Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Hoverboards, Teleportation, & More with Neil DeGrasse Tyson!

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Marques sits down with Neil DeGrasse Tyson to talk about a multitude of past and future tech products for MKBHD's YouTube Original Series, "Retro Tech". Today, we're extremely pleased to release the complete and uncut version of that amazing talk, right here on Waveform! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli http://twitter.com/durvidimel https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Retro Tech Season 2: https://bit.ly/3eMMxrY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Tis the season to treat your family to the great taste of Popeyes. The Festive Family Box is here to make your holidays brighter with all your Popeyes favorites. For just $25, you get four pieces of delicious Popeye's signature chicken, four tasty chicken tenders, four regular size, and everybody's favorite, four buttermilk biscuits. Hurry up, though. Like the holiday season, Popeye's $25 festive family box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeye's. it. All right, welcome back to the waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm

Andrew. And today we've got a bit of a, I was going to call it an interview episode, but it's more of a conversation, but it's. But it's a super fun one. It's with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. And this is actually a conversation from a larger piece. So you guys have already seen, maybe by now, that Retro Tech Season 2 is fully out. So it's on the channel, all the episodes. There are actually six total. One is a premium episode.

But the other five, they all went live on the channel, just like we said. I make a guest appearance in one, too. Yes, all went live on the channel, just like we said. I make a guest appearance in one, too. Yes, you do. For all those Andrew stans out there. Yeah, there's a couple seconds in the hyper-communication episode, which is a good one. You might have noticed in some of those episodes, there's some snips of me talking with Neil

about some of these crazy futuristic topics. And that's part of the fun of Retro Tech is you get to talk to a lot of really interesting people. We had some YouTubers on. we had people like Bill Gates on and people like Sarah Dietschy and Sam Sheffer and Judner and all these YouTubers on. And one person we, I knew I had to talk to for retro tech was Neil, just because he's talked about flying cars in the future, but just like, why not talk about all kinds of future tech with him. And he spoke in our hour or so together about every single one of our episode topics, all of them.

And we unfortunately couldn't use all of the stuff that he said. Of course not, yeah. He would have been in every episode, which I guess wouldn't be the worst thing. He would have been every episode. Easily could have. But this conversation you're about to hear is that full uncut recorded conversation. So I would highly encourage you to check out Retro Tech Season 2 now that it's fully out if you want to check it out. But this is just my conversation with Neil about all those future slash retro tech topics, how they came to be, where we thought we'd be by now, and how we're going to get there.

Check it out. how we're gonna get there. Check it out. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. Thank you for joining me. And honestly, who better to speak to about, well, the physics and logistics of flying cars than you, sir? And I know you have a lot of thoughts on it,

but I just wanna establish, we know that technically it is possible for a car to fly but can you paint a picture for us what a what a world with flying cars would actually look like oh it'd be a disaster okay consider that an ordinary car yeah whose engine fails just sort of slides over to the side of the road waiting for help a flying car whose engine fails is a lethal projectile and so not only for its occupant but for whoever happens to be underneath it. So, um, I, it would, it would be a disaster. I don't, this whole concept of flying cars, I think is, um, it's, it's a, I'd like it. It's a dreamy sort of thing we all imagined in the, cause I'm old enough in the 1960s, you know,

back, those are the futures that never came. And I think there's a reason for that that's not often discussed because people don't think in particular ways that would give them insight as to why we didn't get that future. But nonetheless, yeah, it's not a world you want to be a part of. When I think of flying cars, I almost just picture like a smaller helicopter in my mind. But also, you need a pilot's license for a helicopter. You need to be particularly skilled to operate that. You can't fly a helicopter while putting on makeup, while checking your texts. Yeah, you look at the average person driving on a normal road and it's already not amazing. It's not amazing. Unless they're auto-flown. So here's the thing. We already do have

flying cars and the helicopter, they're called helicopters. All right. You don't think of it as a flying car, but it just lifts up, goes where it wants to, and then lands where it wants to provided there's space. So to say, well, let's have flying cars and that's going to be the future. let's have flying cars and that's going to be the future. Well, not many people know this. I don't think that Langley, the same Langley of Langley, you know, Air Force Base was a pioneer in research on heavier than air flight. Okay. And he was working right up through the late 1800s into the early 1900s. And what was available to him that was a significant producer of energy he's thinking we've got steam engines which are which are you know locomotives use steam engines let's just build a special steam engine that can um put out enough

power to fly right exactly so he failed in all of his attempts. Okay? Yeah. So he showed that, no, you can't make a flying steam engine because the size of the engine you need to get the power you need weighs too much to actually lift the engine into the air. Okay. So the physics and the engineering of that does not work out. What helped is the internal combustion engine, which was smaller and you can have much less weight

for the power that it was generating. I mean, just compare that, right? What does a steam engineer? You need fire and you need a cauldron and you need water and it's got steam and it's a turbine and all of that. The energy it produces is not sufficient to lift it off the ground. So internal combustion engines helped. But by then we had the Wright brothers and they were clever. And so then they did it in 1903. My point about Langley is we can elevate something as heavy as a car. It's really loud to do that, all right? You would need some kind of new frontiers in sound abatement. Have you ever been near a helicopter? Oh, it's loud.

You can't speak. Your toupee flies off. Your head is just, dust kicks up. I mean, that's the thrust necessary to lift the weight of something such as what a car is. So a helicopter is a flying car. And so, you know, we've all seen the videos of basically the drone cars, right? They're larger and they've got fork blades, but is it carrying your whole family? No, it's like one person in a thing. Okay. All right.

Fine. So we went from steam engines, which were huge, to internal combustion engines, which were smaller. Maybe today, or maybe in the future, electric motors are small enough and powerful enough to make even more of a weight to power improvement? Well, of course, that's what drones are, right? They're electric motors. And so, of course, there's still the weight of the battery. Fascinating. And I'm sure you've thought about this and probably even talked about it on your show, that the real bottleneck here is battery technology, all right? I mean, batteries are heavy and they come to us from the 19th century. So here we are in the 21st century

extolling, oh, battery, electric, and it's a battery? If someone from the 19th century, if you told them that in the year 2020, we're still using batteries, they'll say, what? Is that you guys didn't come up with anything better than that? After a century, you've been to the moon, but you're still using chemical batteries. Like what's up with that? So, um, but yes, you can put the energy in a battery, rotate a copter, but still, I don't see that carrying whole families on vacations. All right. And, and so the bigger it is, the louder it's going to be period. The louder is the sound of the blade going through the air. All right. Because electric

motors are silent. So, so here's my point. Why would you want an electric car anyway? Well, it's because we, we, we, we move in dimensions. All right. So if there's a single lane road and a car stalls, it backs up every single car behind it. Because in that scenario, you are moving in one dimension. Okay. So a single slow or stalled car blocks everybody. So what you do is you say, let's add a dimension to this. So let's add a dimension sideways. All right.

So now we have two lanes. All right. So if a car stalls, you can, so this is the X axis, right? Now you, let's go into the Y axis and go around that car. So now one car doesn't hold up all of the traffic. So wider roads is a remarkable way of circumventing too much traffic. That's why, yes, it always takes a lot of sort of municipal, you know, city council decisions. But when they want to widen freeways, it is to just get extra Y-axis movement around what is otherwise slow traffic. And usually if you add one lane to a road that's crowded, it just, everything clears out.

Okay? So now what a flying car does, it adds a third dimension. Okay? So now you have all this traffic down there, but now I got three dimensions. Oh my gosh. There would be no traffic at all if we freely moved in three dimensions. Right. no traffic at all if we freely moved in three dimensions. Because every dimension is an exponential increase in your capacity to move. And I submit to you, we already do move in three

dimensions. For example, that's why freeways have overpasses. True. The traffic that's crossing the freeway, you don't wait for a red light for that to cross. No, they build an overpass. So everybody keeps going. Only got tunnels. Yeah. So overpasses are modern day flying cars. All right.

What else do we have? How is it that New York City can move a billion people a year in mass transit? Because we're moving in a third dimension. We have underground flying cars, and it's called the subway. The subway moves in the same direction as the traffic does, except in a third dimension underground. So flying cars are nothing more than access to the third dimension in your movement. And we kind of already have that implicitly in the design of our transportation systems.

And you don't need to be in full three dimensions if you don't have to be in three dimensions. That's why there's not a continuous overpass over you. You just need an overpass where that other road is. And then you put that in and you got it. So flying cars is a matter of access to higher dimensions, not the fourth dimension. Yeah.

Higher than our traditional two-dimension transportation. And that's what we're kind of doing anyway. That's what bridges are, overpasses, underpasses, this sort of thing. Gotcha. So it sounds to me like, you know, even if in theory we solve the piloting difficulty issue with automatically flying cars, and we solve the noise issue with these incredibly efficient propellers, and we have amazing energy density in these future batteries and we solve every logistical physical problem it still isn't necessary to have flying cars so can i ask you where does where do you think that obsession came from i always see it in tv shows and even in like sci-fi movies flying cars are still an imagination of the future where did that come from yeah i mean it's um i think we always wanted to go faster and faster i mean consider again i'm

old enough i'm an old fart here on your show and uh the you know what happens you know We go from propeller airplanes to jet airplanes. And somewhere in there, we break the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager in his X-1. And then we have rockets and faster and faster to get to our destination was built into the fabric of our understanding of the future that we were approaching. All right. And one of the things we got wrong was the expectation that our access to energy would continue to ascend in lockstep with our access to our imagination. So we remember like motorized walkways everywhere and yeah, flying cars and all that takes energy. But what actually came to pass, and by the way, you take a look at the, in 2001, a space odyssey, the ship that went to Jupiter, it's all

energy. All right. That's, it's this long craft with these modules. It's, it's all energy. Okay. So we're just thinking, yeah, energy is being widely and every free, basically that didn't come to pass. Energy is expensive. It's, it's hard to produce. It's hard to transport, to bring it where you want it. All of these pose challenges. And no one saw, I don't think, the rise of information technology. So now I don't have to go from A to B to bring information. I can send the information. I can send it. And so need to travel fast to be somewhere when I, that got a little reduced. But also if I have access to information technologies, I can get on an airplane today that's flying slower than airplanes in the 1960s did, but I have internet. I have movies. I've got books. I'm comfortable. I have food. And so what's my hurry? Getting to Paris in three hours instead of seven. hours instead of seven. So the urge to go fast, I think, has faded in the face of other amenities that we have access to by traveling slowly. And even when we had the Concorde to go transatlantic,

it was not, the Concorde seat was narrow. Okay. That was a small plane. The, the, the Concorde supersonic transport of any first-class seat on any other airplane is way more luxurious than these very expensive first-class seats on the supersonic transport. Are you in that much of a hurry? Really? So, uh? So I think some of these dreams, just not everyone has the same flying car dream today as we all did back 50 years ago. All right, let's take a quick pause. After the break, we'll talk hoverboards and teleportation.

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To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. Okay, so I guess now if we've established that flying cars aren't such a great logistical idea, what about just like individual people hovering around? What about like hovercraft for, for one person? Oh, hoverboards. Yeah. So, so, all right. So that, that electric driven skateboard that they called hoverboards. Okay. Of course they weren't hoverboards as was in Back to the Future. So I thought that was a little bit of a cheat, but then I thought about it. I thought about it and I said, it kind of is a hoverboard. All right. The only difference is these are touching the ground and the hoverboard itself does not touch the ground, but the hoverboard hovers. All right. Let's, let's, let me restate that. The hoverboard stays within six inches of the ground. So does your electric skateboard.

The hoverboard, as we have learned, cannot hover over water. Duh. Everybody knows that in the year 2015 when Back to the Future 2 took place. It doesn't hover over water. And he can't take the hoverboard and just go wherever he wants in three-dimensional space. He still has to be near the ground. Well, if he has to be near the ground, fine, give me wheels. And I'm still also near the ground just like he is. And it's electric. So you just sort of lean into it and we're good to go. So I did a switch in my judgment of the electric hoverboard. And I now say to myself, yes, it's a hoverboard

just like they had in Back to the Future. And for all we know, Back to the Future inspired the creation of that hoverboard. Oh, yeah. I think so. By the way, now people I see are scooters that are electric, that they might be safer. I'm not sure. aren't scooters that are electric that um they might be safer i'm not sure but uh so uh yeah and is the hoverboard really faster i don't you know it's maybe a little more convenient if it's hands free okay versus like walking walking down the street versus hovering at twice the speed with your you still have to balance on it yeah all. All right. Do you remember Marty still had to do like what he was doing on a regular skateboard? And I don't see people carrying groceries on their skateboard. True.

Yeah, that's a great point. So I think it was a fun portal through which we passed. Just as a reminder that there's still people thinking about innovative transportation of our future. I think that's a beautiful segue to if you could just keep going faster and faster, you'd eventually just want to instantly transport from one place to another. That would be the ultimate convenience. But again, you arrive at a whole bunch of logistical and physical questions about what is the limit of how fast you can move someplace. Now, you're an astrophysicist. Maybe you can break this down for me. There's a newer type

of actual teleportation being worked on, a research called quantum teleportation. Maybe you can explain what that is. Well, okay. So, I don't know specifically what you're referring to, but I can tell you what goes on in the quantum-iverse, in the quantum universe. Let me back up just for a minute. I remembered I was once walking through the Charlotte airport, Charlotte, North Carolina. It's a huge airport. I had to go from a big plane to a little plane, which meant I was not in the right terminal. So I get off the plane and I thought I'd be clever and be all carry on, but that doesn't really accrue to your convenience if you have to go

long distances in the airport itself. So there I am. And I swear I walked two miles, but it was probably only like three quarters of a mile. It felt like two miles in the airport to go to a small plane. And then I thought I was clever. This is early in Twitter, in the world of Twitter. It might've been 2010 or 11. And I thought I'd be clever and I tweeted and I said, just walk miles from one gate

to the other. I can't wait until we have wormholes. And in that way, all gates would just be adjacent to each other via wormholes. And I thought I'd been clever and somebody said, oh, that's cute. And then, but one person said, Dr. Tyson, if we have wormholes, then you don't need airports. Exactly. That's what I'm thinking. Small.

Okay. I was thinking small. So if you have wormholes where it's obviously it's a hole through the fabric of space time where you bypass much longer routes to get to where you're going, thereby effectively moving faster than the speed of light. And you can cross an entire universe that way if you can set up your wormhole suitably to do so. The point is, if you have wormholes, you don't need teleportation devices. Because what does a teleportation device do? It dissembles you into a pocket of energy, beams that energy, presumably at the speed of light, and then reassembles you on the other side.

So that is just entirely unnecessary if you have wormholes. So I'm kind of thinking I'd rather wait till wormholes rather than have somebody tell me to walk inside of a machine that's going to disassemble all my molecules and reassemble it on the other side. Now, with quantum physics, there's something called tunneling, which is a fascinating fact where by the tunneling is an excellent descriptive word for it. And I'll first explain that and then see what we can do about it in our modern thinking. So if you just think of a, of a hill sliding down and then it gets to the bottom of a hill. So if you, if you have to take a marble or something or a rock and it'll fall down, it'll just hang there at the bottom of that hill okay now if the if the if the bottom goes back up again and then goes to an even lower

point okay so it's like a like a roller coaster you go down up and then down even further then this rock it's not the doesn't occupy the lowest energy state it could. The lowest energy state is like down here somewhere. But it's kind of happy staying where it is because it has to go up over another hill to get down to that lower spot. All right. In quantum physics, everything has a, you've heard of the wave particle duality in quantum physics. All physical objects also exist as waves, a wave function. So you can represent this rock as a wave and the wave occupies more places than just the spot of that rock. The wave actually exists on the other side of that other hill. And so that rock has a statistical probability, though low, of disappearing from here

and reappearing on the other side of that hill, and then thereby sliding down to the even lower energy state that it would have access to. So I don't mean to over-explain this. I'm simply saying the waveform of matter enables matter to show up in places that classically thinking walls and barriers would prevent. So if, and when it does this, we say it is tunneled through this barrier. And if this place over here is somewhere else, it could be a mile away. All right. It could be if it tunnels through, it appears in the other place instantly. There is no travel time because the wave function just exists everywhere at all times and have a lower and lower probability of it showing up at the farther away you get from the center of that wave function.

But the probability is not zero. All right? So, boom, something trips the system, it disappears here, shows up over there, it is there instantly. If we, by the way, that works for particles really well, but as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, these quantum effects become sort of washed out. Yeah. Okay. And no longer,

because now to transport you, you have to do that with all of your atoms, not just the one atom. So your wave function has to be sort of coherently organized so that all your particles will disappear simultaneously and then show up in another place. We don't know how to do that. So even if we probably would prefer a wormhole

to move our molecules from one place to another, would it be, do you think, ever physically possible to build this idea we've imagined of a teleportation machine? Energy packet zapped. I think central of a teleportation machine? Energy packet zapped. I think central to the teleportation machine is the memory of how all of your molecules are configured. All right, so think about it. Every morning or some mornings you wake up

and you weigh yourself. That's a data point of how much of you exists. That's one data point. Then there's how tall you are. And so you start listing these properties, but it gets more and more complex. What is the configuration of all those molecules? And they're configured differently in your brain than in your heart, than in your lungs, then in your liver. It's an information processing challenge. It's because we can vaporize you. I don't have any problem with that. I can turn you into energy and then move that energy to the other place and then convert that energy back into particles. I could do that, but I have to remember I need the instruction set to reassemble you. And because once it becomes energy, you've lost all of that information.

Yeah. We don't have anything like that, right? As far as like remembering, like you can reconstruct the same shape in a different place. But remembering where each molecule is inside that shape, is it? Sometimes you don't need to remember it because crystals have repeating structures. So you can characterize a crystal with much less information than remembering where every atom or molecule in the crystal is found, right? That's because there's repeated structures. But when you don't have repeated structure, yeah, this is a huge body of information.

Once you have that information, this is my point, then I don't need to turn you into energy and beam the energy. Find some other energy over there and make it out of that energy because the energy doesn't have that memory. Your mapping of my molecules before it became energy is me. That's me. So unless there's an energy shortage of where you're going and so you got to send the energy over there, fine.

So have we ever converted anything to energy? Yeah, we do that in particle accelerators all the time according to E equals MC squared. Matter, antimatter annihilation is taking pure matter and turning it all into pure energy. So if I had an antimatter version of you and you walked into yourself, then you are gone. Yeah. And you have to contain that energy. By the way, the energy in you, if I convert, in your molecules, if I converted you to energy, would be enough to destroy a city, a small city. Really? It's called a bomb. Oh, just because of the elements I have

inside me can be combined in a way. Yeah, I can convert you to energy, go E equals MC squared. Go ahead and do that. Calculate that. And you have enough energy to take out a city so so um i you know this idea that i'll convert you to energy and beam you that's a huge amount of energy i kind of would rather use the molecules themselves and you gotta watch out for nefarious transporter people. So suppose I have a transporter and I say, politicians, I'll beam you to Washington. And while I obtain the information about you, then I flip a certain neurosynaptic chamber. So now you are conservative instead of liberal

or liberal instead of libertarian. And you end up on the other side, a completely changed politician. That could be diabolical. That's an interesting sci-fi story for you. Yeah. Every single one of these, these quandaries, these questions we have always has a dark side of, well, what if someone had bad intentions and wanted to manipulate this thing? Then that that's

always a huge, huge concern. Wow. One of my favorite, I guess, visual metaphors for this is like, let's say you're shining a laser pointer on the moon and the dot on the laser is on one half of the moon. And then you just bump that laser and the laser goes to the other side of the moon. So now you're shining it on the other half. And maybe technically speaking, that laser point went faster than the speed of light to the other side of the moon, but that's only because it's not really the same laser, right? It's different photons.

It's not the same packet of light. Exactly. That's correct. By the way, that's no different from, we don't have them anymore today, but they have what they call traces. The marquees of movie theaters, when people used to go to movie theaters, there would be this text moving across the screen. Well, how does it move?

You know, I remember first seeing that because that's how old I am. So how does that move? Well, all it's doing is turning lights on and off in the right way so that this letter that's spelling a word appears to move, but nothing is actually moving. So you're correct. That point was not that, that laser point that's on the moon is not what moved across the moon. A separate packet came after that. Right. And so you think it's the dot moving, but it's not. That's correct. So knowing the laws of physics that we do, does that mean intrinsically that teleportation, the way we imagine it in sci-fi, means that you are a different person where you end up if you're

breaking the speed barrier? Yeah. So I've thought a lot about this. And so I have two responses. And so I have two responses. Okay. All right. One of them is, so let's go to a Star Trek style teleportation. So it disassembles your molecules, turns it into a beam of energy, reassembles it on the other side. All right. So is that still you? Now, let's say it's an exact replica of every single molecule is exactly in the same place.

Is that still you? I have to say, no, it's not still you. It is a copy of you. And the reason why I make that distinction is we've already done this experiment. They're called twins. Your twin is an exact copy of you, but you have completely different thoughts. You have completely different life experiences. You have completely different arcs through life. So, the best I could tell you there is that you have made a twin of you, but it's not you. Now, how do we turn that into you? What we now need to do is not simply copy the molecules, you have to copy the neurosynaptic memories that you carry

in your brain's molecules. Okay? Now, that's probably really hard to accomplish. Because if your brain, if I just deny your brain oxygen for five minutes, all those memories are gone. They're not there anymore. You can't access to them. You can't even shock you back into it. In fact, you're dead, okay? You're brain dead at least.

Sorry, I'm screaming at you. So I don't know how to teleport all of the chemo-electrical synaptic memories that exist in the static molecules of your brain. If you could do that, then I'm convinced we are moving you from one location to another. All right. So now here's a third point. Yeah. We live in the era of information. Information is of greater value to us than things.

Okay. Well, why do I have to disassemble all my molecules? If I know how to complete, if I know what molecule exists in every part of my body, I just scan my body. I don't have to decompose it. I can just scan it and then send the information through space. And then you have another device over there that takes all that information okay you got this many hydrogen molecules and this many hydrogen atoms and nitrogen molecules and this is it reassembles me and if you can get the brain going there too it's got my brain and so but if you can do that yeah then you're not actually transporting yourself. You're duplicating yourself. Copy and pasting yourself.

You're copy and pasting. Now you have two exact replicas of yourself. And at that point, your world line splits because the one that was copied in that other location will now meet different people. This one will go to the Bahamas. This one will go to Bermuda. These are two different vacations. They'll meet different people. And basically you just divided yourself into two, basically cloning. Gosh, that to me gets into like the, like the deepest, like consciousness question, which is like, if I- No, no. In this example, you've, you've split your consciousness.

Oh, you think so? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you can duplicate all electrochemical neurosynaptic phenomenon that I have in my brain right here, rather than just reassemble my brain at another location, sure. I believe we could possibly one day do that. Make an exact replica of all the molecules brain matter here to there. But that's what a twin is. A twin has my exact brain, but doesn't have my thoughts, doesn't have my memories, doesn't have anything else about me that tells me who I am. The day we can duplicate that, then we are duplicating your consciousness, because those are all your thoughts, your sense of identity. So if I can duplicate that, then we are duplicating your consciousness because those are all your thoughts, your sense of identity. So if I can duplicate that and I just made two Marcus's and you go off on your way, and then you can do two podcasts that are successful

instead of just one. Yeah. I guess so my question would be, is duplicating your consciousness the same as transferring a stream of consciousness. You know what I mean? Like if you can, let's say, actually copy all the data and all the neurosynaptic information needed, and yes, there is a new consciousness that is exactly the same with all the same memories, but you still want to like move places, do you end one consciousness to pick up where it left off? You could, just for ethical reasons. Or, actually, oh, okay, so we can do one of two things. We could recreate you on the other side and then kill the original version of you. Yeah.

Is that murder? If you're exactly the same thing. I don't know. These are ethical issues. It's an ethical issue to duplicate you. It's an ethical issue to duplicate you It's an ethical issue to destroy one of you. So now but if I can duplicate Your body and your consciousness why duplicate your body at all? just duplicate your consciousness and stick it on a computer and

Okay. Well, this is the you this is the singularity problem with what happens when we don't even need our bodies. But I kind of like my body, you know? It's the only one I've really, yeah, gotten to know. It's pretty good. It's okay, you know, I'm trying to stay in shape. I enjoy eating good foods. You know, I don't have my consciousness

is gonna taste some delicious ice cream sundaes in the future. I don't know how they're going to do that, but maybe they don't have to. They'll just stimulate that part of your brain that makes you think you had an ice cream sundae and you'll be content. The fascinating ethical frontier that I don't think we have fully addressed, maybe science fiction writers have, but I don't think from what I've seen, the full consequences of it have been fully explored. And it's not anybody's fault. I mean, consider the TV series, The Jetsons, okay? I remember that ran sort of in parallel with the Flintstones, right? One is the Stone Age and one is the future. I thought that was a clever sort of Hanna-Barbera construct in the day. But just think of what they did not think of. All right. So they're in the future. They had robots that did things for them, like humanoid robots, that today the thing does itself.

Okay? So you don't need a robot to get in your car to drive you somewhere. Your car is the robot. All right? So I'm just intrigued by what people don't think of when they think they're thinking far in the future. Because they miss things that plug in from the side. And so even with Isaac Asimov's story, iRobot, and the movie, everybody that's doing work, you have maids that are robots.

And it's like, no, you just have an automatic dishwasher, an automatic washing machine, an automatic sweeper. That's what the rumba is, right? So you don't need a humanoid robot doing your task. Plus the human form is not even the best form. All right? I grew up. That's a bold statement. The human, the bones in the hand and the foot. This is an amazing feat of engineering and evolution.

No, it's not. Okay. You're back trouble, but you get older. Your feet hurt. You can't think. Just no. And in fact, we learned this, the engineering of this for runners who are missing legs. We don't rebuild a foot for them when they're going to run.

We just gave them a blade. Okay. That doesn't look anything like anybody's foot, but they're running as fast or faster than they would have had they had human feet. My point is the creativity of thinking about the future sometimes is constrained by our own lack of imagination. All right. Let's take one more quick break.

When we come back, we'll talk virtual reality and whether reality itself even matters. Be right back. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon or they could be late for the bus.

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netsuite.com slash waveform. This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. netsuite.ca slash donate now from December 23rd to the 31st and your gift will be tripled for three times the impact. I have one more question for you about this whole like imagining the future thing. I think when people think of teleportation, they think of the convenience of like we were talking about the three hour versus seven hour thing cross country. I'm imagining like, huh, I want to see the Grand Canyon. And then I'm standing at the edge of it, looking into it just like that. Do you think if virtual reality can get good enough, that maybe that's good enough to satisfy that part of our curiosity where we wanted to transport just to

see cool things? We'll just sort of put the headset on and be there. Excellent question. And I think this has been addressed, maybe not so explicitly in a response to that question, but think about it. I read this, I mean, I wasn't there, but when cinema was invented, the clever filmmakers tried to do things that would be very different kind of experience for people other than just filming a play, of which a lot of early cinema, in fact, was. But those who had some creativity, one of them set up a camera in front of an oncoming locomotive. Okay. And people in the theater was like they they they they were there okay and meanwhile

they're looking at a crappy black and white 2d projection of a locomotive but that as a life experience was something completely out of their out of out of their um out of their world, if you will. So obviously today we're not struck by – we tried that with 3D. Oh, they throw the arrow. In 3D movies they had like an excess number of things coming towards the camera so that you would then recoil. But we're past that now. It's really all about what is the resolution of the image you would then recoil. But we're past that now. It's really all about

what is the resolution of the image you're exposed to. So, all right. So Apple went there a little bit with their retina display where the pixel element is the same size or smaller than the capacity of your retina to resolve. And that way the screen image looks really, really real. Okay. All right. Point is, I think that if you could create imagery that is hyper resolved, okay, because real life is resolved much greater than just your retina can distinguish. Okay, and real life still looks more real than a retina display image does. It still does. So you know you're missing something there.

And so maybe the day will arrive where I can hold an image of something that is so highly resolved, you don't know whether you are looking at an image or reality. At that point, I don't think it matters whether you actually go to the Grand Canyon. And imagine that future where your windows are layered with those high resolution imagery. And then you press a button and this has been shown in sci-fi. I'm not inventing this for anybody, but you do that. And up there it is. There's a brook with trees and a mountain in the background. Boom. There's your grand Canyon that you want to look at. Boom. Here's the nightlife of the city. And then you can just change where your location is.

And does it matter that it's real? That's a different question. Now, I can comment on that. By the way, I'm doing all this talking. I want to hear you, too, because you're a deep thinker on all the issues. But here's something to consider. All right? I overheard someone at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City, where I am, overheard someone at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City, where I am, walk by the Van Gogh Starry Night painting.

This is the famous one with the crescent moon and the, okay, and the swirly sky. Yeah. Walk by it and says, oh, no, I think I recognize that. Yeah, yeah. Is that a copy? And the person said, no, it's the original. It's the original, oh my gosh. And then they like got more interested.

So the knowledge that it's real seems to matter to us. Yeah. Even if you couldn't tell the difference. So maybe flicking a switch and putting you know we we have fireplaces on you know on your tv now you know the channels you know you go onto amazon select and you there's a whole there's a whole place to go to put images up on the tv i admit i i put up a fireplace a few times. The Yule log over Christmas time. Feels real sometimes. Yeah, you snuggle up next to it.

So I think we've taken baby steps in that direction. But if you could like smell the air and feel the breeze and watch the birds fly over it, maybe that's sufficient. And you would certainly want to do that for people who are dying and they had a bucket list that they never fulfilled. Surely you would do that. But knowing that something is not real, though looks real, I don't know if we'll be satisfied with that.

Interesting. Yeah, I think maybe there is something to the lack of magic of a four-hour flight that makes you really appreciate arriving and seeing the thing that the glacier is carved out and actually appreciating its reality versus seeing what it would look like and maybe some of your senses are covered. Maybe you do get the sense of smell and the sound of the birds, but you just know it's not real and it's different. Yeah. Well, this is that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. What was it? The Mars movie. What was the name of that movie? Total Recall. So remember, if I remember correctly, I'm saying, do you remember? They would implant memories of you having had trips okay so i think that was the movie it might have been a different movie but i know what

i'm describing happened in some movies where you sit in a chair and say where do you want to go you give them a thousand dollars because that's what you would have paid to fly go to a hotel thing and they inject it in you boom you have total memories of the beach of the smells of the thing and you know that's that's the matrix all over again. Right. I was going to say, there's a couple of movies like that. Ready Player One, have you seen that? Kind of a similar concept?

Okay. No, I haven't. No, that's a movie I missed. Right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, you're wearing it. You get a VR headset on.

You're in another world. And this world has everything from the real world, a social hierarchy, a history and everything. And that's almost a more important hierarchy and goal than real life. You take the headset off every day and you just kind of go to sleep. Oh, so you're an avatar, your avatars in the world of the headset. Yeah. Okay. So that's a different experience from being injected with the memory. True. Right. True. Cause you know, when you take it off, you know, that didn't happen. Whereas if you're injected with a memory, as far as you're concerned, it happened. And therefore you wouldn't then need the, or have the urge to go to the Grand Canyon because it's sitting in your

memory. And, Oh, but where's your photo album from your trip? Well, we can of course supply you with that and put you in the picture with it. Easy. That's just Photoshop. We got that. That's Photoshop plus, you know? So know so i i i'm interesting where that goes and also there was an episode one of the episodes of black mirror where one of the more disturbing well they're all disturbing but yeah how do i rank how disturbing those It's the one where they had the military combat unit that were brain implanted to see certain tribes of people as monsters so that they would just kill them. This is like the extreme limit of what we actually do in warfare where you have to dehumanize your enemy so that you have no qualms about killing them. All right. So that's a big part of what it is to fight wars.

And so in this show, they took it to that limit. But in there, they're completely controlling the people's thoughts and their rewards are more control over their thoughts. So this guy goes home and he lives in this beautiful home and he's got a beautiful wife who always wants to have sex with him. And then you come out of his sight line and it's like, oh, it's a dilapidated shack and there is no woman there waiting for him. And so, you know, what is real? And what did I sound like Morpheus? What is real? That's the question at the end of the day. It's like, how important is reality versus the imagination of it? How do you define real? You know? So, and of course, when he learned, real, you know? So, and of course, when he learned, you know, jujitsu or whatever, kung fu,

just by the injection into his head. So that could, you know, if your brain is everything, then traveling doesn't matter. We'll just inject it in you. I think that could come, particularly for people who don't have the money to travel. Yeah. Dang. Well, that's really deep. I hate to end it at that, but I don't want to take all of your time. So thank you so much for the exploration of the topic and hopefully we get to do it again. Yeah, yeah. There's more of these topics.

I mean, I think the ethical frontier on all of these topics is not explored as deeply as the topics themselves. Yeah. So I just don't want our technology to leave us in a moral quandary when the technology gurgles up.

So I'd be happy to keep talking about other topics. Surely you've got some up your sleeve. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. That was an incredible chat. Thanks again and shout out to Neil for the time. He's obviously a super busy guy,

but honestly, we could have kept talking for two, three hours. So I'm gonna highlight the fact that he has mentioned to me that he would happily be my personal astrophysicist if I'm ever curious about anything in the universe. So Neil, I will be taking you up on that and we'll be chatting again in the future.

But it's been a fun one. Talk to you guys again next week. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.