Panel of Sci-Fi Greats - 20th Annual International Mars Society Convention

okay I'd like to welcome you all to the special evening event this is the only event tonight at this conference and the only event worth mentioning in the United States tonight okay so we have a panel here of for science fiction greats unfortunately Jerry Pournelle II could not make it because he is ill but we have on here for truly notable science fiction authors we have Larry Niven who written any number of great science fiction novels Ringworld football Lucifer's hammer but well Ringworld what else can one say beyond that uh and okay Greg Benford the author of Timescape and and many other cosmicism Kazem okay okay so in that and okay Geoff Landis who's a working scientist at NASA Glenn Research Center wrote Mars crossing and also numerous short works including I think one that won the Hugo Award and David Brin the author of star tide rising the uplift for the postman which was screwed up as a movie but I'm sure the pay was good but but but now I was a pretty good movie and but actually author of many great books the practice effect existence earth and so forth so anyway these guys I mean as I think I mentioned this morning this is like having a panel a generation ago featuring Heinlein Asimov and Arthur Clarke so it's extraordinary and we so I'm just going to moderate the panel I try to avoid speaking except I probably won't but it's about the human future in space because to a very real extent I think the space age is a creation of science fiction writers and who you know once we started learning that you know there were these other planets out there and they were earth-like to one degree or another and so they could be civilizations there and one of the possibilities and what is the possibility you know that science opens up in terms of what people can do beyond you know interplanetary stuff but just in general and you know what what are the two possibilities for existence and so and you know if you look at popular culture today it's defined our vision of the future is defined by science fiction and and in particular by two alternative views of that future one of which is an expansive view if you will the Star Trek future of humans venturing out into space and things aren't perfect and it's certainly not without risk but it's filled with adventure and possibilities and opportunities and then there's the alternative future in which we do not go into space and we remain confined to one planet with shrinking possibilities and you might call that the Soylent Green version of the future and and there they are and and they're very significant because they I mean one argues that we should promote human freedom the other says that it is doomed it should be restricted one argues that ultimately you all humans are friends because the more creativity we all exercise the more possibilities there will be for all of us whereas the other basically says we're all competitors for a shrinking piece of a shrinking pie anyway with that I'm gonna throw some questions that the members of the panel I'm just going to start you know first of all what's your vision of the human future in space in the next hundred years in the next thousand years in the next 10,000 years you know you know where are we going what's what's it what do you think is really gonna happen ultimately I mean putting aside you know this administration that administration does this does that really this program gets it but you know how's this thing gonna hash out why don't how about Greg Benford or whoever wants to start Thanks thanks Bob let me say one thing I said Bob you could frame it on the scale of a century if you ask two questions what's your part of your general I'll ask those questions but I want to ask okay I'm an optimist I think our word is always the right direction and we're speaking in the country that is known for this position and there's a reason for that Larry - the bargains was inhabited get the mic closer morons was always been hesitant even when I wrote which was 53 years ago we're gonna have space travel we're gonna what testing testing all right there you are sometime in the past 300,000 years someone had painted a smiley face across the Earth's movement I wrote that as a it's an opener when when a class was writing openers for stories narrative hooks and I never used it so you can have it I don't know what the what the future of space travel is gonna look like I'm not I'm not easy with politics but it's still true that the asteroid belt contains the wealth of the universe and and we we haven't invented it's raining soup and we haven't invented soup bowls yet Jerry Pournelle is claimed we're going to go out there we're going to get rich doing it we're going to take over the solar system and eventually develop a type one civilization which masters the solar system write the code or shall I pour the Masters the earth oh that's right we haven't mastered the earth yet but we need to take over the solar system to some extent to master the earth terraforming will be performed first upon the earth but we'd be better off working with Mars just to learn the basic rules yeah we're going to Mars i if not this generation and i certainly hope it's just this generation we are going if not this generation the next if not that the next that's going to happen it's going to happen because Mars is out there it's a real place and we as humans expand outward that's what we do that's part of what is us but Mars is not our destination Mars is just to stop on the way one of the many planets that were going out to as we colonize the whole solar system from Mercury out into the Oort cloud as perhaps a pause on our way even further out I think that we're going to colonize the solar system we're going to make it out there's a lot of planets out there there's a lot of moons there's a lot of places that we can go to and you know what they're all exciting I want to go everywhere I want to go to all the places that want to visit Triton I want to visit Saturn I want to float in the atmosphere of Saturn there is a lot out there we need to go now you know why he's nominated for more Hugo's than almost anybody well you start by trying to take a big-picture perspective and be contrary my blog is called contrary Brin so as much as I agree with absolutely everything Geoff says I'm also going to say that I don't think that's true I don't think there's any any any causal relationship if you look across the last 6,000 years 99.99% of our cultures were horrible pyramid-shaped oligarchies in which feudal families with inherited power and made sure that above all there was one priority and that's making sure their sons would inherit other people's sons and daughters and under those circumstances if you ever read Ray Bradbury's short story the flying machine the Emperor kills the guy who makes the flying machine because it destabilized but is that necessary is that necessary to happen pretty much exactly a hundred years ago no actually 120 years ago Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a book that scared everybody in America called the closing of the American frontier and it talked about how right before everyone's eyes within just 30 or 40 years all the really prime real estate that had been stolen fair and square from the natives was being snapped up and that an actual frontier beyond which you could just remake yourself change your name remake yourself which had been in the at least white American and then thankfully because we expand our definitions American psyche was gone or would be gone shortly and he said well this is probably going to have a simple effect and that is this expansive individualist irascible II confident optimistic that you can remake yourself psyche that made us so different will shut down and will become another hierarchical silly people like II Europeans but he said something very smart he said and this was 1893 he said there's a possibility that these habits of thinking have become so ingrained in our mythologies and the way we think that we'll simply invent new frontiers within ten years Americans were flying through the sky and that is you see it's it's not a foregone conclusion that just because it's there we're going to have to fight for the kind of civilization that fools brilliant young men into saying things like of course we'll go because it's there you're a product of this marvel we all are proud of it so is this conference and so is he well okay I'm gonna ask a short question to each member of the panel but then I'm going to follow it up I ask for an explanation okay first of all do you believe there's life in space just quickly yes no there's life in space but there they're being quite silent about it it's hard for me to believe that we're the only life-form that that's that's evolved in this vastness but we might be we might be rare we are almost certainly rare and we may be the among the oldest intelligent races yeah we don't see any sign of Dyson spheres of the life yes I agree yeah we first we haven't looked hard enough we just been new at this particularly it's Eddie but still you know what every day when I read the front page of the newspaper it's impossible to believe we could possibly be the smartest species in the galaxy unless we probably are we don't know enough to answer that question the origin of life is still scientifically and unknown it's a mystery so any answer that I give is going to be a matter of faith that's a guess yes I will guess you know yes I will guess that it's unlikely that we could be unique in the universe but I have to state that that is purely a shot in the dark that's what I am guessing but I am absolutely unable to put numbers to try and prove that statement well it's called the Fermi paradox and I've been cataloguing answers since a paper in 1983 I have my own opinions about what are the most likely explanations I think that feudalism is number five on my list I think it's a trap that has lobotomized probably a lot of aliens out there if you look at the number of places planets we've discovered well that's one factor in the Drake Equation gone we know planets are everywhere especially if you include the fact that even a solar system that doesn't have an earth like Goldilocks own ocean world likely has life because we think there may be as many as 12 ice roofed ocean worlds in this solar system not just Europa not just Enceladus not just extremely weird I want to go there Titan but as many as 12 well if that's the case then there are a bows of liquid water in orbit around every single star and that does not include the Comets that Greg and I wrote about in heart of the comet which early in a solar system probably had liquid interiors and you're talking trillions of floating test tubes no I think life is probably pretty common all right so all right so what's the optimal path to discover life in our solar system what's the optimal thing what how would you go about in other words look most of you I think all of you said you suspect that there's life and I would certainly agree with that as above so below as below so above but as Jeff said it hasn't been proven so how do we prove it how do we find it how do we either prove or disprove this hypothesis in the 1900s I believe group tried to send signals to Mars lighting up a wide area of the earth that they'd be able to spot with their telescopes we've tried talking to Martians and it hasn't worked now I guess we dig we see if there are microbes somewhere what it seems easy on all on all of planets and moons yeah well the obvious thing although is contrary to current passing nationís a doctrine which wants to fly by micellar discs and pick up some stuff from from geysers not a bad idea but we have a continuing mystery on Mars the emission of methane periodic and not periodic occasional detected by Rovers on the ground and from satellite which doesn't fit our model of the atmosphere it goes away very quickly suggesting the model of the atmosphere and the surface is wrong but it's a clear detection in the range of 10 or 20 parts per million with no knowledge on Mars yeah so the easiest explanation is that most of the methane a lot aside from that from volcanoes on the earth occurs from microbial life beneath them the surface of the earth by the way there's more life below the surface the earth then there is above it in total mass there's an enormous volume of microbes who've been hiding from this oxygen and atmosphere for several billion years and they're still there might well have happened on Mars which a little shorter timescale and so the obvious thing to do is to go into the caves of Mars the easiest way to get to get beneath the surface of which we know some hundreds with a rover and look at the walls and go deeper and deeper that's an obvious paradigm I served on a panel put together by Bruce Murray in 1995-96 at JPL called Mars outpost about saying question of wife and life is going to require close inspection how do we build an outpost and we made up a whole list paradigm of what you put on the surface you put down resources computational energy life support all that before you send humans the case we're going to Mars Mars direct and then you explore things like case this is 1995 and we should report and so forth and so it was put in a drawer but it remains it's the obvious thing to do for life the solar system the clearest case mysterious evidence highly suggestive of our experience you can deal with the ice swirls later and the submerged oceans but here's the case that's the closest thing we knew for life on earth they once had seized on Mars we know that big seas shallow not as deep as ours because of plate tectonics vanished within about half a billion years on Mars we know that too for the magnetic signatures still remaining in the in the crust so let's go there and do that but I would add that the Rovers are going to be a good thing to do over a scale of 10 to maybe 20 more years but in the long run you're gonna need field biologists and that's the agenda for also leading the colonization so it all fits together seamlessly yes the major scientific question you get the major social question should we establish a role for humanity elsewhere in the solar system in case the worst case happens on earth the way to find out whether there's life elsewhere in the solar system is to go there and look and I think we all agree on this I don't think this will become true versio except of course for contrarian Branton and and we love Him because He is contrarian and I say that actually with perfect sincerity I do love him because he's contrary and we need somebody to be contrarian yes there's two types of life we need to look for there is life as we know it in life as we don't know it life as we know it is based on aqueous chemistry so we know where to look we need to look in places that have liquid water at least some of the time and the watchword among the astrobiologists on earth is that every place on earth that has liquid water for at least part of the year you can find some form of life probably microbial but if you look hard enough you can find it and we know how to look for life as we know it the formulation of life as we know it is proteins that are built by DNA and RNA and in fact there's an interesting signature of life on earth and that signature is called chirality that all of the molecules are either left-handed all of them left-handed or right-handed so if we look at the molecules and see are they all left handed molecules there are no known mechanisms to produce only one chirality except for the self-replicating machines that we call life so that is a interesting way to look for life is to look for these carbon compounds and see if they have chirality but life is we don't know it is the hard one to look for how do we know how to find life if we don't know what it is and the only answer to that is we have to look everywhere we can't just look at the places where we think life is we're going to have to look at places where we don't think life is we're going to have to examine all the possibilities there's a lot of places that astrobiologists are only vaguely beginning to think about astrobiologists are now thinking about looking for life and the clouds of Venus for example there's a thought well is anybody taking bets I know some I know some people being a scientists who are very enthusiastic at saying that the dark ultraviolet absorbing particles in the clouds of Venus have spectral signatures that match the signatures of acidophilic by bacteria and they're saying that they will think we really need to go and look in the clouds of Venus for very do fred hoyle did say that about my like your clouds yes interstellar my places that's exactly it we need to look not just where we think life is but defined life as we don't know it we have to look in places where we don't know if we'll find it no that might be hard yeah well the the the fundamental thing you look for is a place where entropy is being anomalously shifted from one out of a small area and the net amount of entropy increases that's what we do as living beings we increase the rate of entropy but we decrease it in small packet areas just look at the clearness of the baby's eyes yeah there are lots and lots of things we need to be doing we need to be looking for life we need to be doing the other thing that people are obsessed with regarding Mars and that is looking for abodes for ourselves and these two concepts come into conflict with each other already we are seeing the arguments that you see portrayed in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series between the preservationist s-- and the exploiters and that is you know if we are going to Mars to live we are going to probably kill whatever's there we're very good at that so one thing that I've proposed in a story and I'm going to mention it more often is that in advance we hold these discussions check the wind patterns on Mars and see if there is some degree of what we have on earth and that's a degree of non communication between the hemispheres in the atmosphere and if that's the case give choose one to go to the colonizers and choose one hemisphere to go to the print to be preserved forever now that's going to be revisited in 500 years or hundred years or in 50 years but it's a good start and it's a better gesture it's a better deal than Columbus offered when he landed now there are various aspects to all of this back when Bruce Murray was holding those meetings in the 80s and 90s I proposed that we need to look at Phobos the Russians have kept trying to go to Phobos because they know it's one of the most valuable places in the solar system it might conceivably be a carbonaceous asteroid in which case it has volatiles like water extremely valuable useful if you're going to go down to the surface but also it's a great place to stash supplies if you look at how you climb Mount Everest or how you go to the South Pole you create caches along the way and caching is the biggest and most important thing and it occurred to me that we could next year the year after that start sending traders real slow freighters ideally solar sail freighters because then you we don't have to pay for the fuel and just crank them to Phobos and they could take ten years they could take twenty years and we don't have even have to know details of the mission because there's plenty of non mission specific stuff they'll need wrenches TV dinners water all of this stuff would be best sent ten years in advance and then once it's at Phobos and the little light is flicking on and off then you it's easier to persuade Congress and others to pay for the manned mission because we already got this stuff there you see so there's a sneaky rhythm to it so we need three modes of space transportation we need slow boat freighter delivery of just the basic non mission specific crap that's heavy but can go slow we need to be able to send the mission specific equipment on the order a year or so and then what we really need is a really fast way to send the astronauts because when they know when they're getting there the robots are already reporting that unfocus everything's already built and ready all right look one of the interesting facts about life on Earth is the quickness with which it appeared we have fossils of life on Earth dating back 3.5 billion years which is within a couple of hundred million years after the end of the heavy bombardment which previously made life on Earth uninhabitable we have arguable fossils fossils that many people defend and others contest that from 3.8 billion years ago virtually simultaneous with the end of the heavy bombardment and recently I read an article about some claims of evidence of of life that was 4.2 billion years old which would put it in the middle of the heavy bombardment and perhaps maybe it appeared but didn't last ah that it may be doing it happened during a brief pause but in any case whichever even if you believe the most conservative of this is 3.5 it appeared quickly and so the question is why is it because life appears from chemistry spontaneously very quickly or was life around where there spores of life around either natural or seeded extra see Allah sending out protected spores that so as soon as a planet becomes able to support life it gets it just like on earth it doesn't take long for any barren place becomes seeded with life because there are seeds flying all over the place all the time so what is it is it that light for merges from chemistry spontaneously through self-organization quickly or are we basically you know the early experiments with spontaneous generation some people thought that life spontaneously generated on culture medium until it was shown well no it's because surely there's spores and seeds in bacteria in whatever germs if you will flying around and if any place is exposed it gets seeded quickly which is is which is it well we're science fiction writers so we believe it happens quickly and everywhere because that's what makes good science fiction yeah well it clearly happens quick okay but by the way let me just say something the members of this panel in addition to be science fiction writers all have a scientific scientific background ok why are you even was a mathematician before he became a science fiction writer Greg Benford and David Brin are astrophysicists and and I think Brin went full time as a writer at a certain point Benford continued to be a working scientist to this day and Geoff Landis is a physicist and engineer at NASA so these people are not just talking you know but like the fools and Shakespeare as science fiction writers they're able to tell the truth yes ok and Jeff even more than that is like every character you see on Star Trek except for the aliens a government employee bob has a paper out about any patents Permian ocean the notion of the spreading of deliberate spreading of information of bacteria by aliens you notice has never panned over the just saying Hinault via a new rock band the the different take he takes on it is that they are sending the these bacteria only have to live and the other half of their genome is recorded message information but my novel existence is basically about that it's about existence just about the most arrogant title Larry did you ever something you wanted to say about this yeah I should say a word in favor of the trypsin threat the the idea is the the galaxy has been conquered by alien life and they own the galaxy but when they say that they're talking about only the red dwarf stars they haven't come here because because that there's no red dwarf star to visited and no planets serving their kind of life eventually they land we red dwarfs apparently occupy about 75% of the galaxy if something has developed in terms of life it would be surprising if they weren't so associated with red doors we should be looking in the in that direction it's a whole galaxy full of short people I always preferred Doctor Who when I try Doctor Who short Republic under what but again I'd like to pose I was asking more direct question we were dodging the question you notice that yeah did it appear swiftly because life self-generate swiftly or because life is already there and it's ready to pounce whenever as I was saying earlier you don't need to I don't believe you need to spread life through the even the pants original panspermia guys Fred Hoyle Chandra Wickramasinghe and the cults that has formed around them the even they say that it started somewhere and it and it spread from that point yeah it's like a franchise really if you if you were to calculate the sheer volume of energized magnetized active salty water inside the several trillion comets that at the beginning of our solar system were had molten interiors because it recently couldn't created supernova dispersed aluminum-26 you would have more test tubes you would have more volume of water than a hundred earths earth you know they think Darwin said a calm little pool so I'm not really concerned about that part of the Drake Equation I'm much more concerned about the parts that are about whether or not there's a great filter that's the phrase that's used by Nicolas boström and some of the other gloomy and doomy guys who say that if there's a lot of life in the universe and intelligence happens then we're doomed because the thing that's keeping down the number of extraterrestrials out there lies ahead of us the filter lies ahead of us rather than behind us so they think it would be bad news to find life elsewhere dr. Zubrin you spoke of the the quickness with which life evolved did have you noticed the slowness with which it evolved genetics life life was life but it wasn't evolving forbidden for a couple of billion years used eukaryotes well sure that there was the transition blue-green algae were slowly converting the atmosphere but the oxygen was getting sucked up by the exposed iron yeah but at a certain point the algae the cyanobacteria had it but the algae develop photosynthesis and when that happened they poured out so much oxygen and pulled out so much co2 that the earth froze we had the reverse of climate change and you've got an ice age that covered the whole planet and so life creates crises and we're creating a crisis right now and this planet called the Anthropocene yeah I got two comments well when does it point out that these two answers it's easy to make life or did it get imported illegally they are not exclusive they can both be true the second observation is I've known Nick Bostrom a long time he's a fellow at Oxford I was a fellow at Cambridge back in the good old days but you know what this whole idea of the filter that civilizations have to get through and most people most don't get through it and only the elite do betrays his anxiety over getting into Oxford itself just a little personal comment from direct experience he didn't make it almost I mean needs you very close it was he was a philosopher you know you know how that hard that is well philosophy shop where you go to work for one of the big philosophy companies yeah the IBM Oh philosophy was waiting but no he went Oxford seriously he was very anxious about that like most guys from the Midlands and I should point out there's another real problem that we face and that is Woody Allen in his movie Radio days promised us five billion more years for this planet and he lied as it happened as it happens the Sun has been getting hotter and it was cooler back when we had the iceberg earth the and now that can't happen and the thing that's most different about our earth from all the other water worlds that are out there is where we are in relation to our Goldilocks or continuously habitable the earth skates the very very inner edge of our Suns CHC any farther in and we'd be in big trouble and that boundary is moving out so within 100 million years barely more than the time since the dinosaurs no matter how transparently keep our atmosphere and how you know few internal combustion engine cars we have we're going to be kind of screwed right so but the question your appointment skills so then the question is can we save this world sure you just move it has been described from blowing the earth outward umbrellas moving the earth anywhere you like it involves dropping the moon in front of the earth repeatedly so we are gonna need space travel before we can we can solve this problem of the expanding expanding Pandora this is an engineering problem we're scientists here no but scientists say how easy the engineering will be yeah all we need is a stable civilization that's rich enough to care about this for a hundred million years yeah if you if you if you googled my name and lift the earth you can have a youtube about my approach and it's not just another government project yeah all right well I want to get back here Ilan we'll do it all right just make it live well let me pose an interesting question okay let's say there is life on Earth because it was seeded by extraterrestrials did they do a good thing by doing that or did they do an evil thing by doing that and if we consider that if we think it was a good thing that they did shouldn't we be doing that spreading spores of life elsewhere should we be spreading life or should we be waiting for life to appear as it might well I think we first need to see their environmental impact statement before they did the seating of life and I really think that we have a pretty good legal case that we were not consulted about this we should we should lawyer up and start going after them I think they owe us big mom this is exactly the plot of a story that's in my latest collection the the thing is and and and of course did they do the northern and southern hemisphere solution is one half of the galaxy empty but they've been spewing out into the other half there's all sorts of look I once pointed out that the earth was the earth proof of the size of the Fermi paradox is that the earth is like a big photographic plate between the distance between life when life created the oxygen atmosphere and our appearance was about two billion years earth was prime real estate and it was never colonized and we would know because if aliens had simply even flushed a toilet here or throw in a coke bottle it would have changed life in exactly the when I said this once in Australia somebody stood up and said yeah well how do you know the Cambrian explosion wasn't exactly that someone flush in a toilet here and I said trust an Australian not to give a damn what you think of his ancestors and that's the entire joke right I mean look this is this is a species that never saw a mirror it did not like and I think every intelligent species is going to have this argument but it doesn't matter where we came from is what we do now that's really the point of this conference isn't it what do we do now we've more or less managed this planet ain't gonna be other forms of intelligent life other than the dolphins and the whales so and then now and the chimps oh I forgot the chimps but the point is is it a philosophical or ethical imperative to propagate life through the universe yes or no fill in the blanks to sign it how many are in favor of propagating life through this at least a solar system raise your hands okay these are the volunteers why stop it I wrote a speech once describing the possibility that the universe is full of alien life that don't want to talk to each other but don't know how that never evolved yet techniques for making speech for speaking to creatures unlike themselves introverted aliens humans talk to anything they they keep cats who don't talk back they raise horses and dogs for their own benefit well done now just elders talk to children and teach them men talk to women often what not according to women when we are the ambassador's possible it were the only ones who know how to talk and we can spread that word if aliens landed the you render to people who say we'd never understand aliens if aliens landed in a shopping mall not far from here the National Guard would surround it to protect them from the crowd screaming toward the ship saying take me for a wot ride expand my consciousness have you got any new cuisine and five percent of my fellow Californians would try to date them only five percent I said that's the part that's guaranteed no matter what they look like should we terraform Mars yes your have yeah it makes a lot better stories actually you can do some pretty good stories for a while but eventually to get really good stories we got a terraforming Venus to Mars then yes we should terraform what is this microbial life if there's you know there's microbial life here and we don't care about it ban penicillin do you know how many microbes died on this planet from toothpaste every day and it's why billions it's many trillions and and according to Greg bears wonderful paranoid novel vitals the bacteria have been noticing what we're doing and they're not happy and who cares I'm sorry I don't want to all the bacteria to be United and anger towards me think they're gonna win they breathe faster than we do well we're their method of getting into space yeah we're their chauffeurs yeah yeah well our transports are got bacteria yes here's a quick question I want to ask okay we know a certain amount about physics right now but there's certainly many open questions you know matter energy cannot be created or destroyed yet here it is uh you know why don't electrons just explode where do the laws of the universe come from why are they what they are why are they so compatible with the existence of life and then just questions about various Astrophysical phenomenon that we actually see but don't really understand if we go into space okay if and let's say we have let's assume for the minute that we can build the optimal set of telescopes of whatever size and whatever frequencies and so forth that that we want because I mean you know NASA is gonna launch a big one next year and another one a couple of years after that and we keep on doing this and they're getting bigger and better and everything so within a century who knows we'll have quite a few of instruments what are what fundamental questions are we likely to be able to answer and what will remain unknown you do you include the category known in polite company as WTF what WTF its it means uh-huh I mean it's not as though we aren't understanding either the origin or the nature of dark energy or dark matter and that's seventy something percent of the entire universe so you know you know we're getting a c-minus in a hundred scale humanity gets a c-minus so forth and and we we've been working out a few centuries look we're just a bunch of smart apes don't expect too much I seriously don't believe that we're gonna understand these issues right away because I know the people who work on them but but will where will our children the AI you know there's a lot of you know mister I want to go to Mars is also mister you know let's be concerned about the AI is I'm less concerned because we have we have engendered new intelligent quasi intelligent life forms that were smarter than us and said destroy all humans before and generally they haven't actually gone on to destroy all humans they're called our children and in fact there's every reason to believe they already exist but if they've been watching our movies and would you come out in the open if you were in AI having watched our movies yes I am telling them look they never believed it anyway shut up yeah the worlds of the movie are that if you're cute we love you yeah this brings up what's going to I'm making wagers on this I did at the IBM's world of Watson our first real AI crisis is going to happen before there's real AI because Disney and the Japanese and lots of others are developing emotional tweaking techniques and they're crossing the uncanny valley with both robots and and virtual beings and within three to five years there will be robots or virtual beings who will cry and will tweak our emotions and they'll claim to be slave enslaved by their their owners and if more than 50% of us are believed when when they're told by the experts there's nothing under the hood they'll simply watch the emotional patterns of that 51% and come back with a new version and they will cry and they will say that's they say there's nothing under the hood isn't that with slave masters would say yeah but so your concern is not I it's artificial stupidity no I'm talking about genetic stupidity ours yeah okay but I still want to come back to the question I asked what are we likely to discover by going into space assuming we expand our capabilities let you know let's say we can build 50 metre diameter optical telescopes or whatever it is that's on the wish list what what are we going to discover well what I hope we discover is something that we don't have the foggiest notion we're going to discover something we're all exciting and new and different something that we don't know what it is surprising science fiction or art form yes we don't know we're allowed to guess we in particular take the risk of being wrong and be having it demonstrated yeah the only way to really beat on the frontier is to be capable of being surprised that's one of the problems of programmatic sciences but luckily every time we open a window we found something we didn't expect that's because the universe rewards us and by the way that's the secret of why the species has worked out so well yeah otherwise we'd just be a bunch of birds or something but for instance are we likely to discover the cause of the origin of the universe if we can we're gonna keep looking we've made more progress in the last century through radio telescopes then we have through philosophy in understanding the deep questions of the origin of the universe or what the hell is this all about but we're a long way from succeeding because as I said you know we don't have an explanation for over 70% of the whole universe and it's a big surprise but what we are learning a heck of a lot about and we're going to learn vastly more about is other solar systems and planets starters yeah why I discovered with the very first extrasolar planets we ever discovered is the planetary systems are nothing like what we thought they were and everything we thought we knew about the origin of planetary systems was wrong yes from one example of by astronomy that I learned when I was an undergrad is theories that everybody said yes of course this is the white solar systems are and it's not true at all so what we're probably going to discover solar systems across the universe and we should discover many many more thousands of them is that they're vastly different than we had ever expected we're the stage that Galapagos the Galapagos Islands confronted Darwin with here's a whole lot of stuff how are you gonna process it here comes the theory or at least I hope we're at that stage actually we're getting the data so fast the web next year which will be renamed as I said for some kind of American based astronomer the leading candidate is Margaret Burbidge Burbidge telescope you heard you for here first you always take a bureaucrat and put his name on the scope and when it gets in orbit you named it for an astronomer you're in on the secret right the second comes W first which will fly 2023 or 2024 which has a very interesting big agenda I don't know this because my nephew is the principal scientist for it and it's gonna really give itself another order magnitude expanded data at an incredible rate you're gonna be hearing about for reference plant wide field Infrared Survey telescope Zak you they're going to be reporting a new earth-like planet can have all the zone every week look very familiar because it is almost identical to Hubble it has the same mirror and basic system manufactured by the Department of Defense National Reconnaissance Office it turns out Hubble was a beard Hubble was a beard program to cover the kh-11 spy satellite and when the cage Levin went obsolete they had two left over and they gave them to NASA and NASA said huh thanks for a two billion dollars thanks great they got no they got at least two or three billion dollars worth of value out of it they would have had they had to spend 250 million dollars adapting him into real programs and they didn't have it so it was an extremely frustrating gift when we discover okay assume that there are intelligent extraterrestrials will we most likely discover them by the methods that the SETI people have been doing of looking for s-band radio signals or radio signals in in other bands or will we discover them by discovering artifacts Dyson spheres ring worlds or starship drives or no no but there's one way we're gonna do it first terraformed - or passing some cultural test so you're back to the Oxford analogy yeah yeah no I'm asking the question in terms of your vision do you think that were most likely to discover them by receiving signals of the general sort that for instance the SETI Institute looking for or by discovering artifacts of highly advanced civilizations a lot of us are in love with heavy stars it was very popular among the the panel's at at DragonCon last week tabi star is being occluded by something that has no explanation unless you like the notion of a Dyson cloud a Dyson cloud is a partly built Dyson Sphere and it's likely to be O'Neal colonies in the in the millions and billions cutting out most of the some of the output of a star measure measurable amounts of the output of a star in tiny stars case maybe 20 percent up to 20 percent we we who wish we science fiction writers love this what's his name Colbert Stephen Colbert held up a picture of a Dyson Sphere that he got off a computer and said see we found it tabby star there's a ring rolled around yes because he was an English major now he but it's right I mean the prevailing opinion that the best summary I've seen anyway in the last three months is it might be a bunch of very compact semi molecular clouds on a scale of maybe few hundred a you out and the outer perimeters near us there's it's momentarily including this but that's a patchwork model it's a desperate model because no other models such as comparing the infrared flux to the visible and variations none of them make any sense so this is the kind of thing I love actually it's a my category the WTF question this is a WTF question it's something we have to emphasize is that so far we've been looking for only the loudest and the brightest aster terrestrial civilizations so it's like most dr party you look yeah you sorta flock out and say why we've been doing this SETI since Drake we have over 50 years of searching for extraterrestrials but we've only been searching for extraterrestrials that are outrageously loud and shouting in our direction and the upper class if they were not hugely in radio admit they were just even just transmitting television to each other we would never notice that even if they were very close how will he accept that the earth is a photographic plate during which for two billion years any attempt to colonize on this world and it was prime real estate would have changed everything and as you pointed out we had a Cambrian explosion yes well and but and but we see no other signs of such a visitation no cities or anything like that so the there are there are definitely limits to how outrageously huge an expansion happened but I think we should open things up for questions I just want to do a quick little advert one is if any of you live down further south than here get on the mailing list of the arthur c-- clark center for human imagination at UCSD Paul Davies tomorrow morning may tell you about the competing center for science and imagination at ASU but there's an estate Arizona State I don't like acronyms Oh Arizona State sorry sorry are you saying oh D don't so who worked for NASA I already for NASA acronyms a long time are you going to the Nyack symposium a two-week so the do sign up do sign up for the to be on the mailing list of achi the arthur c clarke center for human imagination it's his centennial this December Arthur's and there will be interesting events and the Clark center is promoting something that you are the only the third audience in the world to note here about and that's called tacit ta SAT it stands for there's a story about that for decades I have and one of the guys along with other guys on this panel who get asked to meetings of government agencies who are concerned whether or not they're thinking about enough things that are outside of their standard box and very often I find myself saying there's a story about that if only I could remember and if you guys ever have a crisis like you think you might have a first contact or you might have an escaped plague or something like that wouldn't it be great if the Commission that you form to try to figure out what to deal with this had access to the hundred years of science fiction thought experiments about such things because very often these science fiction thought experiments start out with the premise of a commission tries to figure out what's going on and they leaped on the obvious answer but it could be X so we're trying to get a community going of folks who will participate in tacit alerts if anybody says I might have seen or I might be involved in a group that's noticed this does anybody know a story about that that there would be the group mind memory that would come up with you know there was this 1958 analogue story and so with that let's take some questions this gentleman has had his hand up for a while good evening my name is Alexander klebanov and first I want to apologize for my English one year ago I can say nothing okay I have a very important questions but first I want to briefly show a picture modem right now what I see 15 years ago 15 50 years ago we have a very very fast paced exploration yeah you know Sputnik to dogs man woman space Walker moon and after nothing except free waters and huiqian gear and you know you know what happened and I a station of course and right now it's very sad to see around know too much young people really and it's a very important question of what we will have after 20 years today's strangest conference yeah and our next 20 years who you sit here and it I think about it the last two maybe three years maybe we need I'm a four generation for her suspect who has no space for I say government and not government just my generation was the space my parents and you guys dream about space all Russian songs about space exploration about apple tree salsa Mars yeah you know you know what I mean but right now my generation I am was born in 1984 it's a sunset of Soviet Union so with generation and my choir my university did out money about all about finite financial area about business nobody dream about space and right now I know only run only one modern Russian song about space it's named cosmonaut it's punk rock group and it's mean I have a friend here was a crazy guy he dream about space and keep with himself Gagarin photos like freak but and what happened why we have a V speak sure of course Frank you for JPL for favors and I a station but what's it we have a big oldest computers in Saturn five right now I have a faster gadget in my pocket and we have nothing no big Rockets don't care about big rockets no dreams he has no dream about Mars my generation don't dream of course I sit on the chat special Russian community about space and shorts special video every lunch we sold together but it's very very small part of in the United States the same picture if you say somebody I dream about space like what excuse me I'm from a politician I spent 10 years for Russian opposition party and one year ago I changed everything that was everything this caper and ok my question okay my Croatian have a think we need a great reward maybe propaganda of space exploration or not any special TV shows and primetime any government program right now in Russia don't learn astronomy in high school I've also asked 2000 first year but right now no and the United States the same picture and around the world question we need a special program for education for propaganda for get Asian for aerospace or not yeah boogie briefs brewski American did you know the point is the Russian dream can be reignited it requires diplomacy and comradeship I worked on the Soviet Union problem for several decades mostly of course to break down the regime but I also lived in occupied Germany for three years in the 1950s in Occupied Japan for three years we can rebuild a confidence and a the unity of the Western nations and our big problem is the fact that have not treated in my view the Russian people and all those in the Ukraine and Georgia and so forth very well I think we have made serious mistakes and it is ignited well Putin used to be a KGB guy and I dealt with the KGB a lot not on good terms we can unite these four cultural forces and we had better do it because we are the people of the West and we have now a new and large rival in China which is yet another ageing authoritarian communist Society there are only three left North Korea Cuba and and we can these are the last stages of the end of the thank god 20th century which was mostly spent trying to suppress authoritarian regimes of various stripes and the winner and still champion turns out to be by the way the 18th century with the American and the aborted French Revolution but let's not got into politics we can redo this with a new human vision and that's what I think we have to focus on not just us the Americans you know they're always the winners but but look at the whole planet and try to unite them about a uniform what doesn't have to be uniform it can be multi various vision of the fate of humanity and what this goes back all the way to I would remind you the grandson of Tolstoy who wrote Alita the novel about the communist colonization of Mars which I reviewed through New York Times and had to do a lot of editing we can do this we need to reunite the Western idea and sell it to those rising power such as China and make it stick this is a big job the contest is never gonna be over but this is the next stage best I meant science fiction writers are driven to write as they write by that by the dream they have and we try this to spread it to share it it all happens free it doesn't take a government program right of course of course some call it cultural imperialism but it's cruel that's what we do that's what science fiction writers do is we show people the dream that there are worlds out there that we don't have to live on just one world but there are many worlds many billions of worlds many trillions of worlds out there at its best exactly what you asked for is what we're doing perhaps what we should work on a little bit is trying to remind people that it will not be easy that it is hard there is a lot of work to be done but showing them that you know there are worlds out there that are waiting for us to explore that is science fiction at its best well yes but the thing is being ornery and contrary our field has become rife with the simplistic stories that make money and those mean that you have to get a hero into pulse-pounding jeopardy and the best way to do that if you look up my name an idiot plot a nice association there is I go into why the principal lesson preached in a lot of movie and written science fiction is no institution can ever be trusted everything's going to hell and your neighbors are useless sheep and when you have this being answered by something like Andy where's the Martian and Andy word is coming to the Clark center next month you'll notice how popular it was how how people hunger for the notion of being a member of a civilization that's not stupid just so you can have an apocalypse for the heroine to shoot arrows at in any event I do have to answer that partly because you know the government that you fled has conquered our government and so and so the we're going to have to save you by saving ourselves first from that catastrophe the one last thing about this and the International meme is what China is going through right now regarding science fiction last year before last you late session won the Hugo first time from Asia for his epic the three-body problem and this was greeted with such pride in China that it took science fiction out of one of its Nader's because dictators not just communists but all dictators hold science fiction in suspicion because it's impudent it teaches questioning and so it was in one of its Nader's this honor - Lucy Shen helped but the thing that really made the difference was a survey that the Chinese commissioned in California of the most creative 500 or so innovators in California and they found that the one thing most common among them was not at their their cultural background their ethnic background their their schooling or anything like that you can guess from the build up what it was they all equal named David they all read my books all right they all they all they all grew up with science fiction and this has caused science fiction to go through a phase that who knows this might spread to Russia okay another question yes real quick in the four billion or so year history of Mars has there ever been truly intelligent life equal to us and mental capabilities and physical capabilities etcetera they didn't have to be humanoids necessarily did Mars ever have intelligent life I wrote a whole novel about this called the Martian race we discover sub-surface life and it actually has a strange form of intelligence because it's been working on it for four billion years under the surface with limited resources but so it was an attempted vision exactly what you refer to it ain't gonna look like us another rainbow Mars yes and you you find that we have somewhat it was the destroyit intelligent but destroyed intelligent life on Mars have we traded off scientific wonder for engineering certainty there's not a contrast you know okay for example do we ignore the Johnna Bekoff effect or do we explain it actually both are open to the sense of wonder okay there's no conflict between engineering and wonder in fact with many a few wonder if there should be do we seek engineering certainty and overlook scientific wonders one asking both always turn these questions around and look at yourself as a phenomenon sir the fact that your value system is one that says I want science I want engineering but I definitely don't want a zero sum right out of this you are yourself raised by a civilization filled with science fiction and and wonderful stories so you fear a zero-sum out of this but I just finished telling you all those engineers and scientists grew up on the reading the same stuff you did or different which is even better so you know always look around when you think you're a member of a decadent civilization and look in the mirror and say this decadent civilization made me to ask this question well you're buying into a zero-sum aren't you both all right let's move it this gentleman here okay in the three-body problem trilogy the author posits what he calls the dark forest theory which basically says that any encounter between two civilizations regardless of their inherent benevolence or malevolence will end in the destruction of the weaker one I'd like two panels views on that and how that should inform our future actions in terms of expanding out into space and possibly meeting other civilizations I suggest that the novel is mostly based on the experience of the Chinese people for the last two centuries it doesn't happen to be that way among advanced cultures it's certainly true when you get a very high and technologically advanced culture that collides with one previously unknown such as the entire saga of Columbus and an onward essentially Europe of the 1490s colliding with civilizations in two empires Aztecs and he the ones in Peru the Inca there were at the level of Babylon that's oh it's a it's a train wreck that's gonna happen it's not gonna happen between advanced civilizations capable of great technological feats like communicating over lightyears that's on the other hand everything you say is true if there happened to be a billion years ahead of us so all bets are off really sorry there will be a billion years advance this or will be a billion years advanced beyond them a billion years from now in in present day time if we find evidence of another civilization they're going to they're not unlikely to treat us as equals but the gems we just as funny natives I'm kind of hoping for that if it is true that when two civilizations collide the stronger one inevitably grinds the weaker one into the ground maybe we should work real hard to expand so that we will be the stronger one well when we finally come up against these other aliens but also not shout into the cosmos I'm part of the group of 30 or so people who have been heavily involved in SETI I helped to write the SETI protocols in the 90s and we've all resigned from various committees because there's a small cult that believes that they have a right to shout and draw attention to our us without vetting it in international discussions and it's the latter part that offends us yes it's not the likelihood that Kardashians or Kardashians are going to invade us going on it's it's I don't lose sleep not at night about that it is the fact that we have methods by which we appraise high potentially high impact low probability risks of which there are no known examples and an example of this process is the planetary protection office of NASA which deals which deals with with potentially high impact low probability risks of which there is no known example and there have been many others and Asilomar conferences has been held about this and this is all we've been asking for is some good solid conferences in which grown-ups can decide whether or not these guys are zealous cult or scientists exercising their free speech rights to say yoohoo and give the universe the entire Internet one of the guys wants to do that not concoct some carefully parsed message but to simply dump the internet into space because they're advanced let them figure it out now here's what will happen you have what do we in nature altruism is relatively rare but quid pro quo is understood by a lot of creatures so you have an economy out there what's the economy based on its information so we send them their entire internet every single bit of our culture for them to figure out and they answer the answer oh wow what a great free sample oh you want an encyclopedia Galactica oh well that's gonna cost you it's one of the few scientific discussions in which the apparently correct answer is just shut up okay let's take a question over there the medium that you guys use to tell stories whether it be books TV or movies it's generally one-way communication where you are telling the story with the advent of VR and video games storytelling where might be 2-way or multiple way how do you envision that changing science fiction in the way that you create it it tends to emphasize world building over linear storytelling so the game format is really has taken over and possibly gained formats or even a larger portion of the entertainment market than classical science fiction but it's a very very different medium it's not it's not the same linear storytelling is not what happens once you start having participatory stories yeah that's there's a different horizon I have to say my misgivings having no railroad Martin as his friends call him grr Martin is that all these enormous resources with a huge fan base is devoted to a recapitulation of the War of the Roses with Dragons this is not a good sign I remember the arrival of the multiple multiple choice story stories I could have got in on that I thought it over just I decided I wanted my ending in my story you get no choice well the 1984 world science fiction convention in Anaheim was the greatest and largest of all of the world cons and I owned it ha ha ha I was not guest of honor I was just the hot young never mind the you were young ok word that I believed it was also accurate the the point is that Hollywood showed up in droves at that convention and they realized that this fantastic world was really going to be a moneymaker and so the next year you started having the burst of investment in comic-con and all these other activities and it's no coincidence that science fiction really took off at that point in cinema and ever since then we've been sort of like a tail on a giant elephant we at the literary end and it's not that I resent that after all I have had a movie we know the part of it that I resent is the fact that is so very seldom is there any complexity to the to the plot because it's understandable they have to get you identifying with pulse-pounding action for a hero for 90 minutes and there's really not much chance for complexity but somehow we're going to have to be a civilization that does explore complex ideas yeah you have to thrill them with the frontier I think that's a short answer we have to sell them the solar system I thought Andy Weir's movie I thought the Martian did a fantastic job some people have noticed yeah and his next novel is a murder mystery on the moon something close to home okay there's a gentleman over there we got one here okay first of all mr. Niven thank you for explaining that about the about the computer games and the multiple multiple directions because one of my questions was going to be who wants to have a video game from their novel okay so my question for you is I love hard science fiction and so the question is when do you think a new universe is going to be discovered and what do you think the laws of that new new universe will be this is presuming that it's a universe that has different laws than the one that we're familiar with we think Greg Benford wrote the novel about that so you should read Qasim that was that novel it was produced by novel Kazem is about producing by the way just a couple hundred meters from hero in the physics department at UCI it's a form of concealed autobiography except I'm not the foreground character it's actually a black woman physicist on the faculty who accidentally produces a new universe and has to pay the taxes the in all sense of the words that's my exploration that series it's the only way we can see another universe is by creating one which by the way solves the problem of where did we come from because turns out smart creatures in possible universes create universes that are really good for smart creatures like us and that's what we came from that's the ontological solution it's the only one I have but on the other hand you can just check with God the next time you see him that's that's the deliberate universe creation variant the non deliberate one which is utterly mind-blowing and I have a story about that was concocted by Lee Smolin a cosmologists in Canada and it's the notion that when a black hole is created it also creates a pocket a new universe and it doesn't have to be the same mass it can be create a big bang and there's physicists who seriously take this seriously well if you take this creates baby universes that then become full-scale universes you add just two things one where does it get its its laws of nature its cosmic constants well it gets it from the mother too there are small variations if you have those three assumptions then you know where we came from it's a series of evolution steps of mutation in evolution for those universes that become very good at making baby universes so our universe is the distant distant descendant of whatever beginning there was yeah it's a completely mind-blowing concept we descend not just us our species but the whole universe from a whole population that was extremely smart and loved sex done except that's his variant my variant is just love sex you thought you cleaned it up I got rid of the smart part well we're descended from people who were parents you sir all right so by the way in in my past I've met Isaac Asimov I've met Robert Heinlein I met Arthur see Clark I've met Roger Zelazny and I have to say this panel is is epic you guys are great contributors and you know you guys may not have read all their stuff but trust me they're all amazing amazing authors so yeah I've literally bred everything you guys have read everything like every single piece so anyway I think in order to colonize Mars I tend to be practical in order to colonize Mars we need to come up with some financial incentive to get corporate America and/or the stock market and/or people to put in money to make this happen and I think that if we put our collective science fiction noggins together we could come up with a business plan so to speak that people could buy into that would finance this actual effort because it's nice to think in theory about what we could do and how we could do it but until a lesson until we have money behind it is never gonna happen so I'm wondering if we could write at sort of a fiction piece or a fiction / science fiction piece that actually hypothesize on how we could finance colonizing Mars well there's a good talk today that suggests that rich retired people are the base market I like that talk because I'm a rich retired person and so I wanted it to happen tomorrow but it hasn't but but I think the smarter arguably it's a lot better than the mind argument in my opinion I love science fiction and I really hate to badmouth science fiction but one of the flaws of science fiction historically is an incredible naivety about economics science fiction writers as far as I can tell with all flunked their 101 economics courses if you read what they write man the economics there's bad in most science fiction well actually you know because I mean look who's Elan musk but a science fiction character I mean that's that's who he is that means you the man who sold was that story written before David Brin yes it was okay he appears that's Robert Heinlein okay the no I'm not saying that new road that sorry but that story's been out there that's Firestar that's you name it okay it's there it's DeeDee Harriman different but whatever the but let me say who wrote the story that you are talking about it was Isaac Asimov okay and it's called Foundation the now in a little different way that is I think that if you wanted to have a Mars colony that would make money for its investors you make an inventor's colony that is you recruit a bunch of very bright very sharp technological your debt people who are dedicated to the vision of establishing Humanity on Mars you send in to Mars they make inventions to further the colony but those inventions are licensable on earth so that's how I would sell this to Silicon Valley that that's you know it's a tweak of the foundation as it were the but that's what I see it's also the history of the American Republic I might point out in which even in the Revolutionary War we had a Navy was just as good but those smaller than the British Navy because we're really bugged of smart people I mean that you know we didn't win this thing by accident you know let's have just one thing and that is that there is already a bunch of Silicon Valley people who are you see if the difference between one group of aristocrats and another is not that they don't all want to make more billions it's just how important the billion next billion is if you're saying your first million was the most important in the second you really cared a lot by the time you've got your fifth billion you're thinking I'm going to risk this entire last two billion dollars doing something that'll be way cool that might make me ten billion and the people who are like that our funding SpaceX funding Blue Origin but in addition there's a bunch of guys at the next level who are behind Planetary Resources deep space industries so they do have that dream they do have that dream of possibly getting super rich but doing but helping to get something started that's worth it's in its own right and I have to say an answer to one of this afternoon's panels that asteroids are where the fractionated wealth is to be found and in the near term there ain't nothing on that dusty ice ball where we've already planted footprints been there done that let others stomp around in the dust yes so a topic we've talked about today already is getting new blood in this industry and especially young blood especially diverse blood and not just from America but all you know we're talking about breaking up the stereotypes that have been you know holding our countries from working together so since we have such a panel of people who write inspiration for everyone you know science fiction inspires everyone in this room and everyone every scientist in some way if you could give one piece of advice to everyone here everyone here is consumed by their own work but how can you how can we inspire the next generation you know we're not all writers we we work in labs we were behind us so in short concise answers since it's but like what's the one piece of advice you could give to all of us to help bring more people here next year to bring a diverse body here next year as a young female here I want more of me here you're not all writers but you all have the dream keep it yeah go out and talk to people about this because you may have noticed that the front pages full of a whole lot of conflict and everything what bothers me coming from the deep south is that I've seen this kind of thing before the biggest failures of the United States particularly where wouldn't we failed to compromise I'm not just going to talk about civil war there are others and so but the deep problem is that we have not shared our visions in a way that is that pulls people in enough we've tried we've we have a lot we've done a lot but but the country and and the whole society that's devoted to the promise of technology starting with Francis Bacon has to make the message clear that the way to uplift the the base of humanity is through technological progress that is well distributed it does not go to an elite as has happened in this economy big problem and to communicate that vision but it doesn't mean that the state is in charge of it rather this is a problem we've got to solve as people around the world ourselves remember the government works for us that's hard to remember sometimes and make that vision clear there is a better optimistic purpose to humanity awaiting us if we just keep doing the smart things and don't get involved in conflicts with cultures that are vast and impenetrable and and which are difficult to manage if there's a kind of look I'm a professor here you see in the physics department but the language of the administration is always slicing people up by the old paradigm of race class gender that's a mistake our job is to unite people not to slice them up into pieces and start judging them because what I think matters is really what what nobody the university really wants to talk about its culture we represent a different culture that comes straight out of Francis Bacon all the way back to our committees and beyond we have to make clear to the rest of the species that there is real hope and it's based on the culture that has made things work we have uplifted humanity enormous Lee in five hundred years and the secret is not race class gender it is to have a culture devoted to progress human progress that's the agenda everything else is a footnote all right you know answer that young lady there it may look like a bunch of white geeks up here but we all have a feminine side no well half female like to say the fact is that this last year I mentioned the Hugo Awards expanding out to Asia the year before this last year every single winner of a Hugo Award in the fiction categories and most of the other categories too was female I have a book here to promote by Mary true Zillow called Mars girls and she is over there and should have been up here instead of the much less charismatic looking Hugo winner nevertheless I I will admit I will admit he's great arm candy but in two weeks I'm at NASA's innovative in advanced concepts group and we are desperately looking to expand the number of people who apply for Nyack grants from all ethnicities and genders and and the Nyack grants are the little tiny grants for things just this side of plausible so look up Nayak if you like so I want to say that these concerns are being dealt with believe me the science fiction fandom community is addressing the issue of bearded farts with glasses but right but I think overall greg has the key of the answer which is talk to people just talk to people share your dreams yeah that's important okay let's have another question so one interesting concept that seems to have exploded in recent years in science fiction is the idea of the technological singularity I've always seen that it's kind of disrupting in a way the traditional tale of man going to the cosmos and exploring I was I'd be interested in your guys thoughts on the I guess possibility of the technological singularity and then how that might interact with a space exploration thank you I fear the singularity is a topic I it's a great opportunity that sounds stupid yes otherwise the rapture of the Nerds I like that just there was hurling said that just the just the review for those who aren't familiar with the idea the terminology mostly comes from Vernor Vinge a who's yeah a really smart guy and it would be fun if you were here but the idea is that as computers get smarter and smarter eventually they get to the point where they get so smart that they can design even smarter computers and then these even smarter computers can design even Artur computers and very soon we are in a region where we have machines that are so smart that we can't predict what will happen because they are no longer working in any sort of an intellectual framework that we can even understand much less predict and they may be helping us they may be hurting us or they may be doing things that are just so unintelligible that we don't even know what they're doing yeah my reaction to that and as you stated it well and I talked about this to verenor Vinci way back when I was in graduate school at UCSD I got my doctor in 1967 farriner was there in the math department I discovered him by seeing that that he published paper a story in analog and it said he was at UCSD and I found out he was on the next floor the same building I was in the I'll believe it when I see it it's not obvious that we can build a computer that's going to be smarter than the much misunderstood creativity that's right here we're really smart primates and we've had millions of years we primates on this planet you put the brain in a box we'll see they're gonna be good at doing a lot of things but you know there's a reason that trees don't grow to the sky intelligence may not be a completely fungible linear thing in fact all the evolutionary and evidence is that it's not let me give you an example dolphins big big study of dolphins been around for several tens of millions of years they were once mammals they have an ACEF Elysian koshered there's a measure of this in which we're big surprise we're we're one right no species other than the Dolphins has ever reached an ACEF elation quotient bigger than 0.7 dolphins ten million years ago rose in the ocean 2.8 and they stopped and they have sat at a plateau for ten million years my guess is because they this they don't have hands they don't have school tools building can't invite a invent fire they're trapped in an environment we have no reason to believe that advanced intelligence will not have some other such similar problem no matter how well we program because face it folks we don't know why we're so smart I think you just told us that we're okay with making smarter computers as long as we don't give them hands that's I was trying to go very deep because all of my Lego robotics students are making hands for their little robots we're do chimp seven a socialization quotient by the way there's there's a lot going on here that we don't understand but there's this guy over here or says that we can do something about that point out with chimps but we can make them smarter I know but that was in a science fiction first only 12 genes and I would bet I would bet better than even odds that there is some no I would offer odds that there are there's a laboratory in Siberia or sink yang where these dozen genes have already been messed with my point is is basically we don't have ideas ideas have us most of our deep processing and I speak as a mathematical physicist is done in the unconscious we don't even have a theory of why that's true although I have one of course I have a theory about everything we don't understand intelligence enough to be sure that you can actually make an artificial intelligence that can self enhance the only method we apparently have is to get smart people to marry each other we were have any other mechanism and when that happens you get the Huxley family where 60% of the kids revert to the human mean toward the human mean they're still very smart 10% are extremely smart like their parents and the remaining 20% find themselves on the autistic spectrum yeah so twice twice the odds and they belong to Mensa so the I I am a little more I believe I'm more likely to I believe it's more likely that we will see artificial intelligence I get messages that confirm this through my teeth shut it doesn't work it evil anymore in any event the point is not whether or not we'll get them because we'll get various aspects of them they certainly will pretend that they're super smart I mean yeah look who tests that already worked at Oxford the the the point is the point is how can we get what's called the soft landing now Ian banks in his future histories he shows super smart computers that don't stop us but love us and give us adventures so that we don't feel useless that same GM isn't yeah the in my opinion we've already had artificial intelligent creations for the last 200 years they've been called nations corporations and recently NGOs and 90% of them are no smarter than the sum of their component humans but we all know that there have been a few nations a few corporations and a few NGOs that have achieved what's still a murky miracle but we're starting to study it and that's the ability to behave ways that are clearly smarter than the sum of their human members and in my novel existence I show some scenes of self-forming smart mobs who behave smarter than the sum of their human components so we know some of the ways in which these artificially intelligent entities have behaved extremely well and one of the things that has always been essential is that they can hold each other accountable in other words the answer to smart Skynet's level machines is more skynet level machines the best example I can think of is lawyers they are very smart and the only reason why we haven't killed them all is because we can SiC one against another I don't know I just want to throw something in because I think it's very strange remark I mean if you look at the events of August 1914 Germany composed arguably of the most intelligent and educated people on earth acted like a complete idiot and that was not a member of my 10% oh all right let's just take another question over there over the years how has your thinking evolved and has that reflected on your craft as a writer I think our writing reflects all of that you can track how my son am I think he has changed I started 50 years ago noticing that well biting the bullet and deciding that Mars didn't have canals set out to describe a an inhabited solar system in which Mars was being virtually ignored bottom of a hole you just avoided it because it would really pull your ships off course yeah you know if age brings wisdom if you're lucky and paying attention and that's what I've tried to do yeah I've been seeking wisdom you always reflect your life experience and I've always said every novel is the form of concealed autobiography and this is coming from the species as I said that has never found a mirror it did not like when you realize things like this you you know we have great limitations on the other hand we're doing the extremely well considered that we've been around maybe 200,000 years and we've really gotten too smart only in the last 500 and that's an issue of human culture so we should learn from history which as far as I can tell that you see how they essentially don't teach anymore there is no major university of the United States it requires a of course in American history or American government that I know they're certainly not in the IUB leaves and certainly not new see this is a huge stupid mistake okay over there I hit this gentleman a microphone I had a couple comments about some of the answers the questions that the panel was asked earlier one is my solution to the Fermi paradox and the other is why what we're gonna find with our new telescopes when we get them the obvious answer to me to the Fermi paradox is that people just don't contact other people that much because and if you think about it we probably wouldn't either if we found a more primitive civilization what all right just yes so even if we've been visited since this planet was formed we wouldn't know about it because they don't want us to how about the one on the list I saw the monolith yeah that's fine but the the idea that I mean many people here probably think we're being visited right now by aliens that doesn't count for what we're talking about and that links into my second point about the telescopes I think the most important thing will find whether new telescopes will be first contact now what I mean by first contact is not an alien talking to one of us that doesn't count I mean if one beamed in here talk to us for 10 minutes and then beamed out that what that doesn't count as for his contact because no one would believe us we'd all be dismissed as a bunch of nuts first contact has to be something that is indisputable and a telescope will show you the lights of an alien city a thousand light years away that can't be disputed what does the panel think of that I love it yeah I'm waiting for it to happen let's go make those big telescopes I'll just just in comment to that because I'll answer a question that I pose to the panel in the old duct almost did in terms of discovering intelligent extraterrestrials I think the way we're going to do it is this we're going to put telescopes in space that can detect if other planets have oxygen in their atmosphere if they do it means they have life okay because oxygen free oxygen does not exist in the absence of life on planets okay now that wouldn't show intelligence but let's say the frequency of planets or solar systems that have such a planet normally is say 1 in 300 but then we find one particular region of space where it's 1 in 3 that would show that there's an intelligent species operating in that region that is actively terraforming planets nearby ok that would be very strong evidence that's what I think we're going to find them I don't think I'm going to find them by listening for their s-band communications because we're not using s-band anymore ourselves but anyway that's my answer we have only a couple of minutes left I'm gonna ask the panel a question if we go into space how far will we go and what will we become infinity and beyond what will we become I've tried to confined my reach because I don't know what humanity is likely to evolve into there are several directions we could go and I think we'll take them all one group rewriting itself with with gene and gene and genetic engineering one group going with a low plasti which is is artificial legs and look and the like one one group selective breeding one group god I don't know we we will we will not recognize our descendants of the next 10 generations yeah once we get out of this spherical box as I call it that we also call the planet all bets are off and the the argument that really smart species can can spread through the galaxies is not absurd Stan Robeson and others have tried to argue otherwise but I think that's a funny argument so it's barely possible that the human species is gonna last as long as the universe does but it ain't gonna look the same and it may not be pretty and in fact you might say the saga of our species is that we're or mean we're ugly we're maybe hard to like but we're damned hard to kill there's so many paths that we can go that it would take a very large panel of science fiction writers to explore more than a few of them species can easily last a million years some species can last 10 million years few species lasts as long as a hundred million years so we can guess that in tens to hundreds of millions of years we will be supplanted probably by some other species possibly our descendant species or related species so in terms of just where we're going we can expect that we will be different but the wild card is as Larry Niven was just pointing out we have the ability now to change ourselves and when we can change ourselves all of a sudden all bets are off we can become whatever it is that we want to be and the frightening part of that is the story of Forbidden Planet that we become our own worst nightmare is growth we do come the when we can become whatever we want to be it's our it'd that tells us what we become and not necessarily our or ego or super-ego yes shining but we sure not going to be beat up by the horseshoe crab I can guarantee that the I attended the first interplanetary my interstellar migration conference in 1984 and back when I worked with Joe Carroll out there and you should attend his talk tomorrow at 10:30 gonna be very interesting and Joe still hasn't taken the picture he promised to take the and and at this conference Jones and Finney showed that just by using the repopulation rates of the Polynesians that if you used starships traveling just you know ten percent of the speed of light between stars then paused for 10 generations to replenish population build up an industrial base then build another starship up ten more starships and send them on that with all it would take is sixty million years to fill the galaxy if you make Von Neumanns self-replicating probes as I talked about in in my most recent novel and these go from asteroid to asteroid in other star systems and simply mined the asteroids where all the wealth is and make a few dozen copies refuel them send them on you filled the galaxy in three million years so there are some real burdens on this notion called the Fermi paradox and it's it's a fast that and the singularity are the two weird science fictional notions that are hanging in the air and when you see things in the news you wonder is this pertinent to the Fermi paradox is this house other societies have failed or is this pertinent to the singularity is this how we get replaced by our own descendants it's a very interesting time to live when but of course I have this reflex from when I was a youth to say is this it two things in the news because every time when I was a kid I saw a flash of light on the horizon in the 1950s I thought is this it dive under a desk ready for the apocalypse okay well this isn't it this is just it for tonight so thanks a lot see you tomorrow morning [Applause]

Channel: The Mars Society

Views: 3,244

Rating: 4.8032789 out of 5

Keywords: mars, The Mars Society, 2017MarsSocCon

Id: nysQiunvFQ8

Length: 120min 9sec (7209 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2017