Prospects for Humanity | Martin Rees

good evening I'm Alexander Rose I'm the executive director here at the long now foundation and just a few days ago we hit a big milestone in membership here at long now we finally surpassed ten thousand members that have signed up thank you and we we spent a lot of time figuring out who gets to be member ten thousand and so the answer we came up with was that any member in good standing is basically part of a drawing that we're gonna do I think tomorrow and so if if you're a current member you have the chance to become member ten thousand so definitely make sure your current tonight when you go home and you'll be you'll be in the mix good evening I'm Stuart brand from long now about fifty years ago the Apollo program I rusty got photographs the Earth from space got people off planet and we started thinking of this place as a planet and that introduced us to astronomical time and may well be part of why something like long now foundation and thinking long-term and all of that came to be both thinkable and actionable and therefore it's particularly appropriate to have as a speaker tonight the britain's astronomer royal who was also president of the royal society which basically invented modern science and so along with having an astronomical perspective on everything he's aware of all the science going on and all of the technology is spinning out of that and who better to speak about basically the future of everything then martin rees well thank you very much Stuart it's a great pleasure and privilege to be here in front of this audience but hard to follow that wonderful movie clip my talk is going to be mainly predictions and forecasts but I'm going to start with a flashback to the Middle Ages inspired by this Cathedral in Ely ten miles from where I live for medieval people the entire cosmology from creation to apocalypse was just a few thousand years they were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences and prone to irrational dread they lived in turbulent and uncertain times but they built cathedrals this immense and glorious building was constructed with primitive technology by Mason's who knew they wouldn't live to see it finished and it still inspires us almost a millennium later our horizons in space and time are now vastly extended as are our resources and knowledge but today it's only organisations like long now the think center is ahead this seems a paradox but there is a reason the lives of medieval people played out against a backdrop to change little from one generation to the next their children grandchildren live the same lives as they did but for us unlike for them the next century would be drastically different and we can't foresee it nor plan for it so there's been an explosive disjunction between the ever shortening time scale of social and tactical change and the multi-billion year time span to biology geology and cosmology a few years ago I met a well-known Indian tycoon you knew I had the title astronomer royal as Stuart mentioned and he asked do you do the Queen's horoscopes and I responded with a straight face well if she wanted none I'm the man she'd asked he then seemed eager to hear my predictions and I went took a straight face and I said well stock markets will fluctuate troubled in the Middle East and things like that and he listened sagely but I then came clean and I said I'm only a scientist and astronomer and he then lost all interest in my predictions and rightly so because scientists are pretty rotten forecasters almost as bad as economists but not quite are there no economists here so my forecast will be very tentative especially in front of an audience where there are people with far more expertise than me on each of the several topics I'll address but 14 years ago I wrote a book which I entitled our final century question mark my publishers deleted the question mark and the America but the American publishers change the title to our final hour I guess you guys like instant gratification and the reverse well that book typecast me as a doom stir and Luddite and I've tried to counter that a bit in my new book advertised here by offering some scientific optimism despite political pessimism and the theme is this the Earth's existed for forty-five million centuries but this century is special it's the first when one species namely ours has the planets future in his hands we're deep in the Anthropocene we could irreversibly degrade the biosphere or we could trigger the transistor from biological to electronic intelligence while misdirected technology could cause a catastrophic setback to civilization we've had one lucky escape already at any time in the Cold War when armaments escalated beyond all reason the superpowers could have stumbled towards Armageddon through muddled and miscalculation and that threat is merely in abeyance nuclear weapons are based on 20th century science our focus later in my talk on 21st century Sciences bio cyber robotics and space which all offer huge potential benefits but also expose us to novel vulnerabilities but before that let's focus on the long term threats that stem not from conscious decisions but from humanity's ever heavier collective footprint because here even with a cloudy crystal ball there are some things we can predict for instance by mid-century the world will be more crowded 50 years ago world population was about three and a half billion it's now about seven point six billion and the gross been mainly in Asia and Africa has shown in this map where regions are scaley proportion to their growth in the last 30 years but the growth is slowing the number of births per year worldwide actually peaked a few years ago nonetheless populations going up in some areas and world population is forecast to rise to about 9 billion by 2050 that's partly because most people in the developing world are young and they're yet to have children and they live longer the age histogram in the developing world on the Left lots of young people will become more like the one on the right for Western Europe where the birth rate has not increased and most people live a long time and as the upper part of the left hand one fattens up that will give a big rise in population even if the birth rate doesn't go up and the main growth is in East Asia and it's there that the world's human financial resources will become concentrated which will actually end for centuries of North Atlantic dominance and the other big change is this more urbanization and to prevent mega cities becoming turbulent dystopias will surely be a major challenge to governance population growth seems under discussed partly perhaps because of doom-laden forecasts by for instance Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome which proved off the mark also some deem population growth to be a taboo subject tainted by association with the eugenics in the 20s and 30s with Indian policies and Indira Gandhi and more recently with China's hardline one-child policy as it's turned out country to the worst predictions food production and resource extraction have kept pace with rising population that means still occur but there due to conflict or male distribution not overall scarcity but the capacity of the world to cope depends on lifestyle it couldn't sustain its present population if everyone lived as prophet Li as the better of Americans do today each uses much energy and eating as much beef on the other hand 20 billion could live sustainably with a very ascetic quality of life if all adopted a vegan diet didn't travel lived in small high-density apartments and interactive our super internet and virtual reality this scenario is fairly improbable obviously and certainly not alluring but the spread between these two indicates it's naive to quote one headline figure for the world's carrying capacity to feed 9 billion by mid-century will require improved agriculture low till water conserving ham happy GM crops and maybe dietary innovations converting insects highly nutritious and rich in proteins into palatable food and making artificial meat really great new technology and to quote Gandhi there'll be enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed population trends beyond 2050 are harder to predict because enhanced education and empowerment of women surely a benign thing in itself could reduce fertility rates where they're now highest but the demographic transition so-called hasn't reached parts of India and sub-saharan Africa on the other hand if families in Africa remain large then according to the UN projections that consciousness population could double again between 2050 and 2100 to 4 billion Nigeria alone would then have as bigger popular as Europe and North America combined and Africa's population will be nearly ten times Western Europe's we're optimists say that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain it does but it's a geopolitical strains that worry me most sub-saharan Africa can't escape poverty as the so called Asian Tigers did by undercutting Western manufacturing costs these robots could do manufacturing now and they may not have toilets but they do have smartphones they know the injustice of their fate they know what they're missing and migration is easy this is a recipe for instability for multiple mega versions of the tragic boat people crossing the Mediterranean today so surely wealthy nations especially in Europe should urgently promote the growing prosperity in Africa and not just for altruistic reasons and another thing if humanity's collective impact on land use and climate pushes too hard the results of ecological shock could irreversibly impoverish our biosphere extinction rates are rising we are destroying the book of life before we've read it well ready there's more biomass in chickens and turkeys than in all the world's wild birds and the biomass in humans cows and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals biodiversity is crucial for human wellbeing we're clearly harmed if fish stocks tremble to extinction your plants in the rainforests whose gene pool might be useful to us but for many environmentalists preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right over and above what it means to us humans to quote the great ecologist ear Wilson mass extinction is sin that future generations were least forgive us for so the world's getting more crowded under the second firm prediction it'll gradually get warmer now in contrast to population issues climate change is certainly not under discussed though it is I think we'd all agree under responding to the famous Keeling curve shows the concentration of co2 and how it's risen over the last 50 years mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels the seasonal oscillations incidentally are because there's more vegetation in the northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere so in the autumn the co2 rises and leaves falafels trees but what serious is this second arise of course and v IPC see report and it's update a few months ago presents the spread of projections four different assumptions about fossil fuel use in the future etc and here are some of them it's still unclear how much the direct effect of co2 as a greenhouse gas is amplified by water vapor and cloud cover changing this so called climate sensitivity is a further uncertainty that's indicated by the bars on the right which reach to the left projections as an uncertainty due to the uncertain science however despite these uncertainties there are two messages which most would agree on one regional disruptions to weather patterns and more extreme weather will even within the next 20 years or so aggravate pressures on food and water and enhance migration pressures to under business-as-usual scenarios we can't rule out later in this century warming which is really catastrophic and tipping poor triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland's ice so those two things will be agreed but even those who accept both of those statements have diverse views on the policy response and these divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics in particular in how much obligation we should feel towards the long now towards future generations the danish campaigner born Lumbergh has sort of bogeyman status among environmentalists slightly unfairly actually but his Copenhagen consensus a group of economists they downplay the importance of addressing climate change compared to shorter term efforts to help the world's poor but the reason for that is that he applies a standard discount rate five percent per year or something which in effect writes off anything that happens after 2050 but if you care about those who live into the 22nd and Beyond essentially and Beyond and all babies today can expect that then as economists like vitamin at Harvard argue you will deem it worth paying an insurance premium now to protect those generations against the worst-case scenarios you wouldn't use a standard discount rate so even those who agree there's a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence will differ in how urgently the advocate action today it'll depend on expectation of future growth optimism about technical fixes but above all it depends on an ethical issue in optimizing people's life chances should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth as the parentheses I'd note that this one policy context where an essentially zero discount rate is applied and that's to radioactive waste disposal where the depositors are required to prevent leakage for ten thousand years or even more somewhat ironic when we can't plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead consider this analogy suppose astronomers had tracked an asteroid and calculated that it would hit the earth in 2080 63 years from now not for certainty but we say 10 percent probability would we relax saying it's a problem that could be sat on one side for 50 years people will then be richer and it may turn out he's going to miss the earth anyway I don't think we would I think that'd be a consensus we should start straight away and do our damndest to find ways to deflect the asteroid or mitigate its effect what will actually happened on the climate policy front the pledges that were made at the Paris conference and renewed in Poland recently are a positive step but politicians won't gain much resonance by advocating unwelcome lifestyle changes now or high carbon tax when the benefits accrue mainly in distant parts of the world and decades into the future uumm Claude Younker head of the European Union Commission famously said in a different context we know what to do but we don't know how to get reelected when we do it and he's having problems with us Brits this week as you probably know but this one win-win roadmap to a low-carbon future cleaner energy sources I think nations should accelerate R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation and into other technologies where parallel approaches crucial especially storage batteries compressed air pumped storage flywheels etc and smart grids the faster these clean energies advance the sooner will their prices fall so they become affordable too for instance India where they certainly need more generating capacity where the health of the poor is now jeopardized by smoky stoves burning wood and dung and where there will otherwise be pressure for them to build coal-fired power stations Sun and wind are of course the frontrunners but other methods have geographical niches geothermal power in Iceland for instance and tidal energy is attractive where the topography induce especially large amplitude tides and in fact in my country Britain's West Coast is one such place and there are proposals for tidal barrages and lagoons but because of local intermittency especially a solid wind we need continental scale DC grids in Europe to carry solar energy from Morocco and Spain to less sunny northern nations and east-west to smooth peak demand over different time zones in this country and indeed in Eurasia and maybe the latter shall be part of China's belt and Road initiative and despite wise ambivalence about nuclear energy I think we should surely boost R&D into a variety of fourth-generation concepts which could prove to be far more flexible in size and safer than the ones we have now and the potential payoff of fusion is so great at surely worth continuing experiments and prototypes it'd be hard to think of a more inspiring challenged for young engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems for the world but if this transitions too slow and if twenty years from now our time it seems heading irreversibly into dangerous territory there may be pressure for panic measures this could evolve a plan B being fatalistic about continuing dependence on fossil fuels but combating its effects by either a massive investment in carbon capture and storage or else by geoengineering it's feasible for instance to inject enough aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the world's climate sort of artificial volcano and indeed what's scary is that this might be within the resources of a single nation even a single corporation and they could be unintended side effects and of course the other consequences of rising co2 like ocean acidification would be unchecked geoengineering would be a political nightmare not all countries would want to adjust the thermostat the same way and the only beneficiary will be the lawyers they'd have a bonanza if nations could litigate over bad weather there is a more benign kind of geoengineering direct extraction of co2 from the atmosphere this would be there by undoing the Geoengineer who then literally done by burning fossil fuels but a recent report from the National Academy emphasized that even this relative benign policy has downsides especially in its implications for land use if you plant more and more trees incidentally I've talked about science and I should emphasize that in doing so I include engineering and technology indeed the latter are what's most important and in fact my engineering friends like a cartoon which shows two beavers looking out up at a big hydroelectric dam when beaver says to the other I didn't actually build it but it's based on my idea armchair theorists like me should be very modest compared to those who build things that work and meet public demand and I like to say the swedish engineer who invented a zip fastener made a bigger intellectual leap than most theoretical physicists will ever do in their lifetime well we should be evangelists for new technologies not Luddites without them the world can't provide food and sustainable energy for expanding a more demanding population but we need wisely directed technology indeed some are anxious that it's advancing so fast that we may not properly cope with it and if we'll have a bumpy ride through this century and my book expands on these concerns where ever more dependent on elaborate networks electric power grids air traffic control is national finance just-in-time delivery and so forth unless these globalized networks are highly resilient their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic I'll be at rare breakdowns we are world analogs of what happened in the financial system in 2008 our cities will be paralyzed without electricity supermarket shelves empty within days if supply chains were disrupted and air-traffic ins we're a pandemic worldwide within days and social media can spread panic and rumor and economic contagion literally at the speed of light and by the way pandemics natural ones could cause far more societal breakdown now than in earlier centuries English villages and towns like Ely in the 14th century continued to function even when the Black Death half there population the rest went on fatalistically in contrast our society here would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals were overwhelmed and that would incur before the fatality rates got anywhere near even 1% advances in microbiology Diagnostics vaccines and antibiotics offer prospects of course for containing pandemics but the same research has some controversial aspects if he mentioned two of these for instance in 2012 a research group in Wisconsin and one in Holland showed it was surprisingly easy to make the flu virus more virulent and more transmissible the somnus was a scary portent of things to come and in 2014 the US federal government decided to cease funding these so-called gain-of-function experiments they've been renewed now but with some restrictions and the new CRISPR casts 9 technique for gene editing is hugely promising but their ethical concerns and worries about possible runaway consequences of gene drive programs to buy powered species as diverse as mosquitoes may have been attempt to wipe out the mosquito that carries the Zika virus and some nasty people England want to wipe out the grey squirrel which is more successful in competing than the brown squirrel is well back in the early days of recombinant DNA a group of biologists met in a cinema here in California and they agreed on what experiments should and shouldn't be done this encouraging precedent triggered several meetings in the last few years to discuss recent developments in the same spirit but today forty years after the original Asilomar conference the research community is far broader internationally and more influenced by commercial pressure and I'd worry that whatever regulations were imposed on Prudential or ethical grounds on use of these technologies can't be enforced worldwide anymore the drug laws can wear the tax laws can whatever can be done will be done by someone somewhere and that's a nightmare whereas an atomic bomb can't be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities biotech involved small-scale dual-use equipment indeed biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby and competitive game and we know all too well the technical expertise doesn't guarantee balance rationality the global village will have its village idiots and they will have global range and the rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups or even individuals by bio as well as cyber technology will pose an intractable challenge to governments and I think aggravate the tension between freedom privacy and security what about another key technology robotics and ara there are some concerns which are relatively near term as the concerns I have about biotech are but there are deeper imponderables if we go further into the future the smartphone the web and their ancillary x' which are now ubiquitous today for the sea magic even just 25 years ago so looking several decades ahead we must keep our minds open or at least ajar - transformative advances that may now seem science fiction and clearly here I can't make any good forecasts but on the bio front we might expect two things firstly a better understanding of the combination of genes which determined key human characteristics and the ability to synthesize genomes that match these features the great physicist Freeman Dyson conjectures a time when children will be able to design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation paid for chemistry sets well if it ever becomes possible to as it were play God on the kitchen table ecology and even our species may not survive very long unscathed so what about another transformative technology robotics and AI here as I'm sure everyone here knows there being exciting advances in what's called generalized machine learning deep mind and London company now part of Google achieves a remarkable feat its computer beat the world champion in the game of Go there he is and also did the same in in chess and other games now this may at first sight not seem a big deal because it's 20 years since IBM's deep blue beat Kasparov the World Chess Champion but deep blue was programmed in detail by expert players in contrast the machine that played go and chess recently was given just the rules and gained expertise by playing hundreds of thousands of games against itself and the programmers note themselves know how the machines make some seemingly insightful decisions and it is of course the speed of computers which allows them to succeed by the brute-force methods and indeed to learn anything they don't identify dogs cats and human faces by crunching through millions of images not the way babies learn they learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text in Europe they're given EU documents with their boredom threshold is infinite and they succeed by reinforced learning on these big training sets but learning about human behavior involves observing actual people in real homes or workplaces and the machine would feel centrally deprived by the slowness of real life and will be the wildered to quote Stuart Russell are leading AI theorists here Berkeley I quote it could try all kinds of things scrambling eggs stacking wooden blocks chewing was poking its finger into electric outlets but nothing would produce a strong enough feedback loop to convince the computer it was on the right track and lead it in next necessary action and robots are still clumsier than a child in moving pieces on a real chessboard they can't jump from tree to tree like a squirrel though a Boston Dynamics robot called handle can do back flops apparently but sensor technology is of course advancing fast and even though the go p-- playing computer used hundreds of kilowatts of power the brain of its human challenger uses about 30 watts just a light bulb and he can do many other things apart from cosplay go well what will a I do it won't just take over manual work indeed plumbing and gardening will be among the hardest jobs to automate but it'll do routine legal work medical diagnostics even surgery and the big social and economic question is this will the new machine age be like earlier disruptive technologies the car for instance and create as many jobs as it destroys or is it really different this time well I think the answer that will depend on economics and politics mr. money earned by the robots will surely generate huge wealth for an elite and a few companies but I suggest in my book to preserve a healthy society will require massive redistribution of that income to ensure that everyone has at least a living wage this shouldn't be just a handout but should be achieved by creating and upgrading public service jobs where the human elements crucial which are now under valued and where demand is huge above all carers for young and old but also custodians gardeners in public parks and so forth but caring for the old people is something where there's huge demand that are met and it's frankly a more dignified job for human being than working in an Amazon warehouse or in in a factory this transition which requires massive deed redistribution of wealth I could see this happening in Scandinavia and in China but there might be ideological barriers in this country but let's look still further ahead in robotics how human-like will they be AI can of course cope with fast changing networks traffic flow electric grids etc and the Chinese could have an efficient planned economy of a kind that Marx could only dream of and in science - perhaps AI can help us to find the recipe for a high temperature superconductor or settle where the string theory can really describe our universe because the geometry is just too complicated for humans to work through if robots could not only do calculations but observe and interpret their environment as adeptly as we do they really be perceived as intelligent beings to which or to whom we can and of course such machines pervade movies and popular culture so we'd have to ask would we have obligations towards them we worry if our fellow humans and even animals can't fulfill their natural potential so should we feel guilty if our robots are underemployed or bored and what if a machine develops a mind of its own but it's a ghost a ghost docile or go rogue the popular culture portrays a dark side where AI gets out of its box infiltrates the Internet of Things and pursues goals misaligned with human interests or even treats humans as an encumbrance some AI pundits take these concerns seriously and think the field already needs guidelines just as biotech surely does but others like for instance Rodney Brooks inventor of the Baxter robots and the Roomba vacuum cleaner he regard these concerns as premature he thinks it'd be a long time before artificial intelligence is a bigger worry than real stupidity but be that as it may it's likely the society will be transformed by autonomous robots even though the jury's out on whether there'll be idiots afore or displays superhuman capability Ray Kurzweil the futurologist now working at Google he argues that once machines have surpassed human capabilities they could themselves design and assemble a new generation of even more powerful ones and intelligence explosion he thinks humans could transcend biology by merging with computers in old-style spiritualist parlance they would go over to the other side we then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity if your brain were downloaded into a machine in what sense would it still be you should you feel relaxed about your body then being destroyed what would happen if several clothes were made of you and is the input into our sense organs and physical interacts with the real external world so essential to our being this transition would be not only abhorrent but also impossible these are ancient conundrums for philosophers but practical ethicists may soon need to address them Kurzweil incidentally is a proponent of the so called singularity but he's worried that it may not happen in his lifetime so he wants his body frozen his blood replaced by liquid nitrogen until immortality is on offer and he can they be resurrected into some post human world I'm surprised actually to find that three of my British academic colleagues had gone in for this so-called cryonics - had paid the full whack about $80,000 to a company in Arizona and the third had taken the cut price option of just having his head frozen I'm glad they were all from Oxford and not from my University and I told him I'd rather in my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator yes but of course more seriously research on aging is being seriously prioritized we have to ask here will a band of his be incremental or is aging a disease that can be cured dramatic life extension will plainly be a real wild card in population projections with huge social ramifications but it may happen along with human enhancement in other forms it's at least surely on the cards that human beings their mentality and their physique may become malleable through the deployment of genetic modification and cyborg technologies moreover this future evolution the kind of secular intelligent design would take only centuries in contrast for the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution and this is a game-changer when we admire the literature and artifacts that have survived from antiquity we feel in an affinity across a time Gulf for thousands of years with those ancient artists and their civilizations but we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligence is a few centuries hence we'll have any emotional resonance with us even though they may have some algorithmic understanding of how we behave and now I turn to another technology space this is where robots surely have a future and where I will argue changes will happen fastest and should worry us least during this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniaturized probes far more advanced than the wonderful Cassini designed in 1990s which spent 13 years exploring Saturn or the NASA pro or the ISA European probe that went to this comet and landed a robot on it or the NASA probe that sent back these pictures of Pluto 20,000 times further away than the and of course more recently of this minor planet a billion miles further away still think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s when these probes were designed and realize how much better we can do today the next step will be the deployment in space of robotic fabricators which can build large structures for instance giant telescopes with huge gossamer thin mirrors assembled under zero-g fees will go for such an instrument incidentally will be to resolve an image of an earth-like planet around another star and I think a nice target where we do this by the Year 2060 eight the centenary of the iconic Earthrise image I showed earlier of our earth taken from lunar orbit a picture of another earth around another star we a new iconic image but what about manned spaceflight the practical case gets ever weaker with each advance in robotics and miniaturization so will it have a resurgence its nearly 50 years since Neil Armstrong's one small step and I cherished this picture assigned for me a few years ago by seven of the Apollo astronauts in the 1960s there was of course the space race against the Russians NASA got about four percent of the federal budget and had that pace continued they've been footprints on Mars long ago but once the race to the moon was won there was no motivation and I think the NASA budget is now by 0.6 percent of the budget but hundreds more have ventured into space but under anticlimactically they've done no more than circle the earth in low orbits mostly in the International Space Station and this frankly only makes news when something goes wrong when the Lu fails for instance or when they or when they perform stunts such as the Canadian Chris Hadfield playing his guitar and singing so will there be any inspirational of Paulo type projects in future there's no denying that NASA's curiosity and its recent successor trundling across the surface of Mars may miss startling discoveries which no human geologist would overlook but machine learning is advancing fast as his sensor technology in contrast the cost gap between manned and unmanned missions remains huge NASA's man program ever since Apollo has been impeded by public and political pressure into being very risk-averse the Space Shuttle failed twice in 135 launches each of those you remember was a trauma and halted the program for three years because the shuttle had unwisely be proposed and promoted as safe for civilians because of this safety culture NASA will confront political obstacles in achieving any grand goal within a feasible budget China has the resources and the dearest government and maybe the willingness to undertake an Apollo star program it's already going to be building a lunar base but it really wanted to assert superpower status by a space spectacular and to proclaim parity with the US it would need to leapfrog not just rerun what the US did 50 years earlier and the clear-cut Great Leap Forward would be footprints on Mars not just on the moon but leaving aside the Chinese I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers prepared to participate in a cut-price program far riskier than Western nations could impose on publicly supported civilians Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos it blew origins will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers were I an American I would only support NASA's unmanned program I'd argue the private enterprise ventures being a Silicon Valley culture into main long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates should front all manned missions as cut-price high-risk ventures to be many volunteers some perhaps even accepting one-way tickets driven by the same motives as early explorers Mountaineers and luck and the future role of the national agencies will be attenuated becoming more like an airport than an airline and the phrase space tourism should be avoided it lulls people into thinking the touch bench as a routine and if that's the perception the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as those of the Space Shuttle were these exploits must be sold as dangerous sports or intrepid exploration nonetheless by 2100 thrill-seekers may have established bases independent from the earth probably omaha's and musk himself age 47 says he wants to die on Mars but not on impact and he might but don't ever expect mass emigration from the earth no way in our solar system office and environment even as Clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest and here I disagree with musk and with my late colleague Stephen Hawking I think it's a dangerous delusion to think that's based off an escape from Earth's problems dealing with climate change on earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars there's no planet B for all the reef risk-averse people nonetheless we should cheer on these brave space adventurers because they will have a pivotal role in spearheading the posthuman future in the 22nd century and beyond this is why they'll be ill adapted to their Martian habitat so they'll have a more compelling incentive than those of us on earth to redesign themselves they'll harness the super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies that will be developed in coming decades these techniques will one hopes be constrained here on earth on Prudential and ethical grounds but the settlers on Mars will be beyond the trusses and regulators and we surely wish them good luck in modifying their progeny to adapt to alien environments this might be the first step towards divergence into a new species so as these spacefaring adventurers not those of us comfortably adapted to life on earth who will spearhead the posthuman era moreover if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligence they won't need an atmosphere and they may prefer zero-g so it's in deep space not on earth or even on Mars that non-biological brains may develop powers that humans can't even imagine few doubt that machines will gradually surpass or enhance more and more of our distinctively human capabilities as I said Ray Kurzweil and his ilk said to be a few decades the cautious amongst us imagine centuries but either way the timescale for technological advances but an instant compared to the timescale for the win and evolution that led to humanity's emergence and more relevantly less than a millionth of the vast expanse of cosmic time lying ahead so the outcome of future technology and its evolution could surpass humans but as much as we intellectually surpass a slime mold what about consciousness philosophers debate where the consciousness is special to the wet organic brains of humans apes and dogs might it be that electronic intelligence is even if their intellect seemed superhuman with still lack self-awareness or inner life or is consciousness emergent in any sufficiently complex network so that these post humans would still have it even if electronic well some say this is an irrelevant semantic issue like asking whether submarines can swim but I don't think it is this question crucially affects how we react so the far future scenario I've sketched if the machines are zombies we'd not accord their experience is the same value as ours and the posthuman future would seem bleak but if they're conscious we should surely welcome the prospect of their future Kemeny a word about the very far future even if life had originated only on the earth it need not remain of trivial feature of the cosmos because there's enough time for it to start at aspera whereby ever more complex intelligence spreads through the whole galaxy far self-reproducing machines transmitting DNA instructs for 3d printers or such like interstellar voyages or even intergalactic voyages are not going to be Terror for near immortals but this raises the question which astronomers are most often asked is there life out there already we all agree that we don't know well not quite all I mean I and other Tom's get letters from people who've met the aliens been abducted by them and I tell such people do they really think that having traversed interstellar distances the aliens would just meet one or two well-known cranks and go where again and also I say why don't these people write to each other and not write to me well where most of us don't know but we know that there's no way in our solar system where there's any advanced life but there may be some simple eyes that may be freeze-dried bacteria on Mars there may be creatures swimming under the ice on Saturn's moon Enceladus but let's widen our horizon to the realm of the Stars we've learnt that most of these are orbited by retinues of planets like the Sun is but the evidence is mainly indirect we don't observe the planets but we detect their influence on the motion or brightness of the stars they're orbiting and the special interest in planets which are like the earth and there are literally millions of those in our galaxy and we can see the nearest among them and some have been found one of the most remarkable is this object which is a miniature solar system seven planets orbiting around a very faint star an M dwarf and the years for these planets vary from a day-and-a-half Viana most to eighteen days for the outer most would be any life on on them we have no idea they've very spectacular places this is an artist's impression of what it might be like to live on one of them viewed from one of these planets the other would loom larger than our moon does to us swinging fast across our sky but their very own earthly they're probably all tightly locked presenting their same face to the Sun so there'd be a sort of apartheid where everyone lives in one half facing the Sun except the astronomers who are in the other half well all the evidence we have for these exoplanets so far is indirect detecting their effect on the motion or brightness of the star they're going around we'd really like to observe them directly but that's hard to realize just how hard an alien astronomer supposing with a powerful telescope looking at our Sun might be able to see our earth suppose they could then the earth would look like a pale blue dot in Carl Sagan's nice phrase they close in the sky to its star our Sun and the billion times fainter but if the aliens had the big enough intelligence that they could be in a telescope that they could observe this planet observer if they could learn quite a bit about it the shade of blue will be slightly different depending on whether the Pacific Ocean or the landmass of Asia is facing them so they could learn as there were continents and oceans the length of the day something of the seasons and the climate band lies in the faint lights they conferred how to biosphere we can't do this yet but the next generation of telescopes can this is the ELT European extremely large telescope they're not imaginative here in element culture but this is going to be the world's biggest telescope 39-metre down to mirror that's probably the width of this lecture hall and that will be able to make observations like I've envisaged of the earth of Earth like planets around other stars and to slightest American telescopes will come online at about the same time so this is going to be a very exciting prospect in the near future well they will find lots of habitable planets where water could exist but hable habitable doesn't mean inhabited as most of us that's the number one question we still don't know the likelihood do we don't know how life emerged on earth we don't know where there was a rare fluke or where there is inevitable we don't know what triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolize and reproduce moreover even if simple life or widespread we can't assess the odds that evolves into a complex biosphere and even if it did it might be unrecognized be different but the question are we alone fascinates so many that I think SETI searches are worthwhile even though the chance of success is small and I'm actually the chair of the advisory group for URI milliner's breakthrough listen project but that's a topic for a different lecture or maybe for the question period so let me conclude by focusing back closer to the here and now to emphasize that even in these concertina cosmic timeline extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past we are living in a special century the first in Earth's history when one species is empowered to control the fate of the entire biosphere to jumpstart a transition to entities that far transcend our limitations or to take a darker view to foreclose the immense future potential and leave an anarchic and depleted planet my book emphasizes how our society is brittle interconnected and vulnerable we fret on Julie about small risks air crashes carcinogens in food low radiation doses etc but we're in denial about some newly emergent threats which could be globally devastating some are environmental others owed the potential downsides of novel technologies which could cascade globally in our interconnected world innovations bring great hopes but also great fears misterwives mantra the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable so how can we forestall catastrophes and ensure a brighter future the trouble is that even the best politicians focused mainly on the urgent and parochial and getting reelected this is an endemic frustration for those who've been official science advisors in government to attract politicians attention you must get headlined in the press and fill their inboxes so scientists can have more leverage indirectly by campaigning we need law Carl Sagan type figures we can all engage though by involved with NGOs by blogging and journalism or through political activities let me mention two recent advances examples of how the public has been influenced in 2015 there was a papal encyclical which had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference saying that humans had a duty to the environment there's no gainsaying the church's loba reach its long-term vision and concern for the world's poor and the Pope got a standing ovation at the UN and it had a big effect on forging a census in Paris and to take a UK example recently there's now proposed legislation on non degradable plastic waste this wouldn't have happened without the consciousness-raising images in david attenborough's recent blue planet to TV programmes and not if they be shown over here in particular the image of an albatross returning from wandering thousands of miles in a Southern Ocean and regurgitating was young not the hope for nourishment the plastic debris that's an image as iconic as the polar bear on the melting ice floe that certainly influenced UK politicians to take ocean plastic seriously we may be political pessimists but we must surely despite all I've said proclaim that these technologies can boost our develops as well developing world and we should not be too much concerned about the downsides otherwise we never do anything it because your principle can't be carried too far and my book on the future of some tentative hopes fears and recipes and highlights the need to assess which scary scenarios can be dismissed the science fiction and how best to avoid the credible ones we're all on this crowded earth together spaceship earth is hurtling through the void these pastures are anxious and fractious the life-support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns but is too little planning too little horizon scanning we need to think globally I mean do you think rationally empowered by 21st century technology but guided by value that science itself can't provide and above all we need to think long term I've really highlighted the world's religions and as all of us here know secular organization the long now foundation will create a symbol that contrasts romantically with our currently pervasive short-termism in the cavern deep underground a massive clock will be built designed to tick for 10,000 years to resolve with the different chime every day over that expanse of time those of us who visited this century will contemplate a monument built to outlast the cathedrals and will be inspired to hope that a hundred centuries from now it will indeed still be ticking and that some of our progeny will still be there to visit it and I gave the very last word to one of my scientific heroes the eloquent biologist Peter Medawar I quote the bells are topher mankind I like the bells of our pine cattle they're attached to our own neck and it must be our fault if they don't make a tune full and melodious sound thank you very much for listening [Applause] I come with one question I'll get into once and the cards here yeah you're especially good an astronomical risks and non risks and we have a couple people from foundation b612 here we'll make sure that asteroids will not be the threatening thing that happened to six million years ago and so we're probably fine on that for the foreseeable future as long as they get properly funded well I wonder about comet's comets are so unlike asteroids they come out and I've heard some very bleak scenarios of boy if a comet comes it's too fast it's too surprising you can't do anything about it and blam or dead yeah about that well it's certainly the case that you can't predict them so far in advance because they come in from deep space and their orbits aren't quite so predictable and so it would be harder to to forecast which ones are going to be dangerous they're probably less likely than asteroids but I think it's great what's being done to identify asteroids and risk their wrists because asteroids are the risks that can most easily quantify we know roughly how many they will be of different sizes and what they will do and and it's right that we do something to reduce that risk but the important point I'd want to make is that the risk from asteroids is not any bigger it's the same for us it was the Neanderthals indeed for the dinosaurs so it's nonzero but it's it's steady where's the kind of risks that I'm concerned about which I focused on are those we are creating which are getting bigger and bigger year by year and where we don't have a long time base to assess how likely they are and we can't be complacent we'll survive them for the long term so although we should worry about the astronomical risks they don't keep you awake at night it's the others which are larger risks already and growing over time neutron stars things like that you're setting off nearby and whether they could happen but very unlikely here's question famous last words Nicky Glynnis it looks like says national policy reactions are central to a lot of your themes the human cause of threats what do you think is the future in the nation-state and all of this well I mean that's that's very clearly some of them have to be dealt with on the global level I mean climate change most obviously dealing with pandemics and all these things and regulation need to be global so we do need to beef up international organizations or perhaps have rather more along the lines of the IAEA and the World Health Organization to cope with all these things and of course we have large companies which transcend national boundaries so I think we should have public service bodies to do as well and so we certainly need more of that so national boundaries are not enough but of course to generate enthusiasm for these goals camp has to be done the national level and so it could be that we can help our citizens to activate our own politicians maybe a state level or city level if not the federal level and do that more effectively than directly trying to have a global effect the United Nations as a result of a world war and there was a sense of global threat that emerge from that and the United Nations was a response to try to keep a whole piece going climate change is a global threat quite a different order than the rather episodic world origin is that headed in the direction of the of a global governance which is much more strict than what we have now well it needs it but of course the problem of climate change is it it is a threat is long-term and as I mentioned you've got to have a psychological discount rate which is low in order to worry about it at all and we've got to persuade people they do need to think long term and care about what may happen in the lifetime of babies born today will be alive in the year 2020 and so 120 and so I think that's what what we need need to do but as I say I'm pessimistic about the traditional way of dealing with climate change because they're asking for a sacrifice now for this world to remote and uncertain cold and that's why I really do think that R&D into clean energy should be prioritized on the same level as defense research or medical research so that we can really have not just far cheaper more efficient solar and wind but maybe entirely new kinds of power and maybe new kinds of nuclear fourth generation modular reactors and things like that because if we just focus on that completely it's a win-win because the countries and places like Silicon Valley if they develop these innovations for clean energy and and storage and superconducting grids and all that then that'll be hugely beneficial for them commercially but also will help Indians to leapfrog directly from smoky stoves burning wood and dung to clean energy so I think that should be the priority and that in my view is going to be the only way in which we really will see a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions early enough to make a difference and I'm not an expert I mean III would I better at least even's if we'd have one power station within 30 or 40 years but I just think that in the context of 10 trillion dollars a year being spent on engine infrastructure then the few billion a year being spent on fusion R&D is more than justified but fishing as well because the designs doesn't use food the current reactors of 40 or 50 years out of date has been hardly any recent R&D what happens after climate changes say it's a century century and a half yes problem one since I get sea levels we keep rising for a good while yes stabilize things so that is a kind of of flux for generation especially people are going into the coasts with their cities so in a sense we're looking at a continually changing earth even if we get fossil fuel emissions and so on under control how do you see that playing out over time well I think if it's slow enough we can cope with it and I think the the other point is that if countries get more developed then they can cope with it like the Dutch clearly can but clearly it's going to be long term but I think other things we need to worry about are going to be whether the population stabilizes whether the biodiversity etc so to be all these issues because we were putting different kinds of pressures on the planet and some of them are going to be very serious but climate change I think we could deal with if we can get over the next 50 years and avoid the co2 concentration rise into this dangerous level where there might be a tipping point as I say I think the only hope of doing that will be very efficient and they highly funded R&D and do you think geoengineering to buy time for all that to happen is a thing that I think should be done yes I mean some people don't even think that because yeah you know at least a moral hazard people don't care about the the others but I certainly think we search should be done yes Kevin Kelly yes how will science the scientific method change by 2050 some believe that significant discovery has actually been slowing down lately the trend is not toward more amazing science but toward lots and lots of less amazing so yes yes well I don't it's true I mean I think that's often said about particle physics where indeed it is true but well I mean I think there are lots of particles but they're beyond the scope I mean I think the cosmic dark matter is particles but there may be a thousand times heavier than could be detected by any accelerator we can build that's quite possible so it is truth in particle physics the the only exciting discovery in the last thirty years has been about neutrinos but I think it would be perverse to say there haven't been huge discoveries in in biology genetics and in astronomy exoplanets knew nothing about them twenty years ago most of all he knows the last few years that that's a huge thing and we've learned more about the very early universe and not to mention all the rest of science so I think the overall pace of science is accelerating if anything else because more people are active it's true that the low-hanging fruits been picked off and that's certainly true in particle physics but I don't think it's true in all fields and of course computers help a lot of it I mean I wasn't joking when I said that it could be AI that would actually solve string theory where string theory is extremely complicated lots of geometry in in ten dimensions and maybe no humor can ever grasp it but it could be that a machine the kind of machine that could teachers have to play world-class chess in three hours may be able to do the calculations and see if the particular version of string theory does predict the proton has the right mass and things like that so I genuinely think that we can be helped by AI in scientific projects and another example I quoted was finding these sort of alloy that gives you a room-temperature superconductor this is a very difficult to do just like you can test lots of chemicals like in drug development but this is where machines can help acceleration I think in in some mistakes could I make one point which is that the may despite all that be some in wasn't physical ideas which are just beyond our human brain just like a monkey can't understand quantum theory there may be some fundamental aspect of nature which were not even aware of and couldn't understand if we were here 76 I'm here's a question about life don't rub it in on the contrary wise perspective has to do with your age you know would you have been able to at the age of you know 30 typical age here in San Francisco have you had any of the insight that you've been laying on us today anybody here's a question it's anonymous life extension including cryonics means older adults today what you can expect to be here in the 22nd century very interesting statement if people don't use a low discount rate for themselves isn't that interesting as we get longer lived people and that in a sense long-term thinking comes with longer lived people I think it does but I think many people if they don't conceive a long time they do care about their children grandchildren and even if people aren't going to live beyond 70 on average then they know their grandchildren will be alive in 22nd century and I think that is what motivates long-term thinking and they would be unhappy if there was no world 200 years from now for their descendants even though no one now alive would realize what do was happening in the world in the Year 2200 so I think it I think we feel we're part of some ongoing process and just as we realize that we benefit from the heritage of earlier centuries in the infrastructure and literature and science and everything else I think most will be unhappy if we thought that there be no long term survival of anything that we were involved in so I think we do in some sense do have a low discount rate in some contexts but no it's enough I agree with you Isabelle Santa sex what about biological carbon sequestration strategies about expanding kelp yes help enormously fixes carbon grass the questionnaire Astor's lots more trees and there's some kinds of air capture they know I mean I think that was in the that's the cotton report that I mentioned and I think it's feasible I mean I think the two concerns I mean one is that it's going to distort land use which you need lots of land to do this I mean but maybe algae or something like that can get around on that but but if you're going to use trees then it needs lots of land and of course this is a big problem of dealing with the co2 the idea of having to sort of safely store underground or somewhere several billion tons of co2 per year is not a trivial task and I think that's got to be cope with it was well when the hope is that you can sort of send the carbon abyss in the ocean yes that's what I do I think below two and a half miles its density is above that for water and it sinks yeah science on land is pretty thorough we've been on land or land animals ourselves my sense is that the oceans this is a friend Jim love art it was going out about this that our knowledge of the oceans is pretty thin still and yet it's an ocean planet it's a blue planet and we don't know all the processes going on there we don't know all the life-forms there certainly we don't know exactly how they were laid right and the oceans are this enormous event in terms of climate change and what's your sense of the role of ocean science especially under the pressure of climate change we need to understand more in the coming decades well I think as you say it's crucial that we've got to bottle the atmosphere and the ocean is there the main store of co2 and of course of heat and it's also true that we don't done have a good map of the ocean bed to the extent that we have of Mars or the moon and that does seem an anomaly so I think we need to study those and of course as far as feeding 9 or 11 billion people then of course there may be a lot of scope in the oceans and that's why I don't worry particularly about feeding people I guess the last question and everything sort of bears relation to you you know are you pessimistic or optimistic or you know it's a scientist you're used to stating things in terms of odds and an error bar what's your sense of the spa prospects of getting out of this special century not only alive but thriving hmm well very high chance of being alive in a sense of the most unlikely that anything to wipe out humanity that a few things occur but their boast unlikely but I think we will have a bumpy ride I mean I I think that governance is going to get harder for reasons we're starting to see and particularly because of unintended consequences scientific developments and above all the fact that a few people can cause serious disruption I mean we know that cyber attacks could be disruptive the electricity grid in the city or the whole eastern seaboard of the United States things I have complete catastrophe could be caused and even a trivial case we had in England just two weeks ago someone saw a drone over Gatwick Airport and one sighting one drone shut down out Airport for two days and so just be easy because we are so risk-averse and so interconnected that a few people can disrupt society and I think there's going to be a problem making society resilient against our sort of disruption that I think is one of the main challenges to governance we're going to have to face those weird oh yeah well I can't wait for the rest of the century that we get to see this among the specialness is that it keeps being full of surprises and that we not really sure how it's going to come out but we're looking at it from this cosmic perspective that you brought and that is formidable thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

Views: 3,810

Keywords: Science, Civilization, Climate Change, Culture, Economics, Humanity, Environment, Future, Geoengineering, Genetics, Globalization, Government, History, Technology, Infrastructure, Psychology, Astronomy, artificial intelligence

Id: geiikJjfQoE

Length: 83min 43sec (5023 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019