Why the Future Will Be Weird with Isaac Arthur

what anna why is the studio locked i don't know why this studio's locked the opossum appears to be conducting the interview john he seems to be asking really cerebral questions oh yes i do think history would have turned out differently had the holy roman empire not dissolved i've never heard that solution to general relativity but it's brilliant well that seems like a perfectly reasonable solution to the fermi paradox yes absolutely i'd love another cup of joe um i guess you've all fallen into the event horizon with john michael godier the following program was originally intended to be broadcast on christmas eve in today's episode john is joined by isaac arthur isaac arthur is the host of science and futurism with isaac arthur a youtube channel which focuses on exploring the depths of concepts in science and futurism since its first episode in 2014 sfia has considered topics ranging from the seemingly mundane to the extremely exotic featuring episodes on megastructure engineering interstellar travel the future of the earth and the fermi paradox among others regardless of how strange a subject may seem isaac always tries to ensure that the discussion is grounded in the known science of today isaac arthur welcome back to the program thanks for having me on john isaac it's been a crazy year i think everybody can agree on that and at the end of it i've been thinking a lot about the near future and how things are going to unfold over the next century let's say do you see and you tend to be a positivist or a positive person as far as the future of humanity and i tend to as well i think we can solve problems quite well what do you see happening over the next century are we about to enter the most important century in human history i hope not the most important century has a tendency to sound like it's gonna be the last one but i think it's gonna be probably one of the biggest most eventful ones of our history now what do you think the first change will be what's coming down the pike that is going to sort of revolutionize the future do you think it might be something like fusion energy or do you think or we're going to continue down this this strange path that we've been on with social media and sort of communications integration becoming almost a global society through it where do you think the biggest change to being human as we are right now is going to be well i suppose in the long term but this is going to be the century that everyone thinks of as the last one where we are confined to earth you know without the exception of mir and a couple of the predecessor space stations we had going on we've never really had people out forth very long but uh in the 20th century but this is probably gonna be the last century where we can say people lived exclusively on earth and that's probably since the galaxy is going to be the place where most folks get born in the fall future probably the most eventful bit of it of course the other thing is whether or not it's going to be humans who are being born if this might be the way that we are divergent or things like cyborgs robots genetically engineered superman artificial intelligence etc and i think that those two kind of things that go through what overshadow so much of what goes on in the 21st century now i think one of the most important things to remember here is that one area that seems especially lately especially the last six months one area that seems to really be advancing rapidly is life extension and at least being able to maintain um health longer these things seem to be coming very rapidly what's the state of life extension right now do you think that we're going to be around in 200 years i sure hope so people always ask me what technology i hope to live to see and i always tell them life extension you know zombie gray always likes to say on this all science all medicine is life extension technology and we are making big improvements i think this was this most recent period time was the first time in a long time that we actually had the population's average lifespan decreased just a little bit as opposed to going up it happened averaging about one year high off every six years and i should be back on course that soon but we are getting longer lived and there may be people alive right now and i hope that's you and i are included in that who are not looking back at the 20th century thousands of years now saying wow what must have been like to be alive then bro or looking back and saying wow i can barely remember then but so much cooler be alive now we could all get to live to see centuries old and i do suspect there are people being born in this century probably born already who will not really ever have to worry about old age in the same way we do you know that's an interesting idea that the older you get and if you start extending the human lifespan to centuries the earliest memories almost seem like they go away and i know that from experience because having been born in the middle of the 1970s i remember the 1970s but only just barely i'm sorry well i guess i would i technically lived in the 1970s but i didn't get to see it because i was an infant in the moon at the time there's very little about the 1970s i'd want to remember though just from the rebounds but i really don't remember much of anything so i was i mean i'd say maybe five or six years old if i really start having regular cohesive memories where i could say x y and z and before that's very spotty until maybe two years older than nothing i don't know if that's really an effect of just our brains going or why but the memory is clear the more recent y'all to it i guess we'll depend on how we do our brains because we'll have to at some point if we extend life spans enough find out some way to store more memories or store them more accessibly and of course we want to do that anyway so we can actually start remembering better but uh you i don't think you'll be 10 000 years old running on a mark one human brain that's an interesting idea if you could come up with a way to store additional memory or download memory from humans number one that would be one amazing archive the memories of the entirety of humanity because right now you just have what you write down or what you say or things like that but what you remember is untouched territory do you think we could ever get to that point do you think that the the memory of a human is downloadable and preservable and is it even reliable no uh well it's it depends on how accordion of course the question then is is it still your memory if it's a digital recorder that's uh next year that's just recording all the time that will feel like your memory same as a photograph you take that's a photo of us you know you that that's you remember that event but you never took that photo personally it's not uh it was a camera that did it it's character had on film and that's integrated enough in your head it might not make a difference that it was like essentially an external drive in your own brain full of recordings you might you come to think of that as just another piece of your brain and and with enough technology it might really be integrated in like that but the way our brains are set up right now for memory isn't really not in that kind of digital chronological fashion so but of course we might be able to set up whatever we do to record those to be more accessible that way so that we could access our memories or digital memories the same way we access our current memories and perhaps that they could you know download copies of neurons and format that into a chronological history too it's going to be one of those things where i think that will be a big challenge in a big industry of potentially this century but certainly the 22nd if not if you could pick an age an ideal age to live to what would you want to live to i'll give you my answer i probably probably not want to go much further than about 500 years because i don't think i would understand society enough to enjoy it at that point again because of the weight of memory but if you could if you could choose you know all the way up into the point where statistics get you you know you just get vaporized by something or whatever nobody lasts forever how long would you want to live oh my philosophy is always to live forever or die trying um i mean potentially trillions of years but i always put the caveat on that if it turns out that life is really boring or repetitive i mean i suppose you wouldn't care if it's repetitive but not boring but if life will got to be the point that's boring you know it's not a duns and dragons you know magic wish that's gonna go away and you turn to a mountain you know it's uh if you're not enjoying life as an immortal uh you can presumably end it and uh so i just like to keep enjoying it till it gets boring and honestly i think i could probably spend 500 years just catching my reading list these days yeah that's certainly true mine my reading list never shrinks it only grows although i have been rather efficiently sometimes horrified to hear about a book that you know from a friend where you're actually one of the ones you enjoy because then you're not sure what you're going to do to find time to actually read it well even just things like you know i set about to try and read the majority of classical literature years and years ago decades ago actually and i'm still not there you know still reading ancient greek books and i will be forever i don't think i got around to even getting to like kill a mockingbird or saying other classics to a couple years ago and a lot of classics you know homo yeah i know homo and uh you know that's that about that virtual maybe you know that's like maybe maybe half of shakespeare yeah shakespeare is another one think about all the time you have to actually do it and not just a reader but actually get to enjoy multiple performances because things like that you could see several different voicings several different workings and still enjoy it and you know i i like to listen to audiobooks so i'd be listening over again and so it's not unusual for me to hear books six or seven times or more so you think about having centuries available to you lets you just do that to so many more books especially consider your authors to be around still writing them so you actually get to have book 500 of a series not have to worry about the author having died off what uh have you uh run across any good books lately i'm in the middle one right now by brandon sanderson he's actually my favorite author he doesn't really do he does fantasy one science fiction uh his newest book rhythm of war is out there and uh on the sci-fi side i'm trying to think of who i've listened to very recently desi taylor but that i cheated on that because i have to improve the book uh but um i'd say right now with a war and it's a 50 how old i'm audiobook and i'm halfway through it it's taking forever sure there's a problem when you have your orders you never have time for your hobbies when you're younger you've got tons of time and can't afford them yeah absolutely and then you know it actually gets worse when when you do it for a living talk about sci-fi for a living yeah the the reading list gets even bigger and bigger and bigger than it would have it because there's a lot of one where you feel obliged she's like i didn't really enjoy that person's style as much but this new book by them is what i need to read because it's it's going to be one of those ones people are constantly referencing but sometimes you find it it turns out you really enjoy them too usually people enjoyed it they enjoy it for a reason so and sometimes it's not a stupid reason i found a few authors that way that i actually enjoyed and same for some tv shows too as i was thinking uh a lot of the bbc science fiction like blake seven i've ever seen that one time thinking oh my god the special fix on this a horrible and that's my favorite shows from the classic year at least my television lately as far as science fiction goes has been dominated by the mandalorian i absolutely love it i still haven't seen it yet it's fantastic if one enjoys star wars everyone tells me it it saved the franchise from the hobo crime that disney committed to it it did it literally did they've saved it and it it's the first time since watching the original trilogy where it really feels like star wars at least to me and it's been pretty riveting actually that that one's been exciting me and then of course the expanse i i don't know anybody say anything bad about it all what was that also the expanse is also oh yeah i like the expanse first few seasons i haven't seen the rest of it yet i mean because it got cancelled on sci-fi i know they brought it back but i hadn't had a chance to catch up on it and so uh i wasn't sure i know they did apparently come out with more of it right i don't know what the status that is well i think it well it went to amazon and then i think it is now going to be canceled after one or two more seasons i think but then again shows after a while i mean you think about most of science fiction shows you know that actually got like season seven it usually wasn't that much to write home about by the time i got there time for a new concept or new something although like uh well star trek the next generation is always a kind of classic seven season one but the first two seasons are trash and their seventh season was phoning it in but but seasons three through six were great yeah it sometimes happens that way um but this is different with like the mandalorian which it it hit the pavement running so i i definitely highly recommend it and that comes from somebody that did not so much enjoy much of star wars for years now i guess in hindsight the prequels weren't as bad as as the sequels but i was a big fan of the expanded universe and they kind of spit all over with the disney acquisitions uh not that i ever thought they had a chance of really being able to integrate that properly i mean you write your corners your authors are right in the corner and otherwise because they really could do read all 300 books before they write anything you know spend their time so famous right right but at the same time they could have brought some of the better pits over that's actually a little bit of that is going on with the mandalorian finally is it set i mean is it set at the time of the new movies or is it i believe it is set uh a few years after or a few decades after and that it's it's sort of the remnants of the empire and then the new republic is around and things like that uh actually ross tells me it was five years after return of the jedi okay so before before the horrible mistake that was the new stuff excellent so yeah i suppose it's like that in this new star trek franchise i always saw the first few episodes the nepa card series but uh i was i it was one of those examples where i'm going to come back and watch this when they have a complete season or two out there and see if i like it or not well i i liked picard and discovery i liked for the first two years but it's lost me i just lost interest in it it just does not hold my interest now it's not that it's bad it's just not just doesn't feel like start star trek tuning i remember the very first pilot for where they got the captain walking around with uh with the uh second command michael and thinking wow i love this new captain they kill it on the first episode oh yeah yeah this has been the rule i think we've been through what three of them um and it's and i'm like okay well i like this cat like just like you i'm like i like this new captain and then she's dead and although the actress is stays but she's an alternate universe character and then the second captain i was like oh i like this captain and he turned out to be evil i think i've watched that fall ahead yeah i quit in the middle of season one forgot to come back to it when season two was done but i guess that was probably a year ago well the really good one was season two because there they they brought in christopher pike played by anson mount who i actually interviewed on the show and he uh he really owned that role and so that was good so season two was good but the season three is just they're they're running from canon is what they're doing they decided to go into the far far distant future so they don't have to worry about anything canonical well i can kind of sympathize with that a little bit but if you got a franchise you know use the cannon i mean don't be completely bound by if you use that that's that's where you bring your audience from otherwise just i mean it's not there on a million other science fiction series that could be you know written or resurrected and used for tv format you know like for foundation dune well actually i don't know if i want to do any of those because they're such big fan bases that uh you might get your throats there you do it quite perfectly but uh i don't know if he has star trek try to at least well star trek canon is is kind of crazy anyway but well it's very detailed and in-depth yeah of course so star wars but the one thing about about mandalorian is that they have kept in canon very very well so i and there are all kinds of easter eggs you know that that nod back to other stuff from the past so i i enjoyed i've enjoyed the whole thing other than that there's not really that much sci-fi that's been exciting me on television or in books that have come out just recently yeah i mean not not recently i i'm never sure if i'm just missing some of it or it gets dated but uh oh if i get dated for that matter but i'm trying to think about what the last sci-fi book i actually read was um that actually counts as real science fiction because i read a lot of warhammer 40k novels well this is them and i i mean i like them too but they are not even as scientifically realistic as star wars yeah well and that's i mean that's always it really it begs a question hard sci-fi which is rare even even then oftentimes it's not hard or it gets dated um that certainly happened to me i think about how much they did telepathy and like all the stuff in the 50s and 60s and so it was like telepathy wasn't every story and it was just you know fail the question about that though is will telepathy make a comeback because i can think of some future technological ways where it might be possible and maybe not that far off what's your view on it um i think it's actually pretty realistic that we might have something along the lines of telepathy pop-up technological telepathy uh i've thought about doing an episode on that for that matter but in terms of being able to do connectivity between the human brains i think what it is is we realized how how crazy it was to think you could just casually read a mind now that we actually understand them better and things like the mri are out there but at the same time the idea that she'd want to be able to connect people so they could talk yeah absolutely but i think a lot of the concepts from that we sound like the 50s and 60s with it where you have hive minds naturally develop or neurospheres i do think you see technological versions of these but not so much the way they are perceiving it you know more of a sort of very upgraded high-speed internet that uh um as opposed to kind of a joining of minds and definitely not the you know telepathically reading people against the will kind of thing i don't think you'd really have that ability you'd have to have it being translated and emitted from the person whatever they want to send out i think what worries me here is the idea of not actually telepathy where you could hear people's voices in your head or see images from them but emotion because you know essentially it may be easier to transmit an emotion than it is to actually transmit a memory and if you do that and in this world of social media where eventually somebody figures out how to transmit emotions and people's post becomes a a thing of of emotion that gets murky because then you're subjecting people say you know a relative dies and all the people that you know suddenly feel that that that emotion yeah yes because i feel your pain a whole new level of uh yeah that bothers me i think you could be able to read emotions pretty pretty easily as these things go those tend to have so many physiological signs uh you know where to say is there such thing as a lie detector and the answer is kind of well not really so much on the other hand you know reading individual signs like nervousness anxiety depression these things i think will be the point where you might actually have that as like part of the basic software suite everyone has on their augmented reality glasses or contacts or cyborg eyeballs is where it pops up and says you know scanning through x's mood and signals he appears to be in a bad mood and is sad and then allies against the social media post he set up receiving says he just broke up with his girlfriend and with enough data you can start pulling things like that off with a certain degree of certainty because we kind of do that sort of thing ourselves already it's like well you know we're not working off of pure guesswork and all that we have basic rational decisions for why we reasons why we tend to look at someone say he's sad and he just talked about his dog passing away i mean he misses his dog or you know he said that he's been having problems recently with his family and now he's anxious he suddenly must have come up we make these deductions based off of uh all sorts of physiological signs and so those should be something we can kind of model and that would be able to get a lot better with individual people's patterns and data and that's actually kind of terrifying we think about it because it's not so much to worry about big brother scanning your brain to see whether or not you committed treason against the uh the empire so much as you walk in the grocery store and it's you know paying attention to everything you look at it's looking your eyeballs and seeing what products you like so it will pop up that xyz is on sale you know have you ever send your ads because like you know we know she was looking at those chocolate balls but she didn't buy those chocolate balls so we did a credit check on here so we know it's a cash flow issue so are you on a diet we have sugar-free chocolate bars that you like and that is in a way kind of a little bit more horrifying to me than the idea of the classic big brother snowy it is and there's also a bigger picture to this though where it goes the opposite direction because imagine if you could preserve the collective grief of an entire war if you could do that and that removes all walls you know all separations you just know what people felt during a war does that immediately that strikes me as one of those really bad ideas to do that so i think was a good idea i think there was an episode of star trek voyager where they had a memorial on a planet to a war and it got everybody who passed by the spaceship had to relive the experiences and that sounds like such a a good anti-war thing and you think it was like my god that's worse than the war itself to do the people it's gonna be played the trauma for the wind you're you're left with a a big question because does it end all war or does something completely unexpected happen such as war addiction or something like that i was going to say i don't think it might end all war but probably the last action would be somebody blowing up that memorial right the cycle of war begins again and you ended up guaranteeing the existence of it as opposed to uh your original intention to get rid of it now there's also a simulated grief or if you can simulate then you should be able to simulate the opposite of it and people i think it's you'd have some people who want to experience grief temporarily but what people would really want more else is the ability to shut that off right it's kind of in simulations we talked about people might go into them and they might have their you know memory rates they didn't realize they were inside a simulation and say well someone could stick that in the innovation memory so you didn't even know you were a simulation say yeah that someone's probably you that would be one of those multi-trillion dollar patents is the ability to temporarily suppress people's memory so they go into a simulation of like lord of the rings or game of thrones and not remember while they were in it that they were a simulation so there's something people volunteer for it sort of brings up the the simulation theory itself because then you you you end up at the moment of death remembering a whole bunch of stuff you didn't you didn't while you were in the simulation oh sure your life flashes for your eyes you wake up and realize that you are in fact some gigantic disembodied brain sitting somewhere in an asteroid out in the outskirts of the solar system thinking oh that was a good vacation i missed when i had skin my luck i would wake up and realize that i'm something weird like the loch ness monster or something like that that i just completely didn't expect and i'm not happy with i think i mean the critical thing would be you know when we're in dreams now some people say that they know when they're inside a dream or not but i don't i know i've had some times when i was sleeping i was aware that i was dreaming but i didn't really care that i was dreaming so if you go that's gotta be something you can actually stimulate is that you're in the dream you feel the dream and maybe you know it's a dream but you just don't care about that and that would be the thing that kind of trigger to get inside of being able to do simulations well it would be quite i think to wake up suddenly realizing your tentacles yes well and one of the things about i actually hate it when i realize that i'm dreaming inside a dream because then i'm aware of the passage of time so it just takes forever and then you wake up and you're still tired yeah usually in the context of something like that i'm never sure if i've actually woken up and i'm resenting the fact that i keep waking up for flying back to sleep or if i'm still dreaming about it and i'm dreaming that i'm waking up for me to sleep and it's yeah it's like when you wake up and you realize that you didn't just spend the last hour washing the dishes and must now actually wash them yeah so you're holding on creative dreams sometimes so yes you think you have your work done and then you wake up and all the work you did wasn't real just reset that you know now a third aspect again to this this theme is the idea of everybody wanting to be in a euphoria and you know a pleasant experience a pleasant euphoria and to some extent of course this is already with us with you know substance abuse and things like that but i think it's going to get much much more targeted and much worse where some people will just be complete emotional lotus eaters where they choose to just turn off all bad emotion and simply go with the good all the time and that seems to me to be a danger because you know as as i think dr mccoy once said we need our pain sometimes so um there's actually from that book series that has been generally about sanderson the one the bad guys since the officer take people's pain and away from them in the sense of it being uh you know i'm the one who tricked you into doing this you can blame me for all the things you've done that were wrong and of course the character shouts back and in corgi and fashion i need my pain i'm not sure that we can always say that you know people want euphoria very simplistic euphoria and often appears to folks are on the younger side things like that because they don't really have that complex life thing of yet of of all the other types of contentment and happiness that you kind of have from the longer range stuff so i think that might be what gets some of these folks and i'm not sure we really have a lot of more high ground to say that uh that we really need different it's just a little bit more sophisticated in our tastes maybe but i think you would certainly have a problem with people trying to you know hijack their brains uh you know hack them so they were just always happy or things like that but the what worries me more on something like that isn't so much that there'll be people who would want to do that as there'd be people who would tend to subtly encourage that not out of any particularly open evil attitudes so much as every person who's outside of that doing that is somebody you don't really have to worry about as competition and a post-scarcity civilization it's like they're really draining resources by existing in some bubble vat somewhere you know it's minimal so i think for a lot of people it's just a way to you know to get people out of the of the fork drug that they have a small quantity of which is personal prestige or success you know if your drug that you're addicted to is competition inside the real world whatever it is then having other folks who are just off being happy makes you feel better because it's less competition you can pat yourself on the back and say well yeah but they live a very happy life and i walk to help make sure they can enjoy that euphoria and i could see us sliding into that you know normally i don't like slippery slope analogies for human behavior but that one always struck me as a little bit concerning because you know what they say about the road to hell is being paid with good intentions it would be so easy to imagine if it wasn't a drug that made people sick or crazy or anxious or desperate but it just made them generally happy you know like getting us around a virtual utopia all day things like that it would be very easy for me imagine us encouraging folks in that direction once we hit the post scarcity level because there is always a scarcity of one critical thing and that that stuff that nobody else can have like being the best football player or being the person in charge of x y or z or being the best seller of the year that kind of thing that's a unique scarce item but in virtual reality with the euphoria drug that's available to everyone maybe and we have to take a break when we come back we'll tackle the future of nanotechnology i can't stay long i have a busy night tonight i have to make a lot of coffee what are you doing isaac on christmas eve of all nights well it's funny you should mention it hold that thought i need to make an announcement will the owner of a red slay please boom it you're double parked i must say isaac i love what you've done with your beard white looks good on you oh no not beard talk again john we're back with isaac arthur now isaac another thing that seems to be making some headway not not quite as as much as as maybe life extension or the medical stuff but is nanotechnology and over the years in speculative science and science fiction much has been made of nanotech what do you think a realistic nanotechnological future would look like i mean one critical thing to always remember with nanotechnology is we know it's possible because we already have examples of it you know when you look at uh ourselves we have all these microscopic little machines inside us and it's so easy to forget the average cell you know you say well cells are made up of atoms you say well how many atoms you know in the typical cell you have someone say oh probably hundreds maybe thousands you say well more like trillions you know if you think of a brick a good old-fashioned clay brick or cinder block as an atom your typical cell is basically a city built out of those you know you can build smaller machines you know viruses for instance are much smaller so we know we have the ability to make nanotechnology and more importantly self-replicating nano technology but at the same time i think people do tend to overestimate the capacities of that some degree you there should be a lot of things you can do faster easier or better with uh with designed nanotechnology not limited just what can be reproduced organically and through evolution but the same time you're not going to have like a little vial of nanotech that you drop on the floor and 10 minutes later the planet's been eating up in the gray girl they're all real you know physical barriers to how fast something can replicate but in terms of its usefulness to us if you got good booking narrow tech you basically have immortality certainly you certainly have that as far as being able to maintain a human body on that scale which does seem to be the most promising section of nanotechnology as far as i can tell but now what are some of the other ideas i know one of the early ideas of nanotechnology was the idea of being able to create a nanotechnological cloud in your car that hardens during a an accident ultimately basically a nano yeah do you think that that's on the table to a degree one thing um you know we were doing an episode on orbital bomb when i was writing up the other day and it was it's uh how quickly can you uh litho break someone which is instead of aerobraking where you ran them into a rock to slow them down and say can you make that survivable and you think of like if you're coming down from 700 miles an hour how quickly can you stop without killing yourself and in a case like that you could make a bubble that surrounded somebody it was pretty good at protecting them but i don't know that would really need to be nano technology on the other hand you might have something like and i think alastair reynolds played this in his novel pushing the eyes little nano machines that would basically come and envelope every single cell in your body and rip and pull and move you that way kind of like a teleporter that could go at very high speeds and accelerations because it was just disassembling you down the cellular structure real quick so you would be a lot less sensitive to g-force along the way and just reassembles you on the other end things like that are potentially on the table with nanotechnology and i think that's kind of micro technology because you want the cell level at that point but there are so many applications to to using nanotechnology that it's just it's mother seems like the smartphone where you know there's really things you even think of until afterwards in advance you know after it's been out there for a while but it fixes so many potential problems and it's only it's good for safety because maybe it doesn't save you from the car crash but it puts you back together again afterwards you know this implies also things like manufacturing nano factories making say you want to make a wrench with you know little nano machines moving atoms around to create a where wrench what point do you start running into problems like heat generation and things like that that could shut down something like that say in the context of a nano factory i think almost any time you try to make something macroscopic and simple like a venture better off just using the existing kind of production so nanotech is going to individually moving stuff around it's like having somebody move every individual piece of gravel in a pile as opposed to using a bulldozer you are going to burn up more energy by having someone individually move each piece of gravel that way so it's hard to say exactly where the the breakthrough on something that's going to be in terms of where you'd make a profit on on leaving up to the narrow checking their way around but it's like with 3d printers that's a you know very slow process and people talk about speeding up and say well i might want to look at the actual electric bill to move that thing around first and ask yourself what's going to happen if you do speed it up because it's moving that needle around generating heat you speed it up you might set the thing on fire before it actually is done done being produced if you're actually that much faster it's a lot of energy involved in processes like that we're doing everything individual every single movement but at the same time i can't see it being used for producing mass scale goods i can easily imagine be useful intricate stuff you know and and one thing it does open up is not just a pair of humans but the repair and upgrade of things like computers and that allows us to microsize even more in some ways because then we don't need to get a hand in there to pull a piece of component out or put it in the first place the robots are doing that at the smaller scale and they're fixing things and not just expensive things like computers now they're fixing your house too you know you don't like the paint color you tell it i want to change the paint color and the next one you wake up and it's different shade of green or blue or whatever it is and you know something's back in there fixing the wood so the wood's not running out the metal is not rusting anymore it's getting fixed and that's going to have a huge economic impact too now this leads us to something sort of dangerous though if you integrate nanotechnology into computer technology you run into things like okay an artificial intelligence that can have its nanotechnology reconfigure itself and learn and grow things like that and that seems like an avenue where you could end up with a monster right very much so i remember we were sitting around one time trying to figure out all the ways you could potentially contain an ai so it couldn't get itself into problems and uh one thing that it's just as a wafer could escape would be if it was good enough it might be able to take its own hard drives and the laser was just using to read them and and so carefully added its own data that actually managed to cut out something like a little nanotech machine from its own hard drive just by running its little lasers for scanning data i think that's a pretty extreme example but it's kind of a good example how you can never really isolate something completely and have it interact with the universe there's gonna be some way you can interact now the same hand i never really already that much about the self-contained ai that goes crazy and wipes out humanity because i never assume there's just going to be one of these things i figure there's going to be a big big collection of them that uh you know all have varying skills and talents a little bit closer to each other so it's not like us versus a godlike ai it's us and a whole bunch of other things of various demigod stages that uh would be opposing anyone that got run away one along that line of thinking if you have that you've got all these different sort of almost almost godlike ais but not quite what happens do they all have the same motive do they all come to the same conclusion and and work against us or do they immediately go to war with each other in which case humanity is stuck in in the middle of a war between not so super intelligent ais you know that's uh that was that critical question about end goals and instrumental goals uh whatever its end goal is if it's the same it might work together with others of course if it's the same in the sense of i want to take over the entire universe that doesn't really get to work with others but so many weird goals like i want to make paper clips have instrumentals that are so like like i need defenses and resources to do this they can have a lot of points of overlap so i think you would always you know you always are safer in any environment it's never a one-on-one and in reality there's always so many different actors in play that it tends to make an alliance almost always a good thing and a feeling of trust almost always a good thing there's a reason why we have these in the first place it has to be evolutionary advantaged and so i do think that with a a big ecosystem of artificial creations of you know humans enhanced humans cyborgs uploaded humans ais androids this big mixture of this big whole spectrum of various kind of advanced intelligences i think you would have a lot of them that participate together to work together whereas i think ones that will intentionally aim at like essentially universal domination would be almost the first ones out of play because that is something you're going to have to modify or everyone's going to know about it and want to wipe you out right and that's the that's the real trick isn't it because of its motive again the pay-per-click creator if its motive is something related to what it was designed to do originally that's going to be different than if it's something that's very dynamic and can come up in with its own motive entirely on its own and so take over the universe or something like that as i would imagine no one would try to create a supercomputer that wanted to take over the universe from the start it just concludes that it wants to later so you it seems to me the scenario there always comes down to the machines going at each other and humanity isn't just marginalized because once you've got that runaway ai we've been outsmarted unless we were ourselves super intelligent which is a different subject entirely i think at that point in time you know it's because i don't think would ever be an overnight thing as i don't to be found the technological singularity that just kind of pops up real fast i think you would have that big spectrum of what everybody was and it's possible you know a billion years from now there might still be humans like you and i around they really might be but we'd expect that there'd be an awful lot of things that were way beyond us same as that we're way beyond an amoeba you know um at the same time even things with very similar goals can have that kind of problem i mean we were playing out the paper clip maximizer in one episode we were pointing out how it has no matter what its programming is if it's something simple like maximize paper clips it starts having all sorts of existential crisis about what paper clips really are because it wants to maximize them so if a paper clip has to be made out of metal he has a limit to how many it can produce but if it says well you know a paper clip can be made out of plastic or it could be made out of say human ice yeah human right what is a paper clip is a paper clip an actual physical object shaped like that in which case an iceberg will work just fine or is it really the idea of something that binds information together is a photograph of a paperclip as valid as a real paper clip yeah and these are the kind of questions it has to answer along the way and if it wouldn't spread itself out through a universe or a non-ftl universe where it has divide it might have versions of itself that undergo all these essentially denominational breaks and schisms so and since the end goal there is always require more resources to be able to make more paper clips um then the question is do i make more paper clips right now am i maximizing my production per day always about making the most paper clips ever possible and in which case you might have others to say well there are an infinite number of paper clips out there in theory anyway in some multiverse things so i can take a break and do what i've always really wanted to do which is to staple documents you know it's it's so many options around that that you almost wonder he might get something on lines of um convergent uh divergence the point where they start all kind of coming back to the basic survival goals because those are what has to operate on a day-to-day basis so much of its behavior around that with time the other things become kind of more of the official integral the thing it tips its hat to you as the what it really does you know you got the paper clip at the front of all the important buildings the reminder of the paper clip is what's most important but it really doesn't actually pay much attention to getting that done anymore because that's just the background thing wouldn't it be a poetic end for the universe if the end result of all civilizations is a paper clip making machine and that the universe is entirely at the very end reduced to paper clips and then it's just paper clips until the protons decay if they do indeed do so if they do indeed do so i mean it is always one of those things to say what is the philosophical purpose of life the universe and everything and you know if you're not just saying 42 you almost always end up with something like that as as you know if there is no purpose or if there is a purpose yeah the purpose of the universe is to produce paper clips that would seem like that's still a better purpose than no purpose at all so uh in that way people could maximize them i consider myself quite blessed well and if you if you were creating a simulation and you had some end game and i'm gonna replace paperclip with mcrib sandwich so say you absolutely love the mcgrape sandwich and you want the entire universe to convert itself into those and eventually it's just one gigantic mcrib you then you encounter the motives of whatever created the simulation and that can be anything and that's that i actually find that terrifying because presumably whatever it is is in a greater universe than what's here in the simulation so its motives literally could be anything and they don't have to make sense to us and i think that's somewhat terrifying there is a problem with simulations is outside the specific case of the ancestor simulation which by assuming some civilization is is emulating something with his own past or or close to it you know something like game of thrones might be close enough to qualify as an ancestor simulation outside of case like that there's no guarantee that there's any parallel between you in that simulated universe you don't know that it's three-dimensional most of the simulations we've done or two-dimensional simulations you know like or nintendo games where you scroll across side the board and pop up on the other side of the board there is no guarantee that any of the physical laws here apply things that we think of as just normal like entropy might just be equivalent of a built-in sleep timer to save whatever it is they're trying to save which might be money all right it takes this many dollars to run this simulation so even though there's no such thing as entropy in our universe it runs down these simulations so you can only simulate your universe you know for a few trillion years and then it shuts off you know unless you have the upgraded model so we have no idea how big the other universe above us would be that was doing that simulating and in what way it's unbounded because it could be bigger in some ways but smaller in others we could simulate certain universes that were bigger than us in some respects you know if you live in a universe that only lasts for a million years you could simulate one that lasted for a billion years even though it was a million the size of your own universe so it is longer in time or bigger in physical dimensions so there is basically anything you can think of that you could simulate in our universe is essentially mass factor it's bigger something that could be stimulating us and that just opens the door up to so many crazy scenarios and we have to take another break when we come back it's alien civilization time john i was just looking at your w-2 tax forms from 1996. i still have those no but i do why is the shopping mall paying you for special services youtube didn't exist back then so i had an acting job of of sorts oh dear what it says you were a christmas elf oh yeah i remember you from back then i brought joy to tens of families and we're back with isaac arthur now isaac do you sort of uh combine the idea of nanotech with alien civilizations could nanotech in your view be a solution to the fermi paradox in other words could a civilization just upload itself into a nanotechnological cloud emit very little radio because it's just little nano machines locally communicating and go quiet and that eventually the the solution of the fermi paradox is that civilizations become so advanced that they're no longer detectable well that's always a very you know very plausible scenario but more in the sense of we don't know what technology we're going to discover so you know we say things like well we're limited by thermodynamics so we're limited by radio waves or the speed of light we say well we've only even known these things exist for a century or two yeah and we've found so many changes since then but one of the problems are things like that approaches they say well we're going to go miniaturize we're going to go very efficient and say all right now you've been efficient you've maximized your efficiency you can cram a million people into whatever space or energy would normally support one of us but populations keep growing and if a population doubles very slowly just say once every thousand years instead of twice a century we did last century that's a very slow growth rate and yet they double in mere twenty thousand years doubling once every thousand years they'd have doubled a million fold in in just two to twenty thousand years or twenty thousand years next to the age of the universe and then another twenty thousand years they have gone up to a trillion for their number and so on so almost anytime you have something that's based around efficiency if they're still growing then you know it it will eventually break down on the other hand if they're not growing you don't really need a fermi paradox solution anyway because all that really requires is that life not be so common that while literally each other's backyard that life just be a few times per galaxy for instance that you don't just happen to pick up the radio waves and if that's the case they're just not growing that much then that's a fully paradox solution all on its own if you had to guess out of all of the fermi paradox solutions i know of almost a hundred what do you think the which one just strikes you as the most likely that and i bet i know what it is but i'll let you answer um oh i said the first one popped in my head would be the your chaotic cells but i think that one's one of the ones you're popular with it might be the ones that's why i was thinking about it as everybody mentioned that to me one time as your preferred one i always go for the assumption that intelligence of the variety that we have is very rare i just don't know if it's because things are smart as dolphins are real or things making a step from dolphin to human is very rare i tend to figure that very simple life is common but that you know we spent 400 500 million years going from simple land-based life that already had brains to what we own nowadays we spent about a billion years going from that most basic primitive life form up to the stuff that would pass as measly modern microbes you know there was a big jump there to this and and that strikes me as a thing to really be looking at because your generations go a lot faster than you know whatever was changing us and our ancestors a million years ago that's only maybe a hundred thousand generations or less tops whereas bacteria have that many in the course of maybe a thousand years not a million there's so much more evolution that go on in those periods so i tend to think your biggest great filter almost has to be on the front end early in life the eukaryotic life is obviously one possible great filter but there there are others you know a lot of possible ones and one interesting one i think that you did a video recently on is the phosphorus scarcity do you think that's not really something that was talked about up until recently do you think it's just could be that simple that there's just a non-homogeneous uh things that you need for life prevents it in most places oh yeah that's definitely one of the possibilities especially when you have things like that slowly collecting as universe ages one thing that surprised me and i hadn't really heard about it more than in passing and you know you don't really pick up on what other fields think on these things as much you know from physics backgrounds to the biology often i was important to me and it was this whole phosphorous problem in the first place and even before we knew about how rare it was in the universe they were saying that this couldn't see how it would be high enough concentrations on early earth for life to start and i didn't even heard about that as an issue and you tend to figure well if that was a problem here on earth or it's not so unique that it wouldn't have happened on other planets so every resolved here shouldn't be a problem elsewhere but we don't know that there could be something as weird as a freak astronomical event that really created a very high concentration of phosphorus and one little asteroid that crashed somewhere and left a tidal pool right where it was full of phosphorus that could be how life started it could be something that crazy weird and coincidental we don't know and the sad things we might never actually know for the case of earth if we go to a million worlds and observe life start on all those it'll probably start in different ways you might say well 99 time it starts this way we still won't know for sure if that's what actually started on earth because again all we can say is what the odds are not which particular version happened say the fermi paradox solution is simply that we haven't looked well enough and say 50 years from now we know about all sorts of alien civilizations you recently did an episode entitled terrifying aliens what what is the scariest what is the scariest alien scenario that uh you've come up with you know it hp lovecraft had so many wonderful ideas for what alien life might be like but i think something often gets missed in his work is the idea that the bad guys in that weren't your big evil monsters in the background like cthulhu your background monsters your villains though were the people who had basically given in to the the existential fear and uh and were operating on trying to survive in that universe in spite of those creatures and you know that's a given in denialism and things like that my biggest worry with contacting aliens is if we reach them we find out that they're a million years old they're really sophisticated and who we're talking to is just the last few crazed remnants of that civilization because they never found a purpose to life they never found answers you know they never got the uh the deep thought built up of the planet earth and then as douglas adams hitchhiker's got the galaxy that came to the ultimate solution to life the universe and everything the idea that you might encounter an alien species and find out that they had existed for all that time and they just never found a good reason to keep going on so eventually you just become bored of the universe and it doesn't doesn't matter what happens which ultimately if you think about that that is the scenario that happens at the end of the universe when we just don't have any resources and there's nothing left uh what's the point of continuing if you can continue and i mean there is the thing where you say well if after a trillion years and you know all the stars are running down we talk about ways to extend life and our civilization in a time series you know that can go on way longer maybe even better than when you're normal stars but uh at the same time if you've managed to go trillion years ago financial to entropy if you haven't found a you know escape clause some way out of the universe something like that you might wonder folks would still continue on but then you say well some folks will continue on you start wondering what the self-selection bias is there if you've found out that your universe is one of complete purposelessness that will eventually run down with no escape uh and you yourselves are effectively immortal inside that context you can live as long as you can still have resources and energy you might start wondering about what kind of creatures actually continue to go on after all that and it's both uh impressive unsettling and terrifying to think about the kind of entity that would choose to voluntarily keep existing for billions or trillions of years in a context like that they'd be very good at surviving though and it'd become a bit of a hobby i'd say something they're very good at well another thing one possible way out of that though is if a civilization at the end of time decides that the imperative is to try to continue try to create another universe maybe try to recreate a big bang or something like that that it can somehow move to if such things are even possible so do you see any sort of scenarios like that where a civilization that's at the very end and run out of gas could could refresh it and try something new i think they would if they found any theoretical framework and means of doing it they would give it a try you know a universe was something where it was self-destructive eg this is going to be a new universe we create but we can't travel to it like we create the black hole that creates this new universe but we can't pass through it uh or we can't find out because we can't go both ways so it's a leap of faith that's trying to pass through it or even case so it might be one of those things where we'll do this but it will literally blow us up in the process i think that you would have things like that where if they could figure out a way to do that they would you know um if everything's running down the end of the it's you're the end of the show you know the last gasp is there um you want some kind of memorial even if it's simply one of those ones but nobody remember you did it you know and there is the idea of a penrose's idea of a civilization imprinting on the next universe imprinting in the cosmic microwave background radiation a message and that might be something that a civilization at the very end of their universe might well do because there's nothing else i think uh was it stargate universe but they i assume that was what they were aiming for they were the hidden message they had talked about being in the fundamental structure of the universe for that uh show but it got cancelled um but yeah if you could find some way to do that you could imprint even with something you know just like a clear pattern that said blah but you could potentially put quite a bit of rosetta stone to something the size of of the fundamental structure of the universe we wanted to how many bits of data can you carve up if you have to use something like a you know a super cluster as a bit if you had your cosmic voids as your zeros for instance and you're going that big how big of a message could you put into an observable universe um and if i had to work that out but i suspect you could still get a couple megabytes in there to shift gears back to the the immediate near future predicting the immediate near future in regards to space we obviously have elon musk wanting to build a mars colony and we have jeff bezos wanting to create o'neill cylinders and things like that what is the most realistic route you think that that we are going to have our first real presence in space not just a space station orbiting in low earth orbit but what do you think the first and uh one actually let me rephrase that as someone that that makes videos and talks about megastructures what's the first one that you see us building i guess depends on how you define a megastructure if you talk about just something really big a solar shade you know that's uh a solar meal cluster there's just so many things you can do with that and it's so easy to manufacture in situ you know you can build a meal that's a kilometer across and stick into something the size of a normal rocket right now because it's not that thick biggest problem is actually spinning up when you get outside of there but uh you can produce something like that on the moon relatively easy because how hard is it to melt down metal and wallet it's probably much easier than making microchips or rockets you know that would be your first biggest object up there and because you can use something like that for climate control climate change concerns power generation that would be your first big object but looking that might weigh you know a ton per kilometer the first big station that i think would almost have to be something running either mars or moon gravity is a spin gravity station so we could check that out you don't really need one for the moon because only a couple days away but for mars we cannot send people to mars responsibly we cannot send people to mars until we've seen what the effect of humans and low gravity for a year is not zero gravity low gravity and uh you know i think we irresponsibly try to be sending these moles missions out there manned until we've actually done something like that so on the scientific end that might be the way we do that but to me the the bootstrap to get us really into space in a big way always has to be how can we bring this money home here and you really only have those three paths the one is just the continued improvement of the communication system you get with satellites that's a very real thing recon satellite communication data movement there's a growing industry in space the other one of course is your precious metal mining you know those things not materials for building in space because that's catch-22 you know it's nice to be able to build things like an o'neill cylinder have to have people there but uh there's nobody there right now but precious metals we bought those here so asteroid money might be an option and from that the access would start using to build up your space infrastructure or your space stations your hotels but the other one is uh is again the basically your power satellites or solar shades for weather control and i think that's probably going to be it because we don't really need the gold that badly no time frame um as far as the sunshade goes when do you think that that when would that make sense to start building i mean honestly i would not be surprised if we did a prototype one in the next uh in the next decade because it really shouldn't be that hard to do and it is one of those things we need to kind of prototype what types of of sail is going to work best how how badly do they handle sitting there in space because it's not the gentlest environment you know that radiation all those little micro meteos and things like that how well they stay up how high you need to put them up so they're not getting enough drag to fall down uh so you know deploying ones that are say the size of a football stadium uh and way maybe a ton you know those are things that i think we should be probably looking at during the next decade and which we should be able to and um that's another one of those examples where you probably could get the kind of funding for because same as power generation of of power satellites um with the shades that is a potential multi-trillion dollar industry in terms of things about concerns for weather and climates which seems to be a growing concern and it's it's a viable solution i mean if you want yeah oh it works yeah it's i mean nothing's shown until you've actually done it but you know on paper and it's uh on paper putting paper between you the sun works real well or tin foil so which of course things that are on paper sometimes don't go well well you have to put type of stuff out but i mean i'll point out was it earlier today we had that first uh starship land from uh from um you know uh elon musk and spacex and it blew up on the pad on the way back down right and of course that's not too surprising or hardly a thing to be concerned about forced time through but for those of us remember the first time he managed to land one of those rockets that was amazing and you think about that compared to just making a robot whose only job is to scoop up you know lunar regolith and smelt it down into aluminum and roll it as a foil right versus landia rocket yep that that is a whole you know it doesn't seem like the one should be all that hard it would still need prototyping it was to eat walk but i really feel like if we can make a rocket land uh unmanned robotically like that then we can make tin foil in space and bringing the money back i think there are some people that have said that platinum mining platinum from asteroids is becoming viable as far as the money so there are little bits and pieces that seem to be making this more viable and once once it's once it hits that it will happen it always is that runaway process one thing piggybacks on the yellow because if you got that structure up in place you know suddenly you've got it gets just a little bit cheaper to do another plus you're just a little bit better at doing it and you've got all that kind of feeding in together you think about how hard it'll be developed something like microsoft wordpress or in the absence of computers but we use it ubiquitously nowadays but uh some next spreadsheet so all those little simple things we really think about now that open up the door for all the other app design all the other future programs you know back in the day pong right leads to the modern video game these things feed off each other if you get any one of these going it bootstraps the others and uh it's the question which one is it gonna be first and when is that gonna happen and we also jaded from the last few decades of thinking we were going back to the moon any day now and never quite happening and that's it's hard to remember that to the degree that's kind of fair because there was no reason to go back to the moon not until earlier permanently now we have these reusable rockets now we have this cheap space travel when people say things like we might be back on the moon in a decade we're still kind of jaded to want to say nah we say that all the time and yet it feels a lot more real now doesn't it like it really does feel like it's right on the edge of something that's gonna happen sooner than later it does it feels very different i i think back to now say the year 2000 this was all science fiction and i didn't and it didn't look like yeah a mars colony i mean maybe visiting mars yes but a mars colony i i would have said that's centuries in the future and now it's i mean it's still hard but now it's not so impossible seeming and that happened faster i mean i was a little more optimistic i suppose but even then i didn't really i was not thinking mars this century until you know maybe the last five or six years and it's still hard to say that we'll actually have a real colony i'm always for instance but this is one of those things that can happen as fast as people want to once you get the tech in place i don't see you're not going to have a big population in space on other planets um in the next you know couple of decades or century just because there's not much time to leave to go there you know what's what there's no fertile land waiting to be formed so once you get to a certain point where it's not prestigious anymore why are you going to mars and that is still going to be a problem down the road but you know it now feels like that's when it's got a potential solution you know that that is that i should say it feels like something we're actually going to have to worry about that as a problem as opposed to it always being something in the future to be not worried about my last question for you isaac is okay somebody found some mars colony or a space colony of sun an o'neill cylinder or something like that would you relocate are you going to be the first youtuber making videos in space um you know it actually makes me wonder if there's anybody who actually has a button chris hadfield qualifies actually he probably does yes and and he's certainly welcome that title i love that man but uh myself no i don't even like to fly i admittedly a lot of that was because i was a smoker and i didn't like yeah i know planes i quit so maybe i'll fly more after now but um uh i don't like to i mean i love the area i live in uh to me the idea of even moving 20 30 miles away from where i live is not so much looking forward to but uh i would probably go visit the moon or go visit an open ring and if it got easy enough i might go visit mars but i really don't see myself as ever being much of a space tourist level or colonist myself i'd much rather set the ground up for other people to do it you know vicariously enjoy the thrill through them yeah i have to agree i i don't see myself ever going into space although i waffle i waffle on it but i don't see myself ultimately and people will sometimes uh they'll say well if you don't want to go what makes you think other people want to go and say are you serious there are tons of people who want to go to space well i don't want to go climb mount everest you know but there are plenty of people that do and and i mean that is one of those things is you know you always have another generation of folks who would like to go do something that that other folks have not done yet and uh i would love for them to be able to do that doesn't mean i had to go do it myself but i mean if it was a choice between me going there or no one ever doing it oh yeah i'd give my butt on board the space plane then yeah but while there's a line of people who would give up their soul to go on to uh the next rocket and it's not like i want to do that much yeah i'll wait my tone all right isaac it's been a pleasure as always thanks for appearing with us and we'll talk to you again soon john i got you for secret santa well that's just wonderful oh no i i think you like it wait a minute what you got me a box of chocolates instead of like an avocado or something that's wonderful there's a catch though isn't there no catch not this time well i got you something too really here you go i'll even open it for you it's it's a rock john you got me a rock that's right i know you love rocks uh actually wait a minute if we got each other for secret santa then who got the possum you don't want to know john where's the where's that glow coming from i didn't put up christmas lights wait there's an alien fusion reactor outside and it's powering lights wait i don't even have a window in here and i can still see it anna this has to be unhealthy probably enjoy your chocolates john thanks for the rock though you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 200,593

Keywords: Why the Future Will be Weird, Isaac Arthur, Event Horizon John Michael Godier, Event Horizon, Godier, SETI, alien, aliens, alien civilizations, dyson spheres, intelligent life, universe, biosignatures, technosignatures, science, space, fermi paradox, von neumann probes, finding alien civilizations, signal, Hidden aliens, does intelligent alien life exist?, Science and Futurism, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, nanotech, life extension

Id: nFQGzMm_qWg

Length: 67min 28sec (4048 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/kmoonster]

I love being able to eavesdrop on their casual "bth" conversations held over a cup of joe.

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I really wanted to hear the part where Rome is a solution to relativity, though! No fair cutting out the teaser!

[u/curiously_clueless]

I hate not having subtitles for this.

[u/Sargent72]

The latest on longevity can be learned by looking up Dr David Sullivan. He has multiple Youtube videos.