Can we explore the galaxy with self-replicating probes?

Daniel and Kelly talk to Phil Metzger about the engineering challenges of building self-replication space probes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
It's a vast, cold, and mostly empty universe, and as
lucky as we've been to live in a time when
we are discovering planets around other stars, we still have
no evidence that there is anyone out there living on
any of them. The prospect that we are the only
life in the universe, or the only intelligent life, still
haunts us. Of course, people say the aliens could be

(00:30):
out there even if we haven't found them. So let's
flip the script and think about it from the aliens
point of view. Why haven't they found us? Could they
find us? There are lots of planets in the galaxy,
after all, and we're only on one of them. Today
in the podcast, we're going to explore the prospects for
a technology that promises to unleash vast exploratory power, one

(00:53):
that might allow us to visit any planet in the
galaxy and to look for aliens in a reasonable amount
of time, or to allow aliens to have come and
visited our planet. That technology is self replicating probes spacecraft
that build more of themselves, growing our fleet exponentially. Because

(01:14):
if we can do it, we probably will do it,
and if we can do it, aliens likely could also
welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary and so far barren universe.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I'm Kelly Reader Smith.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
I study parasites and space, and I had so much
fun in today's conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
But also I'm not going to sleep tonight.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and though I'm
technically self replicating, I haven't made any exact copies of myself.

Speaker 4 (01:54):
Oh, I guess no human has made an exact copy
of themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yet, although you know so my two children are both blonde,
and my wife is blonde and I'm not, and so
people joked occasionally, since she is a biochemist, that maybe
she had just cloned herself in the lab.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Hazel does look very Katrina issue.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Yeah, yeah, they both. Do you know those dominant Viking genes.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
I guess they wiped out your genes.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
I'm not unhappy about that. They both look great.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
So my question for you today, you are super excited
about aliens.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yes, no news to anyone there.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
If you could make self replicating probes and release them
into the universe so that you could communicate with aliens,
would you do that?

Speaker 1 (02:41):
M Oh my gosh, Well, you know, I'm on the
record for being willing to invite aliens to come visit
Earth as long as they share the secrets of the universe,
even if they send us to the hydrogen minds and
enslave us. That's how badly I want to meet aliens
and learn how the universe works.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
I'm so glad academics have like zero hour over anything.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
Well, that's what makes me free to say these ridiculous stus,
because I'll never ever be around that table where we
make these decisions. So I mean, if you're asking me,
like Daniel, would you launch self replicating probes that could
put us in touch with aliens that might be able
to tell us the secrets of the universe, even if
it risks like wiping out all matter in the galaxy

(03:25):
because the probes go crazy and convert everything into paper
clips essentially, Then yes, I think I still would because
the other alternative is too disappointing, Like we are stuck
on this planet and the aliens are stuck on that planet,
and we can't talk to each other because we're afraid
that our technology is going to run amok. I don't know.
That just seems too dark.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
That's more dark than all of us getting to still
exist but not talking to each other.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
You're warped, man.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yes, yes, I'm warped. I will totally admit I'm warped.
But I want to know who's out there. I want
to know if our other civilizations, and the idea that
there could be out there and we never find them,
that's to me just too difficult to accept. So any
technology that's going to help us make contact with other civilizations. Yes,
I'm a booster. I'm an investor, all right, So.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
If you are anything like me, you might be thinking, one,
I hope Daniel never runs for public office, and if so,
he does not have my vote. And two, I want
to know how likely is it that we could build
these self replicating robots so that if some Daniel Ooyd
individual gets a position in Congress, do they have a
chance at wiping this all out with these self replicating robots?

Speaker 1 (04:36):
And by self replicating robots, Kelly is referring to not
just probes that NASA builds here on Earth, bespoke things
that take ten years, and we send out one of
them and we cross our fingers and hope that it survives,
or even two or ten of those. We're talking about
probes that can make more probes, Probes that are not
birthed here on Earth, but out somewhere in the galaxy,

(04:58):
maybe five ten generations down, that let us tap into
the power of exponential growth so that we can effectively
explore the entire galaxy without ever leaving our rock.

Speaker 4 (05:08):
Amazing, and so we asked our extraordinaries, what do they
think can we even build self replicating probes to explore
the galaxy?

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Is this actual technology that's around the corner, maybe a
few hundred years from now, or is this just Daniel's fantasy?
Thanks very much to everybody who answered these questions. Think
about it for a moment. Do you think we are
around the corner to building self replicating probes? Here's what
our listeners had to.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Say, Yes, we can.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
It will take a while until we can, and they
might eat us afterwards.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
It's plausible that we are somebody else's self replicating probe in.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Terms of practicality, I mean, you know, the short answer
is no. The long answer is well, no, I.

Speaker 5 (05:54):
Don't think our current engineering precision is up to the
tech of making probes that would in turn make probes
with equally good precision. And so on all the way down.

Speaker 6 (06:10):
You know what would happen if this w a ry
and we had bands of world destroying robots roaming the galaxy.
That seems like, if it's not already the plot of
a sci fi novel, it should be.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
You know what, we don't know. We really just don't
know yet.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
So I feel like, yeah, maybe in the next twenty
thirty fifty hundred years.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
We can't write now, but we won't be able to later.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
I mean, we can do anything if we.

Speaker 6 (06:35):
Try once we have sufficiently advanced AI.

Speaker 7 (06:39):
I can't see what the point is unless we also
invent near to speed of life travel. Once they got
to another solar system, we'd be long gone. So who
would they actually be exploring for.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
We can't even build self replicating robots that'll do our
dishes and our laundry, Yet in a near future dish
might very well be pushable.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
Okay. I absolutely loved these answers.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
There was a lot of diversity in these answers, and
as always, there was some like hilarity in there too.
I liked the short answer is no, long answer is.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Correct me up.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
But yeah, lots of people thinking we could do it,
some people saying why should we do it? Some people
say we could do anything. I loved it.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Some people on the Kelly whipb blanket side saying they
might eat us afterwards. You know, that's fair, that's fair.

Speaker 4 (07:30):
I think it's important to point out the possible pitfall
so we can make decisions with clear eyes.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
Maybe that's just me.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
That's good for when we have that Oppenheimer moment. You know,
are we going to push signs forward at risk of
destroying everybody? Or are we going to cower in the darkness?
Those are really the only two options available.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Okay, do not run for Senate.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
So so today we got super lucky because we have
an amazing guest on the show we do.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
We got to speak to Phil Metzger, who actually has
a patent for space concrete. He knows what he's talking about.
He's really thought about building industry off the Earth, and
he disagrees with Kelly about stuff in space. So we
thought who better to come on the podcast.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
I think our disagreements aren't about like the facts. I
think our disagreements are about optimism. And he is a
more optimistic human being that I am, and he's probably
happier for it.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah, and I think disagrees with Kelly describes like a
vast swath of the space industry community.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Yep, yep. And that's a okay, all.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Right, So let's jump into our interview with Phil. It's
my pleasure to introduce to the podcast Professor Phil Metzger.
He's a planetary physicist with the Florida Space Institute. He
has the distinction that he has designed spacecraft. He also
has a three mile wide asteroid named after himself, and
he has strong opinions on the definition of a planet.

(08:55):
Plus he has studied the issue of building industry in space,
so he actually knows what he's talking about. Phil, Welcome
to the podcast.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Hi glad to be here.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
So can I dig into one of those things?

Speaker 4 (09:05):
So I know Phil pretty well for his work on
like you know, regolith on the Moon and stuff like that,
but I don't know about Phil's strong opinions about the
definition of a planet. So is Pluto a planet or
not a planet? What am I missing?

Speaker 2 (09:18):
I'm going to say it's a planet. And that's because
the definition of a planet, going back to the Copernican
Revolution was not based on orbits. It was based on
the geophysical nature of the objects. And that was really
a crucial part of the Copernican argument.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
What do you mean the geophysical nature? You mean, like,
is it mostly spherical?

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Well before the Copernican Revolution, they thought that the majority
of view is that planets were made out of unchanging
ether and they were perfect spheres. They followed heavenly physics,
not earthly physics, and so the Copernican Revolution said, no,
Earth is in the heavens, and these objects are geological bodies,
just like the Earth is. And the primary example they

(09:59):
had was the Moon because they could see it with telescopes.
Galileo saw mountains and those the existence of mountains and
the existence of earth shine reflecting off the Moon allowed
him to create arguments about this category of objects called planets.
And the category he was arguing for was all the

(10:19):
geological bodies in our Solar system, including the moons of
Jupiter which he called planets, and our moon, and it
was all based on the fact that they are geological
bodies like the Earth. It was not broken into what
they orbit. Now. Kepler introduced the category of secondary planets,
meaning a planet that orbits another planet, and that was

(10:42):
the primary term, the technical term we had for that
subcategory of planets all the way until well as early
in the nineteen hundreds that this taxonomy got lost, and
it was for non scientific reasons. We ended up with
the terminology that's most commonly used today.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
If it were up to you, we would have like
hundreds of planets then, because every moon would be a planet.

Speaker 3 (11:04):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Well if there, we've refined upon Galileo's definition since then,
and we now understand that there are small bodies that
wasn't known at the time, and we need to have
a lower size limit because they become dissimilar and the
category is not useful if we include everything down to
a dustpec. And so it was Kuiper in the nineteen

(11:28):
fifties who proposed the lower limit based on gravitational rounding.
He didn't understand the planet formation exactly. And since then
we've refined our understanding of planet formation, and so Alan
Stern and well Alan I think first proposed a refinement
to Kuiper's definition where he said it didn't matter the

(11:49):
formation process, if it ended up large enough to become
gravitationally rounded, then it should be a planet. So that's
the history in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Well, maybe the solution is buried in your previous comment,
and you know, maybe this category is just not useful.
It's sort of historical and archaic and reflects our feelings
about the importance of the Earth, and that now we're
doing all this like layers upon layers upon layers to
try to preserve it as a thing. Maybe we should
just give up on it and accept the fact that
the Solar System is filled with all sorts of stuff,

(12:18):
from tiny specks to huge blobs.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Well, you bring up a great point, and I've heard
Neil de grass Tyson say the same thing, that maybe
we should say that planet is not a useful category.
But you know that's really the outcome of the way
it's currently defined. It's not useful. But if you went
back to the Galileo and you know, the refinements to
the Galileo definition, then it actually is useful again. And

(12:42):
the idea is that planets are unique in the cosmos
because those are the locations where chemical complexity develops and
geological complexity and biology emerges, and civilizations emerge. And that's
an important concept in understanding our place in the cosmos,

(13:03):
And in fact, I would argue that might even be
the most important concept I think planets not only is
it a useful concept if you go back to Galileo's definition,
but it might be the most important concept in physics
and understanding why we're here in the cosmos.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
And incredibly that actually provides a transition to the topic
of the episode. So this whole thing wasn't just a digression,
because imagine that we wanted to explore the galaxy and
to look for other civilizations. Where should we look, right,
should we look in the hearts of stars, should we
look in stellar atmospheres, or should we look on planetary surfaces?

(13:38):
So from that point of view, it's helpful to define
like our target locations in the galaxy. So, Phil, if
you could look anywhere, is that where you would look?
You'd look for things we currently call planets or the
field definition of planets, and look on their surfaces for civilizations.

Speaker 2 (13:53):
Sure, and that is what we've been doing. We've been
looking for exoplanets, looking for biosignatures. There's also a lot
of interest in the large moons of our own solar system,
like is there life under the ice on Europa? Even
people talk about on Pluto Deep under the surface of Pluto.
It's believed that there may be a liquid ocean still liquid, surprisingly,

(14:19):
and maybe there's life because there's organic material on Pluto,
and there's energy that it's kept at liquid this long
energy from nuclear decay apparently. And the literature uses the
word planet including those types of objects. So the people
that are actually looking for life and looking at geological
complexity do use the Galilean definition of a planet just

(14:39):
by default.

Speaker 1 (14:40):
All right, So let's say we want to explore all
the quote unquote planets around all the stars in the
Milky Way and look for civilizations we can chat with.
Why can't we just scale up what NASA is doing
and do a lot more of it. Why do we
need to consider self replicating probes.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, that's a great question, I think. And the reason
why I would argue is because the people or the
civilizations out there that we might detect that might be
communicating may not be biological. It may be that they
have transitioned so that there's now machine life in the cosmos,
and machines are can be designed to be more inherently

(15:23):
capable of long distance travel within the galaxy. They could
be designed to withstand the environment. They could also be immortal,
live for a very long time. Not get bored. Just
program yourself to not be bored. It's hard, and.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
So I've tried that for myself. It just doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah, And so it gets back to when Kardishov Alexei
Kardashev was looking for signs of life and the cosmos.
He defined type one, type two, and type three civilizations
because he was pointing out that what we're looking for
might not be similar to what we have here, and
self replicating probes is one of the common channels people

(16:06):
have discussed of how civilization might go at a larger
scale and end up colonizing the galaxy.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
I think you're saying that what we should be looking
for is aliens self replicating probes. Is that the comment
you're making. Are you saying that it's important for us
to send us self replicating probes because they're more likely
to have a fun conversation with alien self replicating probes.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
All of the above, I think that it's important for
us to get beyond the limits of our biosphere here
on this planet and take life, not just human life,
but take other species with us beyond Earth. And I
think the only economically viable way to do that as well,
self replication, industrial self replication off the planet. And you

(16:50):
also raise another interesting question, would would advance civilizations even
bother to talk to us if we saw that we're
primitive biologicals when they are much more advanced machine intelligence,
And you know, maybe that's a factor too.

Speaker 4 (17:04):
And just to make sure I'm understanding, are we saying
that the life in the universe is no longer squishy
it's actually machines, or that they're still squishy life somewhere
and they're sending machines out to do the exploring and
that's what we would be communicating with or both of
those options.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, both of them. I had in mind the idea
that eventually machine intelligence may replace biological intelligence. Out there
in the cosmos. People have talked about dice and minds,
where you build a dice sphere and use all the
energy of a star to support one mind, one gigantic compute.

(17:40):
And so maybe there are dice in minds scattered across
the cosmos, and they're so far above us that they
were not their peers, so they don't bother talking to us.
But maybe they're out there, maybe they're watching and they're
aware of us.

Speaker 4 (17:53):
I feel like I could personally benefit from a more
broader look at self replicating probes, and so, like you know,
we've talked about how they can have this exponential growth,
but I'm not quite sure what they're growing from or
how they're growing, And so can you give me a
bigger picture look at what these probes do and what
they are and why we want these probes?

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Sure? So the first person I know who talked about
this concept was I think as Robert frietas Free to Us,
writing in the nineteen eighties. He was associated with a
NASA Ames Research Center study in nineteen eighty he talked
about where you send a probe to a star. That

(18:34):
probe will then mine the gas giants. Maybe it'll set
up factories on the moons of the gas giants. But
he looked at all the elements that you could get
from a belief to be nominal star system, and could
you create a complete industry using those resources? And you can,

(18:54):
and you could have this factory start small. He called
it a seed factor, and the seed would be planted
on this icy moon at a giant planet, and it
would start to build larger factories and it would all
be robotic with autonomous labor and eventually it would start
to build other seed spacecraft, and then those seed spacecraft

(19:16):
would be launched from there and go to other star systems.
And so he tried to do some scaling of the
economics of autonomous labor on outer icy moon planets and
colonize in the entire galaxy. Since then, we've started to
develop some of these technologies in order to support NASA.

(19:37):
We've been working on mining the soil on the Moon
or Mars, getting resources making metal, and as we've started
to do this, it got us excited. We started thinking, wow,
you know, maybe this idea from FreeDOS is possible. And
so we've done a little bit more recent work trying
to bring Freetus's ideas into a more concrete instantiation where

(20:03):
we talk about what exact types of robots would be
at these factories, what would be their metabolic throughput, so
how fast can they self replicate and start to build
other spacecraft. So that's the general idea.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Doesn't it go back a little bit further. Wasn't it
von Neuman who introduced this concept of a von Neuman
probe and the universal constructor or something which can build itself.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
You're absolutely right. Yeah, I forgot about von Neuman. So
he was before freed us.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
He's always before everybody and everything. He's got his fingers
and every time he's like Euler.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
You know.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
Right, Let's go through the exercise of thinking about the
exponential factor of self replicating probes, because I think a
lot of people are like, why can't we just get
Elon to do his SpaceX multiplication on our current thing?
You know, why is it really necessary to have the
probes build more probes?

Speaker 2 (20:57):
Well, it's a matter of scale scaling up if you
want to explore the entire galaxy, and maybe you don't,
you know, maybe you don't care about that, But if there's.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
A civili I do, if there's a want to overlook something.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
So if there are any civilizations out there that have
had the same motive that you have, then it's an
economic question. How do you how do you explore ten
to the twenty star systems, and if your labor force
is only ten to the nine biological creatures you know,
in the order of billions, how do you have an

(21:34):
industry that can explore on such a vast scale. And
so you need to have more autonomy and you need
to have a lot of industry with that autonomy in
order to build all the assets, all the capital necessary
to go out into that gigantic cosmos. So it's a
scaling question.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
Yeah. So if I do a simple calculation, you know,
if you start out with like five self replicating ships
and each one can make fine more than it's only
twelve generations before you have a billion ships out there
in the galaxy exploring for you, the power of exponential
functions is just really amazing.

Speaker 2 (22:11):
That's correct. Yeah, And we do see exponential growth like that.
If you put bacteria into sugar water, their population will double, double,
double until it uses up all the sugar and then
of course you get population collapse at that point. But
we do see the exponential scaling occur in some systems.

(22:31):
We also see it in technology Moore's law, for example.
There's been some discussion why does Moore's law exist. Some
people have argued that it's a self fulfilling prophecy that
companies try to meet that metric, But for it to
persist over so many orders of magnitude, I have to
believe it's there's something fundamental that's more than just a

(22:53):
self fulfilling prophecy because all of industry has to scale
up so that each piece of equipment can meet that
exponential growth rate. And so I think that technology does
have an inherent exponentiality to it, where technology builds technology
and because of that feedback loop, it scales up exponentially.
And so extrapolating that idea, you eventually fill up your planet,

(23:18):
you end up ruining your planet and you have population collapse,
just like the bacteria and the sugar water. So I
think it's important to get life outside of the planet
so that we don't ruin this for biology, and then
we could do greater things as well. Of course, that
also raises questions about the ethics of self replicating probes
unleashing them in the cosmos, which you hinted at at

(23:39):
the beginning of.

Speaker 1 (23:40):
This podcast, letting them tap into that galactic Sure. Yeah,
and there's the second element of the industrial aspect, which
is not just the exponential growth, but also starting from space. Right, Like,
we don't necessarily want to build everything on the service
and then have to lift it up out of our gravity. Well,
if you can have industry in space, then you never
have to overcome that, right. Isn't that a big factor.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Yeah, that is. And there are ways we can benefit
Earth by putting industry in space. They're not always obvious,
Like Jeff Bezos talks about moving all of heavy industry
off the planet and only keeping light industry on the Earth.
But the problem you get into is how do you
transport all the mass of manufactured goods down through the
atmosphere to the surface, because re entry physics does damage

(24:25):
the atmosphere, and you know, ablation of materials puts tiny
particles in the atmosphere which contribute to the greenhouse effect
and driving chemistry, and the heating of the atmosphere drives chemistry.

Speaker 1 (24:36):
And if I buy dog chew toys on Amazon, I
don't want them melted from re entry in the atmosphere,
even if they were manufactured on the Moon.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
Right, yeah, right, But despite these problems, there are ways
we can move industry, at least parts of industry into
space to do a great benefit to our planet. I
think by the end of the century we could have
fifty percent of our industrial footprint in space.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
That's a lot, all right.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
So I'm fascinated the technical questions you raised about whether
we could actually put this thing together and make it happen,
build a factory that can make factories to make factories.
But let's take a break and come back and then
dive into those technical details. All right, we're back, and

(25:33):
we're talking to Phil Metzger about building self replicating probes
that go out and explore the galaxy and maybe get
the attention of those crazy dice in minds so we
can learn what they know about the universe.

Speaker 3 (25:44):
That would be pretty awesome.

Speaker 1 (25:46):
So this sounds like a pretty daunting task to build
a machine that could build machines to make more machines.
Let's talk about the first piece of it. How you
get the materials, how you mine it? Because if our
machine is like landing on some alien moon or orbiting
some gas giant, it's got to find the bits to
make more of itself, right, so it needs whatever it's

(26:07):
made out of. It's got to find all of those
bits locally. How does that work? How do you build
a machine which is capable of like mining pieces for itself.
Can we build autonomous mining devices?

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, there's no new physics required, but the technologies are
very immature. Some of them are only conceptual as we
have conceived of these. They are all very doable. It's
just going to take some time and some industrial engineering
to develop them.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
I love your optimism.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Fil Yeah, it's just going to take a few trillion
dollars and you know exactly whatever.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
It's just we know how to do it. It's just
an engineering problem. We just got to get it done right.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
Yeah. So here on the Earth we do it using
human intelligence, human labor, and we've scoured this planet for
thousands of years looking for all the best resources, and
we've discovered there are special metals. We've discovered certain types
of rock, certain type of ore that we can extract
these metals out of. And so we don't just grab

(27:09):
any material off the ground and start trying to build
robots out of it. We have this gigantic logistical network
on the Earth, transportation hubs and giant container ships, and
we have mining is distributed all over the planet bringing
together the materials we need to build this industry. So
if you wanted to set up an industry on the Moon,

(27:31):
the first problem we have is that we don't have
that logistical We don't have thousands of years of developing
that logistics, nor do we have all the deep understanding
of where the resources are in the Moon. The second
problem we have is that the Moon lacks a lot
of the geological processes that the Earth has had. So,
going back to what we said at the start of

(27:52):
this conversation, Galileo argued that it was a planet because
it has the same geological processes. But now we know
that it doesn't have all the same geological processes and
Earth is pretty special. So if we want to build
industry on the Moon or other simpler objects, we're going
to have to develop tech to extract the resources out

(28:12):
of minerals that we would normally pass over. It can
be done, but it's not as efficient. It takes a
lot more energy, and the chemical processes to do that
haven't been developed yet. So people have conceived of how
to use sodium hydroxide to break down rock to get

(28:32):
all the different atoms out of the rock, or how
to use fluorine to do that processing, but we've never
had anybody get funding to go build a fluorine metal
extraction device, which would be very dangerous. Working with fluorine
is hazardous, and so it's going to take a lot
of money and there's not really a market for it.

(28:53):
Nobody wants to go build it because you're not going
to make any money off doing it. So this is
the problem we get into that the technologies that we
need to live and operate beyond Earth are pre economic.
We think that eventually they will have a very important
role in our civilization, but not yet.

Speaker 4 (29:11):
We had a question from a listener where they said
they really wanted to hear about how engineering on the
Moon would differ from engineering here on Earth. Tell me
if this is too far afield, but could we talk
a little bit about how the Moon environment differs from
the Earth environment in ways that would make engineering interesting
but also perhaps more complicated.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah. So it's extremely challenging to try to build hardware
to operate outside of Planet Earth because the environments are
so radically different. On the Moon, you're dealing with a
temperature swing of I forget the number, but it's like
four hundred degrees difference between day and night. We're dealing

(29:49):
with hard vacuum materials like plastics will outgas and lose
their flexibility, and therefore washers and O rings will start
to fail. We're dealing with this tremendously abrasive dust, which
comprises between twenty and up to fifty percent of the
mass of the soil in some locations, because the Moon

(30:10):
lacks a water cycle to wash the dust out of
the soil and to turn it into mud and then mudstone,
and so the dust just builds up over geological time scales,
and working in that extremely abrasive dust is maybe the
biggest challenge. That You've also got low gravity, and then
you've got the radiation environment. We don't have Earth's atmosphere

(30:31):
to shield us from these high energy particles coming down
from space. It doesn't have a magnetic field to also
deflect particles away. The ultraviolet light ruins materials, the space
plasma effects. So we can go on and on listing
the challenges of working in space, and we don't even

(30:52):
understand all the physics of some of that. We don't
understand the space plasma environment and how it interacts with
the lunar surface. So it's a really interesting field to
be in. I've always worked in groups that typically have
a ratio of one third physicists two thirds engineers, and
it's a really cool working environment because the scientists are

(31:15):
trying to understand the basic physics, and then the engineers
are taking that knowledge and creating the technology and then
we need the technology to go learn the physics, so
it's a feedback. They're both supporting each other, which makes
it a really interesting field. It's also a really hard
field to work in because you can't do the tests
that you want to do on your hardware. You just

(31:36):
cannot replicate the lunar environment or even the Martian environment
well enough. Here on Earth, even in the Giant Chamber.
You can't get the gravity right and you know, etc.
So we have to rely on simulations. But we can't
write computer simulations that are good enough because we don't
understand the physics yet. So we really have to get

(31:57):
data from those objects. We got to do more mission
through the Moon, more missions to Mars to learn the science.

Speaker 4 (32:03):
But it also sounds fun, like a fun challenge to
have all of those pieces.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
I like a good challenge.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Oh, it's tremendous fun. It is tremendous fun. And when
I speak to students, undergraduates or high school students, I'll
show them pictures of the amazing things that humans have
done already, like these fabulous skyscrapers or these unbelievable bridges,
and you know, when I drew Gopher Bridge, I'll look
at it and like, I think, how did we get

(32:30):
all this mass up here in the sky before there
was a bridge? You know? And these are really daunting problems,
but we've managed to solve them by doing straightforward engineering.
Break it down into smaller problems, get the funding, do
the engineering. But it needs to be done for space still.
We need to have young people working on these problems.

(32:53):
And there's so much work to be done, so much
discovery still ahead of us, that I think is a
great for young people to be getting into these fields.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
I have that same feeling when I see like the
Golden gate Bridge, like look upon my works, E mighty right,
it is awesome, And I like how you describe the
scope of this challenge. I mean, here on Earth we're
not capable of building robots that can do very much
yet certainly not capable of building robots that can make
more robots. And it's supported by this incredibly vast mining industry,

(33:25):
which requires a lot of human work, you know, many
cases like terrible labor conditions. Right, so we're so far
from being able to do this. Give us a little
bit of that fill optimism. What are we capable of
doing or what do you think is the first thing.
I mean, you've studied like actual lunar industry, you know,
processing regolith etc. What do you think is going to
be the first thing we accomplish down the road towards

(33:48):
being able to do this well.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
We we're currently seeing a lot of progress in robotics
and in automation. And there's one company, for example, that
has robots. They typically will post on social media pictures
of their robots folding the laundry and able to pick
up these cloth pieces and fold them very carefully. So
the dexterity and the machine vision, the autonomy to be

(34:11):
able to do task like that is making tremendous progress.
And again it comes down to an economic question. Is
there a consumer need for these technologies because there's not
a lot of funding going into them unless they can
make a profit. People aren't going to put their retirement
money into something unless it's going to help them retire.
So we're seeing a lot of advancement. I think the

(34:34):
big killer app is going to end up being AI.
I truly believe AI servers are going to have to
go to space because the environmental costs are greatly increasing.
The pushback to building servers is growing for good reason,
And already servers could be profitable if they went to space,

(34:54):
just not as profitable if they build them on the ground.
But I think that the tipping point's going to come
where they start going into space. There are already people
like Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman in the AI world
talking about how there is inevitable we're going to build
servers in space.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
Do you mean service in space to support space industry
or do you mean service in space to support like
people who want help organizing their day through JATGBT on Earth.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, I think that that all the AI servers that
are supporting people on the Earth are eventually going to
be in orbit around the Earth, maybe distant orbit, because
the latency doesn't matter that much for most compute and
so Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman that's what they're talking about.
They're talking about putting the AI servers that we would
have built on the Earth putting them in space instead

(35:42):
because of the environmental impact costs of excessively building data
servers on the Earth.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
But how do you balance that against the issues of
like cooling, right, because in space you have to cool
everything radiatively, and you know, technical support, how do you
go reboot those servers if they're in distant orbit, is
that really going to be economically feasible.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Harden them against radiation?

Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah? Yeah, those are good questions. And as far as
the radiative cooling, the energy in has to equal the
energy out, and that's the same for every spacecraft. So
the scale of solar panels and radiators, that ratio will
be the same on servers that it is on any
other spacecraft. It's just a matter of scaling it up

(36:24):
to an unbelievably gigantic scale, which is, you know, super ambitious,
but nonetheless that's where people are talking about going. And
as far as being able to have radiation hardening, yes,
that's going to require additional mass around the servers to
harden them against radiation. And as far as being able
to repair it, yes, that's going to require better robotics

(36:48):
and more autonomy. But this is I think is going
to be an economic driver that will push those technologies
forward because I don't believe there's ever going to be
an upper limit of demand on intelligence. I think the
intelligence will become the customer for more intelligence, and it'll
create that feedback loop which will have exponential growth which

(37:11):
would destroy our planet if we don't push it off
into space.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Well, I want to invest in Fill's Space Optimism company
at this point.

Speaker 4 (37:20):
All right, so we've talked a little bit about the
resources that you would need to find in space and
then extract and why that might be difficult. So say
you have those resources, what's the next step?

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yes, so the next step is well, beneficiation. That's where
you improve the quality of your resources before actually doing
the extraction process. I have some patents in beneficiation. My
university owns them, but they were inventions that I had,
and I like to tell people. If you go to
the patent search and look on patents on concrete, there's

(37:55):
literally over a million patents on concrete. Look at concrete
for off the planet, there's only two and I have
one of those too, And so there's still room for
nine and ninety nine thousand more patents on concrete. And
that's why it's such a great field to go into.

(38:16):
We've only just begun developing these technologies.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Would you call that exo concrete or astro concrete or something.

Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah, I don't. We didn't come up with a name
for it, but but our idea was that if you're
going to be making concrete by absorbing microwaves, microwaving the
lunar soil until melts. Some minerals are better at absorbing
microwaves than others, and so using magnetic fields, we can
sort the minerals out and improve the microwave absorption by

(38:47):
something like seventy percent, which results in a dramatic reduction
in the energy and a much greater efficiency. So that's
an example of beneficiation. Let me just mention the reason
we need beneficiation is because we're not going to be
able to go all over the moon and find these
native ore bodies of each mineral. Instead, we're going to
be scooping up the dirt off the ground, which is

(39:09):
a mixture of minerals, and so sorting the grains is
an early step. After that, then you have chemical processing,
and there has been some work on this. One of
the processes is called molten regular electrolysis. That's where you
melt the soil. They have an anode and a cathode,
and you run an electrical current through the molten well

(39:32):
basically lava, and that electric field breaks down some of
the minerals so that the oxygen is released, and then
the metals will sink to the bottom and you get
two melted materials. One is the oxides on the top,
which you can use to make ceramic, and the other
one are the pure metals. Now we call that a

(39:54):
mongrel alloy because it's going to be a mixture of iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium,
and even some silicon, and so it's an iron silicon
mongrel alloy. It's very heavy. It's weaker than steel, but
it's pretty good. You know, it's stronger than iron, and

(40:16):
so there's a very rudimentary building material. But if you
want to do better than that, now you need to
have metallurgy. You need to further refine the metals to
separate them from each other using the standard processes we
here on the Earth, but adapted for lower gravity. And
so it'll just be hardcore industrial engineering doing electrochemical processes

(40:38):
to break down the atoms and then separating the different
material streams into making feedstock, and then it's just standard industry.
After that, it's casting forging parts. You could do three
D printing, although the throughput may not be as high
on three D printing. Three D printing is very automatable,
so making parts. Then you have to have a set

(41:00):
robots they can put all the parts together. Typically we
envision these being humanoid robots so that they have they
have flexibility analogous to a human, but they needn't be humanoid.
They could be any kind of robots that can build things. Now,
one of the challenges we get into is that here
on Earth, our industrial supply chain includes something like twenty

(41:22):
thousand different types of screws, and you don't want to
have enough machines on the Moon to make twenty thousand
types of screws if you can get by with three
types of screws, and so we need to do a
lot of industrial ecology to figure out how to create
a self replicating or a closed ecosystem of machines using

(41:45):
fewer parts and fewer machines. So there's a gigantic field
of work that hasn't even started yet for industrial engineers, architects,
computer programmers, mathematicians. The math on writing an industrial economy
is really complex and fascinating math and has really fabulous

(42:07):
theoretical approaches, but it hasn't been applied far enough yet
to look at doing this on the Moon. So there's
a lot of work ahead.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
Still, would we need to get to the point where
we're making like computer chips for our humanoid robots in space?
Is that like how far we need to get before
they can replicate?

Speaker 2 (42:23):
Not at first, but I think eventually you will need that.
In the modeling that I've done, we assumed that you
would start making simple things like metal, and then you
would go through a series of generations of hardware to
and it's all a material science question. It's what material
can we make next, and then what material after that?

(42:45):
And the goal is to make an increasing fraction of
the parts for your industry. And during that interim time
you're continuing to bring things from the Earth, and then
the assembly robots are putting your parts together with the
ones that were brought from Earth, and over time you
wean yourself off of the earth made parts. Now, the
very last thing that we assumed is that you're making

(43:07):
computer chips or I've done some modeling for Mars where
humans would be on Mars, and so in that model,
the very last thing you would make would be the pharmaceuticals.
And it's a question of the mass of product divided
by the mass of capital. You want that ratio to
be sequenced. You want to make the industries that have

(43:28):
the highest ratio first, and then work your way down
through all the sectors of the economy and do the
ones that produce the least mass last, which would be
pharmaceuticals and computer chips.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
So the things that are the least mass you want
to do last, because so they're cheapest to bring from
Earth because they're low mass.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Exactly nice yep, but yet very expensive to stand up
those industries on the new planetary body.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
I mean even here on Earth, Like to make computer
chips is like one company that can make them, and
they rely on several single source manufacturers of like devices
and lenses and stuff like that. So we're talking about
replicating that entire supply chain in a robot that can
replicate that entire supply chain, It just it seems sort
of fantastical.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, So I think we should get away from the
idea of self replicating robots and talk about self replicating
industry or self replicating factories because it will be a
whole family of robots at these factories on this icy
moon around a Jupiter like object. Yeah, so trying to

(44:32):
do this in one robot, I just don't see that happening.
I mean, we have self replicating biology. We call it
self replicating, Like raccoons can make other raccoons, but they're
not independent. They are part of a biosphere and they
depend on other species.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
Are you suggesting we send raccoons to space to explore
the galaxy eventually?

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah, I would love to see that.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
I think I've seen that movie.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
Yeah, well, I mean Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, But
even self replicating biology is not really standalone. Maybe some
simple bacteria can go live off of rocks and self replicate,
but if you want to produce anything economically useful for civilization,
then I think it has to be EcoSpheres of robots

(45:19):
and EcoSpheres of factories.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
But you still have to have the initial thing which
lands for the first time on that planet and begins replicating.
I think I'm getting that you're saying, it's not just
a robot which makes other robots that look like it's
going to make like a foundry, and it's going to
make like helper robots that it's going to make the
whole industry. But you still need the thing which lands
and starts everything off, like the seed. As you were saying, earlier.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Right. One way you could think about it is you're
going to have to relive the entire industrial revolution that
we went through on Earth on this new planet. And
so you're going to have a box, and that box
is going to contain computers that know the whole process.
You know, it knows where it's going. But in the

(46:05):
first generation, it's not going to make everything. It's going
to have some supplies. Even a seed, you know, a
seed has food in the seed so that it can
live off of what it has stored until it can
make its own food. And so you're going to need
some supplies in that box to live off of until
it creates the ability to you know, to replicate everything.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
So we're going to have like a coal powered steampunk
era on every planet we land on.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
Yeah, I used to say something like that, and somebody
once pointed out that that's probably not how it's going
to happen, because maybe we'll invent nanotech, and maybe nanotech
can be smaller scale and support the self replication as
a smoother process. But you know, that's something we're just
speculating about at this point.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Well, do you know anything about this argument between Eric Drexler,
who wrote Engines of Creation, who is a big proponent
of nanotech. And Richard Smalley, the guy who won the
Nobel Prize for buckminster Fullerene, who argues essentially that you
can't have nanotech self replication because the pieces need to
be nanotech and they can't they just like force the

(47:14):
chemistry together. Have you followed that conversation, No, I have not. Well.
Smally essentially says you don't make a girl and a
boy fall in love by pushing them together. He's essentially
saying that, you know, you can't just manage chemistry by
squishing things together at a nanotech level. They had some
like two years of open letters where they were arguing
with each other about whether this is ever going to

(47:35):
be possible.

Speaker 4 (47:36):
But what you're not just smooshing them together, right like?
You know, you know, we know you can smoosh things
together and expect certain chemical reactions depending on what you're
smoohing together.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
I'm going to weigh in an argument I don't know
anything about.

Speaker 4 (47:47):
But it seems like like probably people had more complicated
opinions than just we're going to smoosh things together, right.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Well, I think this series of letters which people should
go out and check out is not an example of
good faith arguing as we often see online.

Speaker 3 (48:02):
So, yeah, got it?

Speaker 4 (48:04):
All right, Well, let's take a break and when we
get back we'll talk about energy sources and autonomy.

Speaker 3 (48:29):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 4 (48:30):
So we're talking about self replicating robots and all of
the steps that would go into making them, and I
feel like maybe we want to have an energy discussion
at two different scales here. Phil was talking about like
smelting and things that would require very high temperatures, and
so I'm wondering what would be the source of power
for that? And then I also, on a tinier scale,
want to know what would be our source of power

(48:52):
for the robots that are building everything.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
Yeah. So in the paper I wrote on this topic,
we assumed everything would be solar powered, and so the
question came down to can a self replicating set of
robots create solar panels that will create enough energy for
that process? In other words, does the metabolism close? And

(49:17):
there's a lot of hand waving in that paper. In fact,
I didn't expect the paper to get as much attention
as it did. In the opening of the paper, we said,
this is a preliminary study, which is just designed to
get more people interested so that then later we can
do a proper study. But everybody got real interested and
it took off, and we never did the proper study.

(49:37):
There's never been funding for it. So in our hand
waving arguments, we used the evidence we had available on
how much energy will it take to make metal? And
you know, a lot of handwaving. And then for a
safety factor, I said, well, let's assume that in every
generation we create thirty times more solar panels than we

(50:00):
think we're going to need in the next generation. So
I had a factor of thirty uncertainty. And even with
a factor of thirty uncertainty, the metabolism closed. So solar
alone should be enough to do it. But you will
be making a lot of solar panels. And we know
that you can make solar panels out of lunar soil.
They're already there are already two companies doing it. Blue

(50:21):
Origin has a technology for making solar panels out of
lunar soil. And there's another company called Mana Electric MAA
and A. They're in Europe and they also have technology
to do this, and they claim they can make solar
panels using something like ninety nine point eight percent lunar

(50:42):
soil and only zero point two percent brought from Earth.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Wow, Okay, so how are they doing that?

Speaker 4 (50:47):
So are they are they doing it from like they're
extracting the resources, they're manufacturing them in space. They're doing
all of that stuff just using like equipment that they
shift from Earth.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
So I haven't seen the details from either of the
to companies, but the press announcements tell us that they
have made solar panels out of simulated lunar soil. And
the way you do it is use a process like
molten regular electrolysis, or fluorine or sodium hydroxide, or you know,
some method to break apart the molecular bonds in these minerals.

(51:22):
So we're dealing with minerals like basalt and ilminite, and
a NORTHO site. You know types of rock and mineral
that are in the lunar soil, and we know the
composition of these minerals, so we know there's iron and aluminum,
and we know there's calcium. Typically you're gonna have a

(51:42):
hard time finding hydrogen on the Moon unless you go
to the polar regions. But I don't know if these
companies process requires hydrogen. Carbon is another one that's hard
to get On the Moon. We know there's some carbon
in the ice of the poles of the Moon, but
not much and it's only the poles. But maybe you
don't need carbon in these processes. So anyways, apparently they're

(52:05):
doing the chemical reactions, they're producing these materials, and they're
laying them down in a wafer so that you have
p N junctions so that they are electronic devices and
are photosensitive so that they can convert photons of energy
into voltage. And they claim that they've made it work.

Speaker 1 (52:25):
But why try to do solar power? I mean, if
you're landing on some random surface, you don't know how
far away that planet is from its star, how bright
that star is. Isn't nuclear power something that's going to
be more robust. We already know how to build those
things fairly miniaturized for stuff here on Earth. Why not
nuclear powered probes?

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Yeah, so for the actual self replicating probes, I think
Free just did talk about nuclear and that's part of
the reason why he wanted it at a gas giant planet,
so that you would have a lot of hydrogen and
you would have helium so that you can do fusion
for example. I don't remember if he was using fusion
or fission in his analysis, but yeah, that is the

(53:08):
goal to eventually have nuclear power so that you're not
bound to being too close to a star. It's a
crawl walk run type situation. So the technologies we're actually
developing right now are ones that we think will be
useful for NASA and useful for commercial companies in the
near term. And it'll be a while before you can
get your whole supply chain up to making nuclear reactors.

Speaker 4 (53:31):
All right, So let's imagine we've got we've got the
power figured out, we make we're replicating these robots we're
scaling up. Let's start talking about like the ethics and
some of the other bigger problems we might encounter. So,
first of all, how do you make sure you don't
get like bad copies? This is like humanities ambassadors that

(53:52):
we're sending out into the solar system. How do we
make sure that they remain good ambassadors.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
Yeah, that's a big problem. So I'm not actually working
on that problem because it's still pretty far down the road,
but it is something that we need to consider. We
need to have ethesis and philosophers thinking about these things,
and they're surprisingly there are people working on these problems.
One of the reasons that we're thinking about it is

(54:18):
because we're trying to detect is there already life in
the cosmos outside of Earth? And we're asking the question,
why don't we see radio signals coming from all the
other stars? You know, why is it not a star
wars galaxy? So this is the question of the Fermi
paradox or the great silence? Why is it so silent
out there? And there's a number of theories. One of

(54:40):
the theories is the dark forest hypothesis, where in game
theory you have to consider the possibility that there are
bad actors that if they discover your presence, they're going
to come and wipe you out because they know that
you might develop self replicating probes, and the probes you
develop could take over the galaxy and wipe them out.

(55:02):
And so in the game theory it becomes a part
of the puzzle like how does self replicating probes fit
into the dark forest hypothesis? Also, if self replicating probes
are possible, why are they not already here? Because we
think we can get there in you know, a few
hundred years or less. I honestly think that we could

(55:24):
get there by the end of the century or maybe
within one hundred years. And so I think there are
people alive today that can see this happening.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
That's my biggest question, right, Like, if this really is possible,
if we're close to it, then surely aliens have been
close to it. And if it doesn't take more than
fifty thousand or on hundred thousand years to explore the
whole galaxy with these probes, then why haven't we been visited?
So what's your personal answer to that? Film.

Speaker 2 (55:47):
Yeah, so there's I think there's three or four really
interesting hypotheses. One is the dark forest one. Another one
is that life is just incredibly improbable and so Earth
might be alone within the visible universe.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
And just to underscore that this is such a powerful
technology that it would allow any alien civilization in the
entire galaxy to visit us in a fairly small amount
of time. And we're talking one hundred thousand years or so,
So you're suggesting that the lack of visiting self replicating
probe suggests that we might be alone in the milky
and not just like rare, but like literally alone.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah, in terms of advanced intelligent life technological species. In fact,
it's worse than that. There was a paper done by
a philosopher at Oxford a few years ago. His name
is slipping my mind. It might have been Stuart Anderson,
where he showed that one civilization in another galaxy could

(56:46):
set up a linear accelerator and dismantle one planet the
size of Mercury, turning all that mass into self replicating probes.
And if they did that a billion years ago, then ever,
every single galaxy in the entire visible universe would already
have every single star colonized. And so it's not just

(57:07):
the galaxy, it's all the galaxies that are involved in
this question. Okay, So yeah, it's a great and very
important question. There's also the theory that civilizations always go
extinct and they don't get that far. I don't think
that's very plausible anymore, because we're already close to that point.
You know. That's the great filter hypothesis. The other hypothesis

(57:28):
is that it's the transcendence hypothesis, and I like this
one a lot. And the idea is that civilizations go
so intelligent that they actually figure out that self replicating
probes are dangerous, so then they don't set them loose,
and they don't really need the material of the rest

(57:52):
of the galaxy, and they're more interested in just watching
and seeing how other star systems develop rather than colonizing.
And so they're not our peers. They're far above us.
If that's possible, maybe that window of danger where you
unleash self replicating probes is a very narrow window, and

(58:14):
maybe they're watching out for that, you know, I mean,
if we're going to get contacted by aliens, I think
we're close to the point where it would happen, because
we're just about to transition to having superintelligence and self
replicating probes, and we're just about to become a danger
to our part of the cosmos.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
And you're trying to hasten that.

Speaker 7 (58:34):
We all know.

Speaker 4 (58:35):
I'm a what blanked, right, And so you said this
is your favorite hypothesis. That feels to me like you
wouldn't want to be working as self replicating probes. Then
what am I missing?

Speaker 1 (58:45):
He wants to get us to the place where we're
responsible with our self replicating probes. Is that the idea?

Speaker 2 (58:50):
Yeah, one of the problems I have in life is
I always try to take a very nuanced approach to everything,
and it's really hard to describe a nuanced position. And
so the nuance in this one is that I think
we need to have industry outside of planet Earth in
order to save the Earth. But there is a danger.
In fact, there's multiple dangers. So as we're going forward

(59:14):
towards this right future, we're going to have to solve
major ethical problems along the way, and so preventing runaway
destroyer probes from setting out from our planet destroying our
planet and then all the other ones, you know, that's
one of the one of the big concerns. There's other
concerns even before then, like if you've got self replicating

(59:35):
industry in space, whoever owns that industry is not going
to need to dilute their equity. They won't need any labor,
they won't need anybody's property on planet Earth. They can
just go out there and replicate, and within twenty years
they can have more industry than our entire planet. And therefore,
even if the whole planet pooled all of our resource together,

(59:57):
we would not be able to buy a signif figant
share of that industry. Even if the owner wanted to sell,
And so there's the potential for more wealth concentration once
we've removed labor from the equation, and once we've removed
the planetary scale limits from the resource equation, And so
that major sociological and ethical problem has to be solved,

(01:00:21):
and we only have about forty years to solve it
in my opinion, So yeah, there are major issues we
got to solve. But still, nonetheless, I think that we're
not going to be able to slow down industrial growth
on our planet. We're not going to be able to
slow down demand for intelligence because it's geopolitical, and if
we want to save our planet, we're going to have
to start developing these technologies off of the planet.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
So then the phil's optimistic view of the future is
that over the next few decades or centuries, we develop
these off planet resources as a way to salvage Earth
and stop putting such a great environmental burden on it
and to expand out to the rest of the Solar System.
But that once we develop self replicating industry, we are
wise about it and we don't release it out into

(01:01:05):
the universe to run like a crazy virus and take
over the rest of the universe and we're still here
because aliens have also been responsible with their technology.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
Well, either they don't exist, or yes, they became smart
along the way they underwent this crisis. This point of
crisis where your technology becomes truly dangerous, you know you
have AI that exceeds the sum of human capability, and
you know that at that level of danger, at that

(01:01:35):
crisis time, either you come through it or you don't.
I think inevitably we're going to get there. Honestly, I'm not.
I don't feel like I need to push for industry
to happen off the planet. I think it's going to
happen no matter what. And so what I'm trying to
push for is to democratize it so that people all
over the world are involved in the process and owners

(01:01:57):
developing equity as we go to try to improve the
odds that we will solve those societal problems.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Well, this conversation has given me a lot of things
to be optimistic about and a lot of things to
panic about.

Speaker 3 (01:02:09):
Tonight when I'm trying to fall asleep.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Yeah, I just hope that if there are aliens listening
to this podcast, that they take Phil's comments to Heart
and that they are wise and responsible with the use
of their self replicating technology.

Speaker 3 (01:02:22):
Thanks so much for being on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Phil, my pleasure, Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 (01:02:32):
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