December 28, 2023 • 57 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Templeton Award-winning author and theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser about his new book “The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity's Future.”
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name's
Robert Lamb. On today's episode, I chat with distinguished theoretical
physicist and a professor of natural philosophy, physics, and astronomy
at Dartmouth College, Marcello Gliser, the first Latin American recipient
of the Templeton Prize. His new book is The Dawn
of a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, out
(00:34):
now in all formats, and it's just a tremendous read
to kick off a new year with optimism and determination
about our relationship to the planet. So without further Ado,
let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Marcello, Welcome to
the show.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
My pleasure. Thanks Rob.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
The new book is The Dawn of a Mindful Universe,
out now in all formats. You stress that this is
not an doom book about the dire trajectory of human civilization.
You point out that, particularly with the existential crisis of
climate change, scare tactics don't seem to work. What is
it about humans that make us so resistant to change?
(01:14):
When confronted with problems like climate change?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
So I think what makes climate change different is that
you don't see the eminent danger in front of your face.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
It's not sort of like the Japanese just bald pearl harbor,
we got to mobilize and five back kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
You know. It's sort of like.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
This slow, slowly encroaching thing, and we tend to not
push back whenever we don't feel this kind of oh
my god, you know, the world is about to end
kind of thing. And so there is a disconnect between
what people keep saying, Look, global warming, it's real, it's happening.
(01:53):
You know, it's affecting all of us. For example, I
live in northern New England.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
And it's late December here and there is no snow
right then.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
There should be two feet of snow out there, and
it's like, oh, it's al Nino. It's normal. It's not
really normal.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
This is the hottest year ever recorded apparently in the planet.
So I'm talking about twenty twenty three. And so that
means that I think the problem, the challenge that people
have is convincing people of two things. First of all,
that yes, it's not happening right now, but it's happening slowly,
(02:32):
and when it starts unfolding, it's going to just get
worse and more challenging.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So it's like the slow approach to the danger.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
And the other one is that most people say that,
you know, I'm just one person.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
What am I going to do?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
You know, if I stop eating meat right now, it's
not going to make a difference, And if I buy
an electric car, it's not going to make a difference,
because I'm just a little little person in this giant
eight billion people world controlled by corporations and governments. So
my actions are useless.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
And the point is that that is only true to
a certain degree, because what you do is a statement
of who you are and why you believe in right,
and the way you position yourself in the world.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Really is a mirror of your attitudes and your value system.
And so if you are a person that is bothered
by global arming, by the fact that the big oil
companies are polluting the world because we need the fuel
and that's the only way mostly that we can use it,
you can do something about it, not so much to
(03:39):
stop global arming by yourself, but to make a statement.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
And I am an optimist. That's why when you talk
about doom.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
You know, like, I'm an optimist and I think that
the alternative, you know, to be a pessimist is a
total disaster, right, because you know, I grew up in Brazil,
and as you know, Brazil, we love soccer, and so
I'm using a soccer metaphor, which is this, right, So
if you are pessimists, you're the kind of guy that
is going to go to a game and even before
(04:08):
the ball is kicked for the first time, you sit
down on the ground and say, oh, there's no way
I can win this game.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I'm giving up, you know. And what kind of game
is that? Right? What kind of life is that? So
you have to try to.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
Make a difference and make a statement because you will
influence people around you. And I think that I'm a
believer in the chain reaction of social forces, and so
that as more and more people engage with this way
of thinking about preservation sustainability, the more difference you know,
we are going to feel in a society as a whole.
(04:43):
It's a big, big challenge, but I think it's possible.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
In the book, you propose a transformation of the collective mindset,
particularly the adoption of a post Copernican worldview. Can can
you walk us through this beginning with just a reminder
of who Nicholas Copernicus was and how he helped transform
an established worldview.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Absolutely, So this is a very long story. This is
sort of the core kind of aspect of the whole book.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
And the idea is this that even before Copernicus's starting,
really from the beginning, if you think about our species, right,
so we are Homo sapiens, and we've been here on
this planet for about three hundred thousand years. Just give
perspective to people, if you look at the history of
the world, right, the planet Earth, Right, planet Earth has
(05:31):
been around for four and a half billion years. So
if you take three hundred thousand of four and a
half billion years, you're talking. And if you take four
and a half billionaires and compress it into twenty four
hours in one day, right, we basically arrived a few
seconds before midnight. So we are the newcomers on the planet, right,
(05:52):
that's for sure. But on the other hand, we have
changed the planet dramatically. And it's not three hundred thousand
years of Homo SAPIs that did it is about ten
thousand years of agrarian and industrial civilization. That they did
it so in about ten thousand years, which changed everything.
So if we look at our history sort of like
in what we call deep time, right, so we start
(06:14):
from the beginning. For most of the time that we
existed in this planet, we were organized socially.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
In a completely different way. Were what we call hunter gatherers, right,
So people organize themselves into small bands.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
They all helped one another. The idea that we're savage
caveman is kind of silly and it's old fashioned. You know,
all the anthropology studies now mentioned that actually those bands
of hunter gatherers they'd stuck together, but they also collaborated, interbred,
you know, with.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Each other, and they had a relationship to the planet.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
And this is the essential point, which is very very
different from the one we have now. And nowadays, the
only cultures that still relate to the planet.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
In a similar way other indigenous cultures. And what do
they say. They say the planet is sacred, right, that the.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Mountains, the rivers, the forests, the animals, everyone is interconnected
in a very fundamental way. And you have to respect
this chain of being because if you don't, you're going
to pay a very high price. So there was this
notion of everything had an enchanted kind of reality about it.
(07:28):
There were spirits everywhere. The ancestors were there too, and
there was really no separation between the reality that we
see with our eyes right now and this kind of
fantastic other world of spirits and forces beyond their control.
So there was a way of dealing with the planet
which was in a sense deeply respectful.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
So with a grand civilization, many wonderful things happened. For example,
we started to plant and we could feed more people,
and of course of that, the population started to grow,
and we started to condense more and more into small
areas which became city states.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
And you know, life expectancy didn't grow much for that
because once we start putting a lot of people together,
there all sorts of issues like sewage and diseases. And
so for most of the history of our species, the
life expectancy was between thirty and forty years old. This
is including Victoria and England in nineteenth century. We never
(08:33):
lived very long.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
But the point back to your question is that what
changed with their ground civilization was the notion that now
we can control the planet, we can control nature. Look,
we are planting, we are making things grow, we can
domesticate animals, and more and more.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
We felt like we are the owners of the place.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Right, And it is no coincidence when you look look
at monotoistic religions which came at about the same time,
you know, Judaism and then Christianity, they all talk about
us as being above the world. You know, God created
the land to serve you. You take ownership of the animals,
et cetera. That's in Genesis in the Bible. Right to say,
(09:18):
all right, this is our place, this is our world.
We control it, and we are above nature. And this notion,
you know, that we are above nature kind of pervaded
all of what happened in the last two thousand years
that we are going to be creating technologies that we
can't use to basically protect us from the forces of
(09:43):
the world. Right, So we build our homes, we warm
them up, we create clothes, they are warm, we eat
and cook our food, etc.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So we tried to really control the forces of nature.
But then comes a storm.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
There comes about panic eruption, or an earthquake or a
tidal wave. And to teachers that you know what folks
is not that simple, right. We are not really above nature.
We are really very much part of the natural world, right.
But we kept on going and became very successful developing technologies.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
And this is our story, right. We are a species
that tells stories about who we are and the place
we have been. Now back to Copernicus. So Copernicus showed
up in the early fifteen hundreds, and in fifteen forty
three he wrote a book.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
He published the book which is sort of like the
big book of his life, okay, And the book was
called on the Revolution of.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
The Celestial Spheres. And what the story was with that
book is that up to his time, everyone believed that
the Earth was the center of the universe.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
That there was the Earth in the middle, and then
you had the moon and had Mercury and Venus around it,
and the Sun and all the other planets up to Saturn,
because that's all.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
They could see. In the fifteen hundreds, everything revolved around us,
and so the Earth was the center of everything.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
And of course we, according to religion, were created in
the image of God. So we were like, you know,
even though we were being kicked out of paradise, we
were sort of the God emissaries in this planet, right,
and so we had this value system where we were
the best, right, our planet was the center. When Copernicus
(11:34):
comes in, he basically changes this story and he says, sorry, folks,
it turns out that from what we can say from astronomy.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
That is not the story. The story is that the
Sun really is the center of our solar system, and
the Earth is just a planet, just like Mercury and
Venus and Jupiter, which means that it just goes around
the Sun.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
And at that point something very profound happens, because if
Earth is just a planet like any other planet, it
does not have the value that people believed it had.
So all of the philosophy and the cosmology, you know,
the way we thought about the universe at the time
was based on the Aristotelian So Aristotle, this Greek philosopher
(12:22):
about three hundred years BCE, built a whole system, a
whole worldview, you know, based on the fact that the
Earth is the center.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Everything falls to it.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Everything changes here by the heavens, the planets, and the
moon and the stars are all eternal and changing. So
the Earth was the place whereas everything was changing, the
skies were eternal.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
There was some hierarchy. There was vertico, you know, from
the center of the earth changing all the way up
to the sky. And the Catholic Church bought that and said,
that is exactly how the world should be if God
created it. And God is not on earth anymore like
(13:05):
he was for our ancestors. God is way up there
in the skies. And it's a very abstract idea, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
The more the idea of the monotheistic God advanced in time,
the more remote God became. You know, in the Old
Testament it was around a lot, you know, it was
like burning bush with Moses and doing all sorts.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Of other things.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
And then in the Christian times, you know, it became
sort of like this idea in the skies.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
It sent a sun, you know. But and so the point.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
Is that as religion left the planet, the planet became
an object, became not sacred anymore, a place where you
could exploit as you wanted. And that attached to the
notion from astronomy from Copernicas, Hey, the Earth is just
a planet. Meant that the combination of the science of
(14:00):
the time and this religion of the time meant that, yes,
you can do to the planet whatever we want. It's
just another world. It's not that important. If there is
life here, there will be life and other planets too.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So it's really cool.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Actually, if you look at the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds,
all these guys, like very famous scientists were speculating about
life and another world, like, you know, like is it
going to be just like here or not? And if
it's just like humans, would they be sinners? And if
there is a sinner there, well you need another Jesus,
you know, And are there many Jesuses and.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
All these different planets to save people. It was like
this wild conversation about this other life. And the end
result of this, right as the centuries advanced, is that
the Earth was objectified and became a place where you
could do as we wanted to. And so that's the
impact of the Copernican idea, which was not really his.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
I mean, all he said is that, look, the Earth
is planet, but the whole everything else that followed, and
this has been the narrative of modern astronomy and cosmology,
which is what I do for a living, you know,
as a researcher, which is essentially this and you must
have heard this before. It's like, man, these are scientists
keep telling us that the more we know about the universe,
(15:21):
the less important we become. You know, if the Earth
is just a.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Planet, and then the Sun was the center of everything.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
But then, sorry, folks, know, the Sun is just a
star and this star they are in this galaxy in
the Milky Way where we live, there are about two
hundred billion stars, you know, and the Sun, the kind
of star that the Sun belongs to, which is it's
called g star, is only about three percent.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Of all the stars.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
And then the galaxy that we thought until one hundred
years ago, everybody thought the Milky Way was the only
galaxy in the universe. And then this American astronomer called
Hubbo said, nope, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies
out there, and these galaxies, furthermore, are moving away from
one another. The universe is expanding, and so like, we're
(16:09):
really becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, right, And then
to top it.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
All, in the last forty years or so, we discovered.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
That the matter that we are made of, the atoms
in your body are just about five percent.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Of the stuff that fills up the universe.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
So all the stars and the planets and the gas
clouds and the people.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
All this stuff is only about five percent of what's
out there. So now even the stuff we are made
of is important, right, and then to finish the whole thing, right,
to less nail on the coffin. In the last twenty
years or so, even our universe may not be the
only universe. That may be part of what's called a multiverse,
(16:53):
which is like a bubbling soup of.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Different universes, and each universe has a different set of
proper And so the narrative that I'm trying to build
here is that we went from a species that thought
of this world as their mother, as the sole responsible
for our existence, to a species where the development of
(17:17):
industrial technologies and this way of looking at the universe
as this very very big place, which is all true scientifically,
you know, took the value of our planet and objectified it,
and it created this mindset where we don't have to
worry about the world. That's the story, you know, that
(17:38):
comes into this book. And then the point is, okay,
now that story needs.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
To change because if we keep telling this story to ourselves,
we are not going to be here telling the story
for much longer. So The question is how can we
build a different argument to explain who we are now?
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Some might, you know, criticize this notion as something radical
that could never captivate the mainstream, but you rightfully point
out that the major shifts in worldview and cultural narrative
occur throughout human history. So it's it's not an unreasonable hope.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Right, I hope not. You know.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
For example, the shift to Copernicanism, the shift from an
Earth centered cosmos to a Sun centered cosmos was like
profoundly changing, right. I mean, there was the whole issue
with Galileo and the Inquisition because he was, you know,
about one hundred years not quiet eighty years after Copernicus.
He was saying, folks, Copernicus is right, you know, and
(18:34):
if you keep insisting that the Earth is the center,
you're going to embarrass yourselves, you know. And only in
the nineteen eighties the Church forgave Galileo.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
You know.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
And so changes of mindset they do happen, right when
there's enough evidence for them to happen, either moved by
fear or moved by scientific evidence. You don't have to believe,
because science is exactly what tells you you don't need
to believe in this. You need to look at the data,
(19:04):
interpret it properly, and understand what's going on. Right, So
where does the fun new story comes in?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Right?
Speaker 4 (19:12):
The story that comes in is that you can rescue
this notion of belonging to the natural world that ancient
cultures have had for a long time and couch it
in a scientific narrative. And that's what I tried to
do in this book.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
Right, And how do you do that? Well? First of all,
there is the story that everybody knows already that we
are made of star dost right, you know. So you have.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Johnny Mitchell and you have Carl Sagan, all of us
saying these things, and people have to internalize that this
is really true.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
And I love to talk about this because it is
so beautiful. You know, it's kind of at the same
time lyrical and scientifically accurate.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
That you know, the iron in.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Your blood, and the calcium in your bones, and the
carbon in your cells, all of these chemical elements, they
all came from stars that blew up over five billion
years ago. So if you stop to think about this,
for instance, so what you know, so because the stars
are what are the great alchemists. So what a star
(20:18):
does essentially is that it grabs hydrogen. A star is
a giant ball of flaming hydrogen. Hydrogen, you guys don't remember,
is the simplest chemical element that exists in nature. It
has one proton and one electron in the one proton
in the nucleus and one electron moving about it. So
that is the simplest thing that exists chemically speaking. And
(20:42):
what a star does it grabs hydrogen, pushes it together,
compresses it really hard, and this compression transforms hydrogen in
all the other chemical elements that exists.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
That's called nuclear fusion.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
So a star is essentially a giant nu clear fusion
device that transforms hydrogen into helium, carbon, oxygen all the
way to iron. And then when it gets to iron,
big stars tend to explode in what we call super
and over explosions, and when that happens, the heavy elements
all the way to uranium.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Are forged in different ways.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
So and then when the stars explode, they spell all
that stuff out into interstellar space, and all these gas
clouds filled with all these chemical elements travel around hit
all the floating clouds of hydrogen sprinkle them with the
heavy chemical elements. And when this star is born and
(21:41):
the planets are born, they carry with them all the
chemistry that will become part of life. So that's who
we are, you know. So the star do story is
really true. So that's connecting us to the history of
the universe as a whole, right, So we connect ourselves
(22:02):
to billions and billions of years of cosmic history.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
So that's one point.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
There's this Buddhist monk that I like a lot called
ticknot Hunt, who talked about this thing called interveing.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
The notion of intervening is really cool, he says. You know,
pick up a book and read a poem, and you
look at that page in that book and you say, wow,
this page is made of paper. So that means that
as I'm reading this book and I'm looking at this
page of paper, there is a cloud that made this
paper possible, you know, because this paper is made of wood.
(22:37):
Wood is tree.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Tree needs water. Water comes from rain, rain comes some clouds,
and the planet made that happen. But it only made
that happen because there is a sun giving it energy
to make it happen and to drive its climate. And
so you're already connected to the Sun, so when you're
reading a page of a book, you're really already.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Connected to this.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
But the Son, of course, is a star that belongs
to a galaxy that belongs to the universe. So in
this page of paper that you're reading, you have the
whole history of the universe, and that's the notion of intervening.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
So this vision that this guy had.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
It really is completely supported by scientific research.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
So that's all good. Now comes the second part.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
That's where it becomes a little provocative from my end,
which is this, In the last fifteen or twenty years,
this new branch of astronomy called astrobiology came out, and
what is astrobiology. Astrobiology is essentially the study of life
in the universe. Right, So now it's kind of awesome.
(23:44):
You can actually get grants from NASA and National Science
Foundation to study aliens or the possibility of alien life
in the universe. You know, twenty years ago that was
not possible at all. And what we have been doing
with the Hubble Space Telescope and now the James we
have space Telescope, which is this spectacular machine that allows
(24:04):
us to look at planets going around other stars, to
search for chemical elements, look at these chemical elements in
their atmospheres to see if the atmosphere stell is about
life in that world or not. So, to make this
a little more concrete, if a native astronomer looked at
(24:25):
Earth from far away, from like ten light years away,
you would say, oh, look at that blue planet over there.
It has a very thick atmosphere. It has water, it
has carbon dioxide, it has methane, it has ozone. That
planet is alive just because of the combinations of possible
(24:46):
chemicals in their atmosphere. So to find life elsewhere, you
don't really need to take a spaceship and go interstellar,
which would.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Be awesome, but it's not possible yet. But you can
look those planets thirty their atmospherees S thirty the chemical
composition of the atmosphere, and say, yep, it really indicates
the presence of biological activity there.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
So we're doing that now, and we have found so
far over five thousand, five hundred exoplanets we call them,
that is, planets rotating orbiting around other stars far away,
and we have been able to study the atmospheres of
a small amount of them. But we have also found
(25:30):
what kind of planet is that? Is it like an
Earth like rocky solid guy, or is it more like Jupiter,
which is this big, giant, buffy ball of gas. And
what we have found out is that the vast majority
of worlds I have nothing to do with Earth, a
much more like Jupiter on neptunes of big gas planets.
(25:54):
Only about three percent of the planets that we have
found so far have a similar look to Earth. But
of those, very few of them orbit a star like
the Sun. Some of them orbit stars which are much colder.
Most of them, in fact, orbit stars which are much colder.
(26:14):
And so as you start looking at this in more detail,
you realize that even from an astronomical perspective, even though
there are trillions, and I'm not joking, trillion is one,
trillion is a one with twelve zeros, there are trillions
of planets in our galaxy alone, okay, but very few
(26:36):
are going to be similar to this planet.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
So what we're beginning to learn is that despite you
have this gigantic diversity of worlds out there which is
really spectacular, and they are all magically amazing, right, I mean,
you have moons in our Solar system, not just the planets.
You have the moons too, like Enceladus and Europa, which
is this moon of Jupiter that has a crust, and
(27:01):
the underneath the ice crust there's a nocean of salt
water that carries four times more water than all the
oceans of our planet together. So like damn.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
You know, if there is that, then maybe hey, salt water, right,
that may be life there, So there'll be there are
planned missions that will go there, hopefully at some point
land drill a hole, try to get some of the
water to analyze if there are any little create creatures
out there. But even if there are, they're not going
(27:33):
to be as complex as life here. See, the thing
about Earth is not that it's just a living planet
as a whole, but it's a living planet with very
complex life, and that makes all the difference. So Avatar,
you know, that's that that movie was made for a
very good reason, you know, which is there will be
(27:54):
very few planets like was similar to there will let
me be the more more bombastic here I do this.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
There will never be another Earth in the whole of
the universe.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
You can have planets similar to Earth maybe, and even
if they have life, life on those planets, even if
it's kind of like our life, like carbon based water bays,
that life is going to be completely different from life here,
which means which I think is really cool, and it's
(28:24):
part of the fundamental soul of the book that we
are the only humans in the universe. There will be
no other humans. There could be other humanoid like things.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
With like a left right symmetry like you have, you know,
left right eye and stuff, but there will be no
other human species in the whole of the universe. And
that puts us back in the center of the universe,
but in a completely different way from before Copernicus, because
now we become the species that is self aware and
(29:01):
is able to tell its own story.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
And the biggest story that we tell is the story
of how we belong to the universe as a whole.
So we are in a sense, telling the story of
the universe. We are the voice and the mind of
the universe telling its own story.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
And so is this this basic idea, this this idea
of the Earth is this precious gem and it being
vitally connected with us. This gets into this idea of
the secular sacredness of the planet.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Correct exactly so in this so I propose this thing
called biocentrism, which is not a word I invented. Other
people have used it, but I used it in a
somewhat different context. I think the context that I use
is similar to the people.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
That we're doing this logical theology.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
I guess in the seventies and eighties, you know, they said,
you know, religion abandoned the world, then we need to
go back to that. And what I'm saying is that, yes,
religion abandoned the world, so did science, because you know,
science also sort of like took the world as a
big laboratory without really respecting it for what it is.
(30:23):
And now we have this new science coming out and
we can bring this notion of what I would call
a secular spirituality, the idea that you can relate to
the world. It doesn't matter if you believe in God
or not. This has nothing to do directly with God.
If you do, that's great, bring God back to the planet.
But if you don't, you can relate to the awesomeness
(30:46):
of being part of this deep connection to the history
of the universe in this planet that allows us to
be able to tell this story.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Right. It's not just that we exist here.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
But this planet has had even though it has had
wild climate changes, you know, there was this planet has
been an ice ball completely. It has been a tropical forest.
You know, it has gone through all these different phases
in these four billion years of existence, but it always
allowed a certain amount of stability in the climate for
(31:24):
life to persist. Right, And life has been around here.
So I told you that the planet's fare and a
half billion years old. Life has been around for three
and a half billion years in here, and it became
incredibly complex. And once you start to look at nature
with these eyes, you know, with the eyes of awesomeness, like,
(31:45):
be grateful for what you have, because this is a jam.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Look at look what happens to us when we try
to get out of the atmosphere. Right, the universe is
profoundly hostile to life. When I read things like life physubiquitous.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
In the universe, that the universe is filled with life,
and like, I find that almost offensive because first of all,
we have zero evidence of that. Okay, so there's zero
evidence that we have been certainly visited by aliens. Right,
there's another whole conversation. And I have lots of friends
writing books about that, but more than that, we have
(32:25):
zero evidence that there is life in other places, which
doesn't mean there isn't. See, this is where you have
to be very careful with scientific statements. We cannot prove
that there is no life in an other world. That's impossible.
I'll tell you why. It's because we simply cannot go
and visit every other world in the universe to find
out if there is life there or not. So we
(32:47):
may say life is rare, or life in our bubble
like cosmic bubble like within a big distance from our
planet here is rare, but we cannot.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Rule it out.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
But what we can rule it out, as I said before,
is that definitely there will be no other.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Human species in the universe, and even.
Speaker 4 (33:07):
If there would be, they'll be so far away and
so remote that for all.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
Purposes, all practical purposes, we really are alone telling our
own story of what's going on. Now.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
You talk about this a little bit in the book.
I was wondering if you might feel this question. Do
you believe that various sci fi, futurists and transhumanist ideas
such as the digitization of consciousness and even things like
interplanetary colonization no matter how far fetch some of the
concepts may be, or you know, just outside of immediate grasp.
(33:42):
Have they played a negative role in moving sort of
the public imagination away from more life centric and earth
centric worldviews.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
I think absolutely yes, because you know, just it's a
matter of focus, right, you say, look, we are going
to mess this planet up, and we're just going to
move somewhere else, so it doesn't matter, you know, let's
just keep doing it. Let's just keeping it up, and
we're just basically eating its entrails, right, that's what fossil fuels,
(34:10):
they come from underground, right, So we're sort of feeding
from the entrails of the planet to sustain this big
civilization on the surface. And hey, if there are other
worlds out there for us to colonize, just like we
did here. So this whole notion of colonizing other planets
(34:30):
is a repetition of what we have.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Done to this planet if you think about this, right,
I mean, what happened.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Here is that there were native populations around the planet.
But then you had the Europeans that had the technology
to explore and go across vast distances and in the oceans,
and that's what they did, and they moved on to
these other places. And what did they do? They plundered, right,
(34:57):
I mean I grew up in Brazil. Brazil was colony
of Portugal that in the fifteen hundreds was the most
powerful country or you know, kingdom in that case in
the world. And they you know, you look at all
the gold in the churches in Europe and cathedrals, where
did that come from?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Well a lot of it came from South America? Right,
And so are we going to just repeat that model
as we move on? So let's go to the moon,
and let's go mind the moon, and then we make
a base on the Moon, and then we colonize, so
we tear a four Mars, which basically means we make
Mars into our earth thing, which is completely ridiculous. It
(35:36):
just doesn't work and it will not work.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
You can make an igloo like life, a biosphere kind
of thing in another world and recreate the earth conditions
in that world locally, but at.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
A global level that is so far away, as you said,
so far Thatch, that it is at this point, given
the problems we have in this planet right now, we
should be focusing everything.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
That we've got here and not and can I go
to Mars and you know, colonize Mars or whatever. So
that's the planetary aspect of things.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
And then the other one the transhumanist idea that we
can and I write a lot about that, not in
this book so much, but in other places, that we.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Can't actually.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
Create some sort of scientific based immortality.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Right, is a.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Very very old idea, right, I mean, at least you
can go back to Frankenstein. So you know eighteen nineteen
where Mary Shelley she used the cutting edge science of
her time, which was look, electricity can make muscles twitch. Right,
that was like Galvani, you know, Volta had discovered this
(36:57):
stuff in Italy and people are like amaze by this, right,
They're like wow. So basically the secret of motion is
electricity growing through your nerves and your muscles. So that
means that if you could recreate a dead person and
pass electricity to that person, science would conquer death.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
Transhumanism is exactly the same notion, but now using our cutting.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Edge technology, which is digital technology.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
So the sense the essence being if we could capture
the essence of who you are, right, so essentially look
into your brain and somehow can download your memories and
the circuitry in your brain, and you can recreate all
of that complexity in a it's.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Called the connectome. You know, how all the synapses of
your neurons connect to one another. It's like a map, right,
so this would be the map to yourself, right, and
each one of us.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Even though we have brains which are very similar, they're
also very different because I'm not Rob, and Rob it's
not me. Even though we share so much of what
we are, right, there is a difference there. So the
idea is if you could capture the assence and create
a giant simulation, then that simulation will be you.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Or an approximation of you. And I find that very
disturbing and also very kind of like, uh, far fetched
is not even a word for this, because we have
zero idea of what it means to capture ourselves, you know,
the essence of who we are from a digital perspective
(38:45):
or any kind of perspective, because we don't know what
consciousness is of how it works. But as you said,
the way you phrase the question, which is very clever,
it is like those things, even though they are very
far fetched, can they be taking us away from our task?
Right now, which is to really celebrate the life that we.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Have and the planet that gives us the possibility of
having this life, as opposed to spending so much energy
and fantasy and money and resources in dreaming up a
future which is not going to help us in the
next few decades, which is when we really need the help.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
And the answer is absolutely that's why we should be focusing.
And the hope of this book is to help people
maybe refocus a little bit on the beauty and the
tremendous miracle in a sense that life in this planet
really is and.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
What a place that we have, that we should be
thinking about it very differently than we are.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Now. Part of the hopefulness of the book is that
it's not just big ideas. You also discuss concrete steps
that individuals and society can take. So what can we do,
what can link listeners to the show do to help
adopt these principles and drive positive change as individuals?
Speaker 4 (40:11):
Right So, so the subtitle of the book is a
Manifesto for Humanity's future. Right So, manifest is kind of
like a little bit of a pretentious thing to say.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
There are lots of people writing manifesto about this or that.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
But so what I did is I went back to
something I read but I was a teenager, which was
a communist manifesto about Marx and angels, you know, said
to say, Okay, what the heck is a manifester and
how do you write one?
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Right? And so basically the manifesto has two parts.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Right, he has this is the argument of why the
world needs to change, Right, So you bring that argument
forward and you say, look, in their case was about
capitalism and the bourgeoisie and we need to you know,
save the workers, et cetera. So that was their story.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Our story is we are making a planet sick, and
we can be healthy as humans in a sick planet.
So we have to change the way we relate to
the planet. It's that simple, right. I Mean, it's a little.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
More sophisticated that in the book, but the bare bones
is this, you know, a sick planet cannot support a
healthy life or any kind of life, human or otherwise.
So then the second part of the manifesto is, okay,
what do you do about this?
Speaker 3 (41:22):
What are the action items? Right? And in their case
was you know, workers of the world unite and you know,
let's throw out the kings and all that, and that's
what happened with Itzar in Russia.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
But in our case is about what can we do
as individuals and as a society in order to actually
start really making a difference, right, And I suggest several
different things. Okay, So at the individual level, and not
just at individual I also at the corporate level. Is
(41:56):
the notion of I call it the doctrine of less what. Well,
you don't need to become vegan overnight, because you know
that doesn't work. But if you cut your meat consumption
in half, if everybody cut the meat consumption in half,
a fifty percent solution, you will make a tremendous impact
(42:20):
on the amount of not just the methane and the
carbon dioxide, but the water pollution and soil pollution, the
cattle grazing and cutting the forest to have area for
the cattle to graze would make Okay.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
So the notion that it is possible to make personal choices,
that's the real challenge. There are personal choices that you can.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Make that may not be ideal for you, that may
involve a certain level of self sacrifice that will impact people.
And some people are man, I don't care, you know,
I don't want to do that.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Well, if we don't care, we're going to be a price.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Like if we didn't care about the Japanese invasion of
the Nazis in Europe, we would have lost Second World
War and the world will have been a very very
different place right now.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
So we care, and when we care, we.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Make change happens. Right The Manhattan Project is a great
example that. You know, if people watched Openheimer, they know
what I'm talking about. That was an incredibly difficult technical challenge,
very expensive. But you put a bunch of great minds
together and give them the resources, and we can solve
problems to a certain point.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I'm going to get to that in a second.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
So less meat, less energy, less water, less garbage. These
are the four lessons that we can all work on together.
Shorter showers, more coposting, et cetera. So all these things
can be done. And then there is the doctrine of
the more more, what more? Engaging with the natural world.
(43:56):
What does that mean? It means go out look at
nature once now, I look up at the sky. If
you live in the city, find a darker corner, go
to a park, look at the park, pay attention to
what's going on.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Walk by the.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Ocean front, you know, engage with the natural world, because,
as I was saying earlier, you know, for most of
our existence, we were beings in the natural world.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
That's what we vote for. That's why we.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Sweat and we run distances. You know, I'm a long
distance runner. I love that and because that connects me
with really the essence of what.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
We have volved here.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
For we were like hunting antelopes and gazelles, you know,
two hundred thousand years ago, and we got them even
though they're much faster than we are, because we could
do this for a long time. So we have all
those senses of very good vision, very good resistance, and
ways of moving which are designed to be in the world.
(44:57):
But what we have done since Sagra Sation is we
created cities which are the anti nature.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Think about that, right. A city is a ball of
concrete surrounded by nature on all sides.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
And the idea is that we can engage with nature
much more. And once we do that, you feel better
about yourself. Even if it's just a walk in the park.
You know, people have been talking about forest bathing and
all these things. Just walk and look at the trees,
you know, and the clouds in the sky and stuff
like that. He has measured physiological benefits. You know, lots
(45:35):
of studies, a few of them at Stanford have already
demonstrated that we feel.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Better when we engage with the world.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
So that's the more connection to the world, more respect
for animal life, right, because that story I was telling
in the beginning where I said, we have basically deemed
ourselves the owners of the planets, and we can do
too everything like we can kill them, we can eat them,
or we can have them as pats, which is you know,
(46:06):
think of this this. It's kind of uncomfortable to say this,
but I'm going to say it because why not look
at the cognitive dissonance here. We love our pats, We
love our dogs and our cats and our bunny rabbits
or even our fish, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
But then we go out and we eat a calf.
How does that work exactly? And you go visit the
farm and you go, oh, look, how cute, you know,
like when you have little kids.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
You go and you go look at the beautiful cow,
and then we go eat them.
Speaker 3 (46:39):
So what is going on here? You know? And you
love your dog like yourself, like the.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
Dog dies or like in the deep depression, it's just
an animal.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
I love my dog deeply. It's just the best dog
in the world. But so, what is going on here?
How do we get to be that way? You know? So,
and that's an uncalled conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
You know, they're like, look, there's a story that can
be told from the farm to the junk of meeting
a supermarket, but it's so far removed that we just
go to the market and we buy that, and we
we just you know, we don't care.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
But we should be caring more. That's the point. You know.
It's because we didn't care for thousands of years that
we are.
Speaker 4 (47:21):
In a difficult situation now. So it's a hard conversation
to have. But the more engagement of the natural world
is essential. And the other thing I suggest is two
more things, just because you know, the Eyasa could talk
for too long.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
One is the notion of education.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Every school, at any level, from elementary school to pach
d level, should tell the story of who we are
in the universe. This whole conversation that we had about
where we come from from stars, how we evolved in
this planet, how connected we are to all forms of.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
Life and to this world in particular. This is a
story that should be told at all levels, you know,
and we hardly have a talk about this, and that's
why we don't know who we are. That's why we
think we are the owners of the place, because we
forgot to tell this story, which is.
Speaker 4 (48:18):
The most important story. And finally, as a consumer, you
have choices too, you know. If you think that that
certain corporation does not align with your ethical values about
the environment and about how they treat animals, don't buy
from that business. Buy from another business. And that has
more power and more pressure than any think. Consumers have
(48:41):
power when they unite and boycott a certain company because
they don't align with their values, you know. And so
there's this Being an optimist, I have to say, there
is this thing called bi corporations now, which are corporations
that have an ethos, have a way of dealing with
the world which is much more alignment sustainability and circular economics, etc.
(49:04):
And so this is happening already, and I have tremendous
fate that all this work is going to kind of
crystallize into a different way of thinking about who we
are in the next decade or so.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
And you also point out that there's a responsibility for
the scientific community as well.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
Correct, there is because and that's the hard one because
as a scientist, I know how my peers think, and
the scientific community should be telling the story I believe
as it is, which is not like, oh, there are
lots of Earth like you know, you know, people talk
(49:42):
about other earths out there. Now there are no other
earths out there. There may be Earth analogus, but there's
only one Earth. So it's just a way of telling
the story. As you know, the way you tell a
story makes a huge difference. You could be telling the
same story and completely change the meaning of that story.
And so I think we should be very careful about
(50:05):
telling the story of our planet and our species in
this planet in a much more environmentally aware way. And
with this notion, and you know, when you use the
word sacred, you know most scientists scringe, right because they
associated that with other kinds of sacred. No, but I'm
(50:25):
talking about the sacredness of life that that perhaps is
the most fundamental universal moral value, which is life is
sacred right and our life of another human, but other
life forms do.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
And so if you relate to that in a more
concrete way, not just as you're just saying that. As
a scientist, you have a role to play.
Speaker 4 (50:48):
You are a role model for this way of thinking
about the world because you are the one bringing all
this information to the public. Right, so the people that
are writing books about science should be thinking a little
more carefully about what are they saying of the power
of science, and science, for example, solve all the problems.
I probably always going to go back to that, and
(51:09):
I can go back to that right now, and the
answer is absolutely not. You know, science not all problems
have a scientific solution. You know, some problems have a
complicated solution that also uses science, but it uses philosophy.
He uses anthropology to anthropological ways of thinking about who
we are in a culture, and native ways of thinking
(51:33):
about who we are and how we relate to certain values.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
So I would believe that now we are.
Speaker 4 (51:39):
At this point where the science that we are using
to describe the planet, you know, it's called systems science,
is telling us a story that we have to bring
together different ways of knowing in order to tell people
what really matters in this world. Not just we are
(52:00):
going to sequest the carbon with our machines, and that's.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Going to solve oup all as well.
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Will not because guess what science historically, and that's a
hard thing to say, but it's true. Historically science always
has served those in power because science needs money to operate,
and this alligance between science and state and science and.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
Industry is what has pushed science forward.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
So unless you have an industry that has a certain
way of thinking about the world, or powers in state
they have a certain way of thinking about the world,
the science that is going to be mostly funded is
not going to be the science that is going to
bring us out of our mindset unless we have a
different mindset, which is what I'm proposing.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
So again it falls to us. It falls to society
to really be the major movement here.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
It falls to society. It falls to families, communities, schools.
You know, it's a rest roots thing. You know, it
goes from every In my opinion and of course, you know,
is that every family should be sitting down together and
talking about this problem because if you have kids, hey,
this is the world they're going to be living in,
you know, and and it's our responsibility to kind of
(53:19):
make them aware of what's going on and what the
possible choices we have for a future that is going
to be a great future, not just a horrible dystopic future,
which is what so.
Speaker 4 (53:30):
Many people are talking about, right. I mean, it's you
talk about doomscrolling for a reason.
Speaker 3 (53:35):
Lots of public intellectuals are talking about a world with
a horrible future ahead, right, like digital doom and you
know you name it, like none of technology taking over,
you know, like noneobots and all sorts of existential risks,
and very few people are talking about Okay, these are.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
The risks, what are the solutions? How can we revert that?
And that's a much harder job because it's so easy
to point fingers and say this is happening. So this
is going to happen, But what about what can we
do even though it costs? That's the thing, you know,
every choice we make involves a little level of self
sacrifice because you cannot leave the other choice. So you're
(54:19):
always losing something when you make a choice. But some
choices are for the common good, and it's time for
us to be thinking about us and this planet in
terms of the common good. Ours and everybody else is
in it.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
So thank you so much. For writing such an inspirational
book and for coming on the show to discuss it.
I recommend it to all our listeners. It's a great read.
It's a very consumable read. You just end up reading
the entire book in a single session, And I think
it's a great read to kick off the new year,
wouldn't you say?
Speaker 3 (54:49):
Absolutely? Twenty twenty four, folks, you know this is the
year where if things don't change radically, you know, we
are going to be paying more and more of a
price every year. And we don't want that. We want
a better place. We don't want a worse place. So
let's wake up and work together to make this happen.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Well said. Where can our listeners follow you and learn
more about your work?
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Oh, I'm all over at social media. You know. There
is a Marcella Glizer dot com. I am on x
and Instagram, and I have a ton of followers on
YouTube and so and also LinkedIn because I'm starting a
new think tank in Tuscany actually, which is precisely to
(55:33):
help corporate leaders rethink about their roles in the world.
You know. So I'm thinking that one way we could
affect change is by going straight to the power source
and making them see other ways of thinking about the
world and then implement them in their business. So, in
a sense, even though I don't like trickle down economics,
(55:54):
this would be a trickle down worldview change, and that's
what we're trying to do. So I'm all over. I
just look for my name and you'll find.
Speaker 2 (56:02):
Me excellent, and we'll have our social media accounts tag
you where we can as well.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
Awesome, Rob, Thank you so much for your time and
fight invitation.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Thank you for chatting with us, Thank you, thank you.
Thanks again to Marcello Glizer for taking time out of
his holiday to chat with me here. The Dawn of
a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, is out now.
Grab a copy. I highly recommend it. A reminder to
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
(56:35):
though on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Also a reminder to everyone to please rate and review
the show wherever you have the power to do so,
and hey, if you listen to us on an Apple device.
Maybe check in and make sure that you're still subscribed
and receiving downloads. It helps us out. Thanks as always
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. If
(56:57):
you want to get in touch with us, email us
at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name's
Robert Lamb. On today's episode, I chat with distinguished theoretical
physicist and a professor of natural philosophy, physics, and astronomy
at Dartmouth College, Marcello Gliser, the first Latin American recipient
of the Templeton Prize. His new book is The Dawn
of a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, out
(00:34):
now in all formats, and it's just a tremendous read
to kick off a new year with optimism and determination
about our relationship to the planet. So without further Ado,
let's jump right into the interview. Hi, Marcello, Welcome to
the show.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
My pleasure. Thanks Rob.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
The new book is The Dawn of a Mindful Universe,
out now in all formats. You stress that this is
not an doom book about the dire trajectory of human civilization.
You point out that, particularly with the existential crisis of
climate change, scare tactics don't seem to work. What is
it about humans that make us so resistant to change?
(01:14):
When confronted with problems like climate change?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:17):
So I think what makes climate change different is that
you don't see the eminent danger in front of your face.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
You know.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
It's not sort of like the Japanese just bald pearl harbor,
we got to mobilize and five back kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
You know. It's sort of like.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
This slow, slowly encroaching thing, and we tend to not
push back whenever we don't feel this kind of oh
my god, you know, the world is about to end
kind of thing. And so there is a disconnect between
what people keep saying, Look, global warming, it's real, it's happening.
(01:53):
You know, it's affecting all of us. For example, I
live in northern New England.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
And it's late December here and there is no snow
right then.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
There should be two feet of snow out there, and
it's like, oh, it's al Nino. It's normal. It's not
really normal.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
You know.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
This is the hottest year ever recorded apparently in the planet.
So I'm talking about twenty twenty three. And so that
means that I think the problem, the challenge that people
have is convincing people of two things. First of all,
that yes, it's not happening right now, but it's happening slowly,
(02:32):
and when it starts unfolding, it's going to just get
worse and more challenging.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So it's like the slow approach to the danger.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
And the other one is that most people say that,
you know, I'm just one person.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
What am I going to do?
Speaker 4 (02:47):
You know, if I stop eating meat right now, it's
not going to make a difference, And if I buy
an electric car, it's not going to make a difference,
because I'm just a little little person in this giant
eight billion people world controlled by corporations and governments. So
my actions are useless.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
And the point is that that is only true to
a certain degree, because what you do is a statement
of who you are and why you believe in right,
and the way you position yourself in the world.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Really is a mirror of your attitudes and your value system.
And so if you are a person that is bothered
by global arming, by the fact that the big oil
companies are polluting the world because we need the fuel
and that's the only way mostly that we can use it,
you can do something about it, not so much to
(03:39):
stop global arming by yourself, but to make a statement.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
And I am an optimist. That's why when you talk
about doom.
Speaker 4 (03:46):
You know, like, I'm an optimist and I think that
the alternative, you know, to be a pessimist is a
total disaster, right, because you know, I grew up in Brazil,
and as you know, Brazil, we love soccer, and so
I'm using a soccer metaphor, which is this, right, So
if you are pessimists, you're the kind of guy that
is going to go to a game and even before
(04:08):
the ball is kicked for the first time, you sit
down on the ground and say, oh, there's no way
I can win this game.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I'm giving up, you know. And what kind of game
is that? Right? What kind of life is that? So
you have to try to.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
Make a difference and make a statement because you will
influence people around you. And I think that I'm a
believer in the chain reaction of social forces, and so
that as more and more people engage with this way
of thinking about preservation sustainability, the more difference you know,
we are going to feel in a society as a whole.
(04:43):
It's a big, big challenge, but I think it's possible.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
In the book, you propose a transformation of the collective mindset,
particularly the adoption of a post Copernican worldview. Can can
you walk us through this beginning with just a reminder
of who Nicholas Copernicus was and how he helped transform
an established worldview.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Absolutely, So this is a very long story. This is
sort of the core kind of aspect of the whole book.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
And the idea is this that even before Copernicus's starting,
really from the beginning, if you think about our species, right,
so we are Homo sapiens, and we've been here on
this planet for about three hundred thousand years. Just give
perspective to people, if you look at the history of
the world, right, the planet Earth, Right, planet Earth has
(05:31):
been around for four and a half billion years. So
if you take three hundred thousand of four and a
half billion years, you're talking. And if you take four
and a half billionaires and compress it into twenty four
hours in one day, right, we basically arrived a few
seconds before midnight. So we are the newcomers on the planet, right,
(05:52):
that's for sure. But on the other hand, we have
changed the planet dramatically. And it's not three hundred thousand
years of Homo SAPIs that did it is about ten
thousand years of agrarian and industrial civilization. That they did
it so in about ten thousand years, which changed everything.
So if we look at our history sort of like
in what we call deep time, right, so we start
(06:14):
from the beginning. For most of the time that we
existed in this planet, we were organized socially.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
In a completely different way. Were what we call hunter gatherers, right,
So people organize themselves into small bands.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
They all helped one another. The idea that we're savage
caveman is kind of silly and it's old fashioned. You know,
all the anthropology studies now mentioned that actually those bands
of hunter gatherers they'd stuck together, but they also collaborated, interbred,
you know, with.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Each other, and they had a relationship to the planet.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
And this is the essential point, which is very very
different from the one we have now. And nowadays, the
only cultures that still relate to the planet.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
In a similar way other indigenous cultures. And what do
they say. They say the planet is sacred, right, that the.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Mountains, the rivers, the forests, the animals, everyone is interconnected
in a very fundamental way. And you have to respect
this chain of being because if you don't, you're going
to pay a very high price. So there was this
notion of everything had an enchanted kind of reality about it.
(07:28):
There were spirits everywhere. The ancestors were there too, and
there was really no separation between the reality that we
see with our eyes right now and this kind of
fantastic other world of spirits and forces beyond their control.
So there was a way of dealing with the planet
which was in a sense deeply respectful.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
So with a grand civilization, many wonderful things happened. For example,
we started to plant and we could feed more people,
and of course of that, the population started to grow,
and we started to condense more and more into small
areas which became city states.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
And you know, life expectancy didn't grow much for that
because once we start putting a lot of people together,
there all sorts of issues like sewage and diseases. And
so for most of the history of our species, the
life expectancy was between thirty and forty years old. This
is including Victoria and England in nineteenth century. We never
(08:33):
lived very long.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
But the point back to your question is that what
changed with their ground civilization was the notion that now
we can control the planet, we can control nature. Look,
we are planting, we are making things grow, we can
domesticate animals, and more and more.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
We felt like we are the owners of the place.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
Right, And it is no coincidence when you look look
at monotoistic religions which came at about the same time,
you know, Judaism and then Christianity, they all talk about
us as being above the world. You know, God created
the land to serve you. You take ownership of the animals,
et cetera. That's in Genesis in the Bible. Right to say,
(09:18):
all right, this is our place, this is our world.
We control it, and we are above nature. And this notion,
you know, that we are above nature kind of pervaded
all of what happened in the last two thousand years
that we are going to be creating technologies that we
can't use to basically protect us from the forces of
(09:43):
the world. Right, So we build our homes, we warm
them up, we create clothes, they are warm, we eat
and cook our food, etc.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So we tried to really control the forces of nature.
But then comes a storm.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
There comes about panic eruption, or an earthquake or a
tidal wave. And to teachers that you know what folks
is not that simple, right. We are not really above nature.
We are really very much part of the natural world, right.
But we kept on going and became very successful developing technologies.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
And this is our story, right. We are a species
that tells stories about who we are and the place
we have been. Now back to Copernicus. So Copernicus showed
up in the early fifteen hundreds, and in fifteen forty
three he wrote a book.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
He published the book which is sort of like the
big book of his life, okay, And the book was
called on the Revolution of.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
The Celestial Spheres. And what the story was with that
book is that up to his time, everyone believed that
the Earth was the center of the universe.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
That there was the Earth in the middle, and then
you had the moon and had Mercury and Venus around it,
and the Sun and all the other planets up to Saturn,
because that's all.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
They could see. In the fifteen hundreds, everything revolved around us,
and so the Earth was the center of everything.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
And of course we, according to religion, were created in
the image of God. So we were like, you know,
even though we were being kicked out of paradise, we
were sort of the God emissaries in this planet, right,
and so we had this value system where we were
the best, right, our planet was the center. When Copernicus
(11:34):
comes in, he basically changes this story and he says, sorry, folks,
it turns out that from what we can say from astronomy.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
That is not the story. The story is that the
Sun really is the center of our solar system, and
the Earth is just a planet, just like Mercury and
Venus and Jupiter, which means that it just goes around
the Sun.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
And at that point something very profound happens, because if
Earth is just a planet like any other planet, it
does not have the value that people believed it had.
So all of the philosophy and the cosmology, you know,
the way we thought about the universe at the time
was based on the Aristotelian So Aristotle, this Greek philosopher
(12:22):
about three hundred years BCE, built a whole system, a
whole worldview, you know, based on the fact that the
Earth is the center.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Everything falls to it.
Speaker 4 (12:32):
Everything changes here by the heavens, the planets, and the
moon and the stars are all eternal and changing. So
the Earth was the place whereas everything was changing, the
skies were eternal.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
There was some hierarchy. There was vertico, you know, from
the center of the earth changing all the way up
to the sky. And the Catholic Church bought that and said,
that is exactly how the world should be if God
created it. And God is not on earth anymore like
(13:05):
he was for our ancestors. God is way up there
in the skies. And it's a very abstract idea, you know.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
The more the idea of the monotheistic God advanced in time,
the more remote God became. You know, in the Old
Testament it was around a lot, you know, it was
like burning bush with Moses and doing all sorts.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Of other things.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
And then in the Christian times, you know, it became
sort of like this idea in the skies.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
It sent a sun, you know. But and so the point.
Speaker 4 (13:39):
Is that as religion left the planet, the planet became
an object, became not sacred anymore, a place where you
could exploit as you wanted. And that attached to the
notion from astronomy from Copernicas, Hey, the Earth is just
a planet. Meant that the combination of the science of
(14:00):
the time and this religion of the time meant that, yes,
you can do to the planet whatever we want. It's
just another world. It's not that important. If there is
life here, there will be life and other planets too.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
So it's really cool.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Actually, if you look at the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds,
all these guys, like very famous scientists were speculating about
life and another world, like, you know, like is it
going to be just like here or not? And if
it's just like humans, would they be sinners? And if
there is a sinner there, well you need another Jesus,
you know, And are there many Jesuses and.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
All these different planets to save people. It was like
this wild conversation about this other life. And the end
result of this, right as the centuries advanced, is that
the Earth was objectified and became a place where you
could do as we wanted to. And so that's the
impact of the Copernican idea, which was not really his.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
I mean, all he said is that, look, the Earth
is planet, but the whole everything else that followed, and
this has been the narrative of modern astronomy and cosmology,
which is what I do for a living, you know,
as a researcher, which is essentially this and you must
have heard this before. It's like, man, these are scientists
keep telling us that the more we know about the universe,
(15:21):
the less important we become. You know, if the Earth
is just a.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Planet, and then the Sun was the center of everything.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
But then, sorry, folks, know, the Sun is just a
star and this star they are in this galaxy in
the Milky Way where we live, there are about two
hundred billion stars, you know, and the Sun, the kind
of star that the Sun belongs to, which is it's
called g star, is only about three percent.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Of all the stars.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
And then the galaxy that we thought until one hundred
years ago, everybody thought the Milky Way was the only
galaxy in the universe. And then this American astronomer called
Hubbo said, nope, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies
out there, and these galaxies, furthermore, are moving away from
one another. The universe is expanding, and so like, we're
(16:09):
really becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, right, And then
to top it.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
All, in the last forty years or so, we discovered.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
That the matter that we are made of, the atoms
in your body are just about five percent.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Of the stuff that fills up the universe.
Speaker 4 (16:28):
So all the stars and the planets and the gas
clouds and the people.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
All this stuff is only about five percent of what's
out there. So now even the stuff we are made
of is important, right, and then to finish the whole thing, right,
to less nail on the coffin. In the last twenty
years or so, even our universe may not be the
only universe. That may be part of what's called a multiverse,
(16:53):
which is like a bubbling soup of.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Different universes, and each universe has a different set of
proper And so the narrative that I'm trying to build
here is that we went from a species that thought
of this world as their mother, as the sole responsible
for our existence, to a species where the development of
(17:17):
industrial technologies and this way of looking at the universe
as this very very big place, which is all true scientifically,
you know, took the value of our planet and objectified it,
and it created this mindset where we don't have to
worry about the world. That's the story, you know, that
(17:38):
comes into this book. And then the point is, okay,
now that story needs.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
To change because if we keep telling this story to ourselves,
we are not going to be here telling the story
for much longer. So The question is how can we
build a different argument to explain who we are now?
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Some might, you know, criticize this notion as something radical
that could never captivate the mainstream, but you rightfully point
out that the major shifts in worldview and cultural narrative
occur throughout human history. So it's it's not an unreasonable hope.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Right, I hope not. You know.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
For example, the shift to Copernicanism, the shift from an
Earth centered cosmos to a Sun centered cosmos was like
profoundly changing, right. I mean, there was the whole issue
with Galileo and the Inquisition because he was, you know,
about one hundred years not quiet eighty years after Copernicus.
He was saying, folks, Copernicus is right, you know, and
(18:34):
if you keep insisting that the Earth is the center,
you're going to embarrass yourselves, you know. And only in
the nineteen eighties the Church forgave Galileo.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
You know.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
And so changes of mindset they do happen, right when
there's enough evidence for them to happen, either moved by
fear or moved by scientific evidence. You don't have to believe,
because science is exactly what tells you you don't need
to believe in this. You need to look at the data,
(19:04):
interpret it properly, and understand what's going on. Right, So
where does the fun new story comes in?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Right?
Speaker 4 (19:12):
The story that comes in is that you can rescue
this notion of belonging to the natural world that ancient
cultures have had for a long time and couch it
in a scientific narrative. And that's what I tried to
do in this book.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
Right, And how do you do that? Well? First of all,
there is the story that everybody knows already that we
are made of star dost right, you know. So you have.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Johnny Mitchell and you have Carl Sagan, all of us
saying these things, and people have to internalize that this
is really true.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:45):
And I love to talk about this because it is
so beautiful. You know, it's kind of at the same
time lyrical and scientifically accurate.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
That you know, the iron in.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Your blood, and the calcium in your bones, and the
carbon in your cells, all of these chemical elements, they
all came from stars that blew up over five billion
years ago. So if you stop to think about this,
for instance, so what you know, so because the stars
are what are the great alchemists. So what a star
(20:18):
does essentially is that it grabs hydrogen. A star is
a giant ball of flaming hydrogen. Hydrogen, you guys don't remember,
is the simplest chemical element that exists in nature. It
has one proton and one electron in the one proton
in the nucleus and one electron moving about it. So
that is the simplest thing that exists chemically speaking. And
(20:42):
what a star does it grabs hydrogen, pushes it together,
compresses it really hard, and this compression transforms hydrogen in
all the other chemical elements that exists.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
That's called nuclear fusion.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
So a star is essentially a giant nu clear fusion
device that transforms hydrogen into helium, carbon, oxygen all the
way to iron. And then when it gets to iron,
big stars tend to explode in what we call super
and over explosions, and when that happens, the heavy elements
all the way to uranium.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Are forged in different ways.
Speaker 4 (21:20):
So and then when the stars explode, they spell all
that stuff out into interstellar space, and all these gas
clouds filled with all these chemical elements travel around hit
all the floating clouds of hydrogen sprinkle them with the
heavy chemical elements. And when this star is born and
(21:41):
the planets are born, they carry with them all the
chemistry that will become part of life. So that's who
we are, you know. So the star do story is
really true. So that's connecting us to the history of
the universe as a whole, right, So we connect ourselves
(22:02):
to billions and billions of years of cosmic history.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
So that's one point.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
There's this Buddhist monk that I like a lot called
ticknot Hunt, who talked about this thing called interveing.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
The notion of intervening is really cool, he says. You know,
pick up a book and read a poem, and you
look at that page in that book and you say, wow,
this page is made of paper. So that means that
as I'm reading this book and I'm looking at this
page of paper, there is a cloud that made this
paper possible, you know, because this paper is made of wood.
(22:37):
Wood is tree.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
Tree needs water. Water comes from rain, rain comes some clouds,
and the planet made that happen. But it only made
that happen because there is a sun giving it energy
to make it happen and to drive its climate. And
so you're already connected to the Sun, so when you're
reading a page of a book, you're really already.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Connected to this.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
But the Son, of course, is a star that belongs
to a galaxy that belongs to the universe. So in
this page of paper that you're reading, you have the
whole history of the universe, and that's the notion of intervening.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
So this vision that this guy had.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
It really is completely supported by scientific research.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
So that's all good. Now comes the second part.
Speaker 4 (23:23):
That's where it becomes a little provocative from my end,
which is this, In the last fifteen or twenty years,
this new branch of astronomy called astrobiology came out, and
what is astrobiology. Astrobiology is essentially the study of life
in the universe. Right, So now it's kind of awesome.
(23:44):
You can actually get grants from NASA and National Science
Foundation to study aliens or the possibility of alien life
in the universe. You know, twenty years ago that was
not possible at all. And what we have been doing
with the Hubble Space Telescope and now the James we
have space Telescope, which is this spectacular machine that allows
(24:04):
us to look at planets going around other stars, to
search for chemical elements, look at these chemical elements in
their atmospheres to see if the atmosphere stell is about
life in that world or not. So, to make this
a little more concrete, if a native astronomer looked at
(24:25):
Earth from far away, from like ten light years away,
you would say, oh, look at that blue planet over there.
It has a very thick atmosphere. It has water, it
has carbon dioxide, it has methane, it has ozone. That
planet is alive just because of the combinations of possible
(24:46):
chemicals in their atmosphere. So to find life elsewhere, you
don't really need to take a spaceship and go interstellar,
which would.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Be awesome, but it's not possible yet. But you can
look those planets thirty their atmospherees S thirty the chemical
composition of the atmosphere, and say, yep, it really indicates
the presence of biological activity there.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
So we're doing that now, and we have found so
far over five thousand, five hundred exoplanets we call them,
that is, planets rotating orbiting around other stars far away,
and we have been able to study the atmospheres of
a small amount of them. But we have also found
(25:30):
what kind of planet is that? Is it like an
Earth like rocky solid guy, or is it more like Jupiter,
which is this big, giant, buffy ball of gas. And
what we have found out is that the vast majority
of worlds I have nothing to do with Earth, a
much more like Jupiter on neptunes of big gas planets.
(25:54):
Only about three percent of the planets that we have
found so far have a similar look to Earth. But
of those, very few of them orbit a star like
the Sun. Some of them orbit stars which are much colder.
Most of them, in fact, orbit stars which are much colder.
(26:14):
And so as you start looking at this in more detail,
you realize that even from an astronomical perspective, even though
there are trillions, and I'm not joking, trillion is one,
trillion is a one with twelve zeros, there are trillions
of planets in our galaxy alone, okay, but very few
(26:36):
are going to be similar to this planet.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
So what we're beginning to learn is that despite you
have this gigantic diversity of worlds out there which is
really spectacular, and they are all magically amazing, right, I mean,
you have moons in our Solar system, not just the planets.
You have the moons too, like Enceladus and Europa, which
is this moon of Jupiter that has a crust, and
(27:01):
the underneath the ice crust there's a nocean of salt
water that carries four times more water than all the
oceans of our planet together. So like damn.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
You know, if there is that, then maybe hey, salt water, right,
that may be life there, So there'll be there are
planned missions that will go there, hopefully at some point
land drill a hole, try to get some of the
water to analyze if there are any little create creatures
out there. But even if there are, they're not going
(27:33):
to be as complex as life here. See, the thing
about Earth is not that it's just a living planet
as a whole, but it's a living planet with very
complex life, and that makes all the difference. So Avatar,
you know, that's that that movie was made for a
very good reason, you know, which is there will be
(27:54):
very few planets like was similar to there will let
me be the more more bombastic here I do this.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
There will never be another Earth in the whole of
the universe.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
You can have planets similar to Earth maybe, and even
if they have life, life on those planets, even if
it's kind of like our life, like carbon based water bays,
that life is going to be completely different from life here,
which means which I think is really cool, and it's
(28:24):
part of the fundamental soul of the book that we
are the only humans in the universe. There will be
no other humans. There could be other humanoid like things.
Speaker 3 (28:36):
With like a left right symmetry like you have, you know,
left right eye and stuff, but there will be no
other human species in the whole of the universe. And
that puts us back in the center of the universe,
but in a completely different way from before Copernicus, because
now we become the species that is self aware and
(29:01):
is able to tell its own story.
Speaker 4 (29:04):
And the biggest story that we tell is the story
of how we belong to the universe as a whole.
So we are in a sense, telling the story of
the universe. We are the voice and the mind of
the universe telling its own story.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
And so is this this basic idea, this this idea
of the Earth is this precious gem and it being
vitally connected with us. This gets into this idea of
the secular sacredness of the planet.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
Correct exactly so in this so I propose this thing
called biocentrism, which is not a word I invented. Other
people have used it, but I used it in a
somewhat different context. I think the context that I use
is similar to the people.
Speaker 3 (29:57):
That we're doing this logical theology.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
I guess in the seventies and eighties, you know, they said,
you know, religion abandoned the world, then we need to
go back to that. And what I'm saying is that, yes,
religion abandoned the world, so did science, because you know,
science also sort of like took the world as a
big laboratory without really respecting it for what it is.
(30:23):
And now we have this new science coming out and
we can bring this notion of what I would call
a secular spirituality, the idea that you can relate to
the world. It doesn't matter if you believe in God
or not. This has nothing to do directly with God.
If you do, that's great, bring God back to the planet.
But if you don't, you can relate to the awesomeness
(30:46):
of being part of this deep connection to the history
of the universe in this planet that allows us to
be able to tell this story.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Right. It's not just that we exist here.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
But this planet has had even though it has had
wild climate changes, you know, there was this planet has
been an ice ball completely. It has been a tropical forest.
You know, it has gone through all these different phases
in these four billion years of existence, but it always
allowed a certain amount of stability in the climate for
(31:24):
life to persist. Right, And life has been around here.
So I told you that the planet's fare and a
half billion years old. Life has been around for three
and a half billion years in here, and it became
incredibly complex. And once you start to look at nature
with these eyes, you know, with the eyes of awesomeness, like,
(31:45):
be grateful for what you have, because this is a jam.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Look at look what happens to us when we try
to get out of the atmosphere. Right, the universe is
profoundly hostile to life. When I read things like life physubiquitous.
Speaker 4 (32:01):
In the universe, that the universe is filled with life,
and like, I find that almost offensive because first of all,
we have zero evidence of that. Okay, so there's zero
evidence that we have been certainly visited by aliens. Right,
there's another whole conversation. And I have lots of friends
writing books about that, but more than that, we have
(32:25):
zero evidence that there is life in other places, which
doesn't mean there isn't. See, this is where you have
to be very careful with scientific statements. We cannot prove
that there is no life in an other world. That's impossible.
I'll tell you why. It's because we simply cannot go
and visit every other world in the universe to find
out if there is life there or not. So we
(32:47):
may say life is rare, or life in our bubble
like cosmic bubble like within a big distance from our
planet here is rare, but we cannot.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Rule it out.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
But what we can rule it out, as I said before,
is that definitely there will be no other.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Human species in the universe, and even.
Speaker 4 (33:07):
If there would be, they'll be so far away and
so remote that for all.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
Purposes, all practical purposes, we really are alone telling our
own story of what's going on. Now.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
You talk about this a little bit in the book.
I was wondering if you might feel this question. Do
you believe that various sci fi, futurists and transhumanist ideas
such as the digitization of consciousness and even things like
interplanetary colonization no matter how far fetch some of the
concepts may be, or you know, just outside of immediate grasp.
(33:42):
Have they played a negative role in moving sort of
the public imagination away from more life centric and earth
centric worldviews.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
I think absolutely yes, because you know, just it's a
matter of focus, right, you say, look, we are going
to mess this planet up, and we're just going to
move somewhere else, so it doesn't matter, you know, let's
just keep doing it. Let's just keeping it up, and
we're just basically eating its entrails, right, that's what fossil fuels,
(34:10):
they come from underground, right, So we're sort of feeding
from the entrails of the planet to sustain this big
civilization on the surface. And hey, if there are other
worlds out there for us to colonize, just like we
did here. So this whole notion of colonizing other planets
(34:30):
is a repetition of what we have.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Done to this planet if you think about this, right,
I mean, what happened.
Speaker 4 (34:36):
Here is that there were native populations around the planet.
But then you had the Europeans that had the technology
to explore and go across vast distances and in the oceans,
and that's what they did, and they moved on to
these other places. And what did they do? They plundered, right,
(34:57):
I mean I grew up in Brazil. Brazil was colony
of Portugal that in the fifteen hundreds was the most
powerful country or you know, kingdom in that case in
the world. And they you know, you look at all
the gold in the churches in Europe and cathedrals, where
did that come from?
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Well a lot of it came from South America? Right,
And so are we going to just repeat that model
as we move on? So let's go to the moon,
and let's go mind the moon, and then we make
a base on the Moon, and then we colonize, so
we tear a four Mars, which basically means we make
Mars into our earth thing, which is completely ridiculous. It
(35:36):
just doesn't work and it will not work.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
You can make an igloo like life, a biosphere kind
of thing in another world and recreate the earth conditions
in that world locally, but at.
Speaker 5 (35:51):
A global level that is so far away, as you said,
so far Thatch, that it is at this point, given
the problems we have in this planet right now, we
should be focusing everything.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
That we've got here and not and can I go
to Mars and you know, colonize Mars or whatever. So
that's the planetary aspect of things.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
And then the other one the transhumanist idea that we
can and I write a lot about that, not in
this book so much, but in other places, that we.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Can't actually.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
Create some sort of scientific based immortality.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
Right, is a.
Speaker 4 (36:33):
Very very old idea, right, I mean, at least you
can go back to Frankenstein. So you know eighteen nineteen
where Mary Shelley she used the cutting edge science of
her time, which was look, electricity can make muscles twitch. Right,
that was like Galvani, you know, Volta had discovered this
(36:57):
stuff in Italy and people are like amaze by this, right,
They're like wow. So basically the secret of motion is
electricity growing through your nerves and your muscles. So that
means that if you could recreate a dead person and
pass electricity to that person, science would conquer death.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (37:21):
Transhumanism is exactly the same notion, but now using our cutting.
Speaker 3 (37:26):
Edge technology, which is digital technology.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
So the sense the essence being if we could capture
the essence of who you are, right, so essentially look
into your brain and somehow can download your memories and
the circuitry in your brain, and you can recreate all
of that complexity in a it's.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Called the connectome. You know, how all the synapses of
your neurons connect to one another. It's like a map, right,
so this would be the map to yourself, right, and
each one of us.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Even though we have brains which are very similar, they're
also very different because I'm not Rob, and Rob it's
not me. Even though we share so much of what
we are, right, there is a difference there. So the
idea is if you could capture the assence and create
a giant simulation, then that simulation will be you.
Speaker 3 (38:24):
Or an approximation of you. And I find that very
disturbing and also very kind of like, uh, far fetched
is not even a word for this, because we have
zero idea of what it means to capture ourselves, you know,
the essence of who we are from a digital perspective
(38:45):
or any kind of perspective, because we don't know what
consciousness is of how it works. But as you said,
the way you phrase the question, which is very clever,
it is like those things, even though they are very
far fetched, can they be taking us away from our task?
Right now, which is to really celebrate the life that we.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Have and the planet that gives us the possibility of
having this life, as opposed to spending so much energy
and fantasy and money and resources in dreaming up a
future which is not going to help us in the
next few decades, which is when we really need the help.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
And the answer is absolutely that's why we should be focusing.
And the hope of this book is to help people
maybe refocus a little bit on the beauty and the
tremendous miracle in a sense that life in this planet
really is and.
Speaker 4 (39:40):
What a place that we have, that we should be
thinking about it very differently than we are.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Now. Part of the hopefulness of the book is that
it's not just big ideas. You also discuss concrete steps
that individuals and society can take. So what can we do,
what can link listeners to the show do to help
adopt these principles and drive positive change as individuals?
Speaker 4 (40:11):
Right So, so the subtitle of the book is a
Manifesto for Humanity's future. Right So, manifest is kind of
like a little bit of a pretentious thing to say.
Speaker 3 (40:21):
There are lots of people writing manifesto about this or that.
Speaker 4 (40:24):
But so what I did is I went back to
something I read but I was a teenager, which was
a communist manifesto about Marx and angels, you know, said
to say, Okay, what the heck is a manifester and
how do you write one?
Speaker 3 (40:35):
Right? And so basically the manifesto has two parts.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
Right, he has this is the argument of why the
world needs to change, Right, So you bring that argument
forward and you say, look, in their case was about
capitalism and the bourgeoisie and we need to you know,
save the workers, et cetera. So that was their story.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
Our story is we are making a planet sick, and
we can be healthy as humans in a sick planet.
So we have to change the way we relate to
the planet. It's that simple, right. I Mean, it's a little.
Speaker 4 (41:09):
More sophisticated that in the book, but the bare bones
is this, you know, a sick planet cannot support a
healthy life or any kind of life, human or otherwise.
So then the second part of the manifesto is, okay,
what do you do about this?
Speaker 3 (41:22):
What are the action items? Right? And in their case
was you know, workers of the world unite and you know,
let's throw out the kings and all that, and that's
what happened with Itzar in Russia.
Speaker 4 (41:35):
But in our case is about what can we do
as individuals and as a society in order to actually
start really making a difference, right, And I suggest several
different things. Okay, So at the individual level, and not
just at individual I also at the corporate level. Is
(41:56):
the notion of I call it the doctrine of less what. Well,
you don't need to become vegan overnight, because you know
that doesn't work. But if you cut your meat consumption
in half, if everybody cut the meat consumption in half,
a fifty percent solution, you will make a tremendous impact
(42:20):
on the amount of not just the methane and the
carbon dioxide, but the water pollution and soil pollution, the
cattle grazing and cutting the forest to have area for
the cattle to graze would make Okay.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
So the notion that it is possible to make personal choices,
that's the real challenge. There are personal choices that you can.
Speaker 4 (42:43):
Make that may not be ideal for you, that may
involve a certain level of self sacrifice that will impact people.
And some people are man, I don't care, you know,
I don't want to do that.
Speaker 3 (42:55):
Well, if we don't care, we're going to be a price.
Speaker 4 (42:58):
Like if we didn't care about the Japanese invasion of
the Nazis in Europe, we would have lost Second World
War and the world will have been a very very
different place right now.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
So we care, and when we care, we.
Speaker 4 (43:11):
Make change happens. Right The Manhattan Project is a great
example that. You know, if people watched Openheimer, they know
what I'm talking about. That was an incredibly difficult technical challenge,
very expensive. But you put a bunch of great minds
together and give them the resources, and we can solve
problems to a certain point.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
I'm going to get to that in a second.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
So less meat, less energy, less water, less garbage. These
are the four lessons that we can all work on together.
Shorter showers, more coposting, et cetera. So all these things
can be done. And then there is the doctrine of
the more more, what more? Engaging with the natural world.
(43:56):
What does that mean? It means go out look at
nature once now, I look up at the sky. If
you live in the city, find a darker corner, go
to a park, look at the park, pay attention to
what's going on.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Walk by the.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
Ocean front, you know, engage with the natural world, because,
as I was saying earlier, you know, for most of
our existence, we were beings in the natural world.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
That's what we vote for. That's why we.
Speaker 4 (44:25):
Sweat and we run distances. You know, I'm a long
distance runner. I love that and because that connects me
with really the essence of what.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
We have volved here.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
For we were like hunting antelopes and gazelles, you know,
two hundred thousand years ago, and we got them even
though they're much faster than we are, because we could
do this for a long time. So we have all
those senses of very good vision, very good resistance, and
ways of moving which are designed to be in the world.
(44:57):
But what we have done since Sagra Sation is we
created cities which are the anti nature.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Think about that, right. A city is a ball of
concrete surrounded by nature on all sides.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
And the idea is that we can engage with nature
much more. And once we do that, you feel better
about yourself. Even if it's just a walk in the park.
You know, people have been talking about forest bathing and
all these things. Just walk and look at the trees,
you know, and the clouds in the sky and stuff
like that. He has measured physiological benefits. You know, lots
(45:35):
of studies, a few of them at Stanford have already
demonstrated that we feel.
Speaker 3 (45:42):
Better when we engage with the world.
Speaker 4 (45:43):
So that's the more connection to the world, more respect
for animal life, right, because that story I was telling
in the beginning where I said, we have basically deemed
ourselves the owners of the planets, and we can do
too everything like we can kill them, we can eat them,
or we can have them as pats, which is you know,
(46:06):
think of this this. It's kind of uncomfortable to say this,
but I'm going to say it because why not look
at the cognitive dissonance here. We love our pats, We
love our dogs and our cats and our bunny rabbits
or even our fish, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:23):
But then we go out and we eat a calf.
How does that work exactly? And you go visit the
farm and you go, oh, look, how cute, you know,
like when you have little kids.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
You go and you go look at the beautiful cow,
and then we go eat them.
Speaker 3 (46:39):
So what is going on here? You know? And you
love your dog like yourself, like the.
Speaker 4 (46:45):
Dog dies or like in the deep depression, it's just
an animal.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
I love my dog deeply. It's just the best dog
in the world. But so, what is going on here?
How do we get to be that way? You know? So,
and that's an uncalled conversation.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
You know, they're like, look, there's a story that can
be told from the farm to the junk of meeting
a supermarket, but it's so far removed that we just
go to the market and we buy that, and we
we just you know, we don't care.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
But we should be caring more. That's the point. You know.
It's because we didn't care for thousands of years that
we are.
Speaker 4 (47:21):
In a difficult situation now. So it's a hard conversation
to have. But the more engagement of the natural world
is essential. And the other thing I suggest is two
more things, just because you know, the Eyasa could talk
for too long.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
One is the notion of education.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Every school, at any level, from elementary school to pach
d level, should tell the story of who we are
in the universe. This whole conversation that we had about
where we come from from stars, how we evolved in
this planet, how connected we are to all forms of.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
Life and to this world in particular. This is a
story that should be told at all levels, you know,
and we hardly have a talk about this, and that's
why we don't know who we are. That's why we
think we are the owners of the place, because we
forgot to tell this story, which is.
Speaker 4 (48:18):
The most important story. And finally, as a consumer, you
have choices too, you know. If you think that that
certain corporation does not align with your ethical values about
the environment and about how they treat animals, don't buy
from that business. Buy from another business. And that has
more power and more pressure than any think. Consumers have
(48:41):
power when they unite and boycott a certain company because
they don't align with their values, you know. And so
there's this Being an optimist, I have to say, there
is this thing called bi corporations now, which are corporations
that have an ethos, have a way of dealing with
the world which is much more alignment sustainability and circular economics, etc.
(49:04):
And so this is happening already, and I have tremendous
fate that all this work is going to kind of
crystallize into a different way of thinking about who we
are in the next decade or so.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
And you also point out that there's a responsibility for
the scientific community as well.
Speaker 4 (49:22):
Correct, there is because and that's the hard one because
as a scientist, I know how my peers think, and
the scientific community should be telling the story I believe
as it is, which is not like, oh, there are
lots of Earth like you know, you know, people talk
(49:42):
about other earths out there. Now there are no other
earths out there. There may be Earth analogus, but there's
only one Earth. So it's just a way of telling
the story. As you know, the way you tell a
story makes a huge difference. You could be telling the
same story and completely change the meaning of that story.
And so I think we should be very careful about
(50:05):
telling the story of our planet and our species in
this planet in a much more environmentally aware way. And
with this notion, and you know, when you use the
word sacred, you know most scientists scringe, right because they
associated that with other kinds of sacred. No, but I'm
(50:25):
talking about the sacredness of life that that perhaps is
the most fundamental universal moral value, which is life is
sacred right and our life of another human, but other
life forms do.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
And so if you relate to that in a more
concrete way, not just as you're just saying that. As
a scientist, you have a role to play.
Speaker 4 (50:48):
You are a role model for this way of thinking
about the world because you are the one bringing all
this information to the public. Right, so the people that
are writing books about science should be thinking a little
more carefully about what are they saying of the power
of science, and science, for example, solve all the problems.
I probably always going to go back to that, and
(51:09):
I can go back to that right now, and the
answer is absolutely not. You know, science not all problems
have a scientific solution. You know, some problems have a
complicated solution that also uses science, but it uses philosophy.
He uses anthropology to anthropological ways of thinking about who
we are in a culture, and native ways of thinking
(51:33):
about who we are and how we relate to certain values.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
So I would believe that now we are.
Speaker 4 (51:39):
At this point where the science that we are using
to describe the planet, you know, it's called systems science,
is telling us a story that we have to bring
together different ways of knowing in order to tell people
what really matters in this world. Not just we are
(52:00):
going to sequest the carbon with our machines, and that's.
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Going to solve oup all as well.
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Will not because guess what science historically, and that's a
hard thing to say, but it's true. Historically science always
has served those in power because science needs money to operate,
and this alligance between science and state and science and.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
Industry is what has pushed science forward.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
So unless you have an industry that has a certain
way of thinking about the world, or powers in state
they have a certain way of thinking about the world,
the science that is going to be mostly funded is
not going to be the science that is going to
bring us out of our mindset unless we have a
different mindset, which is what I'm proposing.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
So again it falls to us. It falls to society
to really be the major movement here.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
It falls to society. It falls to families, communities, schools.
You know, it's a rest roots thing. You know, it
goes from every In my opinion and of course, you know,
is that every family should be sitting down together and
talking about this problem because if you have kids, hey,
this is the world they're going to be living in,
you know, and and it's our responsibility to kind of
(53:19):
make them aware of what's going on and what the
possible choices we have for a future that is going
to be a great future, not just a horrible dystopic future,
which is what so.
Speaker 4 (53:30):
Many people are talking about, right. I mean, it's you
talk about doomscrolling for a reason.
Speaker 3 (53:35):
Lots of public intellectuals are talking about a world with
a horrible future ahead, right, like digital doom and you
know you name it, like none of technology taking over,
you know, like noneobots and all sorts of existential risks,
and very few people are talking about Okay, these are.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
The risks, what are the solutions? How can we revert that?
And that's a much harder job because it's so easy
to point fingers and say this is happening. So this
is going to happen, But what about what can we
do even though it costs? That's the thing, you know,
every choice we make involves a little level of self
sacrifice because you cannot leave the other choice. So you're
(54:19):
always losing something when you make a choice. But some
choices are for the common good, and it's time for
us to be thinking about us and this planet in
terms of the common good. Ours and everybody else is
in it.
Speaker 2 (54:33):
So thank you so much. For writing such an inspirational
book and for coming on the show to discuss it.
I recommend it to all our listeners. It's a great read.
It's a very consumable read. You just end up reading
the entire book in a single session, And I think
it's a great read to kick off the new year,
wouldn't you say?
Speaker 3 (54:49):
Absolutely? Twenty twenty four, folks, you know this is the
year where if things don't change radically, you know, we
are going to be paying more and more of a
price every year. And we don't want that. We want
a better place. We don't want a worse place. So
let's wake up and work together to make this happen.
Speaker 2 (55:07):
Well said. Where can our listeners follow you and learn
more about your work?
Speaker 3 (55:12):
Oh, I'm all over at social media. You know. There
is a Marcella Glizer dot com. I am on x
and Instagram, and I have a ton of followers on
YouTube and so and also LinkedIn because I'm starting a
new think tank in Tuscany actually, which is precisely to
(55:33):
help corporate leaders rethink about their roles in the world.
You know. So I'm thinking that one way we could
affect change is by going straight to the power source
and making them see other ways of thinking about the
world and then implement them in their business. So, in
a sense, even though I don't like trickle down economics,
(55:54):
this would be a trickle down worldview change, and that's
what we're trying to do. So I'm all over. I
just look for my name and you'll find.
Speaker 2 (56:02):
Me excellent, and we'll have our social media accounts tag
you where we can as well.
Speaker 3 (56:08):
Awesome, Rob, Thank you so much for your time and
fight invitation.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Thank you for chatting with us, Thank you, thank you.
Thanks again to Marcello Glizer for taking time out of
his holiday to chat with me here. The Dawn of
a Mindful Universe, a manifesto for Humanity's future, is out now.
Grab a copy. I highly recommend it. A reminder to
everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
(56:35):
though on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Also a reminder to everyone to please rate and review
the show wherever you have the power to do so,
and hey, if you listen to us on an Apple device.
Maybe check in and make sure that you're still subscribed
and receiving downloads. It helps us out. Thanks as always
to the excellent JJ Possway for producing the show. If
(56:57):
you want to get in touch with us, email us
at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (57:11):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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