Cosmic Perspectives Translate Into An Opportunity for All Life to Thrive w/ Jill Tarter #55

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hello, everybody.

(00:00):
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.

(00:03):
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You've personally just experienced information age and what what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you might now, right now, be living through a transitional change, the changes to the age of infinite.
An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be made possible through a new construct where the moon and earth or as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into the infinite future.

(00:42):
The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

(01:08):
If you go to the website www.projectmoonhot.org, top right hand corner, there are a few videos.
Video number 1 and number 3 are what we recommend that you take a look at if you're interested in exploring more with us.
Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic, cosmic perspectives translate into an opportunity for all life to thrive.

(01:31):
Today, we have with us Jill Tarter.
Jill, how are you today?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Good.
As always, we do a very brief bio.
Jill's, CV is extremely long.
Jill is the Emeritus chair of SETI Research and the SETI Institute, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

(01:52):
She's received her bachelor of engineering physics degree, with distinction from Cornell University, which is right around the corner from me, and her master's degree and a PhD in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Now she's also in 2004.
She would Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

(02:13):
And in 2,012, one times 25 most influential people in space.
And before we get started, I had to add this about 6 months ago.
Individuals who are listening thought that we had planned out our podcast.
That's the furthest from the truth.
The way we work is this, and it's quite simple.

(02:35):
We get referred to somebody or call somebody, connect with somebody, and we have a conversation about potentially creating a podcast.
The guest and I speak.
We decide on a title.
The title can take anywhere from 15, 45 minutes to, say, 3 hours.
Then that individual goes out on their own, and we come back the day of the program.

(02:58):
So Jill and I have not discussed anything about the content that Jill's gonna be speaking with us today about, and we start the program.
It's that simple.
So I have about 25 pages of paper in front of me.
I take notes as we go along, and I'm learning alongside with you.
So, Jill, let's get started.
Do you have an outline or bullet points for us to follow?

(03:21):
Actually, I was thinking about it, and there's really only one thing that I wanna talk about, And that's I would really like the opportunity to change your listeners' perspectives.
I think that that's really important for our long future.
So I would like to convince you that a cosmic perspective is the appropriate way to, interact with the world, the environment, the people that live on this planet.

(03:57):
There are many, many challenges that we face today, that all life on this planet faces today.
And those challenges are not going to be solved by nation states, by individual organizations.
They are going to require global cooperation.

(04:21):
And I think one of the best ways of trying to get us into the frame of mind where global cooperation is possible is to try and put us into a larger context to see us, all life on this planet, in a bigger cosmic framework.

(04:47):
So I like to start talking to people by saying that we need to think about ourselves, about where we are and when we are in a larger framework.
Does that make any sense to you?
Yes.
And I'm gonna call this cosmic perspective as a starting.

(05:10):
So where we are and when we are.
Okay.
So help me to understand this.
Well, if I were talking to you with a bunch of PowerPoint slides, I would start talking about where we are, then I would start with a slide of my my study and my house in Berkeley and the East Bay, San Francisco Bay Area on the West Coast of the United States, on a planet circling a star.

(05:43):
And I would end up looking at the image or showing you the image of the Hubble Deep Field where all of those little white dots are not stars in the sky, but they're galaxies.
And like our galaxy, the Milky Way, they have 100 of billions of stars and planets within them.

(06:04):
And so we are just one of many, and the ones that are smaller and fainter in the Hubble deep field image are the ones that are farther away.
And then we start talking about the tyranny of light speed and when we are and how long it takes information to get from these distant worlds to ourselves.

(06:29):
And then we talk about humans.
Right?
Well, humans trace their lineage, not just back through the centuries of our ancestors and not just back through the millennia of our attempts at architecture and law and governance and not just back through the 2,400,000,000 years over which the atmosphere of the earth has been perfused with oxygen, thanks to the labors of of cyanobacteria.

(07:10):
We go back not just to the formation of our planet and our solar system 4 +1000000000 years ago.
We have to go back farther than that.
We have to go back to huge giant clouds of dust and gas that are filled with the building blocks of life, all of which are the result of the life cycle of previous generations of stars, which have cooked up from hydrogen and helium.

(07:49):
All the carbon, the oxygen, the nitrogen, the sulfur, the phosphorus, the stuff that that makes us.
Right?
Because we are really literally made of stardust.
So it takes a cosmos to make a human.
And I think that that perspective more or less holds up a mirror to us, a mirror in which we see ourselves and everyone else we meet on this planet.

(08:20):
And superficially in that mirror, they may look different.
They may have different skin colors.
They may have different costuming.
They may have different religions and social structures.
But indeed, fundamentally, we're all the same when you put us into this larger context.

(08:45):
We're all earthlings, and that's sort of since I retired become my my hobby horse of trying to teach the world to think of themselves as earthlings.
So if you have any electronic devices that have profiles that talk about who you are, I urge you to go in and change those profiles so that the first thing you say about yourself is that you're an earthling.

(09:13):
And then
you I call myself an earther.
An earther.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because they're they're space people, and I say I'm an earther.
To me, earth is extremely important, and it's a focal point.
Even though I do understand everything you went through, my background is also sciences.
So I do understand that, question then.
You said you've been you've been you got to this point, and you said the social structures that we should see ourselves differently.

(09:41):
You're trying to change the behavior of humans by giving them a perspective.
In your opinion, has that perspective and I this is not a statement of your life work, so please don't take it that way.
Has that perspective been working to the degree that we anticipated and we had hoped or you had hoped over the course of your career where humans have become more connected in the way that you're met you're you're talking?

(10:10):
Well, I can tell you that more people are starting to use the phrase earthling and cosmic perspective.
So at least in my realm of association, it's it's gaining some ground.
Do I think that a native of New Guinea who is living a lifestyle that is quite different than mine ever utters the phrase cosmic perspective?

(10:39):
No.
I don't think so yet.
But if that person has become more connected with a larger environment, than previously and can can begin to understand how their personal actions affect, indeed a larger landscape and why it might be important to work with someone who is slightly different, than their tribe to make things better for everyone.

(11:12):
Yeah, I think that's beginning to happen.
I don't know if I've ever used the word the term cosmic perspective, and and that's not to say I don't understand the word cosmic perspective.
And I've been involved with this project personally now for 8 years.
I was not a beyond Earth person.
I was not an enthusiast.

(11:33):
Kinda fell into Project Moon Hat.
And I as much as I try I mean, the moon looks beautiful, at night on certain nights.
I don't it doesn't pull me.
It it doesn't pull me the way we have people on our team who can't I mean, I I think they their body starts to vibrate when they start thinking about these things, and they're surprised after 8 years that that doesn't happen to me.

(12:03):
How how what's the one thing then that makes someone see this cosmic perspective and makes them transition into a different person?
Have you have you been able to identify that?
Well, I'll tell you what it happened for me.
I was about 8 years old and, spending time with relatives in the, West Coast of Florida in the Keys and walking with my dad along, the water at night and looking up in the sky and seeing all these bright points of light.

(12:40):
And my father had already told talked to me about the fact that these were stars, might be planet systems up there, And I just dig up at that gorgeous night sky and thinking, you know, on a planet around one of those points of light, there may be a small creature walking next to somebody of water with their parent and looking up and seeing my sun as a star in their sky.

(13:10):
Yep.
And that was it for me.
I mean, I could never then thereafter see myself as just a human being on this planet without any connection to the larger environment.
I remember the first time I heard about the overview effect, and we had Frank White on quite some time ago.

(13:34):
And I've heard constantly through the beyond Earth ecosystem that the overview effect and the change that happens to people.
And I think back in 1968 when that happened, it was believed with the pale blue dot that the world would be a a different place.
If everybody understood that we're all connected, we take care of the environment, we take care of the land, We'd learn to love one another, that the overview effect would give us a commonality of the species.

(14:04):
Animals would be taken care of.
The list is endless.
I'm now 59.
I don't look out and feel that while there are people working on it, I can't discount that.
I don't feel that that is the the case.
So having this experience, I can understand.
Are you finding that other people are making that transitional effect where the cosmic perspective, the the understanding of being an, an earth like I see.

(14:36):
Is changing their behavior enough that they are taking care of earth the way it should potentially should be without being an environmentalist in the in the way of saying it, just taking care of where we live?
Not yet.
Not enough.
But I do think that, we are very privileged to be at an age and at a point in history where we can bring into people's lives images that place us in a different context.

(15:12):
And I'm thinking about all of the telescopes that we've built and all of the spacecraft that we've launched that have brought us a way of looking at our surroundings in a, in a manner that no one else has been able to do in prior years.
Right?
We actually begin to understand this this concept that it does take a cosmos to make a human.

(15:40):
We can't, we can't be here without all of the interconnectedness of, the the bodies around us and the chemistry and the the history and evolution of biology in a in a universe.

(16:04):
And and people used to argue vociferously about what to believe about life beyond earth.
And I feel fortunate that, I'm at a point in time where I think it's appropriate to try and change the active verb from believe to explore, because it doesn't really matter what you believe or I believe the universe is as it is.

(16:38):
And so I think it's really important to explore it And to understand from things that we can see out there, what might be different futures for life on this planet.
You know, it's astronomy is kind of like having a family photo album.

(17:02):
And so let's assume that some others creature from another world ends up here, and they're they're wanting to understand how we work.
And they go through a family album and see that we started out small, and we grew, and we changed, and we aged, and eventually, we disappeared.

(17:30):
That's what astronomers do.
They look at the sky and they find different examples of phenomena that represent different stages of the life of something that we wanna understand.
And, it we couldn't do a lot of this before.

(17:51):
You know, it's been 400 years.
We've been using trying to use telescopes to understand what's going on out there.
And I think that the fact that we are ever closer to understanding some of the questions that we've been asking and that we can share those answers with our friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues.

(18:17):
I think that just I can't see myself in the same way that I did before that 8 year old looked up and thought I might be a star.
My son might be a star in someone else's universe.
So
I this was these interviews are not done on a timely basis, meaning we have to have one this week and next and next.

(18:43):
That's not our intention.
And I I would not say ironically.
I would say there's a happenstance that's happening here.
We're having 2 back to back programs.
We just had someone on the name, and he'll be going up shortly.
He has about 350,000 followers on YouTube.
He's extremely bright, knows his content, knows his material.
And he brought up in the last interview, he does not believe at all that there's any species besides humans in the universe because he believes mathematically if the if they had started to travel, they would have eventually found our planet.

(19:24):
What's and the reason I'm asking I'm going in this direction is you obviously believe that there's extraterrestrial life set to use part of all of that.
How do you believe that echoes that that storyline happened throughout the universe?
Well, again, you're using the verb that I dislike, the believe verb, when I have thoughts.

(19:46):
Right?
And
I will try to eliminate it.
That's okay.
You know, the folks at the, at Oxford, the UK, have done some literature searches.
And they've looked at this thing we call the Drake equation, which I hate calling it an equation because you can't solve anything with that.

(20:11):
It's just a way to organize our ignorance.
And there's a term in there which purports to be the fraction of all the potentially habitable places where life actually starts.
And they've done a literature search and come up with the fact that guesses for this term differ by 100 of orders of magnitude.

(20:43):
I mean, it's really ridiculous.
So it's just there's no information there.
We don't know.
And I think that it's worth exploring.
So go ahead.
Sorry.
No.
It's just when we look at what happened here on this planet, given enough time, it seems to me that it it's plausible that it could have helped it happened elsewhere or something like it could have helped it happened elsewhere.

(21:19):
And there's an awful lot of time and space for these experiments to possibly, bear fruit or maybe never have.
But, you know, the problem is that we when we talk about, as people do, about something called the Fermi Paradox, which is that, you know, if any and it's what you were alluding to a bit, if anywhere and any when life had appeared somewhere else, then given our example, it's such a short period of time, cosmically speaking, to go from appearance of life to technology and even perhaps technology capable of traveling or moving between the stars, that, they would have been here.

(22:14):
But they're not.
Right?
And therefore, there can't ever have been anywhere or any when another origin of life.
And I think that the policy with that is to make the statement, but they're not here.
Because we can't say that.

(22:35):
Right?
We can say we've explored certain parameters, certain physical variables, but we haven't explored everything.
That would mean that we knew all of physics that there is to know.
And we don't.
Right?
We're learning new things every day.
So I'm not impressed by people who argue that because they're not here, they can't ever have been.

(23:02):
I my take on the call, because it was brought up, and it was, at first, a gentleman's bet.
Would you believe that there'd be life on another outside of Earth?
And I said, let's make it more serious.
Let's make it like a child or yourself, and he didn't wanna go there.
And I said, I do believe that some place out there and just because someone's not here or something or some entity or organism is not here, it does not mean it does not exist.

(23:31):
So I'm kind of in the camp that I believe that in the size, scale, and scope of the universe, there is that possibility that that is that there is something out there.
I do believe that there is something out there that has happened.
With with that in mind, and let's just take the track that I've that we've take you started taking that there is.

(23:53):
What do you hope or what what behavior would you anticipate from individuals who do grasp the the construct that you're offering.
I don't know if I'm saying that the right way, but I think you understand.
In our project, people will often ask me, David, are you gonna also create peace on earth?

(24:18):
I mean, that sounds like a big ask of anybody.
And I say to them, look.
You take 2 heterosexual men, 1 heterosexual woman, and you put them on an island.
Will you have peace?
And everybody laughs.
It's just a a quick visual.
And they say, that's not our directive.
We're not here to to make peace on earth.

(24:39):
The challenge is humanity is struggling now.
We are struggling with what we have defined, the 6 mega challenges if you watch the videos, climate change, mass extinction, ecosystem collapses happening all over the world.
There is, displacement, unrest, social, political, economic, religious, technological, and we've have explosive impact folks, things such as deforestation of the, of the rainforest, the pollution of our oceans.

(25:07):
There's a lot of activity going on that in my lifetime, it was a pretty good lifetime, and that's changing the way in which we live.
Even the United Nations came out with just a day or 2 ago, and you don't have to believe everything they put out.
I'm not saying that.
It's that they mentioned that we will go buy 1.5 c in terms of temperature, and I've been saying it's a freight train gonna miss the station.

(25:31):
Do you in time, do you think that the cosmic perspective, if people understood it, will we get those behaviors that we need to make the transition into a new way of life?
Well, if we were to discover evidence of someone else's technology somewhere else, right, And that technology could not be less advanced than the technology that we on earth command today, because they wouldn't be detectable at a distance.

(26:14):
Mhmm.
So if we detect someone, something, some evidence of technology out there, they're by default older than we are.
Right?
And so somehow, if they're there, they made it through this, technological adolescence that we find ourselves struggling with, all of the things that you were you were mentioning.

(26:41):
They found a way to become an old technology.
And because they did, that means that we can as well.
Somehow, you know, I don't expect them to show up and tell us how to change the deforestation or stop the deforestation.
Or maybe it's Matthew McConaughey behind a series of books talking

(27:04):
to them.
There you go.
There you go.
Anyway, just I think that is the most hopeful thing about this search for technosignatures is When that Should it succeed, we understand that there is a path to a long future even if we don't know what it is.
When we see the the on earth, when we see the pyramids, certain types of activity on earth that we've are unexplainable.

(27:33):
And I I'm not I'm I'm asking the question when it comes it comes to mind.
It's not this is nothing planned.
As you know, I don't didn't know we were gonna go with this.
Does that where humans today can discount or count on that?
When you look at something like the pyramids, do you see that in that same technological advances that someone could have been on earth and help to create and do, was it, 28,000,000 stones put in a certain in certain cons position where they're you can't even put a razor blade between them and it ends perfectly at the top where we couldn't even do that today.

(28:10):
Does that fall under your category of something technologically advanced that makes us think differently?
Well, first of all, I think that we, discredit people's living millennia ago.
We don't give them enough credit, and we don't understand their point of view and how they dealt with time.

(28:39):
There are amazing things that can be done if there's only enough time to work on it.
So, no, I don't think that it required, another technological species to produce the pyramids or the figures on the plains of Nazca.

(29:00):
I think that humans have had that capability to do amazing things for a very long time.
And part of it is I really think their concept of time.
And if you're not trying to, you know, catch the train to New York City to go to your job at a brokerage house and just constantly rushing to get somewhere else.

(29:29):
If you are doing something, in a way that your ancestors did and that you would expect that your offspring would do if you had this much larger vision of time.
I think that you could imagine that humans could do things that we find unexplainable today.

(29:58):
I don't know.
It's not my feeling.
It's just No.
It's just it's a it's just a thought.
Our project is 40 years.
I had we had someone on who's joining our team this morning, and he said, I it's so bold for someone to have a 40 year plan.
And I I I was kind of taken aback because it's not that far away from that, and yet we're leveraging time.

(30:24):
So the reason I asked the question is because I guess what's, the challenge that I'm having in my in my head is that I would love for what you'd like to see happen to happen, and I'm trying to bridge that gap.
I'm trying to bridge the gap fast enough so that we don't have our own existential, extinguishing moment on earth.

(30:49):
Maybe not all no.
Not all humans disappear.
How do we get from teaching some kids?
And I'm not, again, belittling.
I'm taking 1010, 8,000,000,000 people from teaching a few children on the planet certain things and the expectation of life to thrive.

(31:12):
How do we bridge that faster if there was a threat at the end or a a timeline that you might have that's, very long?
How do we get there and make it work?
I'm still struggling with that as a person.
Yeah.
One of the things is I think you listen to the kids.
You don't just teach them.

(31:35):
If we're fortunate, the generations that are coming up have slightly different points of view than our generation.
And they can perhaps think out of the box isn't isn't even enough of a no.

(31:57):
They they they can think in different ways.
They can see the threat to their world in a way that we didn't see it as we were creating the threats.
And they understand this existential, difficult threat that they're born into, and they want to change.

(32:21):
And I think it's, you know, there's so much connectivity across the globe today that wasn't there in the past, and our young people are very good consumers of that connectivity.
They expect to have discussions with their peers in Iceland or or Germany or India or even, the the most remote locations.

(32:59):
These kids know that there is connection possible.
They know that the techniques and the technologies to, make the best use of that connectivity are changing and changing very fast.
So what they use today to talk to their peers in, South Africa will not be the tools that they'll be using 5 or 10 years from now.

(33:27):
And so they have, you know, move fast and break things is part of their life cycle.
Right?
And I think that's they just won't demand better, better environments.
They're not gonna sit still and let the world melt.

(33:50):
Right?
You take a porcelain vase and you crash it, and I know it can be put together back into a very expensive piece of of of an artifact or how would they label it?
Yeah.
Because I am yeah.
I'm trying to get this a hopeful part of it that, yes, that these individuals I have 2 young children, the 2829.
I call them young.

(34:11):
And they 29 again.
Yeah.
They are very different in their approach, how they look at the world, than a lot of the peers that I see out there.
They're not the they never were the on social and didn't spend all that time trying to be those individuals that I I I fear out there.

(34:36):
Again, going back to that question, what's the behavior that while you're teaching these this cosmic perspective, while you're teaching the youth of the world or individuals of the world to see that they come from, space matter, universe matter?
What are you hoping or what what are the behaviors you'd like to see from that?

(35:02):
And does that happen?
So I'm giving you 2.
I apologize.
Does it happen?
Well, my granddaughter
What are they first?
And then does it happen?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They, my granddaughter gets it.
And her her view of how she should be in the world and what she should expect, vastly different than mine at her age, 20.

(35:34):
You're taking me deep into philosophy, which just isn't my forte.
That's okay.
Well, I'm I'm asking you I'm asking you a personal question more than I am a a scientific question because you're there's so much out there about what you've spoken about and what you've accomplished, and those are all great.
I do always try to find where someone comes from.

(35:56):
I get asked all the time, why are you doing this?
You you're not a space person or and I tell them it's not a love.
I don't wake up in the morning and love this.
I do it because I'm it's it's who I am today.
It's part of who I am.
So I'm asking questions to yeah.
I'm pushing a different set of buttons.
Yeah.

(36:18):
Well, again, it all goes back to that 8 year old little girl with her dad on the beach looking up.
And once once you internalize that concept, I don't see how you can ever unlearn it.
The question is how do you get enough people to get that synergistic approach, and what behaviors would we anticipate from that so that it does change?

(36:49):
Well, I think you and and I and all of my colleagues are working pretty hard to try and share this knowledge that we've been able to gather through the use of some amazing technologies.
And I think that today, the scientists that I know, engineers that I know, mathematicians, are, far more attuned to telling the world.

(37:23):
Right?
And not just hiding away in a in a corner doing brilliant things.
They they really do, at least my acquaintances, want to share what they think or argue about with someone who has a different point of view about what they think.
And I think that that connection again, it is, can't I can't I can quote it, but I can't validate it.

(37:55):
But Steven Pinker is fond of saying, you know, we're kinder and gentler than we've ever been as a species, and that's because in his point of view of some formalized governance structure to bring rules to our interactions.
And if there is this, cultural evolution that is as, encompassing and is ever present as biological evolution, then I think that's that's hopeful.

(38:33):
And how you make it faster?
Well, as I said, kids are much more connected than we ever were.
They have a sense that there are others on the other side of the world that are working to change the rules, to be more beneficial to their future.

(38:59):
So we should listen to the kids.
I 2 quick analogies or things that kind of conflict with that.
One of them was when I was growing up, I lived in a place called Middletown, New York, not far from Woodstock.
Yeah.
Peace, love, rock and roll, love the world.
Everybody gets along.

(39:20):
Everybody will do well.
That generation grew up to be the greediest, the most self centered, the most consumeristic society that we've had.
They became the people who did the things that we're, to some degree, having to unravel.
And I was in Luxembourg.
I don't speak often on this topic.

(39:43):
We're not a a very public group.
I was asked to speak in Luxembourg Space Group, at a conference.
They just had it again last week, and I was sold.
They said you're gonna have 500 people in the audience.
We had so many people come.
It was so amazing the year before, and I said, sure.
I'll do it.
I I was living in Luxembourg.
I said, sure.

(40:04):
I'll do this program.
And during that time, 22 companies, you probably know the name, Deep Space Industries and Planet Resources, while they did not file bankruptcy, they had to be acquired probably so that they didn't have the appearance of filing.
They ran out of money and prospects.
So I'm going to not give them the credit that people have given them.

(40:25):
And there were about 70 people in this audience, and everybody's talking about this is the time.
This is the age.
This is when it's going, all the speakers.
And I said, let's travel back to 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74.
I bet you if you went to a conference, they all said the exact same things that you were saying.

(40:49):
What's to say in 50 years we won't be sitting in the same room with 70 people instead of 500, and we've not made that transition?
Well, what's we need to think about what would be the consequences of that.

(41:15):
So 70 years is a short time period.
And suppose we haven't made the transition to kinder and gentler cultural evolution kind of future in 70 years.
Is that really fatal?
Could we do it slower or are these global challenges that we're facing so imminent that if we don't do it today, it's not gonna get done and sayonara?

(41:50):
I don't know the answer to that.
There are certainly things that are that are pressing and on a very short timescale, but there are also there are also some successes.
You know, we fished out huge volumes of the ocean.
And yet with protection, they've revived.

(42:16):
And fishing in those areas are is even more vibrant than it ever was.
So we can make some changes on an appropriate time scale.
What are we gonna do about the rise of sea level?
Can we learn how to defend against that using technologies or using some sorts of biological mediation.

(42:51):
I don't know, but people are thinking about it.
And again, it's the kids and they've gotten the message, I think, that their future is on the line.
We've screwed it up.
You're absolutely right.
Peace, love, and all that.
Right?
But now we're seeing the consequences of it.

(43:13):
And when people think about their grandkids, it becomes important to them.
What kind of changes can they make that will make the world better for their descendants?
I'm an optimistic person.

(43:34):
I get up every day.
We work on this project.
And if you did get a chance to watch the videos, we are working.
We have teams of people around the world.
We are looking to solve these.
When I'm asking these questions, my mind some all often to find an answer, I go negative to go positive.
I have to.
I I go positive.
I I run into a wall.
I go negative.
Oh, and then I go positive again.

(43:55):
Mhmm.
I don't see I honestly don't see having lived and worked in over 50 countries around the world, lived in 3 countries, worked in over 50.
I don't see people caring about their grandchildren the way you're talking about.
I see people talk about it, and yet they're still driving the cars, using the phones, doing the things.

(44:18):
And I'm not I'm not a reductionist.
I don't think we're gonna make it that way.
I don't feel that people are changing their lives in a way fast enough to overcome some of the obstacles that will allow us to get past what could be very challenging for our children.
Again, a one degree we saw this year.
It was not a great year for climate change, but it was also not a great year for all the other 6 mega challenges.

(44:45):
When we how do you get if you're if we're 1 degree sea rise, not sea like sea level, 1 degree Celsius rise.
Celsius.
Yeah.
I I just saying that for the sake of being more clear.
That's not an error.
That's not an easily transitional thing to achieve.
And if you don't have friends in India or Pakistan, if you've never lived in that belt in the Middle East or worked in the areas through Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, with 17,500 islands in Indonesia, and the chances of them having challenges

(45:24):
are
astronomically high.
I I I'm trying to figure out how to get a society, maybe this is my burden, to get enough people on planet Earth to create enough wave so that these grandparents that you're talking about actually do care that much about their children to even get involved in something that would make change.

(45:51):
Does that make sense?
Well,
I, I have a hard time believing, and because I don't know.
I've not been there.
I've not lived there.
I have a hard time believing that on those 1700 islands that the residents don't worry about what's going to be the the world that their grandchildren inherit.

(46:23):
I mean, they may not say it that way, but they're going to be working to to make their local environment better if they can.
I don't know.
I Yeah.
No.
It's it's a it's a hope.
I I I some a friend of mine went to the Caribbean, and he says, you know what?

(46:46):
You buy when you see when the menu is given to you in Caribbean for, on the menu for fish.
He says you see salmon on the menu.
The reason is the port around the Caribbean, many of the islands are the island has got so much pollution that they can't fish.
They have to go too far out.
And, yes, people are talking about these things.

(47:07):
And I'm going back to
David, the counter to that is the place is the hope spots that have been protected.
Right?
They can fish, and they can use that fishing industry, as a source of of wealth.
But they it it has to be protected, and somebody has to start that, and people have started that.

(47:29):
Right?
And I think it must be certainly less than 5% of the ocean volume has been protected.
But where where it's where it's happening, it's working.
So how
do you accelerate it?
How do you accelerate that?
And I'm trying to and I liked I loved your topic when we came up this title, the cosmic perspective.

(47:52):
And how do I'm trying to leverage it in I'm trying to leverage it.
Okay.
Let's take this cosmic perspective.
It hasn't worked for me.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people.
There are plenty of people I run into.
Oh, I'm I'm a lifelong space person.
I watch everything.
Hasn't worked for me, but that's okay because we only need a percentage of people to change.

(48:14):
How do we find, uncover, discover, move this cosmic perspective 2 or 3% faster?
How do we it's not just going to a school.
And, again, I your work when I told someone today on our team you were going to be on this call, the person said, I can't wait.

(48:36):
I can't wait.
You you've your reputation disappointed.
I know they're not going to be because they know me, and they know that I do push and I do ask.
Zubrin said things on the podcast that people have said they've never heard.
So I'm really so tell me what you would teach somebody if you're gonna teach somebody a cosmic perspective.

(48:57):
We were going to act we were going to take a group of a 100 people of all ages and put them in a room.
You'd have a few slides.
I understand that.
How do you get them over that hump that they they behaviorally change and there is an activity or result from that work?

(49:19):
Is that a good question or a bad question?
No.
It's a good question.
And, you know, I I don't have a good answer.
I told you that the that the whole point of, my having a discussion with you is to perhaps change the perspective
Okay.
Listeners.
And, I mean, that is what you need to do.

(49:41):
So I think that what
Can I can I toss an idea out at you then?
Sure.
Okay.
I think that the challenge for me is beyond Earth is so big, and we talk about science research and exploration to such a large degree, then unless you study it, you don't really see the implications of what happens on Earth.

(50:08):
And I think we have to do a better job of getting the youth to tie or not the 2 the information to tie to an understanding of their lives here and that it's that this does exist and it's a piece.
I'm I actually just drew a pie little pie chart, and I'm taking the cosmic perspective.

(50:35):
And I'm saying, okay.
If the cosmic perspective is put in there, which I never really think about in that way, but the way you described it, it's true.
Yes.
We come from all these particles.
We all come together, and whatever was here in the beginning is here today, so we are a member of that.
And then we there's a little I just drew a plus.
You can't see what I'm drawing.
I added a plus, and I say, so what's the next plus?

(50:58):
What's the plus after that?
Well, what it might be is that we stop talking about the challenges, the problems, and instead, we focus on the successes and try and, inspire young people to see that it's possible to have success and that they could be part of creating that success.

(51:29):
We yeah.
We do tend to talk about the doom and gloom because it is pretty gloomy.
But if we could start engaging with young people about the successes here and there and and try and encourage them to see how they could be part of improving those successes or expanding them.

(51:58):
So
No.
That that's you you went in a good direction because I wasn't thinking in that vein, but that's kind of what we're what I think about when I talk to individuals.
Mhmm.
Because I don't know if they're a beyond earth person.
And I use beyond earth because space is really a tough one.
It's just so big.
I see anything beyond earth is I say to individuals, okay.

(52:21):
I don't know if you know this, but cloud computing everything we're doing your whole life is cloud computing, and that came out of work that came out of individuals wanting to get to the moon, getting to be under.
I say to them, if you wear glasses, scratch resistant lenses came out of someone working on water purification.

(52:42):
And every scratch resistant glass that you have today for all the people working to keep your life the way it is, they couldn't see without it.
The glasses would break or cordless power tools, or I talk about weather, simple things such as looking at the weather.
So did you realize that every time you look at the weather, you're looking up?
And that whether you're looking good or not, there's a farmer who's using that to do predictive analytics or a person who's running a ship across an ocean.

(53:10):
And almost invariably, people said, I didn't think about it in that way.
Mhmm.
So I think there's a layering because I I'd like to add cosmic perspective someplace in what we're doing, and I think it's a layering.
And maybe our our formula for the layer cake, let's think of it as a cake, the formulary for the layer cake might be missing some pieces or some flavor.

(53:37):
Does does that make sense?
Yeah.
I'm I have a hard I have a hard time personally talking about how everything will change if we find evidence of someone else's technology because I can't promise that we will succeed on any time scale.

(54:05):
There is the possibility that we are a cosmic miracle.
Right?
And that this is the only place in the universe where chemistry and physics created biology, and that survived.
So unable to promise that if we do this or if we do that or if we expand in this direction, we will succeed in finding evidence of someone else's technology.

(54:36):
So I'm I'm sitting there on the border between science and religion because if I told you that I knew the answer, that would be religion.
I'm not going there.
Right?
But science can't promise the result.
It can only say, this is how much more we can explore.

(54:58):
This is what we might learn.
And, you know, historically, we have built our newest telescopes or newest, facilities, by arguing to funding agencies that these new capabilities are gonna solve these old problems, x, y, and

(55:20):
z.
Yeah.
And we have the great fortune to have a legacy that says, you know, when you build a new instrument that looks at the universe in a new way, opens up a new portion of phase space, the most important thing that that instrument does historically is to discover something that you never expected.

(55:44):
And I'd like to just continue building on that legacy.
It's been working for 400 years.
So I'm I'm assuming you get the same question I do.
With all the challenges on earth, why are they calling problems?
I don't like the word problem.
I use With all the challenges on earth, why are we spending all this money on what you just said?

(56:09):
Right.
First of all What's your answer to a person who says that?
And I've gotta believe you've been asked that on stage or in environments where it's a little bit more uncomfortable.
Sure.
But the way you asked it was all this money with an implication that we're spending huge fraction of our global wealth on this.
I I get that.
I get that question.

(56:30):
So, yeah, that's why I'm asking it.
Yeah.
And the answer is because when we've done so in the past, it has rewarded us with opportunities and capabilities and luxuries and, sustainabilities that we didn't have before.

(56:51):
Can you give me a few examples?
No.
I mean, you ran through a bunch of examples of things that come from technologies that were pursued for other reasons.
How about how about paradigm shifting wise?
I mean, we

(57:12):
I mean, we used to think that we would we were doing what our parents had done and that our descendants would be doing the same thing.
And now we understand that things are changing incredibly rapidly, that whatever we start doing as a first job out of university or out of high school is very unlikely to be what we end up doing at the end of our lives.

(57:47):
And so we need to, I think we what we need to be teaching individuals, young people, is to embrace change, not for its own sake, but because it is happening and we need to thrive within it.
All of us need to thrive.

(58:08):
And so, don't have a static point of view.
Again, when you look up at the sky, I don't understand how you can't how you cannot feel the immensity and the beauty and the the reality that we are part of a big cosmic, environment.

(58:39):
And, you know, that that assumes that you have the luxury of having time to look up at the sky.
Yes.
And Not everybody does.
Doesn't.
Yeah.
I my background is biology, chemistry, physics.
I didn't look up, but I often looked inside.
It was biology.
I was premed, organic chemistry, physics was all part of that.
So my courses were the biology of vertebrates, so I was looking down.

(59:03):
Mine were about plants and species.
Mine mine was, I guess, not looking up.
Mine was looking sideways and down.
Mhmm.
And so you're not unlike some people I know who had the story.
Their parents had to look up.
One of our team members in Germany, he watched the landing on the moon, and that was the end for him.

(59:27):
That was it.
Once he saw it, his parents let him stay up.
He got to see it, and his world changed.
I saw it, and I I did.
My mom threw them out, but I had the newspapers.
I saved them for 20 years, and my mom decided they weren't necessary anymore.
She just tossed them.
I saved those first moon landings, but I didn't have that.

(59:50):
That never led pushed me that way.
I I had a saltwater aquarium because I had a teacher in school who was teaching about saltwater species, and I decided to have an aquarium.
So maybe maybe that different well, that makes us human, but I don't have that.
I don't look up, and I would love to.
I try.
I try.

(01:00:11):
I really do.
Say, this is it.
You know?
What do you do?
Rev up an engine?
Do you take an Oreo cookie?
Is there something that I can do to turn on that passion for that?
No.
I just
I think that going to an isolated, distant, dark site, is a pretty motivating experience.

(01:00:38):
And, you know, you say you've been dealing with biology, but I I used to think that the only way that we would be able to, determine what was contingent and what was necessary in biology was to find another example of a biology that, you know, a second genesis that evolved independently.

(01:01:07):
But now I think that the tools that you have with synthetic biology and artificial intelligence may get us there without having to find a second genesis.
Never never thought about that.
Yes.

(01:01:28):
And so that's your looking up.
Right?
So, what did and I don't I'm not asking to comment on the person.
I'm asking you to comment.
You probably saw the William Shatner, little splurge that he had about the darkness and death being up.
And No.
You didn't see that?

(01:01:49):
No.
There's a William Shatner wrote this piece after he had gone up in Amazon's, and Blues rocket.
And he
more or less thought to himself, and I'm I'm probably for everybody everybody's listening to this.
They know all the words by heart.
I do not.
He thought he was going to get up there and feel this elation, and all he felt was coldness and death.

(01:02:16):
And he he realized that everything he wanted, everything he thought he was pursuing is really on earth, and it's death above.
That's I saw it.
It's like, woah.
To boldly go where no man has gone before, to travel to to different, planets and and learn about different species and and all of that.

(01:02:45):
And it is a wow moment where he's he's turning the tides and the he's turning the camera back on earth just as if in 19 was 80 68 when the overview effect when that photograph was taken and I found the copy I have at some place, it was actually there was a there was an argument in the capsule.

(01:03:07):
They they weren't supposed to.
It wasn't the mission to take a picture of Earth.
And there is a dialogue between, the astronauts at the time saying, no.
That's not what we're supposed to be doing.
And the blue marble picture was taken anyway.
Yeah.
Bill Anders took that.
He wasn't gonna yeah.
He wasn't gonna pass it out.
No.

(01:03:28):
No.
It's it's, you know, it's a unique, absolutely unique perspective.
And why wouldn't you try and capture it and share it?
Bill Anderson, I I so I don't remember, formally okay.
I didn't the story, have you heard that story where they had not agreed to take it?

(01:03:51):
Mhmm.
They took it anyway?
Okay.
So I'm I'm correct in what I had found.
Do you believe the overview effect is enough to make change for humans?
Well, it's better than it's better to try with that than to suggest that people limit their horizons to what they can see at the tip of their nose.

(01:04:30):
Yeah.
I think it's absolutely something that doesn't maybe inspire everyone.
But to the extent that we can share it with a lot of people, it'll stick in some places.
And then I think that the outcome is better than if we didn't.

(01:04:55):
Alright.
You had mentioned earlier that the educational side, you're trying to make sure young individuals what's your big challenge today?
What's the thing that you're trying on your plate that you wanna see accomplished that you feel is the next big thing for you?
Well, again, it's very personal.

(01:05:18):
I've been working on this project for decades, and it's been a roller coaster in terms of funding.
And that's a that's a mini perspective because whether or not SETI gets funded this year or next year or gets terminated by a senator, doesn't really light a fire under many other people, but it certainly does me.

(01:05:42):
And so personally, I've set a challenge to try and think about this as being a potentially multi generational project and then find a way to provide a little bit of stable funding multi generationally to keep this sort of thing moving forward.

(01:06:05):
So we're always exploring.
And the universities long ago figured out this idea of how to fund into the future, and it's called an endowment.
And so my personal challenge these days is to try and find a way to raise an endowment so that we can continue to do this into the future as long as it makes sense, as long as we don't decide that we've looked enough and the answer is negative because it's, to me, a very, monumentous decision.

(01:06:43):
And I just like to see this go forward in a in a smooth fashion.
You know, we we always try and get the best and the brightest young people to come work with us because we want new ideas and new thoughts about what a techno signature might be.
And so
What is a techno signature?
Oh, well, it's evidence of someone else's technology.

(01:07:05):
And I think I have slides which we can show in a in a couple of minutes.
But, so here's the pitch.
It's really hard.
You say to someone, oh, we really want you to come work on this exciting project, but you may not have success in your lifetime.
That's a hard one personally.

(01:07:27):
But then there's the second shoe to fall, which is an oh, by the way, I may not be able to make salary next month.
Right?
So getting people engaged with us and doing new things is, is hard, And we benefit from all of the amazing discoveries about exoplanets and extremophiles that have, blossomed in the last decade.

(01:07:59):
So the slides I sent you Yeah.
Are a slide of the TRAPPIST, an artist an artist concept of what the 7 Earth sized planets orbiting a little red dwarf star in a system called TRAPPIST 1 might look like.
And so the artist working with a physicist or an astronomer envisioned these planets all about Earth's size, but at different distances from the center star, the artist envisioned these worlds as looking different.

(01:08:35):
At at the very least, their equilibrium temperature should be different.
So the planets farther out should be colder than the planets closer in.
Yep.
We haven't seen this system yet.
But when we get the capability to observe this system, what if we found that 2 or 3 or maybe all of them were not at different temperatures, but they were all at the same equilibrium temperature.

(01:09:07):
They all looked pretty much the same.
That would indicate that there was some engineering that had taken place.
This could be a techno signature.
Some technologically capable species had decided that they wanted more real estate and had hopped over to the next world and transformed it to be like their home world.

(01:09:34):
And this is the kind of thing that we never thought about when SETI was getting started.
Right?
We were looking for radio signals and then, optical signals.
We were looking for people's deliberate creatures, deliberate actions to gain our attention.
But a techno signature is something that could be quite different, than deliberate actions.

(01:09:59):
It could be the manifestation of something being done for some technological species' own reasons.
And so I I like using that word, techno signature, in in parallel with the word that's more commonly used, which is biosignature, looking for life, and I think that we need to expand our thinking.

(01:10:26):
That's actually a cool word when you look at it as a contrary because you don't have to look for the biology.
You could look at the symptoms or the the modifications that would have come from that biosignature.
Right.
And you probably they'd be more prevalent just as if our world is different or changing over time.

(01:10:48):
Do you feel that the the Webb Telescope will give is it big enough?
Is it large enough?
Powerful enough?
Even I know it can go the the reach is amazing.
Do you think that it can give us enough of that information to make those observations?
I think that the web is a good step, but I think it's gonna take something that's quite a bit bigger because context is gonna be all important, and you're gonna need fine grain, knowledge of the context of that solar system.

(01:11:20):
So Webb is great.
Webb is wonderful, and we're gonna learn, as I previously said, I think we're gonna learn from Webb things that we never expected it to do.
And that's great.
And I wish I'd be around for another 50 years, so I'll see it happening.
How much money do you how much money does it take to run, Sedi?

(01:11:44):
When you say you run out of money, you're not sure in the next year, how much do you always look for as an annual budget?
You're gonna laugh, but we're talking about a couple of $1,000,000.
And I
don't think we could you know, people ask me, suppose I gave you, a $100,000,000, what would you do?
And I'm I'm I I'm saying, I could use some of it and expand what we're doing and do a bit of innovation, try some things that we're not doing, but there isn't I can't give you a road map to spend 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in a year.

(01:12:31):
Build better telescopes for sure.
With some of them in space for sure.
That that runs up the budget, but can I justify it?
Can I say, well, if I do this, we're gonna learn that?
As I said, the history is is a bit yeah.
We learn new things, and that's great, but the best things that we learn are often those that we didn't know we were gonna find.

(01:12:55):
I I love the ambiguity of a lot of the the way you phrase things has a sense of ambiguity to them, where you believe that we should, and at the same time, you're not sure.
And
Well, I don't know the answer to the question.
No.
I understand that.

(01:13:16):
I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
I see.
It's it's not there's not a definitive nature to this.
I I was in Technion, and I don't have a PhD.
So you normally have a PhD to speak there.
And I gave a presentation on what we were doing.
And when I was done, there was a guy, I think let's say he was in his late sixties.

(01:13:38):
He walks up to me, and he said, I never once thought which you've already offered several times.
I never once thought that the work that I'm doing may never be used in my lifetime or ever be used.
And he he really was shocked by that thought.

(01:14:01):
And so what I had proposed to him in our system, look.
You you should work on that.
Can you help us work on something such as Project Moon Hut?
Could you work on something that might have a more direct correlation?
And he he agreed to that because that gave him some.
He did talk about his grandchildren, and he didn't feel after he was done.

(01:14:26):
He said, I I I don't even know if anything that I I look at far distant galaxies.
I do things that are so far away that might never do anything for us.
So it was your ambiguity, I think, is a surprising thing, which I did not expect.
And now that I've heard you and hear where you're coming from, I get it.

(01:14:47):
Okay.
Well, David, I'm gonna have to sign off because I've left my husband on his own for
No.
No.
That's okay.
I I thank you.
Let me just end this here.
I will give you our last little piece here.
So for those of you out there, I wanna thank you for taking the time today to listen in.
I do hope that you learn something that can make a difference in your life and the lives of others.

(01:15:09):
Again, Project Moon Hut is where we're looking to establish a box, the roof, and the door on the moon to the accelerated development of Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and paradigm shifting from that endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.
And, Jill, what is the single best way to connect with you?
Well, I hate to say it because I already get 2 100, 250 emails a day.

(01:15:35):
Yeah.
There's no way.
Don't reach out to me.
No.
Carter@sedi.org.
Okay.
And I'd love to connect with anybody too.
It's david@moonhut.org.
You can connect with us at Twitter at at project moon hut.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we're all there.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.
Hello, everybody.
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You've personally just experienced information age and what what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you might now, right now, be living through a transitional change, the changes to the age of infinite.
An age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, but by a redefined lifestyle consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be made possible through a new construct where the moon and earth or as we call it, Mearth, will create a new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into the infinite future.
The ingredients for an amazing sci fi story that will come to life in your lifetime.
This podcast is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, h u t, we were named by NASA, through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
If you go to the website www.projectmoonhot.org, top right hand corner, there are a few videos.
Video number 1 and number 3 are what we recommend that you take a look at if you're interested in exploring more with us.
Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic, cosmic perspectives translate into an opportunity for all life to thrive.
Today, we have with us Jill Tarter.
Jill, how are you today?
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
Good.
As always, we do a very brief bio.
Jill's, CV is extremely long.
Jill is the Emeritus chair of SETI Research and the SETI Institute, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
She's received her bachelor of engineering physics degree, with distinction from Cornell University, which is right around the corner from me, and her master's degree and a PhD in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Now she's also in 2004.
She would Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
And in 2,012, one times 25 most influential people in space.
And before we get started, I had to add this about 6 months ago.
Individuals who are listening thought that we had planned out our podcast.
That's the furthest from the truth.
The way we work is this, and it's quite simple.
We get referred to somebody or call somebody, connect with somebody, and we have a conversation about potentially creating a podcast.
The guest and I speak.
We decide on a title.
The title can take anywhere from 15, 45 minutes to, say, 3 hours.
Then that individual goes out on their own, and we come back the day of the program.
So Jill and I have not discussed anything about the content that Jill's gonna be speaking with us today about, and we start the program.
It's that simple.
So I have about 25 pages of paper in front of me.
I take notes as we go along, and I'm learning alongside with you.
So, Jill, let's get started.
Do you have an outline or bullet points for us to follow?
Actually, I was thinking about it, and there's really only one thing that I wanna talk about, And that's I would really like the opportunity to change your listeners' perspectives.
I think that that's really important for our long future.
So I would like to convince you that a cosmic perspective is the appropriate way to, interact with the world, the environment, the people that live on this planet.
There are many, many challenges that we face today, that all life on this planet faces today.
And those challenges are not going to be solved by nation states, by individual organizations.
They are going to require global cooperation.
And I think one of the best ways of trying to get us into the frame of mind where global cooperation is possible is to try and put us into a larger context to see us, all life on this planet, in a bigger cosmic framework.
So I like to start talking to people by saying that we need to think about ourselves, about where we are and when we are in a larger framework.
Does that make any sense to you?
Yes.
And I'm gonna call this cosmic perspective as a starting.
So where we are and when we are.
Okay.
So help me to understand this.
Well, if I were talking to you with a bunch of PowerPoint slides, I would start talking about where we are, then I would start with a slide of my my study and my house in Berkeley and the East Bay, San Francisco Bay Area on the West Coast of the United States, on a planet circling a star.
And I would end up looking at the image or showing you the image of the Hubble Deep Field where all of those little white dots are not stars in the sky, but they're galaxies.
And like our galaxy, the Milky Way, they have 100 of billions of stars and planets within them.
And so we are just one of many, and the ones that are smaller and fainter in the Hubble deep field image are the ones that are farther away.
And then we start talking about the tyranny of light speed and when we are and how long it takes information to get from these distant worlds to ourselves.
And then we talk about humans.
Right?
Well, humans trace their lineage, not just back through the centuries of our ancestors and not just back through the millennia of our attempts at architecture and law and governance and not just back through the 2,400,000,000 years over which the atmosphere of the earth has been perfused with oxygen, thanks to the labors of of cyanobacteria.
We go back not just to the formation of our planet and our solar system 4 +1000000000 years ago.
We have to go back farther than that.
We have to go back to huge giant clouds of dust and gas that are filled with the building blocks of life, all of which are the result of the life cycle of previous generations of stars, which have cooked up from hydrogen and helium.
All the carbon, the oxygen, the nitrogen, the sulfur, the phosphorus, the stuff that that makes us.
Right?
Because we are really literally made of stardust.
So it takes a cosmos to make a human.
And I think that that perspective more or less holds up a mirror to us, a mirror in which we see ourselves and everyone else we meet on this planet.
And superficially in that mirror, they may look different.
They may have different skin colors.
They may have different costuming.
They may have different religions and social structures.
But indeed, fundamentally, we're all the same when you put us into this larger context.
We're all earthlings, and that's sort of since I retired become my my hobby horse of trying to teach the world to think of themselves as earthlings.
So if you have any electronic devices that have profiles that talk about who you are, I urge you to go in and change those profiles so that the first thing you say about yourself is that you're an earthling.
And then
you I call myself an earther.
An earther.
Okay.
Yeah.
Because they're they're space people, and I say I'm an earther.
To me, earth is extremely important, and it's a focal point.
Even though I do understand everything you went through, my background is also sciences.
So I do understand that, question then.
You said you've been you've been you got to this point, and you said the social structures that we should see ourselves differently.
You're trying to change the behavior of humans by giving them a perspective.
In your opinion, has that perspective and I this is not a statement of your life work, so please don't take it that way.
Has that perspective been working to the degree that we anticipated and we had hoped or you had hoped over the course of your career where humans have become more connected in the way that you're met you're you're talking?
Well, I can tell you that more people are starting to use the phrase earthling and cosmic perspective.
So at least in my realm of association, it's it's gaining some ground.
Do I think that a native of New Guinea who is living a lifestyle that is quite different than mine ever utters the phrase cosmic perspective?
No.
I don't think so yet.
But if that person has become more connected with a larger environment, than previously and can can begin to understand how their personal actions affect, indeed a larger landscape and why it might be important to work with someone who is slightly different, than their tribe to make things better for everyone.
Yeah, I think that's beginning to happen.
I don't know if I've ever used the word the term cosmic perspective, and and that's not to say I don't understand the word cosmic perspective.
And I've been involved with this project personally now for 8 years.
I was not a beyond Earth person.
I was not an enthusiast.
Kinda fell into Project Moon Hat.
And I as much as I try I mean, the moon looks beautiful, at night on certain nights.
I don't it doesn't pull me.
It it doesn't pull me the way we have people on our team who can't I mean, I I think they their body starts to vibrate when they start thinking about these things, and they're surprised after 8 years that that doesn't happen to me.
How how what's the one thing then that makes someone see this cosmic perspective and makes them transition into a different person?
Have you have you been able to identify that?
Well, I'll tell you what it happened for me.
I was about 8 years old and, spending time with relatives in the, West Coast of Florida in the Keys and walking with my dad along, the water at night and looking up in the sky and seeing all these bright points of light.
And my father had already told talked to me about the fact that these were stars, might be planet systems up there, And I just dig up at that gorgeous night sky and thinking, you know, on a planet around one of those points of light, there may be a small creature walking next to somebody of water with their parent and looking up and seeing my sun as a star in their sky.
Yep.
And that was it for me.
I mean, I could never then thereafter see myself as just a human being on this planet without any connection to the larger environment.
I remember the first time I heard about the overview effect, and we had Frank White on quite some time ago.
And I've heard constantly through the beyond Earth ecosystem that the overview effect and the change that happens to people.
And I think back in 1968 when that happened, it was believed with the pale blue dot that the world would be a a different place.
If everybody understood that we're all connected, we take care of the environment, we take care of the land, We'd learn to love one another, that the overview effect would give us a commonality of the species.
Animals would be taken care of.
The list is endless.
I'm now 59.
I don't look out and feel that while there are people working on it, I can't discount that.
I don't feel that that is the the case.
So having this experience, I can understand.
Are you finding that other people are making that transitional effect where the cosmic perspective, the the understanding of being an, an earth like I see.
Is changing their behavior enough that they are taking care of earth the way it should potentially should be without being an environmentalist in the in the way of saying it, just taking care of where we live?
Not yet.
Not enough.
But I do think that, we are very privileged to be at an age and at a point in history where we can bring into people's lives images that place us in a different context.
And I'm thinking about all of the telescopes that we've built and all of the spacecraft that we've launched that have brought us a way of looking at our surroundings in a, in a manner that no one else has been able to do in prior years.
Right?
We actually begin to understand this this concept that it does take a cosmos to make a human.
We can't, we can't be here without all of the interconnectedness of, the the bodies around us and the chemistry and the the history and evolution of biology in a in a universe.
And and people used to argue vociferously about what to believe about life beyond earth.
And I feel fortunate that, I'm at a point in time where I think it's appropriate to try and change the active verb from believe to explore, because it doesn't really matter what you believe or I believe the universe is as it is.
And so I think it's really important to explore it And to understand from things that we can see out there, what might be different futures for life on this planet.
You know, it's astronomy is kind of like having a family photo album.
And so let's assume that some others creature from another world ends up here, and they're they're wanting to understand how we work.
And they go through a family album and see that we started out small, and we grew, and we changed, and we aged, and eventually, we disappeared.
That's what astronomers do.
They look at the sky and they find different examples of phenomena that represent different stages of the life of something that we wanna understand.
And, it we couldn't do a lot of this before.
You know, it's been 400 years.
We've been using trying to use telescopes to understand what's going on out there.
And I think that the fact that we are ever closer to understanding some of the questions that we've been asking and that we can share those answers with our friends and family and acquaintances and colleagues.
I think that just I can't see myself in the same way that I did before that 8 year old looked up and thought I might be a star.
My son might be a star in someone else's universe.
So
I this was these interviews are not done on a timely basis, meaning we have to have one this week and next and next.
That's not our intention.
And I I would not say ironically.
I would say there's a happenstance that's happening here.
We're having 2 back to back programs.
We just had someone on the name, and he'll be going up shortly.
He has about 350,000 followers on YouTube.
He's extremely bright, knows his content, knows his material.
And he brought up in the last interview, he does not believe at all that there's any species besides humans in the universe because he believes mathematically if the if they had started to travel, they would have eventually found our planet.
What's and the reason I'm asking I'm going in this direction is you obviously believe that there's extraterrestrial life set to use part of all of that.
How do you believe that echoes that that storyline happened throughout the universe?
Well, again, you're using the verb that I dislike, the believe verb, when I have thoughts.
Right?
And
I will try to eliminate it.
That's okay.
You know, the folks at the, at Oxford, the UK, have done some literature searches.
And they've looked at this thing we call the Drake equation, which I hate calling it an equation because you can't solve anything with that.
It's just a way to organize our ignorance.
And there's a term in there which purports to be the fraction of all the potentially habitable places where life actually starts.
And they've done a literature search and come up with the fact that guesses for this term differ by 100 of orders of magnitude.
I mean, it's really ridiculous.
So it's just there's no information there.
We don't know.
And I think that it's worth exploring.
So go ahead.
Sorry.
No.
It's just when we look at what happened here on this planet, given enough time, it seems to me that it it's plausible that it could have helped it happened elsewhere or something like it could have helped it happened elsewhere.
And there's an awful lot of time and space for these experiments to possibly, bear fruit or maybe never have.
But, you know, the problem is that we when we talk about, as people do, about something called the Fermi Paradox, which is that, you know, if any and it's what you were alluding to a bit, if anywhere and any when life had appeared somewhere else, then given our example, it's such a short period of time, cosmically speaking, to go from appearance of life to technology and even perhaps technology capable of traveling or moving between the stars, that, they would have been here.
But they're not.
Right?
And therefore, there can't ever have been anywhere or any when another origin of life.
And I think that the policy with that is to make the statement, but they're not here.
Because we can't say that.
Right?
We can say we've explored certain parameters, certain physical variables, but we haven't explored everything.
That would mean that we knew all of physics that there is to know.
And we don't.
Right?
We're learning new things every day.
So I'm not impressed by people who argue that because they're not here, they can't ever have been.
I my take on the call, because it was brought up, and it was, at first, a gentleman's bet.
Would you believe that there'd be life on another outside of Earth?
And I said, let's make it more serious.
Let's make it like a child or yourself, and he didn't wanna go there.
And I said, I do believe that some place out there and just because someone's not here or something or some entity or organism is not here, it does not mean it does not exist.
So I'm kind of in the camp that I believe that in the size, scale, and scope of the universe, there is that possibility that that is that there is something out there.
I do believe that there is something out there that has happened.
With with that in mind, and let's just take the track that I've that we've take you started taking that there is.
What do you hope or what what behavior would you anticipate from individuals who do grasp the the construct that you're offering.
I don't know if I'm saying that the right way, but I think you understand.
In our project, people will often ask me, David, are you gonna also create peace on earth?
I mean, that sounds like a big ask of anybody.
And I say to them, look.
You take 2 heterosexual men, 1 heterosexual woman, and you put them on an island.
Will you have peace?
And everybody laughs.
It's just a a quick visual.
And they say, that's not our directive.
We're not here to to make peace on earth.
The challenge is humanity is struggling now.
We are struggling with what we have defined, the 6 mega challenges if you watch the videos, climate change, mass extinction, ecosystem collapses happening all over the world.
There is, displacement, unrest, social, political, economic, religious, technological, and we've have explosive impact folks, things such as deforestation of the, of the rainforest, the pollution of our oceans.
There's a lot of activity going on that in my lifetime, it was a pretty good lifetime, and that's changing the way in which we live.
Even the United Nations came out with just a day or 2 ago, and you don't have to believe everything they put out.
I'm not saying that.
It's that they mentioned that we will go buy 1.5 c in terms of temperature, and I've been saying it's a freight train gonna miss the station.
Do you in time, do you think that the cosmic perspective, if people understood it, will we get those behaviors that we need to make the transition into a new way of life?
Well, if we were to discover evidence of someone else's technology somewhere else, right, And that technology could not be less advanced than the technology that we on earth command today, because they wouldn't be detectable at a distance.
Mhmm.
So if we detect someone, something, some evidence of technology out there, they're by default older than we are.
Right?
And so somehow, if they're there, they made it through this, technological adolescence that we find ourselves struggling with, all of the things that you were you were mentioning.
They found a way to become an old technology.
And because they did, that means that we can as well.
Somehow, you know, I don't expect them to show up and tell us how to change the deforestation or stop the deforestation.
Or maybe it's Matthew McConaughey behind a series of books talking
to them.
There you go.
There you go.
Anyway, just I think that is the most hopeful thing about this search for technosignatures is When that Should it succeed, we understand that there is a path to a long future even if we don't know what it is.
When we see the the on earth, when we see the pyramids, certain types of activity on earth that we've are unexplainable.
And I I'm not I'm I'm asking the question when it comes it comes to mind.
It's not this is nothing planned.
As you know, I don't didn't know we were gonna go with this.
Does that where humans today can discount or count on that?
When you look at something like the pyramids, do you see that in that same technological advances that someone could have been on earth and help to create and do, was it, 28,000,000 stones put in a certain in certain cons position where they're you can't even put a razor blade between them and it ends perfectly at the top where we couldn't even do that today.
Does that fall under your category of something technologically advanced that makes us think differently?
Well, first of all, I think that we, discredit people's living millennia ago.
We don't give them enough credit, and we don't understand their point of view and how they dealt with time.
There are amazing things that can be done if there's only enough time to work on it.
So, no, I don't think that it required, another technological species to produce the pyramids or the figures on the plains of Nazca.
I think that humans have had that capability to do amazing things for a very long time.
And part of it is I really think their concept of time.
And if you're not trying to, you know, catch the train to New York City to go to your job at a brokerage house and just constantly rushing to get somewhere else.
If you are doing something, in a way that your ancestors did and that you would expect that your offspring would do if you had this much larger vision of time.
I think that you could imagine that humans could do things that we find unexplainable today.
I don't know.
It's not my feeling.
It's just No.
It's just it's a it's just a thought.
Our project is 40 years.
I had we had someone on who's joining our team this morning, and he said, I it's so bold for someone to have a 40 year plan.
And I I I was kind of taken aback because it's not that far away from that, and yet we're leveraging time.
So the reason I asked the question is because I guess what's, the challenge that I'm having in my in my head is that I would love for what you'd like to see happen to happen, and I'm trying to bridge that gap.
I'm trying to bridge the gap fast enough so that we don't have our own existential, extinguishing moment on earth.
Maybe not all no.
Not all humans disappear.
How do we get from teaching some kids?
And I'm not, again, belittling.
I'm taking 1010, 8,000,000,000 people from teaching a few children on the planet certain things and the expectation of life to thrive.
How do we bridge that faster if there was a threat at the end or a a timeline that you might have that's, very long?
How do we get there and make it work?
I'm still struggling with that as a person.
Yeah.
One of the things is I think you listen to the kids.
You don't just teach them.
If we're fortunate, the generations that are coming up have slightly different points of view than our generation.
And they can perhaps think out of the box isn't isn't even enough of a no.
They they they can think in different ways.
They can see the threat to their world in a way that we didn't see it as we were creating the threats.
And they understand this existential, difficult threat that they're born into, and they want to change.
And I think it's, you know, there's so much connectivity across the globe today that wasn't there in the past, and our young people are very good consumers of that connectivity.
They expect to have discussions with their peers in Iceland or or Germany or India or even, the the most remote locations.
These kids know that there is connection possible.
They know that the techniques and the technologies to, make the best use of that connectivity are changing and changing very fast.
So what they use today to talk to their peers in, South Africa will not be the tools that they'll be using 5 or 10 years from now.
And so they have, you know, move fast and break things is part of their life cycle.
Right?
And I think that's they just won't demand better, better environments.
They're not gonna sit still and let the world melt.
Right?
You take a porcelain vase and you crash it, and I know it can be put together back into a very expensive piece of of of an artifact or how would they label it?
Yeah.
Because I am yeah.
I'm trying to get this a hopeful part of it that, yes, that these individuals I have 2 young children, the 2829.
I call them young.
And they 29 again.
Yeah.
They are very different in their approach, how they look at the world, than a lot of the peers that I see out there.
They're not the they never were the on social and didn't spend all that time trying to be those individuals that I I I fear out there.
Again, going back to that question, what's the behavior that while you're teaching these this cosmic perspective, while you're teaching the youth of the world or individuals of the world to see that they come from, space matter, universe matter?
What are you hoping or what what are the behaviors you'd like to see from that?
And does that happen?
So I'm giving you 2.
I apologize.
Does it happen?
Well, my granddaughter
What are they first?
And then does it happen?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They, my granddaughter gets it.
And her her view of how she should be in the world and what she should expect, vastly different than mine at her age, 20.
You're taking me deep into philosophy, which just isn't my forte.
That's okay.
Well, I'm I'm asking you I'm asking you a personal question more than I am a a scientific question because you're there's so much out there about what you've spoken about and what you've accomplished, and those are all great.
I do always try to find where someone comes from.
I get asked all the time, why are you doing this?
You you're not a space person or and I tell them it's not a love.
I don't wake up in the morning and love this.
I do it because I'm it's it's who I am today.
It's part of who I am.
So I'm asking questions to yeah.
I'm pushing a different set of buttons.
Yeah.
Well, again, it all goes back to that 8 year old little girl with her dad on the beach looking up.
And once once you internalize that concept, I don't see how you can ever unlearn it.
The question is how do you get enough people to get that synergistic approach, and what behaviors would we anticipate from that so that it does change?
Well, I think you and and I and all of my colleagues are working pretty hard to try and share this knowledge that we've been able to gather through the use of some amazing technologies.
And I think that today, the scientists that I know, engineers that I know, mathematicians, are, far more attuned to telling the world.
Right?
And not just hiding away in a in a corner doing brilliant things.
They they really do, at least my acquaintances, want to share what they think or argue about with someone who has a different point of view about what they think.
And I think that that connection again, it is, can't I can't I can quote it, but I can't validate it.
But Steven Pinker is fond of saying, you know, we're kinder and gentler than we've ever been as a species, and that's because in his point of view of some formalized governance structure to bring rules to our interactions.
And if there is this, cultural evolution that is as, encompassing and is ever present as biological evolution, then I think that's that's hopeful.
And how you make it faster?
Well, as I said, kids are much more connected than we ever were.
They have a sense that there are others on the other side of the world that are working to change the rules, to be more beneficial to their future.
So we should listen to the kids.
I 2 quick analogies or things that kind of conflict with that.
One of them was when I was growing up, I lived in a place called Middletown, New York, not far from Woodstock.
Yeah.
Peace, love, rock and roll, love the world.
Everybody gets along.
Everybody will do well.
That generation grew up to be the greediest, the most self centered, the most consumeristic society that we've had.
They became the people who did the things that we're, to some degree, having to unravel.
And I was in Luxembourg.
I don't speak often on this topic.
We're not a a very public group.
I was asked to speak in Luxembourg Space Group, at a conference.
They just had it again last week, and I was sold.
They said you're gonna have 500 people in the audience.
We had so many people come.
It was so amazing the year before, and I said, sure.
I'll do it.
I I was living in Luxembourg.
I said, sure.
I'll do this program.
And during that time, 22 companies, you probably know the name, Deep Space Industries and Planet Resources, while they did not file bankruptcy, they had to be acquired probably so that they didn't have the appearance of filing.
They ran out of money and prospects.
So I'm going to not give them the credit that people have given them.
And there were about 70 people in this audience, and everybody's talking about this is the time.
This is the age.
This is when it's going, all the speakers.
And I said, let's travel back to 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74.
I bet you if you went to a conference, they all said the exact same things that you were saying.
What's to say in 50 years we won't be sitting in the same room with 70 people instead of 500, and we've not made that transition?
Well, what's we need to think about what would be the consequences of that.
So 70 years is a short time period.
And suppose we haven't made the transition to kinder and gentler cultural evolution kind of future in 70 years.
Is that really fatal?
Could we do it slower or are these global challenges that we're facing so imminent that if we don't do it today, it's not gonna get done and sayonara?
I don't know the answer to that.
There are certainly things that are that are pressing and on a very short timescale, but there are also there are also some successes.
You know, we fished out huge volumes of the ocean.
And yet with protection, they've revived.
And fishing in those areas are is even more vibrant than it ever was.
So we can make some changes on an appropriate time scale.
What are we gonna do about the rise of sea level?
Can we learn how to defend against that using technologies or using some sorts of biological mediation.
I don't know, but people are thinking about it.
And again, it's the kids and they've gotten the message, I think, that their future is on the line.
We've screwed it up.
You're absolutely right.
Peace, love, and all that.
Right?
But now we're seeing the consequences of it.
And when people think about their grandkids, it becomes important to them.
What kind of changes can they make that will make the world better for their descendants?
I'm an optimistic person.
I get up every day.
We work on this project.
And if you did get a chance to watch the videos, we are working.
We have teams of people around the world.
We are looking to solve these.
When I'm asking these questions, my mind some all often to find an answer, I go negative to go positive.
I have to.
I I go positive.
I I run into a wall.
I go negative.
Oh, and then I go positive again.
Mhmm.
I don't see I honestly don't see having lived and worked in over 50 countries around the world, lived in 3 countries, worked in over 50.
I don't see people caring about their grandchildren the way you're talking about.
I see people talk about it, and yet they're still driving the cars, using the phones, doing the things.
And I'm not I'm not a reductionist.
I don't think we're gonna make it that way.
I don't feel that people are changing their lives in a way fast enough to overcome some of the obstacles that will allow us to get past what could be very challenging for our children.
Again, a one degree we saw this year.
It was not a great year for climate change, but it was also not a great year for all the other 6 mega challenges.
When we how do you get if you're if we're 1 degree sea rise, not sea like sea level, 1 degree Celsius rise.
Celsius.
Yeah.
I I just saying that for the sake of being more clear.
That's not an error.
That's not an easily transitional thing to achieve.
And if you don't have friends in India or Pakistan, if you've never lived in that belt in the Middle East or worked in the areas through Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, with 17,500 islands in Indonesia, and the chances of them having challenges
are
astronomically high.
I I I'm trying to figure out how to get a society, maybe this is my burden, to get enough people on planet Earth to create enough wave so that these grandparents that you're talking about actually do care that much about their children to even get involved in something that would make change.
Does that make sense?
Well,
I, I have a hard time believing, and because I don't know.
I've not been there.
I've not lived there.
I have a hard time believing that on those 1700 islands that the residents don't worry about what's going to be the the world that their grandchildren inherit.
I mean, they may not say it that way, but they're going to be working to to make their local environment better if they can.
I don't know.
I Yeah.
No.
It's it's a it's a hope.
I I I some a friend of mine went to the Caribbean, and he says, you know what?
You buy when you see when the menu is given to you in Caribbean for, on the menu for fish.
He says you see salmon on the menu.
The reason is the port around the Caribbean, many of the islands are the island has got so much pollution that they can't fish.
They have to go too far out.
And, yes, people are talking about these things.
And I'm going back to
David, the counter to that is the place is the hope spots that have been protected.
Right?
They can fish, and they can use that fishing industry, as a source of of wealth.
But they it it has to be protected, and somebody has to start that, and people have started that.
Right?
And I think it must be certainly less than 5% of the ocean volume has been protected.
But where where it's where it's happening, it's working.
So how
do you accelerate it?
How do you accelerate that?
And I'm trying to and I liked I loved your topic when we came up this title, the cosmic perspective.
And how do I'm trying to leverage it in I'm trying to leverage it.
Okay.
Let's take this cosmic perspective.
It hasn't worked for me.
That doesn't mean it doesn't work for other people.
There are plenty of people I run into.
Oh, I'm I'm a lifelong space person.
I watch everything.
Hasn't worked for me, but that's okay because we only need a percentage of people to change.
How do we find, uncover, discover, move this cosmic perspective 2 or 3% faster?
How do we it's not just going to a school.
And, again, I your work when I told someone today on our team you were going to be on this call, the person said, I can't wait.
I can't wait.
You you've your reputation disappointed.
I know they're not going to be because they know me, and they know that I do push and I do ask.
Zubrin said things on the podcast that people have said they've never heard.
So I'm really so tell me what you would teach somebody if you're gonna teach somebody a cosmic perspective.
We were going to act we were going to take a group of a 100 people of all ages and put them in a room.
You'd have a few slides.
I understand that.
How do you get them over that hump that they they behaviorally change and there is an activity or result from that work?
Is that a good question or a bad question?
No.
It's a good question.
And, you know, I I don't have a good answer.
I told you that the that the whole point of, my having a discussion with you is to perhaps change the perspective
Okay.
Listeners.
And, I mean, that is what you need to do.
So I think that what
Can I can I toss an idea out at you then?
Sure.
Okay.
I think that the challenge for me is beyond Earth is so big, and we talk about science research and exploration to such a large degree, then unless you study it, you don't really see the implications of what happens on Earth.
And I think we have to do a better job of getting the youth to tie or not the 2 the information to tie to an understanding of their lives here and that it's that this does exist and it's a piece.
I'm I actually just drew a pie little pie chart, and I'm taking the cosmic perspective.
And I'm saying, okay.
If the cosmic perspective is put in there, which I never really think about in that way, but the way you described it, it's true.
Yes.
We come from all these particles.
We all come together, and whatever was here in the beginning is here today, so we are a member of that.
And then we there's a little I just drew a plus.
You can't see what I'm drawing.
I added a plus, and I say, so what's the next plus?
What's the plus after that?
Well, what it might be is that we stop talking about the challenges, the problems, and instead, we focus on the successes and try and, inspire young people to see that it's possible to have success and that they could be part of creating that success.
We yeah.
We do tend to talk about the doom and gloom because it is pretty gloomy.
But if we could start engaging with young people about the successes here and there and and try and encourage them to see how they could be part of improving those successes or expanding them.
So
No.
That that's you you went in a good direction because I wasn't thinking in that vein, but that's kind of what we're what I think about when I talk to individuals.
Mhmm.
Because I don't know if they're a beyond earth person.
And I use beyond earth because space is really a tough one.
It's just so big.
I see anything beyond earth is I say to individuals, okay.
I don't know if you know this, but cloud computing everything we're doing your whole life is cloud computing, and that came out of work that came out of individuals wanting to get to the moon, getting to be under.
I say to them, if you wear glasses, scratch resistant lenses came out of someone working on water purification.
And every scratch resistant glass that you have today for all the people working to keep your life the way it is, they couldn't see without it.
The glasses would break or cordless power tools, or I talk about weather, simple things such as looking at the weather.
So did you realize that every time you look at the weather, you're looking up?
And that whether you're looking good or not, there's a farmer who's using that to do predictive analytics or a person who's running a ship across an ocean.
And almost invariably, people said, I didn't think about it in that way.
Mhmm.
So I think there's a layering because I I'd like to add cosmic perspective someplace in what we're doing, and I think it's a layering.
And maybe our our formula for the layer cake, let's think of it as a cake, the formulary for the layer cake might be missing some pieces or some flavor.
Does does that make sense?
Yeah.
I'm I have a hard I have a hard time personally talking about how everything will change if we find evidence of someone else's technology because I can't promise that we will succeed on any time scale.
There is the possibility that we are a cosmic miracle.
Right?
And that this is the only place in the universe where chemistry and physics created biology, and that survived.
So unable to promise that if we do this or if we do that or if we expand in this direction, we will succeed in finding evidence of someone else's technology.
So I'm I'm sitting there on the border between science and religion because if I told you that I knew the answer, that would be religion.
I'm not going there.
Right?
But science can't promise the result.
It can only say, this is how much more we can explore.
This is what we might learn.
And, you know, historically, we have built our newest telescopes or newest, facilities, by arguing to funding agencies that these new capabilities are gonna solve these old problems, x, y, and
z.
Yeah.
And we have the great fortune to have a legacy that says, you know, when you build a new instrument that looks at the universe in a new way, opens up a new portion of phase space, the most important thing that that instrument does historically is to discover something that you never expected.
And I'd like to just continue building on that legacy.
It's been working for 400 years.
So I'm I'm assuming you get the same question I do.
With all the challenges on earth, why are they calling problems?
I don't like the word problem.
I use With all the challenges on earth, why are we spending all this money on what you just said?
Right.
First of all What's your answer to a person who says that?
And I've gotta believe you've been asked that on stage or in environments where it's a little bit more uncomfortable.
Sure.
But the way you asked it was all this money with an implication that we're spending huge fraction of our global wealth on this.
I I get that.
I get that question.
So, yeah, that's why I'm asking it.
Yeah.
And the answer is because when we've done so in the past, it has rewarded us with opportunities and capabilities and luxuries and, sustainabilities that we didn't have before.
Can you give me a few examples?
No.
I mean, you ran through a bunch of examples of things that come from technologies that were pursued for other reasons.
How about how about paradigm shifting wise?
I mean, we
I mean, we used to think that we would we were doing what our parents had done and that our descendants would be doing the same thing.
And now we understand that things are changing incredibly rapidly, that whatever we start doing as a first job out of university or out of high school is very unlikely to be what we end up doing at the end of our lives.
And so we need to, I think we what we need to be teaching individuals, young people, is to embrace change, not for its own sake, but because it is happening and we need to thrive within it.
All of us need to thrive.
And so, don't have a static point of view.
Again, when you look up at the sky, I don't understand how you can't how you cannot feel the immensity and the beauty and the the reality that we are part of a big cosmic, environment.
And, you know, that that assumes that you have the luxury of having time to look up at the sky.
Yes.
And Not everybody does.
Doesn't.
Yeah.
I my background is biology, chemistry, physics.
I didn't look up, but I often looked inside.
It was biology.
I was premed, organic chemistry, physics was all part of that.
So my courses were the biology of vertebrates, so I was looking down.
Mine were about plants and species.
Mine mine was, I guess, not looking up.
Mine was looking sideways and down.
Mhmm.
And so you're not unlike some people I know who had the story.
Their parents had to look up.
One of our team members in Germany, he watched the landing on the moon, and that was the end for him.
That was it.
Once he saw it, his parents let him stay up.
He got to see it, and his world changed.
I saw it, and I I did.
My mom threw them out, but I had the newspapers.
I saved them for 20 years, and my mom decided they weren't necessary anymore.
She just tossed them.
I saved those first moon landings, but I didn't have that.
That never led pushed me that way.
I I had a saltwater aquarium because I had a teacher in school who was teaching about saltwater species, and I decided to have an aquarium.
So maybe maybe that different well, that makes us human, but I don't have that.
I don't look up, and I would love to.
I try.
I try.
I really do.
Say, this is it.
You know?
What do you do?
Rev up an engine?
Do you take an Oreo cookie?
Is there something that I can do to turn on that passion for that?
No.
I just
I think that going to an isolated, distant, dark site, is a pretty motivating experience.
And, you know, you say you've been dealing with biology, but I I used to think that the only way that we would be able to, determine what was contingent and what was necessary in biology was to find another example of a biology that, you know, a second genesis that evolved independently.
But now I think that the tools that you have with synthetic biology and artificial intelligence may get us there without having to find a second genesis.
Never never thought about that.
Yes.
And so that's your looking up.
Right?
So, what did and I don't I'm not asking to comment on the person.
I'm asking you to comment.
You probably saw the William Shatner, little splurge that he had about the darkness and death being up.
And No.
You didn't see that?
No.
There's a William Shatner wrote this piece after he had gone up in Amazon's, and Blues rocket.
And he
more or less thought to himself, and I'm I'm probably for everybody everybody's listening to this.
They know all the words by heart.
I do not.
He thought he was going to get up there and feel this elation, and all he felt was coldness and death.
And he he realized that everything he wanted, everything he thought he was pursuing is really on earth, and it's death above.
That's I saw it.
It's like, woah.
To boldly go where no man has gone before, to travel to to different, planets and and learn about different species and and all of that.
And it is a wow moment where he's he's turning the tides and the he's turning the camera back on earth just as if in 19 was 80 68 when the overview effect when that photograph was taken and I found the copy I have at some place, it was actually there was a there was an argument in the capsule.
They they weren't supposed to.
It wasn't the mission to take a picture of Earth.
And there is a dialogue between, the astronauts at the time saying, no.
That's not what we're supposed to be doing.
And the blue marble picture was taken anyway.
Yeah.
Bill Anders took that.
He wasn't gonna yeah.
He wasn't gonna pass it out.
No.
No.
It's it's, you know, it's a unique, absolutely unique perspective.
And why wouldn't you try and capture it and share it?
Bill Anderson, I I so I don't remember, formally okay.
I didn't the story, have you heard that story where they had not agreed to take it?
Mhmm.
They took it anyway?
Okay.
So I'm I'm correct in what I had found.
Do you believe the overview effect is enough to make change for humans?
Well, it's better than it's better to try with that than to suggest that people limit their horizons to what they can see at the tip of their nose.
Yeah.
I think it's absolutely something that doesn't maybe inspire everyone.
But to the extent that we can share it with a lot of people, it'll stick in some places.
And then I think that the outcome is better than if we didn't.
Alright.
You had mentioned earlier that the educational side, you're trying to make sure young individuals what's your big challenge today?
What's the thing that you're trying on your plate that you wanna see accomplished that you feel is the next big thing for you?
Well, again, it's very personal.
I've been working on this project for decades, and it's been a roller coaster in terms of funding.
And that's a that's a mini perspective because whether or not SETI gets funded this year or next year or gets terminated by a senator, doesn't really light a fire under many other people, but it certainly does me.
And so personally, I've set a challenge to try and think about this as being a potentially multi generational project and then find a way to provide a little bit of stable funding multi generationally to keep this sort of thing moving forward.
So we're always exploring.
And the universities long ago figured out this idea of how to fund into the future, and it's called an endowment.
And so my personal challenge these days is to try and find a way to raise an endowment so that we can continue to do this into the future as long as it makes sense, as long as we don't decide that we've looked enough and the answer is negative because it's, to me, a very, monumentous decision.
And I just like to see this go forward in a in a smooth fashion.
You know, we we always try and get the best and the brightest young people to come work with us because we want new ideas and new thoughts about what a techno signature might be.
And so
What is a techno signature?
Oh, well, it's evidence of someone else's technology.
And I think I have slides which we can show in a in a couple of minutes.
But, so here's the pitch.
It's really hard.
You say to someone, oh, we really want you to come work on this exciting project, but you may not have success in your lifetime.
That's a hard one personally.
But then there's the second shoe to fall, which is an oh, by the way, I may not be able to make salary next month.
Right?
So getting people engaged with us and doing new things is, is hard, And we benefit from all of the amazing discoveries about exoplanets and extremophiles that have, blossomed in the last decade.
So the slides I sent you Yeah.
Are a slide of the TRAPPIST, an artist an artist concept of what the 7 Earth sized planets orbiting a little red dwarf star in a system called TRAPPIST 1 might look like.
And so the artist working with a physicist or an astronomer envisioned these planets all about Earth's size, but at different distances from the center star, the artist envisioned these worlds as looking different.
At at the very least, their equilibrium temperature should be different.
So the planets farther out should be colder than the planets closer in.
Yep.
We haven't seen this system yet.
But when we get the capability to observe this system, what if we found that 2 or 3 or maybe all of them were not at different temperatures, but they were all at the same equilibrium temperature.
They all looked pretty much the same.
That would indicate that there was some engineering that had taken place.
This could be a techno signature.
Some technologically capable species had decided that they wanted more real estate and had hopped over to the next world and transformed it to be like their home world.
And this is the kind of thing that we never thought about when SETI was getting started.
Right?
We were looking for radio signals and then, optical signals.
We were looking for people's deliberate creatures, deliberate actions to gain our attention.
But a techno signature is something that could be quite different, than deliberate actions.
It could be the manifestation of something being done for some technological species' own reasons.
And so I I like using that word, techno signature, in in parallel with the word that's more commonly used, which is biosignature, looking for life, and I think that we need to expand our thinking.
That's actually a cool word when you look at it as a contrary because you don't have to look for the biology.
You could look at the symptoms or the the modifications that would have come from that biosignature.
Right.
And you probably they'd be more prevalent just as if our world is different or changing over time.
Do you feel that the the Webb Telescope will give is it big enough?
Is it large enough?
Powerful enough?
Even I know it can go the the reach is amazing.
Do you think that it can give us enough of that information to make those observations?
I think that the web is a good step, but I think it's gonna take something that's quite a bit bigger because context is gonna be all important, and you're gonna need fine grain, knowledge of the context of that solar system.
So Webb is great.
Webb is wonderful, and we're gonna learn, as I previously said, I think we're gonna learn from Webb things that we never expected it to do.
And that's great.
And I wish I'd be around for another 50 years, so I'll see it happening.
How much money do you how much money does it take to run, Sedi?
When you say you run out of money, you're not sure in the next year, how much do you always look for as an annual budget?
You're gonna laugh, but we're talking about a couple of $1,000,000.
And I
don't think we could you know, people ask me, suppose I gave you, a $100,000,000, what would you do?
And I'm I'm I I'm saying, I could use some of it and expand what we're doing and do a bit of innovation, try some things that we're not doing, but there isn't I can't give you a road map to spend 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars in a year.
Build better telescopes for sure.
With some of them in space for sure.
That that runs up the budget, but can I justify it?
Can I say, well, if I do this, we're gonna learn that?
As I said, the history is is a bit yeah.
We learn new things, and that's great, but the best things that we learn are often those that we didn't know we were gonna find.
I I love the ambiguity of a lot of the the way you phrase things has a sense of ambiguity to them, where you believe that we should, and at the same time, you're not sure.
And
Well, I don't know the answer to the question.
No.
I understand that.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong.
I see.
It's it's not there's not a definitive nature to this.
I I was in Technion, and I don't have a PhD.
So you normally have a PhD to speak there.
And I gave a presentation on what we were doing.
And when I was done, there was a guy, I think let's say he was in his late sixties.
He walks up to me, and he said, I never once thought which you've already offered several times.
I never once thought that the work that I'm doing may never be used in my lifetime or ever be used.
And he he really was shocked by that thought.
And so what I had proposed to him in our system, look.
You you should work on that.
Can you help us work on something such as Project Moon Hut?
Could you work on something that might have a more direct correlation?
And he he agreed to that because that gave him some.
He did talk about his grandchildren, and he didn't feel after he was done.
He said, I I I don't even know if anything that I I look at far distant galaxies.
I do things that are so far away that might never do anything for us.
So it was your ambiguity, I think, is a surprising thing, which I did not expect.
And now that I've heard you and hear where you're coming from, I get it.
Okay.
Well, David, I'm gonna have to sign off because I've left my husband on his own for
No.
No.
That's okay.
I I thank you.
Let me just end this here.
I will give you our last little piece here.
So for those of you out there, I wanna thank you for taking the time today to listen in.
I do hope that you learn something that can make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
Again, Project Moon Hut is where we're looking to establish a box, the roof, and the door on the moon to the accelerated development of Earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and paradigm shifting from that endeavor back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.
And, Jill, what is the single best way to connect with you?
Well, I hate to say it because I already get 2 100, 250 emails a day.
Yeah.
There's no way.
Don't reach out to me.
No.
Carter@sedi.org.
Okay.
And I'd love to connect with anybody too.
It's david@moonhut.org.
You can connect with us at Twitter at at project moon hut.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we're all there.
And that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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