In This Episode

Join host David Goldsmith as he welcomes Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today and cohost of Astronomy Cast, to explore the profound implications of life in the universe. Fraser shares his insights on why life is better than rocks, emphasizing the unique value that living beings bring to the cosmos. He argues that despite the vastness of space, we might be alone in the universe, challenging listeners to consider the consequences of our actions on Earth and beyond.

Throughout the conversation, Fraser presents compelling arguments about the necessity of maintaining life and biodiversity on our planet while also looking outward to future possibilities in space exploration. He discusses how our technological advancements can lead to a sustainable future and how we must act now to prevent irreversible damage to our environment. The discussion takes unexpected turns, revealing the interconnectedness of life on Earth and the potential for human innovation to shape our destiny.

This episode urges listeners to reflect on their role in preserving life and fostering advancements that benefit all species, both on Earth and beyond.

Episode Outlines

  • The transition from the information age to the age of infinite possibilities
  • Fraser's lofty goal: convincing listeners that life is better than rocks
  • The argument for why life improves the universe
  • Exploring the Fermi paradox: Where is everyone?
  • The implications of advanced civilizations and their potential absence
  • Challenges facing humanity: The six mega challenges
  • The importance of sustainability and living in balance with nature
  • How innovations from space exploration can benefit Earth
  • The role of technology in ensuring a sustainable future
  • A call to action for individuals to contribute positively to society

Biography of the Guest

Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today and cohost of Astronomy Cast, where he shares his passion for astronomy with a broad audience. With over 343,000 subscribers on YouTube, Fraser has established himself as a leading voice in space education.

He has spent years engaging with experts in the field and generating valuable content related to all things space. Fraser's work focuses on making complex scientific concepts accessible to everyone, fostering a greater understanding of our universe.

In addition to his extensive background in astronomy journalism, Fraser is committed to promoting discussions around sustainability and the future of life beyond Earth. His insights into the interconnectedness of life and technology make him a vital contributor to conversations about humanity's place in the cosmos. The themes in today’s episode are just the beginning. Dive deeper into innovation, interconnected thinking, and paradigm-shifting ideas at  www.projectmoonhut.org—where the future is being built.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, everybody.

(00:01):
This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the age of infinite.
Throughout history, humans have made significant transformational changes, which in turn have led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You've personally just experienced the information age, and, boy, what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you might right now be living through an age of transformation into the age of infinite, an age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, by a redefining lifestyle, consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be made possible through a new construct with the moon and the earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into the infinite future.

(00:42):
The ingredients for amazing sci fi story that it will come to life during 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, 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.

(01:06):
If you're interested in knowing more, you can go to the website www.projectmoonod.org.
In the top right hand corner, there are several videos.
I always suggest people watch number 1 and number 3.
Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic.
The topic is the future of life in the universe depends on us.

(01:27):
Wow.
We're putting a lot of pressure on us.
And today, we have with us Fraser Cain.
How are you doing, Fraser?
I'm doing great.
Well, as always, we do have a very brief bio.
Frazer is the publish publisher of Universe Today and cohost of Astronomy Cast.
On YouTube, he has 343,000 subscribers as of today, I look today, to his program, where he too interviews experts on the beyond Earth ecosystem.

(01:54):
So this is new to him to some degree, and he also generates a tremendous amount of valuable educational content that to do with anything or all things space.
Now I've added this recently, and those of you who've listened in the past, I'm often asked how much did we prepare for this program.
So I'm going to give you a quick snippet of how this works.

(02:19):
What we do is we don't we start off with a guest that's selected, and there's a process to even find a guest, someone we like, who we can work with.
Then the guest watches the videos and listens to some of the Project Moon Hut programs that we had.
And then we have a call and we decide on a program.
We don't know the content, and during that call, we create the title.

(02:42):
This can last anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours to select that title.
And then the guest is left to their own, such as Fraser goes out on his own, and he puts together the program.
I, nor you listening, have any clue what he's going to talk about.
I start with about 12 blank pages of paper in front of me, and the cameras are off so I don't see him, and we go from there.

(03:07):
So let's get started.
Fraser, do you have an outline or bullet points for us
to follow today?
I do.
Excited.
Good.
Good.
Yeah.
So can you give them to us?
I can.
I can.
Yeah.
So so but I have but first, I I have a lofty goal.
Sure.
Is that my hope is by the end of this program, I will have convinced you to throw away your reason why and replace it with my own.

(03:34):
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So so your very raison d'etre, I plan to, to replace.
Okay.
So I let's let's hear it.
End of this conversation, let me know how close I got.
What what we're good we'll do at the end.
We'll talk.
Alright.
Alright.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
So, so life is better than rocks.

(03:58):
Okay.
Number 2.
We're probably alone in the universe.
The octopuses can't do it.
Can't do it.
Next.
Stop wrecking Earth.
Wrecking
earth.
That's it.
That's my list.
No.
That's a good list.
I I I had to make sure I spelled everything properly.

(04:19):
Okay.
So let's start with this.
Well, octopus was one.
No.
Life is better than rocks.
We'll start with life No.
No.
They no.
No.
They they the spelling.
That make sure I spelled it wrong.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Wrecking and octopus.
So sitting on number 1, life is better than rocks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I like and this is subjective, and I think, you know, my whole argument will collapse like a house of cards if people are going to disagree with me on this point.

(04:44):
Okay.
And that is I life improves the universe.
We see life here on earth.
Think about the oceans, the forest, the even in our houses, everything.
The the incredible diversity that is constantly going on here on planet Earth makes our planet better.

(05:06):
It makes it interesting.
It makes it chaotic.
It makes it kind of scary, but it also makes it more interesting.
And to imagine a universe like the moon and think about the moon or think about an asteroid, It's a rock.
It's an interesting rock.
It's got a lot of different layers to it.
It's got perhaps volcanism.
It there's micrometeorites hitting the surface.

(05:27):
There's gravitational effects and forces that are going on.
But at the end of the day, it's a rock.
And so I think that if we could choose to have a lot a universe that is devoid of life that was formed in the big bang is expanding out forever.
The and and it is just rocks and eventually will head on to the heat death of the universe, that would be a waste of a perfectly good universe that the one that is filled with life in all of its varieties, the good and the bad, makes for a more interesting universe.

(06:04):
So so just the way you said it, I'm gonna jump in a little bit here because the first thing that came to mind is if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to see it or hear it.
Mhmm.
Did it fall?
Did it did that happen?
So I'm when you're saying life improves the universe, it's metaphorically I don't know if that's the right definition.

(06:26):
You're saying Yeah.
Well, it means Because
we exist because we exist, the entire the entire billions, 14,000,000,000, they all the all of this is better because this one little tiny rock in the middle of nowhere and the blip in time
Well, I mean, this this rock could be a write off.

(06:48):
This rock could be the worst life the worst place in the entire universe that is interesting.
Okay.
Right?
So it's so I'm not saying there's anything necessarily special.
Oh, so you're not saying earth so you didn't mean earth.
You're saying life improves the universe.
Life improves the universe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't catch you with that because you talked about the ocean.
It's still about forest.
Yep.
Yeah.
And so when you imagine the diversity of life here on Earth, you think about all of the different ecosystems.

(07:12):
Imagine a universe filled with life.
Every possible ecosystem that has been that has creatures adapted living there, intelligent civilizations, spanning the cosmos, creating galactic federations.
Oh, yeah.
No.
We've been there.
I I've seen I've seen, what's his name?
William Shatner.
Right?
He's not Yeah.
Gone to all
of the Exactly.

(07:33):
Right?
And so imagine that that Star Trek you that Star Trek future and, you know, you think about that classic Carl Sagan quote, right, that life is the way the universe observes itself, That back to your tree falling in the forest.
If if there is no life to observe the universe, what was the point?

(07:54):
The So so I'm gonna place my flag and say life is better than rocks.
So,
one of the inter going back, you said Carl Sagan.
We talked about William Shatner and and traveling.
It's an interesting concept because life I do agree with you on this this measurement.
But even not bad.
You could look at Star Trek, and you could look at almost any of these sci fi movies.

(08:19):
Most of it's not the transport that it's important.
It's meeting the new civilizations.
So it's not traveling between the planets that's the often is the focus of a Star Trek episode.
It was what happened when they got there.
Mhmm.
Mhmm.
So I do agree with you.
So so I agree with this, but where does it

(08:40):
I I'm I'm not sure where you want me to
go with it.
Like, okay.
Well, that's it.
Like like because because I'm going to say that we need to make sure that life spreads and is maintained in the universe.
So
Okay.
That's that's why that's this is important.
So if you so if
I believe that.
Disagree with me and you say, meh, life, I I'll take rocks.

(09:02):
Well, good news.
The universe has supplied you with rocks.
Well, sometimes sometimes while sitting here at my desk, I do think that.
Well, then then then perhaps you may disagree.
About the way Yeah.
I'm joking about
what's going on.
And when the sun expands in a few 1000000000 years and wipes out all life on earth, you will have the rocks and only the rocks that you were hoping for.

(09:27):
I won't be in this chair, though.
So Yeah.
Without all that pesky life to complicate this rock filled future.
So So, okay.
I I'm going to let let's ride with this.
I can play with this.
Yes.
I do believe that life improves the the I believe that life adds value.
I don't know if it improves the universe, but I believe it adds value to the complexity of Yeah.

(09:51):
Well, I mean
but but, again, like, I think it's a subjective question.
Right?
Like, I think, like, what the universe is what life is giving us is diversity.
That diversity of culture, diversity of life forms, diversity of just the way that things happen on our planet makes this planet interesting.
And I think one of the excitements, what's so attractive about Star Trek, is this idea that you could trap hop in a spacecraft, fly to another star system, meet an alien species that has none of our similar evolutionary biology is completely alien in every way, and yet we could find common ground and enjoy their exotic cuisines and interesting cultural elements and all that.

(10:34):
Like, I think that's the heart of it is that the more time and space that you get, the more interesting, crazy stuff can form that can be exciting.
So my question then is a question I have in my mind is when did you first think this?

(10:58):
Probably 25 years ago.
Do you know why?
Yeah.
I read, Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot, and I read, Bob Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, and those those got me thinking.

(11:20):
In your everyday In what Do do you try to put I I guess
This is the source of universe today.
What I'm about to explain to you is why universe today exists.
It's why I'd why I have my career.
Why I do this job.
Okay.

(11:41):
So
so yeah.
Ted because I've got some questions, but I wanna see where you go with them, and then we can follow-up.
Okay.
Yeah.
Perfect.
Yeah.
So are we done with number 1?
I
think so.
I think so.
I mean, unless you know, I mean, obviously, this is an interview.
We're not having a debate.
So, we
we're having a discussion.
We're having a discussion, but, you know, obviously, feel free if anyone because because, again, my whole opinion will crumble if you think rocks are better than life.

(12:07):
I don't think rocks are better than life.
I actually I the thing is I think that there's value to all sorts of things that happen in the universe in and of themselves.
So I do think there's a value to a rock.
Do I put a value over one over the other?
Well, we theoretic and I I've never thought about this, so I'm kind of playing the not the devil's advocate.

(12:29):
I'm playing a little we sit on a rock.
If there was no rock,
we wouldn't be here.
So there's have both.
Yeah.
We we have to have a rock to have the life.
No?
No.
I mean, life is trying to destroy rocks.
Right?
When you think about your soil around your house, it is ground up rocks created by life and processes that that would life is trying to do is, is dismantle the natural world.

(12:59):
And by natural, I mean, like, the physical, like, the rocks, the energy in the rocks.
Trying to use the energy to take apart the rocks, to organize it in a more useful manner for the life.
So it's it's selfish in its way.
I'm sorry using the word, but it's
selfish in its way.
I mean, we are I mean, we are halfway through this process that that we, obviously, we have rocks, so the life hasn't gotten to it, but there's lots of places where life has completely demolished rocks.

(13:27):
So and it's really hard.
Like, the life as it exists here on Earth is not gonna get around to demolishing planet Earth, but a future life might you know, we can imagine some future where life tears apart a planet and turns it into more life.
You don't know me well enough, but I'm a very literal person.
So if someone says something, I often listen to the words, and then they say, that's not what I said.

(13:51):
And I said, no.
That's exactly what you said.
Well, that's not what I meant.
So when this word better is part of my challenge.
It's not that it's that there's a value Mhmm.
To all the pieces in an ecosystem, whether you appreciate it or not.
The other day, someone mentioned something, and I said, well, a virus is a living creature, and it has evolved our human species and animal species.

(14:15):
And they said, yeah.
But we don't need viruses.
We kinda do.
So, well, yeah, we do.
And this person had challenged that because it was a negative, and I said, we need creatures on this planet.
I don't know what I was listening to, so please bear with me.
But this guy was telling this story how he was up in Antarctica, and this they saw a polar bear on another rock.

(14:38):
And the polar bear started coming towards this group of people, and they were trying to get as far away from the polar bear as possible.
And at one point, the polar bear jumped and was maybe 15, 20 feet to, you know, 5 meters away, and then it went underwater, and it came up where they were, grabbed one of the people Oh.
And pulled them into the water.
Yeah.
And it was hunting.

(14:59):
Yeah.
Of course.
And and and I That was a that was a people problem, not a polar bear problem.
Not a polar bear.
Right.
Yeah.
And so but polar bears are just in this case, the polar bear was harming another creature.
So when we need that balance that Yeah.
It's not a yin and yang, but the the balance of or the things that happen in the universe to get where we are.

(15:20):
So I guess I like the life in the rocks.
I think they all have a place.
So would I say life is better than rocks?
Uh-huh.
I would say, in my mind, they're both valuable, yet life adds that dimensionality Mhmm.
To the universe.
Yes.
That's that's what I appreciate.
Does that make sense?

(15:41):
Yeah.
No.
For sure.
I'm I'm saying that that the material components of the universe and the energy in the universe are are the raw ingredients for everything that life does.
Okay.
I and and I that I would have So how
much of it it wants to use is up to life.
K.

(16:02):
Right.
So so I'm not I'm not I mean, I think, you know, by the end, I'm gonna really firmly advocate for us living in sustainable balance here on planet Earth and even in the solar system.
But, but I also think there's a certain amount of chaos.
You kinda can't control what the outcome is gonna be.
So so you can nip this whole thing in the bud.

(16:23):
You can No.
No.
No.
We're not we're not nipping it.
I'm No.
No.
I'm not saying you can.
I'm saying
one can.
One can nip this whole thing in the bud and just say, you know what?
Life is just too dangerous.
Let's just stick with rocks.
Rocks and stars and and let that all reach the Have you had
a person who has said the opposite?
Let me ask you.
You've done okay.
Never.
So it's there's a there's a question that we ask with Project Moon Hut, and I've actually started keeping score just recently.

(16:50):
Yeah.
And I say name one project on planet Earth on the entire Earth that is working for all of Earth to solve the challenges on Earth collectively, not for a society, not for a group, but for all species on Earth.
Name 1.
Mhmm.
Just name 1.
And I've asked a lot of people.
They've given me smaller examples of things that are happening.
Yeah.

(17:11):
And the number is still 0.
Yeah.
I wouldn't be able to give you one.
So And
well, hello.
So that's why I'm interested in where you're gonna go.
So let's take this number 2.
What do we have?
We prob we are probably alone in the universe.
That's right.
We're probably alone.
Okay.
Yeah.
So when we think about the universe, we think about that there are 100 of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone.

(17:38):
There are 100 of billions, possibly trillions of galaxies in the observable universe.
Each one of these stars probably has 1 or many planets.
There are rogue planets that are floating in between the star systems.
Evidence, paleological evidence shows that the moment life could have survived here on Earth, it did.

(18:07):
That life goes back to whatever 4000000000 years ago, just a few 100000000000 years after the formation.
Like, the moment the Earth wasn't a molten ball of lava, life formed.
So
You think it happened that quickly?
It well, I best
on like, I think that happened that quickly.
There is evidence for fossilized microbes that are just a few 1000000000 years after the big bang.

(18:32):
You know?
In relative terms, yes.
It happened
Oh, so not the big bang.
Sorry.
After after the formation of the earth.
I apologize.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there there is, we'll get to the big bang part in a second.
But there is yeah.
So there is life going back here on earth to just a few 100000000 years after the formation of the earth.
That I would agree with.
Yes.
I just
So life formed really in almost instantaneously.

(18:54):
The moment the conditions were acceptable, not great, just acceptable life formed.
And so the standard view is that life is everywhere here on earth, every, every nook and cranny where we find liquid water, we find life.
And so the standard view is life must be everywhere.

(19:15):
Okay.
Right?
It should be everywhere.
There should be life on other planets.
There should be life.
There should be tens of thousands of advanced civilizations across the Milky Way.
There should be advanced civilizations in every galaxy that we can see.
The universe should be teeming with life.
And and, well, and I we're using I I think it's very easy.

(19:38):
I did it for a moment, then I stopped.
And who's the I'm gonna use an author to kinda demonstrate the differences.
Was it Andrew Work or something Work that just wrote that book recently where the the other species was a different type of
Oh, Andy Weir?
Andy Weir.
Project Hail Mary?
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so defining life is in your mind anything that is

(20:04):
what?
You know, when you see it.
Right?
So This was the scientific interview.
I remember.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like, anything that that you know, there's lots of definitions for life, and you can there's a geneticist perspective of what life is and there's a and there's a a a biologist point of view and and there's many different but but the gist is some combination of it pulls in energy from its environment.

(20:32):
It has some kind of membrane where it it organizes stuff inside itself and moves, changes, reproduces, grows, kicks around its environment, does stuff.
So if you have the equation, and it's an equation, life forms instantaneously when the conditions meet a certain set of of behaviors conditions.

(20:57):
Okay?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so and and what you're saying is, therefore, if that's the case, then it should be happening all over the universe.
Right.
And you're saying this is not the equation.
Well, no.
No.
I'm saying, like, that's the that's everyone's expectation.
And yet Yep.
And that the the idea of you know, because here in the universe, we exist with a common set of rules.

(21:18):
We've got we've got the energy from stars.
We have the chem we have chemistry.
We have laws of physics.
They they guide or they play a role here on everything that happens on planet Earth.
They must have those same rules must be happening everywhere across the universe that that we can see.
From what we can tell, the universe is the same everywhere, that there are stars, the stars give off energy, the radiation falls on planets, the planets are made out of various chemicals, the chemicals interact with each other, some will have liquid water, that the kinds of processes that happen here on earth are happening everywhere around this this universe.

(21:56):
That's an expectation.
Yes.
If Yeah.
For those who believe that life forms, if the conditions are right for at least our type of species
Yeah.
Then that will happen on other planets.
Right.
And that because
Because it's mathematically impossible not to based upon
the number of assumption.

(22:17):
Like Yes.
Like, if you're gonna make the assumption that the laws of physics are completely different for every cubic meter of the universe, then you can't you can't make can't say anything about the universe.
So yeah.
So that's like astronomers kinda say we're not special.
This what we see here is kind of how everything is probably out there.

(22:38):
And so then this idea of evolutionary, you know, evolutionary biology by natural natural selection is one of the resulting features you would expect for limited amounts of energy falling onto limited amounts of chemistry.
Yeah.
Right.
That, that you get more sunlight, you get less sunlight, you have more ingredients, you have less ingredients that you're attempting.

(23:04):
You're the life form is attempting to adapt itself to live in the, to live in the habitat that it finds itself and over time will become better and better adapted to its surroundings, and you'll have natural selection.
You will have animals eating each other.
You have creatures eating each other, aliens eating each other to which are better adapted and and more fit to survive in certain environments.

(23:32):
And this process, this evolutionary process that we see here on Earth feels like it should be the kind of thing that we would find out there across the universe.
So right now, life forms instantaneously, and the formula is now you're adding plus natural selection Yeah.
Is a mechanism by which planets or species or Right.
Be able to, progress,
change, evolve.
Right.
And even if life doesn't doesn't form instantaneously, there seem

(23:56):
to be mechanisms how life can move from world to world, from star system to star system.
So life could have started only one time in the entire universe, but has naturally shifted around from world to world through these various processes.
So Do you do you believe that?
I don't have any.

(24:18):
I I don't believe it.
It's not about a belief thing.
It's whether or not there's evidence.
I mean, we see Oumuamua.
It was believed to be 30,000 interstellar asteroids passing through the solar system at any one time.
These are these are objects that formed in other star systems.
So there are definitely mechanisms that get material from 1 star system to another star system.
It doesn't seem impossible that when you run the clock of the entire solar system for 4,600,000,000 years that an asteroid was knocked off of another star system kept microbes inside safely, and it happened to hit Earth.

(24:57):
Doesn't seem impossible to me.
Okay.
Well, the premise seems like that is not your premise because by saying that life forms instantaneously when the characteristics behavior or what's happening makes it happen Yeah.
Then you would not be saying that you believe that there's a singular source of creation, and then that has been spread.

(25:20):
Where did the first microbe form on earth?
Let me pull up a map.
Don't don't bother.
Right?
It doesn't matter.
We don't know.
It we can never know
because Well, I'm asking you, do you think it came from another from another rock, another thing,
or do you think it instantaneously formed by?
No opinion.
I have no opinion.

(25:41):
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have no I've I do I have insufficient evidence to decide either way.
But what I do know is that like, a a better example is when you think about a coconut, which beach on Hawaii did the Coke the first coconut to grow in Hawaii land on?

(26:04):
Or doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Or was it spontaneously
I don't I don't think a coconut spontaneously formed on Hawaii.
There are other islands that have coconuts that existed long before Hawaii was formed.
Well, I Hawaii was part of a massive
Yeah.
Right?
So there was there were coconut there were palm trees before Hawaii existed, and yet as soon as Hawaii formed, then a coconut showed up.

(26:29):
So You
know, you're making work for me.
I'm gonna have to do the history of coconuts.
That's up to you.
I could have used any other analogy.
I know.
I it's Or
would you prefer finches?
So you're I understand where you're going.
Okay?
So you're Yeah.
But you're more, I believe, because you're put you said, I believe life forms instantaneously that this other construct that it was dispersed through the universe.

(26:54):
No.
So I don't say I don't say that I believe that life formed instantaneously.
I'm saying that is the that is what happened
Oh, okay.
Here on Earth.
And then you have this other So the assumption
is and there's another possibility that life like, whether it formed or whether it got here through some other mechanism is irrelevant.
The point is it was here.
Okay.
Got it.
And and so when you add all of those pieces together, everyone's ad hoc assumption is life should be everywhere.

(27:20):
It should be everywhere.
Right?
And so you talk to you talk to anyone.
You talk to astronomers, you talk to the regular public and you say, are there aliens?
Do you think they're aliens?
And they'll say, yes, of course, of course.
It's a huge universe.
It's big.
We don't, we've only explored a tiny little piece of it.
How could there not be aliens?

(27:41):
There have to be aliens.
And what I'm saying is that there aren't any that that earth is the only place with life at all in the entire observable universe.
And at this point, I hope your audience is losing their minds.

(28:03):
Well, it's just me.
It doesn't matter.
Okay.
Fine.
But but people are vociferously disagreeing with my, my hubristic, assertion.
Mean I that we are doesn't matter
it doesn't matter what other people you and I are talking.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you and I Of
course.
No.
No.
I'm I'm
used to I'm used to this.
When I hear this Yeah.

(28:24):
Not even a single bacteria on another star system.
If you had asked me this is my answer, and then this would be my second my my process.
Yeah.
I would say, I would like to believe that something like this happened, yet I have no evidence.

(28:45):
Mhmm.
So But would you be against it?
If I if I said, let's have a bet, you know, gentleman's bet, we can get the answer in a second here.
A $100 each way.
I'll take the there is no life in the universe.
Will you take the yes, there is life in the universe?
Would you take that bet?
And then we could then know the answer instantaneously.
No.
I know that, and my, I I'd never bet.

(29:09):
I mean, I got married.
I started businesses.
Those are all bets.
But Sure.
What I what would I say?
Would you take that bet?
What would I do?
Would I take that bet?
Yeah.
I'm leaning towards saying, no.
I wouldn't take that bet.
Really?
Interesting.
I would Okay.
I would take the I would say that the the probability Yeah.

(29:33):
A single occurrence
A material life form.
A single celled organism.
If it if it has to be observable universe.
Well, observable is a tough word because we keep on getting observable further.
Sure.
Include the new stuff.
Include the time you anytime you think about it.
I would say that the randomness of collisions of something happening, whether it be infinitesimally small, it doesn't mean we have to have humans and tigers or

(30:00):
Yep.
Yep.
And and coconuts.
A microbe.
That a microbe planet in your system in Alcantara.
May have formed, and it could have died.
Mhmm.
But I believe that the randomness of collisions of opportunity would probably have addressed itself, but we might not even recognize when we see it.
Okay.
So you and I because we're

(30:22):
we're betting a $100.
I don't wanna lose Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
It's a lot of money.
So it's so it's so it's rocks as far as the eye can see.
As far as I could say, I would say that as far as you could see, yes.
And mine is Okay.
On one of those.
Yeah.
Again, we might not be able to identify it as Yeah.
We wouldn't see it because we wouldn't know it could be in a different spectrum of light.
Or Yeah.

(30:43):
I mean, like, I'm not gonna include
stuff that exists in some extra dimension that we can't No.
No.
I'm not talking about extra dimensions.
I'm just talking about we just might not be able to see it because we can't see it with human eyes.
Thing that would cast a shadow.
Right?
If it Okay.
Yeah.
I would say went after the rocks that I'm sitting on.
I've never been asked this question, so it's really it's a you've thought about it.
I haven't, and my mind is racing.

(31:06):
You've never wondered.
You've never thought I believe that there's aliens in the universe?
I've never been put into the question of saying yes or no.
I've had the discussion about possibilities, and that's the Yeah.
The world is humans can get away with a lot Yeah.
When there's possibilities.

(31:27):
When you say it's a yes or a no Yeah.
You have to take a camp.
Yeah.
And if I had to take the camp today, maybe in 6 months, I'd think differently.
Maybe after we're done, I'll think differently.
But if I had to take a camp, realize and I think you we're my background is organic chemistry, physics, calculus.
I mean, I do the extreme sciences.
So I'm my mind my my thought is I see, you could change the formula.

(31:57):
Would you bet your would you bet your life on it?
Well, no.
Who'd who'd bet their life on things?
No.
But I'm saying if if this was it, if this was you, Willy, I would take a camp.
No.
I would not.
I would not.
I would say It's crazy.
But if I had to bet my life on it, I would say No
one's asking you to bet your life on it.
Oh, but a $100, so then I'm gonna go with $100.

(32:18):
I'm gonna say, I believe there's something I believe there's something out there.
Okay.
Great.
I yes.
Wonderful.
Okay.
Now right.
But the like, the fact that it took you that long, like, everyone else, I I assume, who's listening to this, would take that bet in a heartbeat that it's, that it's madness to think that there's not life out there.
So this, so the idea, and you probably heard of it, is the Fermi paradox, this idea that fine, right?

(32:43):
If life is everywhere, then where is everybody?
And when Fermi Enrico Fermi first formulated this idea, what he talked about was not like, is there going to be life forms on the underside of an ocean in a far flung corner of the universe?
And, of course, we haven't found that life because we've barely we've barely started to explore.

(33:08):
And when you talk to Jill Tarter, she will say, wondering about whether or not there's life in the universe is like taking a single spoonful of the ocean, not seeing any whales in it and thinking that there's no such thing as whales.
But And and And Yes.
You're you're Jill is gonna be on next week.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, maybe I'll bring this question up to her.

(33:29):
That'd be great.
Yeah.
And so but the Fermi paradox is not about having explored the entire universe.
The the back of the mat napkin math that Enrico Fermi did was he imagined some other alien civilization who had reached a certain level of technical capability, sent out spacecraft to other star systems.

(33:54):
Those star systems, the spacecraft built more copies of themselves.
They went off to other star systems.
So he was imagining, like, we have life here on Earth that as a a civilization reaches a certain level of technology, it will set off into the cosmos and begin the process of converting the cosmos from rocks to life.

(34:18):
I think there's also an a contrary one that as soon as you get to a certain point, if you don't make a decision, the whole thing implodes.
Yeah.
That's a we'll we'll get to that in a second, but Okay.
But we'll stay on the on the on the
No.
No.
That's okay.
I just was sorry.
I I just So so this idea and so that that and we're on our way.
When you think about what's happening with humanity, here we are, you know, someone's about to build a, hot on the moon with a door.

(34:43):
Someone else is going to be building a self replicating robot that 3 d prints that goes to the asteroid belt and builds copies of itself, extracts antimatter, sends these self replicating robots off to Alpha Centauri to to Wolf 359, they're gonna build copies of themselves.
And according, you know, if you go 10% the speed of light, you will fully explore your entire galaxy in about 10,000,000 years.

(35:14):
Like the Milky way is about 170, 150,000 light years across.
You go 10% of the speed of light point 500,000.
Yeah.
You've you've you've done it in about 2,000,000 years.
You've gone to every single star system, and you have filled every single star system with robots and and life if you want.
I mean, if you took a lot, if you took life along with your robots, you would have that.

(35:39):
And and so it's not that we would be like, it's up to us to go to these other star systems, but in fact, it's about the fact that these that that an alien civilization that starts anywhere across the entire Milky Way 2000000 years later, we'll have filled the entire Milky Way with self replicating robot probes.

(36:01):
That there are about 4,000,000,000 galaxies that we can reach if we're able to build spacecraft capable of going just shy of the speed of light.
So beyond that, all the the other 2 trillion galaxies we can never reach, but there's about 4,000,000,000 that we can reach.
The rest are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, and we could never get to them.
But 4,000,000,000 is a lot.

(36:23):
Right?
That's a big Yeah.
That's that's a big swath.
It's it's 4% of the universe.
And Is that what it is?
If yeah.
And if we started today, we could send about a send a bunch of robots out, antimatter robots that would reach 1 per galaxy, and they would begin the process of colonizing those.
And colonizing is a terrible word, exploring.

(36:45):
We don't use yeah.
We in ours, we don't use colonizing or settlement.
Yeah.
Explore.
Right?
And so by all means, we could we could and then we could have a map.
Like, we could have all of these robots just traveling to all these different star systems, sending data home to us here on earth, and then and then throwing themselves into the star to wipe away all trace of their existence if we wanted to.

(37:07):
Okay.
Or we could we could send DNA factories that that spread cyanobacteria on every single planet that we run into and fill the universe with cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria would like that just fine.
Thank you very much.
So so the question about why we don't see any aliens out there is not that we haven't gone out to find them, it's that they haven't come to find us.

(37:34):
And it doesn't matter where they start.
Right?
Any one of those galaxies within 4, you know, within the 4,000,000,000 galaxies in our local universe, each one which has potentially tens of thousands of intelligent civilizations, not one has sent out these robot probes to every single place in the universe.

(37:58):
And that's weird, right?
That is the Fermi paradox that we sit here in what seems like a pristine universe that that when a an advanced civilization begins really digging in, they are turning their asteroids into Dyson spheres.
They are starting to utilize big chunks of the radiation from their star.

(38:23):
These are signs that are easily recognizable across millions of light years.
If we watch the galaxy wink out star by star as they all shifted into the infrared spectrum, it would be dramatic and obvious.
And yet very expansive surveys have been done looking for infrared shifted galaxies across the observable universe, and they haven't been seen.

(38:50):
It appears that the universe is raw wilderness in every direction that we look.
K.
So the, you know, so the the conclusion from that and and so if if if, like, any little speck of life through the evolutionary through the evolutionary process can become an advanced civilization capable of sending out fleets of robotic spacecraft to every nook and cranny, then we have to assume that it's never happened anywhere else.

(39:22):
We're also I think there's also an assumption there that over the 1,000,000,000 of years of evolution that a a species would have reached that level to be able to do that, and maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Sure.
Maybe we're right now across the entire universe.

(39:43):
We're right now reaching that point where some
That seems really weird
that I I that there
are, you know, say there are 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe that there are potentially a 100,000,000,000 stars in each one of those galaxies that life could have formed on any of them or all of them, that advanced civilizations could have gotten started in any one of those galaxies and would have begun adapting their environment in a way that is observable to us.

(40:16):
It it could also be that they have never reached that.
It could have been that they haven't gotten this far yet.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so the you know, I think most people when they hear that, they say, well, but it's really far.
Oh, but it's, like, you know, it's really hard or it's really slow or maybe they don't want to.
But I don't even think
mine was just a matter of math.
It's

(40:37):
Yeah.
Well, you have to run that experiment.
You have to say to yourself, okay.
Fine.
Right?
Like, maybe the gentle dolphinoids in city alpha 6 don't want to create a solar system spanning civilization.
No problem.
But the Borg over at wolf 359, they sure want to, and they're going to do it.

(41:00):
And so the dolphinoids can either stop them or Oh, we're also
we're also making the assumption that they have the same cognitive patterns that we have Yeah.
Of exploration and or domination or
Well, I mean, it could
be anything.
Right?
It could be the most gentle, most loving exploration to send out peace and enlightenment to everyone to harmonize relations between civilizations.

(41:33):
It it it should just be obvious.
I think, though, built into that, in my mind, it was built into that is the the presumption that whatever species develops has the cognitive capabilities of wanting to or being able to think in this way.
And my mind, as you're talking about this, I said, a dog I went to a dog likes to wander.

(41:56):
Mhmm.
A dog will sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff and keep on going it if it hasn't been it'll just keep on going to eat and do, but that doesn't mean if the whole world was filled with dogs that one day Yeah.
They will rise up and have the ability that there will be one of them that supersedes the other.
And even though the planet could be rich in species, it doesn't mean that they'll be building something to leave.

(42:22):
Right.
But imagine you run that experiment on 2 trillion galaxies, 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy over and over and over again.
Right?
So it's not about We have to It's not about
it's not about one place.
But we can take we can take that we can take that set that you've created Mhmm.

(42:44):
And let's call it a 100, and we can take that set, and we could say yes.
But the conditions, the way we know them if we're using our biological systems and and, yeah, they, the groupings that we've had for creating life, what we consider to be criteria, we'd have to take out of that anything that's too far away from a heat source because it depends on the size.

(43:08):
We'd have to take away anything that doesn't have certain types of, minerals rock on that planet or on that rock.
So we could probably if we took that 100 set, there might only be 7, and I'm making this number up.
There might only be 7.
Right.
That could potentially meet the criteria you have.

(43:29):
Now let's assume on those 7, only 3 of them meet the criteria that you just said.
Sure.
Okay.
So now what does so you got 3.
They've got 3 out of 100,000,000,000 stars.
Correct.
What happens next?
Okay.
So now if you say that they actually do what you're saying, well, we could say that one of them completely fails.
They kill themselves.
Mhmm.
They Yep.
Nuclear war.

(43:50):
They do all the things that you shouldn't do.
So now we're down to 2.
Yep.
Yep.
And then we have a group that really tries to get out, but they don't have that cognitive capability to make that.
But we do have one.
Yeah.
Now in that one, even if you're using a replication factor of going and then finding and going and finding Mhmm.
To find a little rock earth or near earth or close enough for us to see something might be as just as impossible as the largest scope of the entire universe.

(44:20):
Said, they do it in 10 they do it in 2000000 years.
So the moment that one that survived, the one out of 100,000,000 star systems, that one goes on to completely explore the galaxy.
I I I think I I can I understand what you're saying?
I believe there's a lot of math in there that can easily be

(44:41):
Well right.
But but but you can, I mean, you can look at them because because the numbers are so large?
Right?
You know?
And and The
data set is huge.
Yes.
The data set is huge.
And so the what matters is that takes one time.
No.
It takes one time for the first one, but it takes it doesn't change the model on the next one that that next one will occur because maybe they go to a rock.

(45:04):
That rule they need to go but they go to so let's assume that humans decide to pick a rock Mhmm.
And let's call it Mars.
Sure.
Sure.
Because the moon's gonna be okay for a bit.
Let's call it Mars.
They go to Mars.
They've done it.
They made the jump.
Yeah.
But what happens is on Mars, they didn't make they didn't have all the data, and they made wrong assumptions about surviving a number of people, and they collapse.

(45:28):
Sure.
The people on that original planet, let's call it Earth, might not have the wherewithal, the capital, all of the other things for to make that next change again.
Yeah.
We'll figure to that.
That's my point number 3.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So
let's So are we ready
to the 3 years or more?
No.
We're not.
Because I because I
I feel like I'm not you don't understand it yet.
I don't think.

(45:49):
And so I I think I just wanna sort of take a
few crack
steps just to get there.
Yeah.
I'd love it.
Right.
So the point is, like and back to my coconut analogy that Yep.
That if a coconut lands, like, say you've got all the beaches on Hawaii and 99% of the beaches are bad for coconuts to land on, but there's one beach that's okay for coconuts to land on and coconuts can can grow on that beach.

(46:14):
Yep.
100 years later, where where are the coconut palms growing?
They could be on the island or just to that one beach because the rest of the island They're they're everywhere.
The rest of the island might not might not be conducive to that.
It could be But we weather it could Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.

(46:35):
Fine.
We can pick any plan.
The point being that that once the coconut has the toehold on Hawaii, it then spreads.
It drops more coconuts.
The coconuts grow.
You get more coconuts.
Eventually, the entire island has been settled by coconuts.
And, and so it doesn't matter where it starts.
If you take a sandwich, and this is the other analogy that I use in one spore of mold drops on your sandwich and you leave your sandwich out and you come back a week later, your entire sandwich is covered in mold.

(47:08):
If in fact, it was left alone to its own devices.
Right.
If in fact, that mold was found by my wife, it would have been tossed or exposed or whatever.
If in fact, that coconut is like the 17,500 tree species on planet Earth at this time today, out of 60,000 tree species or 17,500 on the razor's edge Yeah.

(47:30):
Of going extinct.
And they're going extinct because of variables outside of the control of the tree.
Yes.
So I mean, toilet paper is 80 toilet paper and hand wipes are 80,000 trees a day.
Yeah.
So if someone really wants toilet paper hand wipes or toilet paper butt wipes, whatever you wanna call them,
that Yeah.

(47:51):
That species might not be back be all over the planet, all over the island if you came back 50 years from there.
I was assuming there was no people looking to turn countries into toilet wipe.
Right?
I'm But you understand what I'm saying?
I'm using that as an example.
No.
I understand.
There
there's variables out.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
All I'm saying is is that is that there is life in every nook and cranny of planet Earth.

(48:17):
Yes.
We don't have to go very far to find life.
Yeah.
Because life is doing the spreading.
And, and if intelligent life gains the technological capability, it will do the spreading.
And for every life form that doesn't wanna do the spreading, there will be a life form that will, or for every 1,000 that don't want to, there will be one that wants to, and it's the one that wants to is the one that we see, that we will see.

(48:45):
And so you and so that experiment has been run on 100,000,000,000 planets, 100,000,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies, and we have not one time seen evidence that that an alien civilization has begun this process of settling their galaxy.

(49:06):
And, and, and so that leads us to wonder, like there are 2 possibilities, either we are alone in the universe or something really horrible happens to any advanced civilization that tries to.
That gets to a certain level of technology.

(49:28):
And we can imagine all kinds of possibilities.
We can imagine a nuclear apocalypse, but the nuclear apocalypse won't kill life on earth.
We can imagine an asteroid strike, but an asteroid strike won't kill life on earth.
We can imagine, a a plague, but a plague won't kill life on earth.
Like, there is life forms 10 kilometers below the surface of of earth.
There's life forms

(49:50):
hottest temperatures at the bottom of the ocean.
Yes.
Against the the black smokers at the bottom of the ocean that that we are that life is unkillable.
You would have to take the entire planet Earth and drop it into the sun if you really wanted to get rid of life on Earth.
K.
So so life is life is everywhere, and so it seems weird.

(50:13):
And of course, like what if we create our robot overlords?
Well, then we would see the universe being filled with robotic spacecraft and we don't see that.
So it doesn't seem to be that that alien species transcended into robots.
So the so it's a possibility that there's some inevitable outcome, some science experiment that intelligent civilizations can't help themselves but do.

(50:38):
I I just choose not to believe that because it's a horrible thought.
I would much prefer we're alone because the alternative is horrific.
Ah, that's an interesting
Yeah.
So Yeah.
Like, I'm having to make a leap of faith here in that in that I'm just like it
No.
That that's an interesting take that it it's either this way or the alternative is The other one be behind door number 2.

(51:04):
Yeah.
And door number 2, like, if it's if it's knocked out 100,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies for 100,000,000,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies.
It is 100% lethal, whatever this thing is, nobody has escaped it.
So we can't expect to escape it either.

(51:25):
The I I you remind me, I had this conversation with I I was at an event I met, if you wanna call it, the first astronaut I've met.
His name was Jim Newman, and I he's out of California.
We were sitting and talking, and I didn't know he was an astronaut at the time.
We we just started talking about life, and he said, we will we'll never know if there's life outside of this of earth.

(51:51):
And his his presumption, and I'm gonna shorten it and probably not do it the justice that he did it, is he said that if someone was gonna come visit us, and you've heard this, they would have had to look through their mic through their telescopes.
They would have had to pick this rock 50000 years ago or whatever, depending on their speed of travel.
Then they would have to have then hopped in and and seen what they saw and said, we're gonna go to that rock, that small tiny rock orbiting around the sun.

(52:21):
And by the time they got here, we could all be gone or the choice of even selecting it would never have happened.
I totally disagree.
And that was his that was his first take on it.
That was the first time I was questioned in that way.
I never heard about it in in that light.
I think here the he was talking about slower than the speed of light Sure.

(52:42):
Whereas traveling at very much slower speeds.
You use 10%, I think it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The speed of light.
Yeah.
He was probably talking Voyager speeds.
I I
like, I I think I get that that feeling, but I actually think it's wrong
that we currently have the James Webb Space Telescope, which is theoretically capable of detecting life, gases from life in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.

(53:06):
There are plans to build a telescope called the solar gravitational lens that would put a telescope out about a 1000 astronomical units from the sun where the gravity of the sun acts like a natural lens and magnifies the light from a distant exoplanet to the point that you would see a 1 megapixel image of an exoplanet.

(53:28):
So you would not only see the exoplanet, you would see the mountains and the oceans and the and the trees Wow.
Rivers and the cities and and the moons that were going around it, and that's like one spacecraft.
We could we have the test mission, which is identifying every every planet in our in our neighborhood.
We've got the extremely large telescope coming online in 2027 that is gonna be capable of directly observing Earth sized world orbiting around sun like stars.

(53:58):
It is perfectly reasonable for us to assume that in the next few 100 years, we will have a very detailed survey of every single planet, habitable planet within a few 1,000 light years of us and and telescopes out of the solar panels.
And and your belief
that there will be nothing imaging them.
And your belief will be there will be nothing next to it.

(54:20):
Yeah.
We'll find that.
Fine.
Yeah.
It it's And we have to you know, antimatter would allow us to travel at a significant portion of the speed of light.
We have laser sail technology theoretically.
But even if we're lazy and we wanna take the slow route, we can wait a 100000 years and star systems will get close to us that they pass within a few 100 astronomical units of the sun or a few 1,000, and they're relatively easy to hump from hop from star system to star system.

(54:49):
So a lazy civilization could take a few 1000000 years extra and travel to every single star system in the entire Milky Way for a fraction, for 1% of the travel time because you just wait for all the star systems to drift closely to each other.
I I I'm I don't want I wanna continue with this.

(55:10):
It's interesting.
A question came to mind of the and you would know this.
You probably have read this.
William Shatner wrote his recently comment about death or Mhmm.
Beyond earth.
I feel like you're the downer at the party.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
When he said that, did you say did your heart say, yes, he's exactly right?

(55:34):
No.
What did you say?
Well, I mean, like, his
his experience, and this is the 4th point, is how important earth is.
Like, this is all
So do we wanna we we still have octopuses yet.
So you
wanna have octopuses in the
on the you wanna So it's like
I mean, I guess, like, my only hope is that I've made the case that we're alone.

(55:55):
I I don't I I and I
and I can appreciate that this is a this for a lot of people, I have absolutely not made the case.
Well, it's it's again, it's other people.
I've given them some interesting
My my question would be, let's say you've done this.
Yeah.
Let's say you've done this a 1000 times to people you've spoken to, not people in the audience.

(56:16):
There's a huge difference.
One way conversation versus two way conversation, large group versus a small group.
Yeah.
When you walk away from those conversations, and let's say they let's use this I'm gonna use a number of 1,000 because I'm gonna give an analogy.
Yeah.
On LinkedIn, I think I'm, like, 17,500 connections.

(56:38):
Let's just use that as a number.
Okay.
I get all the time people who write to me, David, love to have you a part of my love to connect.
Your CV is amazing.
I'd like to connect.
And I always do one thing.
I write back, love to connect.
Why did you connect to me?
Now why did I do that?
Because I had a person who when I had had 69 connections, and I accepted with a lot of reservation, And he wrote me this beautiful letter about how he read paid to think, the book that I'd written, and how he it has changed his entire x y z.

(57:11):
It was beautiful.
Yeah.
And I've had people I don't know who I've influenced, so I have to accept, but I do write back.
Out of a 100, I get maybe 10 people who write back.
So they said they wanna connect.
I then write something back, which is a connection.
I accept it and write something back.
They don't answer.
Yes.
Of course.
Out of the people who answer, probably not data specific, 6 of them write back, I just wanted to connect.

(57:40):
It it was awesome to meet you.
Thank you.
Now what do you write back?
I mean, there's nothing you could write back to that.
Yeah.
You don't realize you created a connection.
I created a conversation.
You more or less slammed the door.
Yeah.
And then out of that group, maybe 3, 4.
I had one this morning from Pakistan where I I set up a meeting.
I said, I'd like to meet you if you're gonna write back to me.

(58:01):
I'm writing a cool conversation.
Yeah.
It's really neat.
I like
that.
The challenge is that it's a small, small, small segment where we could say that people think something or do something.
But I've been keeping track.
People do not respond, and I ask them every single one, why did you connect?
So my question is, out of the thousand, how many of them walked away where they said, I completely agree with you?

(58:27):
Or how many of them said, I have to think about it?
Or how many of them said,
I don't know?
Yeah.
I mean, I think the response
is you've got to be wrong.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Like, it's like it is it is it is a it it's a faith issue.
So I make what I feel is a fairly cogent cogent argument, and they'll be like, well, that's fine, but I just don't believe you.

(58:49):
K.
So and he used the word so, again, I'm very literal.
He used the word faith.
Mhmm.
It also could be a faith issue.
It could be a matter of religion, a matter of societal norms.
It could be that their their belief is that if there's not something out there I have no value, there could be a lot of inherent reasons why they wouldn't.

(59:16):
So if your argument is not having a lot of people walk away with that, yep.
Got it.
Mhmm.
What's I'm sorry.
I'm this is who I am.
Yeah.
What do you think is missing in that formula that can get people over that hump to get this?
Well, I mean, like, I I think that

(59:38):
there's a where I'm kind
of going with this argument is I'm worried that there's a learned helplessness.
Okay.
About humanity that, that we have as our operating system, an assumption that that some, that we, that someone else is going to, is going to fix it.

(01:00:01):
Oh, wow.
And, and some, and we have that across the environment.
We have that across the economy or that across human connection.
We're always assuming I don't need to recycle.
I don't need to decrease my energy usage.
Someone else is gonna solve this problem.
And every civilization has ended because everybody kept saying that until everybody died.

(01:00:28):
Okay.
So now now I
and and that's the ultimate.
No.
No.
I I I I love that because that connection, which is not an easy one to get, is an assumptive be and I'm not saying bad.
It's just the word assumptive.
Mhmm.

(01:00:49):
Not a negative bad, not a a negative assumption or positive assumption.
The assumption is that human beings or the behavior of human beings, because we're not talking about trees and amoebas and we're not talking about whales Mhmm.
That the human species has this underlying belief structure.
For some reason, that something will save them.

(01:01:13):
Yes.
And you don't like that.
Mhmm.
And you're hoping that they can tap into a different side of them.
Yes.
Yeah.
A 100%.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and No.
No.
You it manifests itself just in like, it manifests itself over and over and over again in So in political, you know, people who are who are being trapped in tyranny in you know, see what's happening in Iran right now.

(01:01:41):
You think about the environment, you think about the what happened during World War 2, like, just again and again, it's only when people take a stand for the things that matter that that things change, and we avoid annihilation.
I I I'm gonna maybe this might be helpful because I I'm now understanding where you're coming from, which I love.

(01:02:08):
I appreciate it.
Mhmm.
And I'm gonna give you 2 data points, 2 thoughts to think about.
And one of them is a a methodology of awareness.
Individuals are not aware of what they don't know, but they believe they know it anyway.
They did they believe they understand something.
So I made this mistake.
I had developed this program called redefining.

(01:02:30):
If you use it and you understand it, and it's not simple, if you use it every single time you use it, you will come up with a better answer than the answer you had before to get to your desired outcome.
Every time there's if it's 1%, if it's 50%, if it's point 1, it's always better because I've used it over and over and always does.
But the first time I presented it, I said to a group of people, I was excited.

(01:02:52):
There were about 13 people I've been working with, and I said, let me share with you what I'm working on.
I went over it, and these are all executives of pretty large companies.
And they say, oh, no.
No.
I do that.
No.
No.
I do that.
I do that.
And I'm thinking, I know you.
You do not do that.
So the next time I changed them, I changed me.

(01:03:14):
I didn't try to change them.
What I did is I said, there's a big piece of paper in front of you.
I did it, like, 2 weeks later to another group of people.
There's a big piece of paper in front of you.
I would like you all have processes for addressing major challenges.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I said, can you write me down the process that you use that your your organization uses, not just you, but your organization also uses?

(01:03:38):
And let me see it because I wanna see where you come from.
Mhmm.
And I let them struggle.
Yeah.
This went on for
Of course, they don't.
20 minutes, and people are saying, well, you know, I kinda do this, and I kinda do that.
And then what we did is we put them up.
And I said, do you know if you do this, you'll be in a constant loop?
You'll never get an answer?
And another one was, okay, sir.
Here it was, then ask again.

(01:04:00):
Like, you did all of this and then ask again because it's complete failure.
Yeah.
The they didn't have one.
And then I showed it to them, and the second group said, I get it.
Right.
They completely not understood where it because it's bad and bought in.
They completely understood it because they didn't have a methodology, and they thought they did.

(01:04:21):
I think in this case, which I do love now because it does fit project Moon Hat, is that you're kind of articulating there's another reason for us to live a different way of life, and maybe it's based upon our our inherent belief structure of where we are in the universe.
Mhmm.
Does that make sense what I just said?
Yeah.

(01:04:42):
Our responsibility.
So I'm gonna take it from a different perspective, and I'm I'm using this.
I am Jewish, and in the Jewish religion, we are not.
I've never been taught.
I don't think it is.
You're never taught that you're going to be given something.
Like, you can't pray for something.
We don't I don't I've never prayed that someone that something would show up or that the world would be better or this would happen.

(01:05:06):
In in the way I was brought up and most of the people I know, you were told, no.
You can have anything you want.
You just have to work for it.
No.
No.
No.
You can have to work for it.
No.
You can have to you have to work for everything.
And so I don't come from the position that there is another life out there that will save us.
I don't think that the Vulcans are gonna show up because we hit, warp speed for the first time, whatever version of the movie it is.

(01:05:31):
I don't remember these names, the the the titles.
I don't come from that.
I come from the belief that no matter what, it's still up to us.
It's still up to us.
Mhmm.
So I do agree.
I I do love this.
I'm not gonna it's not an argument.
I call it a theoretical argument, meaning that I do love your case scenarios that it's it's the probability of what you're saying happening in the universe is infinitesimal to 0.

(01:05:57):
I do agree with that.
Mhmm.
I just don't tie that to me changing my behavior because I personally believe no one's coming
to help us at all.
Right.
Right.
Of course.
And so I think I mean, I don't think people have a a actual specific expectation or belief that this is that someone is gonna show up and fix everything, but they act as if Yes.

(01:06:27):
That's what's going to happen, and they continue living living their lives.
But that that is a behavioral component of it, and it does fill into what you're saying.
So, yes, they do believe something else will save them.
It doesn't have to be another species.
It could be, well, the smart people will figure it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Or maybe the you know, we just need a, you know, an asteroid strike to reset everything, but that's Correct.

(01:06:53):
It's madness.
There are people who believe we need the the the Earth should have nuclear bombs, and then it will reset itself.
And it won't.
And so that's what I'm about to move on to.
Let's move on to Octopuses?
We'll talk about the Octopuses.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so, I mean, we are not I mean, we are the the most advanced civilization, the most, intellectually capable, species on Earth.

(01:07:19):
We we wiped out all of our competitors and we're the ones that build cities, we're the ones that farm, we're the ones that put animals in pens, we're the ones who who exert dominance on every nook and cranny of this planet.
We have extracted all of the ready resources.
We've extracted the oil.
We've extracted 100 of 1000000 of years of of of plant life, of algae that has fallen to the bottom of the ocean and formed coal and oil.

(01:07:51):
We have extracted all of the readily available minerals, metals that are on the surface.
We've we've dug deep and found it.
We've extracted we're extracting now the water in giant underground aquifers that have been built up over tens of 1,000,000 of of years.
We're using that up too.
And so if we do mess this up, there are other life forms that couldn't step up.

(01:08:18):
There are the there are the crows, the ravens, the parrots.
There are the octopuses.
There are the chimpanzees, the gorillas.
You know, there's a lot of there's dolphins.
So there are other life forms.
And even if one of them can gain a certain level of sentience to the point that they can build cities and build undertake a space, program, build a a hut on the moon with a door, and so on.

(01:08:53):
We have used up the the legacy.
We have used up.
We have stolen their resources for ourselves that we have preloaded all of the stuff.
And even if any other civilization forms after us, the kind of technology that it would take for them to be able to get at that high value resource would be extreme, and the planet is is heating up.

(01:09:20):
I mean, over the next, say, 500,000,000 years, the sun will will boil the oceans and continue on until it eventually becomes a red giant star.
Now that's not causing global warming.
Well, to make sure that people understand that global warming is is absolutely humanity, burning fossil fuels in the short term, and that if we disappear, then temperatures go back to exactly as they were without us.

(01:09:48):
But over the long term, the sun is heating up and Yeah.
And it will end life on Earth eventually in about 5000000000 years.
So we can't we can't we can't depend on the aliens to do it, and we can't depend on the future to do it.

(01:10:11):
That's why we can't, the octopuses can't do it.
It's we, we can't rely on the aliens and we can't rely on the future.
So so yeah.
Let's I put an x to the aliens.
No aliens.
X to the aliens
and x to the octopuses.
Yeah.
Actually, I have met some aliens, and I think they're among us.

(01:10:33):
So I'm not so sure.
But Okay.
They're they're not helping us.
They're not okay.
But yeah.
Yeah.
So
They're not helping.
They're just human beings.
Yeah.
Those aliens that I'm talking
Once they they threw their lot in with us
They they they They're going they're coming down with the ship.
Yeah.
They're they're, what is it?
Men in black.
They're sitting at the bar drinking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then They've gone native.

(01:10:55):
They've gone native.
And then Yeah.
Do you think with the 500,000,000 years that potentially is just off the cuff of that potentially another species could evolve?
That's necessary.
It's a long shot.
Okay.
And we've like, maybe, but we've used the good stuff.

(01:11:20):
We've used up the good stuff.
So even if they do evolve, they're not gonna have oil reserves, coal reserves, uranium reserves, iron, nickel, copper, cobalt, cadmium, manganese, etcetera.
We grabbed it and used it.

(01:11:41):
Okay.
So let's let's go down the the bad rabbit hole.
Do you believe and we're doing the gentleman's bet.
Mhmm.
Mhmm.
Do you believe we'll solve this before what we have labeled the 6 mega challenges which you've heard about?
Mhmm.

(01:12:02):
Do you believe that we'll beat that race?
Well, so
that's number 4.
Oh, okay.
So are we done with 3?
I think so.
Unless you Okay.
Have any questions.
No.
No.
No.
That if if you're answering if you're answering
to 4.
And and spaceships
No.
Because you're gonna answer it here.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Stop stop wrecking Earth.
Yep.
Yeah.
So that's it.
Why the in if we do this right, if we live sustainably in balance with the planet, we can increase the diversity of planet Earth.

(01:12:30):
We can utilize the energy that is coming freely available to us from the sun and other renewable energy sources.
We can live in balance on this planet for until the sun cooks us all.
And in fact, maybe we can shift the orbit of the planet outward to stay in balance while the sun continues to to move on the planet.

(01:12:53):
We have 100 of millions of years ahead of us if we choose.
Never thought of moving Earth out into a different orbit.
That's a good idea.
Okay?
It's relatively straightforward.
You just have to bring No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Large you have to bring an asteroid close to the Earth once every 10000 years, and it will be enough to shift the Earth's orbit out slowly as it as the sun heats up, and it's Oh, okay.
Sufficient.
In fact, you take one asteroid, have it go from the from the Earth to Jupiter, and so it's stealing a little bit of orbital momentum from Jupiter, but, like, nothing that would ever ever show up on Jupiter's orbit, and then it gives it to Earth.

(01:13:25):
And so you're slowly shifting Earth's orbit outward in lockstep with the way the sun is heating up.
So Okay.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
For Wow.
Cool.
Never thought about it.
5,000,000,000 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No problem.
You you just gotta buy time.
Like, it is like, nothing in that violates the laws of physics.
We just need to get to a place that we can do it.
And so we are unsustainable in this.

(01:13:47):
So we have started the clock.
We have started the stopwatch in in how much time we have left to to figure this out before we use that all of the goods, all of the oil, all of the coal, all the uranium, all of the gold.
We have converted we have destroyed the forest and turned them into cropland.

(01:14:09):
We are we are we have we're growing an unsustainable number of cows, etcetera.
It is So have you have you
made these have you made this balance life change?
Oh, I I mean, probably not, but I did but I did buy 80 acres in Canadian forest to restore.

(01:14:31):
What is Canada?
Come on.
Yeah.
I know.
Exactly.
Right?
So Let me snow and beavers, but but we, but yeah.
So I So so let me ask to protect this property so that it is never falls into the hands of loggers again, and all I do all day is think of ways to jam more diversity into the property.
Okay.
So, I'm gonna do this with you, which I do somebody else.

(01:14:54):
Do you ever take photos on your on your phone?
Mhmm.
Okay.
I the guy who invented Siri, I don't know if you know this, for every photograph you take and post, it's equivalent to 3 20 watt light bulbs running for an hour because you have to consider that there are servers that are running to Yeah.
Make it that's not including storage.

(01:15:15):
That's just to get it from your phone, be your phone being charged, send it through the wires, send it through these servers, post it online for someone to see it, and to maintain it cost more, but it's 3 20 watt light bulbs.
Do you, do you buy ever buy new clothing?
Not really.
Well, how old are you now today?
I'm 51.

(01:15:36):
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm I'm 50.
So I I lived in Hong Kong, and every all my clothing had to be new because it had to fit the Right.
The marketplace.
But Yeah.
Yeah.
I do you buy foods that are shipped to you?
Mhmm.
Of course.
Okay.
Yeah.
I asked the woman in France, and I'm not picking on French people.

(01:15:57):
She's a fabulous person.
She believes in all the things you kinda just said that we have to do this.
And I said it just as I'm saying it now.
I said, you're a French woman.
Right?
And and and in a nice sense, and she smiled.
Yes.
And I said, you didn't give a makeup.
She looked at me.
She looked in the camera.
There was somebody else, and she said, no.

(01:16:20):
Yeah.
I said, you're a French woman.
I know that you love to dress.
Are you gonna give up buying nice clothing?
David.
Okay.
I said, are you?
She said, no.
I said, do you love friend your French, you love French food, elegant delicacies from around the world.
You love to dine.

(01:16:41):
Are you gonna give up dining in in these delicacies from around the world?
No.
I said, so then if you won't and you know everything that we'd spoken about today, you know, was on that conversation, you know all of this, then and you won't do it.

(01:17:02):
How do you expect others to do it?
I I am a fan of the theory that individuals feeling guilty over their carbon footprint is a deliberate campaign by by fossil fuel companies and governments to try and shift the blame to individuals when it is a policy issue at the heart of it.

(01:17:32):
It wasn't even my my questioning to you and to her was not that.
It's that humans are not reductionist in in their lifestyle and thinking.
Of course.
But we live we live in a society that is shaped by the by the politics and the business practices that are permitted by the government and encouraged.
There are

(01:17:53):
And do you think the government do you think governments around the world today are or at least the next 20 years?
Let's give you a window.
Do you think in the next 20 years, there will be enough tenacity, enough fortitude, enough understanding, enough conviction I I know.
Scale for 7,800,000,000 people.
Yeah.
I am I am overall,

(01:18:17):
optimistic.
I am, you know, I'm I am like, I think when you see the rate of adoption of of low carbon technology, of the switch to electrification, the rise of solar panels, wind powers, like, I think the the the climate of the planet is gonna take a hit.

(01:18:38):
I think that a lot of the least fortunate people are going to take the brunt of the damage that we've done to the climate.
But I think that we will figure this out And, 200 years from now, we will have solved the living in balance with the amount of resources that we have available to us from space.

(01:19:01):
And, you know, and I'm sure you've had this conversation with a lot of people that space is potentially one of the best ways that you can you can find some room to breathe, that you can extract resources in space, there's energy in space, you can dump your pollution in space, and you have lots of room.
But I, again, think that that is wishful thinking that that's gonna solve our problems.

(01:19:23):
So
the have you worked spent a lot of time, not just traveling, in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia No.
Botswana, Zambia?
Okay.
No.
I've lived in Hong Kong.
Is the closest thing that I've done.
Okay.
Yeah.
I I've, lived in Hong Kong for 10 years.

(01:19:44):
I've lived in Luxembourg.
And while in in Hong Kong and around the world, I've worked in about over 50 countries.
And to me, speaking is not working.
You fly in in, let's say, it's Hong Kong and you stay at the peninsula, which is beautiful hotel.
You go up on the to the peak, which is the beautiful mountain.
You come down.
You speak, and you leave.
You didn't work in Hong Kong.
You spoke in Hong Kong.
Mhmm.

(01:20:05):
Working is when you spend time on the ground in Bangladesh for weeks, and you get to meet the people, and you understand their culture and their not everything that you can learn.
I think that the rate of change that's necessary when you're in these environments, 67 or 62, I don't know the number today, of the world's pop percent of the world's population lives in these regions.
And their lifestyle and what their what's important to them is a very different, construct.

(01:20:34):
And I'll give you an example in a moment as I move this forward.
I do believe that's that beyond earth has a power, but not the power of, that is being promoted.
I believe that the power comes from the innovations necessary, which is required when you paradigm shift to a different location.

(01:20:58):
So let me give you an example.
You leave Canada and you now go to live in Cambodia.
You now have to learn everything new.
Mhmm.
Okay.
Now just going there means you're gonna have to learn to grocery shop different.
You're gonna have to store things different.
You have to travel different.
We know the world so much.
We make so many assumptions about the world that without even realizing it, we harm the world even when we're trying to solve the world.

(01:21:26):
But what if I said to you, how would you take a shower on the moon?
Now before you answer that, think about it because I want you to come back to it.
I was on the phone with a good friend of mine, out of Shaolin, China when I was in Hong Kong.
We were talking.
We had talked about half hour, 40 minutes, and great conversation.
She said, I've gotta take a shower.
And I said, oh, why don't we talk in about 20, 25 minutes?

(01:21:49):
And she I mean, through the video camera, I could still feel it.
She wound up with her hand so hard that she smacked me through that camera.
And she said this, don't you go telling me that I can't take my 20 to 50 minute shower every day because you've lived this life.

(01:22:11):
You've had it, and now it's our turn.
Mhmm.
And I went, oh.
I've had that exact conversation with, with a friend of mine in China.
And so the construct is that to change her mind with rational thinking, meaning as an example, not gonna do it.

(01:22:32):
So if I said to you, though, or said to her, how would you take a shower on the moon?
You know how to do this.
Right?
I'm assuming.
How do you take a shower on the moon?
How would you do it?
How do you take a shower on the moon?
Because I'd like to hear it when you would say it.
Oh, well, I because
the project moon how would you take a shower on the moon?
Well, I mean, like, water conservation is the key and that you would be you know, you you got the gravity, but you still have gravity on the moon.

(01:22:53):
So it's gonna work roughly the same, but you just have to be really careful about how much water that you use, and you're recycling the water as you would in a in a space station, etcetera.
Right.
So you what you did is you made a change.
Now the average individual on planet Earth has never thought about that question.
I never thought about it until Mhmm.
I had this woman, and I said, oh, what if we on Earth, we had a shower, we hopped in, we hit the water, and for 2 minutes or 3, whatever it is, 2 minutes, the water, it you get water that gets heavily filtered.

(01:23:25):
It goes out the system.
It gets filtered in the home.
And then after that, you have a recycling water that continually goes with a filter behind the wall so that you could take a 20 or 50 minute shower like sitting in a bath because the the dirty water's gone and it's being cleaned a certain way, but this water is not.
The challenge the the value for beyond earth is not going to beyond earth.

(01:23:50):
It's the innovations necessary and the paradigm shifting thinking that's required to do it creates new innovations on earth that addresses climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapses, displacement, social, political, economic, religious.
It involves unrest and how we how we get along with people in closed environments, in different societies.

(01:24:14):
It involves explosive impact from things such as overfishing the oceans, deforestation of the rainforest, the pollutions that go into the ocean.
That that construct of the thinking is the value.
I think, you know,
that is an argument that people make for the value of NASA.
And but they also make that argument for the value of war.

(01:24:38):
Yeah.
And and and I think that those are you're looking for a framework to adopt a a new kinds of technology, but I think they're they're a they're sub secondary to the process of using technology to solve problems.

(01:25:00):
And I think just getting humanity to this level of balance here on earth is challenge enough and will keep us busy.
Like, I would be perfectly happy if we never sent another rocket
Mhmm.
Except for, like, a couple for Earth observation and stuff.
Right?
And for weather patterns or whatever.
Exactly.
And that we spent our energy on on sorting out how to balance life on earth, but that we actually threw ourselves into this challenge and not just try to split the difference and spend some time building aircraft carrier carriers and sometimes developing new solar panels.

(01:25:37):
Like, I think the the ideally, you want the the new technology that you develop, the innovation that you create to be the direct result of the problem that you're trying to solve.
I think you're
It's never is.
It's it's messy.
It's sloppy.
It can be.
It can be.
And I think that that is a when people say, well, the reason why we're going

(01:25:59):
to go to the moon is because it's gonna develop a
lot of really, really great technologies.
The question is, could you develop those really great technologies without going to the moon?
And the answer is, of course, yes.
Actually, I would argue because I I I taught new product and service development and innovation in NYU for 12 years.
I've also done this around the world.
I will say no because too many assumptions are built into too many models of and frameworks that people bring to the table.

(01:26:26):
And you said and I so let me jump take a jump, then you can answer that.
Sure.
NASA, you said, that's the argument.
Mhmm.
So if NASA's argument is create the innovations, another way I say it, or most yadayadayadayadayadayada yada yada yada yada, save Earth.
That's the thing.
That's the the methodology.
Would you assume that NASA, when someone's interested in the innovations and to learn about them, is gonna get have open arms to make sure those innovations get to marketplace?

(01:26:57):
I'm assume that based upon that model.
I'm saying that I can imagine a scenario where technologies are developed for an objective that benefits humanity that is directly for the purpose of those benefits.
So But I could, you know, there's some kind of, you know well, I I'm not sure what it is, and, obviously, it may require a certain amount of of, psychological, like, modifying people psychologically to get on board.

(01:27:26):
With the idea.
Right?
And I can imagine a an a a a culture of innovation, a a series of prizes like the XPRIZE that are deliberately chosen to shift humanity into positive directions without the needing to build weapons of war or without needing to necessarily go to space.

(01:27:49):
So I and so I think we go to
space for and the I guess my whole point of this whole conversation is that I have a different reason to go to space.
Okay.
And the different reason let me finish that, and then I wanna hear that.
Sure.
Yeah.
I wanna tell you that our team has reached out, including myself, to what's called spin offs at NASA.

(01:28:11):
Mhmm.
Of course.
There's a department called spin offs.
Yep.
We have reached out to the director of this unit.
I've done it three times, not gotten a reply back.
We've written up to their information, never gotten reply back.
We have people on our team writing emails to them and not one email comes back because they promote on their website.

(01:28:34):
There are over 2,000 innovations that NASA we're go we're talking others that NASA has invented to that has turned back on Earth.
Mhmm.
And yet we can't find that list, and we can't find the data on it, and we have been asking.
And if there's some dollars do.
Well, I'd love that.
But the point is if your structure is built on that premise, then that would be a priority.

(01:28:58):
Mhmm.
And if if Jay from India who's on our team wrote a beautiful letter, I saw it first, he couldn't get.
We have different people writing.
I'm writing it, and I'm not getting.
Then all it says to me is that the mechanism that we're that's being promoted and the actual activity that's happening is not matching.
Yeah.

(01:29:19):
Does that make sense?
Yep.
Yep.
So tell me what your what you we we were I stopped you.
I apologize.
Tell me what yours is.
It's back to the beginning that
life is better than rocks.
So why do we go to space to give the universe the chance to have life?

(01:29:40):
That if we don't do it, nobody will.
If we don't do it, the octopuses can't.
If we don't figure out a way to get out into space and to connect to other star systems.
Eventually, the sun in 5,000,000,000 years will sort this out for us, and then the universe will look forward to a Google years of rocks cooling down.

(01:30:09):
K.
So I I'm assuming you know what my next question is.
No.
Tell me how.
I don't I don't care.
No.
No.
I'm I'm that's some Yeah.
I don't There's a philosophical argument, but do you have do you have a framework that you believe would make sure this happens?

(01:30:31):
Don't wreck earth.
Okay.
Yeah.
How do you how do we how do we again, 1010,000,000,000 people.
Yeah.
Again, we have Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
We also have Botswana, Zambia.
We have Have.
Cartagena or Colombia.
We have,
I assume it will happen when it's naturally going to happen.

(01:30:55):
So when you look at the rise of reusable rockets, what's happening with SpaceX and with the Rocket Labs and Neutron and all of these other places.
These were like, you can go back to technical papers written by NASA in the 19 sixties that were suggesting these rocket systems, but they didn't have the technology to do it.

(01:31:16):
The Apollo program cost about $250,000,000,000 in inflation adjusted money to reach the Moon.
The entire view of you had the Mercury, the Gemini, and the Apollo missions, it's more like $350,000,000 in inflation adjusted dollars.
SpaceX is building a rocket capable of landing humans on the moon, and they're doing it for in the tens of 1,000,000 of dollars that k.

(01:31:40):
That the SLS program, which is feels like it's just an overly expensive boondoggle
is only 4,200,000,000 to launch?
Per launch, blah blah blah.
It's only probably about $40,000,000,000 total cost in to this point.
So it's being done for 10% the price of the of the of the because you've got technology.
We have modern capability.

(01:32:01):
We have we have computers.
We have miniaturization.
We have cubesats.
We have fiber optic.
We have all these detectors.
So technology continues growing and at a certain point, technologies become inevitable.
And one of those inevitable technologies is going to be all of the subsystems that make exploration into the universe inevitable, but it won't happen if we mess up our planet.

(01:32:29):
Okay.
So let's let's so you've you've said it a few times, mess up the planet.
Yeah.
When do you think, and I we use the 6 mega challenges.
Those cover a lot of what you've been talking about.
When do you think there is a that that over the lemming's cliff that if we haven't solved it by then Yeah.

(01:32:51):
We could be in really big trouble.
Do you have a you said 200 years, but where is it?
500,000,000 years.
So you think so you think that we still have 500 years of living the way we're living today?
500,000,000.
500,000,000.
But do you think if we live the way we're living today, and we don't have global, not just regional, not just for western society, not just for the wealthy, there are 227 150 billionaires in the world, and there are 10,500,000,000aires in the world.

(01:33:21):
Yeah.
Not for those people.
We're talking about we're talking about Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Northern Africa.
If we continue at this in this rate where, let's say, it does increase 1 c, these countries are gonna have a lot of trouble surviving for many reasons.

(01:33:42):
And and there'll be portions of the world which will be overheated.
So is there a timeline in your head that you say, if if I could direct the resources of humanity, I would spend every penny that I every spare penny that I could to stabilizing the climate to stabilizing humanity's impact on planet Earth to increasing biodiversity and.

(01:34:10):
And can giving humanity room to breathe to sort out the life problem.
So while you might not think it, we are completely what you're saying is completely in line with what project Munoz is doing.
I mean, it's it's so in line.

(01:34:32):
The only difference is we take what you're saying, and we're putting it into organizational structure that fits today's society.
For example, we're we're partially a 501c3, but we have proper organizations as a structure that we've already gotten approved.
You can't you can't do things as a nonprofit to a as to a certain degree.

(01:34:55):
For example, if we needed to raise $1,600,000,000,000, we can't have a lot of bake sales.
You'd have to have either awesome cookies or be selling all the time.
We are trying in our minds, and it's not the only solution, is we are trying to do that stabilization by leveraging ecosystems such as using computational social science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, network analysis, datasets to be able to find opportunities within networks to do exactly what you're saying to stabilize, increase biodiversity, improve innovation.

(01:35:30):
Has nothing to do with beyond Earth.
It's just we that's part of it.
We also have a tech transfer unit team.
You probably don't know this.
I didn't know this, that most companies the majority of companies out there that do tech transfer, they make their money off of lawsuits.
Oh.
So what they do is they go out, they create they create an innovation, they put it out there, and then they wait for people to violate it, and then they sue them.

(01:35:55):
And that's where the majority of their money comes from.
Even I think it was Alan from, Gates, from, Microsoft.
He tried to do it, and it ended up converting.
It's not the same as what his he started out as.
That's what I was told by someone who's a patent attorney.
So ours is completely completely how do we get deals made to move tech into places that it needs to be.

(01:36:17):
So if someone's let's say they earn in US dollars or Canadian dollars or euros, they earn 16,000 of x per year.
They can't afford a $25,000 licensing fee, but that's what happens.
Mhmm.
We wanna make sure that per market, protect, we get it out there, and we and we do for cause.
But what we are doing is trying to build an ecosystem around what you're saying.

(01:36:42):
Leveraging beyond earth, but also leveraging on earth.
Because Great.
Politics is overriding a lot of what what what you just said, stabilize increase biodiversity.
Those that's politics.
And why are you doing it?
Good question.
I'm the pieces that for some without going into all the details of it, I was in I spoke in an event in Silicon Valley, and when I was done, there was a guy standing next to me.

(01:37:17):
His name was Bruce, and he said if you ever go to would like a tour of NASA, give me a call.
Now I'm not a space fanatic.
I do like certain things about it.
I do like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, star love those things, but I'm not a person who looks up at the stars all the time.
And I said, sure.
I'd love to.
And he says, when are you in town?
I said, I come to Silicon Valley every month.
I've been traveling about 2 to 300000 miles a year.

(01:37:39):
I always stopped in Silicon Valley.
And so the next month I fly in, I go to NASA Ames, and this guy, Bruce, is on the phone, and there's a he he points I I he points to me and he says to kinda take a seat.
And next to me sits Lynn Harper, who's an astrobiologist.
And they didn't realize my background.
We have this great conversation, and we go on for 3 hours.

(01:38:02):
I mean, 3 hours about where platinum comes from and
Mhmm.
Why NASA doesn't work.
They told me a lot of why NASA doesn't work.
And then I left.
I didn't get a tour.
They said, come back.
So I come back, and the next time, the exact same thing happens, but with other people.
And the 3rd time I'm smart enough to know, I don't go into the facilities in Ames, and I get a tour of NASA.

(01:38:24):
I was not impressed.
Maybe I was not shown the right rooms, but they did turn on the flight simulator for me, which was nice because I asked them, do they turn on the flight simulator for everybody?
And he said, no.
They don't turn it on for anybody.
The guy sticks his head in and he says, you want us to turn it on for you?
So I got to play with it a little bit, which is kinda cool.
And then we were out at a restaurant, and I was so tired of hearing from all these people all the challenges that the the Beyond Earth ecosystem was engaged in.

(01:38:53):
I looked at this guy, Bruce, and I said, you want me to tell you how to get to the moon?
Like, who are you?
And I said, we're sitting here.
We're having lunch.
Let me show you.
And for the next hour and a half, I brought I outlined a 4 phased program, and then he said, who's gonna pay for this?
And I showed him how network analysis, computational social science, how that could do it.

(01:39:14):
And then he said, well, how are you gonna get this?
And I would answer it.
How are you gonna get this?
And I would answer it.
And I came it was because I was solving a challenge, and I I love challenges.
Not that I'd like to have them, but a challenge is fun.
You get to identify and figure out solutions.
And he looked at me when we were done.
He said, I've never seen anything like this.
First time ever.

(01:39:35):
And he said, you have to go to this event, the great giant leap in Hawaii.
And I said, look.
It's gonna cost me $7,000 to change my ticket.
I'm really not interested.
Thank you very much.
And as we're walking out, I had said we need a box with a roof on the moon because not not colonization, not settlement.
He says to me, when we're walking out, he says, we don't need a box with a roof on the moon.

(01:40:00):
And I'm thinking, oh, I blew it.
And that's pitching like we talked about earlier.
What didn't I do right that he didn't grab it?
And he says, we need a box with a roof and a door, a home.
And I went, oh my god.
He got it.
But I left.
I was done.
None of this space ecosystem thing and and helicopter and rockets.
And I go to Hong Kong to my to our office, and there's a Slovakian who's in our office.

(01:40:24):
Absolutely phenomenal person.
She's 5 foot 7, which is about 1.72 centimeters.
We're having this conversation.
I tell her what happened, and she sounds like my Hungarian grandmother used to.
And she says, you're going.
Trust me.
You're going.
It's NASA.
She rearranged my schedule because I couldn't tell my grandmother no, and I went to this great giant leap.

(01:40:48):
And the first event I went to again, I know nothing.
I still know nothing compared to someone like you.
You're you've got so much knowledge.
My computer was catching on fire because I couldn't figure out all the acronyms.
Just I was typing, typing, typing.
What the hell do these mean things mean?
And during that event, I said your business will fail, your business will fail, your business will fail, and everybody was egging me on, and I shared it with a few people.

(01:41:09):
And a long story short is after that event, we decide to put together a team, and that's how it started.
It wasn't a a passion for beyond Earth.
It wasn't a passion for living in another planet.
It wasn't to go to Mars.
And simultaneously, I was working on a paper, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, and sensor tech, how they're all emerging for the first time in history, and what that what could happen with it.

(01:41:37):
And then I was also working on some of the challenges we're facing on Earth, and they they merged.
What if we leveraged the Beyond Earth ecosystem in a way that is social, meaning nonprofit, is done in a certain way that has a different that brings everybody in as inclusive.

(01:41:58):
We don't go after military and government.
So there's there's videos on this.
You've seen some of that.
Ours is to do what you're saying, but and I'm not gonna say but yet or in addition to.
We've added some of the mechanisms to make it happen because we're not gonna change you're in a room right now.
I I know you're in a room because we don't have a video on, but I know you're in a room.

(01:42:20):
And you have a door.
Yeah.
I could try to change you all day long to go out the wind go out another place in you.
But if I showed up tomorrow, you're out in your woods, making sure that the 80 acres are taken care of.
It's 80 acres.
Right?
Yep.
And I plaster over your door and put a new door in with fix the furniture.

(01:42:41):
It looks beautiful, and you walk out and you have a better view.
Are you gonna tell me when you come the next time, say, oh, no.
No.
No.
I'm gonna walk through the wall where it was before.
You're gonna go out that door.
What if we change the systems and structure?
What if we change the world around us in a way that can solve that?
So that was a great anecdote.

(01:43:03):
Okay.
What's that word?
Try again.
Yep.
Sure.
Why are you doing this?
You know, I I I'd love to say there's a a big reason.
I think that I believe that this is the solution to some of the challenges that we're facing.
And unless we do it, the next 40 years of our lives will not be like the last 50.

(01:43:28):
And I get up every morning to do it to make that change.
To I just
hope that the the the next few decades are better than the last few decades?
I think the next 25 years will not be good for planet for the for all species on Earth.
Mhmm.
I believe we're going to see continued of the 6 mega challenges.

(01:43:51):
I do believe that they're gonna continue, and they're gonna cause displacement.
They're gonna cause conflict.
They're gonna cause wars.
You're gonna the 17,500 species Yeah.
Maybe 8,000 of me gone.
I believe that those things are going to happen, and I love I believe I'm an earther.
I believe that I'd like to go outside, and I'd like to enjoy my life.
And I want my children to enjoy their lives, and I'd like my children's children to enjoy their lives.

(01:44:14):
And then if I went 40 years, I will be 15 it's 99, so I'd have 4 generations on this planet.
I would like to make a difference in that long term prospect, and I believe that that can be changed.
And I'm put and we're we have a great team around the world.
We have people volunteering in everything, every category you could think about, large organizations from KPMG, Deloitte, PW, CUI, but JPMorgan Private Banking to Dassault Systems has given us things, you know, all sorts of companies, organizations.

(01:44:46):
I believe it can be changed.
And and I were I why am I doing it?
I think I can make the difference.
I think I can make it so that the earth for me, my family, and the people that I love and care about will have a different future.
Well, that seems short term.
Yeah.
It is.
It's only 40 years.

(01:45:07):
Yeah.
It's 40 years.
It's 40 years.
What about the future?
What about beyond that?
What about
the generation?
That's what I say.
I I I've got 2 children, and my hope is that in 40 years, my children will inherit a better world, and their children's children will inherit a better world, and their children's children and better is a relative term.

(01:45:28):
It's that's like the beginning.
It's a I'm I'm hoping that the world will continue to will have less of the challenges.
So, yes, I'm doing it for in perpetuity, but I don't have I don't have a personal belief that I live on forever, that I was that I I that these things that when I die, I'm done.
To me, I'm done.

(01:45:49):
So so I want to add to your mission statement
Okay.
That you are contributing to keeping the flame of life, helping the flame of life exist in the universe.

(01:46:12):
And that by accomplishing what you want to do, you will also help ensure that that life, which makes the universe better, will be a part of the future of the universe.
So let me ask you then.
I and I hear what you're saying.
I'm looking at the directive right now.

(01:46:33):
If I was to make that change, if we were, not I, if because I'm gonna type it is what I meant.
If we were to make that change, how actively engaged would you be with Project Moon Hut to make this, future happen?
I well, it'd be interesting.
I've I have no idea.
I'd have to, you know, see it.
Well, I
I I know I'm putting you on the spot.

(01:46:55):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, busy guy.
I'm busy guy.
If you if you're
a busy guy, congratulations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we were to make this change because you're asking it's it's you're you're asking some I get asked 2 questions a lot.
One is, why you spend why are we spending all this money on space?
They don't know what we do.
And I I say, can I ask you a question?

(01:47:18):
Everybody says yes.
I said, have you ever seen a rocket where people took money, stuffed it into the rocket, and shipped it up into space?
They said, what do you mean?
I said, if you ever see you say we're spending money in space.
Have you ever seen us put brought money into a rocket and ship it up into space?
And every time they say, oh, no.
So where do we spend it?
I say, on earth.
I withdraw my question.

(01:47:39):
It's something of that nature.
The second one is, David, why don't you work on the challenges we have on earth?
And I say, can I ask you a question?
What do you do for a living?
Well, I'm Fraser, and I have podcasts, and I put on programs.
Great.
Why aren't you a farmer?
What do you mean?
I like what I'm doing.

(01:48:00):
So, no.
I want you to be a farmer.
And they, well, I don't get it.
And I say, well, you're I think what you're asking me is you think I am doing something that is useful.
You'd like me to change what I'm doing to fit what you think.
My question to you is, are you doing the things that you believe will change the entire planet to get to a certain whatever you want to believe?

(01:48:25):
Mhmm.
And 9 they always say, I withdraw my question because it's a they're asking me to change.
Yep.
I'm asking you if you're asking me to change on make a a directive change, is this something of so much value to you that you will be a part of the team to help us get to that point, or is it just a message?

(01:48:46):
It's well, the ideal it means it's definitely the message.
Okay.
And I you know, it doesn't sound like it's counter to No.
To what you're saying.
Like, for sure, you've expanded a little you've expanded a little bit further.
Yeah.
Let's take care of planet Earth.
That's it.
And I think, I mean, I think that that we have these goals, these lofty goals about how we wanna live our lives and what contribution that we wanna make.

(01:49:18):
And then we also have the way we spend our time
and the things that we do in the in the hobbies that
we enjoy and and how we, and I think at the very least, you wanna try and do as little harm.
You know, don't don't vote for the people who are trying to tear the world apart.
Don't try to support the technologies that are doing harm.

(01:49:41):
Try to limit and minimize your impact on the planet, but also be realistic about where we stand in this journey.
And You you talk to a lot of people.
You have on your program people who are involved in in the creation of weapons.
Mhmm.
Who you have been involved, the people who are you working with do things that you know if you were to think back are harmful.

(01:50:05):
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Them.
Of course.
So I I hear what you're saying.
The thing is we need and I'm talking the collectively.
Mhmm.
We need people who have an idea, who are willing to stand behind that idea and participate in the in in the Yeah.
In the pieces that need to happen.

(01:50:27):
And that your answer is absolutely correct.
What you're asking for, I love.
The challenge I'm asking you is, how do you get people to get involved with this?
Because you were the one who said people go about their way, and people believe that they'll do.
And so Yeah.
I mean, like, my like, the the reason I
have taken the form that I have Uh-huh.

(01:50:50):
Is so that I can be a an amplifier for the projects that I think are doing doing good.
And and the plan is you know and I think just having this interview with you and me planning to put this out in the podcast, like like, I flit about across all of the projects and all of the ways that people are attempting to bring about this sci fi future that we've all been, anticipating.

(01:51:22):
And and I have to, you know, I I spend my time contributing to and the and the energy and the distribution platform that I have to try to raise as many boats as I can.
So so so what happened was Are you saying
I I was not clear because you made an assumption that when I said, will you help Mhmm.

(01:51:45):
You thought that this was life and time consuming.
No.
I'm I'm I help anybody who I can in in helping get their message out, in in helping in, helping organize guests, whatever, you know, whatever I can do.
I'm a connector.
Okay.
So Yeah.

(01:52:06):
So what you're are are you saying that with what we've talked about today, that there is a means for an alliance, whatever degree that may be, that you believe I guess being on the show, you've kind of agreed that you believe that what we're at least trying to do is something that fits into your basket.

(01:52:30):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Of course.
Of course.
Okay.
And if if there are places and you'd like to learn more, I think you signed an NDA.
I believe so.
If No.
I haven't.
You haven't.
Okay.
If there are things that you believe if you saw what we were working on and you believe that it was there, you would help us even further.
Mhmm.
Of course.

(01:52:51):
Okay.
So I would propose to you this.
This is what we do with everybody.
It's a it's a long onboarding.
Is we show you some of the things behind the veil.
We do everything NDA wise.
The reason is we want people to join us, not compete against us.
There's a big difference.
We're not doing it for protection.
You just don't walk up to a company and say, bang, bang, bang, show me everything.

(01:53:12):
We want people to work with us.
We're in coopetition.
We want we even want competitors.
Hey.
Let's join together and make this work.
That's why we're a 501c3 compared to a profit organization.
If we show you behind the veil and you like it, not saying you have to and you like it, you'll help us where we say we can find a home for you.
Yeah.
That's
what we ask.
I would never sign an NDA.

(01:53:34):
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's so this is actually so something about Universe Today that you might wanna know is we never, agree to embargos on news stories.
So We do embargo.
What is that?
So in so in the news field, a a company that is generating some news will will reach out to journalists and they'll make the story embargo.

(01:53:58):
They'll provide additional you know, provide information to journalists, allow them to do interviews, and the journalist agrees to hold off on the story for to to reach the embargo point.
And then at that moment, you and all other media outlets are able to publish all of this stuff at the same time.
And about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I got sick of embargos.

(01:54:22):
And, a few friends of mine who I consider to be really excellent journalists who had been essentially prohibited from getting access to this information.
It was a meth it was a mechanism of the news creators to sort of decide who is an acceptable journalist and who isn't, and I just said, okay.

(01:54:45):
That's it.
We're not we're not going to look at embargos anymore.
We're not gonna break embargos, like, we're not gonna as soon as we hear about what you're working on, we're not going to put out information.
We're not gonna, you know, break your secret, but we're just gonna wait until the information is publicly available.
And so for the last 15 years, Universe Today has never had access to information in advance.

(01:55:10):
We don't sign NDAs.
We don't we're not, you know, off the record.
We just if if you want a piece of news that you want us to report on, just make it available, and we will
That I understand.
So ours is our our ours is a little different.
We're not saying that.
We're saying we would love help.

(01:55:33):
Mhmm.
And all we're saying is anything that you own is yours.
We if you it's very mutual.
Yeah.
Even even McKinsey.
We've never had anybody change anything except for McKinsey changed 3 words.
3.
Yeah.
Is we're not saying that you can't do anything you want outside.
We're just saying, please don't share our plans right now because

(01:55:55):
that's the one thing I can't do.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because and and so you understand where that often comes from.
For example, if you're going for a trademark and a reporter uses that trademark Yeah.
That trademark can no longer be secured.
Yeah.
If you show something and you're in the process of patenting it Yep.

(01:56:17):
You can't.
And the reporter reports it.
It is not public knowledge, and it can't be protected.
Yep.
So it makes it complicated.
Yep.
And I never I didn't put you into the category of reporter.
I'm sorry.
I put
you in the category of a person and space no.
I put you in the category of someone who was looking to make change.
Yeah.
And if I put you into the side of the cat of a reporter, oh my god.

(01:56:40):
That changes everything because it's not it's not about the building of it.
It's just the reporting of it.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a space bias.
Right.
People talk about well, people have, like, a left leaning bias.
They have a right leaning bias.
I have a space leaning bias.
And what is a space bias?
So I am I am ready to enthusiastically report on on anyone who's willing to stick their head up and take the risk to help ensure humanity's future in space.

(01:57:11):
But but my and my job is to amplify.
So
And and and so that's the way that's the role that I fit into this ecosystem.
And so, yeah, if, you know, what's my bias?
My bias is that I am pro space.
I am Okay.
So I'm gonna help I'm gonna look at ours to see what we could do.
I can't promise.
On your end, we're and ours, if you at the end, it says for all species on Earth.

(01:57:36):
And you Yeah.
Yours is humans.
Ours is always all species.
So just tell me when you have something exciting that you wanna share with the world that has to do with space, and I'm your guy.
Okay.
So if and when it comes to resources, and I'm assuming that anybody who hears this because this will be put out into the ether, if someone needs access or knows or knowledge or something, they get to I could reach out to you and say, look.

(01:58:04):
We're looking for and you you like to play the connector role, but not inside.
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I I mean, inside.
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I am the I am the amplifier.
I am the I am the loud speaker when when
I think it's important.
In in And
I am and I am the I am the journalist when I think it's also important.

(01:58:26):
I hadn't thought of you as a journalist, which is interesting.
I
know.
It is it is like befriending a tiger.
No.
No.
No.
I I'm more concerned.
I one of the things that we do with individuals who are coming on board, and I think I did it with you, I say, okay.
Take your age and add 40 years onto it.
So whatever your age, I think I did with you, was 80 to, you're 40 or 80.

(01:58:49):
And I say, okay.
And I think you had children.
So you say, okay.
How old do they be?
And then I do it all the way down, and in some cases, there's 4 generations.
And I asked them along the way, what do you think the world will be like?
I mean, what do you honestly think?
How it will change?
What could be done?
And then the majority of people can't even give answers.
They've never thought about that.
So I'm so I'm not I am challenged with the fact that I do believe having worked in these countries.

(01:59:13):
Bangladesh floods every year.
There's a 179,000,000 people.
It floods every single year.
And if we have a 15 CMC level water rise, that tidal surge will be devastating.
And we saw in India this year over was it almost close to 50 c?
A 120 degrees, 100 degrees.
That was 6 weeks, 7 weeks of it.

(01:59:34):
And then we saw in Pakistan, we saw 30% of the country underwater.
And I just took 3 countries in a row.
Yeah.
I could take others.
That's devastating.
So my take is a little bit more if why do I do this?
I know a lot of people in Bangladesh.
I know a lot of people in India.

(01:59:56):
As I told you, I just spoke to somebody in in Pakistan.
I know people I'm I am a globalist, and I use that in the term that I've worked around the world.
I have friends around the world, and I really would like people to get along and have a better world.
So the challenge when I think of somebody, I think of them helping because they see a tsunami coming, and I'm using a bad analogy, but let's say that it doesn't matter what your role is.

(02:00:23):
We have to help.
So I guess when you say that people are stymied, they don't make those decisions, could it also be that they have put barriers on their walls of what they can will do and won't do, like a journalist?
Oh, maybe.
But but, you know, my my job as a journalist is to investigate stories, to follow where they go, to report on what I find.

(02:00:52):
Yeah.
No.
I I I get it.
All I do you have an is there another Frasier?
No.
Another Frasier that says No.
I have to make sure I'm a part of this in a bigger way if it's possible.
No.
K.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I like like, again, if you have things that you wanna tell the world and No.

(02:01:14):
I I I and they're interesting to me and they're interesting to the writing team, and I and I think they they fit within our purview, then then I will absolutely report on it.
And if you have secrets that you don't want the world to know, do not tell me.
Oh, and I completely understand that.
Because I will share them.
I because it's my job.

(02:01:36):
I yes.
And I also, like, I
just, like, I think, like, I think transparency is important.
I understand that it's a that it is a brutal environment for attempting to to make things happen in this existing landscape, and that's not my problem.

(02:01:57):
I I the the the reason I think it's an interesting conversation, the reason I'm pursuing it today Mhmm.
Is my one thing I love about not having video in front of each other, like we say, you're not looking at me.
You can't see my eyes starting around looking out the window, looking around saying, yeah.
What I'm asking myself is you had said earlier, why aren't people doing this?
Mhmm.

(02:02:18):
And I gave you some answers, but I didn't give you the one you just gave me.
Is that the construct of the world that you live in, that you've created by policy or personal choice prohibits that from happening without so you can't do the thing that might be helpful.

(02:02:42):
And I I use lawyers as an example.
Mhmm.
You meet someone says, I'm a lawyer.
Okay.
Immediately, there are all sorts of things that come to mind.
Good and bad.
Yeah.
Many times, it's not good.
But if you're an intellectual property lawyer, wouldn't it be nicer to say to somebody, oh, I'm an expert in protecting and making sure patents get to market.

(02:03:03):
That would be a different answer than an intellectual property attorney.
If you are a compensation attorney, I'm an expert in putting together programs that amplify the organization's culture to be able to meet the needs long term.
If you're a corporate attorney and you do mergers and acquisitions, I'm the I'm an expert Mhmm.
In bringing together assets to make them stronger as a whole.

(02:03:26):
When you use the word reporter in the way you did, you put blinders, you put barriers intentionally in it.
It's just a delay.
Yeah.
No.
It's just right.
But it's just a delay.
Like like Yeah.
The the point, you know, where I come on board is when the is when you have a message.

(02:03:48):
Yeah.
You'll help us get it out there.
I'll help you get it out there.
I I love that, and I appreciate that.
We appreciate that.
We appreciate.
It's just you you actually opened up my eyes to something that I kind of been a little blind to in a reason that someone wouldn't do something because you reacted the way you did Mhmm.
Which was, wow.
I had never added that to my list.

(02:04:10):
Mhmm.
Is that the construct, the framework that the individual has doesn't allow them to jump that fence.
Right.
Which is, Casey Handler.
He said the reason I can't sign it is that I am involved in too many things that I might be violate.
That's great.
Casey is amazing.
He's brilliant.
Absolutely off the chart.
Brilliant.

(02:04:31):
Yep.
So this is great.
Do you have any questions for me?
No.
No.
No.
I mean, I think, you know, during this interview, you've, you've explained a ton of information.
So I think it's been it's been a lot of fun.
Yeah.
This has been interesting.
You've, given a very different perspective, so I appreciate it.
Meet my goal.
Well, I'm what I said was I will take a look Yeah.

(02:04:56):
And I will see, and I don't know because it's wording.
I don't know how to be able to change because it's a
Mullet all.
You don't start off with missions or goals.
You never do.
No.
No.
You always start off with desired outcomes.
And so what I have to do is look at desired outcomes Sure.
Because that determines the planning that you put in place, which determines the macro factors, which determines Sure.

(02:05:20):
So I have to look to say because by adding 2 words, for example, beyond earth, would in fact change some of the activity we're engaged in because it's got a different outcome.
Does that make sense?
It's a up it's a it's an outrageous claim to make that you're going to, give somebody a why, and, and it's purely, it's mostly sarcastic and hilarious.

(02:05:51):
So,
oh, I I'm I'm I will I do question.
These interviews are forbidden to question.
Yeah.
So yeah.
No.
It was it it it I I love the conversation.
We went definitely in places I didn't expect to go.
So I I do wanna thank you for for being on the on the program.
I will reach out.
I would like to know other people you think who should be on.

(02:06:14):
Absolutely.
And and I wanna thank all of you listening out there who have taken the time in your day to listen in.
I do hope that some way, shape, or form you learn something today that'll make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
And once again, here's the directive that we've got.
The Project Moon, that foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.

(02:06:48):
There are videos on the web, project moon hut.org.
Fraser, is there what's the single best way for someone to reach out to you, connect to you to get though that valuable resources you offered today?
I would say the best thing is my weekly email newsletter.
So I write a magazine every Friday that goes out to 55,000 people

(02:07:09):
Wow.
Contains a breakdown of all of the interesting space and astronomy news that's happening this week, links to all the stories as well as links to all of the interesting space research that I found, links to all our videos, podcasts, all of that.
It's like one place.
So if you just go to universe today.com/newsletter, you can sign up to that.

(02:07:30):
Perfect.
So once again, thank you, Frasier.
And for me personally, for everybody who is listening in, love to connect to you.
You could reach me at david@moonhut.org.
You can also reach us at, at on Twitter at at project moon hut.
There's LinkedIn and Facebook.

(02:07:51):
You could look us up.
Pull us up there.
Instagram also.
So many ways to reach out to us.
So 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 have led to the renaming of periods into ages.
You've personally just experienced the information age, and, boy, what a ride it's been.
Now consider that you might right now be living through an age of transformation into the age of infinite, an age that is not defined by scarcity and abundance, by a redefining lifestyle, consisting of infinite possibilities and infinite resources, which will be made possible through a new construct with the moon and the earth, as we call it, Mearth, will create new ecosystem and a new economic system that will transition us into the infinite future.
The ingredients for amazing sci fi story that it will come to life during 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, 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're interested in knowing more, you can go to the website www.projectmoonod.org.
In the top right hand corner, there are several videos.
I always suggest people watch number 1 and number 3.
Today, we're going to be exploring an amazing topic.
The topic is the future of life in the universe depends on us.
Wow.
We're putting a lot of pressure on us.
And today, we have with us Fraser Cain.
How are you doing, Fraser?
I'm doing great.
Well, as always, we do have a very brief bio.
Frazer is the publish publisher of Universe Today and cohost of Astronomy Cast.
On YouTube, he has 343,000 subscribers as of today, I look today, to his program, where he too interviews experts on the beyond Earth ecosystem.
So this is new to him to some degree, and he also generates a tremendous amount of valuable educational content that to do with anything or all things space.
Now I've added this recently, and those of you who've listened in the past, I'm often asked how much did we prepare for this program.
So I'm going to give you a quick snippet of how this works.
What we do is we don't we start off with a guest that's selected, and there's a process to even find a guest, someone we like, who we can work with.
Then the guest watches the videos and listens to some of the Project Moon Hut programs that we had.
And then we have a call and we decide on a program.
We don't know the content, and during that call, we create the title.
This can last anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours to select that title.
And then the guest is left to their own, such as Fraser goes out on his own, and he puts together the program.
I, nor you listening, have any clue what he's going to talk about.
I start with about 12 blank pages of paper in front of me, and the cameras are off so I don't see him, and we go from there.
So let's get started.
Fraser, do you have an outline or bullet points for us
to follow today?
I do.
Excited.
Good.
Good.
Yeah.
So can you give them to us?
I can.
I can.
Yeah.
So so but I have but first, I I have a lofty goal.
Sure.
Is that my hope is by the end of this program, I will have convinced you to throw away your reason why and replace it with my own.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So so your very raison d'etre, I plan to, to replace.
Okay.
So I let's let's hear it.
End of this conversation, let me know how close I got.
What what we're good we'll do at the end.
We'll talk.
Alright.
Alright.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
So, so life is better than rocks.
Okay.
Number 2.
We're probably alone in the universe.
The octopuses can't do it.
Can't do it.
Next.
Stop wrecking Earth.
Wrecking
earth.
That's it.
That's my list.
No.
That's a good list.
I I I had to make sure I spelled everything properly.
Okay.
So let's start with this.
Well, octopus was one.
No.
Life is better than rocks.
We'll start with life No.
No.
They no.
No.
They they the spelling.
That make sure I spelled it wrong.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Wrecking and octopus.
So sitting on number 1, life is better than rocks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I like and this is subjective, and I think, you know, my whole argument will collapse like a house of cards if people are going to disagree with me on this point.
Okay.
And that is I life improves the universe.
We see life here on earth.
Think about the oceans, the forest, the even in our houses, everything.
The the incredible diversity that is constantly going on here on planet Earth makes our planet better.
It makes it interesting.
It makes it chaotic.
It makes it kind of scary, but it also makes it more interesting.
And to imagine a universe like the moon and think about the moon or think about an asteroid, It's a rock.
It's an interesting rock.
It's got a lot of different layers to it.
It's got perhaps volcanism.
It there's micrometeorites hitting the surface.
There's gravitational effects and forces that are going on.
But at the end of the day, it's a rock.
And so I think that if we could choose to have a lot a universe that is devoid of life that was formed in the big bang is expanding out forever.
The and and it is just rocks and eventually will head on to the heat death of the universe, that would be a waste of a perfectly good universe that the one that is filled with life in all of its varieties, the good and the bad, makes for a more interesting universe.
So so just the way you said it, I'm gonna jump in a little bit here because the first thing that came to mind is if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to see it or hear it.
Mhmm.
Did it fall?
Did it did that happen?
So I'm when you're saying life improves the universe, it's metaphorically I don't know if that's the right definition.
You're saying Yeah.
Well, it means Because
we exist because we exist, the entire the entire billions, 14,000,000,000, they all the all of this is better because this one little tiny rock in the middle of nowhere and the blip in time
Well, I mean, this this rock could be a write off.
This rock could be the worst life the worst place in the entire universe that is interesting.
Okay.
Right?
So it's so I'm not saying there's anything necessarily special.
Oh, so you're not saying earth so you didn't mean earth.
You're saying life improves the universe.
Life improves the universe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I didn't catch you with that because you talked about the ocean.
It's still about forest.
Yep.
Yeah.
And so when you imagine the diversity of life here on Earth, you think about all of the different ecosystems.
Imagine a universe filled with life.
Every possible ecosystem that has been that has creatures adapted living there, intelligent civilizations, spanning the cosmos, creating galactic federations.
Oh, yeah.
No.
We've been there.
I I've seen I've seen, what's his name?
William Shatner.
Right?
He's not Yeah.
Gone to all
of the Exactly.
Right?
And so imagine that that Star Trek you that Star Trek future and, you know, you think about that classic Carl Sagan quote, right, that life is the way the universe observes itself, That back to your tree falling in the forest.
If if there is no life to observe the universe, what was the point?
The So so I'm gonna place my flag and say life is better than rocks.
So,
one of the inter going back, you said Carl Sagan.
We talked about William Shatner and and traveling.
It's an interesting concept because life I do agree with you on this this measurement.
But even not bad.
You could look at Star Trek, and you could look at almost any of these sci fi movies.
Most of it's not the transport that it's important.
It's meeting the new civilizations.
So it's not traveling between the planets that's the often is the focus of a Star Trek episode.
It was what happened when they got there.
Mhmm.
Mhmm.
So I do agree with you.
So so I agree with this, but where does it
I I'm I'm not sure where you want me to
go with it.
Like, okay.
Well, that's it.
Like like because because I'm going to say that we need to make sure that life spreads and is maintained in the universe.
So
Okay.
That's that's why that's this is important.
So if you so if
I believe that.
Disagree with me and you say, meh, life, I I'll take rocks.
Well, good news.
The universe has supplied you with rocks.
Well, sometimes sometimes while sitting here at my desk, I do think that.
Well, then then then perhaps you may disagree.
About the way Yeah.
I'm joking about
what's going on.
And when the sun expands in a few 1000000000 years and wipes out all life on earth, you will have the rocks and only the rocks that you were hoping for.
I won't be in this chair, though.
So Yeah.
Without all that pesky life to complicate this rock filled future.
So So, okay.
I I'm going to let let's ride with this.
I can play with this.
Yes.
I do believe that life improves the the I believe that life adds value.
I don't know if it improves the universe, but I believe it adds value to the complexity of Yeah.
Well, I mean
but but, again, like, I think it's a subjective question.
Right?
Like, I think, like, what the universe is what life is giving us is diversity.
That diversity of culture, diversity of life forms, diversity of just the way that things happen on our planet makes this planet interesting.
And I think one of the excitements, what's so attractive about Star Trek, is this idea that you could trap hop in a spacecraft, fly to another star system, meet an alien species that has none of our similar evolutionary biology is completely alien in every way, and yet we could find common ground and enjoy their exotic cuisines and interesting cultural elements and all that.
Like, I think that's the heart of it is that the more time and space that you get, the more interesting, crazy stuff can form that can be exciting.
So my question then is a question I have in my mind is when did you first think this?
Probably 25 years ago.
Do you know why?
Yeah.
I read, Carl Sagan's book, Pale Blue Dot, and I read, Bob Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, and those those got me thinking.
In your everyday In what Do do you try to put I I guess
This is the source of universe today.
What I'm about to explain to you is why universe today exists.
It's why I'd why I have my career.
Why I do this job.
Okay.
So
so yeah.
Ted because I've got some questions, but I wanna see where you go with them, and then we can follow-up.
Okay.
Yeah.
Perfect.
Yeah.
So are we done with number 1?
I
think so.
I think so.
I mean, unless you know, I mean, obviously, this is an interview.
We're not having a debate.
So, we
we're having a discussion.
We're having a discussion, but, you know, obviously, feel free if anyone because because, again, my whole opinion will crumble if you think rocks are better than life.
I don't think rocks are better than life.
I actually I the thing is I think that there's value to all sorts of things that happen in the universe in and of themselves.
So I do think there's a value to a rock.
Do I put a value over one over the other?
Well, we theoretic and I I've never thought about this, so I'm kind of playing the not the devil's advocate.
I'm playing a little we sit on a rock.
If there was no rock,
we wouldn't be here.
So there's have both.
Yeah.
We we have to have a rock to have the life.
No?
No.
I mean, life is trying to destroy rocks.
Right?
When you think about your soil around your house, it is ground up rocks created by life and processes that that would life is trying to do is, is dismantle the natural world.
And by natural, I mean, like, the physical, like, the rocks, the energy in the rocks.
Trying to use the energy to take apart the rocks, to organize it in a more useful manner for the life.
So it's it's selfish in its way.
I'm sorry using the word, but it's
selfish in its way.
I mean, we are I mean, we are halfway through this process that that we, obviously, we have rocks, so the life hasn't gotten to it, but there's lots of places where life has completely demolished rocks.
So and it's really hard.
Like, the life as it exists here on Earth is not gonna get around to demolishing planet Earth, but a future life might you know, we can imagine some future where life tears apart a planet and turns it into more life.
You don't know me well enough, but I'm a very literal person.
So if someone says something, I often listen to the words, and then they say, that's not what I said.
And I said, no.
That's exactly what you said.
Well, that's not what I meant.
So when this word better is part of my challenge.
It's not that it's that there's a value Mhmm.
To all the pieces in an ecosystem, whether you appreciate it or not.
The other day, someone mentioned something, and I said, well, a virus is a living creature, and it has evolved our human species and animal species.
And they said, yeah.
But we don't need viruses.
We kinda do.
So, well, yeah, we do.
And this person had challenged that because it was a negative, and I said, we need creatures on this planet.
I don't know what I was listening to, so please bear with me.
But this guy was telling this story how he was up in Antarctica, and this they saw a polar bear on another rock.
And the polar bear started coming towards this group of people, and they were trying to get as far away from the polar bear as possible.
And at one point, the polar bear jumped and was maybe 15, 20 feet to, you know, 5 meters away, and then it went underwater, and it came up where they were, grabbed one of the people Oh.
And pulled them into the water.
Yeah.
And it was hunting.
Yeah.
Of course.
And and and I That was a that was a people problem, not a polar bear problem.
Not a polar bear.
Right.
Yeah.
And so but polar bears are just in this case, the polar bear was harming another creature.
So when we need that balance that Yeah.
It's not a yin and yang, but the the balance of or the things that happen in the universe to get where we are.
So I guess I like the life in the rocks.
I think they all have a place.
So would I say life is better than rocks?
Uh-huh.
I would say, in my mind, they're both valuable, yet life adds that dimensionality Mhmm.
To the universe.
Yes.
That's that's what I appreciate.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
No.
For sure.
I'm I'm saying that that the material components of the universe and the energy in the universe are are the raw ingredients for everything that life does.
Okay.
I and and I that I would have So how
much of it it wants to use is up to life.
K.
Right.
So so I'm not I'm not I mean, I think, you know, by the end, I'm gonna really firmly advocate for us living in sustainable balance here on planet Earth and even in the solar system.
But, but I also think there's a certain amount of chaos.
You kinda can't control what the outcome is gonna be.
So so you can nip this whole thing in the bud.
You can No.
No.
No.
We're not we're not nipping it.
I'm No.
No.
I'm not saying you can.
I'm saying
one can.
One can nip this whole thing in the bud and just say, you know what?
Life is just too dangerous.
Let's just stick with rocks.
Rocks and stars and and let that all reach the Have you had
a person who has said the opposite?
Let me ask you.
You've done okay.
Never.
So it's there's a there's a question that we ask with Project Moon Hut, and I've actually started keeping score just recently.
Yeah.
And I say name one project on planet Earth on the entire Earth that is working for all of Earth to solve the challenges on Earth collectively, not for a society, not for a group, but for all species on Earth.
Name 1.
Mhmm.
Just name 1.
And I've asked a lot of people.
They've given me smaller examples of things that are happening.
Yeah.
And the number is still 0.
Yeah.
I wouldn't be able to give you one.
So And
well, hello.
So that's why I'm interested in where you're gonna go.
So let's take this number 2.
What do we have?
We prob we are probably alone in the universe.
That's right.
We're probably alone.
Okay.
Yeah.
So when we think about the universe, we think about that there are 100 of billions of stars in the Milky Way alone.
There are 100 of billions, possibly trillions of galaxies in the observable universe.
Each one of these stars probably has 1 or many planets.
There are rogue planets that are floating in between the star systems.
Evidence, paleological evidence shows that the moment life could have survived here on Earth, it did.
That life goes back to whatever 4000000000 years ago, just a few 100000000000 years after the formation.
Like, the moment the Earth wasn't a molten ball of lava, life formed.
So
You think it happened that quickly?
It well, I best
on like, I think that happened that quickly.
There is evidence for fossilized microbes that are just a few 1000000000 years after the big bang.
You know?
In relative terms, yes.
It happened
Oh, so not the big bang.
Sorry.
After after the formation of the earth.
I apologize.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there there is, we'll get to the big bang part in a second.
But there is yeah.
So there is life going back here on earth to just a few 100000000 years after the formation of the earth.
That I would agree with.
Yes.
I just
So life formed really in almost instantaneously.
The moment the conditions were acceptable, not great, just acceptable life formed.
And so the standard view is that life is everywhere here on earth, every, every nook and cranny where we find liquid water, we find life.
And so the standard view is life must be everywhere.
Okay.
Right?
It should be everywhere.
There should be life on other planets.
There should be life.
There should be tens of thousands of advanced civilizations across the Milky Way.
There should be advanced civilizations in every galaxy that we can see.
The universe should be teeming with life.
And and, well, and I we're using I I think it's very easy.
I did it for a moment, then I stopped.
And who's the I'm gonna use an author to kinda demonstrate the differences.
Was it Andrew Work or something Work that just wrote that book recently where the the other species was a different type of
Oh, Andy Weir?
Andy Weir.
Project Hail Mary?
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so defining life is in your mind anything that is
what?
You know, when you see it.
Right?
So This was the scientific interview.
I remember.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, like, anything that that you know, there's lots of definitions for life, and you can there's a geneticist perspective of what life is and there's a and there's a a a biologist point of view and and there's many different but but the gist is some combination of it pulls in energy from its environment.
It has some kind of membrane where it it organizes stuff inside itself and moves, changes, reproduces, grows, kicks around its environment, does stuff.
So if you have the equation, and it's an equation, life forms instantaneously when the conditions meet a certain set of of behaviors conditions.
Okay?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so and and what you're saying is, therefore, if that's the case, then it should be happening all over the universe.
Right.
And you're saying this is not the equation.
Well, no.
No.
I'm saying, like, that's the that's everyone's expectation.
And yet Yep.
And that the the idea of you know, because here in the universe, we exist with a common set of rules.
We've got we've got the energy from stars.
We have the chem we have chemistry.
We have laws of physics.
They they guide or they play a role here on everything that happens on planet Earth.
They must have those same rules must be happening everywhere across the universe that that we can see.
From what we can tell, the universe is the same everywhere, that there are stars, the stars give off energy, the radiation falls on planets, the planets are made out of various chemicals, the chemicals interact with each other, some will have liquid water, that the kinds of processes that happen here on earth are happening everywhere around this this universe.
That's an expectation.
Yes.
If Yeah.
For those who believe that life forms, if the conditions are right for at least our type of species
Yeah.
Then that will happen on other planets.
Right.
And that because
Because it's mathematically impossible not to based upon
the number of assumption.
Like Yes.
Like, if you're gonna make the assumption that the laws of physics are completely different for every cubic meter of the universe, then you can't you can't make can't say anything about the universe.
So yeah.
So that's like astronomers kinda say we're not special.
This what we see here is kind of how everything is probably out there.
And so then this idea of evolutionary, you know, evolutionary biology by natural natural selection is one of the resulting features you would expect for limited amounts of energy falling onto limited amounts of chemistry.
Yeah.
Right.
That, that you get more sunlight, you get less sunlight, you have more ingredients, you have less ingredients that you're attempting.
You're the life form is attempting to adapt itself to live in the, to live in the habitat that it finds itself and over time will become better and better adapted to its surroundings, and you'll have natural selection.
You will have animals eating each other.
You have creatures eating each other, aliens eating each other to which are better adapted and and more fit to survive in certain environments.
And this process, this evolutionary process that we see here on Earth feels like it should be the kind of thing that we would find out there across the universe.
So right now, life forms instantaneously, and the formula is now you're adding plus natural selection Yeah.
Is a mechanism by which planets or species or Right.
Be able to, progress,
change, evolve.
Right.
And even if life doesn't doesn't form instantaneously, there seem
to be mechanisms how life can move from world to world, from star system to star system.
So life could have started only one time in the entire universe, but has naturally shifted around from world to world through these various processes.
So Do you do you believe that?
I don't have any.
I I don't believe it.
It's not about a belief thing.
It's whether or not there's evidence.
I mean, we see Oumuamua.
It was believed to be 30,000 interstellar asteroids passing through the solar system at any one time.
These are these are objects that formed in other star systems.
So there are definitely mechanisms that get material from 1 star system to another star system.
It doesn't seem impossible that when you run the clock of the entire solar system for 4,600,000,000 years that an asteroid was knocked off of another star system kept microbes inside safely, and it happened to hit Earth.
Doesn't seem impossible to me.
Okay.
Well, the premise seems like that is not your premise because by saying that life forms instantaneously when the characteristics behavior or what's happening makes it happen Yeah.
Then you would not be saying that you believe that there's a singular source of creation, and then that has been spread.
Where did the first microbe form on earth?
Let me pull up a map.
Don't don't bother.
Right?
It doesn't matter.
We don't know.
It we can never know
because Well, I'm asking you, do you think it came from another from another rock, another thing,
or do you think it instantaneously formed by?
No opinion.
I have no opinion.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have no I've I do I have insufficient evidence to decide either way.
But what I do know is that like, a a better example is when you think about a coconut, which beach on Hawaii did the Coke the first coconut to grow in Hawaii land on?
Or doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Or was it spontaneously
I don't I don't think a coconut spontaneously formed on Hawaii.
There are other islands that have coconuts that existed long before Hawaii was formed.
Well, I Hawaii was part of a massive
Yeah.
Right?
So there was there were coconut there were palm trees before Hawaii existed, and yet as soon as Hawaii formed, then a coconut showed up.
So You
know, you're making work for me.
I'm gonna have to do the history of coconuts.
That's up to you.
I could have used any other analogy.
I know.
I it's Or
would you prefer finches?
So you're I understand where you're going.
Okay?
So you're Yeah.
But you're more, I believe, because you're put you said, I believe life forms instantaneously that this other construct that it was dispersed through the universe.
No.
So I don't say I don't say that I believe that life formed instantaneously.
I'm saying that is the that is what happened
Oh, okay.
Here on Earth.
And then you have this other So the assumption
is and there's another possibility that life like, whether it formed or whether it got here through some other mechanism is irrelevant.
The point is it was here.
Okay.
Got it.
And and so when you add all of those pieces together, everyone's ad hoc assumption is life should be everywhere.
It should be everywhere.
Right?
And so you talk to you talk to anyone.
You talk to astronomers, you talk to the regular public and you say, are there aliens?
Do you think they're aliens?
And they'll say, yes, of course, of course.
It's a huge universe.
It's big.
We don't, we've only explored a tiny little piece of it.
How could there not be aliens?
There have to be aliens.
And what I'm saying is that there aren't any that that earth is the only place with life at all in the entire observable universe.
And at this point, I hope your audience is losing their minds.
Well, it's just me.
It doesn't matter.
Okay.
Fine.
But but people are vociferously disagreeing with my, my hubristic, assertion.
Mean I that we are doesn't matter
it doesn't matter what other people you and I are talking.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That you and I Of
course.
No.
No.
I'm I'm
used to I'm used to this.
When I hear this Yeah.
Not even a single bacteria on another star system.
If you had asked me this is my answer, and then this would be my second my my process.
Yeah.
I would say, I would like to believe that something like this happened, yet I have no evidence.
Mhmm.
So But would you be against it?
If I if I said, let's have a bet, you know, gentleman's bet, we can get the answer in a second here.
A $100 each way.
I'll take the there is no life in the universe.
Will you take the yes, there is life in the universe?
Would you take that bet?
And then we could then know the answer instantaneously.
No.
I know that, and my, I I'd never bet.
I mean, I got married.
I started businesses.
Those are all bets.
But Sure.
What I what would I say?
Would you take that bet?
What would I do?
Would I take that bet?
Yeah.
I'm leaning towards saying, no.
I wouldn't take that bet.
Really?
Interesting.
I would Okay.
I would take the I would say that the the probability Yeah.
A single occurrence
A material life form.
A single celled organism.
If it if it has to be observable universe.
Well, observable is a tough word because we keep on getting observable further.
Sure.
Include the new stuff.
Include the time you anytime you think about it.
I would say that the randomness of collisions of something happening, whether it be infinitesimally small, it doesn't mean we have to have humans and tigers or
Yep.
Yep.
And and coconuts.
A microbe.
That a microbe planet in your system in Alcantara.
May have formed, and it could have died.
Mhmm.
But I believe that the randomness of collisions of opportunity would probably have addressed itself, but we might not even recognize when we see it.
Okay.
So you and I because we're
we're betting a $100.
I don't wanna lose Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
It's a lot of money.
So it's so it's so it's rocks as far as the eye can see.
As far as I could say, I would say that as far as you could see, yes.
And mine is Okay.
On one of those.
Yeah.
Again, we might not be able to identify it as Yeah.
We wouldn't see it because we wouldn't know it could be in a different spectrum of light.
Or Yeah.
I mean, like, I'm not gonna include
stuff that exists in some extra dimension that we can't No.
No.
I'm not talking about extra dimensions.
I'm just talking about we just might not be able to see it because we can't see it with human eyes.
Thing that would cast a shadow.
Right?
If it Okay.
Yeah.
I would say went after the rocks that I'm sitting on.
I've never been asked this question, so it's really it's a you've thought about it.
I haven't, and my mind is racing.
You've never wondered.
You've never thought I believe that there's aliens in the universe?
I've never been put into the question of saying yes or no.
I've had the discussion about possibilities, and that's the Yeah.
The world is humans can get away with a lot Yeah.
When there's possibilities.
When you say it's a yes or a no Yeah.
You have to take a camp.
Yeah.
And if I had to take the camp today, maybe in 6 months, I'd think differently.
Maybe after we're done, I'll think differently.
But if I had to take a camp, realize and I think you we're my background is organic chemistry, physics, calculus.
I mean, I do the extreme sciences.
So I'm my mind my my thought is I see, you could change the formula.
Would you bet your would you bet your life on it?
Well, no.
Who'd who'd bet their life on things?
No.
But I'm saying if if this was it, if this was you, Willy, I would take a camp.
No.
I would not.
I would not.
I would say It's crazy.
But if I had to bet my life on it, I would say No
one's asking you to bet your life on it.
Oh, but a $100, so then I'm gonna go with $100.
I'm gonna say, I believe there's something I believe there's something out there.
Okay.
Great.
I yes.
Wonderful.
Okay.
Now right.
But the like, the fact that it took you that long, like, everyone else, I I assume, who's listening to this, would take that bet in a heartbeat that it's, that it's madness to think that there's not life out there.
So this, so the idea, and you probably heard of it, is the Fermi paradox, this idea that fine, right?
If life is everywhere, then where is everybody?
And when Fermi Enrico Fermi first formulated this idea, what he talked about was not like, is there going to be life forms on the underside of an ocean in a far flung corner of the universe?
And, of course, we haven't found that life because we've barely we've barely started to explore.
And when you talk to Jill Tarter, she will say, wondering about whether or not there's life in the universe is like taking a single spoonful of the ocean, not seeing any whales in it and thinking that there's no such thing as whales.
But And and And Yes.
You're you're Jill is gonna be on next week.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, maybe I'll bring this question up to her.
That'd be great.
Yeah.
And so but the Fermi paradox is not about having explored the entire universe.
The the back of the mat napkin math that Enrico Fermi did was he imagined some other alien civilization who had reached a certain level of technical capability, sent out spacecraft to other star systems.
Those star systems, the spacecraft built more copies of themselves.
They went off to other star systems.
So he was imagining, like, we have life here on Earth that as a a civilization reaches a certain level of technology, it will set off into the cosmos and begin the process of converting the cosmos from rocks to life.
I think there's also an a contrary one that as soon as you get to a certain point, if you don't make a decision, the whole thing implodes.
Yeah.
That's a we'll we'll get to that in a second, but Okay.
But we'll stay on the on the on the
No.
No.
That's okay.
I just was sorry.
I I just So so this idea and so that that and we're on our way.
When you think about what's happening with humanity, here we are, you know, someone's about to build a, hot on the moon with a door.
Someone else is going to be building a self replicating robot that 3 d prints that goes to the asteroid belt and builds copies of itself, extracts antimatter, sends these self replicating robots off to Alpha Centauri to to Wolf 359, they're gonna build copies of themselves.
And according, you know, if you go 10% the speed of light, you will fully explore your entire galaxy in about 10,000,000 years.
Like the Milky way is about 170, 150,000 light years across.
You go 10% of the speed of light point 500,000.
Yeah.
You've you've you've done it in about 2,000,000 years.
You've gone to every single star system, and you have filled every single star system with robots and and life if you want.
I mean, if you took a lot, if you took life along with your robots, you would have that.
And and so it's not that we would be like, it's up to us to go to these other star systems, but in fact, it's about the fact that these that that an alien civilization that starts anywhere across the entire Milky Way 2000000 years later, we'll have filled the entire Milky Way with self replicating robot probes.
That there are about 4,000,000,000 galaxies that we can reach if we're able to build spacecraft capable of going just shy of the speed of light.
So beyond that, all the the other 2 trillion galaxies we can never reach, but there's about 4,000,000,000 that we can reach.
The rest are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, and we could never get to them.
But 4,000,000,000 is a lot.
Right?
That's a big Yeah.
That's that's a big swath.
It's it's 4% of the universe.
And Is that what it is?
If yeah.
And if we started today, we could send about a send a bunch of robots out, antimatter robots that would reach 1 per galaxy, and they would begin the process of colonizing those.
And colonizing is a terrible word, exploring.
We don't use yeah.
We in ours, we don't use colonizing or settlement.
Yeah.
Explore.
Right?
And so by all means, we could we could and then we could have a map.
Like, we could have all of these robots just traveling to all these different star systems, sending data home to us here on earth, and then and then throwing themselves into the star to wipe away all trace of their existence if we wanted to.
Okay.
Or we could we could send DNA factories that that spread cyanobacteria on every single planet that we run into and fill the universe with cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria would like that just fine.
Thank you very much.
So so the question about why we don't see any aliens out there is not that we haven't gone out to find them, it's that they haven't come to find us.
And it doesn't matter where they start.
Right?
Any one of those galaxies within 4, you know, within the 4,000,000,000 galaxies in our local universe, each one which has potentially tens of thousands of intelligent civilizations, not one has sent out these robot probes to every single place in the universe.
And that's weird, right?
That is the Fermi paradox that we sit here in what seems like a pristine universe that that when a an advanced civilization begins really digging in, they are turning their asteroids into Dyson spheres.
They are starting to utilize big chunks of the radiation from their star.
These are signs that are easily recognizable across millions of light years.
If we watch the galaxy wink out star by star as they all shifted into the infrared spectrum, it would be dramatic and obvious.
And yet very expansive surveys have been done looking for infrared shifted galaxies across the observable universe, and they haven't been seen.
It appears that the universe is raw wilderness in every direction that we look.
K.
So the, you know, so the the conclusion from that and and so if if if, like, any little speck of life through the evolutionary through the evolutionary process can become an advanced civilization capable of sending out fleets of robotic spacecraft to every nook and cranny, then we have to assume that it's never happened anywhere else.
We're also I think there's also an assumption there that over the 1,000,000,000 of years of evolution that a a species would have reached that level to be able to do that, and maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate.
Sure.
Maybe we're right now across the entire universe.
We're right now reaching that point where some
That seems really weird
that I I that there
are, you know, say there are 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe that there are potentially a 100,000,000,000 stars in each one of those galaxies that life could have formed on any of them or all of them, that advanced civilizations could have gotten started in any one of those galaxies and would have begun adapting their environment in a way that is observable to us.
It it could also be that they have never reached that.
It could have been that they haven't gotten this far yet.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So so the you know, I think most people when they hear that, they say, well, but it's really far.
Oh, but it's, like, you know, it's really hard or it's really slow or maybe they don't want to.
But I don't even think
mine was just a matter of math.
It's
Yeah.
Well, you have to run that experiment.
You have to say to yourself, okay.
Fine.
Right?
Like, maybe the gentle dolphinoids in city alpha 6 don't want to create a solar system spanning civilization.
No problem.
But the Borg over at wolf 359, they sure want to, and they're going to do it.
And so the dolphinoids can either stop them or Oh, we're also
we're also making the assumption that they have the same cognitive patterns that we have Yeah.
Of exploration and or domination or
Well, I mean, it could
be anything.
Right?
It could be the most gentle, most loving exploration to send out peace and enlightenment to everyone to harmonize relations between civilizations.
It it it should just be obvious.
I think, though, built into that, in my mind, it was built into that is the the presumption that whatever species develops has the cognitive capabilities of wanting to or being able to think in this way.
And my mind, as you're talking about this, I said, a dog I went to a dog likes to wander.
Mhmm.
A dog will sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff and keep on going it if it hasn't been it'll just keep on going to eat and do, but that doesn't mean if the whole world was filled with dogs that one day Yeah.
They will rise up and have the ability that there will be one of them that supersedes the other.
And even though the planet could be rich in species, it doesn't mean that they'll be building something to leave.
Right.
But imagine you run that experiment on 2 trillion galaxies, 100,000,000,000 stars per galaxy over and over and over again.
Right?
So it's not about We have to It's not about
it's not about one place.
But we can take we can take that we can take that set that you've created Mhmm.
And let's call it a 100, and we can take that set, and we could say yes.
But the conditions, the way we know them if we're using our biological systems and and, yeah, they, the groupings that we've had for creating life, what we consider to be criteria, we'd have to take out of that anything that's too far away from a heat source because it depends on the size.
We'd have to take away anything that doesn't have certain types of, minerals rock on that planet or on that rock.
So we could probably if we took that 100 set, there might only be 7, and I'm making this number up.
There might only be 7.
Right.
That could potentially meet the criteria you have.
Now let's assume on those 7, only 3 of them meet the criteria that you just said.
Sure.
Okay.
So now what does so you got 3.
They've got 3 out of 100,000,000,000 stars.
Correct.
What happens next?
Okay.
So now if you say that they actually do what you're saying, well, we could say that one of them completely fails.
They kill themselves.
Mhmm.
They Yep.
Nuclear war.
They do all the things that you shouldn't do.
So now we're down to 2.
Yep.
Yep.
And then we have a group that really tries to get out, but they don't have that cognitive capability to make that.
But we do have one.
Yeah.
Now in that one, even if you're using a replication factor of going and then finding and going and finding Mhmm.
To find a little rock earth or near earth or close enough for us to see something might be as just as impossible as the largest scope of the entire universe.
Said, they do it in 10 they do it in 2000000 years.
So the moment that one that survived, the one out of 100,000,000 star systems, that one goes on to completely explore the galaxy.
I I I think I I can I understand what you're saying?
I believe there's a lot of math in there that can easily be
Well right.
But but but you can, I mean, you can look at them because because the numbers are so large?
Right?
You know?
And and The
data set is huge.
Yes.
The data set is huge.
And so the what matters is that takes one time.
No.
It takes one time for the first one, but it takes it doesn't change the model on the next one that that next one will occur because maybe they go to a rock.
That rule they need to go but they go to so let's assume that humans decide to pick a rock Mhmm.
And let's call it Mars.
Sure.
Sure.
Because the moon's gonna be okay for a bit.
Let's call it Mars.
They go to Mars.
They've done it.
They made the jump.
Yeah.
But what happens is on Mars, they didn't make they didn't have all the data, and they made wrong assumptions about surviving a number of people, and they collapse.
Sure.
The people on that original planet, let's call it Earth, might not have the wherewithal, the capital, all of the other things for to make that next change again.
Yeah.
We'll figure to that.
That's my point number 3.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
So
let's So are we ready
to the 3 years or more?
No.
We're not.
Because I because I
I feel like I'm not you don't understand it yet.
I don't think.
And so I I think I just wanna sort of take a
few crack
steps just to get there.
Yeah.
I'd love it.
Right.
So the point is, like and back to my coconut analogy that Yep.
That if a coconut lands, like, say you've got all the beaches on Hawaii and 99% of the beaches are bad for coconuts to land on, but there's one beach that's okay for coconuts to land on and coconuts can can grow on that beach.
Yep.
100 years later, where where are the coconut palms growing?
They could be on the island or just to that one beach because the rest of the island They're they're everywhere.
The rest of the island might not might not be conducive to that.
It could be But we weather it could Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fine.
We can pick any plan.
The point being that that once the coconut has the toehold on Hawaii, it then spreads.
It drops more coconuts.
The coconuts grow.
You get more coconuts.
Eventually, the entire island has been settled by coconuts.
And, and so it doesn't matter where it starts.
If you take a sandwich, and this is the other analogy that I use in one spore of mold drops on your sandwich and you leave your sandwich out and you come back a week later, your entire sandwich is covered in mold.
If in fact, it was left alone to its own devices.
Right.
If in fact, that mold was found by my wife, it would have been tossed or exposed or whatever.
If in fact, that coconut is like the 17,500 tree species on planet Earth at this time today, out of 60,000 tree species or 17,500 on the razor's edge Yeah.
Of going extinct.
And they're going extinct because of variables outside of the control of the tree.
Yes.
So I mean, toilet paper is 80 toilet paper and hand wipes are 80,000 trees a day.
Yeah.
So if someone really wants toilet paper hand wipes or toilet paper butt wipes, whatever you wanna call them,
that Yeah.
That species might not be back be all over the planet, all over the island if you came back 50 years from there.
I was assuming there was no people looking to turn countries into toilet wipe.
Right?
I'm But you understand what I'm saying?
I'm using that as an example.
No.
I understand.
There
there's variables out.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
All I'm saying is is that is that there is life in every nook and cranny of planet Earth.
Yes.
We don't have to go very far to find life.
Yeah.
Because life is doing the spreading.
And, and if intelligent life gains the technological capability, it will do the spreading.
And for every life form that doesn't wanna do the spreading, there will be a life form that will, or for every 1,000 that don't want to, there will be one that wants to, and it's the one that wants to is the one that we see, that we will see.
And so you and so that experiment has been run on 100,000,000,000 planets, 100,000,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies, and we have not one time seen evidence that that an alien civilization has begun this process of settling their galaxy.
And, and, and so that leads us to wonder, like there are 2 possibilities, either we are alone in the universe or something really horrible happens to any advanced civilization that tries to.
That gets to a certain level of technology.
And we can imagine all kinds of possibilities.
We can imagine a nuclear apocalypse, but the nuclear apocalypse won't kill life on earth.
We can imagine an asteroid strike, but an asteroid strike won't kill life on earth.
We can imagine, a a plague, but a plague won't kill life on earth.
Like, there is life forms 10 kilometers below the surface of of earth.
There's life forms
hottest temperatures at the bottom of the ocean.
Yes.
Against the the black smokers at the bottom of the ocean that that we are that life is unkillable.
You would have to take the entire planet Earth and drop it into the sun if you really wanted to get rid of life on Earth.
K.
So so life is life is everywhere, and so it seems weird.
And of course, like what if we create our robot overlords?
Well, then we would see the universe being filled with robotic spacecraft and we don't see that.
So it doesn't seem to be that that alien species transcended into robots.
So the so it's a possibility that there's some inevitable outcome, some science experiment that intelligent civilizations can't help themselves but do.
I I just choose not to believe that because it's a horrible thought.
I would much prefer we're alone because the alternative is horrific.
Ah, that's an interesting
Yeah.
So Yeah.
Like, I'm having to make a leap of faith here in that in that I'm just like it
No.
That that's an interesting take that it it's either this way or the alternative is The other one be behind door number 2.
Yeah.
And door number 2, like, if it's if it's knocked out 100,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies for 100,000,000,000,000 star systems across 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies.
It is 100% lethal, whatever this thing is, nobody has escaped it.
So we can't expect to escape it either.
The I I you remind me, I had this conversation with I I was at an event I met, if you wanna call it, the first astronaut I've met.
His name was Jim Newman, and I he's out of California.
We were sitting and talking, and I didn't know he was an astronaut at the time.
We we just started talking about life, and he said, we will we'll never know if there's life outside of this of earth.
And his his presumption, and I'm gonna shorten it and probably not do it the justice that he did it, is he said that if someone was gonna come visit us, and you've heard this, they would have had to look through their mic through their telescopes.
They would have had to pick this rock 50000 years ago or whatever, depending on their speed of travel.
Then they would have to have then hopped in and and seen what they saw and said, we're gonna go to that rock, that small tiny rock orbiting around the sun.
And by the time they got here, we could all be gone or the choice of even selecting it would never have happened.
I totally disagree.
And that was his that was his first take on it.
That was the first time I was questioned in that way.
I never heard about it in in that light.
I think here the he was talking about slower than the speed of light Sure.
Whereas traveling at very much slower speeds.
You use 10%, I think it was.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The speed of light.
Yeah.
He was probably talking Voyager speeds.
I I
like, I I think I get that that feeling, but I actually think it's wrong
that we currently have the James Webb Space Telescope, which is theoretically capable of detecting life, gases from life in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet.
There are plans to build a telescope called the solar gravitational lens that would put a telescope out about a 1000 astronomical units from the sun where the gravity of the sun acts like a natural lens and magnifies the light from a distant exoplanet to the point that you would see a 1 megapixel image of an exoplanet.
So you would not only see the exoplanet, you would see the mountains and the oceans and the and the trees Wow.
Rivers and the cities and and the moons that were going around it, and that's like one spacecraft.
We could we have the test mission, which is identifying every every planet in our in our neighborhood.
We've got the extremely large telescope coming online in 2027 that is gonna be capable of directly observing Earth sized world orbiting around sun like stars.
It is perfectly reasonable for us to assume that in the next few 100 years, we will have a very detailed survey of every single planet, habitable planet within a few 1,000 light years of us and and telescopes out of the solar panels.
And and your belief
that there will be nothing imaging them.
And your belief will be there will be nothing next to it.
Yeah.
We'll find that.
Fine.
Yeah.
It it's And we have to you know, antimatter would allow us to travel at a significant portion of the speed of light.
We have laser sail technology theoretically.
But even if we're lazy and we wanna take the slow route, we can wait a 100000 years and star systems will get close to us that they pass within a few 100 astronomical units of the sun or a few 1,000, and they're relatively easy to hump from hop from star system to star system.
So a lazy civilization could take a few 1000000 years extra and travel to every single star system in the entire Milky Way for a fraction, for 1% of the travel time because you just wait for all the star systems to drift closely to each other.
I I I'm I don't want I wanna continue with this.
It's interesting.
A question came to mind of the and you would know this.
You probably have read this.
William Shatner wrote his recently comment about death or Mhmm.
Beyond earth.
I feel like you're the downer at the party.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
When he said that, did you say did your heart say, yes, he's exactly right?
No.
What did you say?
Well, I mean, like, his
his experience, and this is the 4th point, is how important earth is.
Like, this is all
So do we wanna we we still have octopuses yet.
So you
wanna have octopuses in the
on the you wanna So it's like
I mean, I guess, like, my only hope is that I've made the case that we're alone.
I I don't I I and I
and I can appreciate that this is a this for a lot of people, I have absolutely not made the case.
Well, it's it's again, it's other people.
I've given them some interesting
My my question would be, let's say you've done this.
Yeah.
Let's say you've done this a 1000 times to people you've spoken to, not people in the audience.
There's a huge difference.
One way conversation versus two way conversation, large group versus a small group.
Yeah.
When you walk away from those conversations, and let's say they let's use this I'm gonna use a number of 1,000 because I'm gonna give an analogy.
Yeah.
On LinkedIn, I think I'm, like, 17,500 connections.
Let's just use that as a number.
Okay.
I get all the time people who write to me, David, love to have you a part of my love to connect.
Your CV is amazing.
I'd like to connect.
And I always do one thing.
I write back, love to connect.
Why did you connect to me?
Now why did I do that?
Because I had a person who when I had had 69 connections, and I accepted with a lot of reservation, And he wrote me this beautiful letter about how he read paid to think, the book that I'd written, and how he it has changed his entire x y z.
It was beautiful.
Yeah.
And I've had people I don't know who I've influenced, so I have to accept, but I do write back.
Out of a 100, I get maybe 10 people who write back.
So they said they wanna connect.
I then write something back, which is a connection.
I accept it and write something back.
They don't answer.
Yes.
Of course.
Out of the people who answer, probably not data specific, 6 of them write back, I just wanted to connect.
It it was awesome to meet you.
Thank you.
Now what do you write back?
I mean, there's nothing you could write back to that.
Yeah.
You don't realize you created a connection.
I created a conversation.
You more or less slammed the door.
Yeah.
And then out of that group, maybe 3, 4.
I had one this morning from Pakistan where I I set up a meeting.
I said, I'd like to meet you if you're gonna write back to me.
I'm writing a cool conversation.
Yeah.
It's really neat.
I like
that.
The challenge is that it's a small, small, small segment where we could say that people think something or do something.
But I've been keeping track.
People do not respond, and I ask them every single one, why did you connect?
So my question is, out of the thousand, how many of them walked away where they said, I completely agree with you?
Or how many of them said, I have to think about it?
Or how many of them said,
I don't know?
Yeah.
I mean, I think the response
is you've got to be wrong.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Like, it's like it is it is it is a it it's a faith issue.
So I make what I feel is a fairly cogent cogent argument, and they'll be like, well, that's fine, but I just don't believe you.
K.
So and he used the word so, again, I'm very literal.
He used the word faith.
Mhmm.
It also could be a faith issue.
It could be a matter of religion, a matter of societal norms.
It could be that their their belief is that if there's not something out there I have no value, there could be a lot of inherent reasons why they wouldn't.
So if your argument is not having a lot of people walk away with that, yep.
Got it.
Mhmm.
What's I'm sorry.
I'm this is who I am.
Yeah.
What do you think is missing in that formula that can get people over that hump to get this?
Well, I mean, like, I I think that
there's a where I'm kind
of going with this argument is I'm worried that there's a learned helplessness.
Okay.
About humanity that, that we have as our operating system, an assumption that that some, that we, that someone else is going to, is going to fix it.
Oh, wow.
And, and some, and we have that across the environment.
We have that across the economy or that across human connection.
We're always assuming I don't need to recycle.
I don't need to decrease my energy usage.
Someone else is gonna solve this problem.
And every civilization has ended because everybody kept saying that until everybody died.
Okay.
So now now I
and and that's the ultimate.
No.
No.
I I I I love that because that connection, which is not an easy one to get, is an assumptive be and I'm not saying bad.
It's just the word assumptive.
Mhmm.
Not a negative bad, not a a negative assumption or positive assumption.
The assumption is that human beings or the behavior of human beings, because we're not talking about trees and amoebas and we're not talking about whales Mhmm.
That the human species has this underlying belief structure.
For some reason, that something will save them.
Yes.
And you don't like that.
Mhmm.
And you're hoping that they can tap into a different side of them.
Yes.
Yeah.
A 100%.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And and No.
No.
You it manifests itself just in like, it manifests itself over and over and over again in So in political, you know, people who are who are being trapped in tyranny in you know, see what's happening in Iran right now.
You think about the environment, you think about the what happened during World War 2, like, just again and again, it's only when people take a stand for the things that matter that that things change, and we avoid annihilation.
I I I'm gonna maybe this might be helpful because I I'm now understanding where you're coming from, which I love.
I appreciate it.
Mhmm.
And I'm gonna give you 2 data points, 2 thoughts to think about.
And one of them is a a methodology of awareness.
Individuals are not aware of what they don't know, but they believe they know it anyway.
They did they believe they understand something.
So I made this mistake.
I had developed this program called redefining.
If you use it and you understand it, and it's not simple, if you use it every single time you use it, you will come up with a better answer than the answer you had before to get to your desired outcome.
Every time there's if it's 1%, if it's 50%, if it's point 1, it's always better because I've used it over and over and always does.
But the first time I presented it, I said to a group of people, I was excited.
There were about 13 people I've been working with, and I said, let me share with you what I'm working on.
I went over it, and these are all executives of pretty large companies.
And they say, oh, no.
No.
I do that.
No.
No.
I do that.
I do that.
And I'm thinking, I know you.
You do not do that.
So the next time I changed them, I changed me.
I didn't try to change them.
What I did is I said, there's a big piece of paper in front of you.
I did it, like, 2 weeks later to another group of people.
There's a big piece of paper in front of you.
I would like you all have processes for addressing major challenges.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I said, can you write me down the process that you use that your your organization uses, not just you, but your organization also uses?
And let me see it because I wanna see where you come from.
Mhmm.
And I let them struggle.
Yeah.
This went on for
Of course, they don't.
20 minutes, and people are saying, well, you know, I kinda do this, and I kinda do that.
And then what we did is we put them up.
And I said, do you know if you do this, you'll be in a constant loop?
You'll never get an answer?
And another one was, okay, sir.
Here it was, then ask again.
Like, you did all of this and then ask again because it's complete failure.
Yeah.
The they didn't have one.
And then I showed it to them, and the second group said, I get it.
Right.
They completely not understood where it because it's bad and bought in.
They completely understood it because they didn't have a methodology, and they thought they did.
I think in this case, which I do love now because it does fit project Moon Hat, is that you're kind of articulating there's another reason for us to live a different way of life, and maybe it's based upon our our inherent belief structure of where we are in the universe.
Mhmm.
Does that make sense what I just said?
Yeah.
Our responsibility.
So I'm gonna take it from a different perspective, and I'm I'm using this.
I am Jewish, and in the Jewish religion, we are not.
I've never been taught.
I don't think it is.
You're never taught that you're going to be given something.
Like, you can't pray for something.
We don't I don't I've never prayed that someone that something would show up or that the world would be better or this would happen.
In in the way I was brought up and most of the people I know, you were told, no.
You can have anything you want.
You just have to work for it.
No.
No.
No.
You can have to work for it.
No.
You can have to you have to work for everything.
And so I don't come from the position that there is another life out there that will save us.
I don't think that the Vulcans are gonna show up because we hit, warp speed for the first time, whatever version of the movie it is.
I don't remember these names, the the the titles.
I don't come from that.
I come from the belief that no matter what, it's still up to us.
It's still up to us.
Mhmm.
So I do agree.
I I do love this.
I'm not gonna it's not an argument.
I call it a theoretical argument, meaning that I do love your case scenarios that it's it's the probability of what you're saying happening in the universe is infinitesimal to 0.
I do agree with that.
Mhmm.
I just don't tie that to me changing my behavior because I personally believe no one's coming
to help us at all.
Right.
Right.
Of course.
And so I think I mean, I don't think people have a a actual specific expectation or belief that this is that someone is gonna show up and fix everything, but they act as if Yes.
That's what's going to happen, and they continue living living their lives.
But that that is a behavioral component of it, and it does fill into what you're saying.
So, yes, they do believe something else will save them.
It doesn't have to be another species.
It could be, well, the smart people will figure it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Or maybe the you know, we just need a, you know, an asteroid strike to reset everything, but that's Correct.
It's madness.
There are people who believe we need the the the Earth should have nuclear bombs, and then it will reset itself.
And it won't.
And so that's what I'm about to move on to.
Let's move on to Octopuses?
We'll talk about the Octopuses.
Yeah.
Okay.
So so, I mean, we are not I mean, we are the the most advanced civilization, the most, intellectually capable, species on Earth.
We we wiped out all of our competitors and we're the ones that build cities, we're the ones that farm, we're the ones that put animals in pens, we're the ones who who exert dominance on every nook and cranny of this planet.
We have extracted all of the ready resources.
We've extracted the oil.
We've extracted 100 of 1000000 of years of of of plant life, of algae that has fallen to the bottom of the ocean and formed coal and oil.
We have extracted all of the readily available minerals, metals that are on the surface.
We've we've dug deep and found it.
We've extracted we're extracting now the water in giant underground aquifers that have been built up over tens of 1,000,000 of of years.
We're using that up too.
And so if we do mess this up, there are other life forms that couldn't step up.
There are the there are the crows, the ravens, the parrots.
There are the octopuses.
There are the chimpanzees, the gorillas.
You know, there's a lot of there's dolphins.
So there are other life forms.
And even if one of them can gain a certain level of sentience to the point that they can build cities and build undertake a space, program, build a a hut on the moon with a door, and so on.
We have used up the the legacy.
We have used up.
We have stolen their resources for ourselves that we have preloaded all of the stuff.
And even if any other civilization forms after us, the kind of technology that it would take for them to be able to get at that high value resource would be extreme, and the planet is is heating up.
I mean, over the next, say, 500,000,000 years, the sun will will boil the oceans and continue on until it eventually becomes a red giant star.
Now that's not causing global warming.
Well, to make sure that people understand that global warming is is absolutely humanity, burning fossil fuels in the short term, and that if we disappear, then temperatures go back to exactly as they were without us.
But over the long term, the sun is heating up and Yeah.
And it will end life on Earth eventually in about 5000000000 years.
So we can't we can't we can't depend on the aliens to do it, and we can't depend on the future to do it.
That's why we can't, the octopuses can't do it.
It's we, we can't rely on the aliens and we can't rely on the future.
So so yeah.
Let's I put an x to the aliens.
No aliens.
X to the aliens
and x to the octopuses.
Yeah.
Actually, I have met some aliens, and I think they're among us.
So I'm not so sure.
But Okay.
They're they're not helping us.
They're not okay.
But yeah.
Yeah.
So
They're not helping.
They're just human beings.
Yeah.
Those aliens that I'm talking
Once they they threw their lot in with us
They they they They're going they're coming down with the ship.
Yeah.
They're they're, what is it?
Men in black.
They're sitting at the bar drinking.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then They've gone native.
They've gone native.
And then Yeah.
Do you think with the 500,000,000 years that potentially is just off the cuff of that potentially another species could evolve?
That's necessary.
It's a long shot.
Okay.
And we've like, maybe, but we've used the good stuff.
We've used up the good stuff.
So even if they do evolve, they're not gonna have oil reserves, coal reserves, uranium reserves, iron, nickel, copper, cobalt, cadmium, manganese, etcetera.
We grabbed it and used it.
Okay.
So let's let's go down the the bad rabbit hole.
Do you believe and we're doing the gentleman's bet.
Mhmm.
Mhmm.
Do you believe we'll solve this before what we have labeled the 6 mega challenges which you've heard about?
Mhmm.
Do you believe that we'll beat that race?
Well, so
that's number 4.
Oh, okay.
So are we done with 3?
I think so.
Unless you Okay.
Have any questions.
No.
No.
No.
That if if you're answering if you're answering
to 4.
And and spaceships
No.
Because you're gonna answer it here.
So Yeah.
Yeah.
Stop stop wrecking Earth.
Yep.
Yeah.
So that's it.
Why the in if we do this right, if we live sustainably in balance with the planet, we can increase the diversity of planet Earth.
We can utilize the energy that is coming freely available to us from the sun and other renewable energy sources.
We can live in balance on this planet for until the sun cooks us all.
And in fact, maybe we can shift the orbit of the planet outward to stay in balance while the sun continues to to move on the planet.
We have 100 of millions of years ahead of us if we choose.
Never thought of moving Earth out into a different orbit.
That's a good idea.
Okay?
It's relatively straightforward.
You just have to bring No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Large you have to bring an asteroid close to the Earth once every 10000 years, and it will be enough to shift the Earth's orbit out slowly as it as the sun heats up, and it's Oh, okay.
Sufficient.
In fact, you take one asteroid, have it go from the from the Earth to Jupiter, and so it's stealing a little bit of orbital momentum from Jupiter, but, like, nothing that would ever ever show up on Jupiter's orbit, and then it gives it to Earth.
And so you're slowly shifting Earth's orbit outward in lockstep with the way the sun is heating up.
So Okay.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
For Wow.
Cool.
Never thought about it.
5,000,000,000 years.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No problem.
You you just gotta buy time.
Like, it is like, nothing in that violates the laws of physics.
We just need to get to a place that we can do it.
And so we are unsustainable in this.
So we have started the clock.
We have started the stopwatch in in how much time we have left to to figure this out before we use that all of the goods, all of the oil, all of the coal, all the uranium, all of the gold.
We have converted we have destroyed the forest and turned them into cropland.
We are we are we have we're growing an unsustainable number of cows, etcetera.
It is So have you have you
made these have you made this balance life change?
Oh, I I mean, probably not, but I did but I did buy 80 acres in Canadian forest to restore.
What is Canada?
Come on.
Yeah.
I know.
Exactly.
Right?
So Let me snow and beavers, but but we, but yeah.
So I So so let me ask to protect this property so that it is never falls into the hands of loggers again, and all I do all day is think of ways to jam more diversity into the property.
Okay.
So, I'm gonna do this with you, which I do somebody else.
Do you ever take photos on your on your phone?
Mhmm.
Okay.
I the guy who invented Siri, I don't know if you know this, for every photograph you take and post, it's equivalent to 3 20 watt light bulbs running for an hour because you have to consider that there are servers that are running to Yeah.
Make it that's not including storage.
That's just to get it from your phone, be your phone being charged, send it through the wires, send it through these servers, post it online for someone to see it, and to maintain it cost more, but it's 3 20 watt light bulbs.
Do you, do you buy ever buy new clothing?
Not really.
Well, how old are you now today?
I'm 51.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm I'm 50.
So I I lived in Hong Kong, and every all my clothing had to be new because it had to fit the Right.
The marketplace.
But Yeah.
Yeah.
I do you buy foods that are shipped to you?
Mhmm.
Of course.
Okay.
Yeah.
I asked the woman in France, and I'm not picking on French people.
She's a fabulous person.
She believes in all the things you kinda just said that we have to do this.
And I said it just as I'm saying it now.
I said, you're a French woman.
Right?
And and and in a nice sense, and she smiled.
Yes.
And I said, you didn't give a makeup.
She looked at me.
She looked in the camera.
There was somebody else, and she said, no.
Yeah.
I said, you're a French woman.
I know that you love to dress.
Are you gonna give up buying nice clothing?
David.
Okay.
I said, are you?
She said, no.
I said, do you love friend your French, you love French food, elegant delicacies from around the world.
You love to dine.
Are you gonna give up dining in in these delicacies from around the world?
No.
I said, so then if you won't and you know everything that we'd spoken about today, you know, was on that conversation, you know all of this, then and you won't do it.
How do you expect others to do it?
I I am a fan of the theory that individuals feeling guilty over their carbon footprint is a deliberate campaign by by fossil fuel companies and governments to try and shift the blame to individuals when it is a policy issue at the heart of it.
It wasn't even my my questioning to you and to her was not that.
It's that humans are not reductionist in in their lifestyle and thinking.
Of course.
But we live we live in a society that is shaped by the by the politics and the business practices that are permitted by the government and encouraged.
There are
And do you think the government do you think governments around the world today are or at least the next 20 years?
Let's give you a window.
Do you think in the next 20 years, there will be enough tenacity, enough fortitude, enough understanding, enough conviction I I know.
Scale for 7,800,000,000 people.
Yeah.
I am I am overall,
optimistic.
I am, you know, I'm I am like, I think when you see the rate of adoption of of low carbon technology, of the switch to electrification, the rise of solar panels, wind powers, like, I think the the the climate of the planet is gonna take a hit.
I think that a lot of the least fortunate people are going to take the brunt of the damage that we've done to the climate.
But I think that we will figure this out And, 200 years from now, we will have solved the living in balance with the amount of resources that we have available to us from space.
And, you know, and I'm sure you've had this conversation with a lot of people that space is potentially one of the best ways that you can you can find some room to breathe, that you can extract resources in space, there's energy in space, you can dump your pollution in space, and you have lots of room.
But I, again, think that that is wishful thinking that that's gonna solve our problems.
So
the have you worked spent a lot of time, not just traveling, in countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia No.
Botswana, Zambia?
Okay.
No.
I've lived in Hong Kong.
Is the closest thing that I've done.
Okay.
Yeah.
I I've, lived in Hong Kong for 10 years.
I've lived in Luxembourg.
And while in in Hong Kong and around the world, I've worked in about over 50 countries.
And to me, speaking is not working.
You fly in in, let's say, it's Hong Kong and you stay at the peninsula, which is beautiful hotel.
You go up on the to the peak, which is the beautiful mountain.
You come down.
You speak, and you leave.
You didn't work in Hong Kong.
You spoke in Hong Kong.
Mhmm.
Working is when you spend time on the ground in Bangladesh for weeks, and you get to meet the people, and you understand their culture and their not everything that you can learn.
I think that the rate of change that's necessary when you're in these environments, 67 or 62, I don't know the number today, of the world's pop percent of the world's population lives in these regions.
And their lifestyle and what their what's important to them is a very different, construct.
And I'll give you an example in a moment as I move this forward.
I do believe that's that beyond earth has a power, but not the power of, that is being promoted.
I believe that the power comes from the innovations necessary, which is required when you paradigm shift to a different location.
So let me give you an example.
You leave Canada and you now go to live in Cambodia.
You now have to learn everything new.
Mhmm.
Okay.
Now just going there means you're gonna have to learn to grocery shop different.
You're gonna have to store things different.
You have to travel different.
We know the world so much.
We make so many assumptions about the world that without even realizing it, we harm the world even when we're trying to solve the world.
But what if I said to you, how would you take a shower on the moon?
Now before you answer that, think about it because I want you to come back to it.
I was on the phone with a good friend of mine, out of Shaolin, China when I was in Hong Kong.
We were talking.
We had talked about half hour, 40 minutes, and great conversation.
She said, I've gotta take a shower.
And I said, oh, why don't we talk in about 20, 25 minutes?
And she I mean, through the video camera, I could still feel it.
She wound up with her hand so hard that she smacked me through that camera.
And she said this, don't you go telling me that I can't take my 20 to 50 minute shower every day because you've lived this life.
You've had it, and now it's our turn.
Mhmm.
And I went, oh.
I've had that exact conversation with, with a friend of mine in China.
And so the construct is that to change her mind with rational thinking, meaning as an example, not gonna do it.
So if I said to you, though, or said to her, how would you take a shower on the moon?
You know how to do this.
Right?
I'm assuming.
How do you take a shower on the moon?
How would you do it?
How do you take a shower on the moon?
Because I'd like to hear it when you would say it.
Oh, well, I because
the project moon how would you take a shower on the moon?
Well, I mean, like, water conservation is the key and that you would be you know, you you got the gravity, but you still have gravity on the moon.
So it's gonna work roughly the same, but you just have to be really careful about how much water that you use, and you're recycling the water as you would in a in a space station, etcetera.
Right.
So you what you did is you made a change.
Now the average individual on planet Earth has never thought about that question.
I never thought about it until Mhmm.
I had this woman, and I said, oh, what if we on Earth, we had a shower, we hopped in, we hit the water, and for 2 minutes or 3, whatever it is, 2 minutes, the water, it you get water that gets heavily filtered.
It goes out the system.
It gets filtered in the home.
And then after that, you have a recycling water that continually goes with a filter behind the wall so that you could take a 20 or 50 minute shower like sitting in a bath because the the dirty water's gone and it's being cleaned a certain way, but this water is not.
The challenge the the value for beyond earth is not going to beyond earth.
It's the innovations necessary and the paradigm shifting thinking that's required to do it creates new innovations on earth that addresses climate change, mass extinction, ecosystems collapses, displacement, social, political, economic, religious.
It involves unrest and how we how we get along with people in closed environments, in different societies.
It involves explosive impact from things such as overfishing the oceans, deforestation of the rainforest, the pollutions that go into the ocean.
That that construct of the thinking is the value.
I think, you know,
that is an argument that people make for the value of NASA.
And but they also make that argument for the value of war.
Yeah.
And and and I think that those are you're looking for a framework to adopt a a new kinds of technology, but I think they're they're a they're sub secondary to the process of using technology to solve problems.
And I think just getting humanity to this level of balance here on earth is challenge enough and will keep us busy.
Like, I would be perfectly happy if we never sent another rocket
Mhmm.
Except for, like, a couple for Earth observation and stuff.
Right?
And for weather patterns or whatever.
Exactly.
And that we spent our energy on on sorting out how to balance life on earth, but that we actually threw ourselves into this challenge and not just try to split the difference and spend some time building aircraft carrier carriers and sometimes developing new solar panels.
Like, I think the the ideally, you want the the new technology that you develop, the innovation that you create to be the direct result of the problem that you're trying to solve.
I think you're
It's never is.
It's it's messy.
It's sloppy.
It can be.
It can be.
And I think that that is a when people say, well, the reason why we're going
to go to the moon is because it's gonna develop a
lot of really, really great technologies.
The question is, could you develop those really great technologies without going to the moon?
And the answer is, of course, yes.
Actually, I would argue because I I I taught new product and service development and innovation in NYU for 12 years.
I've also done this around the world.
I will say no because too many assumptions are built into too many models of and frameworks that people bring to the table.
And you said and I so let me jump take a jump, then you can answer that.
Sure.
NASA, you said, that's the argument.
Mhmm.
So if NASA's argument is create the innovations, another way I say it, or most yadayadayadayadayadayada yada yada yada yada, save Earth.
That's the thing.
That's the the methodology.
Would you assume that NASA, when someone's interested in the innovations and to learn about them, is gonna get have open arms to make sure those innovations get to marketplace?
I'm assume that based upon that model.
I'm saying that I can imagine a scenario where technologies are developed for an objective that benefits humanity that is directly for the purpose of those benefits.
So But I could, you know, there's some kind of, you know well, I I'm not sure what it is, and, obviously, it may require a certain amount of of, psychological, like, modifying people psychologically to get on board.
With the idea.
Right?
And I can imagine a an a a a culture of innovation, a a series of prizes like the XPRIZE that are deliberately chosen to shift humanity into positive directions without the needing to build weapons of war or without needing to necessarily go to space.
So I and so I think we go to
space for and the I guess my whole point of this whole conversation is that I have a different reason to go to space.
Okay.
And the different reason let me finish that, and then I wanna hear that.
Sure.
Yeah.
I wanna tell you that our team has reached out, including myself, to what's called spin offs at NASA.
Mhmm.
Of course.
There's a department called spin offs.
Yep.
We have reached out to the director of this unit.
I've done it three times, not gotten a reply back.
We've written up to their information, never gotten reply back.
We have people on our team writing emails to them and not one email comes back because they promote on their website.
There are over 2,000 innovations that NASA we're go we're talking others that NASA has invented to that has turned back on Earth.
Mhmm.
And yet we can't find that list, and we can't find the data on it, and we have been asking.
And if there's some dollars do.
Well, I'd love that.
But the point is if your structure is built on that premise, then that would be a priority.
Mhmm.
And if if Jay from India who's on our team wrote a beautiful letter, I saw it first, he couldn't get.
We have different people writing.
I'm writing it, and I'm not getting.
Then all it says to me is that the mechanism that we're that's being promoted and the actual activity that's happening is not matching.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yep.
Yep.
So tell me what your what you we we were I stopped you.
I apologize.
Tell me what yours is.
It's back to the beginning that
life is better than rocks.
So why do we go to space to give the universe the chance to have life?
That if we don't do it, nobody will.
If we don't do it, the octopuses can't.
If we don't figure out a way to get out into space and to connect to other star systems.
Eventually, the sun in 5,000,000,000 years will sort this out for us, and then the universe will look forward to a Google years of rocks cooling down.
K.
So I I'm assuming you know what my next question is.
No.
Tell me how.
I don't I don't care.
No.
No.
I'm I'm that's some Yeah.
I don't There's a philosophical argument, but do you have do you have a framework that you believe would make sure this happens?
Don't wreck earth.
Okay.
Yeah.
How do you how do we how do we again, 1010,000,000,000 people.
Yeah.
Again, we have Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
We also have Botswana, Zambia.
We have Have.
Cartagena or Colombia.
We have,
I assume it will happen when it's naturally going to happen.
So when you look at the rise of reusable rockets, what's happening with SpaceX and with the Rocket Labs and Neutron and all of these other places.
These were like, you can go back to technical papers written by NASA in the 19 sixties that were suggesting these rocket systems, but they didn't have the technology to do it.
The Apollo program cost about $250,000,000,000 in inflation adjusted money to reach the Moon.
The entire view of you had the Mercury, the Gemini, and the Apollo missions, it's more like $350,000,000 in inflation adjusted dollars.
SpaceX is building a rocket capable of landing humans on the moon, and they're doing it for in the tens of 1,000,000 of dollars that k.
That the SLS program, which is feels like it's just an overly expensive boondoggle
is only 4,200,000,000 to launch?
Per launch, blah blah blah.
It's only probably about $40,000,000,000 total cost in to this point.
So it's being done for 10% the price of the of the of the because you've got technology.
We have modern capability.
We have we have computers.
We have miniaturization.
We have cubesats.
We have fiber optic.
We have all these detectors.
So technology continues growing and at a certain point, technologies become inevitable.
And one of those inevitable technologies is going to be all of the subsystems that make exploration into the universe inevitable, but it won't happen if we mess up our planet.
Okay.
So let's let's so you've you've said it a few times, mess up the planet.
Yeah.
When do you think, and I we use the 6 mega challenges.
Those cover a lot of what you've been talking about.
When do you think there is a that that over the lemming's cliff that if we haven't solved it by then Yeah.
We could be in really big trouble.
Do you have a you said 200 years, but where is it?
500,000,000 years.
So you think so you think that we still have 500 years of living the way we're living today?
500,000,000.
500,000,000.
But do you think if we live the way we're living today, and we don't have global, not just regional, not just for western society, not just for the wealthy, there are 227 150 billionaires in the world, and there are 10,500,000,000aires in the world.
Yeah.
Not for those people.
We're talking about we're talking about Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Northern Africa.
If we continue at this in this rate where, let's say, it does increase 1 c, these countries are gonna have a lot of trouble surviving for many reasons.
And and there'll be portions of the world which will be overheated.
So is there a timeline in your head that you say, if if I could direct the resources of humanity, I would spend every penny that I every spare penny that I could to stabilizing the climate to stabilizing humanity's impact on planet Earth to increasing biodiversity and.
And can giving humanity room to breathe to sort out the life problem.
So while you might not think it, we are completely what you're saying is completely in line with what project Munoz is doing.
I mean, it's it's so in line.
The only difference is we take what you're saying, and we're putting it into organizational structure that fits today's society.
For example, we're we're partially a 501c3, but we have proper organizations as a structure that we've already gotten approved.
You can't you can't do things as a nonprofit to a as to a certain degree.
For example, if we needed to raise $1,600,000,000,000, we can't have a lot of bake sales.
You'd have to have either awesome cookies or be selling all the time.
We are trying in our minds, and it's not the only solution, is we are trying to do that stabilization by leveraging ecosystems such as using computational social science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, network analysis, datasets to be able to find opportunities within networks to do exactly what you're saying to stabilize, increase biodiversity, improve innovation.
Has nothing to do with beyond Earth.
It's just we that's part of it.
We also have a tech transfer unit team.
You probably don't know this.
I didn't know this, that most companies the majority of companies out there that do tech transfer, they make their money off of lawsuits.
Oh.
So what they do is they go out, they create they create an innovation, they put it out there, and then they wait for people to violate it, and then they sue them.
And that's where the majority of their money comes from.
Even I think it was Alan from, Gates, from, Microsoft.
He tried to do it, and it ended up converting.
It's not the same as what his he started out as.
That's what I was told by someone who's a patent attorney.
So ours is completely completely how do we get deals made to move tech into places that it needs to be.
So if someone's let's say they earn in US dollars or Canadian dollars or euros, they earn 16,000 of x per year.
They can't afford a $25,000 licensing fee, but that's what happens.
Mhmm.
We wanna make sure that per market, protect, we get it out there, and we and we do for cause.
But what we are doing is trying to build an ecosystem around what you're saying.
Leveraging beyond earth, but also leveraging on earth.
Because Great.
Politics is overriding a lot of what what what you just said, stabilize increase biodiversity.
Those that's politics.
And why are you doing it?
Good question.
I'm the pieces that for some without going into all the details of it, I was in I spoke in an event in Silicon Valley, and when I was done, there was a guy standing next to me.
His name was Bruce, and he said if you ever go to would like a tour of NASA, give me a call.
Now I'm not a space fanatic.
I do like certain things about it.
I do like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, star love those things, but I'm not a person who looks up at the stars all the time.
And I said, sure.
I'd love to.
And he says, when are you in town?
I said, I come to Silicon Valley every month.
I've been traveling about 2 to 300000 miles a year.
I always stopped in Silicon Valley.
And so the next month I fly in, I go to NASA Ames, and this guy, Bruce, is on the phone, and there's a he he points I I he points to me and he says to kinda take a seat.
And next to me sits Lynn Harper, who's an astrobiologist.
And they didn't realize my background.
We have this great conversation, and we go on for 3 hours.
I mean, 3 hours about where platinum comes from and
Mhmm.
Why NASA doesn't work.
They told me a lot of why NASA doesn't work.
And then I left.
I didn't get a tour.
They said, come back.
So I come back, and the next time, the exact same thing happens, but with other people.
And the 3rd time I'm smart enough to know, I don't go into the facilities in Ames, and I get a tour of NASA.
I was not impressed.
Maybe I was not shown the right rooms, but they did turn on the flight simulator for me, which was nice because I asked them, do they turn on the flight simulator for everybody?
And he said, no.
They don't turn it on for anybody.
The guy sticks his head in and he says, you want us to turn it on for you?
So I got to play with it a little bit, which is kinda cool.
And then we were out at a restaurant, and I was so tired of hearing from all these people all the challenges that the the Beyond Earth ecosystem was engaged in.
I looked at this guy, Bruce, and I said, you want me to tell you how to get to the moon?
Like, who are you?
And I said, we're sitting here.
We're having lunch.
Let me show you.
And for the next hour and a half, I brought I outlined a 4 phased program, and then he said, who's gonna pay for this?
And I showed him how network analysis, computational social science, how that could do it.
And then he said, well, how are you gonna get this?
And I would answer it.
How are you gonna get this?
And I would answer it.
And I came it was because I was solving a challenge, and I I love challenges.
Not that I'd like to have them, but a challenge is fun.
You get to identify and figure out solutions.
And he looked at me when we were done.
He said, I've never seen anything like this.
First time ever.
And he said, you have to go to this event, the great giant leap in Hawaii.
And I said, look.
It's gonna cost me $7,000 to change my ticket.
I'm really not interested.
Thank you very much.
And as we're walking out, I had said we need a box with a roof on the moon because not not colonization, not settlement.
He says to me, when we're walking out, he says, we don't need a box with a roof on the moon.
And I'm thinking, oh, I blew it.
And that's pitching like we talked about earlier.
What didn't I do right that he didn't grab it?
And he says, we need a box with a roof and a door, a home.
And I went, oh my god.
He got it.
But I left.
I was done.
None of this space ecosystem thing and and helicopter and rockets.
And I go to Hong Kong to my to our office, and there's a Slovakian who's in our office.
Absolutely phenomenal person.
She's 5 foot 7, which is about 1.72 centimeters.
We're having this conversation.
I tell her what happened, and she sounds like my Hungarian grandmother used to.
And she says, you're going.
Trust me.
You're going.
It's NASA.
She rearranged my schedule because I couldn't tell my grandmother no, and I went to this great giant leap.
And the first event I went to again, I know nothing.
I still know nothing compared to someone like you.
You're you've got so much knowledge.
My computer was catching on fire because I couldn't figure out all the acronyms.
Just I was typing, typing, typing.
What the hell do these mean things mean?
And during that event, I said your business will fail, your business will fail, your business will fail, and everybody was egging me on, and I shared it with a few people.
And a long story short is after that event, we decide to put together a team, and that's how it started.
It wasn't a a passion for beyond Earth.
It wasn't a passion for living in another planet.
It wasn't to go to Mars.
And simultaneously, I was working on a paper, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3 d printing, and sensor tech, how they're all emerging for the first time in history, and what that what could happen with it.
And then I was also working on some of the challenges we're facing on Earth, and they they merged.
What if we leveraged the Beyond Earth ecosystem in a way that is social, meaning nonprofit, is done in a certain way that has a different that brings everybody in as inclusive.
We don't go after military and government.
So there's there's videos on this.
You've seen some of that.
Ours is to do what you're saying, but and I'm not gonna say but yet or in addition to.
We've added some of the mechanisms to make it happen because we're not gonna change you're in a room right now.
I I know you're in a room because we don't have a video on, but I know you're in a room.
And you have a door.
Yeah.
I could try to change you all day long to go out the wind go out another place in you.
But if I showed up tomorrow, you're out in your woods, making sure that the 80 acres are taken care of.
It's 80 acres.
Right?
Yep.
And I plaster over your door and put a new door in with fix the furniture.
It looks beautiful, and you walk out and you have a better view.
Are you gonna tell me when you come the next time, say, oh, no.
No.
No.
I'm gonna walk through the wall where it was before.
You're gonna go out that door.
What if we change the systems and structure?
What if we change the world around us in a way that can solve that?
So that was a great anecdote.
Okay.
What's that word?
Try again.
Yep.
Sure.
Why are you doing this?
You know, I I I'd love to say there's a a big reason.
I think that I believe that this is the solution to some of the challenges that we're facing.
And unless we do it, the next 40 years of our lives will not be like the last 50.
And I get up every morning to do it to make that change.
To I just
hope that the the the next few decades are better than the last few decades?
I think the next 25 years will not be good for planet for the for all species on Earth.
Mhmm.
I believe we're going to see continued of the 6 mega challenges.
I do believe that they're gonna continue, and they're gonna cause displacement.
They're gonna cause conflict.
They're gonna cause wars.
You're gonna the 17,500 species Yeah.
Maybe 8,000 of me gone.
I believe that those things are going to happen, and I love I believe I'm an earther.
I believe that I'd like to go outside, and I'd like to enjoy my life.
And I want my children to enjoy their lives, and I'd like my children's children to enjoy their lives.
And then if I went 40 years, I will be 15 it's 99, so I'd have 4 generations on this planet.
I would like to make a difference in that long term prospect, and I believe that that can be changed.
And I'm put and we're we have a great team around the world.
We have people volunteering in everything, every category you could think about, large organizations from KPMG, Deloitte, PW, CUI, but JPMorgan Private Banking to Dassault Systems has given us things, you know, all sorts of companies, organizations.
I believe it can be changed.
And and I were I why am I doing it?
I think I can make the difference.
I think I can make it so that the earth for me, my family, and the people that I love and care about will have a different future.
Well, that seems short term.
Yeah.
It is.
It's only 40 years.
Yeah.
It's 40 years.
It's 40 years.
What about the future?
What about beyond that?
What about
the generation?
That's what I say.
I I I've got 2 children, and my hope is that in 40 years, my children will inherit a better world, and their children's children will inherit a better world, and their children's children and better is a relative term.
It's that's like the beginning.
It's a I'm I'm hoping that the world will continue to will have less of the challenges.
So, yes, I'm doing it for in perpetuity, but I don't have I don't have a personal belief that I live on forever, that I was that I I that these things that when I die, I'm done.
To me, I'm done.
So so I want to add to your mission statement
Okay.
That you are contributing to keeping the flame of life, helping the flame of life exist in the universe.
And that by accomplishing what you want to do, you will also help ensure that that life, which makes the universe better, will be a part of the future of the universe.
So let me ask you then.
I and I hear what you're saying.
I'm looking at the directive right now.
If I was to make that change, if we were, not I, if because I'm gonna type it is what I meant.
If we were to make that change, how actively engaged would you be with Project Moon Hut to make this, future happen?
I well, it'd be interesting.
I've I have no idea.
I'd have to, you know, see it.
Well, I
I I know I'm putting you on the spot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, busy guy.
I'm busy guy.
If you if you're
a busy guy, congratulations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If we were to make this change because you're asking it's it's you're you're asking some I get asked 2 questions a lot.
One is, why you spend why are we spending all this money on space?
They don't know what we do.
And I I say, can I ask you a question?
Everybody says yes.
I said, have you ever seen a rocket where people took money, stuffed it into the rocket, and shipped it up into space?
They said, what do you mean?
I said, if you ever see you say we're spending money in space.
Have you ever seen us put brought money into a rocket and ship it up into space?
And every time they say, oh, no.
So where do we spend it?
I say, on earth.
I withdraw my question.
It's something of that nature.
The second one is, David, why don't you work on the challenges we have on earth?
And I say, can I ask you a question?
What do you do for a living?
Well, I'm Fraser, and I have podcasts, and I put on programs.
Great.
Why aren't you a farmer?
What do you mean?
I like what I'm doing.
So, no.
I want you to be a farmer.
And they, well, I don't get it.
And I say, well, you're I think what you're asking me is you think I am doing something that is useful.
You'd like me to change what I'm doing to fit what you think.
My question to you is, are you doing the things that you believe will change the entire planet to get to a certain whatever you want to believe?
Mhmm.
And 9 they always say, I withdraw my question because it's a they're asking me to change.
Yep.
I'm asking you if you're asking me to change on make a a directive change, is this something of so much value to you that you will be a part of the team to help us get to that point, or is it just a message?
It's well, the ideal it means it's definitely the message.
Okay.
And I you know, it doesn't sound like it's counter to No.
To what you're saying.
Like, for sure, you've expanded a little you've expanded a little bit further.
Yeah.
Let's take care of planet Earth.
That's it.
And I think, I mean, I think that that we have these goals, these lofty goals about how we wanna live our lives and what contribution that we wanna make.
And then we also have the way we spend our time
and the things that we do in the in the hobbies that
we enjoy and and how we, and I think at the very least, you wanna try and do as little harm.
You know, don't don't vote for the people who are trying to tear the world apart.
Don't try to support the technologies that are doing harm.
Try to limit and minimize your impact on the planet, but also be realistic about where we stand in this journey.
And You you talk to a lot of people.
You have on your program people who are involved in in the creation of weapons.
Mhmm.
Who you have been involved, the people who are you working with do things that you know if you were to think back are harmful.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Them.
Of course.
So I I hear what you're saying.
The thing is we need and I'm talking the collectively.
Mhmm.
We need people who have an idea, who are willing to stand behind that idea and participate in the in in the Yeah.
In the pieces that need to happen.
And that your answer is absolutely correct.
What you're asking for, I love.
The challenge I'm asking you is, how do you get people to get involved with this?
Because you were the one who said people go about their way, and people believe that they'll do.
And so Yeah.
I mean, like, my like, the the reason I
have taken the form that I have Uh-huh.
Is so that I can be a an amplifier for the projects that I think are doing doing good.
And and the plan is you know and I think just having this interview with you and me planning to put this out in the podcast, like like, I flit about across all of the projects and all of the ways that people are attempting to bring about this sci fi future that we've all been, anticipating.
And and I have to, you know, I I spend my time contributing to and the and the energy and the distribution platform that I have to try to raise as many boats as I can.
So so so what happened was Are you saying
I I was not clear because you made an assumption that when I said, will you help Mhmm.
You thought that this was life and time consuming.
No.
I'm I'm I help anybody who I can in in helping get their message out, in in helping in, helping organize guests, whatever, you know, whatever I can do.
I'm a connector.
Okay.
So Yeah.
So what you're are are you saying that with what we've talked about today, that there is a means for an alliance, whatever degree that may be, that you believe I guess being on the show, you've kind of agreed that you believe that what we're at least trying to do is something that fits into your basket.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Of course.
Of course.
Okay.
And if if there are places and you'd like to learn more, I think you signed an NDA.
I believe so.
If No.
I haven't.
You haven't.
Okay.
If there are things that you believe if you saw what we were working on and you believe that it was there, you would help us even further.
Mhmm.
Of course.
Okay.
So I would propose to you this.
This is what we do with everybody.
It's a it's a long onboarding.
Is we show you some of the things behind the veil.
We do everything NDA wise.
The reason is we want people to join us, not compete against us.
There's a big difference.
We're not doing it for protection.
You just don't walk up to a company and say, bang, bang, bang, show me everything.
We want people to work with us.
We're in coopetition.
We want we even want competitors.
Hey.
Let's join together and make this work.
That's why we're a 501c3 compared to a profit organization.
If we show you behind the veil and you like it, not saying you have to and you like it, you'll help us where we say we can find a home for you.
Yeah.
That's
what we ask.
I would never sign an NDA.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's so this is actually so something about Universe Today that you might wanna know is we never, agree to embargos on news stories.
So We do embargo.
What is that?
So in so in the news field, a a company that is generating some news will will reach out to journalists and they'll make the story embargo.
They'll provide additional you know, provide information to journalists, allow them to do interviews, and the journalist agrees to hold off on the story for to to reach the embargo point.
And then at that moment, you and all other media outlets are able to publish all of this stuff at the same time.
And about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I got sick of embargos.
And, a few friends of mine who I consider to be really excellent journalists who had been essentially prohibited from getting access to this information.
It was a meth it was a mechanism of the news creators to sort of decide who is an acceptable journalist and who isn't, and I just said, okay.
That's it.
We're not we're not going to look at embargos anymore.
We're not gonna break embargos, like, we're not gonna as soon as we hear about what you're working on, we're not going to put out information.
We're not gonna, you know, break your secret, but we're just gonna wait until the information is publicly available.
And so for the last 15 years, Universe Today has never had access to information in advance.
We don't sign NDAs.
We don't we're not, you know, off the record.
We just if if you want a piece of news that you want us to report on, just make it available, and we will
That I understand.
So ours is our our ours is a little different.
We're not saying that.
We're saying we would love help.
Mhmm.
And all we're saying is anything that you own is yours.
We if you it's very mutual.
Yeah.
Even even McKinsey.
We've never had anybody change anything except for McKinsey changed 3 words.
3.
Yeah.
Is we're not saying that you can't do anything you want outside.
We're just saying, please don't share our plans right now because
that's the one thing I can't do.
Yeah.
Okay.
Because and and so you understand where that often comes from.
For example, if you're going for a trademark and a reporter uses that trademark Yeah.
That trademark can no longer be secured.
Yeah.
If you show something and you're in the process of patenting it Yep.
You can't.
And the reporter reports it.
It is not public knowledge, and it can't be protected.
Yep.
So it makes it complicated.
Yep.
And I never I didn't put you into the category of reporter.
I'm sorry.
I put
you in the category of a person and space no.
I put you in the category of someone who was looking to make change.
Yeah.
And if I put you into the side of the cat of a reporter, oh my god.
That changes everything because it's not it's not about the building of it.
It's just the reporting of it.
Yeah.
I mean, I have a space bias.
Right.
People talk about well, people have, like, a left leaning bias.
They have a right leaning bias.
I have a space leaning bias.
And what is a space bias?
So I am I am ready to enthusiastically report on on anyone who's willing to stick their head up and take the risk to help ensure humanity's future in space.
But but my and my job is to amplify.
So
And and and so that's the way that's the role that I fit into this ecosystem.
And so, yeah, if, you know, what's my bias?
My bias is that I am pro space.
I am Okay.
So I'm gonna help I'm gonna look at ours to see what we could do.
I can't promise.
On your end, we're and ours, if you at the end, it says for all species on Earth.
And you Yeah.
Yours is humans.
Ours is always all species.
So just tell me when you have something exciting that you wanna share with the world that has to do with space, and I'm your guy.
Okay.
So if and when it comes to resources, and I'm assuming that anybody who hears this because this will be put out into the ether, if someone needs access or knows or knowledge or something, they get to I could reach out to you and say, look.
We're looking for and you you like to play the connector role, but not inside.
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I I mean, inside.
That's right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I am the I am the amplifier.
I am the I am the loud speaker when when
I think it's important.
In in And
I am and I am the I am the journalist when I think it's also important.
I hadn't thought of you as a journalist, which is interesting.
I
know.
It is it is like befriending a tiger.
No.
No.
No.
I I'm more concerned.
I one of the things that we do with individuals who are coming on board, and I think I did it with you, I say, okay.
Take your age and add 40 years onto it.
So whatever your age, I think I did with you, was 80 to, you're 40 or 80.
And I say, okay.
And I think you had children.
So you say, okay.
How old do they be?
And then I do it all the way down, and in some cases, there's 4 generations.
And I asked them along the way, what do you think the world will be like?
I mean, what do you honestly think?
How it will change?
What could be done?
And then the majority of people can't even give answers.
They've never thought about that.
So I'm so I'm not I am challenged with the fact that I do believe having worked in these countries.
Bangladesh floods every year.
There's a 179,000,000 people.
It floods every single year.
And if we have a 15 CMC level water rise, that tidal surge will be devastating.
And we saw in India this year over was it almost close to 50 c?
A 120 degrees, 100 degrees.
That was 6 weeks, 7 weeks of it.
And then we saw in Pakistan, we saw 30% of the country underwater.
And I just took 3 countries in a row.
Yeah.
I could take others.
That's devastating.
So my take is a little bit more if why do I do this?
I know a lot of people in Bangladesh.
I know a lot of people in India.
As I told you, I just spoke to somebody in in Pakistan.
I know people I'm I am a globalist, and I use that in the term that I've worked around the world.
I have friends around the world, and I really would like people to get along and have a better world.
So the challenge when I think of somebody, I think of them helping because they see a tsunami coming, and I'm using a bad analogy, but let's say that it doesn't matter what your role is.
We have to help.
So I guess when you say that people are stymied, they don't make those decisions, could it also be that they have put barriers on their walls of what they can will do and won't do, like a journalist?
Oh, maybe.
But but, you know, my my job as a journalist is to investigate stories, to follow where they go, to report on what I find.
Yeah.
No.
I I I get it.
All I do you have an is there another Frasier?
No.
Another Frasier that says No.
I have to make sure I'm a part of this in a bigger way if it's possible.
No.
K.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I like like, again, if you have things that you wanna tell the world and No.
I I I and they're interesting to me and they're interesting to the writing team, and I and I think they they fit within our purview, then then I will absolutely report on it.
And if you have secrets that you don't want the world to know, do not tell me.
Oh, and I completely understand that.
Because I will share them.
I because it's my job.
I yes.
And I also, like, I
just, like, I think, like, I think transparency is important.
I understand that it's a that it is a brutal environment for attempting to to make things happen in this existing landscape, and that's not my problem.
I I the the the reason I think it's an interesting conversation, the reason I'm pursuing it today Mhmm.
Is my one thing I love about not having video in front of each other, like we say, you're not looking at me.
You can't see my eyes starting around looking out the window, looking around saying, yeah.
What I'm asking myself is you had said earlier, why aren't people doing this?
Mhmm.
And I gave you some answers, but I didn't give you the one you just gave me.
Is that the construct of the world that you live in, that you've created by policy or personal choice prohibits that from happening without so you can't do the thing that might be helpful.
And I I use lawyers as an example.
Mhmm.
You meet someone says, I'm a lawyer.
Okay.
Immediately, there are all sorts of things that come to mind.
Good and bad.
Yeah.
Many times, it's not good.
But if you're an intellectual property lawyer, wouldn't it be nicer to say to somebody, oh, I'm an expert in protecting and making sure patents get to market.
That would be a different answer than an intellectual property attorney.
If you are a compensation attorney, I'm an expert in putting together programs that amplify the organization's culture to be able to meet the needs long term.
If you're a corporate attorney and you do mergers and acquisitions, I'm the I'm an expert Mhmm.
In bringing together assets to make them stronger as a whole.
When you use the word reporter in the way you did, you put blinders, you put barriers intentionally in it.
It's just a delay.
Yeah.
No.
It's just right.
But it's just a delay.
Like like Yeah.
The the point, you know, where I come on board is when the is when you have a message.
Yeah.
You'll help us get it out there.
I'll help you get it out there.
I I love that, and I appreciate that.
We appreciate that.
We appreciate.
It's just you you actually opened up my eyes to something that I kind of been a little blind to in a reason that someone wouldn't do something because you reacted the way you did Mhmm.
Which was, wow.
I had never added that to my list.
Mhmm.
Is that the construct, the framework that the individual has doesn't allow them to jump that fence.
Right.
Which is, Casey Handler.
He said the reason I can't sign it is that I am involved in too many things that I might be violate.
That's great.
Casey is amazing.
He's brilliant.
Absolutely off the chart.
Brilliant.
Yep.
So this is great.
Do you have any questions for me?
No.
No.
No.
I mean, I think, you know, during this interview, you've, you've explained a ton of information.
So I think it's been it's been a lot of fun.
Yeah.
This has been interesting.
You've, given a very different perspective, so I appreciate it.
Meet my goal.
Well, I'm what I said was I will take a look Yeah.
And I will see, and I don't know because it's wording.
I don't know how to be able to change because it's a
Mullet all.
You don't start off with missions or goals.
You never do.
No.
No.
You always start off with desired outcomes.
And so what I have to do is look at desired outcomes Sure.
Because that determines the planning that you put in place, which determines the macro factors, which determines Sure.
So I have to look to say because by adding 2 words, for example, beyond earth, would in fact change some of the activity we're engaged in because it's got a different outcome.
Does that make sense?
It's a up it's a it's an outrageous claim to make that you're going to, give somebody a why, and, and it's purely, it's mostly sarcastic and hilarious.
So,
oh, I I'm I'm I will I do question.
These interviews are forbidden to question.
Yeah.
So yeah.
No.
It was it it it I I love the conversation.
We went definitely in places I didn't expect to go.
So I I do wanna thank you for for being on the on the program.
I will reach out.
I would like to know other people you think who should be on.
Absolutely.
And and I wanna thank all of you listening out there who have taken the time in your day to listen in.
I do hope that some way, shape, or form you learn something today that'll make a difference in your life and the lives of others.
And once again, here's the directive that we've got.
The Project Moon, that foundation is where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon through the accelerated development of an earth and space based ecosystem, then to turn the innovations and the paradigm shifting thinking from that endeavor back on earth to improve how we live on earth for all species.
There are videos on the web, project moon hut.org.
Fraser, is there what's the single best way for someone to reach out to you, connect to you to get though that valuable resources you offered today?
I would say the best thing is my weekly email newsletter.
So I write a magazine every Friday that goes out to 55,000 people
Wow.
Contains a breakdown of all of the interesting space and astronomy news that's happening this week, links to all the stories as well as links to all of the interesting space research that I found, links to all our videos, podcasts, all of that.
It's like one place.
So if you just go to universe today.com/newsletter, you can sign up to that.
Perfect.
So once again, thank you, Frasier.
And for me personally, for everybody who is listening in, love to connect to you.
You could reach me at david@moonhut.org.
You can also reach us at, at on Twitter at at project moon hut.
There's LinkedIn and Facebook.
You could look us up.
Pull us up there.
Instagram also.
So many ways to reach out to us.
So that said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.

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