December 19, 2024 • 58 mins
What will happen to our scientific knowledge if civilization collapses? Will astrophysics survive a future stone age?
In this episode, we rest from our journey to talk with astrophysicist Tom Murphy, who’s been on an odyssey of his own—moving from academia to a growing concern about the collapse of civilization, to an ever expanding appreciation of the cosmos.
Together we’ll gaze at the grandeur of the stars and marvel at the complexity of one of our oldest cousins: the amoeba. If you’re seeking a moment to marvel at the interconnectedness of life on Earth and the universe its interwoven with, this is the episode for you.
Tom Murphy is an Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy/Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego. After a career studying colliding galaxies and testing General Relativity using lasers to the moon, Murphy retired early to shift focus onto Planetary Limits and the intrinsic incompatibility between modernity and ecological longevity. Creator of a textbook on energy, the Do the Math blog, and the Metastatic Modernity video series, his main plea is that you bypass these resources and read the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
Hey, we'retaking a rest in our odyssey today
to talk with a new friend, astrophysicistTom Murphy.
Together,we'll gaze at the grandeur of the stars
and marvel at the complexityof one of our oldest cousins, the amoeba.
In this conversation,we'll hear about Tom's own odyssey,
(00:25):
from professor of astrophysicsto his growing concern
about the collapse of civilization,to his ever expanding appreciation
for the mysteries of the universe.
Maybe you know, Tom,from his writings on his Do the Math blog,
or you've seen his new YouTubeseries, Metastatic Modernity.
(00:46):
And if you haven't, well, here'sTom Murphy.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast
exploring life on an incredible planetand the universe.
(01:07):
It's interwoven with.
I'm Alex Smith.
What initially drew youto becoming an astrophysicist?
(01:30):
How deep into your life, even childhood?
Was that something that you, yeah,were passionate about as a kid growing up?
I had all kinds of passions that wouldchange every few months or years.
And at one point,I wanted to be a taxidermist.
That just really appealed to me.
And, my parentsweren't too happy about that one.
(01:51):
When I was a 15 year old in the summer.
I grew up in Tennessee.
I was out with my little refractortelescope that I hadn't really paid
much attention to.
I'd just gotten it for my 15th birthday,a few months before.
But I was looking at stars and I realizedthat stars are actually kind of boring.
They look just like stars in the telescopeand almost about to give up.
(02:12):
I was like, I gave it a good try.
Let me look at this other one.
Bright star. Just, you know.
And it was Saturn.
And I saw the ringsand it was just unreal.
I started dancing aroundand whooping and hollering in the yard.
I felt like I had discovered Saturn.
(02:32):
Obviously I knew thatI wasn't the discoverer of Saturn, but
it felt very much like that.
About a half
year later, Halley's Comet came around
and I started watching it
every night that I could, watching itgo through the sky a few degrees a day.
And it introduced meto the constellations.
(02:54):
And I got to know the sky a little bit.
And I got associated with the amateurastronomy club, got the bug and built
a ten inch telescope.
And that was all in.
But I saw all nine
planets in one nightwhen there were nine planets
through my telescope, and I saw a quasar2 billion light years away,
and I saw a supernova in a galaxyabout 35 million light years away.
(03:16):
And, you know, it's just fantastic.
And one key element there thatI really resonated with at some point.
I was a subscriber to Skyand telescope magazine, and every month
I got news updates.What's happening in astronomy?
And here was one about this supernovathat I just mentioned,
the one that I had seen.And I thought, you know what?
(03:38):
That little news blurb
is the only news blurb that we would share
with another civilization.
Many light years away.
That's our only common news.
They would be reading somethingabout that supernova, too, and I felt like
I'm a citizen of the universe.
Not so much.
(03:59):
Just tied up, entangled in human affairsand politics
and economics and all of our concernshere on this planet.
I felt that was broaderand that was very appealing, that it was
touching something bigger
and something that wasn't about me in
something that wasn't about humansand something it wasn't even about Earth.
(04:20):
That is somethingthat was just on a bigger scale.
So I think I really like that.
Why do you call yourselfa recovering astrophysicist?
(04:41):
Yeah, well, for one thing, I am retired.
I hung up the gloves to the pointwhere I'm
not really even tracking media hitson, like my wife said.
Oh, did you see these new imagesfrom Jupiter? No.
And I didn't go chase them down then.
So I spent a lot of my years
and a lot of my lifereally fascinated by cosmology.
(05:03):
And I don't think it's boring now.
I just have movedto a different area of interest.
And being retiredhas allowed me to do that.
And I should mention, I retired at age 53,so it was definitely not
the normal situation of being 80and still coming in to,
you know, most university professorsdon't just never stop.
(05:25):
And I always assumethat that would be me too.
I mean, astrophysics was my life
and I did live a parallel lifefor many years because in fact,
the first year that I was at UCSan Diego teaching,
I taught a course on energyand the environment
for general education, non science major
(05:45):
audience and I learned a lot,
and it sort of opened my eyes to the factthat this is not an easy story.
I thought it would be an easy storyto piece together how we move forward
based fossil fuels, for instance,and deal with climate change.
I thought technology isjust always the answer.
(06:05):
So I came at it from that approach,and I just
the more I dug into it,the more I realized this is not so easy.
And at some point, it turned into kind
of an existential concern about peak oiland what the implications of that
would be, knowing it's a finite sourceand how utterly dependent we are on it.
And when we get to solar fast
(06:26):
enough and EVs fast enough,you know, that kind of concern,
what happens when that rug gets pulled outfrom under our economies?
So that was the level of concernthat I had.
I recognized that that there was a chance
of our way of lifeor economic system collapsing.
(06:46):
So I thought my field of astrophysicscould be utterly forgotten,
that all the work that I'd doneif we really botched this,
all of that could be flusheddown the tubes.
And that hurt tremendously in terms of
if there was a collapse of some kind.
That's right.
That people would lose accessto the knowledge that was gained
(07:08):
in the field of astrophysics. For example.
That's right.
And and it certainly wouldn'tbe a priority to continue doing
those luxuries,you know, researching in that field.
So I thought I might spenda little bit of my time
thinking about that existential threat,
because I really don'twant to see that happen.
(07:29):
I was coming at it from the point of view.
That boy, modernity is so great,let's not threaten it.
And if we deny
that collapse is even possible, that'sthe easiest way to slip into it, you know?
So we have to go in with eyes wide open.
(07:53):
I don't
talk one on one with many astrophysicists,so you'll have to get me help.
Give me a good sense of whetherI'm correct about this, but I imagine
for many people who are drawn to thisfield, there's a similar kind of profound
that is experienced at some point with
this is an unstable, livable universethat we're this tiny little part of.
(08:18):
And to get to reach outand learn more about that peer into
that is mind boggling.
And at the same time,like your initial concern
with whereour global civilization was going
was coming from a place of likewanting to protect this incredible
field of knowledgethat you were so attuned to.
(08:41):
And it seems like a lot of peoplein those kinds
of fields of science,I imagine there is a similar sort of
aligning themselveswith global civilization
and its apparatuses and mindsets,because that is what allows
the exploration of the starsto this sophisticated degree.
(09:05):
And I'm interested in your journey of itseems like you almost kind of saw
that the global civilizationthat, on one hand, was allowing us to peer
into the universe with sophisticatedknowledge that even though,
you know, many indigenous culturesdid have a profound understanding
of the stars in their own way,didn't have the instruments
(09:28):
that our global civilizationallowed us to get these vivid images.
And I'm curious about whenand how your alliance shifted.
And if you feel like you are kind ofon the outside
of what is typical for other peoplein your field in that way?
Definitelyin the outside, I don't fit in anymore,
which is part of why I retired.
(09:48):
It was not working for me.
And so I think I would saystudying astrophysics definitely
does bring a sense of awe and humility.
And it's about stories.
It's still I mean, we're a story people.
And so we have basically been ableto unlock a story of
how the universe came to bethat wasn't a concoction of our heads
(10:14):
so much as a result of the observationsthat led us to one surprise after another.
And that's another element herethat I think is important.
And I've been pondering it latelyin the sense that I think for good
reasons, physicists and astrophysicistsmight be viewed as arrogant.
Right?
A lot of people in the academyor are envious of the of the physicists
(10:39):
and, you know, try to at some level mimicthat style.
And physicists can be quite arrogant.
I've known plenty of them,but at the same time, and this is why
I'm struggling, because there'sthis kind of both things going on.
There's a humility there, right,
that comes from not being in charge.
(10:59):
In other words,
we can't control the universe.
We are only here to observe it.
We can't do experiments with itor strictly observers
and when it comes to physics,
we don't get to decide how physics works.
We didn't decide that relativitywas a great idea and it seems neatness.
Einstein guy had cool hair,so let's just go with that.
(11:21):
But that's true too.
That might be true. Fantastic hairstyle.
And we didn't go with quantum mechanicsbecause it was kind of gnarly and cool
and interesting.
In fact, the community was deadset against these things
when they were proposed.
Interesting, but it was the experimentsthat forced it down our throats.
We had no choice.
(11:42):
And at this point, we can't say,you know what?
This is out of fashion.Let's not do relativity
or quantum mechanics anymore,or let's do this new thing.
Only if the experiments drag youby the nose to that.
And so there's a humility in that.
Physicists in astrophysicsare not the arbiters of truth.
It's the actual universe.
As we measure it,we have to live with the results.
(12:06):
We hand the microphone
to the universe, and we can't predictwhat it's going to say.
We're not deciding.
We're not calling the shots.
In that contrast to how modernityworks, to that, we have kind of concocted,
invented,imagined this way to live on the planet.
It's artificial and it's not tested onevolutionary timescales.
(12:29):
It's a flash, and we can't do that.
Even that's beyond our means.
(12:50):
What inspired you to first createthe Do the Math blog?
Yeah, the Do the Math blog.
I started in 2011 and I had taught
this course on energyand the environment many times by then.
I don't know, 3 or 4 times,I guess, and each time became more
and more concerned about the trajectoryand the possibility
that, you know,if we don't pay attention to this fossil
(13:13):
fuel looming disappearance,that could be very disruptive,
then we could descend into collapse.
And so my first post was galacticscale energy, about
if we continue to 2.3% growthrate for indefinitely,
and I use 2.3% because that's a factorof ten every century.
(13:33):
So it's a mathematical rate of what?
An energy rate of the rateof our energy use because it had been 3%
per year, greater energy use.
And what what would happenif we continued?
And in 2500 years, we'd be consumingall of this stellar output
from 100 billion stars in the MilkyWay galaxy in a short 2500 years.
Oh, just 100 billion.
(13:54):
Okay. Yeah, just hundred billion stars in.
And you can't even access those starsat the speed of light within 2500 years.
So it's just physically impossibleto continue
to this growth ratefor even a couple millennia.
It's just absurd.
Physics says absolutely not.
Okay, so that's such an incredible
I mean, well, because Daniel Quinn,I forget which book it is he talks about.
(14:17):
Similarly, like if our population growthcontinued at the present rate,
I forget, and how many yearsyou'd have a human beings lined up
elbow to elbow on every cornerof the Milky Way galaxy.
If we could even be floating in space,that's how many people would have
something like that.So yeah, exponentials are absurd.
They get out of hand very quickly innothing, in reality, in the real universe
(14:40):
continues an exponential for very longbecause they do become absurd.
Something always gets in the wayand stops it.
And that won't be different for us as welland get the same story.
And so when you say energy use to just tohelp me understand like that's like what?
Like burning fossil fuels. Yeah.
It could be biomass or nuclear or solaror even things we haven't invented yet.
(15:02):
There's a thermodynamic argumentto it, to that within 400 years
we would reach the boiling temperatureof water here on Earth.
If we continue the 2% growth
rate in our annual increase in energy use.
Now, if you use solar,if you buy yourself a little more time,
but then you run out of solarin 400 years.
So either way,
(15:23):
how do you run out of solar and wind itjust because the sun's so big?
Well, just the solar energythat's hitting the Earth.
It's only so big.
It's a tiny catcher's mittand it only catches so much of the light.
And so it's just finite.
And I saw on your blogthat you, calculated how much wind power
there is on the earth, right.
And so I, I went through thatwith all of these things and do the math.
(15:44):
How much wind helmet's geothermal,
how much tidal, how much nuclear fission,what are its limitation.
And and nuclear fusion.
What are the prospectsand what does it get?
You and I, went through a lot
of these quantitative assessments in thisdo the math blog.
Some of what is demonstratingthe absurdity of continuing to grow.
But then it got more realistic of,okay, what are our options for
(16:06):
even if we stabilized at this 18 terawatt
scale of societal energy use,what could we do?
And the answer is that's very heartthat we will hit this sort of steady
state at today's levels.
And that's beforeI was really ecologically aware.
Since then, I've realized thateven if we could,
we just continueto drive the six mass extinction
(16:28):
because we would continue miningand polluting and fragmenting habitats.
Even at steady state, we can't exist.
We can't survive at this scalebecause we're eating through
nonrenewable resourcesat this incredible rate,
and it's just completely, grosslyunsustainable.
(16:48):
All these forms of growth will have toend, whether it's economics or population.
We're not going to spaceto colonize space.
So put that out of your mind.
Can I ask,so why are we not going to space?
Well, you know, I,
I think, an astrophysicist is telling methis.
Yeah. That's right,that's right. Forget about it.
(17:09):
So there are so many reasonsI mean, you don't see condominiums
on, Mount Everest or on the ocean flooreven ten meters below the surface, not
yours are far more benign,far more orders of magnitude
more benign than the surfaceof any other body in the solar system.
The magnetosphere of the Earthprotects us from cosmic rays.
(17:30):
Exposure is about a hundred times higheroutside of the Earth's magnetosphere.
So on the moon surface on Mars,your risk of cancer goes up 100 fold.
So you are definitely getting itwithin a year or two.
So you're living in a cave, so you have tobe a caveman in the space station.
We have to import oxygen every monthbecause even though there's scrubbing
and recycling and water, it'snever going to be perfect.
(17:51):
And so we are tetheredstill in those environments
to the only environmentthat we've ever lived in of Earth.
That's just the truth of it.That's the reality.
And this is with a large budget.
I mean, it's expensive
to send those rockets upwith oxygen and water extremely expensive.
So if there were a technological solution,you can be sure we'd be doing it.
(18:12):
And this is a high budget operation.
This is the bestthey've got the best technology
available right now,and it's not even close to good enough.
Not even a few months. Okay, fine.
That's all. That's all fantasy.
We are part of the Earth.
We imagine ourselvesis somehow separate from it.
But man,we are just deeply embedded in this thing.
(18:44):
Well,
so you mentioned in the seriesthat you created helped
create an apparatusthat shot a laser to the moon, right.
Which I won't even begin to pretendthat I could even begin to understand.
And you mentioned how that pales
in comparison to an amoeba, right?
And I'd love to hear more about that.
(19:05):
That's not what I think.
Most people would expect an astrophysicistto come back and say, yeah, yeah.
And I think there's some power in thatbecause I did it.
That would be somethingthat most people would boast about.
And this is a devicethat basically built from scratch
that shot pulses at the moon,takes 2.5 seconds for a pulse
to get to the moon to hit the reflectorsthat the asteroid and a half seconds.
(19:29):
That's the roundtrip time.
But it varies a lotbecause the moon's in an elliptical orbit.
And there's all this geometrythat's changing all the time.
My apparatus was shooting 20 pulses
a second,so it's like juggling 50 balls at a time.
50 shots were in route somewherein that circuit and all interleaved.
And that's a difficult task to coordinate.
(19:50):
And is it to measure somethingor what was the.
Yeah, the point is that gravitytells bodies how to move,
and gravity is one of the fundamentalpieces of physics
that we describe using general relativity
and general
relativity will change the storyof how the moon moves around the Earth.
Let's say you go from Newtonian gravityto general relativity.
(20:11):
There are consequences.
It changes the way the orbit movesand the shape of the orbit.
And that changeshow we understand the orbit.
Right, and how we would measure it.
I mean, we would measure different resultsif if it weren't general relativity,
this shape of the moon'sorbit would just be different.
And so, you know, it's one of these placeswhere you can experiment
(20:34):
and ask, well,what is the moon actually doing?
Whose rules is it following?
Because it might not be the oneswe invented or deduced
the difference between general relativityand Newtonian orbits for the moon.
All right. The ten meter scale.
Okay.
So that's big in some sense,but also small compared to the distance
to the moon.
So Newtonian getsyou almost the exact right answer.
(20:56):
But it's just off by a little bit.
And so the question iswell if we measure to millimeter accuracy.
And that's what my apparatusdid, was measured millimeter accuracy,
which still boggles my mind somewhatbecause if I tried to measure
from my,you know, laptop screen to the corner
of my room to millimeter accuracy,I would be hard pressed.
(21:17):
And then it would inviteall kinds of questions
for exactly what part of my laptop screen,
you know, it's like at millimeter level,things become really kind of tricky.
And, you know, Earth-Moon at millimeterlevel, that's very tricky.
A lot of things you have to figure out,
especially when it's just thesetwo balls of rocks or going to space.
Right. And you can't measurefrom center to center.
You have to measure from a floppy surfaceto another floppy surface
(21:39):
that's got tides and atmospheric
loading and ocean loadingand all these, you know, it's a fluid.
The Earth is just anot a solid, rigid body.
It's very complicated.
And the apparatus itselfwas very complicated
because it had to do this juggling actand we had to open up, basically open
the eyes of this apparatusfor only 100 nanoseconds
(22:00):
around the timethat we expected the light to return.
And we had to get that rightevery single time, 20 times a second.
And each one is differentbecause it's moving so fast
that you can't just, like,dial it in and say, I think it's here now.
It's moving so fast.
You, you know, you can't just set itsomewhere and expect it to work.
And it had a lot of subsystemsthat had to interact.
It's a challenging job.
(22:21):
But compare that to an amoeba
that can heal, a wound,that can self replicate,
that can learn thingsthat can transfer knowledge to others,
all without a brain that can senseits environment, it can find food,
it can find all the resources and mineralsthat it needs.
It can keep pathogens out.
(22:43):
It's got a cell membrane.
It can move the right kinds of things
through that membraneand block the wrong kinds of things.
And incredible.
And it all works in this orchestrated way
that makes what I built
just this pathetic little gizmo.
Well, this goes against everythingI was ever taught.
(23:04):
Exactly.
I thought an amoeba was the most simple,
boring, rudimentary,primitive form of life there is.
And you're describing a space laser.
That's just thinking.
How could it possibly be that such a
a space laser that also requires
not just a lifetime of educationand hard work for you and the team
(23:25):
that participated it, and the organizationand the funding that allows for the,
you know, something like this to get puttogether and an entire global civilization
that had to develop over hundreds
and thousands of years,that laid the foundation for this.
Yet an amoeba.
I can't I can't believe it.
Okay, so here's here's the challenge.
(23:47):
Let's get the best scientists,molecular biologists,
whatever field in the world together
in a room and say, build me an amoeba.
And by the way, don't cheat.
Don't take the genetic codethat nature already worked out
from scratch.
Designthis thing that works, that can replicate,
(24:09):
that can avoid pathogens, that can,you know, defend itself against,
the paramecium or whateverit has to do, like, figure it out.
No frickin way.
Not even close.
It would just be a
we're just not capable of doing whatlife is done,
because life had billions of yearsto do it.
(24:29):
And the hardest possible testerand teacher of does
it work in the real world,in a full context, in variability
in relationship to all these other thingsthat are also striving to live
and can you manage your materials flowsand have 100% recycling and efficiency?
(24:49):
And wow, it's just it goes on and on.
Goes.
(25:11):
So you're kind of like,
I see you as if Neil deGrasse Tyson
and Daniel Quinn had a baby.
It it said, yeah, there's a resemblance
then to Quinn'sbooks and Ishmael in particular,
something you and I both share and kind of
what brought us initially togetherand what we first talked about.
I'm curious about how the ideasin that book fit into where you were at.
(25:36):
How did it complementwhere you already thinking,
how did it challengewhat you're already thinking?
What have you taken from
that as you've continued to beon this intellectual journey?
Yeah, itdefinitely was a turning point for me.
The Daniel Quinn books, the centraltheme being that we've concocted
this incredible fiction,
Earth belongs to us, and we were meantto rule it, which is prevalent.
(25:58):
That's how people of our culture do think.
But it's a complete fabrication.
It's another fiction.
Most importantly, it's a fictionthat has not stood the test of time,
and it's causing incredibleecological harm.
It's a total nosedive.
We've initiated a six mass extinctionin record time.
(26:18):
It's so egregiously
out of step with ecological reality
that it's not just a fiction,it's a really bad one.
It's not even very cleverbecause it's going to terminate itself
very quickly compared to, you know,the amoeba is going to track right on.
So in your series Metastatic Modernity,
(26:40):
you, give us all the diagnosis.
And if you could describehow you understand modernity,
you know, I compare modernity to a cancer
because the cancer is a mode that,otherwise healthy organ
can find itself in through some mutation,
(27:00):
some new genetic instruction
that is not part of its long history.
It's something random and new, right?
The cancer is differentfrom the part of the body that it has.
I don't know if you put it in.
Well, it's it it basically changesthe programing
of the cellsin an otherwise healthy organ.
(27:22):
And so now those cells begin to just grow
like crazyand growth becomes the, the theme
which obviously connects to modernityand our, our growth, focus and obsession.
And that growth comes at the expenseof the functioning
of that original organ, butalso all the organ and said it interacts
(27:43):
with others, relationships are destroyedand all the adjacent organs are,
are squeezed, just like we're squeezingout all the other species on the planet.
And so humans,you might get pancreatic cancer,
but your pancreas hasn't been cancerousits whole time.
It wasn't rotten to the core. It's fine.
It had a role to functionwithin this organism,
(28:04):
just like in any species functionswithin a community of life.
And it's all co-evolved
and has some relationships and connectionsthat are time tested.
And so it's not the fault of the organof the cells
in the organ,it's the fault of the programing.
That's
what webasically got is an operating system now
that is cancerous and it's metastasized.
(28:28):
It's moved to all parts of the globe.
All human cultures now are impacted.
Even the ones who have tried to abstain
and stay away from itare, caught up in the storm.
Those very few, you know, the leversthat, as one would call
them, are struggling, as are all,you know, almost all the animals.
(28:48):
And so that's the cancer.
And it's notthat humans are bad to the core.
That's what often so peopleconflate modernity and humanity.
They misinterpret my messages.
Humanity is failing.
Well, no, modernity should fail.
Let's hope it fails because it's a cancer.
You don't care for the cancer to win.
You cheer for the organ to recover.
So I'm cheering for humans to recover
(29:10):
what the cancer has forced them to lose
and has only been inthe timeline is significant too.
And Daniel Quinn hits this as well.
But it's a very recent phenomenonthat most of our time on this planet,
just like most of the time a pancreashas been in the body, it's been operating
normally within its normal relationswith all the other organs, other species.
(29:33):
We've been afflicted with this thingjust right at the last
bit here, and it's gotten out of controlvery quickly.
It's stage four.
It's rapidlyendangering ourselves and life on Earth.
(30:04):
The term modernity
is always interesting to me, becauseit's important that it's broad enough
that people know we're not just talkingabout capitalism or forms of supremacy
or like Western civilization, which,you know, I see as particularly insidious
or good representations of the problemas a whole.
But also modernity is a funny wordbecause it's just referring to
(30:28):
what is modern and what is happening now.
I use the word modernityin intentionally vague, but
here's what I foundwhen I used the word civilization
and said that civilization is a cancer,
or that civilization is destined to failand collapse.
People are far more attached
(30:51):
to that idea, because that brings with it
this idea of being civiland being anything but barbaric.
And so if you say that civilizationis going to fail,
people think of chaos and pandemoniumand violence and all this stuff.
I realize that I can't use thatbecause that's an inaccurate view of what
non modernity civilizations are orpeople are like.
(31:12):
They are civil to each other.
Excellent people are.
They can be.I mean, you know, they can be.
There is I'm sure there's not everyone'sperfect. Right.
So modernity on the other hand, doesn'tcause the same knee jerk reaction
because they fill in the blanksand make up whatever that means to them.
And it's a less threatening right,because no one's happy with this.
Right? Right.
I think very few people are looking aroundbeing like, well, just another
(31:36):
great day in the perfect societywe've constructed together.
That's right.
And so I like getting specificand helping people understand about when
did this cancer develop.
I really like in your series,the Time on the River model
that you proposed, that it's notthat modernity
was created in any one moment,but it's a combination of these things.
(31:58):
So if you could talk about that metaphor,how you describe it and why
you think that that worksso well for how we got here.
So the river, definitely,we're now caught up in this turbulent
flow that's rapid and dangerous.
And it used to be a lot more gentle.
When we started agriculture,it wasn't suddenly being thrown
(32:20):
into what we have now.
It was a gradual process.
And so I thought about itin terms of stepping
into a slow moving stream and realizing,oh, it's got some,
you know, it's pleasant and lying backand you start gently floating down.
And while this is really kind of neat,
but once you're in that river,lots of new tributaries come.
So for instance,once you start agriculture
(32:43):
and you have surplus in storage,you need to secure that stored grain.
You end up with hierarchiesto manage division of labor.
You have permanent
settlement more often thatwhich you have to defend property rights.
You have the system of passingthat down hereditary.
So you have patriarchy.
(33:05):
I think that's really connectedto monotheism, which has all this
hierarchical.
It's another tributarythat comes in, right, another tributary.
So all these tributariesthat once you start down this stream, once
you give yourself to this flow,
it has a lot of consequences.
A lot of things just come with itand they just get elaborated.
And there's a lot of positive feedbackand it just sort of gets faster and faster
(33:28):
and you end up with human supremacy and,you know, separating yourself from nature.
You end up deciding that certainthings are weeds and you kill them.
And it's war with the world, which is nothow we got here, not how humans evolved.
We tell a narrative now about evolutionthat's very much influenced
by our culture, as it's a competitionand we're the winners.
(33:48):
But that's not how evolution itself works.
Yes, there is competition,but that is not the entire story.
There's also a tremendous amountof cooperation
because no species gets by on its own.
There's no such thing as a separate entitythat.
Yeah, I love that you say there'sno such thing as a squirrel in isolation.
Yeah, that's right.
(34:08):
It needs the tree.
It needs the mushrooms, it needs the bugs.
It needs.And the tree needs all those things too.
And it's all a big web and all related,
so you can't win.
There's no winning this game.
It's a cooperative game.
And that's what people haven't really
appreciated about evolutionis how cooperative it is in evolution.
(34:30):
I now kind of see as one enormousphenomenon,
that life is one big phenomenon.
And you do have
genetic sequester of different snippetsthat are in different organisms,
but they have a lot of overlapand a lot of heritage.
But as the code is being manipulated on one side and evolving, it's
also simultaneously in the full context,
(34:50):
the full connectionevolving somewhere else.
And that reaches to all the branchesthat that node connects to.
It's coevolution.
It's all doing it at once.
It's not in isolation any organisms.
Evolution is completely in the contextof all the other evolutions
that are going on.
And so it's one phenomenonwith a lot of sort of
(35:12):
components and a lot of complexityand a lot of interaction.
We are not standalone creatures.
We are completely dependenton that entire connected,
tangled, incomprehensible web
that we're never going to fully understandand that's not even the point.
To try to do that, we just need to learn
(35:33):
how to live in it and with itin a way that doesn't destroy it.
(35:59):
I think a lot of people increasingly
agree with the statement
that we're part of a web of life,and we all need each other,
and I think that kind of brings usto a really key thing you bring up
that's a bit more uncomfortable andand harder for people to be on board with.
But I want to explore a little with you.
(36:21):
Edward Abbey, the author says endlessgrowth is the mindset of a cancer cell,
and we're talking about this
cancer that has spread throughout humanityand the whole world.
And you talk about thatmetaphor, obviously, in your series
called Metastatic Modernity,but you talk about the limits
of the metaphor of cancer because
(36:41):
modernity is like cancer.
If cancer had some perks, andI think that's what makes it so difficult.
You you have this great list of our likesand our dislikes,
because it's true that modernityor global civilization has allowed us
incredible, you know, access to food,ironically enough, for everyone.
(37:03):
Yeah.
Transportation, climate control,I can adjust, I can,
you know, I'm able to make my roomthe exact temperature
I want at any time,which is pretty amazing.
I can take showers.
I got a smartphone talking with youright now on my laptop.
And then there's a list of thingsthat we don't like
(37:25):
pollution, deforestation, biodiversity
loss, extinctions, climate change,landfills, traffic, parking.
I have to walkif I want to go to my car down the street.
I live in Los Angeles.
I had to walk 15 minutes to get to my car.
It's terrible transportation system.
And also, I actually should mentionthe worst of all you don't have on this
list.
The worst of, our civilization
(37:47):
is obviously the leaf blower.
Right.
I will have to. Yeah, yeah.
I confess to youthat we have newts that cross my driveway,
and when there's a lot of leaf litter,we might run over a newt
because we don't see them.
And so suddenly I'm in this positionwhere it's enough for me, for the newts.
I'm doing a habitat for the newts.
(38:09):
Yeah, but it's it'selectric and quiet and all that. So.
But yes, I never considered thatI might have a leaf blower,
but these newts are worth it.
Well, I can't,I can't be opposed to newts,
but the tempting thing that we havewhen we look at these lists
of our positivesof what modernity brings us
and the negatives, it's like,all right, well, I know how to solve this.
(38:32):
Let's keep the positives.
Let's get rid of the negatives.
And you bring up the pointthat the positives in
the negativesare intrinsically linked with each other.
Now, people, don't like to hear this at first glance.
It's like, okay, are you suggestingwe return to, like, a stone age?
We're going to get rid of allof our medicine and our access to food.
I'm going to have to be freezingall the time.
(38:53):
I'll never take a hot shower again.I'm going to be smelly.
What are you suggesting?
I guess first,
what's your understanding of whythese lists are intrinsically interlinked?
And we can only have onewithout the other?
Yeah, that.
Well, I mean, the first thing to sayis that they just are that way.
I mean, thatwe don't get any of these perks without,
(39:14):
huge chain of material energy,ecological dependencies.
We don't conjure them out of our headsand then just have them
without any impacton the rest of the world.
Where did the materials come from?
What happened in the productionof these devices and their manufacture?
And you know, what chemicals were usedand where did that go?
(39:35):
And what happens to the materialwhen it's done?
And if you want the perks,there are going to be downsides.
Well,so you talked about the newts though.
You want to protect the newts.
So you're engaging in one of thethe dislikes are the materials that had to
be made to create this quiet electricleaf blower so you can protect the newts.
It's just so hardfor us to engage with this reality.
(39:57):
This is an unfortunate reality
that all of the blessings of eternitycome with the curses.
Obviously, it's not simple enoughfor it's like, all right, well,
I guess I'm going to just cutall of the blessings out of my life
and that's going to somehowstop the curses.
That's not the solution either.
And whenever anyone talksabout this kind of thing, you know,
people are always going to bring like,oh, you want us to live in the stone ages?
(40:20):
Why is your answer to that? No.
Well, for one thing,I guess I would say that
we never go backwards, that
we have locked in certain thingsthat we're not going to just forget.
I don't know what the future looks like.
It might have a lot of elementsthat, to a casual observer,
(40:40):
might look kind of Stone age,but it'll have things that a stone age
person has no idea what's going onand why you're doing certain things.
So it's not going to be just an etcha sketch, you know, erase the
all the things that we've done.
There will be carry over.
And I can't really predictwhat that looks like.
And nor is it really productive to trythat hard because we're just the universe
(41:04):
in the way that real things unfoldare never the way we thought they would.
We're just not good at it.
We were good at anticipatingthe consequences that we're now seeing
from all of the things that we've done.
So it's kind of a foolish exercisein my mind to try to nail down
what the future looks like and whatpractices, can and can't persist.
(41:25):
I mean, certain categories,you can understand that
we're probably in the far futurenot using metals.
We're probably using plantand animal material and rock, you know,
things that are at handand part of a regenerative atmosphere.
And, you know, we right noware caught in this modernity period.
(41:45):
We're all products of modernity.
That's not just going to disappear for us.
I mean, I
imagine that I will always live in a houseand I'll always have a driveway
and would need some.
As long as that's true,the newts are going to need protection.
And so I'm already doing it wrong.
But the important thing to recognizeis that this whole system
(42:09):
doesn't changenecessarily by individuals changing.
It changes by replacement
as those accustomed to certain ways die.
And the new babies that come along adaptand adapt
to whatever world they find themselvesin, and it just looks normal.
(42:30):
You do get some carryoverthat the elders will tell the young people
what they're supposed to be doing basedon old ideas, and some of that will stick.
But have you ever met a teenager?
You know, they're quite capableof rejecting
what the older folks are sayingis important?
That's just part of how we're wired.
And so I think we do adapt.
(42:52):
It's going to be a generational adaptationas the conditions on the ground
just really do changeand as new realities become apparent.
And so it's not a matter of the peoplelistening to this.
What are you doing right now that's wrong?
And how should you live right.
You're not going to don't expect to.
(43:13):
What you can do in what I've doneand what I think is
useful,is to fall out of love with modernity
and see it for what it is,and don't be depressed about it.
It's going away because you don'tget depressed if your cancer goes away.
Think of modernity as the affliction
that we hope can disappear with
(43:37):
as little mayhem as possible.
It's not possibleto eliminate all of it, partly
because people are attached to itand it's all they know.
But don't conflate humanity and modernity.
If modernity goes away, it'snot a failure of humanity.
It's the salvation of humanity out
from under this burdensome disease
(43:59):
that is killing the worldand therefore will kill us with it.
And I think if you fall out of lovewith modernity,
you're just going to stop doingsome of the things
just because you don't believe in itanymore.
You don't see the point anymore.
And that will change your behaviors.
And it will help the generational shiftby seeing other ways to view the world.
(44:20):
We shouldn't expect us in our livesto get it right, but we can help
set the path so that we make it easierfor the following generations to change.
And they're not going to get right either.
But eventually we can sort of try to encourage better, more responsible behaviors.
So you're
(44:40):
a teenager jumping around,hooting and hollering,
you just discovered Saturnand you work very hard.
You become an astrophysicist.
You help create a laser
that measures to the millimeter
the moon from the Earth,
and you start to learn
(45:02):
more about the limitations of modernityand that this whole system
that we have builtour society on is going to be reaching
some limits, whether it's peak oilor climate change or population,
that starts to make you concerned that
modernity is going to collapse.
(45:24):
And the reason why you're concerned withthat sounds like was because
maternity is what is holding upthe field of astrophysics,
and you want to protectthat body of knowledge
and the revelations and the understandingthat's come with it.
And now you're retired.
Yeah.
You've gone through this whole journey.
(45:45):
You're retired from one profession,but you are experiencing life
full time and learning and teachingand sharing the message.
In many ways,you should be clear about that.
But now I want you to look back on allthat, because it sounds like
you are.
You're saying like, pickwhat you're rooting for.
You know, the doctor doesn't rootfor the cancer.
(46:06):
You've come to terms
with the collapse of modernityand see that as a potential saving grace.
If we can navigate that collapse.
Well, how do you square thatwith the initial concern
you havewith what that would mean for astrophysics
and our continued understandingand sharing of that?
(46:27):
Yeah, that's interesting to think about.
What do I think about preservingthe astrophysics knowledge?
As you said,that was a large motivator for me.
And not just astrophysics,but our entire scientific edifice
and and all that we've learned.
I don't imagine that we will forget
that the sun is a star.
(46:50):
I don't imagine that we'll forget thatwe move around it.
I don't imagine thatwe'll forget about evolution.
That's something that's
that integral to ecologyand how life works.
I think that's going to becomemore of a focus as it, as it needs to be.
And so I think some of the very keyunderstandings
(47:11):
are going to be hard to erase.
No, we won't havethe same kind of technology.
But nowhere in the contract was it written
that humans would understandcomplete truth.
It's never been in the contractfor any species.
We have brains that have allowed usto get farther along than a lot of others,
(47:34):
but that doesn't mean that
we will arrive at the full destination.
We are incapable of doing that.
And that's okay.
We need to accept thatwe have limitations,
and we need to acceptthat we are a species of stories.
And I expect that future storieswill have elements
(47:55):
of the things that we have learnedthrough our scientific process.
And modernityis not a permanent condition.
It's a stunt. It'sjust a short term stunt.
So that's not forever.
Nor is our current levelof scientific understanding.
And so I've let loose of thatas being the guiding principle.
(48:17):
And now to replace it,it's the amazingness of life.
And when I go out now and encounter
animals and plants and insects and
whatever, I talk to them.
They don't understand my syntax,
(48:37):
I understand it, which is something
I love to tell babybirds chirping in the nest
how awesome they areand how they're going to love flying.
And it's going to be just thisgreat experience.
And so, I'm enjoying it with them in a way.
So I'm trying to connectmore to the life around me, because that's
(49:00):
what I've recognized is more incrediblethan anything we can design.
And we should be humbledand honored by what has emerged.
(50:05):
And. You're someone who
has gone on quite an intellectual odyssey.
Maybe not always knowingwhere it's going to lead,
but you've questiona lot of assumptions you had.
(50:25):
Like you said, you no longer fit in
with the academic worldthat you had been a part of.
How does one navigate their own
intellectual journey?
Yeah, I don't know.
I never set out to do thisparticular journey.
This is how the universe works.It's full of surprises.
Have you navigated with a compass?
(50:47):
Has there been a map?
What's been pulling you or guiding youas you've gone
to these surprising new placesthat you couldn't have imagined?
Yeah, I think the way it works for meis I get little snippets of things
I hadn't thought about beforethat pull me further along.
And so it's not a compass.
I have no idea where I'm heading toor what I'm trying to do.
(51:10):
In fact, my initial forayinto this whole business was,
we're going to solve this with technology,but I'll hit on something that I hadn't
considered before that challengesmy sense of how things are,
and I'll want to follow up on it.
And, you know, it's led me to learna little bit more about indigenous
(51:31):
ways of being, because I think there'sa lot of wisdom there.
It's all these little snippetsthat make me think,
I hadn't thought of it like that before.
And just being open to those redirectsand being honest,
that I don't have all the answersand nobody can have.
That's the other thing.
Nobody can have all the answers,and the best we can do
(51:53):
is put one foot in front of the otherand try not to step on a Inuit,
you know, as we do. So, there's no map.
And in fact, I'm very suspicious of mapsbecause we often confuse
the map for the territory,and I'm much more interested in
putting myself in the territoryand seeing what it's like
without preconceivednotions of what I'm going to find.
(52:17):
And I think that's what
science at its best seems to be.
I'm saying this is someonewho has very low scientific,
ability or comprehensionthat does not come to me naturally.
But, you know, there's
this one aspect of the scientific processcoming from the enlightenment.
My understanding is, is there's excitementlike, oh, this is going to help us
(52:39):
fully understandand therefore fully control
the rest of the chaotic universe.
That's one component of it,but the other seems to be,
which I think you are embodyingso beautifully
is just this commitment
to keeping an open mindand asking questions
(53:03):
and being wary of the storiesthat we are telling ourselves.
And I always questioning like,or is that, you know, as you say,
we are these story creaturesor these beings that require narrative.
That's our strength.That's also our weakness.
So you build this laserjust to make sure, just like,
all right, Einstein,I just want to say I'm just testing.
(53:24):
I'm true.
Is this okay? It's true.
I just I was just asking.
This is like you continue to go downthis route.
You're not following answers.
You just continue to follow questions. And
it seems to me that is such a beautiful
irony of the scientific revolution.
(53:44):
We came to it thinking like, oh, okay,this is great.
Now this is going to really help usconfirm all of our assumptions
about our superiority as a speciesand what we can manipulate and master.
And it seems like there's still
plenty of scientists out there that aregoing down that route, or maybe more.
The people on the politicians and the CEOsthat are funding the scientists
(54:07):
or maybe thinking that,but then the scientific process
and just continually askingthese questions has accidentally,
unexpectedlyled us down this route of being like, oh,
oh my God, the earth orbits the sun.
We're one of many species like David.
That is not what science set out to prove,but by having the questions
(54:31):
be your guide.
It's kind of led down that route,which is pretty incredible
testament to that processwhen done honestly.
Yeah.
But as someone who actually knows
what you're talking about,what's your take on that?
Well, yeah, I think you put it well.
And I think, you know, there are elements,I mean, humans have always been
amazing scientists 100,000 years agobecause we're keen observers.
(54:55):
That's a big, crucial piece of it,is watching what's happening
and trying to piece it togetherand build a model for it.
Now, the model doesn't have to be perfect,
and we tend to take them tooseriously and literally.
But curiosity is really good.
And one thing I would havea lot of students do is
come up with their own questions andnot treat science as a bunch of answers,
(55:16):
but treat it as a way of framing questionsthat are interesting,
questions you really are driven,you want to know,
and you might not be able to know,but just being able to ask
the question is profound and useful.
There are a lot of questions
we're never going to know the answersto, and science has limits that way.
I mean, why is there somethingrather than nothing? Forget it.
(55:38):
We're not going to knowthe answer to that.
We just accept that.
Well, there is and isn't that great.
And I think one thing I also learnedis in scientific talks,
if I would go to a scientific talkor give one, the standard format is
here's all this stuff that we figured outand aren't we great?
You know, we've tied this up and abovethis are pretty boring people.
(56:00):
Not and like
they might appreciate the accomplishmentand some new incremental learning.
But I guarantee you have a scientific talkthat says,
and we still don't know whythis is happening.
And you've got peopleon the edge of their seat now.
They're paying attention
and they're all thinking about it and allwondering, I wonder if this is going on
(56:21):
and on, almost all the questions,even if it was an incidental thing,
almost all the questions at the end are,have you thought about this?
Have you looked at this?You know about that mystery.
So we love mysteriesand that's a good thing.
We just don't need to necessarilyhave the expectation
or the demandthat we resolve all our mysteries.
I think it's healthy to live in mystery,live in uncertainty, appreciate it,
(56:44):
admire it, revel in it.
Well, Tom, I thankyou so much for talking with me today.
I'm really excited for folksto watch the series Metastatic Maternity
to see the follow up writing and dive
deeper on the Do the Math blog.
I really appreciate it and talk with you.
(57:05):
Great.Well, it's nice to have this exchange.
Take care.
Thanks for listening.
Next month we'll get back on the trailand pick up where we left off.
Last time.
Until then,I hope you'll get a chance to rest a bit
(57:27):
and appreciate our good Ole universe.
Maybe talk with the baby bird,tell them about the podcast.
And of course, you can also check outthe Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
It's a nice place to join otherfellow travelers as we make our way there.
Time and space,and there you'll have access to a whole
(57:49):
nother episode's worth of conversationwith Tom.
There's more to this discussion,and you'll find it on our Patreon.
Your support makes this podcast possible,
so thanks again to Tom Murphy.
And as always, a theme music isCelestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.
You can find a link in our show notes,as well as the link to Tom's Works.
(58:12):
Talk with you soon.
Hey, we'retaking a rest in our odyssey today
to talk with a new friend, astrophysicistTom Murphy.
Together,we'll gaze at the grandeur of the stars
and marvel at the complexityof one of our oldest cousins, the amoeba.
In this conversation,we'll hear about Tom's own odyssey,
(00:25):
from professor of astrophysicsto his growing concern
about the collapse of civilization,to his ever expanding appreciation
for the mysteries of the universe.
Maybe you know, Tom,from his writings on his Do the Math blog,
or you've seen his new YouTubeseries, Metastatic Modernity.
(00:46):
And if you haven't, well, here'sTom Murphy.
Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast
exploring life on an incredible planetand the universe.
(01:07):
It's interwoven with.
I'm Alex Smith.
What initially drew youto becoming an astrophysicist?
(01:30):
How deep into your life, even childhood?
Was that something that you, yeah,were passionate about as a kid growing up?
I had all kinds of passions that wouldchange every few months or years.
And at one point,I wanted to be a taxidermist.
That just really appealed to me.
And, my parentsweren't too happy about that one.
(01:51):
When I was a 15 year old in the summer.
I grew up in Tennessee.
I was out with my little refractortelescope that I hadn't really paid
much attention to.
I'd just gotten it for my 15th birthday,a few months before.
But I was looking at stars and I realizedthat stars are actually kind of boring.
They look just like stars in the telescopeand almost about to give up.
(02:12):
I was like, I gave it a good try.
Let me look at this other one.
Bright star. Just, you know.
And it was Saturn.
And I saw the ringsand it was just unreal.
I started dancing aroundand whooping and hollering in the yard.
I felt like I had discovered Saturn.
(02:32):
Obviously I knew thatI wasn't the discoverer of Saturn, but
it felt very much like that.
About a half
year later, Halley's Comet came around
and I started watching it
every night that I could, watching itgo through the sky a few degrees a day.
And it introduced meto the constellations.
(02:54):
And I got to know the sky a little bit.
And I got associated with the amateurastronomy club, got the bug and built
a ten inch telescope.
And that was all in.
But I saw all nine
planets in one nightwhen there were nine planets
through my telescope, and I saw a quasar2 billion light years away,
and I saw a supernova in a galaxyabout 35 million light years away.
(03:16):
And, you know, it's just fantastic.
And one key element there thatI really resonated with at some point.
I was a subscriber to Skyand telescope magazine, and every month
I got news updates.What's happening in astronomy?
And here was one about this supernovathat I just mentioned,
the one that I had seen.And I thought, you know what?
(03:38):
That little news blurb
is the only news blurb that we would share
with another civilization.
Many light years away.
That's our only common news.
They would be reading somethingabout that supernova, too, and I felt like
I'm a citizen of the universe.
Not so much.
(03:59):
Just tied up, entangled in human affairsand politics
and economics and all of our concernshere on this planet.
I felt that was broaderand that was very appealing, that it was
touching something bigger
and something that wasn't about me in
something that wasn't about humansand something it wasn't even about Earth.
(04:20):
That is somethingthat was just on a bigger scale.
So I think I really like that.
Why do you call yourselfa recovering astrophysicist?
(04:41):
Yeah, well, for one thing, I am retired.
I hung up the gloves to the pointwhere I'm
not really even tracking media hitson, like my wife said.
Oh, did you see these new imagesfrom Jupiter? No.
And I didn't go chase them down then.
So I spent a lot of my years
and a lot of my lifereally fascinated by cosmology.
(05:03):
And I don't think it's boring now.
I just have movedto a different area of interest.
And being retiredhas allowed me to do that.
And I should mention, I retired at age 53,so it was definitely not
the normal situation of being 80and still coming in to,
you know, most university professorsdon't just never stop.
(05:25):
And I always assumethat that would be me too.
I mean, astrophysics was my life
and I did live a parallel lifefor many years because in fact,
the first year that I was at UCSan Diego teaching,
I taught a course on energyand the environment
for general education, non science major
(05:45):
audience and I learned a lot,
and it sort of opened my eyes to the factthat this is not an easy story.
I thought it would be an easy storyto piece together how we move forward
based fossil fuels, for instance,and deal with climate change.
I thought technology isjust always the answer.
(06:05):
So I came at it from that approach,and I just
the more I dug into it,the more I realized this is not so easy.
And at some point, it turned into kind
of an existential concern about peak oiland what the implications of that
would be, knowing it's a finite sourceand how utterly dependent we are on it.
And when we get to solar fast
(06:26):
enough and EVs fast enough,you know, that kind of concern,
what happens when that rug gets pulled outfrom under our economies?
So that was the level of concernthat I had.
I recognized that that there was a chance
of our way of lifeor economic system collapsing.
(06:46):
So I thought my field of astrophysicscould be utterly forgotten,
that all the work that I'd doneif we really botched this,
all of that could be flusheddown the tubes.
And that hurt tremendously in terms of
if there was a collapse of some kind.
That's right.
That people would lose accessto the knowledge that was gained
(07:08):
in the field of astrophysics. For example.
That's right.
And and it certainly wouldn'tbe a priority to continue doing
those luxuries,you know, researching in that field.
So I thought I might spenda little bit of my time
thinking about that existential threat,
because I really don'twant to see that happen.
(07:29):
I was coming at it from the point of view.
That boy, modernity is so great,let's not threaten it.
And if we deny
that collapse is even possible, that'sthe easiest way to slip into it, you know?
So we have to go in with eyes wide open.
(07:53):
I don't
talk one on one with many astrophysicists,so you'll have to get me help.
Give me a good sense of whetherI'm correct about this, but I imagine
for many people who are drawn to thisfield, there's a similar kind of profound
that is experienced at some point with
this is an unstable, livable universethat we're this tiny little part of.
(08:18):
And to get to reach outand learn more about that peer into
that is mind boggling.
And at the same time,like your initial concern
with whereour global civilization was going
was coming from a place of likewanting to protect this incredible
field of knowledgethat you were so attuned to.
(08:41):
And it seems like a lot of peoplein those kinds
of fields of science,I imagine there is a similar sort of
aligning themselveswith global civilization
and its apparatuses and mindsets,because that is what allows
the exploration of the starsto this sophisticated degree.
(09:05):
And I'm interested in your journey of itseems like you almost kind of saw
that the global civilizationthat, on one hand, was allowing us to peer
into the universe with sophisticatedknowledge that even though,
you know, many indigenous culturesdid have a profound understanding
of the stars in their own way,didn't have the instruments
(09:28):
that our global civilizationallowed us to get these vivid images.
And I'm curious about whenand how your alliance shifted.
And if you feel like you are kind ofon the outside
of what is typical for other peoplein your field in that way?
Definitelyin the outside, I don't fit in anymore,
which is part of why I retired.
(09:48):
It was not working for me.
And so I think I would saystudying astrophysics definitely
does bring a sense of awe and humility.
And it's about stories.
It's still I mean, we're a story people.
And so we have basically been ableto unlock a story of
how the universe came to bethat wasn't a concoction of our heads
(10:14):
so much as a result of the observationsthat led us to one surprise after another.
And that's another element herethat I think is important.
And I've been pondering it latelyin the sense that I think for good
reasons, physicists and astrophysicistsmight be viewed as arrogant.
Right?
A lot of people in the academyor are envious of the of the physicists
(10:39):
and, you know, try to at some level mimicthat style.
And physicists can be quite arrogant.
I've known plenty of them,but at the same time, and this is why
I'm struggling, because there'sthis kind of both things going on.
There's a humility there, right,
that comes from not being in charge.
(10:59):
In other words,
we can't control the universe.
We are only here to observe it.
We can't do experiments with itor strictly observers
and when it comes to physics,
we don't get to decide how physics works.
We didn't decide that relativitywas a great idea and it seems neatness.
Einstein guy had cool hair,so let's just go with that.
(11:21):
But that's true too.
That might be true. Fantastic hairstyle.
And we didn't go with quantum mechanicsbecause it was kind of gnarly and cool
and interesting.
In fact, the community was deadset against these things
when they were proposed.
Interesting, but it was the experimentsthat forced it down our throats.
We had no choice.
(11:42):
And at this point, we can't say,you know what?
This is out of fashion.Let's not do relativity
or quantum mechanics anymore,or let's do this new thing.
Only if the experiments drag youby the nose to that.
And so there's a humility in that.
Physicists in astrophysicsare not the arbiters of truth.
It's the actual universe.
As we measure it,we have to live with the results.
(12:06):
We hand the microphone
to the universe, and we can't predictwhat it's going to say.
We're not deciding.
We're not calling the shots.
In that contrast to how modernityworks, to that, we have kind of concocted,
invented,imagined this way to live on the planet.
It's artificial and it's not tested onevolutionary timescales.
(12:29):
It's a flash, and we can't do that.
Even that's beyond our means.
(12:50):
What inspired you to first createthe Do the Math blog?
Yeah, the Do the Math blog.
I started in 2011 and I had taught
this course on energyand the environment many times by then.
I don't know, 3 or 4 times,I guess, and each time became more
and more concerned about the trajectoryand the possibility
that, you know,if we don't pay attention to this fossil
(13:13):
fuel looming disappearance,that could be very disruptive,
then we could descend into collapse.
And so my first post was galacticscale energy, about
if we continue to 2.3% growthrate for indefinitely,
and I use 2.3% because that's a factorof ten every century.
(13:33):
So it's a mathematical rate of what?
An energy rate of the rateof our energy use because it had been 3%
per year, greater energy use.
And what what would happenif we continued?
And in 2500 years, we'd be consumingall of this stellar output
from 100 billion stars in the MilkyWay galaxy in a short 2500 years.
Oh, just 100 billion.
(13:54):
Okay. Yeah, just hundred billion stars in.
And you can't even access those starsat the speed of light within 2500 years.
So it's just physically impossibleto continue
to this growth ratefor even a couple millennia.
It's just absurd.
Physics says absolutely not.
Okay, so that's such an incredible
I mean, well, because Daniel Quinn,I forget which book it is he talks about.
(14:17):
Similarly, like if our population growthcontinued at the present rate,
I forget, and how many yearsyou'd have a human beings lined up
elbow to elbow on every cornerof the Milky Way galaxy.
If we could even be floating in space,that's how many people would have
something like that.So yeah, exponentials are absurd.
They get out of hand very quickly innothing, in reality, in the real universe
(14:40):
continues an exponential for very longbecause they do become absurd.
Something always gets in the wayand stops it.
And that won't be different for us as welland get the same story.
And so when you say energy use to just tohelp me understand like that's like what?
Like burning fossil fuels. Yeah.
It could be biomass or nuclear or solaror even things we haven't invented yet.
(15:02):
There's a thermodynamic argumentto it, to that within 400 years
we would reach the boiling temperatureof water here on Earth.
If we continue the 2% growth
rate in our annual increase in energy use.
Now, if you use solar,if you buy yourself a little more time,
but then you run out of solarin 400 years.
So either way,
(15:23):
how do you run out of solar and wind itjust because the sun's so big?
Well, just the solar energythat's hitting the Earth.
It's only so big.
It's a tiny catcher's mittand it only catches so much of the light.
And so it's just finite.
And I saw on your blogthat you, calculated how much wind power
there is on the earth, right.
And so I, I went through thatwith all of these things and do the math.
(15:44):
How much wind helmet's geothermal,
how much tidal, how much nuclear fission,what are its limitation.
And and nuclear fusion.
What are the prospectsand what does it get?
You and I, went through a lot
of these quantitative assessments in thisdo the math blog.
Some of what is demonstratingthe absurdity of continuing to grow.
But then it got more realistic of,okay, what are our options for
(16:06):
even if we stabilized at this 18 terawatt
scale of societal energy use,what could we do?
And the answer is that's very heartthat we will hit this sort of steady
state at today's levels.
And that's beforeI was really ecologically aware.
Since then, I've realized thateven if we could,
we just continueto drive the six mass extinction
(16:28):
because we would continue miningand polluting and fragmenting habitats.
Even at steady state, we can't exist.
We can't survive at this scalebecause we're eating through
nonrenewable resourcesat this incredible rate,
and it's just completely, grosslyunsustainable.
(16:48):
All these forms of growth will have toend, whether it's economics or population.
We're not going to spaceto colonize space.
So put that out of your mind.
Can I ask,so why are we not going to space?
Well, you know, I,
I think, an astrophysicist is telling methis.
Yeah. That's right,that's right. Forget about it.
(17:09):
So there are so many reasonsI mean, you don't see condominiums
on, Mount Everest or on the ocean flooreven ten meters below the surface, not
yours are far more benign,far more orders of magnitude
more benign than the surfaceof any other body in the solar system.
The magnetosphere of the Earthprotects us from cosmic rays.
(17:30):
Exposure is about a hundred times higheroutside of the Earth's magnetosphere.
So on the moon surface on Mars,your risk of cancer goes up 100 fold.
So you are definitely getting itwithin a year or two.
So you're living in a cave, so you have tobe a caveman in the space station.
We have to import oxygen every monthbecause even though there's scrubbing
and recycling and water, it'snever going to be perfect.
(17:51):
And so we are tetheredstill in those environments
to the only environmentthat we've ever lived in of Earth.
That's just the truth of it.That's the reality.
And this is with a large budget.
I mean, it's expensive
to send those rockets upwith oxygen and water extremely expensive.
So if there were a technological solution,you can be sure we'd be doing it.
(18:12):
And this is a high budget operation.
This is the bestthey've got the best technology
available right now,and it's not even close to good enough.
Not even a few months. Okay, fine.
That's all. That's all fantasy.
We are part of the Earth.
We imagine ourselvesis somehow separate from it.
But man,we are just deeply embedded in this thing.
(18:44):
Well,
so you mentioned in the seriesthat you created helped
create an apparatusthat shot a laser to the moon, right.
Which I won't even begin to pretendthat I could even begin to understand.
And you mentioned how that pales
in comparison to an amoeba, right?
And I'd love to hear more about that.
(19:05):
That's not what I think.
Most people would expect an astrophysicistto come back and say, yeah, yeah.
And I think there's some power in thatbecause I did it.
That would be somethingthat most people would boast about.
And this is a devicethat basically built from scratch
that shot pulses at the moon,takes 2.5 seconds for a pulse
to get to the moon to hit the reflectorsthat the asteroid and a half seconds.
(19:29):
That's the roundtrip time.
But it varies a lotbecause the moon's in an elliptical orbit.
And there's all this geometrythat's changing all the time.
My apparatus was shooting 20 pulses
a second,so it's like juggling 50 balls at a time.
50 shots were in route somewherein that circuit and all interleaved.
And that's a difficult task to coordinate.
(19:50):
And is it to measure somethingor what was the.
Yeah, the point is that gravitytells bodies how to move,
and gravity is one of the fundamentalpieces of physics
that we describe using general relativity
and general
relativity will change the storyof how the moon moves around the Earth.
Let's say you go from Newtonian gravityto general relativity.
(20:11):
There are consequences.
It changes the way the orbit movesand the shape of the orbit.
And that changeshow we understand the orbit.
Right, and how we would measure it.
I mean, we would measure different resultsif if it weren't general relativity,
this shape of the moon'sorbit would just be different.
And so, you know, it's one of these placeswhere you can experiment
(20:34):
and ask, well,what is the moon actually doing?
Whose rules is it following?
Because it might not be the oneswe invented or deduced
the difference between general relativityand Newtonian orbits for the moon.
All right. The ten meter scale.
Okay.
So that's big in some sense,but also small compared to the distance
to the moon.
So Newtonian getsyou almost the exact right answer.
(20:56):
But it's just off by a little bit.
And so the question iswell if we measure to millimeter accuracy.
And that's what my apparatusdid, was measured millimeter accuracy,
which still boggles my mind somewhatbecause if I tried to measure
from my,you know, laptop screen to the corner
of my room to millimeter accuracy,I would be hard pressed.
(21:17):
And then it would inviteall kinds of questions
for exactly what part of my laptop screen,
you know, it's like at millimeter level,things become really kind of tricky.
And, you know, Earth-Moon at millimeterlevel, that's very tricky.
A lot of things you have to figure out,
especially when it's just thesetwo balls of rocks or going to space.
Right. And you can't measurefrom center to center.
You have to measure from a floppy surfaceto another floppy surface
(21:39):
that's got tides and atmospheric
loading and ocean loadingand all these, you know, it's a fluid.
The Earth is just anot a solid, rigid body.
It's very complicated.
And the apparatus itselfwas very complicated
because it had to do this juggling actand we had to open up, basically open
the eyes of this apparatusfor only 100 nanoseconds
(22:00):
around the timethat we expected the light to return.
And we had to get that rightevery single time, 20 times a second.
And each one is differentbecause it's moving so fast
that you can't just, like,dial it in and say, I think it's here now.
It's moving so fast.
You, you know, you can't just set itsomewhere and expect it to work.
And it had a lot of subsystemsthat had to interact.
It's a challenging job.
(22:21):
But compare that to an amoeba
that can heal, a wound,that can self replicate,
that can learn thingsthat can transfer knowledge to others,
all without a brain that can senseits environment, it can find food,
it can find all the resources and mineralsthat it needs.
It can keep pathogens out.
(22:43):
It's got a cell membrane.
It can move the right kinds of things
through that membraneand block the wrong kinds of things.
And incredible.
And it all works in this orchestrated way
that makes what I built
just this pathetic little gizmo.
Well, this goes against everythingI was ever taught.
(23:04):
Exactly.
I thought an amoeba was the most simple,
boring, rudimentary,primitive form of life there is.
And you're describing a space laser.
That's just thinking.
How could it possibly be that such a
a space laser that also requires
not just a lifetime of educationand hard work for you and the team
(23:25):
that participated it, and the organizationand the funding that allows for the,
you know, something like this to get puttogether and an entire global civilization
that had to develop over hundreds
and thousands of years,that laid the foundation for this.
Yet an amoeba.
I can't I can't believe it.
Okay, so here's here's the challenge.
(23:47):
Let's get the best scientists,molecular biologists,
whatever field in the world together
in a room and say, build me an amoeba.
And by the way, don't cheat.
Don't take the genetic codethat nature already worked out
from scratch.
Designthis thing that works, that can replicate,
(24:09):
that can avoid pathogens, that can,you know, defend itself against,
the paramecium or whateverit has to do, like, figure it out.
No frickin way.
Not even close.
It would just be a
we're just not capable of doing whatlife is done,
because life had billions of yearsto do it.
(24:29):
And the hardest possible testerand teacher of does
it work in the real world,in a full context, in variability
in relationship to all these other thingsthat are also striving to live
and can you manage your materials flowsand have 100% recycling and efficiency?
(24:49):
And wow, it's just it goes on and on.
Goes.
(25:11):
So you're kind of like,
I see you as if Neil deGrasse Tyson
and Daniel Quinn had a baby.
It it said, yeah, there's a resemblance
then to Quinn'sbooks and Ishmael in particular,
something you and I both share and kind of
what brought us initially togetherand what we first talked about.
I'm curious about how the ideasin that book fit into where you were at.
(25:36):
How did it complementwhere you already thinking,
how did it challengewhat you're already thinking?
What have you taken from
that as you've continued to beon this intellectual journey?
Yeah, itdefinitely was a turning point for me.
The Daniel Quinn books, the centraltheme being that we've concocted
this incredible fiction,
Earth belongs to us, and we were meantto rule it, which is prevalent.
(25:58):
That's how people of our culture do think.
But it's a complete fabrication.
It's another fiction.
Most importantly, it's a fictionthat has not stood the test of time,
and it's causing incredibleecological harm.
It's a total nosedive.
We've initiated a six mass extinctionin record time.
(26:18):
It's so egregiously
out of step with ecological reality
that it's not just a fiction,it's a really bad one.
It's not even very cleverbecause it's going to terminate itself
very quickly compared to, you know,the amoeba is going to track right on.
So in your series Metastatic Modernity,
(26:40):
you, give us all the diagnosis.
And if you could describehow you understand modernity,
you know, I compare modernity to a cancer
because the cancer is a mode that,otherwise healthy organ
can find itself in through some mutation,
(27:00):
some new genetic instruction
that is not part of its long history.
It's something random and new, right?
The cancer is differentfrom the part of the body that it has.
I don't know if you put it in.
Well, it's it it basically changesthe programing
of the cellsin an otherwise healthy organ.
(27:22):
And so now those cells begin to just grow
like crazyand growth becomes the, the theme
which obviously connects to modernityand our, our growth, focus and obsession.
And that growth comes at the expenseof the functioning
of that original organ, butalso all the organ and said it interacts
(27:43):
with others, relationships are destroyedand all the adjacent organs are,
are squeezed, just like we're squeezingout all the other species on the planet.
And so humans,you might get pancreatic cancer,
but your pancreas hasn't been cancerousits whole time.
It wasn't rotten to the core. It's fine.
It had a role to functionwithin this organism,
(28:04):
just like in any species functionswithin a community of life.
And it's all co-evolved
and has some relationships and connectionsthat are time tested.
And so it's not the fault of the organof the cells
in the organ,it's the fault of the programing.
That's
what webasically got is an operating system now
that is cancerous and it's metastasized.
(28:28):
It's moved to all parts of the globe.
All human cultures now are impacted.
Even the ones who have tried to abstain
and stay away from itare, caught up in the storm.
Those very few, you know, the leversthat, as one would call
them, are struggling, as are all,you know, almost all the animals.
(28:48):
And so that's the cancer.
And it's notthat humans are bad to the core.
That's what often so peopleconflate modernity and humanity.
They misinterpret my messages.
Humanity is failing.
Well, no, modernity should fail.
Let's hope it fails because it's a cancer.
You don't care for the cancer to win.
You cheer for the organ to recover.
So I'm cheering for humans to recover
(29:10):
what the cancer has forced them to lose
and has only been inthe timeline is significant too.
And Daniel Quinn hits this as well.
But it's a very recent phenomenonthat most of our time on this planet,
just like most of the time a pancreashas been in the body, it's been operating
normally within its normal relationswith all the other organs, other species.
(29:33):
We've been afflicted with this thingjust right at the last
bit here, and it's gotten out of controlvery quickly.
It's stage four.
It's rapidlyendangering ourselves and life on Earth.
(30:04):
The term modernity
is always interesting to me, becauseit's important that it's broad enough
that people know we're not just talkingabout capitalism or forms of supremacy
or like Western civilization, which,you know, I see as particularly insidious
or good representations of the problemas a whole.
But also modernity is a funny wordbecause it's just referring to
(30:28):
what is modern and what is happening now.
I use the word modernityin intentionally vague, but
here's what I foundwhen I used the word civilization
and said that civilization is a cancer,
or that civilization is destined to failand collapse.
People are far more attached
(30:51):
to that idea, because that brings with it
this idea of being civiland being anything but barbaric.
And so if you say that civilizationis going to fail,
people think of chaos and pandemoniumand violence and all this stuff.
I realize that I can't use thatbecause that's an inaccurate view of what
non modernity civilizations are orpeople are like.
(31:12):
They are civil to each other.
Excellent people are.
They can be.I mean, you know, they can be.
There is I'm sure there's not everyone'sperfect. Right.
So modernity on the other hand, doesn'tcause the same knee jerk reaction
because they fill in the blanksand make up whatever that means to them.
And it's a less threatening right,because no one's happy with this.
Right? Right.
I think very few people are looking aroundbeing like, well, just another
(31:36):
great day in the perfect societywe've constructed together.
That's right.
And so I like getting specificand helping people understand about when
did this cancer develop.
I really like in your series,the Time on the River model
that you proposed, that it's notthat modernity
was created in any one moment,but it's a combination of these things.
(31:58):
So if you could talk about that metaphor,how you describe it and why
you think that that worksso well for how we got here.
So the river, definitely,we're now caught up in this turbulent
flow that's rapid and dangerous.
And it used to be a lot more gentle.
When we started agriculture,it wasn't suddenly being thrown
(32:20):
into what we have now.
It was a gradual process.
And so I thought about itin terms of stepping
into a slow moving stream and realizing,oh, it's got some,
you know, it's pleasant and lying backand you start gently floating down.
And while this is really kind of neat,
but once you're in that river,lots of new tributaries come.
So for instance,once you start agriculture
(32:43):
and you have surplus in storage,you need to secure that stored grain.
You end up with hierarchiesto manage division of labor.
You have permanent
settlement more often thatwhich you have to defend property rights.
You have the system of passingthat down hereditary.
So you have patriarchy.
(33:05):
I think that's really connectedto monotheism, which has all this
hierarchical.
It's another tributarythat comes in, right, another tributary.
So all these tributariesthat once you start down this stream, once
you give yourself to this flow,
it has a lot of consequences.
A lot of things just come with itand they just get elaborated.
And there's a lot of positive feedbackand it just sort of gets faster and faster
(33:28):
and you end up with human supremacy and,you know, separating yourself from nature.
You end up deciding that certainthings are weeds and you kill them.
And it's war with the world, which is nothow we got here, not how humans evolved.
We tell a narrative now about evolutionthat's very much influenced
by our culture, as it's a competitionand we're the winners.
(33:48):
But that's not how evolution itself works.
Yes, there is competition,but that is not the entire story.
There's also a tremendous amountof cooperation
because no species gets by on its own.
There's no such thing as a separate entitythat.
Yeah, I love that you say there'sno such thing as a squirrel in isolation.
Yeah, that's right.
(34:08):
It needs the tree.
It needs the mushrooms, it needs the bugs.
It needs.And the tree needs all those things too.
And it's all a big web and all related,
so you can't win.
There's no winning this game.
It's a cooperative game.
And that's what people haven't really
appreciated about evolutionis how cooperative it is in evolution.
(34:30):
I now kind of see as one enormousphenomenon,
that life is one big phenomenon.
And you do have
genetic sequester of different snippetsthat are in different organisms,
but they have a lot of overlapand a lot of heritage.
But as the code is being manipulated on one side and evolving, it's
also simultaneously in the full context,
(34:50):
the full connectionevolving somewhere else.
And that reaches to all the branchesthat that node connects to.
It's coevolution.
It's all doing it at once.
It's not in isolation any organisms.
Evolution is completely in the contextof all the other evolutions
that are going on.
And so it's one phenomenonwith a lot of sort of
(35:12):
components and a lot of complexityand a lot of interaction.
We are not standalone creatures.
We are completely dependenton that entire connected,
tangled, incomprehensible web
that we're never going to fully understandand that's not even the point.
To try to do that, we just need to learn
(35:33):
how to live in it and with itin a way that doesn't destroy it.
(35:59):
I think a lot of people increasingly
agree with the statement
that we're part of a web of life,and we all need each other,
and I think that kind of brings usto a really key thing you bring up
that's a bit more uncomfortable andand harder for people to be on board with.
But I want to explore a little with you.
(36:21):
Edward Abbey, the author says endlessgrowth is the mindset of a cancer cell,
and we're talking about this
cancer that has spread throughout humanityand the whole world.
And you talk about thatmetaphor, obviously, in your series
called Metastatic Modernity,but you talk about the limits
of the metaphor of cancer because
(36:41):
modernity is like cancer.
If cancer had some perks, andI think that's what makes it so difficult.
You you have this great list of our likesand our dislikes,
because it's true that modernityor global civilization has allowed us
incredible, you know, access to food,ironically enough, for everyone.
(37:03):
Yeah.
Transportation, climate control,I can adjust, I can,
you know, I'm able to make my roomthe exact temperature
I want at any time,which is pretty amazing.
I can take showers.
I got a smartphone talking with youright now on my laptop.
And then there's a list of thingsthat we don't like
(37:25):
pollution, deforestation, biodiversity
loss, extinctions, climate change,landfills, traffic, parking.
I have to walkif I want to go to my car down the street.
I live in Los Angeles.
I had to walk 15 minutes to get to my car.
It's terrible transportation system.
And also, I actually should mentionthe worst of all you don't have on this
list.
The worst of, our civilization
(37:47):
is obviously the leaf blower.
Right.
I will have to. Yeah, yeah.
I confess to youthat we have newts that cross my driveway,
and when there's a lot of leaf litter,we might run over a newt
because we don't see them.
And so suddenly I'm in this positionwhere it's enough for me, for the newts.
I'm doing a habitat for the newts.
(38:09):
Yeah, but it's it'selectric and quiet and all that. So.
But yes, I never considered thatI might have a leaf blower,
but these newts are worth it.
Well, I can't,I can't be opposed to newts,
but the tempting thing that we havewhen we look at these lists
of our positivesof what modernity brings us
and the negatives, it's like,all right, well, I know how to solve this.
(38:32):
Let's keep the positives.
Let's get rid of the negatives.
And you bring up the pointthat the positives in
the negativesare intrinsically linked with each other.
Now, people, don't like to hear this at first glance.
It's like, okay, are you suggestingwe return to, like, a stone age?
We're going to get rid of allof our medicine and our access to food.
I'm going to have to be freezingall the time.
(38:53):
I'll never take a hot shower again.I'm going to be smelly.
What are you suggesting?
I guess first,
what's your understanding of whythese lists are intrinsically interlinked?
And we can only have onewithout the other?
Yeah, that.
Well, I mean, the first thing to sayis that they just are that way.
I mean, thatwe don't get any of these perks without,
(39:14):
huge chain of material energy,ecological dependencies.
We don't conjure them out of our headsand then just have them
without any impacton the rest of the world.
Where did the materials come from?
What happened in the productionof these devices and their manufacture?
And you know, what chemicals were usedand where did that go?
(39:35):
And what happens to the materialwhen it's done?
And if you want the perks,there are going to be downsides.
Well,so you talked about the newts though.
You want to protect the newts.
So you're engaging in one of thethe dislikes are the materials that had to
be made to create this quiet electricleaf blower so you can protect the newts.
It's just so hardfor us to engage with this reality.
(39:57):
This is an unfortunate reality
that all of the blessings of eternitycome with the curses.
Obviously, it's not simple enoughfor it's like, all right, well,
I guess I'm going to just cutall of the blessings out of my life
and that's going to somehowstop the curses.
That's not the solution either.
And whenever anyone talksabout this kind of thing, you know,
people are always going to bring like,oh, you want us to live in the stone ages?
(40:20):
Why is your answer to that? No.
Well, for one thing,I guess I would say that
we never go backwards, that
we have locked in certain thingsthat we're not going to just forget.
I don't know what the future looks like.
It might have a lot of elementsthat, to a casual observer,
(40:40):
might look kind of Stone age,but it'll have things that a stone age
person has no idea what's going onand why you're doing certain things.
So it's not going to be just an etcha sketch, you know, erase the
all the things that we've done.
There will be carry over.
And I can't really predictwhat that looks like.
And nor is it really productive to trythat hard because we're just the universe
(41:04):
in the way that real things unfoldare never the way we thought they would.
We're just not good at it.
We were good at anticipatingthe consequences that we're now seeing
from all of the things that we've done.
So it's kind of a foolish exercisein my mind to try to nail down
what the future looks like and whatpractices, can and can't persist.
(41:25):
I mean, certain categories,you can understand that
we're probably in the far futurenot using metals.
We're probably using plantand animal material and rock, you know,
things that are at handand part of a regenerative atmosphere.
And, you know, we right noware caught in this modernity period.
(41:45):
We're all products of modernity.
That's not just going to disappear for us.
I mean, I
imagine that I will always live in a houseand I'll always have a driveway
and would need some.
As long as that's true,the newts are going to need protection.
And so I'm already doing it wrong.
But the important thing to recognizeis that this whole system
(42:09):
doesn't changenecessarily by individuals changing.
It changes by replacement
as those accustomed to certain ways die.
And the new babies that come along adaptand adapt
to whatever world they find themselvesin, and it just looks normal.
(42:30):
You do get some carryoverthat the elders will tell the young people
what they're supposed to be doing basedon old ideas, and some of that will stick.
But have you ever met a teenager?
You know, they're quite capableof rejecting
what the older folks are sayingis important?
That's just part of how we're wired.
And so I think we do adapt.
(42:52):
It's going to be a generational adaptationas the conditions on the ground
just really do changeand as new realities become apparent.
And so it's not a matter of the peoplelistening to this.
What are you doing right now that's wrong?
And how should you live right.
You're not going to don't expect to.
(43:13):
What you can do in what I've doneand what I think is
useful,is to fall out of love with modernity
and see it for what it is,and don't be depressed about it.
It's going away because you don'tget depressed if your cancer goes away.
Think of modernity as the affliction
that we hope can disappear with
(43:37):
as little mayhem as possible.
It's not possibleto eliminate all of it, partly
because people are attached to itand it's all they know.
But don't conflate humanity and modernity.
If modernity goes away, it'snot a failure of humanity.
It's the salvation of humanity out
from under this burdensome disease
(43:59):
that is killing the worldand therefore will kill us with it.
And I think if you fall out of lovewith modernity,
you're just going to stop doingsome of the things
just because you don't believe in itanymore.
You don't see the point anymore.
And that will change your behaviors.
And it will help the generational shiftby seeing other ways to view the world.
(44:20):
We shouldn't expect us in our livesto get it right, but we can help
set the path so that we make it easierfor the following generations to change.
And they're not going to get right either.
But eventually we can sort of try to encourage better, more responsible behaviors.
So you're
(44:40):
a teenager jumping around,hooting and hollering,
you just discovered Saturnand you work very hard.
You become an astrophysicist.
You help create a laser
that measures to the millimeter
the moon from the Earth,
and you start to learn
(45:02):
more about the limitations of modernityand that this whole system
that we have builtour society on is going to be reaching
some limits, whether it's peak oilor climate change or population,
that starts to make you concerned that
modernity is going to collapse.
(45:24):
And the reason why you're concerned withthat sounds like was because
maternity is what is holding upthe field of astrophysics,
and you want to protectthat body of knowledge
and the revelations and the understandingthat's come with it.
And now you're retired.
Yeah.
You've gone through this whole journey.
(45:45):
You're retired from one profession,but you are experiencing life
full time and learning and teachingand sharing the message.
In many ways,you should be clear about that.
But now I want you to look back on allthat, because it sounds like
you are.
You're saying like, pickwhat you're rooting for.
You know, the doctor doesn't rootfor the cancer.
(46:06):
You've come to terms
with the collapse of modernityand see that as a potential saving grace.
If we can navigate that collapse.
Well, how do you square thatwith the initial concern
you havewith what that would mean for astrophysics
and our continued understandingand sharing of that?
(46:27):
Yeah, that's interesting to think about.
What do I think about preservingthe astrophysics knowledge?
As you said,that was a large motivator for me.
And not just astrophysics,but our entire scientific edifice
and and all that we've learned.
I don't imagine that we will forget
that the sun is a star.
(46:50):
I don't imagine that we'll forget thatwe move around it.
I don't imagine thatwe'll forget about evolution.
That's something that's
that integral to ecologyand how life works.
I think that's going to becomemore of a focus as it, as it needs to be.
And so I think some of the very keyunderstandings
(47:11):
are going to be hard to erase.
No, we won't havethe same kind of technology.
But nowhere in the contract was it written
that humans would understandcomplete truth.
It's never been in the contractfor any species.
We have brains that have allowed usto get farther along than a lot of others,
(47:34):
but that doesn't mean that
we will arrive at the full destination.
We are incapable of doing that.
And that's okay.
We need to accept thatwe have limitations,
and we need to acceptthat we are a species of stories.
And I expect that future storieswill have elements
(47:55):
of the things that we have learnedthrough our scientific process.
And modernityis not a permanent condition.
It's a stunt. It'sjust a short term stunt.
So that's not forever.
Nor is our current levelof scientific understanding.
And so I've let loose of thatas being the guiding principle.
(48:17):
And now to replace it,it's the amazingness of life.
And when I go out now and encounter
animals and plants and insects and
whatever, I talk to them.
They don't understand my syntax,
(48:37):
I understand it, which is something
I love to tell babybirds chirping in the nest
how awesome they areand how they're going to love flying.
And it's going to be just thisgreat experience.
And so, I'm enjoying it with them in a way.
So I'm trying to connectmore to the life around me, because that's
(49:00):
what I've recognized is more incrediblethan anything we can design.
And we should be humbledand honored by what has emerged.
(50:05):
And. You're someone who
has gone on quite an intellectual odyssey.
Maybe not always knowingwhere it's going to lead,
but you've questiona lot of assumptions you had.
(50:25):
Like you said, you no longer fit in
with the academic worldthat you had been a part of.
How does one navigate their own
intellectual journey?
Yeah, I don't know.
I never set out to do thisparticular journey.
This is how the universe works.It's full of surprises.
Have you navigated with a compass?
(50:47):
Has there been a map?
What's been pulling you or guiding youas you've gone
to these surprising new placesthat you couldn't have imagined?
Yeah, I think the way it works for meis I get little snippets of things
I hadn't thought about beforethat pull me further along.
And so it's not a compass.
I have no idea where I'm heading toor what I'm trying to do.
(51:10):
In fact, my initial forayinto this whole business was,
we're going to solve this with technology,but I'll hit on something that I hadn't
considered before that challengesmy sense of how things are,
and I'll want to follow up on it.
And, you know, it's led me to learna little bit more about indigenous
(51:31):
ways of being, because I think there'sa lot of wisdom there.
It's all these little snippetsthat make me think,
I hadn't thought of it like that before.
And just being open to those redirectsand being honest,
that I don't have all the answersand nobody can have.
That's the other thing.
Nobody can have all the answers,and the best we can do
(51:53):
is put one foot in front of the otherand try not to step on a Inuit,
you know, as we do. So, there's no map.
And in fact, I'm very suspicious of mapsbecause we often confuse
the map for the territory,and I'm much more interested in
putting myself in the territoryand seeing what it's like
without preconceivednotions of what I'm going to find.
(52:17):
And I think that's what
science at its best seems to be.
I'm saying this is someonewho has very low scientific,
ability or comprehensionthat does not come to me naturally.
But, you know, there's
this one aspect of the scientific processcoming from the enlightenment.
My understanding is, is there's excitementlike, oh, this is going to help us
(52:39):
fully understandand therefore fully control
the rest of the chaotic universe.
That's one component of it,but the other seems to be,
which I think you are embodyingso beautifully
is just this commitment
to keeping an open mindand asking questions
(53:03):
and being wary of the storiesthat we are telling ourselves.
And I always questioning like,or is that, you know, as you say,
we are these story creaturesor these beings that require narrative.
That's our strength.That's also our weakness.
So you build this laserjust to make sure, just like,
all right, Einstein,I just want to say I'm just testing.
(53:24):
I'm true.
Is this okay? It's true.
I just I was just asking.
This is like you continue to go downthis route.
You're not following answers.
You just continue to follow questions. And
it seems to me that is such a beautiful
irony of the scientific revolution.
(53:44):
We came to it thinking like, oh, okay,this is great.
Now this is going to really help usconfirm all of our assumptions
about our superiority as a speciesand what we can manipulate and master.
And it seems like there's still
plenty of scientists out there that aregoing down that route, or maybe more.
The people on the politicians and the CEOsthat are funding the scientists
(54:07):
or maybe thinking that,but then the scientific process
and just continually askingthese questions has accidentally,
unexpectedlyled us down this route of being like, oh,
oh my God, the earth orbits the sun.
We're one of many species like David.
That is not what science set out to prove,but by having the questions
(54:31):
be your guide.
It's kind of led down that route,which is pretty incredible
testament to that processwhen done honestly.
Yeah.
But as someone who actually knows
what you're talking about,what's your take on that?
Well, yeah, I think you put it well.
And I think, you know, there are elements,I mean, humans have always been
amazing scientists 100,000 years agobecause we're keen observers.
(54:55):
That's a big, crucial piece of it,is watching what's happening
and trying to piece it togetherand build a model for it.
Now, the model doesn't have to be perfect,
and we tend to take them tooseriously and literally.
But curiosity is really good.
And one thing I would havea lot of students do is
come up with their own questions andnot treat science as a bunch of answers,
(55:16):
but treat it as a way of framing questionsthat are interesting,
questions you really are driven,you want to know,
and you might not be able to know,but just being able to ask
the question is profound and useful.
There are a lot of questions
we're never going to know the answersto, and science has limits that way.
I mean, why is there somethingrather than nothing? Forget it.
(55:38):
We're not going to knowthe answer to that.
We just accept that.
Well, there is and isn't that great.
And I think one thing I also learnedis in scientific talks,
if I would go to a scientific talkor give one, the standard format is
here's all this stuff that we figured outand aren't we great?
You know, we've tied this up and abovethis are pretty boring people.
(56:00):
Not and like
they might appreciate the accomplishmentand some new incremental learning.
But I guarantee you have a scientific talkthat says,
and we still don't know whythis is happening.
And you've got peopleon the edge of their seat now.
They're paying attention
and they're all thinking about it and allwondering, I wonder if this is going on
(56:21):
and on, almost all the questions,even if it was an incidental thing,
almost all the questions at the end are,have you thought about this?
Have you looked at this?You know about that mystery.
So we love mysteriesand that's a good thing.
We just don't need to necessarilyhave the expectation
or the demandthat we resolve all our mysteries.
I think it's healthy to live in mystery,live in uncertainty, appreciate it,
(56:44):
admire it, revel in it.
Well, Tom, I thankyou so much for talking with me today.
I'm really excited for folksto watch the series Metastatic Maternity
to see the follow up writing and dive
deeper on the Do the Math blog.
I really appreciate it and talk with you.
(57:05):
Great.Well, it's nice to have this exchange.
Take care.
Thanks for listening.
Next month we'll get back on the trailand pick up where we left off.
Last time.
Until then,I hope you'll get a chance to rest a bit
(57:27):
and appreciate our good Ole universe.
Maybe talk with the baby bird,tell them about the podcast.
And of course, you can also check outthe Human Nature Odyssey Patreon.
It's a nice place to join otherfellow travelers as we make our way there.
Time and space,and there you'll have access to a whole
(57:49):
nother episode's worth of conversationwith Tom.
There's more to this discussion,and you'll find it on our Patreon.
Your support makes this podcast possible,
so thanks again to Tom Murphy.
And as always, a theme music isCelestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.
You can find a link in our show notes,as well as the link to Tom's Works.
(58:12):
Talk with you soon.
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