Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series. And we are not about to enter into the 4th industrial revolution. If we do things right, we can enter into the age of infinite, infinite possibilities and infinite resources.
The Age of Infinite podcast series is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors and paradigm shift thinking along with innovations and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.
Today, we're going to be exploring an incredible topic, what life has achieved so far and where we need to go next. We have with us today Howard Bloom. How are you, Howard? Good, David. How about you? I'm doing great. Looking forward to this. If you were to learn a little bit about Howard, you're hopefully gonna learn a lot. Howard has an amazing past. He studied intensively everything from theoretical physics to microbiology.
Starting at the age of 10, he then founded one of the biggest PR firms in the music industry representing everybody from Michael Jackson and GISS to Aerosmith and Run DMC. And if you think that being isolated during COVID is challenging, consider that Howard was bedridden for up to 15 years. So that's our introduction to Howard. You can look anything up you'd like online. Howard, do you have an outline for us to work from? Yes. I do. You wanna hear it? I do. I gotta write it down.
Bullet points and 7 requisite 10. Okay. Then we go on from there. Okay. We can go anywhere. The first point, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Number 2. Number 2, 142 mass extinctions. 142 mass extinctions. Number 3. The temperature going rocketing up and down, 80 degrees every 3 hours. 80 degrees every 3 hours. Right. Okay. Number 4. Another climate catastrophe, a massive climate change called summer, winter, fall, and spring. Strophe.
Summer, winter, fall, and spring. Number 5. Number 5 is planetesimals and volcanoes. And volcanoes. Number 6. Number 6 is 400 degrees sea vents. And number 7. Number 7, which is my last one, is, surfing catastrophe and taming disasters. Okay. Disasters. Alright. I am looking forward to this. Number let's start with number 1, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Teach me something. Once upon a once upon a time Yeah. Circling a mediocre yellow star, there was a poison pill of a planet.
It was toxic as you can possibly imagine. And the tox some of the tox just a few of the toxic elements were oxygen, which was a poison, sulfur, which was a poison, and phosphorus, which was a poison. The conditions on that planet were absolutely ghastly. Every 3 hours every 3 hours, the temperature went up or down 80 degrees.
Every 3 hours, you went from one catastrophe, which is being if you were at a single point on that planet, that poison pill of stone, Every 3 hours, you are bathed in something toxic called radiation. Is he is this is it 80 is the 80 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? This is Fahrenheit. Okay. So you got radiation every 3 hours. Yes. 1st, you were in radiation, just swamped with it. Then you were in total darkness, which is equally evil. Yeah. The planet was on this this is a planet.
This point is a pillar stone, this home of toxicity. And because it was its axis was at an angle to its mediocre yellow sun, It went through, climate change beyond belief. And today, we call one of those forms of climate change, summer, winter, fall, and spring. I had a feeling I I had a feeling you were describing Earth. Right. And and this particular porcelain pillar stone had 400 degrees sierence. 400 degrees. But a very strange experiment began on this absolutely impossible planet.
It consisted of magma molecules, figuring out ways to massively socialize and reproduce themselves within lipid envelopes, within fatty little envelopes like the bubbles that a 3 year old loves with a bubble making machine. The whole enterprise was absolutely absurd. How in the world do you work with molecules so big that they contain 1,000,000 or billions of atoms? How in the world do they learn to make copies of themselves?
How in the world do they learn to take sulfur and phosphorus and turn those poisons into pistons in their peculiar form of operation? Well, these megamolecular projects were the first cells, and they took on this planet of disaster. And surprisingly, they managed to thrive, not because the planet was friendly to them. The planet was totally inimical to them. The planet was prepared to tear them apart at any second, to disable them totally.
And yet they learned their way over the disabilities and around the dangers. In fact, they learned to take the dangers and turn them into power sources. And today, that initial project, that absolutely impossible project, the odds against it are infinite. That project today has green and garden, this poison pillar stone, and the poison pillar stone is the earth.
To give you an idea of how poisonous the things in this earth are, when the first cyanobacteria developed about a 1000000000 years ago, 1 to 2000000000 years ago, they took in the things that they could eat and they farted out the things that were toxic to them, the things they couldn't incorporate within their cellular structure. And what's a little fart? Bacterial colony of 7 trillion is the size of your palm, but it's so thin that if it were on your palm, you couldn't even see it.
So what's a little bacterial part? Nothing. But over the course of a 1000000000 years, those toxic parts built up. And because they were poisonous, they killed off almost all the life on earth. The only creatures that survived were boarding house cells, cells that were willing to take in smaller borders who could actually turn this toxic stuff into an energy source. Those are called eukaryotic cells. Inside of them, they have these things we call mitochondria.
Mitochondria take that poison that filled the atmosphere and they turn it into a power source. That poison is called oxygen. That gives you an idea of the extent to which life on this planet has had the obligation of being, of of being catastrophe servers and disaster tamers. So just, the for the I I my background is biology, one of my majors.
The the cell the jump that you took from the bacteria, the 1 to 2000000000 years ago, and their, creation or the excretion of the oxygen, the cells that formed, what made those cells form in this toxic environment? What was the impetus? Do you is there is there any clue? Well, first of all, life takes advantage of all toxins, eventually. Life finds the ways that those toxins are can be instead of poisonous, they can be power source. We don't know how they do it.
We don't know how those first tiny bacteria that were able to eat oxygen and thrive using oxygen evolved. What we do know is the work of limb ergulis, which has proven to the satisfaction of folks in biology today, that large cells that couldn't handle oxygen took in the smaller cells. And today, in every single one of your cells that the descendants of those smaller cells still exist as your power sources using that poison oxygen to power you, and they're called mitochondria. Right.
Yes. So every single cell of you. So we don't know where they came from. We just know that they're there. In the same sense that we don't know where this project of life took place. I mean, remember, at one point, life there was so little life that it would have fit on your thumbnail. And in fact, that was a major achievement for life, going from thoroughly microscopic to the size of your thumbnail.
Just think of how prone that entire project of life, the size of your thumbnail, was to being wiped out utterly. I I had I had never in my life thought about the fact that we started with one cell. Well, we don't know if we started with one cell often. I've got this paper in physical plus, called the Xerox effect, and it demonstrates that in this universe, the same thing the conditions for a certain thing all take place pretty much at the same time.
The result is that we have pretty much the same thing happening everywhere, which means that sales, once the conditions were ripe for sales, could have started all over this planet. We didn't necessarily descend from one tiny little puddle, which is Darwin's view of things, or one tiny common ancestral cell. We may have started from a bunch of ancestral cells. We don't know. So so, just play with me a little bit here. 2 things.
1st, even if ubiquitously happened all over planet Earth, which is a very large sphere in the scope of human beings in the universe. Compared to a bacterium. And compared to bacterias. I've got to believe that even if it happened almost simultaneously, there still was the first one. Yes. That's very likely. There's probably the first one. So the second question, taking that into consideration, the earth was cooling, when he when I think of I'm not gonna say humans.
When I think of there being a ground and a body of water, again, considering the side, a land, and an ocean, I cannot picture, I cannot fathom that on land and water, there was nothing in any of that. Land, there was nothing. The ocean was empty. For the first half 1000000000 years, 500000000 years of this planet's existence, there was no life. And the big and the big question is how the fuck did the light begin? It's the most absurd process you can possibly imagine.
Remember, a self replication, Richard Dawkins has trained us to think in terms of selfish individual genes. There is no such thing as an individual gene. The small genome we know, a genome is a gene team, is 400 genes. And those genes, those 400 genes have to work together to make things happen. No gene has ever assembled anything on its own. Its gene teams have have assembled things.
Plus, the gene teams work with, an exterior structure, the lipid envelope, that envelope with fatty stuff, like a children's bubble. And without the bubble, life as we know it would not exist, and the bubble is self replicating too. So was the was the DNA strand in that first cell that we know of or RNA, was that there in the in the first that we ever conceive of so that it could replicate?
Well, when Lynn Margolis and I were bouncing this around before her death about 5 years ago, what what we thought was probable is first came the lipid envelopes. Now why do we think that? If you take if you grind up bits of the Murchison meteorite, which comes from outer space, and you drop them into a glass of water. They form lipid envelopes, little fatty envelopes immediately, little fatty bubbles.
So Lynn and I felt, and I still do feel, that within those lipid envelopes, there was a special environment that's just a little different than the environment of the sea outside the bubble. And within that special pool, that tiny little pool of water, the genes, the genomes assembled themselves, these giant gene teams and began to do their thing, making copies of themselves. And well liquid envelopes were very cooperative because they basically are weaves of molecules.
Mhmm. And every time it was time to split, they wove an entirely new envelope and buttered it off. Very cooperative. This teamwork, I mean, look, the basic one of the most basic laws of science is the second law of thermodynamics, which says all things tend toward disorder, all things tend to fall apart. The universe is not like that at all. Not at all.
That that law is though though everyone in science bows down to it, prays to it, mutters it every day, that law is thorough bullshit, complete bullshit because the universe tends to assemble things. The universe tends to climb up the stairway of complexity, not tumble down like a slinky.
So you It is a in my I also I can't say that I see that, but yet if in fact we are constantly humans are or species and and if we just use the planet Earth, there is a complexity that has been rapidly has been expanding. So if everything goes to chaos, in my mind, it's okay. So when does it start? Right. And there's no and and and the universe is still expanding. Is this is it gonna go to chaos and fit in another 13,700,000,000 years?
Ward Kelvin's idea that, this is a, a heat death universe, that it's all going to disappear into a vast and, undifferentiated mist is such horse potty. It it so flies in the face of everything we have learned in the science of the last 350 years, the years since the Royal Society was founded in Britain, that it's ridiculous. So in fact, things fall together, they don't fall apart. At the beginning of the universe, we had a big bang. The big bang was not a chaos, far from it.
The big bang the big bang was a rushing sheet of space, time, and speed. Now if you and I had been sitting around at a coffee table at the beginning of the universe, and you had predicted that there will be a pinprick infinitely smaller than a pinprick and it would have all of the universe implicit in it, all of a universe, I I would say, David, you're crazy. You know, we've been sitting here. We've accumulated 40,000 coffee cups so far.
We've been here forever, and there never has been a pinprick smaller than a pinprick, and the notion that there should be one is ridiculous. And the notion, in other words, in the anti universe is even more ridiculous. And all of a sudden, a pinprick is smaller than a pinprick, appears it's a big bang, and it starts whooshing down on a sheet of space, time, and speed.
And within the 10 to the minus 30 seconds, of the universe's existence, That sheet of time, space, and speed precipitates the way a rain cloud precipitates into rain. Mhmm. And it precipitates in the form of quarks and leptons. Now if this were a random universe of 6 monkeys and 6 type of universe, since there are gazillions of quarks, you'd expect gazillions of different forms of quarks.
And you would expect them to come in forms so radically different from each other that they couldn't have anything to do with each other. And that's not what it's asking. Structured. Yeah. Structured. Yeah. It's 16 different forms of quarks with a gazillion identical copies of each of those, 16 different quarks. 16 year quarks is not a 6 monkeys at 6 hybrids universe.
It is universe falling together and creating form at each step of its development, creating form, and then something else happens. This is a communicative, gossipy, conversational, social cosmos, and those quirks cannot exist on their own. And they come with little etiquette books built into them, rules about who to avoid and who to who to hang out with.
And they immediately come together in groups of 3 by avoiding those that their etiquette books say you should shun, and gathering with those the etiquette will say, you should get together with. And those threesomes turn out one form of threesome turns out to be some radically new property that is nowhere implicit in the properties of courts, and it's called a proton.
And another form of these threesomes is comes out in the form of something there also is not predictable from space, time, speed, and quarks. And it's a neutron. And this universe is so profoundly social that if those neutrons do not find omega, if they don't pair up socially in the first ten and a half minutes of their existence, they are overvalued. Behind. They go through what is called beta decay.
And this process of the same thing happening all over the universe continues 300000 years after the Big Bang. Up until then, things have been like a bumper car smash up. Objects have been smashing at each other and ricocheting off of each other at speeds that are beyond comprehension. That's called heat. By 300,000 to 380,000 years into the universe's existence, things slow down. That's called cooling.
And you and I are at a coffee table at the beginning of the universe, and we're 300000 years into the universe's existence, and you come up with one of your wacky predictions, and you say, you see those things that, relatively speaking, are the size of Empire State Buildings? Yeah, I do. They're all over the place. They're banging into each other. And you see those tiny little things that, relatively speaking, are the size of your fist? Yeah, I see those too.
They've been around for 300000 years now. So what's new? And you say, well, I predict that any minute now things are going to slow down to the point where those gigantic things discover they have an inanimate longing. And the little tiny things are gonna discover they have an inanimate longing, and the inanimate longing of the tiny things is going to precisely fit the inanimate longing of these gigantic things, 1800 times their size. David, I know you've lost it. I know you've lost it.
This is, it's homocentrism. It's anthropomorphism. We are we are forbidden anthropomorphism in science, and that's exactly what you're using right now. And all of a sudden, things slow down, and guess what happens? The gigantic things discover they have an inanimate longing, a social urge. The tiny things discover they have an inanimate longing, a social urge. And the giant things and the tiny things get together. And what does that produce?
It doesn't produce things with the qualities of the giant things, which are protons, or the tiny little things, which are electrons, doesn't produce that at all. It produces something radically new that we call an atom or that we call hydrogen, that we call helium. And the same thing happens in identically the same way all across the face of the universe. Later on, the universe will start sweeping things together with gravity.
It will start sweeping these new atoms together with gravity in massive, massive clouds that look like lumpy potatoes or that actually have spiral arms. Those things are galaxies. And no matter where you look, you will find these galaxies all over the universe. And then those sweet things start coming together with the great gravity crusades. The great gravity forces. So so where Let me let me let me stop you for a minute.
So Okay. To get this straight, we've got simultaneously throughout this universe or this, the space that we have. The cooling, because it happens at the slowing down happens at the the same time. Pretty much the same time. They're everywhere. In relative terms. It therefore causes a reaction because of that cooling that creates the atom. And Well, the the cooling creates the conditions. The right.
It creates a condition for the atoms to be formed, which would not have and then what you're suggesting is and I would have thought differently, but you're suggesting is that gravity was not there at the beginning, but gravity came later on? Or was Yeah. Oh, okay. So Gravity was gravity was implicit from the beginning. Okay. Gravity didn't rear its head and start to operate until the formation of the atoms. And then the atoms began to get together in wisps of gas.
Yep. And then then began the great gravity crusades. A big wisp of bat gas would go up against a small wisp of gas. A big wisp of gas would have more gravitational attraction than a smaller wisp of gas, and what astronomers call cannibalism would begin to take place. The bigger whisks would swallow the smallest, and that's would be even even larger so that the next time they went into a head to head match with another wisp of gas, they would win, hopefully.
So so, is the formula where are are we describing also that because of the size of the are you talking about the size of the mass, the mass ends up creating a larger gravity condition? Yes. Therefore, both okay. So I just just trying to translate it into my English. So we now have we have mass attracting another Masses attract masses. Masses are the masses are going head to head with each other. Right. So they're And the bigger ones are are winning. Are winning.
And bigger ones are bulking up even more. And eventually, this creates gravity balls. And some of those gravity balls are so humongous that their gravity allows them to chew apart the atomic nuclei in their heart. And we perceive the screams of these dying atomic nuclei as what we call light. So that's when light first appears in the universe. And these giant sweepings are galaxies. Within the galaxies, more gravity crusades are taking place. The winners are suns.
Some losers make a deal with the winners. If I hang around you at a certain distance and am obedient to you, will you let me live? And the answer is yes. And those are planets. And then some other gravity balls make a deal with the planets. It's the same deal. If I hang around to a certain distance and speed. Those are the moons. Yeah. So at every step, we don't see a disintegrating universe. So we're seeing we're seeing excuse me for jumping in.
We're seeing Okay. According to what you're saying. And and the reason I'm doing this is I I actually have said this to myself. There are people like you out there in the world who actually think about this. And I and I say that jokingly to myself.
What you're saying is that the construct of the, the law of thermodynamics saying that we move towards chaos, demonstrably is inaccurate because through 1,000,000,000 of years, we are seeing not a, a breakdown, but yet a structured order where no matter where we go in the universe, we will find the atom moving and, the atom and gravity coexisting to create these clusters. These clusters create these suns. The suns have a structural order. It could it doesn't have to be circular.
It could be elliptical, but there's some formation where they're allowed to stay as long as they stay within that the amount of, gravitational pull. Eventually, they degrade or the sun explodes, but this order is a simultaneous or is a a construct that no matter where we look as we know it today, it is all structured. So, therefore, the second law of thermodynamics is is inaccurate because we have not seen it. Right. We've seen the opposite. So and that's what you're saying.
Yeah. Those galaxies, as huge as they are, tens of 1,000,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000,000 of stars, they are gathering in larger herds, in herds of galaxies. Group behavior, social behavior is all over the place even among galaxies. These are called galaxy clusters. So but on earth, this poison pill of stone, we have this astonishing act of self assembly, far more astonishing than the assembly of galaxies, stars, and planets or atoms. And it is these macromolecules, these huge molecules.
A genome is a single molecule. Yeah. A genome can consist of 400 genes to 48,000 genes. It's a single molecule. It's a gene team. And how in the world those gene teams assembled? And how in the world they got the skill of reproducing themselves is beyond my comprehension. And I've been so Come on. Come on, Howard. Come on, Howard. You know, I you're gonna you're gonna tell the story, and then you're not gonna have the end? Oh my god.
I I feel I I I don't know I don't know I don't know if that should continue. You you've you've you've run into a brick wall for me. I get it. But the the the point is that life is so resilient in what it does. It is so good at taking advantage of catastrophe and the disaster. It is so good at harvesting climate change and all the other catastrophes on this planet that it has continued to grow and it has greened the garden of the place.
Now we think that we've run out of resources and we've run out of space and we are poisoning the planet, and that's ridiculous. Because for every ounce of biomass, of living stuff on this planet, there are 100,000,000 ounces of dead stuff just waiting to be kidnapped, seduced and recruited into the process of life. Because that's what life is all about. Life isn't materialistic. It is constantly conquering dead stuff and turning it into living stuff.
So just I wanna step back for one moment because we're going to be moving all the way through the age of infinite possibilities in the future, so I'm getting it. With the hypothesis, and I'm going to let's, there is the second law of thermodynamics, so let's call this the Howard Bloom law. And there's probably some other name, but let's just call it the Howard Bloom law. Right. If everything in space has this construct that and I and I I'm picturing bands going out.
So there's the band of the the big bang. There's the band of the proton. There's the band of the atom and and on and on. We got to a point where a planetary group of conditions caused a complex structure, even more complex, more orderly to exist on Earth. This is a personal question. You could take it scientifically or personally. Right. Do you therefore then believe that throughout the universe at this that time in in history, the 13,700,000,000, years later Right.
This happened universally throughout the universe. The odds are extremely good. 99.9%. That's what I thought you were gonna say. Over the Because because it has it has to be congruent But You don't believe it? Have any evidence for life of any place else. Yeah. But your con your cons be all for the history of the universe. Yeah. So your construct your construct has to be you can't stop the construct that Earth.
You have to use that same construct across all universes not all universes, all galaxies, all planets, and that, therefore, someplace else in the universe, hydrogen I mean, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus, and a planet like this or another planet with another series created a similar type of development? That's the natural conclusion. Okay. I don't believe it because we have no evidence for life elsewhere. But here's our obligation.
Okay. We are the first forms of life to have consciousness, and we are the first forms of life capable of taking life to other poison pills of stone, to other hostile gravity balls. And, you know, bacteria are just as clever as we are. We're in a race with them for research and development all the time.
The COVID crisis, the coronavirus crisis is a demonstration of the extent to which the microbial world manages to outpace us in research and development, and we just barely manage to catch up and get ahead. But so bacteria can do all kinds of astonishing things. Plus, bacteria know what we, with our environmental movement, have totally forgotten. They know that life is just the thinnest of skins right now on this planet.
It took us 4000000000 years to get here, but we have barely, barely scratched the surface. We don't know that. We think we're running out of resources. Bacteria do know that. So there are bacteria 12 miles beneath your feet right now, turning granite and other dead stuff into life stuff, turning it into food. They know that the resources are almost infinite. Not infinite, but very close. No. You could do you could use you can resort to infinite. That's the name of our program.
Right. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'll let you that one. I'll give you that one. Right. So meanwhile, the one thing we can do the bacteria cannot do, that sparrows, eagles, and hawks cannot do is we can lift life beyond the gravity well. We can lift life beyond the atmosphere. And once you get beyond the atmosphere and beyond the gravity well, you can go anywhere with just a small amount of energy. And what is our obligation? To carry life to other hostile, impossible gravity falls.
So it can take root there. We are life's messenger. We are life's transportation. So okay. So I'm gonna make just, and I am not that I'm interrupting, but I am interrupting. When your the terminology you're using, I want to clarify.
When you say it is our obligation to take life, I think the assumption when you say that would be to take human life, but I believe you told me that I believe that what you're saying is on the spacecraft, on the the walls, and everywhere, we're going to be bringing all sorts of life with us that will end up inadvertently or inadvertently. We will have a virus or we will have a bacteria or we will have something that goes to another planet that potentially has the ability to succeed. Right.
And, look, the minute we put a human into space, my friend Buzz Ald, for example, has been up there. Yeah. We have launched an ecosystem. What do I mean? You and I are a 100,000,000,000,000 cells. 90,000,000,000,000 of those cells don't even claim to be us. They're bacterial colonies and without them we cannot survive. In our gut, those bacterial colonies make our vitamin Ds or vitamin Ps or vitamin Ks. They take food. You go down to the local store and you've got an urge.
You really want a chocolate egg layer. You haven't had one in a long time. You take it back home when you eat it. What are you actually doing? You're actually chewing this stuff so it's digestible by bacteria that can digest what you can't digest. You just bought groceries for the bacteria. They are using you as a transport system to bring them groceries. Meanwhile, what they excrete is glucose, which just happens to be the fuel that your body runs on. So take a human into space.
You've taken an ecosystem of the space. But what I'm advocating, I have this manifesto that I wrote. It's a visual manifesto, a 100 pictures and only 28 100 words, and it's called Garden of Solar System Green the Galaxy. And it's about the obligation to take arms with us wherever we go. For example, on the moon, where you wanna build the moon hut. To allow humans to live on that moon hut, they've got to garden.
They've got to garden their own vegetables and fruits so that they they are not living off of, nutrient poor foods like the freeze dried foods that NASA sends into up to the International Space Station, Even on the International Space Station, the Russians have had a gardening experiment going for at least 7 years, and we've had gardening experiments going up there too. And the astronauts like to raise flowers because it makes things pretty.
But, you know, the pictures that you see of space are pictures of people in tin cans. People cannot live in tin cans.
There's this thing that E. O. Wilson, the father of associate in biology, calls biophilia, and there's a whole bunch of research that demonstrates that if you take a bunch of hospital patients in rooms that look out over brick walls, and you compare them with hospital patients who have rooms overlooking a park, the hospital patients who have a room overlooking a park are going to, heal faster Mhmm. And live longer.
Similar to similar to bringing animals into hospitals or old age homes or nursing homes. They Right. Exactly. They they for some reason, the biological connection causes humans to thrive. To flourish. It helps us flourish. So we need to take these green things with us. And once they are up there, remember life's enormous skill is to take the task and turn it into opportunity.
So God knows what they are going to do with 1 sixth the gravity of Earth on the moon, with 1 third the gravity of Earth on Mars, with the radiation conditions on the moon and Mars. Lord alone knows that there have been a 142 mass extinctions on this planet. So we're now wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. We're moving to number 2. Okay. Right? We're moving to number 2. We're on a 142 mass extinctions. Which and and so those mass extinctions have wiped out an awful lot of species.
But other species have not only survived, they have thrived. Look what you know, we had we humans were born in an ice age. And the peculiar thing about us is that unlike the other primates with whom we were living in Africa, we had wanderlust. At least a certain percentage of us had wanderlust. And we had a wanderlust that involved taking on the impossible disasters of the new ice ages and using them as opportunities. So humans went what's called paraglacial.
We started living on the edge of glaciers, the tons of the ice stage itself, the tons of catastrophe. And in our own time, in the last 6000 years, there are people who have adapted to living very close to the North Pole. They live off of walrus, which have also adapted to living at the North Pole, or they wouldn't be there. And they, they they have built these incredible buildings with tremendous thermal properties, igloos, or at least they used to in the past.
Now they're living in huts like the ones that we used and we wanna put on the moon. And humans have a tendency to reach out to disorder and to massive problems and turn them into opportunities, not over the course of necessarily just one generation or one lifetime, but over the course of several generations or even 100 of generations and lifetimes. So to step back one second just because I don't wanna leave this question. You say there's a 142.
Right. I'm I'm I'm completely illiterate in this except for Right. The the we all hire the general, the dinosaur extinction. Can you give me 2 of your favorites of extinction? Well, I I don't study these extinctions either. As you can see, I'm more on the positive side of things. But but they did end up changing by a lot. 65000000 years ago, the darks we all know the story. The dinosaurs were standing around doing their thing.
Actually, climate conditions were so radically different on this planet that dinosaurs were living in in not tropical, but intermediate climatic conditions at the South Pole. And all of a sudden, if the current theory is right, a meteor showed up in the sky and whomped into the earth in the Gulf of Mexico and, destroyed the conditions under which dinosaurs live for at least the next 3 years, and the dinosaurs died. And according to current theory, you all know this.
Mhmm. These tiny little rodents that have been living scuttering around under the dinosaurs' feet and managing to survive the dinosaurs by coming out at night, not during the day, all of a sudden, they had the planet to themselves or so the theory goes. And those are your ancestors and mine, these little rat like things. Yeah. They were insectivores. Is there is there another one that you can share with me? Because I'm interested, and I can look it up later, but I'm just wondering.
Do you know one other mass Well, there are apparently there are this is highly hypothetical. Actually, there's a lot of proof, but it's still hypothetical. And that is that there were 2 ice ballers periods of ice ballers. And in those two periods, the ice on the at the equator was point well, it was a kilometer thing. Okay. And life has a difficult time under those circumstances. And yet life seems to survive one of those ice ball earths.
So, well and and you know that if you go to the south pole or the north pole and you take samples of the seawater under the ice, you'll find all kinds of bacteria. Yes. And and then what and I think it's it's at least a kilometer. I don't know the true depth, but, in the South Pole, you're talking at least a kilometer thick. And the bacteria are, don't mind at all. They don't wear fur coats. They don't look for a central heating. They're having a good time there.
Just like just like the bacteria down at the bottom of the ocean where the thermal shafts are. Yeah. Exactly. We're absolutely impossible conditions. So remember, not only is the temperature 400 degrees down there, which is way above boiling, and it can be way above boiling because the pressure is so high. So the pressure is something like 40 times the pressure closer to the surface of the sea. And if you were you know, I were to step out of a bathyspope or step out of one of those gizmos Yeah.
We would be crushed. We would crush the size of a tennis ball Yeah. In a very short amount of time. And we wouldn't find living under those circumstances easy. In fact, we'd be dead. Yes. Nonetheless, bacteria are living and thriving there, and shrimp are eating the bacteria. And tube worms, these things 3 feet long that look like, red tapes, are thriving there.
And so life manages to take advantage of all kinds of bizarre conditions, and it will be interesting to see how life will take on the lesser gravity of Mars and the moon, radiation conditions of Mars and the moon. But one way or the other, we're gonna go there and say, and we have to go there to say it's our obligation on behalf of all living things to go there and take as many other species as we can with us with the exception of in insects who I'm not fond of. Do do do you know Yossi Amin?
Yes. Why do I know Yossi Amin? Yossi out of Israel has SpacePharma, and I don't know if it was on the show with us. I was just recommending him to somebody the other day. Yeah. I think we might have spoken about him when we spoke earlier. I don't know. The Yossi was on the program and I'd visit him in Israel, but one of the not but one of the things he shared with me is when we have put in microgravity his laboratory experiments, nerves grow 10 times longer than they would. Amazing. Ten times.
Astonishing. Right. That's amazing. The challenge becomes is we're looking to regenerate nerves. Yet if we're up with 10 times, that's an issue. And if we're going to bear children or a Right. Or a creature of any type is going to reproduce, that messaging system might be different or at least understood differently. And that Well, if we're gonna bear children, we're gonna have to have artificial gravity because, you're gonna go into it. I know.
But we have its embryos break up in a woman's womb if they don't have gravity. Yes. They they they take for granted an embryonic embryonic development takes for granted gravity, and you can't take gravity for granted up there. So, you know, the old space ships the space stations that picture with great big bicycle wheels that were constantly turning and producing artificial gravity. At some point, we're going to need to start actually building those things.
And they're not on anybody's well, they were on the drawing board of the Gateway Foundation or something like that. They called it the Von Braun station. They do now have a new name for it. But, they're still at the PowerPoint stage. They're not actually producing any hardware, that I know of.
Oh, and and I and that's where and to some degree with Project Moon, it was we're trying to help individuals understand some of this there's more complexity that that in order to be space faring, we need to understand and to see imagery that people, that companies are tossing around saying we're going to build the first in space, and we're going to do this in the next 25 years.
We're not close to these type of circular gravitational space, objects that we can live in that type of environment today. We're not that close. Most advanced in in habitat building is Bob Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada. And he has been actually building structures for space, for 15 years. Unfortunately, his wife died 3 months ago, and he let everybody at the company go.
And we hope that after the coronavirus crisis is over, he has the option, to come back into it and keep the company going because he's ahead of anybody else. I I had asked somebody just recently because they had brought up this, the condition, and I thank you for the clarity there. I did not know what happened, and I don't study this research wise. It was just I heard it in passing that Bigelow had closed. So now there's an explanation to it. So thank you. Right.
So, hopefully, it will open when when this is over, but he's not doing artificial gravity stations at all. He's doing great big bubbles in space. So let's take the 142 mass extinctions. Let's carry it forward. What where are we gonna go from there? Well, we have to understand, first of all, that climate change is a natural part of this planet, that we can actually use the resources of space to utterly utterly abnegate, utterly wipe out all human contributions to climate change.
We can do it by harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it to earth using microwaves, like the microwaves that power your cell phone, absolutely harmless microwaves. If we do that, we can, again, eliminate all man made carbon emissions, all man made greenhouse gas emissions. We can eliminate the use of fossil fuels for energy production. And according to my partner in this for 4 years, Doctor. APJ Kalam, the 11th President of India, we can lift 2,000,000,000 people out of poverty.
And the Chinese, if we think that's impractical, the Chinese have committed to doing it. They want to dominate the space energy sector by 2,035. They have their 1st factory. It's been in operation for roughly a year, making nothing but components for space solar power, the harvesting of solar power in space and sending it down to earth.
Since that's the multi $1,000,000,000,000 industry, the energy industry, whoever dominates that industry is very likely to dominate the mid part of the 21st century. And John's do you know John Strickland? I don't I don't know if you know John. John Strickland is a yeah. He's my he's the chief analyst for the group that Buzz Aldrin committed to being found 15 years ago. Okay. John John and I did we did a podcast on the logic behind moon power, satellites and, along with solving climate change.
So, yes, that's a it's viable technology. Absolutely. Right. And John has worked out ways to do construction in space. I'm not sure that they're the ways that construction is actually gonna be done. There's something called an arcanaut, which is going to go up into space and start building trusses In space, trusses are the base of anything that you build, and I believe it's supposed to go up in the next year, which is slow because actually, here we are.
We've got up right now, Elon Musk is building the first real spaceship. It's called the Starship, and it's capable it's built to hold a 100 people on their way to Mars, or to carry a 100 roughly a 120 tons of cargo, which so outclasses everything else that has ever been done that it's ridiculous. Most things are a big deal. Most rockets are a big deal if they carry 6 tons in space. 6 tons is a fleet compared to 120 ton elephant.
And those ships, you can see pictures of them, you can follow the construction of them every day. Elon felt that the real challenge was not to create the Starship, it was to create the assembly line that produced thousands of these Starships because the Starship could also take you point to point from New York to Shanghai, in 45 minutes or less. So and that's one of the things that Elon is planning as a source of cash flow so that he can do his real project.
And his real project is building the beginnings of a city on Mars with these Starships. So these Starships radically changed the name of the game, but what we're missing is infrastructure on the moon on Mars. We need construction equipment to build habitats. We need habitats. We need gardens. We need farming up there.
We need ice harvesting equipment because this ice, we think, at the south pole of the moon, and the Chinese were busy exploring that possibility right now on the edge of the biggest crater, in the solar system, which is at the south pole of the moon, which is where the water is supposed to be.
So we need ice harvesters to take in the ice from the moon and to turn it into breathable oxygen, into drinkable water, and into rocket fuel so that you can take a starship, to the moon and you can refuel it there and you can either come back to Earth or you can go to Mars or you can go to Jupiter or you can go to Europa. One of the moons of, Jupiter, if I'm right. I always get these moons mixed up. There's a there's a 79 moons around Jupiter, I think it is.
Amazing. So and Europa has oceans, and we think they're water oceans. They might be long. They might be methane oceans. But one way or the other, here we are, the only life forms capable carrying life beyond the gravity well to other poison pills of stone. And what has life's imperative been ever since it was all of life on earth was the size of your dumb man? It has been to kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead out dead animals as you can and bring them into the grand enterprise of life.
And that is our job to advance that cause on other poison builders now. So the so the the jump we took a jump from being complex and going to complexity. Now we're the premise is that the next iteration is because we're able to take complexity or takes difficult environments and to survive and thrive through them, that our next journey is to take the construct of the species on Earth and bring them to other planets where they will learn to thrive and grow also. Right. Exactly.
And other moons as well. And other moons. It's very much it's very much like what we did when the first ice ages, hit us 200, 200000000 years ago. And 2 100,000,000, I get my figures all mixed up, my 1,000,000 and my 1,000. But a long time ago, 200000 years ago, we became modern humans. And, it's very much like the catastrophe of the ice ages where we actually tracked huge distances to get to the glaciers and live on their edges.
We became human by thriving on catastrophe, and that's that's our job. And it's our job to take life wherever we possibly can. Johnny, we are the Johnny Appleseeds of faith. I I maybe it's not our job. Maybe it is what is we we are. I'm gonna use a different analogy. We have a laborer we have a black lab. Our son has a black lab, but stays very often. And when she sees an animal, she's not looking to eat it. She just has a natural inclination to attack it.
She does not she does not think about it. It her her eyes blaze over, and she goes after it. And she will fight a squirrel. She will fight whatever because that's her natural inclination. So what you're suggesting is that and I'm not going to say our DNA, but built into us is to to humankind in some in some individuals more than others is this natural inclination to need to go. Right. There's the, blue and old blueism. An agent that looks up goes up. An agent that looks down goes down.
Right now, we're looking down. We have to start looking up. That is much more of a biological imperative than it sounds. If you watch, 2 lizards, 2 male lizards going up against each other in a battle for dominance, It's a battle to see who can break nature's most basic law, gravity, the best. It's a head bobbing contest, and he who gets his head up the highest wins. And when he wins, he goes through a total whole ship.
The hormones of victory flood his system, and he looks for the highest thing around and stands on it like the lion king on the cliff overlooking the kingdom of all that he surveys. The lizard who loses also goes through the hormonal ship. He has the hormones of defeat. He turns brown. The lizard that won turns a bright green. The lizard that loses turns brown, and he hugs the ground as if he wanted to crawl a hole or dig a hole and crawl into it.
Just the same thing you and I think were depressed. If you watch 2 lobsters, 2 male lobsters go up against each other for dominance because lobsters have dominance hierarchies too. Again, he who wins is he who defies for nature's most base basic law of gravity, the best. And see who gets his head off the highest. So and so the idea that we aspire to things on high, that's not just built into us.
That's built into all complex biological creatures, all multicellular creatures with hierarchical systems, and hierarchical systems seem to be built into us, and they seem to have been built into us for about 550,000,000 years. That's how basic this drive towards the sky is. And once upon a time, a bunch of loony dinosaurs, did something that they did in biological terms, but I'm gonna sum it up in anthropomorphic terms.
But those anthropomorphic terms are directly correspond with what happened biologically. There was a bunch of useful loony dinosaurs who wanted to take to the sky, and their parents were conservatives. Their parents were ecological ecology lovers. And their parents basically would have said, if you were one of their parents, why are you going up there? There's nothing up there. Take a look. There's nothing to eat. You can't eat clouds, and that's all that's up there. There's no place to stay.
There's no place for shelter. None. There's no foothold in the sky at all. All you're going to do is die. You're wasting your time and energy. Look. The earth is good to us. She's our mother. She is rich. She gives us stuff to eat. She gives us places to find shelter. Stick to the earth. And those loony dinosaurs did what the parents told them not to and took to the skies.
And the result is that the conservative dinosaurs who hog the brain of the earth mother earth have been gone for 65000000 years. Gone. Totally. And how many of the loony dinosaurs who flew have you seen today when you were walking outdoors? Yep. I I I I I love the story because I I'm picturing these, they didn't have TikTok back then, and they didn't have some of these other but they they were counter to the beliefs of their parents.
And nature has given us other ways to indicate how she favors breaking the rules. The creatures of the sky, that includes both birds and sky mammals, bats, live 60% longer than the creatures of the earth, 60% longer. And there are more species of them than there are of us earth crawling mammals. So what does that entail? There are more ways of making a living in the sky than there are making a living on the earth, and nature favors those. Nature loves those who oppose her most.
And by opposing gravity, just the way all our kin on this planet have opposed gravity, we will be doing nature's work. Nature has built that aspiration for the sky into us the way she's built it into lizards and lobsters.
For another call, you and I, I would like to hear, and I'm just saying this out loud because I don't wanna forget it, is I'd love at some point to discuss this privately about or maybe at the end your take on the transition to, artificial intelligence or technology robotics and some of the theories that maybe Elon has put out. I'm using that name just because it's a well known name.
So we won't go into now because I wanna get back to number 3, which is temperature shifts 80 degrees every 3 hours. Okay. That was back in the early stages of this planet. The planet today, we have 24 hour days. Back then, we had 3 hour days. The planet was moving around the excess much faster. And so you went from being flooded with radiation for 3 hours to utter darkness. And when you transition from the radiation flood to the utter darkness, wham, the temperature went down 80 degrees.
3 hours later, when you transition from the utter darkness to being flooded with radiation, wham, the temperature went up 80 degrees. And life not only survived under these conditions, life thrived under these conditions. And we're not entirely sure how because people who study the origins of life don't look at these massive climate changes, Day and night, we call them today. Summer, winter, fall, and spring, we call them today.
But look how far our creatures have gone to adapt to summer, winter, fall, and spring. Some birds fly 6,000 miles to get from a warm place, to a place that is going to be warm, to to get from a place that's about to be chilly to a place that's about to be warm. That monarch butterflies, which grow in Ontario and New York State. Over the course of 4 generations, they fly 2,000 miles. These tiny little things.
It's impossible to believe that they carry enough energy in their bodies to accomplish anything like that at all. And their their means of flight is not energy efficient. Not at all. And yet they manage to fly, roughly, a 1000 miles for each generation that and end up in the same forest in Mexico, that is astonishing, and it's an adaptation to, guess what, climate change. So, yes, we can use yeah. Do you do you think well, I don't know how to I'm trying to find the way to ask the question.
Let me make a statement on the question. Climate change is impacting everything ocean in the oceans from mass migrations to where creatures are spawning. They're moving more north if the temperature is getting too warm. They're changing their condition, and some of them are going extinct up to 200 species per day. They the numbers I've heard go extinct.
So do is there in this calculation in a possibility of the rapid transition that we're making could be that 1 and you probably know the the construct where humans actually make the biggest mistake of all so they never get to where they wanna go. Do you think that that could be a possible outcome? You know what I'm asking?
I think that what's gonna I think that what's gonna happen is unless our civilization, western civilization, begins to realize the astonishing things that it has done and begins to see its obligation to do even more astonishing things in the future, the Chinese are gonna own this territory, and they're gonna own the 21st century. After all, they have plans, for example, for space solar power. They have plans to colonize the entire solar system. Serious plans. They intend to achieve these things.
We don't have any long range plans like that. Our Artemis program to reach the moon is silly because it's about getting to the moon, but what do you do when you get there? There's no, there's nobody's building a habitation. Nobody is putting is building construction equipment for the moon. The moon has wicked circumstances that would destroy a caterpillar machine of any kind because the dust is the most, corrosive, stuff that you've ever seen.
And if it gets in your spacesuit within 3 hours, your spacesuit is unusable. Yep. And that was one of the challenges that Buzz Aldrin had. I I I'm just sharing this. I believe you I I met Buzz Buzz at the first ever space meeting I went to, which was a PhD meeting more than it was a a space meeting. And one of the things that was on the landing on the moon that is not discussed often, I didn't know any of this, is that their space suits were binding up. Right. The space dust tears things apart.
It's like glass. Yeah. It is just corrosive. It's you know, the carborundum sandpapers that you get for really heavy duty sanding? Mhmm. Well, it's like, got a whole planetary body or a whole heavenly body that's covered in that stuff, 3 feet deep, and the car's kind of thing that that that's on your harbor under the sandpaper, and that sandpaper can tear things apart. So let's the the question is a little different, but I wanna touch on what you've just said.
One of the challenges that I look at in terms of if we're gonna compete east and west, and I'm looking more at Earth as one total, is the, China itself. It's not all of Asia. China has the 2035 dream. Right. China has the belt and road. If you were to go around the planet, maybe you could help me here because I'm asking if you know of any other.
I would argue that no other country in the world has defined the industries that the society should go into to be ready for the 21st the continuation of the 21st century. No other, country on the planet has a full fledged plan to dominate and move forward as compared to the the Chinese. Do you know of any The Chinese no. The Chinese are the only ones. The Belt and Road Initiative pulls together 60 countries and 3 point 3,600,000,000 human beings. It's a really grand vision.
And it and it is it's a competition against the west because the west runs the seas. So now you can get to Europe, which is the number one trading partner for China, and they can do that in 17, 18 days as compared to a boat from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Rotterdam, which is 32? Well, they're planning on having high speed rail that will go all the way from the factory towns of China, to Lisbon and Spain.
And do it in 2 days so that they can ship their products from their factories out to Europe and continue to flood Europe with well made products, that have come in at a price that otherwise would not be affordable in case of cell phones, for example. And we have to we have well, there are lots of things we have to do, but we have to have a president who has a vision. And instead, we have a president who has, lobotomy. That can be a bit of a problem.
The one person who has plans of this sort is Elon Musk, and his plan is for speed on Mars and for thousands of starships, taking off of regular intervals intervals for the destination of your choice, whether the station destination is Shanghai or the moon or Mars. So he's going to provide the transportation system. He knows that all he knows is the transportation. We need we need more than that. We need the whole ecosystem. And and and by the way, that's project Moon Hut.
Just Well, that's interesting. I mean, that's what we're doing. For 6 years. So we'll go over that another time. What I my question was the a bigger question, and I think you study these things a lot more than I do. So I I'm asking, and I maybe I'm not saying it as well as I'd like to. There is a theory that humankind has, or earth and life on earth has chances to succeed and not. So we jumped over the 1st hurdle, and we jumped over the 2nd hurdle.
We jumped over the 3rd, and there is there are hurdles. And there's one belief that unless humankind makes a few alterations, we could poof out of existence before we actually achieve getting there. Right. There is a theory of what do you know what that name is called? There's a theory of that that it poofs out? Okay. Well, there is one. Do you this is a hopeful, I I don't know your age, but this is a do you believe humankind will make the race in time? I believe it will make the race in time.
I don't wanna see the Chinese doing it. I would prefer to see us doing it. Chinese values are very different from ours, and they are, dictatorial. They are anti free speech, as you can tell from what's happening in Hong Kong right now. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years, just so you know. So my Right. That has been my home. It's an agony. So I I talk to my friends every day. Right. And and I suffer for their agony.
I would not wanna have to go through what they're going about to go through. It's But but I don't want the world to go through what with what they're they're about to go through. And the purpose of the Belt and Road is not only to speed commerce. It is to speed, the sway of Chinese ideas and the Chinese autocratic way of doing things and to spread that around the world in place of democratic values. Mhmm. And I prize democratic values.
I mean, I'm Jewish and the only thing we've got is language and our ability to use it. And if you cut off our free speech, you cut off our creativity. Mhmm. And and I'm Jewish too, so the combination, historically of that ability to be able to innovate and create. So with the so let's get back on to the topic. So we've just covered actually number 4 too, another mass catastrophe spring, winter, summer, fall. You've got the number 5 is what we're on.
Well, that's the volcanoes and the volcanoes and planetesimals. Look. This was Well, what's the I've never heard of a planetesimal. Okay. A planetesimal is, also known as a meteor. It's a it is a gravitational it's a gravity ball. And it's a gravity ball that is so large that, our planet attracts it. And once because it attracts it, that gravity ball comes smacking into our gravity ball, like a tablespoon hitting a pudding. Makes a big, big, big splat.
And this planet, which formed from planetesimals, which formed from these meteors that it managed to swallow whole from its winnings in the great gravity crusades. The great gravity crusades were still going on with it when this planet formed. And the result was that when life began, it looks like these planetesimals were still smacking into the Earth's surface. Now for Earth, every planetesimal that's smacked into its surface was a victory.
It means it was able to swallow another gravity ball and to bulk up, making it more capable of swallowing even more gravity balls. But what was a victory for Earth, was a catastrophe for life. Mhmm. And yet life lived through these catastrophes. And if life can do it and mankind cannot, that would be awful. We should be capable of doing anything that early life was able to do and more because of our qualities of imagination, consciousness, and technology.
And I I would agree, and I I learned this the other day. So, I think it's a that Jupiter, because of the size of its mass, is a protector, and I'm gonna use the word planetesimals. It's a protector of Earth because the mass is so large that it takes the bigger masses of asteroids, and it swallows them so that the earth doesn't get hit. I didn't know that. That's an interest the moon and I don't know how the theory runs, but the moon is also a protector of the earth.
And the theory goes that without the moon, we wouldn't have life on earth. Now I haven't looked up that theory recently, and I forget its details. There's a there's a guy by the name of Neil Cummings. I can introduce you to him. He's been on the show. I've known him for a while, and he wrote a book about whether life on Earth would exist if there was no moon. Right.
And, but the way things are going, life is so we're creating adaptable that it looks like life could easily be here even without a moon. But we don't know. There's no evidence of life anywhere else. So what we do have, and it's been accumulating over the last 20 to 30 years, is evidence there's something for lack of a better term, I call it molecular genesis, the creation, the self formation, the self assembly of molecules.
Once you had atoms, first, you had the first atoms and there were only 3 forms of them, hydrogen, helium, and lithium. That's all there was in this universe, but the mere fact that there were atoms of all was an enormous astonishment.
Those once those atoms started congregating in the really, really big gravity balls, the ones that caught fire, the ones that caught fire by eating the atomic nuclei at their hearts, the ones that were spilling the photons that were cries of distress from dying atomic nuclei. Those stars, when they died, when they went NOVA, when they died, they crunched those atomic nuclei fragments in their hearts in ways that were previously unimaginable.
And if you had predicted it, I would have known you were crazy. I would have known you were wrong. They crunched those elements of atomic nuclei into 98 new social gatherings. 98 new forms of social structure. And those 98 forms of social structure take once they've got a Is that the periodic table? Yes. They became the periodic table. Once they once they spewed out this was not garbage. The universe was not garbaging her way down.
She was garbaging her way up because the garbage was rich in possibilities that had these 98 new forms of atomic nuclei. And when they were let loose from the gravity of the dying star, they were able to find electrons to circle them. So we became we became more comp we became more complex. We Yes. We went from a simplistic 3 to this super supernova, the crushing, and we ended up with more, not less. Yes. And those 98 are responsible for life. Now something else is responsible for life.
Those atoms began to gather an even greater social aggregations called molecules, and that's molecular genesis. And I keep looking for the figures on when this molecular genesis began and how it proceeded, but no one seems to be studying that. Nonetheless, wherever we look in this solar system and beyond, in this galaxy, we find wisps of gas that contain some of the first biological, molecules, molecules based on carbon. So we find them all over the place.
But these are relatively simple molecules. These are just, at most, hundreds of atoms, and in most cases, 6 or 7 atoms. How we went from those simple molecules to the complex molecules of a genome, with billions of atoms in such a well structured order that they can call to other atoms and make them assemble or call to other, molecules and make them assemble in a precise replica of themselves, I mean, that's beyond astonishing.
So there's a field that we're missing, molecular genesis, telling us when and how these first molecules assemble, and then we don't know how in the world they assemble for the other life. Which utterly beyond us. Which, yes, which begs to, and if you took that iteration as not only is it structured in the the brain, we don't even have to say the human brain, but the ability to be cognizant of what's around you. But here's the trick.
Genomes, in the same way that brains with ideas reflect the world around us, and with science, we try to make we try to distinguish between those ideas that do reflect the world around us and those that don't. Genes went through this same process. A gene is a record of how to survive in a given environment. In other words, it is a way of summing up in a molecular code the environment around it. And it passes it on.
Is that you're saying that we our gene learns, and then it passes on to the next generation of experiences that they had. Right. Exactly. So the universe began looking at herself in a mirror through symbolic systems of representation of herself with the first genomes. And now she does it through our consciousness and ideas. She examines herself in a mirror and finds a way to symbolically represent herself. My point was that you're asking for this molecular, what did you call it?
The molecular genesis. Molecular genesis. And what I'm saying is you just described the complexity. My hands are up in the air right now as I'm doing this. You described the complexity, and I'm saying even that complexity is so complex. But then to say that all of these these molecules, these structures within our body are able to recall, think, re aggregate, and do. Well, they can't think, but they do certainly carry within them, a a record.
But what I mean is the human brain as it acts as a whole. Oh, yes. Right. That that is eve that's another that's a to the 400th power, another questionable situation is we can't even figure out the molecular genesis to figure out how intelligent thought. And that could be for a dog looking at and hunting down or a lion hunting down or an amoeba eating something. How how that happens, we don't even know. So the these are huge questions.
So these questions and and a different way of looking at science is in my book, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. And Barbara Ehrenreich says that, we've had 200 to 350 years of science and it's all been reductionistic. It's all followed a pattern that was laid out by Aristotle 24 100 years ago, and that this book, The God Problem, How A Godless Cosmos Creates, may be the first step step into the next 250 years of science.
And what we say at Project Moon Hat is we can't be reductionistic in our approach to space. We can't be reductionistic in the into how we live on Earth. We have to create a new evolution or a new iteration of how we look for hope in the future. So there's a similarity in that same construct.
Yes. So if if we were to take now you did say volcano, so I did stop you on the, the fur in the volcano and I'm as Well, we believe currently, as of the last week, we believe that the gigantic volcanic eruptions were responsible for some of these mass extinctions. According to one study, mass extinctions take place every 26,500,000 years. And that's the basis for the calculation that we have 142 mass extinctions.
And volcanoes have apparently played a very significant role in some of those mass extinctions. Volcanoes have apparently some of them have been so large, they've been capable of blacking out the sky for up to 3 years. Like the one that they say in the United States, which the way right. The supervolcano? Is that that's what they're called? The supervolcano under the yellow under Yellowstone. That's allegedly Earth.
Yes. Now in the early days of the earth, when life was forming, these things were much more common. The the mantle of the earth, the core of the earth, all the various layers that we know on the earth were still in formation. I mean, it takes a lot of work to turn gravity balls like planetesesimals, meteors, into a mantle and a liquid core. And not to mention continents and seas. But then that work was still taking place when life first formed. How do we know?
Because there was a giant continent called Pangaea when life first formed, and eventually that continent broke off into 7 continents. And those are the continents that we know today, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America, they were all part of 1 gigantic continent at one point. So an awful lot of geological change has been going on in the time that life has been here.
And and then, when 2 tectonic plates meet and their clash, sets up a batch of stone that juts up high into the sky, called the Himalayas, the exposure of all of that stone, that stone starts absorbing certain elements from the atmosphere and changes the atmosphere and creates climate change. So what we humans have to know, what we have to get used to is, yes, we are capable of getting rid of the human contribution to climate change. No, we are not capable of getting rid of climate change.
Climate change has been endemic to this planet since this planet first began. What does that mean? It means in the same way that once upon a time, we have the climate by stealing the skins, the furs of animals and wrapping them around us and by building tents. The first tents were 17000 years ago. They were made of mammoth husks, mammoth ribs and mammoth hides. Those are climate controlled technologies. And what we need are climate stabilization technologies.
If we truly want the climate of the earth to be like it was in 16/50, which seems to be the general goal these days, then we're going to have to develop the technologies to accomplish that.
Now at a conference in Japan about 6 years ago, there was a woman from the European Space Administration who showed us that the giant satellites that we have to create in space, solar farms, 5 miles by 5 miles, 5 miles across and 5 miles in-depth, that those could be used to power lasers that when a hurricane is on its way for Jamaica, we could use laser to heat an edge of the hurricane and change its direction so it doesn't reach, Jamaica.
But the real trick is hurricanes and tornadoes are energy sources. They are massive energy sources. And our task and I know it sounds ridiculous right now, but humans accomplish ridiculous things. We've been doing that ever since we've been human. Our task is to harness these things and make them work for us, make them energy sources.
But but one way or the other, we have to create stabilization technologies if we want the climate to stay the way it was in 16 50 because that is totally unnatural. Massive climate change is mother nature's way. Do we have a right to disrupt nature? Or remember the lesson of the loony dinosaurs who took over the sky. Nature loves those who oppose her most.
She loves those who break her rules because it's on the backs of those who break her rules that she makes it up the next stair step on the ladder of complexity or the stair step of complexity. And climbing that stair step is something she is inexorably drawn to. That's her way. That that is her core. It's when I do these interviews, as as I've shared and I think anybody's listening and understands, they're in they're conversations. I'm I'm here to learn.
And it's interesting how my mind is racing to look at the complexity in a additive way, not a not a a law of thermodynamics degradation way, but just that you've given a different angle on it. And then to take the hurricane, and how do we harness it yet at the I I would actually say the word is the the Sorry. I'm sorry. Bless you. No no no worries. The I think the word harness is probably in my mind is not the exact word.
And my mindset is we're not we would like to be able to, like a horse, harness it and control it so that it doesn't still hit into Jamaica, yet at the same time, we can create and and take the energy and use that positively for all species on earth. Right.
And one of the members of one of the groups that I run, the the Big Bang Tango Media Lab, has a vision of chimneys, 2 miles high that would take advantage of these differentials in temperature, and the winds, the differentials in temperatures create in order to harvest energy. How practical that idea is, I don't know. But remember, a lot of humans have done a lot of totally impractical things.
So and this is for someone who's listening in just because, as I told you, sometimes I have to break out of this. The there's a differential in temperature from the base to the top and it goes through. It's not a hurricane or typhoon depending on how you label it or call it. It's not one ubiquitous set of conditions. And I'm do you could you go into that a little bit just so that in your terms Well, it's sim it's simple it's simple convection. Now I understand.
I just wanted I wanna get somebody else who doesn't who's coming in and doesn't have a science background to get a little better understanding. Describe it to me in a way that you would give me the information so I could understand it at a more complex level. Well, warm air rises, and cold air settles on the ground. And if you've got a 2 mile high chimney, it's cold up there. It's very cold up there, and it's much, much warmer at the bottom.
So the warm air is gonna rise, to join with the cold air, penetrate the cold air. And and there's stuff about how many pounds of pressure per square inch or how many molecules, per square inch there are in cold, air. It's dense. There are a lot of molecules per square inch. In warm air, there are a lot fewer molecules per square inch. One way or the other, the warm air goes up.
So if you're harvesting that difference between the warm air at the surface and the cold air way up there in the jet stream, you can produce a whole lot of energy, and it's temperature differentials of that kind that power hurricanes and tornadoes. So you're harnessing the power of hurricanes and tornadoes, but I would like to more directly harness the hurricanes and the tornadoes themselves. That may be well, it is, of course, impractical, but we humans do impractical things all the time.
K. So Life has done impractical things all the time. So so let's take on, number 6, which is the 400 c vents. Okay. Those, we pretty much covered. The the richness of life down there is just astonishing. Yep. And the richness of life. 400? Oh, there's the £400 per The 400 degrees. Degrees. Okay. That's why I was I didn't I Right. I was writing as fast as I could. I didn't put a degree somewhere. Okay. Okay. And then the surface catastrophe maintaining, number 7.
Okay. The universe operates by surfing catastrophe. Look what she did. Stars were catastrophe. At least they were to the atomic nuclei of their heart that were being chewed to pieces. Star Death was a catastrophe. It destroyed one of the most astonishing things nature had ever created, a star. And out of that star death came 98 new forms of atoms. That's astonishing. What does that teach you about nature's relationship to catastrophe?
She uses catastrophe to climb the ladder of complexity, to climb the stair steps of complexity. And and she's always basically going fuck you to what came before. She's always outdoing it with something that seemed utterly impossible and utterly inconceivable. And if that's nature's imperative, and it is, then that's our job too. We have to be disaster tamers. We have to be, catastrophe surfers.
We have to, do things that are utterly outrageous and that seem to go utterly against nature's laws because that's nature's most basic imperative. That is nature's most basic law. So are we do we have to my mind what I'm what I'm thinking is 13.7000000000 years. It took a long time to get from age to age to age. It took a long time for humans to get to a point we're going faster and faster and faster. On the grand scope of the universe, we're a blip in time.
What you're saying is we should surf within the surf within the surf to find the wave that we could ride. Yes. And we should stop looking at disasters just as disasters because they are when they kill people at gaslight, and start looking at them as opportunities. But most important, we should take to the skies just like the loony dinosaurs who flew, except the loony dinosaurs who flew were restricted to the atmosphere, its atmosphere that allows their wings to keep them aloft.
We've gone beyond wings. We've gone beyond wings in a mere 103 years. And it's our job to take life and ourselves to the skies. So I I would like to take it in 2 questions then off of that. Number 1 is number 1, and I'm gonna ask this question first, and then I'll tell you the reason why. What do you project or what do you see or what is your forecast as to how we will become or get to space? You know, you could use any theory. It could be Elon's or it could be yours, however you want them.
That would be the first one. And the reason I'm asking is because when we have the conversation about Project Moon Hut, I wanna be able to understand your thinking. So that's the first question. What how would you answer that? NASA's not gonna get us there. NASA hasn't been getting us anywhere since 2011, has not been getting humans anywhere. It's been getting wondrous, astonishing robotic expeditions, into the skies, to Mars in particular, but not humans.
And it's not going to because NASA is just a giant 1,000,000,000, a sink for 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars to keep this space military industrial complex alive, Boeing in particular. But Elon is a man with a vision, and he's a man with a vision who is capable of implement that vision. And we gotta we should have security guards around Elon at all times to keep him safe because he's the only visionary really going outside the box on planet Earth today.
And the other one is Xi Jinping, but he is simply picking up all of the fantasies of the west for the future that we have discarded because we're busy lacerating ourselves over things like racism, which is a problem we definitely have to solve. But we are convincing ourselves that we are the most polluted, awful civilization in the history of mankind. No. We are not. If you've been born in Western civilization in 18/50, your life expectancy would have been 38.5 years.
If you've been born in Western civilization in 2000, your life expectancy would have been 78.5 years, 40 years longer, more than twice as long. If you took a Stanford Binet IQ test from 1916, the 1st year it was administered, and gave it to a 100 random kids off the street today, they would register as marginal geniuses with an IQ of about a 135. Why? Because we've added 35 points to the average IQ in the last 104 years.
If you looked at the poorest paid worker in London in the year 2000, She earned what an entire tenement full of workers earned in 18/50, Irish stock workers. She earned she would have earned, what, 7 of them earned, and that's not calculating things like her cell phone that even prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, a techno freak, could not possibly have owned despite all of his wealth.
If you were born in 16/50 in the west or if you were born in one of those indigenous civilizations that lives at peace with its fellow men and in harmony with nature, your odds of dying a violent death at the hands of a fellow human being would have been 10 times what they are today.
In other words, western civilization has increased peace by a factor of 10, and western civilization has increased the average height by 4 inches, except in Holland where it's increased the average height by 7 inches. Western civilization has done all these things, and no other civilization in the history of mankind has done anything like it. So if our great grandparents could give us an extra 40 years of life, what do we owe to our great grandkids? Another 40 years of life or more.
If our great grandparents could give us 35 extra points on our IQ, what do we owe to our great grandkids? Another 35 points or more on their IQ. If our great grandparents could increase our earnings by a factor of 7, then we it is our obligation to increase the earnings of the poorest paid worker by a factor of 7 for our grandchildren's time.
And if piece is going up by a factor of 10, then it's our obligation on behalf of our grandkids to increase it by a factor of 10 all over again, and we won't bother with the hype. Let's hope that continues to go wrong too. But you have to realize something when it comes to define gravity and the natural inclination toward the sky that is built into our biology. Every morning, you wake up in a bed horizontal in the in form that gravity naturally dictates for you.
And then you put your feet on the floor and you do something impossible. You stand up. You defy gravity for the rest of the day. You are like a pencil being balanced on its point, and you manage to do that with software in your brain, not primarily with your hardware, but with your software. That is how deeply nature wants to rise. That is how deeply nature aspires to the skies.
So do you when I say when if we were to give without putting it on Elon, can you give me the next 30 years that you see? Yeah. Elon's, starships are gonna be So your your believe that you believe that the answer you believe that the answer is Elon? Yes. Okay. He's the only one doing what he is doing. Literally, the only creature of any kind on planet Earth doing what he is doing. And those starships will provide a large capacity, transport system to the skies or between the cities.
Somebody's got to wake up to the fact, sooner or later, that we need to build the infrastructure elements, the farming, the habitats, the construction equipment, the ice harvesters. We're we're gonna go you and I are gonna have fun. I hope you know that when we're done. We're gonna have fun when I go over what Project Moon had has been about. Right. Well, I have a I have a meeting. It's 11 minutes. Okay. So so okay. So that's perfect. Alright.
The this was this is different than what I expected, in terms of the angle or and and that's what I love about having these experiences. Having over a 190 interviews is that the ability to learn things in a way that were it was great. You you brought brought me, brought the listeners to a journey, which I I definitely appreciate. I appreciate you taking the time to to make sure that, that you would be on the program. So I I forgot who was the one who introduced us. I I I've gotta thank them too.
I'll look it up because there's a connection. Right. I I have it too. It's Bruce Pittman, possibly. I'm not sure. No. No. No. It was, from SpaceCom. Steve Wolf. All that was yes. Yes. Steve Wolf. Steve Wolf had said that I should get you on because he's going to be on the program, and Peter Garretson also had mentioned you Oh, that's terrific. From a different angle. He's like a brother to me. He's he did a phenomenal interview. He's it was really great.
So as you said, we've had an for for as few interviews we've had, we have some really powerful, strong, individuals. And Franklin being on this week too, I think is gonna add to the the richness. So for that, I wanna thank you for taking the time. So thank you very much. Well, it's a great one, David. For those, I want to thank all of you for taking the time to listen in.
And I I sincerely hope that you learned something new today that will make a difference in your life, your life, and the lives of others. And in this case, the life, the existence of or the the spreading of our wings to others' planets and and into space. Again, once we are Project Moon Hut Foundation, you can learn more about us by connecting with us at [email protected]. The website is not where it needs to be today. We're working on a new website.
So if there was one way to connect to you, Howard, what would be bloom.net. Howard bloom.net. Okay. And bloom is bl0om, like the flowers that bloom in the spring for a lot. I have a Larry Bloom from the island who I went to camp with when I was young, so I knew the bloom. Bl0om. And Right. We would love to connect with you. You could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can go to YouTube, and we've just put up some videos.
So there's project it's the first time we're actually releasing these. There's one up there, and that is at the YouTube. You look up Project Moon Hut, and you'll see a Project Moon Hut Foundation logo. You can connect with us on Facebook. You can connect with us at Project Moon Hut at Twitter. You can also connect to me at at Goldsmith on Twitter, and we're we're here. So if you wanna learn more about what we're doing and be involved, we would love to hear from you.
So that said, to everybody, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening. Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith, and welcome to the Age of Infinite podcast series. And we are not about to enter into the 4th industrial revolution. If we do things right, we can enter into the age of infinite, infinite possibilities and infinite resources.
The Age of Infinite podcast series is brought to you by the Project Moon Hut Foundation, where we look to establish a box with a roof and a door on the moon, a moon hut, through the accelerated development of an Earth and space based ecosystem, then to use the endeavors and paradigm shift thinking along with innovations and turn them back on Earth to improve how we live on Earth for all species.
Today, we're going to be exploring an incredible topic, what life has achieved so far and where we need to go next. We have with us today Howard Bloom. How are you, Howard? Good, David. How about you? I'm doing great. Looking forward to this. If you were to learn a little bit about Howard, you're hopefully gonna learn a lot. Howard has an amazing past. He studied intensively everything from theoretical physics to microbiology.
Starting at the age of 10, he then founded one of the biggest PR firms in the music industry representing everybody from Michael Jackson and GISS to Aerosmith and Run DMC. And if you think that being isolated during COVID is challenging, consider that Howard was bedridden for up to 15 years. So that's our introduction to Howard. You can look anything up you'd like online. Howard, do you have an outline for us to work from? Yes. I do. You wanna hear it? I do. I gotta write it down.
Bullet points and 7 requisite 10. Okay. Then we go on from there. Okay. We can go anywhere. The first point, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Number 2. Number 2, 142 mass extinctions. 142 mass extinctions. Number 3. The temperature going rocketing up and down, 80 degrees every 3 hours. 80 degrees every 3 hours. Right. Okay. Number 4. Another climate catastrophe, a massive climate change called summer, winter, fall, and spring. Strophe.
Summer, winter, fall, and spring. Number 5. Number 5 is planetesimals and volcanoes. And volcanoes. Number 6. Number 6 is 400 degrees sea vents. And number 7. Number 7, which is my last one, is, surfing catastrophe and taming disasters. Okay. Disasters. Alright. I am looking forward to this. Number let's start with number 1, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Teach me something. Once upon a once upon a time Yeah. Circling a mediocre yellow star, there was a poison pill of a planet.
It was toxic as you can possibly imagine. And the tox some of the tox just a few of the toxic elements were oxygen, which was a poison, sulfur, which was a poison, and phosphorus, which was a poison. The conditions on that planet were absolutely ghastly. Every 3 hours every 3 hours, the temperature went up or down 80 degrees.
Every 3 hours, you went from one catastrophe, which is being if you were at a single point on that planet, that poison pill of stone, Every 3 hours, you are bathed in something toxic called radiation. Is he is this is it 80 is the 80 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? This is Fahrenheit. Okay. So you got radiation every 3 hours. Yes. 1st, you were in radiation, just swamped with it. Then you were in total darkness, which is equally evil. Yeah. The planet was on this this is a planet.
This point is a pillar stone, this home of toxicity. And because it was its axis was at an angle to its mediocre yellow sun, It went through, climate change beyond belief. And today, we call one of those forms of climate change, summer, winter, fall, and spring. I had a feeling I I had a feeling you were describing Earth. Right. And and this particular porcelain pillar stone had 400 degrees sierence. 400 degrees. But a very strange experiment began on this absolutely impossible planet.
It consisted of magma molecules, figuring out ways to massively socialize and reproduce themselves within lipid envelopes, within fatty little envelopes like the bubbles that a 3 year old loves with a bubble making machine. The whole enterprise was absolutely absurd. How in the world do you work with molecules so big that they contain 1,000,000 or billions of atoms? How in the world do they learn to make copies of themselves?
How in the world do they learn to take sulfur and phosphorus and turn those poisons into pistons in their peculiar form of operation? Well, these megamolecular projects were the first cells, and they took on this planet of disaster. And surprisingly, they managed to thrive, not because the planet was friendly to them. The planet was totally inimical to them. The planet was prepared to tear them apart at any second, to disable them totally.
And yet they learned their way over the disabilities and around the dangers. In fact, they learned to take the dangers and turn them into power sources. And today, that initial project, that absolutely impossible project, the odds against it are infinite. That project today has green and garden, this poison pillar stone, and the poison pillar stone is the earth.
To give you an idea of how poisonous the things in this earth are, when the first cyanobacteria developed about a 1000000000 years ago, 1 to 2000000000 years ago, they took in the things that they could eat and they farted out the things that were toxic to them, the things they couldn't incorporate within their cellular structure. And what's a little fart? Bacterial colony of 7 trillion is the size of your palm, but it's so thin that if it were on your palm, you couldn't even see it.
So what's a little bacterial part? Nothing. But over the course of a 1000000000 years, those toxic parts built up. And because they were poisonous, they killed off almost all the life on earth. The only creatures that survived were boarding house cells, cells that were willing to take in smaller borders who could actually turn this toxic stuff into an energy source. Those are called eukaryotic cells. Inside of them, they have these things we call mitochondria.
Mitochondria take that poison that filled the atmosphere and they turn it into a power source. That poison is called oxygen. That gives you an idea of the extent to which life on this planet has had the obligation of being, of of being catastrophe servers and disaster tamers. So just, the for the I I my background is biology, one of my majors.
The the cell the jump that you took from the bacteria, the 1 to 2000000000 years ago, and their, creation or the excretion of the oxygen, the cells that formed, what made those cells form in this toxic environment? What was the impetus? Do you is there is there any clue? Well, first of all, life takes advantage of all toxins, eventually. Life finds the ways that those toxins are can be instead of poisonous, they can be power source. We don't know how they do it.
We don't know how those first tiny bacteria that were able to eat oxygen and thrive using oxygen evolved. What we do know is the work of limb ergulis, which has proven to the satisfaction of folks in biology today, that large cells that couldn't handle oxygen took in the smaller cells. And today, in every single one of your cells that the descendants of those smaller cells still exist as your power sources using that poison oxygen to power you, and they're called mitochondria. Right.
Yes. So every single cell of you. So we don't know where they came from. We just know that they're there. In the same sense that we don't know where this project of life took place. I mean, remember, at one point, life there was so little life that it would have fit on your thumbnail. And in fact, that was a major achievement for life, going from thoroughly microscopic to the size of your thumbnail.
Just think of how prone that entire project of life, the size of your thumbnail, was to being wiped out utterly. I I had I had never in my life thought about the fact that we started with one cell. Well, we don't know if we started with one cell often. I've got this paper in physical plus, called the Xerox effect, and it demonstrates that in this universe, the same thing the conditions for a certain thing all take place pretty much at the same time.
The result is that we have pretty much the same thing happening everywhere, which means that sales, once the conditions were ripe for sales, could have started all over this planet. We didn't necessarily descend from one tiny little puddle, which is Darwin's view of things, or one tiny common ancestral cell. We may have started from a bunch of ancestral cells. We don't know. So so, just play with me a little bit here. 2 things.
1st, even if ubiquitously happened all over planet Earth, which is a very large sphere in the scope of human beings in the universe. Compared to a bacterium. And compared to bacterias. I've got to believe that even if it happened almost simultaneously, there still was the first one. Yes. That's very likely. There's probably the first one. So the second question, taking that into consideration, the earth was cooling, when he when I think of I'm not gonna say humans.
When I think of there being a ground and a body of water, again, considering the side, a land, and an ocean, I cannot picture, I cannot fathom that on land and water, there was nothing in any of that. Land, there was nothing. The ocean was empty. For the first half 1000000000 years, 500000000 years of this planet's existence, there was no life. And the big and the big question is how the fuck did the light begin? It's the most absurd process you can possibly imagine.
Remember, a self replication, Richard Dawkins has trained us to think in terms of selfish individual genes. There is no such thing as an individual gene. The small genome we know, a genome is a gene team, is 400 genes. And those genes, those 400 genes have to work together to make things happen. No gene has ever assembled anything on its own. Its gene teams have have assembled things.
Plus, the gene teams work with, an exterior structure, the lipid envelope, that envelope with fatty stuff, like a children's bubble. And without the bubble, life as we know it would not exist, and the bubble is self replicating too. So was the was the DNA strand in that first cell that we know of or RNA, was that there in the in the first that we ever conceive of so that it could replicate?
Well, when Lynn Margolis and I were bouncing this around before her death about 5 years ago, what what we thought was probable is first came the lipid envelopes. Now why do we think that? If you take if you grind up bits of the Murchison meteorite, which comes from outer space, and you drop them into a glass of water. They form lipid envelopes, little fatty envelopes immediately, little fatty bubbles.
So Lynn and I felt, and I still do feel, that within those lipid envelopes, there was a special environment that's just a little different than the environment of the sea outside the bubble. And within that special pool, that tiny little pool of water, the genes, the genomes assembled themselves, these giant gene teams and began to do their thing, making copies of themselves. And well liquid envelopes were very cooperative because they basically are weaves of molecules.
Mhmm. And every time it was time to split, they wove an entirely new envelope and buttered it off. Very cooperative. This teamwork, I mean, look, the basic one of the most basic laws of science is the second law of thermodynamics, which says all things tend toward disorder, all things tend to fall apart. The universe is not like that at all. Not at all.
That that law is though though everyone in science bows down to it, prays to it, mutters it every day, that law is thorough bullshit, complete bullshit because the universe tends to assemble things. The universe tends to climb up the stairway of complexity, not tumble down like a slinky.
So you It is a in my I also I can't say that I see that, but yet if in fact we are constantly humans are or species and and if we just use the planet Earth, there is a complexity that has been rapidly has been expanding. So if everything goes to chaos, in my mind, it's okay. So when does it start? Right. And there's no and and and the universe is still expanding. Is this is it gonna go to chaos and fit in another 13,700,000,000 years?
Ward Kelvin's idea that, this is a, a heat death universe, that it's all going to disappear into a vast and, undifferentiated mist is such horse potty. It it so flies in the face of everything we have learned in the science of the last 350 years, the years since the Royal Society was founded in Britain, that it's ridiculous. So in fact, things fall together, they don't fall apart. At the beginning of the universe, we had a big bang. The big bang was not a chaos, far from it.
The big bang the big bang was a rushing sheet of space, time, and speed. Now if you and I had been sitting around at a coffee table at the beginning of the universe, and you had predicted that there will be a pinprick infinitely smaller than a pinprick and it would have all of the universe implicit in it, all of a universe, I I would say, David, you're crazy. You know, we've been sitting here. We've accumulated 40,000 coffee cups so far.
We've been here forever, and there never has been a pinprick smaller than a pinprick, and the notion that there should be one is ridiculous. And the notion, in other words, in the anti universe is even more ridiculous. And all of a sudden, a pinprick is smaller than a pinprick, appears it's a big bang, and it starts whooshing down on a sheet of space, time, and speed.
And within the 10 to the minus 30 seconds, of the universe's existence, That sheet of time, space, and speed precipitates the way a rain cloud precipitates into rain. Mhmm. And it precipitates in the form of quarks and leptons. Now if this were a random universe of 6 monkeys and 6 type of universe, since there are gazillions of quarks, you'd expect gazillions of different forms of quarks.
And you would expect them to come in forms so radically different from each other that they couldn't have anything to do with each other. And that's not what it's asking. Structured. Yeah. Structured. Yeah. It's 16 different forms of quarks with a gazillion identical copies of each of those, 16 different quarks. 16 year quarks is not a 6 monkeys at 6 hybrids universe.
It is universe falling together and creating form at each step of its development, creating form, and then something else happens. This is a communicative, gossipy, conversational, social cosmos, and those quirks cannot exist on their own. And they come with little etiquette books built into them, rules about who to avoid and who to who to hang out with.
And they immediately come together in groups of 3 by avoiding those that their etiquette books say you should shun, and gathering with those the etiquette will say, you should get together with. And those threesomes turn out one form of threesome turns out to be some radically new property that is nowhere implicit in the properties of courts, and it's called a proton.
And another form of these threesomes is comes out in the form of something there also is not predictable from space, time, speed, and quarks. And it's a neutron. And this universe is so profoundly social that if those neutrons do not find omega, if they don't pair up socially in the first ten and a half minutes of their existence, they are overvalued. Behind. They go through what is called beta decay.
And this process of the same thing happening all over the universe continues 300000 years after the Big Bang. Up until then, things have been like a bumper car smash up. Objects have been smashing at each other and ricocheting off of each other at speeds that are beyond comprehension. That's called heat. By 300,000 to 380,000 years into the universe's existence, things slow down. That's called cooling.
And you and I are at a coffee table at the beginning of the universe, and we're 300000 years into the universe's existence, and you come up with one of your wacky predictions, and you say, you see those things that, relatively speaking, are the size of Empire State Buildings? Yeah, I do. They're all over the place. They're banging into each other. And you see those tiny little things that, relatively speaking, are the size of your fist? Yeah, I see those too.
They've been around for 300000 years now. So what's new? And you say, well, I predict that any minute now things are going to slow down to the point where those gigantic things discover they have an inanimate longing. And the little tiny things are gonna discover they have an inanimate longing, and the inanimate longing of the tiny things is going to precisely fit the inanimate longing of these gigantic things, 1800 times their size. David, I know you've lost it. I know you've lost it.
This is, it's homocentrism. It's anthropomorphism. We are we are forbidden anthropomorphism in science, and that's exactly what you're using right now. And all of a sudden, things slow down, and guess what happens? The gigantic things discover they have an inanimate longing, a social urge. The tiny things discover they have an inanimate longing, a social urge. And the giant things and the tiny things get together. And what does that produce?
It doesn't produce things with the qualities of the giant things, which are protons, or the tiny little things, which are electrons, doesn't produce that at all. It produces something radically new that we call an atom or that we call hydrogen, that we call helium. And the same thing happens in identically the same way all across the face of the universe. Later on, the universe will start sweeping things together with gravity.
It will start sweeping these new atoms together with gravity in massive, massive clouds that look like lumpy potatoes or that actually have spiral arms. Those things are galaxies. And no matter where you look, you will find these galaxies all over the universe. And then those sweet things start coming together with the great gravity crusades. The great gravity forces. So so where Let me let me let me stop you for a minute.
So Okay. To get this straight, we've got simultaneously throughout this universe or this, the space that we have. The cooling, because it happens at the slowing down happens at the the same time. Pretty much the same time. They're everywhere. In relative terms. It therefore causes a reaction because of that cooling that creates the atom. And Well, the the cooling creates the conditions. The right.
It creates a condition for the atoms to be formed, which would not have and then what you're suggesting is and I would have thought differently, but you're suggesting is that gravity was not there at the beginning, but gravity came later on? Or was Yeah. Oh, okay. So Gravity was gravity was implicit from the beginning. Okay. Gravity didn't rear its head and start to operate until the formation of the atoms. And then the atoms began to get together in wisps of gas.
Yep. And then then began the great gravity crusades. A big wisp of bat gas would go up against a small wisp of gas. A big wisp of gas would have more gravitational attraction than a smaller wisp of gas, and what astronomers call cannibalism would begin to take place. The bigger whisks would swallow the smallest, and that's would be even even larger so that the next time they went into a head to head match with another wisp of gas, they would win, hopefully.
So so, is the formula where are are we describing also that because of the size of the are you talking about the size of the mass, the mass ends up creating a larger gravity condition? Yes. Therefore, both okay. So I just just trying to translate it into my English. So we now have we have mass attracting another Masses attract masses. Masses are the masses are going head to head with each other. Right. So they're And the bigger ones are are winning. Are winning.
And bigger ones are bulking up even more. And eventually, this creates gravity balls. And some of those gravity balls are so humongous that their gravity allows them to chew apart the atomic nuclei in their heart. And we perceive the screams of these dying atomic nuclei as what we call light. So that's when light first appears in the universe. And these giant sweepings are galaxies. Within the galaxies, more gravity crusades are taking place. The winners are suns.
Some losers make a deal with the winners. If I hang around you at a certain distance and am obedient to you, will you let me live? And the answer is yes. And those are planets. And then some other gravity balls make a deal with the planets. It's the same deal. If I hang around to a certain distance and speed. Those are the moons. Yeah. So at every step, we don't see a disintegrating universe. So we're seeing we're seeing excuse me for jumping in.
We're seeing Okay. According to what you're saying. And and the reason I'm doing this is I I actually have said this to myself. There are people like you out there in the world who actually think about this. And I and I say that jokingly to myself.
What you're saying is that the construct of the, the law of thermodynamics saying that we move towards chaos, demonstrably is inaccurate because through 1,000,000,000 of years, we are seeing not a, a breakdown, but yet a structured order where no matter where we go in the universe, we will find the atom moving and, the atom and gravity coexisting to create these clusters. These clusters create these suns. The suns have a structural order. It could it doesn't have to be circular.
It could be elliptical, but there's some formation where they're allowed to stay as long as they stay within that the amount of, gravitational pull. Eventually, they degrade or the sun explodes, but this order is a simultaneous or is a a construct that no matter where we look as we know it today, it is all structured. So, therefore, the second law of thermodynamics is is inaccurate because we have not seen it. Right. We've seen the opposite. So and that's what you're saying.
Yeah. Those galaxies, as huge as they are, tens of 1,000,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000,000 of stars, they are gathering in larger herds, in herds of galaxies. Group behavior, social behavior is all over the place even among galaxies. These are called galaxy clusters. So but on earth, this poison pill of stone, we have this astonishing act of self assembly, far more astonishing than the assembly of galaxies, stars, and planets or atoms. And it is these macromolecules, these huge molecules.
A genome is a single molecule. Yeah. A genome can consist of 400 genes to 48,000 genes. It's a single molecule. It's a gene team. And how in the world those gene teams assembled? And how in the world they got the skill of reproducing themselves is beyond my comprehension. And I've been so Come on. Come on, Howard. Come on, Howard. You know, I you're gonna you're gonna tell the story, and then you're not gonna have the end? Oh my god.
I I feel I I I don't know I don't know I don't know if that should continue. You you've you've you've run into a brick wall for me. I get it. But the the the point is that life is so resilient in what it does. It is so good at taking advantage of catastrophe and the disaster. It is so good at harvesting climate change and all the other catastrophes on this planet that it has continued to grow and it has greened the garden of the place.
Now we think that we've run out of resources and we've run out of space and we are poisoning the planet, and that's ridiculous. Because for every ounce of biomass, of living stuff on this planet, there are 100,000,000 ounces of dead stuff just waiting to be kidnapped, seduced and recruited into the process of life. Because that's what life is all about. Life isn't materialistic. It is constantly conquering dead stuff and turning it into living stuff.
So just I wanna step back for one moment because we're going to be moving all the way through the age of infinite possibilities in the future, so I'm getting it. With the hypothesis, and I'm going to let's, there is the second law of thermodynamics, so let's call this the Howard Bloom law. And there's probably some other name, but let's just call it the Howard Bloom law. Right. If everything in space has this construct that and I and I I'm picturing bands going out.
So there's the band of the the big bang. There's the band of the proton. There's the band of the atom and and on and on. We got to a point where a planetary group of conditions caused a complex structure, even more complex, more orderly to exist on Earth. This is a personal question. You could take it scientifically or personally. Right. Do you therefore then believe that throughout the universe at this that time in in history, the 13,700,000,000, years later Right.
This happened universally throughout the universe. The odds are extremely good. 99.9%. That's what I thought you were gonna say. Over the Because because it has it has to be congruent But You don't believe it? Have any evidence for life of any place else. Yeah. But your con your cons be all for the history of the universe. Yeah. So your construct your construct has to be you can't stop the construct that Earth.
You have to use that same construct across all universes not all universes, all galaxies, all planets, and that, therefore, someplace else in the universe, hydrogen I mean, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus, and a planet like this or another planet with another series created a similar type of development? That's the natural conclusion. Okay. I don't believe it because we have no evidence for life elsewhere. But here's our obligation.
Okay. We are the first forms of life to have consciousness, and we are the first forms of life capable of taking life to other poison pills of stone, to other hostile gravity balls. And, you know, bacteria are just as clever as we are. We're in a race with them for research and development all the time.
The COVID crisis, the coronavirus crisis is a demonstration of the extent to which the microbial world manages to outpace us in research and development, and we just barely manage to catch up and get ahead. But so bacteria can do all kinds of astonishing things. Plus, bacteria know what we, with our environmental movement, have totally forgotten. They know that life is just the thinnest of skins right now on this planet.
It took us 4000000000 years to get here, but we have barely, barely scratched the surface. We don't know that. We think we're running out of resources. Bacteria do know that. So there are bacteria 12 miles beneath your feet right now, turning granite and other dead stuff into life stuff, turning it into food. They know that the resources are almost infinite. Not infinite, but very close. No. You could do you could use you can resort to infinite. That's the name of our program.
Right. I'm I'm I'm I'm I'll let you that one. I'll give you that one. Right. So meanwhile, the one thing we can do the bacteria cannot do, that sparrows, eagles, and hawks cannot do is we can lift life beyond the gravity well. We can lift life beyond the atmosphere. And once you get beyond the atmosphere and beyond the gravity well, you can go anywhere with just a small amount of energy. And what is our obligation? To carry life to other hostile, impossible gravity falls.
So it can take root there. We are life's messenger. We are life's transportation. So okay. So I'm gonna make just, and I am not that I'm interrupting, but I am interrupting. When your the terminology you're using, I want to clarify.
When you say it is our obligation to take life, I think the assumption when you say that would be to take human life, but I believe you told me that I believe that what you're saying is on the spacecraft, on the the walls, and everywhere, we're going to be bringing all sorts of life with us that will end up inadvertently or inadvertently. We will have a virus or we will have a bacteria or we will have something that goes to another planet that potentially has the ability to succeed. Right.
And, look, the minute we put a human into space, my friend Buzz Ald, for example, has been up there. Yeah. We have launched an ecosystem. What do I mean? You and I are a 100,000,000,000,000 cells. 90,000,000,000,000 of those cells don't even claim to be us. They're bacterial colonies and without them we cannot survive. In our gut, those bacterial colonies make our vitamin Ds or vitamin Ps or vitamin Ks. They take food. You go down to the local store and you've got an urge.
You really want a chocolate egg layer. You haven't had one in a long time. You take it back home when you eat it. What are you actually doing? You're actually chewing this stuff so it's digestible by bacteria that can digest what you can't digest. You just bought groceries for the bacteria. They are using you as a transport system to bring them groceries. Meanwhile, what they excrete is glucose, which just happens to be the fuel that your body runs on. So take a human into space.
You've taken an ecosystem of the space. But what I'm advocating, I have this manifesto that I wrote. It's a visual manifesto, a 100 pictures and only 28 100 words, and it's called Garden of Solar System Green the Galaxy. And it's about the obligation to take arms with us wherever we go. For example, on the moon, where you wanna build the moon hut. To allow humans to live on that moon hut, they've got to garden.
They've got to garden their own vegetables and fruits so that they they are not living off of, nutrient poor foods like the freeze dried foods that NASA sends into up to the International Space Station, Even on the International Space Station, the Russians have had a gardening experiment going for at least 7 years, and we've had gardening experiments going up there too. And the astronauts like to raise flowers because it makes things pretty.
But, you know, the pictures that you see of space are pictures of people in tin cans. People cannot live in tin cans.
There's this thing that E. O. Wilson, the father of associate in biology, calls biophilia, and there's a whole bunch of research that demonstrates that if you take a bunch of hospital patients in rooms that look out over brick walls, and you compare them with hospital patients who have rooms overlooking a park, the hospital patients who have a room overlooking a park are going to, heal faster Mhmm. And live longer.
Similar to similar to bringing animals into hospitals or old age homes or nursing homes. They Right. Exactly. They they for some reason, the biological connection causes humans to thrive. To flourish. It helps us flourish. So we need to take these green things with us. And once they are up there, remember life's enormous skill is to take the task and turn it into opportunity.
So God knows what they are going to do with 1 sixth the gravity of Earth on the moon, with 1 third the gravity of Earth on Mars, with the radiation conditions on the moon and Mars. Lord alone knows that there have been a 142 mass extinctions on this planet. So we're now wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. We're moving to number 2. Okay. Right? We're moving to number 2. We're on a 142 mass extinctions. Which and and so those mass extinctions have wiped out an awful lot of species.
But other species have not only survived, they have thrived. Look what you know, we had we humans were born in an ice age. And the peculiar thing about us is that unlike the other primates with whom we were living in Africa, we had wanderlust. At least a certain percentage of us had wanderlust. And we had a wanderlust that involved taking on the impossible disasters of the new ice ages and using them as opportunities. So humans went what's called paraglacial.
We started living on the edge of glaciers, the tons of the ice stage itself, the tons of catastrophe. And in our own time, in the last 6000 years, there are people who have adapted to living very close to the North Pole. They live off of walrus, which have also adapted to living at the North Pole, or they wouldn't be there. And they, they they have built these incredible buildings with tremendous thermal properties, igloos, or at least they used to in the past.
Now they're living in huts like the ones that we used and we wanna put on the moon. And humans have a tendency to reach out to disorder and to massive problems and turn them into opportunities, not over the course of necessarily just one generation or one lifetime, but over the course of several generations or even 100 of generations and lifetimes. So to step back one second just because I don't wanna leave this question. You say there's a 142.
Right. I'm I'm I'm completely illiterate in this except for Right. The the we all hire the general, the dinosaur extinction. Can you give me 2 of your favorites of extinction? Well, I I don't study these extinctions either. As you can see, I'm more on the positive side of things. But but they did end up changing by a lot. 65000000 years ago, the darks we all know the story. The dinosaurs were standing around doing their thing.
Actually, climate conditions were so radically different on this planet that dinosaurs were living in in not tropical, but intermediate climatic conditions at the South Pole. And all of a sudden, if the current theory is right, a meteor showed up in the sky and whomped into the earth in the Gulf of Mexico and, destroyed the conditions under which dinosaurs live for at least the next 3 years, and the dinosaurs died. And according to current theory, you all know this.
Mhmm. These tiny little rodents that have been living scuttering around under the dinosaurs' feet and managing to survive the dinosaurs by coming out at night, not during the day, all of a sudden, they had the planet to themselves or so the theory goes. And those are your ancestors and mine, these little rat like things. Yeah. They were insectivores. Is there is there another one that you can share with me? Because I'm interested, and I can look it up later, but I'm just wondering.
Do you know one other mass Well, there are apparently there are this is highly hypothetical. Actually, there's a lot of proof, but it's still hypothetical. And that is that there were 2 ice ballers periods of ice ballers. And in those two periods, the ice on the at the equator was point well, it was a kilometer thing. Okay. And life has a difficult time under those circumstances. And yet life seems to survive one of those ice ball earths.
So, well and and you know that if you go to the south pole or the north pole and you take samples of the seawater under the ice, you'll find all kinds of bacteria. Yes. And and then what and I think it's it's at least a kilometer. I don't know the true depth, but, in the South Pole, you're talking at least a kilometer thick. And the bacteria are, don't mind at all. They don't wear fur coats. They don't look for a central heating. They're having a good time there.
Just like just like the bacteria down at the bottom of the ocean where the thermal shafts are. Yeah. Exactly. We're absolutely impossible conditions. So remember, not only is the temperature 400 degrees down there, which is way above boiling, and it can be way above boiling because the pressure is so high. So the pressure is something like 40 times the pressure closer to the surface of the sea. And if you were you know, I were to step out of a bathyspope or step out of one of those gizmos Yeah.
We would be crushed. We would crush the size of a tennis ball Yeah. In a very short amount of time. And we wouldn't find living under those circumstances easy. In fact, we'd be dead. Yes. Nonetheless, bacteria are living and thriving there, and shrimp are eating the bacteria. And tube worms, these things 3 feet long that look like, red tapes, are thriving there.
And so life manages to take advantage of all kinds of bizarre conditions, and it will be interesting to see how life will take on the lesser gravity of Mars and the moon, radiation conditions of Mars and the moon. But one way or the other, we're gonna go there and say, and we have to go there to say it's our obligation on behalf of all living things to go there and take as many other species as we can with us with the exception of in insects who I'm not fond of. Do do do you know Yossi Amin?
Yes. Why do I know Yossi Amin? Yossi out of Israel has SpacePharma, and I don't know if it was on the show with us. I was just recommending him to somebody the other day. Yeah. I think we might have spoken about him when we spoke earlier. I don't know. The Yossi was on the program and I'd visit him in Israel, but one of the not but one of the things he shared with me is when we have put in microgravity his laboratory experiments, nerves grow 10 times longer than they would. Amazing. Ten times.
Astonishing. Right. That's amazing. The challenge becomes is we're looking to regenerate nerves. Yet if we're up with 10 times, that's an issue. And if we're going to bear children or a Right. Or a creature of any type is going to reproduce, that messaging system might be different or at least understood differently. And that Well, if we're gonna bear children, we're gonna have to have artificial gravity because, you're gonna go into it. I know.
But we have its embryos break up in a woman's womb if they don't have gravity. Yes. They they they take for granted an embryonic embryonic development takes for granted gravity, and you can't take gravity for granted up there. So, you know, the old space ships the space stations that picture with great big bicycle wheels that were constantly turning and producing artificial gravity. At some point, we're going to need to start actually building those things.
And they're not on anybody's well, they were on the drawing board of the Gateway Foundation or something like that. They called it the Von Braun station. They do now have a new name for it. But, they're still at the PowerPoint stage. They're not actually producing any hardware, that I know of.
Oh, and and I and that's where and to some degree with Project Moon, it was we're trying to help individuals understand some of this there's more complexity that that in order to be space faring, we need to understand and to see imagery that people, that companies are tossing around saying we're going to build the first in space, and we're going to do this in the next 25 years.
We're not close to these type of circular gravitational space, objects that we can live in that type of environment today. We're not that close. Most advanced in in habitat building is Bob Bigelow, Bigelow Aerospace in Nevada. And he has been actually building structures for space, for 15 years. Unfortunately, his wife died 3 months ago, and he let everybody at the company go.
And we hope that after the coronavirus crisis is over, he has the option, to come back into it and keep the company going because he's ahead of anybody else. I I had asked somebody just recently because they had brought up this, the condition, and I thank you for the clarity there. I did not know what happened, and I don't study this research wise. It was just I heard it in passing that Bigelow had closed. So now there's an explanation to it. So thank you. Right.
So, hopefully, it will open when when this is over, but he's not doing artificial gravity stations at all. He's doing great big bubbles in space. So let's take the 142 mass extinctions. Let's carry it forward. What where are we gonna go from there? Well, we have to understand, first of all, that climate change is a natural part of this planet, that we can actually use the resources of space to utterly utterly abnegate, utterly wipe out all human contributions to climate change.
We can do it by harvesting solar power in space and transmitting it to earth using microwaves, like the microwaves that power your cell phone, absolutely harmless microwaves. If we do that, we can, again, eliminate all man made carbon emissions, all man made greenhouse gas emissions. We can eliminate the use of fossil fuels for energy production. And according to my partner in this for 4 years, Doctor. APJ Kalam, the 11th President of India, we can lift 2,000,000,000 people out of poverty.
And the Chinese, if we think that's impractical, the Chinese have committed to doing it. They want to dominate the space energy sector by 2,035. They have their 1st factory. It's been in operation for roughly a year, making nothing but components for space solar power, the harvesting of solar power in space and sending it down to earth.
Since that's the multi $1,000,000,000,000 industry, the energy industry, whoever dominates that industry is very likely to dominate the mid part of the 21st century. And John's do you know John Strickland? I don't I don't know if you know John. John Strickland is a yeah. He's my he's the chief analyst for the group that Buzz Aldrin committed to being found 15 years ago. Okay. John John and I did we did a podcast on the logic behind moon power, satellites and, along with solving climate change.
So, yes, that's a it's viable technology. Absolutely. Right. And John has worked out ways to do construction in space. I'm not sure that they're the ways that construction is actually gonna be done. There's something called an arcanaut, which is going to go up into space and start building trusses In space, trusses are the base of anything that you build, and I believe it's supposed to go up in the next year, which is slow because actually, here we are.
We've got up right now, Elon Musk is building the first real spaceship. It's called the Starship, and it's capable it's built to hold a 100 people on their way to Mars, or to carry a 100 roughly a 120 tons of cargo, which so outclasses everything else that has ever been done that it's ridiculous. Most things are a big deal. Most rockets are a big deal if they carry 6 tons in space. 6 tons is a fleet compared to 120 ton elephant.
And those ships, you can see pictures of them, you can follow the construction of them every day. Elon felt that the real challenge was not to create the Starship, it was to create the assembly line that produced thousands of these Starships because the Starship could also take you point to point from New York to Shanghai, in 45 minutes or less. So and that's one of the things that Elon is planning as a source of cash flow so that he can do his real project.
And his real project is building the beginnings of a city on Mars with these Starships. So these Starships radically changed the name of the game, but what we're missing is infrastructure on the moon on Mars. We need construction equipment to build habitats. We need habitats. We need gardens. We need farming up there.
We need ice harvesting equipment because this ice, we think, at the south pole of the moon, and the Chinese were busy exploring that possibility right now on the edge of the biggest crater, in the solar system, which is at the south pole of the moon, which is where the water is supposed to be.
So we need ice harvesters to take in the ice from the moon and to turn it into breathable oxygen, into drinkable water, and into rocket fuel so that you can take a starship, to the moon and you can refuel it there and you can either come back to Earth or you can go to Mars or you can go to Jupiter or you can go to Europa. One of the moons of, Jupiter, if I'm right. I always get these moons mixed up. There's a there's a 79 moons around Jupiter, I think it is.
Amazing. So and Europa has oceans, and we think they're water oceans. They might be long. They might be methane oceans. But one way or the other, here we are, the only life forms capable carrying life beyond the gravity well to other poison pills of stone. And what has life's imperative been ever since it was all of life on earth was the size of your dumb man? It has been to kidnap, seduce, and recruit as many dead out dead animals as you can and bring them into the grand enterprise of life.
And that is our job to advance that cause on other poison builders now. So the so the the jump we took a jump from being complex and going to complexity. Now we're the premise is that the next iteration is because we're able to take complexity or takes difficult environments and to survive and thrive through them, that our next journey is to take the construct of the species on Earth and bring them to other planets where they will learn to thrive and grow also. Right. Exactly.
And other moons as well. And other moons. It's very much it's very much like what we did when the first ice ages, hit us 200, 200000000 years ago. And 2 100,000,000, I get my figures all mixed up, my 1,000,000 and my 1,000. But a long time ago, 200000 years ago, we became modern humans. And, it's very much like the catastrophe of the ice ages where we actually tracked huge distances to get to the glaciers and live on their edges.
We became human by thriving on catastrophe, and that's that's our job. And it's our job to take life wherever we possibly can. Johnny, we are the Johnny Appleseeds of faith. I I maybe it's not our job. Maybe it is what is we we are. I'm gonna use a different analogy. We have a laborer we have a black lab. Our son has a black lab, but stays very often. And when she sees an animal, she's not looking to eat it. She just has a natural inclination to attack it.
She does not she does not think about it. It her her eyes blaze over, and she goes after it. And she will fight a squirrel. She will fight whatever because that's her natural inclination. So what you're suggesting is that and I'm not going to say our DNA, but built into us is to to humankind in some in some individuals more than others is this natural inclination to need to go. Right. There's the, blue and old blueism. An agent that looks up goes up. An agent that looks down goes down.
Right now, we're looking down. We have to start looking up. That is much more of a biological imperative than it sounds. If you watch, 2 lizards, 2 male lizards going up against each other in a battle for dominance, It's a battle to see who can break nature's most basic law, gravity, the best. It's a head bobbing contest, and he who gets his head up the highest wins. And when he wins, he goes through a total whole ship.
The hormones of victory flood his system, and he looks for the highest thing around and stands on it like the lion king on the cliff overlooking the kingdom of all that he surveys. The lizard who loses also goes through the hormonal ship. He has the hormones of defeat. He turns brown. The lizard that won turns a bright green. The lizard that loses turns brown, and he hugs the ground as if he wanted to crawl a hole or dig a hole and crawl into it.
Just the same thing you and I think were depressed. If you watch 2 lobsters, 2 male lobsters go up against each other for dominance because lobsters have dominance hierarchies too. Again, he who wins is he who defies for nature's most base basic law of gravity, the best. And see who gets his head off the highest. So and so the idea that we aspire to things on high, that's not just built into us.
That's built into all complex biological creatures, all multicellular creatures with hierarchical systems, and hierarchical systems seem to be built into us, and they seem to have been built into us for about 550,000,000 years. That's how basic this drive towards the sky is. And once upon a time, a bunch of loony dinosaurs, did something that they did in biological terms, but I'm gonna sum it up in anthropomorphic terms.
But those anthropomorphic terms are directly correspond with what happened biologically. There was a bunch of useful loony dinosaurs who wanted to take to the sky, and their parents were conservatives. Their parents were ecological ecology lovers. And their parents basically would have said, if you were one of their parents, why are you going up there? There's nothing up there. Take a look. There's nothing to eat. You can't eat clouds, and that's all that's up there. There's no place to stay.
There's no place for shelter. None. There's no foothold in the sky at all. All you're going to do is die. You're wasting your time and energy. Look. The earth is good to us. She's our mother. She is rich. She gives us stuff to eat. She gives us places to find shelter. Stick to the earth. And those loony dinosaurs did what the parents told them not to and took to the skies.
And the result is that the conservative dinosaurs who hog the brain of the earth mother earth have been gone for 65000000 years. Gone. Totally. And how many of the loony dinosaurs who flew have you seen today when you were walking outdoors? Yep. I I I I I love the story because I I'm picturing these, they didn't have TikTok back then, and they didn't have some of these other but they they were counter to the beliefs of their parents.
And nature has given us other ways to indicate how she favors breaking the rules. The creatures of the sky, that includes both birds and sky mammals, bats, live 60% longer than the creatures of the earth, 60% longer. And there are more species of them than there are of us earth crawling mammals. So what does that entail? There are more ways of making a living in the sky than there are making a living on the earth, and nature favors those. Nature loves those who oppose her most.
And by opposing gravity, just the way all our kin on this planet have opposed gravity, we will be doing nature's work. Nature has built that aspiration for the sky into us the way she's built it into lizards and lobsters.
For another call, you and I, I would like to hear, and I'm just saying this out loud because I don't wanna forget it, is I'd love at some point to discuss this privately about or maybe at the end your take on the transition to, artificial intelligence or technology robotics and some of the theories that maybe Elon has put out. I'm using that name just because it's a well known name.
So we won't go into now because I wanna get back to number 3, which is temperature shifts 80 degrees every 3 hours. Okay. That was back in the early stages of this planet. The planet today, we have 24 hour days. Back then, we had 3 hour days. The planet was moving around the excess much faster. And so you went from being flooded with radiation for 3 hours to utter darkness. And when you transition from the radiation flood to the utter darkness, wham, the temperature went down 80 degrees.
3 hours later, when you transition from the utter darkness to being flooded with radiation, wham, the temperature went up 80 degrees. And life not only survived under these conditions, life thrived under these conditions. And we're not entirely sure how because people who study the origins of life don't look at these massive climate changes, Day and night, we call them today. Summer, winter, fall, and spring, we call them today.
But look how far our creatures have gone to adapt to summer, winter, fall, and spring. Some birds fly 6,000 miles to get from a warm place, to a place that is going to be warm, to to get from a place that's about to be chilly to a place that's about to be warm. That monarch butterflies, which grow in Ontario and New York State. Over the course of 4 generations, they fly 2,000 miles. These tiny little things.
It's impossible to believe that they carry enough energy in their bodies to accomplish anything like that at all. And their their means of flight is not energy efficient. Not at all. And yet they manage to fly, roughly, a 1000 miles for each generation that and end up in the same forest in Mexico, that is astonishing, and it's an adaptation to, guess what, climate change. So, yes, we can use yeah. Do you do you think well, I don't know how to I'm trying to find the way to ask the question.
Let me make a statement on the question. Climate change is impacting everything ocean in the oceans from mass migrations to where creatures are spawning. They're moving more north if the temperature is getting too warm. They're changing their condition, and some of them are going extinct up to 200 species per day. They the numbers I've heard go extinct.
So do is there in this calculation in a possibility of the rapid transition that we're making could be that 1 and you probably know the the construct where humans actually make the biggest mistake of all so they never get to where they wanna go. Do you think that that could be a possible outcome? You know what I'm asking?
I think that what's gonna I think that what's gonna happen is unless our civilization, western civilization, begins to realize the astonishing things that it has done and begins to see its obligation to do even more astonishing things in the future, the Chinese are gonna own this territory, and they're gonna own the 21st century. After all, they have plans, for example, for space solar power. They have plans to colonize the entire solar system. Serious plans. They intend to achieve these things.
We don't have any long range plans like that. Our Artemis program to reach the moon is silly because it's about getting to the moon, but what do you do when you get there? There's no, there's nobody's building a habitation. Nobody is putting is building construction equipment for the moon. The moon has wicked circumstances that would destroy a caterpillar machine of any kind because the dust is the most, corrosive, stuff that you've ever seen.
And if it gets in your spacesuit within 3 hours, your spacesuit is unusable. Yep. And that was one of the challenges that Buzz Aldrin had. I I I'm just sharing this. I believe you I I met Buzz Buzz at the first ever space meeting I went to, which was a PhD meeting more than it was a a space meeting. And one of the things that was on the landing on the moon that is not discussed often, I didn't know any of this, is that their space suits were binding up. Right. The space dust tears things apart.
It's like glass. Yeah. It is just corrosive. It's you know, the carborundum sandpapers that you get for really heavy duty sanding? Mhmm. Well, it's like, got a whole planetary body or a whole heavenly body that's covered in that stuff, 3 feet deep, and the car's kind of thing that that that's on your harbor under the sandpaper, and that sandpaper can tear things apart. So let's the the question is a little different, but I wanna touch on what you've just said.
One of the challenges that I look at in terms of if we're gonna compete east and west, and I'm looking more at Earth as one total, is the, China itself. It's not all of Asia. China has the 2035 dream. Right. China has the belt and road. If you were to go around the planet, maybe you could help me here because I'm asking if you know of any other.
I would argue that no other country in the world has defined the industries that the society should go into to be ready for the 21st the continuation of the 21st century. No other, country on the planet has a full fledged plan to dominate and move forward as compared to the the Chinese. Do you know of any The Chinese no. The Chinese are the only ones. The Belt and Road Initiative pulls together 60 countries and 3 point 3,600,000,000 human beings. It's a really grand vision.
And it and it is it's a competition against the west because the west runs the seas. So now you can get to Europe, which is the number one trading partner for China, and they can do that in 17, 18 days as compared to a boat from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Rotterdam, which is 32? Well, they're planning on having high speed rail that will go all the way from the factory towns of China, to Lisbon and Spain.
And do it in 2 days so that they can ship their products from their factories out to Europe and continue to flood Europe with well made products, that have come in at a price that otherwise would not be affordable in case of cell phones, for example. And we have to we have well, there are lots of things we have to do, but we have to have a president who has a vision. And instead, we have a president who has, lobotomy. That can be a bit of a problem.
The one person who has plans of this sort is Elon Musk, and his plan is for speed on Mars and for thousands of starships, taking off of regular intervals intervals for the destination of your choice, whether the station destination is Shanghai or the moon or Mars. So he's going to provide the transportation system. He knows that all he knows is the transportation. We need we need more than that. We need the whole ecosystem. And and and by the way, that's project Moon Hut.
Just Well, that's interesting. I mean, that's what we're doing. For 6 years. So we'll go over that another time. What I my question was the a bigger question, and I think you study these things a lot more than I do. So I I'm asking, and I maybe I'm not saying it as well as I'd like to. There is a theory that humankind has, or earth and life on earth has chances to succeed and not. So we jumped over the 1st hurdle, and we jumped over the 2nd hurdle.
We jumped over the 3rd, and there is there are hurdles. And there's one belief that unless humankind makes a few alterations, we could poof out of existence before we actually achieve getting there. Right. There is a theory of what do you know what that name is called? There's a theory of that that it poofs out? Okay. Well, there is one. Do you this is a hopeful, I I don't know your age, but this is a do you believe humankind will make the race in time? I believe it will make the race in time.
I don't wanna see the Chinese doing it. I would prefer to see us doing it. Chinese values are very different from ours, and they are, dictatorial. They are anti free speech, as you can tell from what's happening in Hong Kong right now. I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 I've lived in Hong Kong for 10 years, just so you know. So my Right. That has been my home. It's an agony. So I I talk to my friends every day. Right. And and I suffer for their agony.
I would not wanna have to go through what they're going about to go through. It's But but I don't want the world to go through what with what they're they're about to go through. And the purpose of the Belt and Road is not only to speed commerce. It is to speed, the sway of Chinese ideas and the Chinese autocratic way of doing things and to spread that around the world in place of democratic values. Mhmm. And I prize democratic values.
I mean, I'm Jewish and the only thing we've got is language and our ability to use it. And if you cut off our free speech, you cut off our creativity. Mhmm. And and I'm Jewish too, so the combination, historically of that ability to be able to innovate and create. So with the so let's get back on to the topic. So we've just covered actually number 4 too, another mass catastrophe spring, winter, summer, fall. You've got the number 5 is what we're on.
Well, that's the volcanoes and the volcanoes and planetesimals. Look. This was Well, what's the I've never heard of a planetesimal. Okay. A planetesimal is, also known as a meteor. It's a it is a gravitational it's a gravity ball. And it's a gravity ball that is so large that, our planet attracts it. And once because it attracts it, that gravity ball comes smacking into our gravity ball, like a tablespoon hitting a pudding. Makes a big, big, big splat.
And this planet, which formed from planetesimals, which formed from these meteors that it managed to swallow whole from its winnings in the great gravity crusades. The great gravity crusades were still going on with it when this planet formed. And the result was that when life began, it looks like these planetesimals were still smacking into the Earth's surface. Now for Earth, every planetesimal that's smacked into its surface was a victory.
It means it was able to swallow another gravity ball and to bulk up, making it more capable of swallowing even more gravity balls. But what was a victory for Earth, was a catastrophe for life. Mhmm. And yet life lived through these catastrophes. And if life can do it and mankind cannot, that would be awful. We should be capable of doing anything that early life was able to do and more because of our qualities of imagination, consciousness, and technology.
And I I would agree, and I I learned this the other day. So, I think it's a that Jupiter, because of the size of its mass, is a protector, and I'm gonna use the word planetesimals. It's a protector of Earth because the mass is so large that it takes the bigger masses of asteroids, and it swallows them so that the earth doesn't get hit. I didn't know that. That's an interest the moon and I don't know how the theory runs, but the moon is also a protector of the earth.
And the theory goes that without the moon, we wouldn't have life on earth. Now I haven't looked up that theory recently, and I forget its details. There's a there's a guy by the name of Neil Cummings. I can introduce you to him. He's been on the show. I've known him for a while, and he wrote a book about whether life on Earth would exist if there was no moon. Right.
And, but the way things are going, life is so we're creating adaptable that it looks like life could easily be here even without a moon. But we don't know. There's no evidence of life anywhere else. So what we do have, and it's been accumulating over the last 20 to 30 years, is evidence there's something for lack of a better term, I call it molecular genesis, the creation, the self formation, the self assembly of molecules.
Once you had atoms, first, you had the first atoms and there were only 3 forms of them, hydrogen, helium, and lithium. That's all there was in this universe, but the mere fact that there were atoms of all was an enormous astonishment.
Those once those atoms started congregating in the really, really big gravity balls, the ones that caught fire, the ones that caught fire by eating the atomic nuclei at their hearts, the ones that were spilling the photons that were cries of distress from dying atomic nuclei. Those stars, when they died, when they went NOVA, when they died, they crunched those atomic nuclei fragments in their hearts in ways that were previously unimaginable.
And if you had predicted it, I would have known you were crazy. I would have known you were wrong. They crunched those elements of atomic nuclei into 98 new social gatherings. 98 new forms of social structure. And those 98 forms of social structure take once they've got a Is that the periodic table? Yes. They became the periodic table. Once they once they spewed out this was not garbage. The universe was not garbaging her way down.
She was garbaging her way up because the garbage was rich in possibilities that had these 98 new forms of atomic nuclei. And when they were let loose from the gravity of the dying star, they were able to find electrons to circle them. So we became we became more comp we became more complex. We Yes. We went from a simplistic 3 to this super supernova, the crushing, and we ended up with more, not less. Yes. And those 98 are responsible for life. Now something else is responsible for life.
Those atoms began to gather an even greater social aggregations called molecules, and that's molecular genesis. And I keep looking for the figures on when this molecular genesis began and how it proceeded, but no one seems to be studying that. Nonetheless, wherever we look in this solar system and beyond, in this galaxy, we find wisps of gas that contain some of the first biological, molecules, molecules based on carbon. So we find them all over the place.
But these are relatively simple molecules. These are just, at most, hundreds of atoms, and in most cases, 6 or 7 atoms. How we went from those simple molecules to the complex molecules of a genome, with billions of atoms in such a well structured order that they can call to other atoms and make them assemble or call to other, molecules and make them assemble in a precise replica of themselves, I mean, that's beyond astonishing.
So there's a field that we're missing, molecular genesis, telling us when and how these first molecules assemble, and then we don't know how in the world they assemble for the other life. Which utterly beyond us. Which, yes, which begs to, and if you took that iteration as not only is it structured in the the brain, we don't even have to say the human brain, but the ability to be cognizant of what's around you. But here's the trick.
Genomes, in the same way that brains with ideas reflect the world around us, and with science, we try to make we try to distinguish between those ideas that do reflect the world around us and those that don't. Genes went through this same process. A gene is a record of how to survive in a given environment. In other words, it is a way of summing up in a molecular code the environment around it. And it passes it on.
Is that you're saying that we our gene learns, and then it passes on to the next generation of experiences that they had. Right. Exactly. So the universe began looking at herself in a mirror through symbolic systems of representation of herself with the first genomes. And now she does it through our consciousness and ideas. She examines herself in a mirror and finds a way to symbolically represent herself. My point was that you're asking for this molecular, what did you call it?
The molecular genesis. Molecular genesis. And what I'm saying is you just described the complexity. My hands are up in the air right now as I'm doing this. You described the complexity, and I'm saying even that complexity is so complex. But then to say that all of these these molecules, these structures within our body are able to recall, think, re aggregate, and do. Well, they can't think, but they do certainly carry within them, a a record.
But what I mean is the human brain as it acts as a whole. Oh, yes. Right. That that is eve that's another that's a to the 400th power, another questionable situation is we can't even figure out the molecular genesis to figure out how intelligent thought. And that could be for a dog looking at and hunting down or a lion hunting down or an amoeba eating something. How how that happens, we don't even know. So the these are huge questions.
So these questions and and a different way of looking at science is in my book, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates. And Barbara Ehrenreich says that, we've had 200 to 350 years of science and it's all been reductionistic. It's all followed a pattern that was laid out by Aristotle 24 100 years ago, and that this book, The God Problem, How A Godless Cosmos Creates, may be the first step step into the next 250 years of science.
And what we say at Project Moon Hat is we can't be reductionistic in our approach to space. We can't be reductionistic in the into how we live on Earth. We have to create a new evolution or a new iteration of how we look for hope in the future. So there's a similarity in that same construct.
Yes. So if if we were to take now you did say volcano, so I did stop you on the, the fur in the volcano and I'm as Well, we believe currently, as of the last week, we believe that the gigantic volcanic eruptions were responsible for some of these mass extinctions. According to one study, mass extinctions take place every 26,500,000 years. And that's the basis for the calculation that we have 142 mass extinctions.
And volcanoes have apparently played a very significant role in some of those mass extinctions. Volcanoes have apparently some of them have been so large, they've been capable of blacking out the sky for up to 3 years. Like the one that they say in the United States, which the way right. The supervolcano? Is that that's what they're called? The supervolcano under the yellow under Yellowstone. That's allegedly Earth.
Yes. Now in the early days of the earth, when life was forming, these things were much more common. The the mantle of the earth, the core of the earth, all the various layers that we know on the earth were still in formation. I mean, it takes a lot of work to turn gravity balls like planetesesimals, meteors, into a mantle and a liquid core. And not to mention continents and seas. But then that work was still taking place when life first formed. How do we know?
Because there was a giant continent called Pangaea when life first formed, and eventually that continent broke off into 7 continents. And those are the continents that we know today, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, North America, they were all part of 1 gigantic continent at one point. So an awful lot of geological change has been going on in the time that life has been here.
And and then, when 2 tectonic plates meet and their clash, sets up a batch of stone that juts up high into the sky, called the Himalayas, the exposure of all of that stone, that stone starts absorbing certain elements from the atmosphere and changes the atmosphere and creates climate change. So what we humans have to know, what we have to get used to is, yes, we are capable of getting rid of the human contribution to climate change. No, we are not capable of getting rid of climate change.
Climate change has been endemic to this planet since this planet first began. What does that mean? It means in the same way that once upon a time, we have the climate by stealing the skins, the furs of animals and wrapping them around us and by building tents. The first tents were 17000 years ago. They were made of mammoth husks, mammoth ribs and mammoth hides. Those are climate controlled technologies. And what we need are climate stabilization technologies.
If we truly want the climate of the earth to be like it was in 16/50, which seems to be the general goal these days, then we're going to have to develop the technologies to accomplish that.
Now at a conference in Japan about 6 years ago, there was a woman from the European Space Administration who showed us that the giant satellites that we have to create in space, solar farms, 5 miles by 5 miles, 5 miles across and 5 miles in-depth, that those could be used to power lasers that when a hurricane is on its way for Jamaica, we could use laser to heat an edge of the hurricane and change its direction so it doesn't reach, Jamaica.
But the real trick is hurricanes and tornadoes are energy sources. They are massive energy sources. And our task and I know it sounds ridiculous right now, but humans accomplish ridiculous things. We've been doing that ever since we've been human. Our task is to harness these things and make them work for us, make them energy sources.
But but one way or the other, we have to create stabilization technologies if we want the climate to stay the way it was in 16 50 because that is totally unnatural. Massive climate change is mother nature's way. Do we have a right to disrupt nature? Or remember the lesson of the loony dinosaurs who took over the sky. Nature loves those who oppose her most.
She loves those who break her rules because it's on the backs of those who break her rules that she makes it up the next stair step on the ladder of complexity or the stair step of complexity. And climbing that stair step is something she is inexorably drawn to. That's her way. That that is her core. It's when I do these interviews, as as I've shared and I think anybody's listening and understands, they're in they're conversations. I'm I'm here to learn.
And it's interesting how my mind is racing to look at the complexity in a additive way, not a not a a law of thermodynamics degradation way, but just that you've given a different angle on it. And then to take the hurricane, and how do we harness it yet at the I I would actually say the word is the the Sorry. I'm sorry. Bless you. No no no worries. The I think the word harness is probably in my mind is not the exact word.
And my mindset is we're not we would like to be able to, like a horse, harness it and control it so that it doesn't still hit into Jamaica, yet at the same time, we can create and and take the energy and use that positively for all species on earth. Right.
And one of the members of one of the groups that I run, the the Big Bang Tango Media Lab, has a vision of chimneys, 2 miles high that would take advantage of these differentials in temperature, and the winds, the differentials in temperatures create in order to harvest energy. How practical that idea is, I don't know. But remember, a lot of humans have done a lot of totally impractical things.
So and this is for someone who's listening in just because, as I told you, sometimes I have to break out of this. The there's a differential in temperature from the base to the top and it goes through. It's not a hurricane or typhoon depending on how you label it or call it. It's not one ubiquitous set of conditions. And I'm do you could you go into that a little bit just so that in your terms Well, it's sim it's simple it's simple convection. Now I understand.
I just wanted I wanna get somebody else who doesn't who's coming in and doesn't have a science background to get a little better understanding. Describe it to me in a way that you would give me the information so I could understand it at a more complex level. Well, warm air rises, and cold air settles on the ground. And if you've got a 2 mile high chimney, it's cold up there. It's very cold up there, and it's much, much warmer at the bottom.
So the warm air is gonna rise, to join with the cold air, penetrate the cold air. And and there's stuff about how many pounds of pressure per square inch or how many molecules, per square inch there are in cold, air. It's dense. There are a lot of molecules per square inch. In warm air, there are a lot fewer molecules per square inch. One way or the other, the warm air goes up.
So if you're harvesting that difference between the warm air at the surface and the cold air way up there in the jet stream, you can produce a whole lot of energy, and it's temperature differentials of that kind that power hurricanes and tornadoes. So you're harnessing the power of hurricanes and tornadoes, but I would like to more directly harness the hurricanes and the tornadoes themselves. That may be well, it is, of course, impractical, but we humans do impractical things all the time.
K. So Life has done impractical things all the time. So so let's take on, number 6, which is the 400 c vents. Okay. Those, we pretty much covered. The the richness of life down there is just astonishing. Yep. And the richness of life. 400? Oh, there's the £400 per The 400 degrees. Degrees. Okay. That's why I was I didn't I Right. I was writing as fast as I could. I didn't put a degree somewhere. Okay. Okay. And then the surface catastrophe maintaining, number 7.
Okay. The universe operates by surfing catastrophe. Look what she did. Stars were catastrophe. At least they were to the atomic nuclei of their heart that were being chewed to pieces. Star Death was a catastrophe. It destroyed one of the most astonishing things nature had ever created, a star. And out of that star death came 98 new forms of atoms. That's astonishing. What does that teach you about nature's relationship to catastrophe?
She uses catastrophe to climb the ladder of complexity, to climb the stair steps of complexity. And and she's always basically going fuck you to what came before. She's always outdoing it with something that seemed utterly impossible and utterly inconceivable. And if that's nature's imperative, and it is, then that's our job too. We have to be disaster tamers. We have to be, catastrophe surfers.
We have to, do things that are utterly outrageous and that seem to go utterly against nature's laws because that's nature's most basic imperative. That is nature's most basic law. So are we do we have to my mind what I'm what I'm thinking is 13.7000000000 years. It took a long time to get from age to age to age. It took a long time for humans to get to a point we're going faster and faster and faster. On the grand scope of the universe, we're a blip in time.
What you're saying is we should surf within the surf within the surf to find the wave that we could ride. Yes. And we should stop looking at disasters just as disasters because they are when they kill people at gaslight, and start looking at them as opportunities. But most important, we should take to the skies just like the loony dinosaurs who flew, except the loony dinosaurs who flew were restricted to the atmosphere, its atmosphere that allows their wings to keep them aloft.
We've gone beyond wings. We've gone beyond wings in a mere 103 years. And it's our job to take life and ourselves to the skies. So I I would like to take it in 2 questions then off of that. Number 1 is number 1, and I'm gonna ask this question first, and then I'll tell you the reason why. What do you project or what do you see or what is your forecast as to how we will become or get to space? You know, you could use any theory. It could be Elon's or it could be yours, however you want them.
That would be the first one. And the reason I'm asking is because when we have the conversation about Project Moon Hut, I wanna be able to understand your thinking. So that's the first question. What how would you answer that? NASA's not gonna get us there. NASA hasn't been getting us anywhere since 2011, has not been getting humans anywhere. It's been getting wondrous, astonishing robotic expeditions, into the skies, to Mars in particular, but not humans.
And it's not going to because NASA is just a giant 1,000,000,000, a sink for 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars to keep this space military industrial complex alive, Boeing in particular. But Elon is a man with a vision, and he's a man with a vision who is capable of implement that vision. And we gotta we should have security guards around Elon at all times to keep him safe because he's the only visionary really going outside the box on planet Earth today.
And the other one is Xi Jinping, but he is simply picking up all of the fantasies of the west for the future that we have discarded because we're busy lacerating ourselves over things like racism, which is a problem we definitely have to solve. But we are convincing ourselves that we are the most polluted, awful civilization in the history of mankind. No. We are not. If you've been born in Western civilization in 18/50, your life expectancy would have been 38.5 years.
If you've been born in Western civilization in 2000, your life expectancy would have been 78.5 years, 40 years longer, more than twice as long. If you took a Stanford Binet IQ test from 1916, the 1st year it was administered, and gave it to a 100 random kids off the street today, they would register as marginal geniuses with an IQ of about a 135. Why? Because we've added 35 points to the average IQ in the last 104 years.
If you looked at the poorest paid worker in London in the year 2000, She earned what an entire tenement full of workers earned in 18/50, Irish stock workers. She earned she would have earned, what, 7 of them earned, and that's not calculating things like her cell phone that even prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, a techno freak, could not possibly have owned despite all of his wealth.
If you were born in 16/50 in the west or if you were born in one of those indigenous civilizations that lives at peace with its fellow men and in harmony with nature, your odds of dying a violent death at the hands of a fellow human being would have been 10 times what they are today.
In other words, western civilization has increased peace by a factor of 10, and western civilization has increased the average height by 4 inches, except in Holland where it's increased the average height by 7 inches. Western civilization has done all these things, and no other civilization in the history of mankind has done anything like it. So if our great grandparents could give us an extra 40 years of life, what do we owe to our great grandkids? Another 40 years of life or more.
If our great grandparents could give us 35 extra points on our IQ, what do we owe to our great grandkids? Another 35 points or more on their IQ. If our great grandparents could increase our earnings by a factor of 7, then we it is our obligation to increase the earnings of the poorest paid worker by a factor of 7 for our grandchildren's time.
And if piece is going up by a factor of 10, then it's our obligation on behalf of our grandkids to increase it by a factor of 10 all over again, and we won't bother with the hype. Let's hope that continues to go wrong too. But you have to realize something when it comes to define gravity and the natural inclination toward the sky that is built into our biology. Every morning, you wake up in a bed horizontal in the in form that gravity naturally dictates for you.
And then you put your feet on the floor and you do something impossible. You stand up. You defy gravity for the rest of the day. You are like a pencil being balanced on its point, and you manage to do that with software in your brain, not primarily with your hardware, but with your software. That is how deeply nature wants to rise. That is how deeply nature aspires to the skies.
So do you when I say when if we were to give without putting it on Elon, can you give me the next 30 years that you see? Yeah. Elon's, starships are gonna be So your your believe that you believe that the answer you believe that the answer is Elon? Yes. Okay. He's the only one doing what he is doing. Literally, the only creature of any kind on planet Earth doing what he is doing. And those starships will provide a large capacity, transport system to the skies or between the cities.
Somebody's got to wake up to the fact, sooner or later, that we need to build the infrastructure elements, the farming, the habitats, the construction equipment, the ice harvesters. We're we're gonna go you and I are gonna have fun. I hope you know that when we're done. We're gonna have fun when I go over what Project Moon had has been about. Right. Well, I have a I have a meeting. It's 11 minutes. Okay. So so okay. So that's perfect. Alright.
The this was this is different than what I expected, in terms of the angle or and and that's what I love about having these experiences. Having over a 190 interviews is that the ability to learn things in a way that were it was great. You you brought brought me, brought the listeners to a journey, which I I definitely appreciate. I appreciate you taking the time to to make sure that, that you would be on the program. So I I forgot who was the one who introduced us. I I I've gotta thank them too.
I'll look it up because there's a connection. Right. I I have it too. It's Bruce Pittman, possibly. I'm not sure. No. No. No. It was, from SpaceCom. Steve Wolf. All that was yes. Yes. Steve Wolf. Steve Wolf had said that I should get you on because he's going to be on the program, and Peter Garretson also had mentioned you Oh, that's terrific. From a different angle. He's like a brother to me. He's he did a phenomenal interview. He's it was really great.
So as you said, we've had an for for as few interviews we've had, we have some really powerful, strong, individuals. And Franklin being on this week too, I think is gonna add to the the richness. So for that, I wanna thank you for taking the time. So thank you very much. Well, it's a great one, David. For those, I want to thank all of you for taking the time to listen in.
And I I sincerely hope that you learned something new today that will make a difference in your life, your life, and the lives of others. And in this case, the life, the existence of or the the spreading of our wings to others' planets and and into space. Again, once we are Project Moon Hut Foundation, you can learn more about us by connecting with us at [email protected]. The website is not where it needs to be today. We're working on a new website.
So if there was one way to connect to you, Howard, what would be bloom.net. Howard bloom.net. Okay. And bloom is bl0om, like the flowers that bloom in the spring for a lot. I have a Larry Bloom from the island who I went to camp with when I was young, so I knew the bloom. Bl0om. And Right. We would love to connect with you. You could reach out to me at [email protected]. You can go to YouTube, and we've just put up some videos.
So there's project it's the first time we're actually releasing these. There's one up there, and that is at the YouTube. You look up Project Moon Hut, and you'll see a Project Moon Hut Foundation logo. You can connect with us on Facebook. You can connect with us at Project Moon Hut at Twitter. You can also connect to me at at Goldsmith on Twitter, and we're we're here. So if you wanna learn more about what we're doing and be involved, we would love to hear from you.
So that said, to everybody, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.