Hey, we're taking a rest in our odyssey today to talk with a new friend, astrophysicist Tom Murphy. Together, we'll gaze at the grandeur of the stars and marvel at the complexity of one of our oldest cousins, the amoeba. In this conversation, we'll hear about Tom's own odyssey, from professor of astrophysics to his growing concern about the collapse of civilization, to his ever expanding appreciation for the mysteries of the universe.
Maybe you know, Tom, from his writings on his Do the Math blog, or you've seen his new YouTube series, Metastatic Modernity. And if you haven't, well, here's Tom Murphy. Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring life on an incredible planet and the universe. It's interwoven with. I'm Alex Smith. What initially drew you to becoming an astrophysicist? How deep into your life, even childhood? Was that something that you, yeah, were passionate about as a kid growing up?
I had all kinds of passions that would change every few months or years. And at one point, I wanted to be a taxidermist. That just really appealed to me. And, my parents weren't too happy about that one. When I was a 15 year old in the summer. I grew up in Tennessee. I was out with my little refractor telescope that I hadn't really paid much attention to. I'd just gotten it for my 15th birthday, a few months before.
But I was looking at stars and I realized that stars are actually kind of boring. They look just like stars in the telescope and almost about to give up. I was like, I gave it a good try. Let me look at this other one. Bright star. Just, you know. And it was Saturn. And I saw the rings and it was just unreal. I started dancing around and whooping and hollering in the yard. I felt like I had discovered Saturn.
Obviously I knew that I wasn't the discoverer of Saturn, but it felt very much like that. About a half year later, Halley's Comet came around and I started watching it every night that I could, watching it go through the sky a few degrees a day. And it introduced me to the constellations. And I got to know the sky a little bit. And I got associated with the amateur astronomy club, got the bug and built a ten inch telescope. And that was all in.
But I saw all nine planets in one night when there were nine planets through my telescope, and I saw a quasar 2 billion light years away, and I saw a supernova in a galaxy about 35 million light years away. And, you know, it's just fantastic. And one key element there that I really resonated with at some point. I was a subscriber to Sky and telescope magazine, and every month I got news updates. What's happening in astronomy? And here was one about this supernova that I just mentioned,
the one that I had seen. And I thought, you know what? That little news blurb is the only news blurb that we would share with another civilization. Many light years away. That's our only common news. They would be reading something about that supernova, too, and I felt like I'm a citizen of the universe. Not so much. Just tied up, entangled in human affairs and politics and economics and all of our concerns here on this planet.
I felt that was broader and that was very appealing, that it was touching something bigger and something that wasn't about me in something that wasn't about humans and something it wasn't even about Earth. That is something that was just on a bigger scale. So I think I really like that. Why do you call yourself a recovering astrophysicist? Yeah, well, for one thing, I am retired. I hung up the gloves to the point where I'm not really even tracking media hits on, like my wife said.
Oh, did you see these new images from Jupiter? No. And I didn't go chase them down then. So I spent a lot of my years and a lot of my life really fascinated by cosmology. And I don't think it's boring now. I just have moved to a different area of interest. And being retired has allowed me to do that. And I should mention, I retired at age 53, so it was definitely not the normal situation of being 80 and still coming in to, you know, most university professors don't just never stop.
And I always assume that that would be me too. I mean, astrophysics was my life and I did live a parallel life for many years because in fact, the first year that I was at UC San Diego teaching, I taught a course on energy and the environment for general education, non science major audience and I learned a lot, and it sort of opened my eyes to the fact that this is not an easy story.
I thought it would be an easy story to piece together how we move forward based fossil fuels, for instance, and deal with climate change. I thought technology is just always the answer. So I came at it from that approach, and I just the more I dug into it, the more I realized this is not so easy. And at some point, it turned into kind of an existential concern about peak oil and what the implications of that would be, knowing it's a finite source and how utterly dependent we are on it.
And when we get to solar fast enough and EVs fast enough, you know, that kind of concern, what happens when that rug gets pulled out from under our economies? So that was the level of concern that I had. I recognized that that there was a chance of our way of life or economic system collapsing. So I thought my field of astrophysics could be utterly forgotten, that all the work that I'd done if we really botched this, all of that could be flushed down the tubes.
And that hurt tremendously in terms of if there was a collapse of some kind. That's right. That people would lose access to the knowledge that was gained in the field of astrophysics. For example. That's right. And and it certainly wouldn't be a priority to continue doing those luxuries, you know, researching in that field. So I thought I might spend a little bit of my time thinking about that existential threat, because I really don't want to see that happen.
I was coming at it from the point of view. That boy, modernity is so great, let's not threaten it. And if we deny that collapse is even possible, that's the easiest way to slip into it, you know? So we have to go in with eyes wide open. I don't talk one on one with many astrophysicists, so you'll have to get me help.
Give me a good sense of whether I'm correct about this, but I imagine for many people who are drawn to this field, there's a similar kind of profound that is experienced at some point with this is an unstable, livable universe that we're this tiny little part of. And to get to reach out and learn more about that peer into that is mind boggling.
And at the same time, like your initial concern with where our global civilization was going was coming from a place of like wanting to protect this incredible field of knowledge that you were so attuned to. And it seems like a lot of people in those kinds of fields of science, I imagine there is a similar sort of aligning themselves with global civilization and its apparatuses and mindsets, because that is what allows the exploration of the stars to this sophisticated degree.
And I'm interested in your journey of it seems like you almost kind of saw that the global civilization that, on one hand, was allowing us to peer into the universe with sophisticated knowledge that even though, you know, many indigenous cultures did have a profound understanding of the stars in their own way, didn't have the instruments that our global civilization allowed us to get these vivid images. And I'm curious about when and how your alliance shifted.
And if you feel like you are kind of on the outside of what is typical for other people in your field in that way? Definitely in the outside, I don't fit in anymore, which is part of why I retired. It was not working for me. And so I think I would say studying astrophysics definitely does bring a sense of awe and humility. And it's about stories. It's still I mean, we're a story people.
And so we have basically been able to unlock a story of how the universe came to be that wasn't a concoction of our heads so much as a result of the observations that led us to one surprise after another. And that's another element here that I think is important. And I've been pondering it lately in the sense that I think for good reasons, physicists and astrophysicists might be viewed as arrogant. Right?
A lot of people in the academy or are envious of the of the physicists and, you know, try to at some level mimic that style. And physicists can be quite arrogant. I've known plenty of them, but at the same time, and this is why I'm struggling, because there's this kind of both things going on. There's a humility there, right, that comes from not being in charge. In other words, we can't control the universe. We are only here to observe it.
We can't do experiments with it or strictly observers and when it comes to physics, we don't get to decide how physics works. We didn't decide that relativity was a great idea and it seems neatness. Einstein guy had cool hair, so let's just go with that. But that's true too. That might be true. Fantastic hairstyle. And we didn't go with quantum mechanics because it was kind of gnarly and cool and interesting. In fact, the community was dead set against these things when they were proposed.
Interesting, but it was the experiments that forced it down our throats. We had no choice. And at this point, we can't say, you know what? This is out of fashion. Let's not do relativity or quantum mechanics anymore, or let's do this new thing. Only if the experiments drag you by the nose to that. And so there's a humility in that. Physicists in astrophysics are not the arbiters of truth. It's the actual universe. As we measure it, we have to live with the results.
We hand the microphone to the universe, and we can't predict what it's going to say. We're not deciding. We're not calling the shots. In that contrast to how modernity works, to that, we have kind of concocted, invented, imagined this way to live on the planet. It's artificial and it's not tested on evolutionary timescales. It's a flash, and we can't do that. Even that's beyond our means. What inspired you to first create the Do the Math blog? Yeah, the Do the Math blog.
I started in 2011 and I had taught this course on energy and the environment many times by then. I don't know, 3 or 4 times, I guess, and each time became more and more concerned about the trajectory and the possibility that, you know, if we don't pay attention to this fossil fuel looming disappearance, that could be very disruptive, then we could descend into collapse.
And so my first post was galactic scale energy, about if we continue to 2.3% growth rate for indefinitely, and I use 2.3% because that's a factor of ten every century. So it's a mathematical rate of what? An energy rate of the rate of our energy use because it had been 3% per year, greater energy use. And what what would happen if we continued? And in 2500 years, we'd be consuming all of this stellar output from 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy in a short 2500 years.
Oh, just 100 billion. Okay. Yeah, just hundred billion stars in. And you can't even access those stars at the speed of light within 2500 years. So it's just physically impossible to continue to this growth rate for even a couple millennia. It's just absurd. Physics says absolutely not. Okay, so that's such an incredible I mean, well, because Daniel Quinn, I forget which book it is he talks about.
Similarly, like if our population growth continued at the present rate, I forget, and how many years you'd have a human beings lined up elbow to elbow on every corner of the Milky Way galaxy. If we could even be floating in space, that's how many people would have something like that. So yeah, exponentials are absurd. They get out of hand very quickly in nothing, in reality, in the real universe continues an exponential for very long because they do become absurd.
Something always gets in the way and stops it. And that won't be different for us as well and get the same story. And so when you say energy use to just to help me understand like that's like what? Like burning fossil fuels. Yeah. It could be biomass or nuclear or solar or even things we haven't invented yet. There's a thermodynamic argument to it, to that within 400 years we would reach the boiling temperature of water here on Earth.
If we continue the 2% growth rate in our annual increase in energy use. Now, if you use solar, if you buy yourself a little more time, but then you run out of solar in 400 years. So either way, how do you run out of solar and wind it just because the sun's so big? Well, just the solar energy that's hitting the Earth. It's only so big. It's a tiny catcher's mitt and it only catches so much of the light. And so it's just finite.
And I saw on your blog that you, calculated how much wind power there is on the earth, right. And so I, I went through that with all of these things and do the math. How much wind helmet's geothermal, how much tidal, how much nuclear fission, what are its limitation. And and nuclear fusion. What are the prospects and what does it get? You and I, went through a lot of these quantitative assessments in this do the math blog. Some of what is demonstrating the absurdity of continuing to grow.
But then it got more realistic of, okay, what are our options for even if we stabilized at this 18 terawatt scale of societal energy use, what could we do? And the answer is that's very heart that we will hit this sort of steady state at today's levels. And that's before I was really ecologically aware. Since then, I've realized that even if we could, we just continue to drive the six mass extinction because we would continue mining and polluting and fragmenting habitats.
Even at steady state, we can't exist. We can't survive at this scale because we're eating through nonrenewable resources at this incredible rate, and it's just completely, grossly unsustainable. All these forms of growth will have to end, whether it's economics or population. We're not going to space to colonize space. So put that out of your mind. Can I ask, so why are we not going to space? Well, you know, I, I think, an astrophysicist is telling me this.
Yeah. That's right, that's right. Forget about it. So there are so many reasons I mean, you don't see condominiums on, Mount Everest or on the ocean floor even ten meters below the surface, not yours are far more benign, far more orders of magnitude more benign than the surface of any other body in the solar system. The magnetosphere of the Earth protects us from cosmic rays. Exposure is about a hundred times higher outside of the Earth's magnetosphere.
So on the moon surface on Mars, your risk of cancer goes up 100 fold. So you are definitely getting it within a year or two. So you're living in a cave, so you have to be a caveman in the space station. We have to import oxygen every month because even though there's scrubbing and recycling and water, it's never going to be perfect. And so we are tethered still in those environments to the only environment that we've ever lived in of Earth. That's just the truth of it. That's the reality.
And this is with a large budget. I mean, it's expensive to send those rockets up with oxygen and water extremely expensive. So if there were a technological solution, you can be sure we'd be doing it. And this is a high budget operation. This is the best they've got the best technology available right now, and it's not even close to good enough. Not even a few months. Okay, fine. That's all. That's all fantasy. We are part of the Earth. We imagine ourselves is somehow separate from it.
But man, we are just deeply embedded in this thing. Well, so you mentioned in the series that you created helped create an apparatus that shot a laser to the moon, right. Which I won't even begin to pretend that I could even begin to understand. And you mentioned how that pales in comparison to an amoeba, right? And I'd love to hear more about that. That's not what I think. Most people would expect an astrophysicist to come back and say, yeah, yeah.
And I think there's some power in that because I did it. That would be something that most people would boast about. And this is a device that basically built from scratch that shot pulses at the moon, takes 2.5 seconds for a pulse to get to the moon to hit the reflectors that the asteroid and a half seconds. That's the roundtrip time. But it varies a lot because the moon's in an elliptical orbit. And there's all this geometry that's changing all the time.
My apparatus was shooting 20 pulses a second, so it's like juggling 50 balls at a time. 50 shots were in route somewhere in that circuit and all interleaved. And that's a difficult task to coordinate. And is it to measure something or what was the. Yeah, the point is that gravity tells bodies how to move, and gravity is one of the fundamental pieces of physics that we describe using general relativity and general relativity will change the story of how the moon moves around the Earth.
Let's say you go from Newtonian gravity to general relativity. There are consequences. It changes the way the orbit moves and the shape of the orbit. And that changes how we understand the orbit. Right, and how we would measure it. I mean, we would measure different results if if it weren't general relativity, this shape of the moon's orbit would just be different. And so, you know, it's one of these places where you can experiment and ask, well, what is the moon actually doing?
Whose rules is it following? Because it might not be the ones we invented or deduced the difference between general relativity and Newtonian orbits for the moon. All right. The ten meter scale. Okay. So that's big in some sense, but also small compared to the distance to the moon. So Newtonian gets you almost the exact right answer. But it's just off by a little bit. And so the question is well if we measure to millimeter accuracy.
And that's what my apparatus did, was measured millimeter accuracy, which still boggles my mind somewhat because if I tried to measure from my, you know, laptop screen to the corner of my room to millimeter accuracy, I would be hard pressed. And then it would invite all kinds of questions for exactly what part of my laptop screen, you know, it's like at millimeter level, things become really kind of tricky. And, you know, Earth-Moon at millimeter level, that's very tricky.
A lot of things you have to figure out, especially when it's just these two balls of rocks or going to space. Right. And you can't measure from center to center. You have to measure from a floppy surface to another floppy surface that's got tides and atmospheric loading and ocean loading and all these, you know, it's a fluid. The Earth is just a not a solid, rigid body. It's very complicated.
And the apparatus itself was very complicated because it had to do this juggling act and we had to open up, basically open the eyes of this apparatus for only 100 nanoseconds around the time that we expected the light to return. And we had to get that right every single time, 20 times a second. And each one is different because it's moving so fast that you can't just, like, dial it in and say, I think it's here now. It's moving so fast.
You, you know, you can't just set it somewhere and expect it to work. And it had a lot of subsystems that had to interact. It's a challenging job. But compare that to an amoeba that can heal, a wound, that can self replicate, that can learn things that can transfer knowledge to others, all without a brain that can sense its environment, it can find food, it can find all the resources and minerals that it needs. It can keep pathogens out. It's got a cell membrane.
It can move the right kinds of things through that membrane and block the wrong kinds of things. And incredible. And it all works in this orchestrated way that makes what I built just this pathetic little gizmo. Well, this goes against everything I was ever taught. Exactly. I thought an amoeba was the most simple, boring, rudimentary, primitive form of life there is. And you're describing a space laser. That's just thinking.
How could it possibly be that such a a space laser that also requires not just a lifetime of education and hard work for you and the team that participated it, and the organization and the funding that allows for the, you know, something like this to get put together and an entire global civilization that had to develop over hundreds and thousands of years, that laid the foundation for this. Yet an amoeba. I can't I can't believe it. Okay, so here's here's the challenge.
Let's get the best scientists, molecular biologists, whatever field in the world together in a room and say, build me an amoeba. And by the way, don't cheat. Don't take the genetic code that nature already worked out from scratch. Design this thing that works, that can replicate, that can avoid pathogens, that can, you know, defend itself against, the paramecium or whatever it has to do, like, figure it out. No frickin way. Not even close.
It would just be a we're just not capable of doing what life is done, because life had billions of years to do it. And the hardest possible tester and teacher of does it work in the real world, in a full context, in variability in relationship to all these other things that are also striving to live and can you manage your materials flows and have 100% recycling and efficiency? And wow, it's just it goes on and on.
Goes. So you're kind of like, I see you as if Neil deGrasse Tyson and Daniel Quinn had a baby. It it said, yeah, there's a resemblance then to Quinn's books and Ishmael in particular, something you and I both share and kind of what brought us initially together and what we first talked about. I'm curious about how the ideas in that book fit into where you were at. How did it complement where you already thinking, how did it challenge what you're already thinking?
What have you taken from that as you've continued to be on this intellectual journey? Yeah, it definitely was a turning point for me. The Daniel Quinn books, the central theme being that we've concocted this incredible fiction, Earth belongs to us, and we were meant to rule it, which is prevalent. That's how people of our culture do think. But it's a complete fabrication. It's another fiction.
Most importantly, it's a fiction that has not stood the test of time, and it's causing incredible ecological harm. It's a total nosedive. We've initiated a six mass extinction in record time. It's so egregiously out of step with ecological reality that it's not just a fiction, it's a really bad one. It's not even very clever because it's going to terminate itself very quickly compared to, you know, the amoeba is going to track right on.
So in your series Metastatic Modernity, you, give us all the diagnosis. And if you could describe how you understand modernity, you know, I compare modernity to a cancer because the cancer is a mode that, otherwise healthy organ can find itself in through some mutation, some new genetic instruction that is not part of its long history. It's something random and new, right? The cancer is different from the part of the body that it has. I don't know if you put it in.
Well, it's it it basically changes the programing of the cells in an otherwise healthy organ. And so now those cells begin to just grow like crazy and growth becomes the, the theme which obviously connects to modernity and our, our growth, focus and obsession.
And that growth comes at the expense of the functioning of that original organ, but also all the organ and said it interacts with others, relationships are destroyed and all the adjacent organs are, are squeezed, just like we're squeezing out all the other species on the planet. And so humans, you might get pancreatic cancer, but your pancreas hasn't been cancerous its whole time. It wasn't rotten to the core. It's fine.
It had a role to function within this organism, just like in any species functions within a community of life. And it's all co-evolved and has some relationships and connections that are time tested. And so it's not the fault of the organ of the cells in the organ, it's the fault of the programing. That's what we basically got is an operating system now that is cancerous and it's metastasized. It's moved to all parts of the globe. All human cultures now are impacted.
Even the ones who have tried to abstain and stay away from it are, caught up in the storm. Those very few, you know, the levers that, as one would call them, are struggling, as are all, you know, almost all the animals. And so that's the cancer. And it's not that humans are bad to the core. That's what often so people conflate modernity and humanity. They misinterpret my messages. Humanity is failing. Well, no, modernity should fail. Let's hope it fails because it's a cancer.
You don't care for the cancer to win. You cheer for the organ to recover. So I'm cheering for humans to recover what the cancer has forced them to lose and has only been in the timeline is significant too. And Daniel Quinn hits this as well. But it's a very recent phenomenon that most of our time on this planet, just like most of the time a pancreas has been in the body, it's been operating normally within its normal relations with all the other organs, other species.
We've been afflicted with this thing just right at the last bit here, and it's gotten out of control very quickly. It's stage four. It's rapidly endangering ourselves and life on Earth. The term modernity is always interesting to me, because it's important that it's broad enough that people know we're not just talking about capitalism or forms of supremacy or like Western civilization, which, you know, I see as particularly insidious or good representations of the problem as a whole.
But also modernity is a funny word because it's just referring to what is modern and what is happening now. I use the word modernity in intentionally vague, but here's what I found when I used the word civilization and said that civilization is a cancer, or that civilization is destined to fail and collapse. People are far more attached to that idea, because that brings with it this idea of being civil and being anything but barbaric.
And so if you say that civilization is going to fail, people think of chaos and pandemonium and violence and all this stuff. I realize that I can't use that because that's an inaccurate view of what non modernity civilizations are or people are like. They are civil to each other. Excellent people are. They can be. I mean, you know, they can be. There is I'm sure there's not everyone's perfect. Right.
So modernity on the other hand, doesn't cause the same knee jerk reaction because they fill in the blanks and make up whatever that means to them. And it's a less threatening right, because no one's happy with this. Right? Right. I think very few people are looking around being like, well, just another great day in the perfect society we've constructed together. That's right. And so I like getting specific and helping people understand about when did this cancer develop.
I really like in your series, the Time on the River model that you proposed, that it's not that modernity was created in any one moment, but it's a combination of these things. So if you could talk about that metaphor, how you describe it and why you think that that works so well for how we got here. So the river, definitely, we're now caught up in this turbulent flow that's rapid and dangerous. And it used to be a lot more gentle.
When we started agriculture, it wasn't suddenly being thrown into what we have now. It was a gradual process. And so I thought about it in terms of stepping into a slow moving stream and realizing, oh, it's got some, you know, it's pleasant and lying back and you start gently floating down. And while this is really kind of neat, but once you're in that river, lots of new tributaries come.
So for instance, once you start agriculture and you have surplus in storage, you need to secure that stored grain. You end up with hierarchies to manage division of labor. You have permanent settlement more often that which you have to defend property rights. You have the system of passing that down hereditary. So you have patriarchy. I think that's really connected to monotheism, which has all this hierarchical. It's another tributary that comes in, right, another tributary.
So all these tributaries that once you start down this stream, once you give yourself to this flow, it has a lot of consequences. A lot of things just come with it and they just get elaborated. And there's a lot of positive feedback and it just sort of gets faster and faster and you end up with human supremacy and, you know, separating yourself from nature. You end up deciding that certain things are weeds and you kill them.
And it's war with the world, which is not how we got here, not how humans evolved. We tell a narrative now about evolution that's very much influenced by our culture, as it's a competition and we're the winners. But that's not how evolution itself works. Yes, there is competition, but that is not the entire story. There's also a tremendous amount of cooperation because no species gets by on its own. There's no such thing as a separate entity that.
Yeah, I love that you say there's no such thing as a squirrel in isolation. Yeah, that's right. It needs the tree. It needs the mushrooms, it needs the bugs. It needs. And the tree needs all those things too. And it's all a big web and all related, so you can't win. There's no winning this game. It's a cooperative game. And that's what people haven't really appreciated about evolution is how cooperative it is in evolution.
I now kind of see as one enormous phenomenon, that life is one big phenomenon. And you do have genetic sequester of different snippets that are in different organisms, but they have a lot of overlap and a lot of heritage. But as the code is being manipulated on one side and evolving, it's also simultaneously in the full context, the full connection evolving somewhere else. And that reaches to all the branches that that node connects to. It's coevolution. It's all doing it at once.
It's not in isolation any organisms. Evolution is completely in the context of all the other evolutions that are going on. And so it's one phenomenon with a lot of sort of components and a lot of complexity and a lot of interaction. We are not standalone creatures. We are completely dependent on that entire connected, tangled, incomprehensible web that we're never going to fully understand and that's not even the point.
To try to do that, we just need to learn how to live in it and with it in a way that doesn't destroy it. I think a lot of people increasingly agree with the statement that we're part of a web of life, and we all need each other, and I think that kind of brings us to a really key thing you bring up that's a bit more uncomfortable and and harder for people to be on board with. But I want to explore a little with you.
Edward Abbey, the author says endless growth is the mindset of a cancer cell, and we're talking about this cancer that has spread throughout humanity and the whole world. And you talk about that metaphor, obviously, in your series called Metastatic Modernity, but you talk about the limits of the metaphor of cancer because modernity is like cancer. If cancer had some perks, and I think that's what makes it so difficult.
You you have this great list of our likes and our dislikes, because it's true that modernity or global civilization has allowed us incredible, you know, access to food, ironically enough, for everyone. Yeah. Transportation, climate control, I can adjust, I can, you know, I'm able to make my room the exact temperature I want at any time, which is pretty amazing. I can take showers. I got a smartphone talking with you right now on my laptop.
And then there's a list of things that we don't like pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, extinctions, climate change, landfills, traffic, parking. I have to walk if I want to go to my car down the street. I live in Los Angeles. I had to walk 15 minutes to get to my car. It's terrible transportation system. And also, I actually should mention the worst of all you don't have on this list. The worst of, our civilization is obviously the leaf blower. Right. I will have to. Yeah, yeah.
I confess to you that we have newts that cross my driveway, and when there's a lot of leaf litter, we might run over a newt because we don't see them. And so suddenly I'm in this position where it's enough for me, for the newts. I'm doing a habitat for the newts. Yeah, but it's it's electric and quiet and all that. So. But yes, I never considered that I might have a leaf blower, but these newts are worth it.
Well, I can't, I can't be opposed to newts, but the tempting thing that we have when we look at these lists of our positives of what modernity brings us and the negatives, it's like, all right, well, I know how to solve this. Let's keep the positives. Let's get rid of the negatives. And you bring up the point that the positives in the negatives are intrinsically linked with each other. Now, people, don't like to hear this at first glance.
It's like, okay, are you suggesting we return to, like, a stone age? We're going to get rid of all of our medicine and our access to food. I'm going to have to be freezing all the time. I'll never take a hot shower again. I'm going to be smelly. What are you suggesting? I guess first, what's your understanding of why these lists are intrinsically interlinked? And we can only have one without the other? Yeah, that. Well, I mean, the first thing to say is that they just are that way.
I mean, that we don't get any of these perks without, huge chain of material energy, ecological dependencies. We don't conjure them out of our heads and then just have them without any impact on the rest of the world. Where did the materials come from? What happened in the production of these devices and their manufacture? And you know, what chemicals were used and where did that go? And what happens to the material when it's done? And if you want the perks, there are going to be downsides.
Well, so you talked about the newts though. You want to protect the newts. So you're engaging in one of the the dislikes are the materials that had to be made to create this quiet electric leaf blower so you can protect the newts. It's just so hard for us to engage with this reality. This is an unfortunate reality that all of the blessings of eternity come with the curses.
Obviously, it's not simple enough for it's like, all right, well, I guess I'm going to just cut all of the blessings out of my life and that's going to somehow stop the curses. That's not the solution either. And whenever anyone talks about this kind of thing, you know, people are always going to bring like, oh, you want us to live in the stone ages?
Why is your answer to that? No. Well, for one thing, I guess I would say that we never go backwards, that we have locked in certain things that we're not going to just forget. I don't know what the future looks like. It might have a lot of elements that, to a casual observer, might look kind of Stone age, but it'll have things that a stone age person has no idea what's going on and why you're doing certain things.
So it's not going to be just an etch a sketch, you know, erase the all the things that we've done. There will be carry over. And I can't really predict what that looks like. And nor is it really productive to try that hard because we're just the universe in the way that real things unfold are never the way we thought they would. We're just not good at it. We were good at anticipating the consequences that we're now seeing from all of the things that we've done.
So it's kind of a foolish exercise in my mind to try to nail down what the future looks like and what practices, can and can't persist. I mean, certain categories, you can understand that we're probably in the far future not using metals. We're probably using plant and animal material and rock, you know, things that are at hand and part of a regenerative atmosphere. And, you know, we right now are caught in this modernity period. We're all products of modernity.
That's not just going to disappear for us. I mean, I imagine that I will always live in a house and I'll always have a driveway and would need some. As long as that's true, the newts are going to need protection. And so I'm already doing it wrong. But the important thing to recognize is that this whole system doesn't change necessarily by individuals changing. It changes by replacement as those accustomed to certain ways die.
And the new babies that come along adapt and adapt to whatever world they find themselves in, and it just looks normal. You do get some carryover that the elders will tell the young people what they're supposed to be doing based on old ideas, and some of that will stick. But have you ever met a teenager? You know, they're quite capable of rejecting what the older folks are saying is important? That's just part of how we're wired. And so I think we do adapt.
It's going to be a generational adaptation as the conditions on the ground just really do change and as new realities become apparent. And so it's not a matter of the people listening to this. What are you doing right now that's wrong? And how should you live right. You're not going to don't expect to. What you can do in what I've done and what I think is useful, is to fall out of love with modernity and see it for what it is, and don't be depressed about it.
It's going away because you don't get depressed if your cancer goes away. Think of modernity as the affliction that we hope can disappear with as little mayhem as possible. It's not possible to eliminate all of it, partly because people are attached to it and it's all they know. But don't conflate humanity and modernity. If modernity goes away, it's not a failure of humanity.
It's the salvation of humanity out from under this burdensome disease that is killing the world and therefore will kill us with it. And I think if you fall out of love with modernity, you're just going to stop doing some of the things just because you don't believe in it anymore. You don't see the point anymore. And that will change your behaviors. And it will help the generational shift by seeing other ways to view the world.
We shouldn't expect us in our lives to get it right, but we can help set the path so that we make it easier for the following generations to change. And they're not going to get right either. But eventually we can sort of try to encourage better, more responsible behaviors. So you're a teenager jumping around, hooting and hollering, you just discovered Saturn and you work very hard. You become an astrophysicist.
You help create a laser that measures to the millimeter the moon from the Earth, and you start to learn more about the limitations of modernity and that this whole system that we have built our society on is going to be reaching some limits, whether it's peak oil or climate change or population, that starts to make you concerned that modernity is going to collapse.
And the reason why you're concerned with that sounds like was because maternity is what is holding up the field of astrophysics, and you want to protect that body of knowledge and the revelations and the understanding that's come with it. And now you're retired. Yeah. You've gone through this whole journey. You're retired from one profession, but you are experiencing life full time and learning and teaching and sharing the message. In many ways, you should be clear about that.
But now I want you to look back on all that, because it sounds like you are. You're saying like, pick what you're rooting for. You know, the doctor doesn't root for the cancer. You've come to terms with the collapse of modernity and see that as a potential saving grace. If we can navigate that collapse. Well, how do you square that with the initial concern you have with what that would mean for astrophysics and our continued understanding and sharing of that?
Yeah, that's interesting to think about. What do I think about preserving the astrophysics knowledge? As you said, that was a large motivator for me. And not just astrophysics, but our entire scientific edifice and and all that we've learned. I don't imagine that we will forget that the sun is a star. I don't imagine that we'll forget that we move around it. I don't imagine that we'll forget about evolution. That's something that's that integral to ecology and how life works.
I think that's going to become more of a focus as it, as it needs to be. And so I think some of the very key understandings are going to be hard to erase. No, we won't have the same kind of technology. But nowhere in the contract was it written that humans would understand complete truth. It's never been in the contract for any species. We have brains that have allowed us to get farther along than a lot of others, but that doesn't mean that we will arrive at the full destination.
We are incapable of doing that. And that's okay. We need to accept that we have limitations, and we need to accept that we are a species of stories. And I expect that future stories will have elements of the things that we have learned through our scientific process. And modernity is not a permanent condition. It's a stunt. It's just a short term stunt. So that's not forever. Nor is our current level of scientific understanding. And so I've let loose of that as being the guiding principle.
And now to replace it, it's the amazingness of life. And when I go out now and encounter animals and plants and insects and whatever, I talk to them. They don't understand my syntax, I understand it, which is something I love to tell baby birds chirping in the nest how awesome they are and how they're going to love flying. And it's going to be just this great experience. And so, I'm enjoying it with them in a way.
So I'm trying to connect more to the life around me, because that's what I've recognized is more incredible than anything we can design. And we should be humbled and honored by what has emerged. And. You're someone who has gone on quite an intellectual odyssey. Maybe not always knowing where it's going to lead, but you've question a lot of assumptions you had. Like you said, you no longer fit in with the academic world that you had been a part of.
How does one navigate their own intellectual journey? Yeah, I don't know. I never set out to do this particular journey. This is how the universe works. It's full of surprises. Have you navigated with a compass? Has there been a map? What's been pulling you or guiding you as you've gone to these surprising new places that you couldn't have imagined? Yeah, I think the way it works for me is I get little snippets of things I hadn't thought about before that pull me further along.
And so it's not a compass. I have no idea where I'm heading to or what I'm trying to do. In fact, my initial foray into this whole business was, we're going to solve this with technology, but I'll hit on something that I hadn't considered before that challenges my sense of how things are, and I'll want to follow up on it. And, you know, it's led me to learn a little bit more about indigenous ways of being, because I think there's a lot of wisdom there.
It's all these little snippets that make me think, I hadn't thought of it like that before. And just being open to those redirects and being honest, that I don't have all the answers and nobody can have. That's the other thing. Nobody can have all the answers, and the best we can do is put one foot in front of the other and try not to step on a Inuit, you know, as we do. So, there's no map.
And in fact, I'm very suspicious of maps because we often confuse the map for the territory, and I'm much more interested in putting myself in the territory and seeing what it's like without preconceived notions of what I'm going to find. And I think that's what science at its best seems to be. I'm saying this is someone who has very low scientific, ability or comprehension that does not come to me naturally.
But, you know, there's this one aspect of the scientific process coming from the enlightenment. My understanding is, is there's excitement like, oh, this is going to help us fully understand and therefore fully control the rest of the chaotic universe. That's one component of it, but the other seems to be, which I think you are embodying so beautifully is just this commitment to keeping an open mind and asking questions and being wary of the stories that we are telling ourselves.
And I always questioning like, or is that, you know, as you say, we are these story creatures or these beings that require narrative. That's our strength. That's also our weakness. So you build this laser just to make sure, just like, all right, Einstein, I just want to say I'm just testing. I'm true. Is this okay? It's true. I just I was just asking. This is like you continue to go down this route. You're not following answers.
You just continue to follow questions. And it seems to me that is such a beautiful irony of the scientific revolution. We came to it thinking like, oh, okay, this is great. Now this is going to really help us confirm all of our assumptions about our superiority as a species and what we can manipulate and master. And it seems like there's still plenty of scientists out there that are going down that route, or maybe more.
The people on the politicians and the CEOs that are funding the scientists or maybe thinking that, but then the scientific process and just continually asking these questions has accidentally, unexpectedly led us down this route of being like, oh, oh my God, the earth orbits the sun. We're one of many species like David. That is not what science set out to prove, but by having the questions be your guide.
It's kind of led down that route, which is pretty incredible testament to that process when done honestly. Yeah. But as someone who actually knows what you're talking about, what's your take on that? Well, yeah, I think you put it well. And I think, you know, there are elements, I mean, humans have always been amazing scientists 100,000 years ago because we're keen observers. That's a big, crucial piece of it, is watching what's happening and trying to piece it together and build a model for it.
Now, the model doesn't have to be perfect, and we tend to take them too seriously and literally. But curiosity is really good. And one thing I would have a lot of students do is come up with their own questions and not treat science as a bunch of answers, but treat it as a way of framing questions that are interesting, questions you really are driven, you want to know, and you might not be able to know, but just being able to ask the question is profound and useful.
There are a lot of questions we're never going to know the answers to, and science has limits that way. I mean, why is there something rather than nothing? Forget it. We're not going to know the answer to that. We just accept that. Well, there is and isn't that great. And I think one thing I also learned is in scientific talks, if I would go to a scientific talk or give one, the standard format is here's all this stuff that we figured out and aren't we great?
You know, we've tied this up and above this are pretty boring people. Not and like they might appreciate the accomplishment and some new incremental learning. But I guarantee you have a scientific talk that says, and we still don't know why this is happening. And you've got people on the edge of their seat now.
They're paying attention and they're all thinking about it and all wondering, I wonder if this is going on and on, almost all the questions, even if it was an incidental thing, almost all the questions at the end are, have you thought about this? Have you looked at this? You know about that mystery. So we love mysteries and that's a good thing. We just don't need to necessarily have the expectation or the demand that we resolve all our mysteries.
I think it's healthy to live in mystery, live in uncertainty, appreciate it, admire it, revel in it. Well, Tom, I thank you so much for talking with me today. I'm really excited for folks to watch the series Metastatic Maternity to see the follow up writing and dive deeper on the Do the Math blog. I really appreciate it and talk with you. Great. Well, it's nice to have this exchange. Take care. Thanks for listening. Next month we'll get back on the trail and pick up where we left off. Last time.
Until then, I hope you'll get a chance to rest a bit and appreciate our good Ole universe. Maybe talk with the baby bird, tell them about the podcast. And of course, you can also check out the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon. It's a nice place to join other fellow travelers as we make our way there. Time and space, and there you'll have access to a whole nother episode's worth of conversation with Tom. There's more to this discussion, and you'll find it on our Patreon.
Your support makes this podcast possible, so thanks again to Tom Murphy. And as always, a theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes, as well as the link to Tom's Works. Talk with you soon.