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Oohways, your old uncle who's pretty dubious of that fat free salad dressing ally ward back with another episode of ologies. So before you think, wait, did I hear this one already? Is this just a revisiting of lepidopterology with butterfly expert Filedrus, who also professionally plays with baby dogs on his new CW television show Ready Set Pet. Nope, it's a different episode, different Filedrus. It's a different Filmorus.
Boy.
Howdy, you know in the sixty plus episodes that we have journeyed through together, friends, we have gone face first into death and tumors and misogyny, pet euthanasia, dabbled into crow funerals. But I gotta say this one. Wow, this one's gonna have you just staring into the mirror at one am, asking the fuck ward. Maybe more than any of them. This one is the apocalypse? Are you ready? No? Okay, I'm gonna stall for one second before the existential upheople.
Just a quick thanks to everyone supporting via Patreon dot com, slash ologies, anyone who has put merch on your bod from ologiesmerch dot com, and all the folks who, for zero dollars rate make the commitment to hit subscribe, who leave a review which I creep with joy and I highlight one each week this week, you know what I'm gonna do too. Once quick shout out to Tara and Maine, who is a self proclaimed former podcast hater and now
an ologite. Come be one with us, and also thank you for the timely aes Hell review from Seattle Me two two seven, who says I especially love the takes on dark topics like death and fear so refreshing. I'm an instant fan. Well, wow, Seattle Me two two seven, buckle up, we're talking about doomsday. So Eschatology comes from the Greek for last, meaning it's the study of the end, the end of the world. So, as this ologist explains, this term is no longer bound to just religious contexts,
but also scientific study. So he is a neuroscientist, philosophy scholar, and author of three books, including The End, What Science and Religion tell Us About the Apocalypse and his latest release, Morality Foresight and Human Flourishing and Introduction to Existential Risks. As you'll hear, the Apocalypse and this episode were both a long time in the making, and I coerced this ologist to drive a few hours and meet me in an airport hotel in Philly, and he was so generous
with his time. He pretty much spent the evening being lobbed questions, just barraged like asteroids, one after the other. And you'll hear about his background that led him to this branch of philosophy and where we're at on the old doomsday clock, whether or not any of us should have babies, if we should bother recycling, why voting matters, looking at you, America and some pop cultural anti Christ's artificial intelligence simulations, black mirror technology as friend or foe.
And now he's just a pretty chill guy anyway, So pack up your bug out bag and put a down payment on a bunker while you enjoy the brilliant brain of eschatologist Phil torrest glasses.
It's just.
You don't even need an apocalypse. You're your own nightmare. Oh my god, this is yours. Okay, So let's start off number one by saying that I have been twitter stalking you for a year no response from you, and I was like, wow, that felt tors guy. Pretty busy. Yeah, pretty important guy, It's pretty important. So many times I was like, hey, I'd love for you to be on them. No, okay, I don't know who nails you. Also, no, I'm not trying to put you on blast. I'm just saying that
you're this is a very big get for me. This is of no fault of your own. I was just very eagerly like, Hi, it's me again.
Well thank you. And when I finally saw the tweet that I responded to, I responded to it very eagerly.
I was like, these apocalypse people are very aloof The apocalypse scene is like the most aloof of all of them. Little did I know, Oh, you are eager. And also you are the second filters I've had on the podcast. How often do you someone who studies theories about the end of the world. Get confused with someone who studies butterflies and has a show about puppies.
I'm more I feel kind of bad for the emails that he might receive, you know, because he studies butterflies, and you know, that's pretty awesome and pretty fun, and there's a lightheartedness to it, whereas there's a darkness and a heaviness, oh God, to thinking about say, runaway climate change or value misaligned superintelligence.
So, okay, let's dive into what your ology is. It's eschatology. Eschatology, how do we say it.
It's a good question. There's actually a debate right now, Okay, whether the idea of secular apocalyptic scenarios should constitute its own yield, or or rather whether it to just be a topic that is discussed by people experts in their various uh uh, you know, areas of expertise. So that so, in other words, the term the semiska, the term have evolved over time, and at this point, like, yeah, there's a sense in which it's kind of the topic that
I'm interested in is kind of scientific eschatology. Yeah, thinking about the the end of the world from once again like a in evidence based you know, uh, empirical perspective.
As opposed to a proof you did, which would be more like being smoked by Zeus or something.
Yeah, okay, that's right.
Yeah, which we in this in this way we are our own angry God. Yeah kind of yeah.
I mean there are you know, myths uh of uh, you know, Greek myths of humans who gain too much power and uh, you know it didn't turn out so well. I mean, the central concept is that of existential risk, and that is cheerfully defined as any event that would either cause human extinction or result in irreversible decline of our potential for desirable future development.
So in this case, the end of the planet as we know it, or the end of our species the Great Ruby. Also, this subject matter is so so dark and surreal that I just could not stop laughing at the absurd awfulness of it. I'm so sorry. I don't know why. This is so far the most hilarious episode. It's just so terrible. It's like kind of funny.
I was at a conference a while back and with a bunch of people who publish on this topic, and we had a really good time. It was a lot of fun. There was a lot of laughter and joyousness, and at some point we sort of conjectured that there must be self selection process, you know, if you're if you are like lugubrious by disposition a certain amount.
Ps The word lugubrious means sad and mournful, and I'm not too proud to admit that I just had to look it up.
Then you just don't end up, you know, living, you know, in breathing these issues all the time.
We need balance, because how can we appreciate a butterfly if we don't appreciate the fact that the butterfly could maybe just combust spontaneously into fire, along with every one that you love.
In fact, I've sometimes mentioned, you know, a kind of paradox of the field, which is that I think it is among the most important topics that anybody could be talking about or thinking about, researching, publishing on.
Well.
I mean, the whole crux of what you do is how can we appreciate our existence if we don't examine the possibility of it ending? Right?
That is sort of that is an impla. Yeah, So the stuff that I do in particular is mostly trying to understand the nature of the biggest global scale kind of disaster scenarios facing humanity this century for the express purpose of identifying ways to mitigate those risks and make sure that they never happen.
Right, let's go back in time to baby Philterrus. Okay, at what point did your family realize you were more contemplative, perhaps than other children?
Yeah, we're talking about me en. That's okay, Okay, got it. So it's interesting. I mean my interest now I can there's a kind of genealogy I can trace all the way back to the childhood because I grew up in a pretty religious household. Oh and what flavor Baptists to use the more esoteric term the broader view was dispensationalist.
I don't know what that means.
So that's when you hear about the rapture. Oh, you can think spensatialism.
Okay, that is the poof I'm gone. Are my clothes and shoes still here, but my body and soul is gone. That's the rapture. Yeah, okay, if.
You actually look carefully the chronology of the narrative, it's stunning, like the rapture supposed to happen and your your soul is separated from your body, and then there's a seven year tribulation where the Anti Christ gains power in the UN or EU or something like that, and then signs of peace treaty initially begin a tribulation with Israel, okay, and then halfway through invades Israel, and then God reigns down all of this horrible punishment, and then there's the
Second Coming and that's when Armageddon happens, and then there's there There, and then there are various other things that continue to happen.
In the You grew up with these yes, sorry, I did with these beliefs.
I did it. You know it. I have to say it fueled some some pretty freaky termames never you know, for an eight year old. And I do actually have this vivid memory of being in the basement of my house when Bill Clinton on election night, when Bill Clinton won, and it was widely agreed upon in my community that he was the Antichrist, and so I just remember being overcome with terror, and you know, like, this is really happening, and you know the.
I love that the Anti Christ plays a saxophone, like because they're going to be smooth and they're gonna charm you.
Totally. It's part of the charm. Yeah, it's part of the Yeah, the charisma and.
An early nineties sax solo and everyone's like, well, damn, here he is. He has arrived. Is your family still pretty religious?
Half of it is?
Okay?
Yeah, half the thing is quite quite religious and the other half isn't so much along with me. Is kind of drifted away from, you know, the dogmatism and the various belief commitments that half the family has. But I do think it planted seeds of interest with respect to Christian eschatology. There was a sense of like, well, what's what's a grander topic then thinking about not just the
death of individuals but the species. And of course the vast majority of species that have ever lived on the planets have gone extinct.
And there's something like ninety nine point nine percent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.
That's correct.
Yeah, So like fate has our number.
I mean, the odds are not favorable.
No, maybe odds be ever in your favor, Okay, but can humans skirt extinction like perhaps some ferns and weird birds and old timey dead salamanders and the other five billion extinct species she couldn't.
We are unique in that, I mean, for obvious reasons. We're we have a very high encephalization quotient, you know, big brain, big brains, and have the capacity to to modify our environment in various ways. You know. It's been said that the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program, you know, And so we maybe can use technology to actually significantly reduce the probability of all
sorts of catastrophes. But unfortunately, most of the risk these days comes from technology itself and large scale human activity, you know, and climate change and global biodiversity loss. So yeah, technology is Janus faced, and you know, kind of a double edged shorts. Who was Janus?
Well, first off, let's call him the Roman god formerly pronounced Janus by me because I never knew it was Janus. But anyway, he's the god of beginnings and transitions, and he looks to both the past and the future at the same time, hence January named after this bro. But Janus faced means that you can have characteristics that contrast or be deceitful. So it's like the scholarly way of
saying this, someone is a two face pitch. So phil is saying technology is a two face bitch, Well, what at what point did you have to decide upon this as a major So this is a this is a sect of theology and philosophy of sorts.
Correct, not correct, I would not say theology. Okay, yeah, it's I mean it's naturalistic, you know. So that actually gets at a really interesting point. For most of human history, contemplations about the end of the world were deeply intertwined with religious beliefs, and so there was there was a sense in which people kind of thought took seriously sort of the long term future of humanity. But that was within the a theological framework according to which you know, we have immortal souls, and.
You know, at the end of the world there's there's to be a series of supernatural events. And only recently have humans started to think about the end from a secular, from a naturalistic perspective. The concept itself is really quite recent. There just isn't much that was said about human extinction.
Even after the end of World War Two, which of course, you know, coincided with the inauguration of the atomic age, there's still I don't know, there wasn't that much thought about you know what happens if our evolutionary lineage terminates, maybe as a result of our own actions.
But like, we just invented soap, you know what I mean, Like we just figured out how babies were made. You know, we're such idiots. I mean, God bless us. But like the idea of being like and when shall the specure be mortal? Is like we have so much else to figure out, you know. Yeah, I mean honestly, contraception is like thirty years old. It's crazy. Yeah, so we didn't
even begin curbing the population really until recently. So okay, getting back to school, though, at what point are you saying, philters, I am a philosophy major. This is my subset. Did you find a mentor in it? Or how do you do how do you become one of you? How do you do your life?
If that's what you want?
Yes?
For some reason, well, yeah, philosophy was my main subject. And then I got a master's in neuroscience, which is somewhat related to there's some it's also baller.
I mean, come on, masters in neuroscience.
It is it sounds way more impressive than it actually is. I'll just to be candidate.
So Phil got his bachelor's in philosophy and his masters in neuroscience, and at some point he encountered a paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom entitled Existential Risks Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards. Now, the term existential risk means the apocalypse, just doomsday, the end. And I looked up this paper just to have a little look sie, just to do a little perusing, And I'm just going to read you the first sentence quote, it's dangerous to
be alive and risks are everywhere. I was like, wow, man, okay, straight out of the gate. Okay, I like that. But the next sentence was a little cheerier, saying, luckily, not all risks are equally serious. So I started skimming this paper and I came to a header just titled bangs, and I was like, oh, man, dude, I have cut bangs, And yes, it did feel like the end of the world. And then I realized that it was just one of four categories of big death in various levels of suddenness
like bangs, crunches, shrieks, and whimpers. So this boss from paper includes topics such as nuclear holocaust, asteroid impact killed by extraterrestrial civilization, and a whole category titled quote, we're living in a simulation and it gets shut down, so just a casual bebop down hazard street, which wasn't in op to Phil Taurus, because you know what, someone's got to do these jobs, right, I.
Think it's in his original paper, Bostrom notes that the number of papers published about dung beetles in scholarly journals far exceeds the number about like human extinction or you know, yeah, so that's starting to change a little bit. Maybe this this brings us right back to the two phil tours is.
I know, so speaking of like a double signed coin bridging this entomology and eschatology divide. Though one published paper titled the Role of dung Beetles in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cattle farming. So dung beetles, they're out there making the most of an objectively shitty situation, and they're helping us survive along the way.
Climate change is a phenomenon we've never encountered before, at least not this type of you know, anthropogenic climate change, which is very rapid. There's also global biodiverse loss, which is truly extraordinary. It's widely considered that we're in this early stage of the six mass extinction event right now.
Oh good, And just to give listeners a sense of how dire the situation is with respect to the global global ecosystems and the biosphere more generally, there was a report from twenty fourteen called the Living Planet Report, and they found that between I don't know, I'm chuckling, but it's just, oh god, I don't know what is between nineteen seventy and twenty twelve, the global population of wild vertebrates declined by fifty eight percent.
Oh that's a lot.
It's a huge amount.
It's what.
It's deeply unsettling. I mean, it's not difficult to extrapolate that into the future. Right, So this is happening, it's urgent.
This is like the part and a party where shit starts going wrong, like someone barfs, someone breaks the coffee table, it's get late, the neighbors call the police, and it's just like, oh, this party is done, this party is done. You got we got to get out of here. Have you considered writing a book just called We're All Fucked? You would move so many copies just haven't be called we're fucked. I mean, that's kind of that. That's kind of the reality, isn't it.
Yeah? Yeah, well no, I do think there's hope.
Wow, Okay, let's run down. Let's say you're at a dinner party and someone's like, oh, what do you do? And you tell them and they're like, what, how's the world going to end? Give me a quick menu if we if we had sat down at a restaurant and we're like, here are the options for apocalypse? What are we looking at?
Yeah? I would I sort of identify three main classes of phenomena. So the first class, I think is environmental degradation. Uh, you know if we, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to you know, to set up colonies on Mars, which is I think misguided, and all that money would be a lot better spent trying to ensure that this spaceship that we're on it remains habitable. So yeah, there are all sorts of statistics that could be mentioned here that are very unsettling, okay and very worrisome.
Give me some By the way, I'm with you on the way, why are we going to go to Mars? When we have a planet that we're not done ruining yet. Yeah, Like, we have a whole planet here. We could just not mess this up. Yeah, so give me some unsettling statistics. I'm ready for them.
I'm also very skeptical of space conversation just generally. And there's a really fantastic book that's forthcoming by a guy named Daniel Dudney who's a political scientist at Johns Hopkins called Dark Skies, which offers a really detailed case for why venturing into the Solar System and then into the galaxy could actually have quite ruinous consequences, evolutionary trajectories that we will likely followers, and all sorts of technologies that could we could use to alter our phenotypes.
You got to just splice us together with a tartar grade, you know what I mean, half human, half tartar grade. My head on a tartar grade body, but the size of a dog. I mean, that's what we're looking at. We stand dehydration for ten years, it'd be great. Can you imagine I'm going to photoshop that?
So sorry to veer off in that direction, but space conversation is I mean, that's another issue that is you know, right, now. I mean it could be the next ten years that we have some colonies on Mars. So like, yeah, I think it's it's a timely issue. Yeah, okay, So getting back to the main potential causes of our annihilation.
Yeah, it sucks. I love, it sucks so bad we're all gonna die. Okay, So we got environmental degradation.
Yeah, this is exactly the moment when we need environmental wisdom, you know, and we clearly don't have it. So the other issue, I think it has to do with emerging technologies that are dual use in nature, can be used for both harmful or beneficial ends. There are various domains of technology right now that are developing extremely rapidly at exponential pace or like super exponential pace, and they hold immense promises to cure disease, to reverse aging, to maybe
even restore the environment in some way. I mean, de extinction is like a new thing.
I didn't know that was even a word.
That's a word. Yep.
Very optimistic.
Yeah, George Church at Harvard is right now working on a project to bring back the wooly mammoth and some other species.
So so a good idea.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think they should. I don't know, maybe not, but I think there's a very good conversation to be had about that.
The conversations being is it ethical to edit Asian elephant genes and add in willly mammoth traits? And does this lead the way to careless extinctions? Because now we know we have these genetic backups on ice? And also, was Mistress Nophlebigus the ones selectively seen and then fully acknowledged mammoth like puppet of Sesame Street? Was he an agent of existential foreshadowing in this life simulation we call Earth? Also is technology evil?
Technology could enable us to do all sorts of I think genuinely marvelous things. But also these same technologies could enable us to synthesize designer pathogens that you know are really unnaturally dangerous. They could have long incubation periods, so you don't you know, they could spread around the globe without people exhibiting symptoms, super lethal and making matters worse.
It's not only the case that theechnology it is becoming more powerful, but it's becoming much more accessible too, So it's not just that like a large group of scientists like the Manhattan you know Manhattan Project size group of experts are able to create a pathogen that is, you know, exceptionally lethal. But you know, small groups, little small terrorist groups, maybe even single individuals.
So you could diy Crisp or the plague.
Yeah, don't say it's so loudly though.
Never mind, don't do that. Also, I hope our phones are eavesdropping, it's a fact.
And researching books and papers that I have an Internet history.
Oh, I bet you're on so many watch lists.
Looking up some really really frightening pathogens.
I mean I google a lot about like whale dicks and stuff for this podcast, But yours are history is way it's going to be way more suspicious than you.
Yeah, no doubt.
So we're looking at at essentially we're we're screwing up the planet itself. And I mean a lot of species are going extinct. Technology is moving so fast it can be used probably more for bad than for good, or at least they could outpace one could outpace the other.
As some as two philosophers Julian Sephlescun and ingmar Person, who have written a bunch of papers together have pointed out it tends to be a fact that it's just easier to do harm than to do good.
You know what, settle in right now, get cozy for something that will haunt the rest of your waking hours.
It's easier, it's easier to harm a hundred people than to you know, benefit them to the same degree. So I think technology is just kind of a big magnifying glass and is just you know, it isn't it isn't genuinely like a qualitatively new situation when like a single individual has the has the power to wreak you know, civilizational havoc. These technologies are seem to be empowering individuals
much more than the state. You know, there's a book about this exact issue called The Future of Violence, and they talk about they conjecture that there may be an impending dissolution of the social contract and with a kind of return to hobbesy and anarchy where there's just no secure you know, the state is no longer able to provide security because single individuals can harm huge numbers of people in ways that are really difficult to detect and also are difficult to prevent.
Ps. Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher from the sixteen hundreds, and he held the core belief human beings are selfish creatures.
That's the idea behind the at least the Hobbsyan version of social contract.
Is this also the logic behind doomsday bunkers, where you just like, you get a bunch of d hydrate of potatoes and you just like hitt at the underground pretty much. Yeah, I mean, you're just like a piece. You all fight it out up there. I'm gonna live in this bunker.
I haven't gotten to that point yet myself, okay, but I haven't tempted at times just to stash a couple extra bottles of wine or something, just in.
Case some swords maybe.
Yeah.
So this is like, if you have one million pretty chill people, you just need one who will off the other million. Is that kind of what we're talking about?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or you could look at from a different perspective and say, imagine you have out of a population of seven point six billion, you've got one million malicious agents who have omni sidle tendencies and would actually like to destroy humanity if they could. Is, by the way, a topic I've also written about and there are those people out there. For sure.
I've never heard the word omni sidle, but.
Like, yeah, it's a lovely term.
Like this is my personal brand. I'm really into omnoside. It's a fun fact. Omnicidal means kill everything and everyone until the extinction of our species. It's very ott, very over the top, very extra, very diva, very drama. Needs to just not.
So you can imagine like one million, uh genuinely malicious agents and set and then ask like, what is the probability that any one of them will gain access to the relevant technology, which increasingly that's possible, you know, is to set up a biohacker lab. You know, you only need a few in her bucks.
Oh part in my despair grunting.
John Soto's even even hypothesizes that the this distribution of unprecedented destructive capabilities could constitute the great a great filter that explains, uh, you know, some probability bottleneck that all civilizations have to go through and almost none of them make it out. Well, that's why we don't observe aliens wandering through the U niverse. The universe seems to be vacant in terms of with respect to life, so they all use that.
They all have like teenage gamers trying to kill each other and they're on their own planet and they're like and then they all die.
Also, oh god, you you really should have co authored because that would have been a nice flare at some.
Point, just alien in cells with twelve dicks being like, I can't even get laid at all. I'm gonna kill everyone, Holy smokes.
Okay, okay, so the last one. Sorry for delaying.
I have too many questions. I'm so sorry.
Yeah, no, no, no, it's fine. The last one I mentioned before that is a bit more speculative, but I would say it's machine super intelligence.
Oh boy, we're talking ais AI. Okay, oh yeah, we got some artificial intelligence. It's gonna kill us all. Yeah.
So one of the biggest myths is that the AI system that is dangerous is one that has some kind of malicious, malevolent, malign intentions. And while it's possible that a super intelligent machine could be designed in such a way or could for some reason acquire like you know, I kind of must kill humans value system.
I love by the way, that if there's a malicious AI, it can kill us all, but it can't make a complete sentence. Do you know what I'm meaning? Like, it can't great to make your acquaintance, I must kill all of the humans in existence. It can only use an economy of words. That's like, yeah, very simple, but it's very sophisticated that it could kill us all. You can't just can't. I can't learn, can't learn the language, so must kill humans.
Yeah yeah, and the voice too, the better synthesized voices by the time. So actually the real danger is that it exceeds us It exceeds the best possible that any member of our species could possibly achieve, and also that it's its value system is not sufficiently well lined with ours. It makes for a much less compelling movie, you know, storyline. But this is actually the real substantive concern that people have. You know, computers tend to process information way faster than humans,
a million plus times as fast. Basically the outside world to it looks frozen.
And that's not even without that's even without quantum computing.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm just talking.
Yeah, you're just talking about what we got, which, compared to quantum computing, is so slow. Yeah, oh boy. Quantum computing, by the bye, relies on an atoms superposition of being essentially two things at once instead of our current computers, which rely on transistors to make bits that represent ones and zeros. Anyway, that's as nutshell as it gets and probably a little bit wrong. But how much faster is quantum computing? Some say one hundred million times faster than your laptop.
It's a lot, And so I like ran the numbers that I think the average PhD program in the US is like something like eight point two years. And that you know, if a computer's process information million times faster, that means that you know, a super intelligent machine or just just a generally artificially general artificial general intelligence could earn a PhD in something like four point three minutes or something.
So so much cheaper.
Yeah, so that's on the one hand. Second, there's something called the instrumental convergence thesis, and this is just the idea that for a wide range of final goals, there are some very predictable intermediary goals that the system is going to pursue.
So essentially, if you have goals, there are some basic things that you have to do to achieve them, Like if you wanted to be a musician, Phil says, you would have to get good at, say, shredding on guitar. You would have to obtain the guitar. And if your stepdad tried to kill your dreams, you would resist him and tell him fuck you, Doug, no one likes your coleslaw or your mustache, and then you'd keep practicing those hot licks. Same with AI.
It's going to first of all, might look around and think, you know, these humans they could turn, could try to shut me down, so it's maybe in my interest to eliminate them.
I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Another thing is, you know humans are made out of conveniently located atoms. So it's, as one researcher famously put it, eliezer Cawska. You know, it's not to paraphrase him, it's not that the a I hastes you or loves you. It just notices that you're made out of material that it can use for something else. So kind of the the analogy here, this is another kind of uh, it's becoming a cliche. A bit is you know when humans go,
you know, raise forests to build a suburban neighborhood. You know, the result is sometimes like a you know, pretty devastating ant genocide. And it's not that the It's not that we have any ill will towards it's not like the it's not that we're malevolent towards the ants. It's simply that we're much smarter and therefore can manipulate the world in ways that the ant can't even conceive. And also, we just have different values. Our value systems are not
properly aligned. So if you think about this analogy, you know, with us as the ants going about our business, we have our own values. We want to build these little colonies underground, and then the super intelligent system that we create ends up having values that don't perfectly align with our colony building values. Then you know, it may just raise the forest and in pursuit of its own you know, particular aims with the with the consequence being that we all perish.
And the next thing, you know, we fucked once again. Come to the conclusion end of the flow chart, We're fucked.
Yeah, that reminds me a lot of there was a I think I probably gonna forget the guy's name but there was a geophysicist, oh, Brad Werner I think his name. He presented, gave a presentation that was titled is Earth Fucked? And he got he got a fair amount of press for it. And as he explained to someone I think from Lake his moto or something that he his answer is more or less.
Yeah, it's just a shrug. Yeah, so a single slide.
Yep.
You're like, wow, that was a forty five second presentation. He's done, He's like, and there's CRSAL in the lobby, so bye bye. Now, how do you think the world is going to end? If you had to put your money on it? Not that money matters when the apocalypse is not. But if someone's like, mister trus yeah, put your money on the end, what is it?
I think it would be imprudent to specify one particular scenario.
You're like all of them.
I have yet to discover a particularly good counter argument to the issue that we're talking about before.
So in regard to the democratization of destructive technology, that little.
Thing if there is a technology, you know, as some people have said, if everybody around the world had an app on their phone that where they could open it up and push a button that would destroy the world. Who thinks the world would last for more than two seconds?
Oh, it would be over. There would be someone who got rejected for a date. We'd be smoked.
Yeah, it's it's implausible to think we would last for a minute, and it would.
I'm sorry that it would. One million percent be a dude between the ages of like sixteen and twenty three that did it, like one hundred percent, someone's prom date, someone's girlfriend left them for someone who does more CrossFit, and then the world is over.
This is another topic that has been discussed among the relevant scholars. Basically, the argument is that you know, a a milieu in which there are extremely powerful technologies and then there are there's this segment of humanity that is suffering from testosterone poisoning and uh, you know that's I've written about this as well. I'm very worried about it. Yeah, it's what.
Can we do for the What can we do for the dudes? Like if the dude were a stray animal, say a wounded raccoon, are a neglected rabbit dog, what could we do to help fix them so they don't kill us in the face.
I you know, I don't have a good answer. I mentioned before the Philosopher's Julians have leskud In more person who wrote a really interesting book from twenty twelve called to Unfit for the Future where they talked about they go into immense detail about the possibility of using moral bio enhancements.
Moral bio enhancements these are a thing. I feel like coffee is already kind of one of them.
These would be biomedical interventions that would aim to enhance our empathy, sympathetic concern. And it's really controversial. It's person engineering type stuff. So they argue on the one hand that if we remain as we are moving into the future, uh, we're the outcome is going to be bad. So so we're fucked. So that is what that is what warrants I believe they would would say they're considering a possibility
that's really quite radical. Anyways, The point is that you know, statistically speaking, women tend to do better than men with respect to empathy and sympathy and and you know moral characteristics like that. So they have this really great line where they say, you know what may need to happen is that we make men more like women, or rather
men more like men who are like women. There are definitely people in this field who takes seriously the potentially quite combustible mixture of you know, just toxic masculinity and dual use technologies.
Oh, that's such a that's a that's like a toddler with a machine gun kind of I don't.
Know what to say. Maybe maybe put the men on Mars or something. You just sequester them over there and then oxytocin supplements. Maybe oxytocin is one of the main the possibilities that Sevelescu and Person discuss. But unfortunately oxytocin the the effects are limited to racial in groups according to a whole bunch of studies, So you do get more empathetic to other humans, but it doesn't cope beyond your race, at least in the studies.
So the hugest problem we have pretty much.
Yeah, So they do mention at some point that this is, let's say, not a trivial problem with you know, because I mean, we have fluoride in the in the public drinking water for healthier I dentician as, we vaccinate, vaccinate, and yeah, so there's a kind of perspective where I don't know, maybe It's not totally crazy that you'd put some oxytocin in the the public drinking.
Water, the mountain dew. Just put it in the monster energy because I'd be like, those are the people who need it.
I really like the more targeted approach. That's much more clever.
How often do you think about the apocalypse? Is it only when you're working or is it when you're driving around when a new Mariah Carey single drops when you are I don't know, Okay, a girl can dream. I'm trying to think of the good things in life as faint and I guess the subconscious effect that a good publicist would have. Mariah Carey does have a new album coming out. It drops November sixteenth, people, and fittingly for this episode, it's titled Caution. Also does Phil ever get bummed?
But like, do you think about it on a daily basis? Like, maybe I shouldn't sweat this because we're about to annally annihilate the planet.
So if you take seriously some of the probability estimates that scholars have proposed, Bostrom has has a few Toby ords, you know, has suggested that we maybe have a one and six chance of surviving the century.
One in six chance of surviving the next eighty two years. Yeah, are you gonna have kids? You have kids? No, Okay, are you gonna have kids? Do you think or is that because you're like, we're all gonna die anyway? Because I've often thought that, I'm like, never when there's too many of us, we're growing exponentially. No one needs more of me. One of me is plenty, and also one of me is enough for the world, and then they're
just gonna die. But how do you what do you how do you approach those kind of like decisions.
There's a philosophical component and then like a kind of empirical component. Empirically, I think I could imagine a version of the world that is worth living in, you know where, like you, people take science seriously. You know, it could be the case that climate change is right now not a concern at all because people listen to scientists back in the nineties, et cetera, and then took actions just
like we did with the with the ozone hole. Yeah, there's a sense in which the world could be significantly more livable than it is. Unfortunately, we're in a world you know where I mean, I don't I can only assume what your personal politics are. But you know, Donald Trump is got elected even after the Trump tape, and you know, et cetera. I mean, that's an unfortunate world.
To put it crudely, it's a shitty world. So I'm dis And maybe another way to put this is I have I'm deeply disappointed in my species forgot doing better. And so then there's a philosophical issue and this gets to uh an idea referred to as anti natalism.
Oh okay, Oh there's a word for it.
Oh.
I thought it was just spinsterism. It was an old weird aunt with no kids. Is I don't know there was an anti natalism.
Yeah, so it's a it's a pretty fascinating view. Uh. It's it's like Arthur Schopenhower is kind of famously an anti natalist who believe and his argument was that life is just terrible.
You know, life is duca, So duka translates from the Sanskrit and it means suffering pain or stress. So life is duka is a Buddhist phrase that means that life is kind of unsatisfactory and painful. Life just kind of sucks. Now, in all transparency, when phil said life is duka. I thought he meant douchie, which is a casual term for pooh. But he also said that some argue that the most compassionate thing you can do is not bring a child into the world because it's hard. It's just hard to live,
it's hard to be a person. But a lot of this probably depends on your own outlook on life and how much you enjoy it. I do not enjoy most Italian food, to a lot of people's shock and disgust of me. But Ergo I would never bring someone to buka tobebbo as a treat. However, some people love it. They would definitely invite others to a spaghetti fest. Now, from an evolutionary standpoint, some scientists think it's better for a species not to fully grasp the pain of existence.
Thomas Metzinger and another philosopher has talked about how, you know, evolutionarily speaking, we probably would not have been selected tendencies to recognize the extent of harm in our life. Those tendencies would be selected against because that's not really good.
For right, for it on right, You're like, this is terrible, that's macwormous.
Yeah, exactly, so, he says it's always a harm to bring a human into the world because, yeah, because you're all that human's sure they're gonna have some good experiences, they're also going to have bad experiences, whereas a person who doesn't exist isn't going to miss those good experiences. But is you know, it is good that that individual is not experiencing the bad stuff.
If you had a time frame that you thought the apocalypse maybe were to visit us kind of like a doom fairy, when do you think that might happen. I'm just trying to figure out, like, do I buy the extra protection plan with the electronics? How much do I invest in my retirement.
This is a general issue that we've returned to several times. I'm so sorry, No, no, it's fine. I just don't have a good sense objectively. I mean, you can you know, we know that, you know, a huge asteroid that could kill our species strikes Earth every four hundred million years or something, or four hundred thousand years. Maybe a super volcanic or a super volcano erupts every fifty thousand or so. The last one, well two super volcanic co ruptions ago
was the Toba catastrophe. That might have resulted in the population bottleneck of maybe a thousand humans, So we almost went extinct to oh, we're.
So close with those one thousand. Must have been so horny. Oh they must have been like you guys, we got work to do. So, I mean we could have a we could have Yellowstone could just pop off, and then there could be twelve of us left.
That is a freighting possibility.
Yeah, yeah, So the Toba catastrophe theory just looked it up. It holds that seventy five thousand years ago in Indonesia, there was a volcano so wicked that it led to a volcanic winter that lasted six to ten years and maybe a thousand year long cooling episode for the Earth, and we all almost died. Now for more on volcano doom. If you're like, wow, didn't know I was so horny for a volcano facts, see episode one with Jess Phoenix. You will lava it.
Boston puts the probability at least twenty percent based on objective and subjective considerations, that is, before twenty one hundred. Martin Reese suggests that there's a fifty to fifty chance of civilization will collapse. This century. If you take seriously some of these estimates and you compare them to the likelihood of dying, for example, in a car accident or a plane accident or something of that sort, it turns out you're much more likely to encounter some kind of
human extinction event that really like thousands of times more likely. Wow, I should add quickly, you're also much more likely to die in a huge asteroid strike then gets struck by lightning or something. And that's just because in asteroids is going to harm so many people that if you if you consider the probability over you know, millennia, then that's how you get the probability that you're more likely to die that way.
Oh, but it's still numbers or numbers, I'll take it.
Yeah.
Do you live your life differently thinking about the apocalypse or do you give advice to anyone like we should still be recycling.
Right we should? Yeah?
Okay, yeah, we should still be helping fellow humans.
Oh very much so, right, yeah, absolutely.
Trying not to squash any endangered species. Vote for people who give at least one shit about the future, right yeah, And don't develop ai that could use human atoms as fuel. Have you ever watched Black Mirror. Yes, how do you feel about it?
Very good?
Good?
Yeah, why I mean, sorry, I'm screaming. Let me, let me, let me change my answer to it. I think the show is fantastic. I think a lot of the topics that they that the show explores are really fascinating. And it's a lot of these issues are kind of right around the corner. So it's it's uh, I mean, it's giving us a.
Sneak peek in certain respects, at least of kind of near term, you know, issues with social media, with you know, possibly things like mind uploading. I mean that might be you know, in the next you know, several decades. Yeah, it's really quite good, and it's I think it's helpful to explore the more dystopian possibilities because again, you know, these technologies are dual use. They don't just have destructive capabilities, but also, on the other hand, they could really ameliorate
the human condition in all sorts of amazing ways. I certainly would be elated if we could cure all disease, you know, as hell and cancer, Alzheimer's. But the you know, and focusing on the peril, I think doesn't make one a pessimist. This is an issue that I've had with a lot of Stephen Pinker's work, because he seems to think that people who talk about existential risks are are pessimistic. Like, you know, I tend to be fairly optimistic in my personal life by my nature, but there are some facts
about the world that make me pessimistic. Anyways, The point is, in order to increase the chance that there is actually a really good outcome, it's critical to focus on the worst case scenarios on how things could go wrong, where you say, okay, let's fix this outcome. In fact, Pinker has accused some existential risk scholars of just kind of sitting around trying to invent new doomsday scenarios. Well, kind of, yes, because because we certainly don't want to be blindsided.
We got these big old noggins, we gotta use some your thing ahead. I'd like to rely on the theory that this is all a simulation possibilities, that that's true, it's possible, Okay, Like, can you just say that it's possible if it were a simulation. If someone were like, hey, got news, would you do anything differently in your life?
Probably not.
But some scholars He says, like Max Tech Mark have simulation theories, maybe a little tongue in cheek that maybe the more strife and jerks and power and religious wars we have, the more entertaining we are to the folks running the simulation. Kind of like an ant farm with a lot of battles and activities only were people. And it feels real and it hurts and we want to sleep all the time to escape the pain. Can I ask you some Patreon questions about make it quick? Yeah,
I'm gonna lob a couple questions that you at random. Okay, so on Patreon. Patreon patrons get to some questions and I'm just going to ask you a few. At total randoms, a lot of people all were like, how are we going out? That's like everyone's would to be self induced our extraterrestrial. Everyone's like, how are we going out? Everyone wants to know. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break
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Okay your questions. Kira Liechtenfeld asked do you put any stock into the doomsday clock? She also notes that was an accidental rhyme and ps. The doomsday clock is a symbol that the bulletin of atomic scientists, first employed in nineteen forty seven. It represents how close we are to a man made global catastrophe. Now, should I change man made to person made? Or should I just leave it man made?
Leave it?
Also how close we are to climate change or a global nuclear war. Now, doomsday is represented by midnight, and in nineteen forty seven it was set to seven. It's to the hour. Now it's been set backwards and forwards twenty three times since then, and it reached a placid seventeen minutes to the hour in nineteen ninety one. But it has changed recently.
That Donald Trump, I'm sure you know this or listeners know this, but he more or less single handedly pushed the doomsday clock, the minute hand of the doomsday clock forward. That happened in twenty seventeen. They announced must January or something, and then that was the clock went from three minutes before midnight, which represents doom, to two and a half minutes.
And then last earlier this year, I should say it was pushed forward another thirty seconds, almost entirely because of Trump's actions and you know, climate denialism and background you know, also like withdrawing from the Paris climate Agreement and the Iraan nuclear Deal, both of which the bulletin the Atomic Scientists, which runs the Doomsday o'clock identified previously as as they put it, two bright spots in front of a canopy of bleakness, or they had some kind of something somewhat
dark and dismally poetic. And yeah, so Donald, there is at exactly the moment in human history. You know, we've been around for two hundred thousand years and recorded history started maybe four thousand years ago, six thousand years ago, I guess, And as Stephen Hawking said be in an Guardian op ed in twenty sixteen, I think there's a very good reason for thinking this is the most dangerous
moment in all of human history. So that this critical juncture in our career as a species exactly the moment when we need someone who is deeply sagacious and wise and thoughtful and understands our evolving exsidential predicament. We have someone who is I mean, I know, I'm not this isn't a bold original thesis that I'm proposing here, but someone who is just profoundly ignorant and just revels in ignorance and foolishness in myopia.
Aaron Stbrooks wants to know, are we better off heading for water or going underground?
Are those the only two options?
I don't know. I think she's assuming that we want to survive.
Yeah, just dark. Well, yeah, some scholars have advocated for bunkers that are continually occupied.
If you're cruising Redfin for an apocalypse, Pia de terre. There's a former missile silo near Topeka for sale just over three million dollars thirty four acres solar panels, comes with a lawnmower and eleven thousand square feet of hunker down fun time space below the earth. Perhaps you can invite Michael Stipe for a slumber party.
So that's one option. Water. I don't know. I mean, actually submarines could serve the exact same purpose as bunkers. You know, there could be some global catastrophe, just some scenarios it actually wouldn't be effective, of course, like a runway greenhouse effect. Or you know, there could be a physics disaster that results in black hole or strange lit or a vacuum bubble as it's called, that could actually destroy the entire universe. That seems unlikely, but also possible.
I mean maybe, I mean, Mars sounds as appealing as underground or underwater to me, and Mars doesn't sound too appealing.
It does not sound very appealing. It seems very dry there. Jessica Vitter really wants to know where humans so obsessed with being judged at the end of their life. Is it something learned or just part of our makeup.
Oh, that's a good question. Surely some of it is learned. I mean, this is outside my area of expertise, so I would just you know, I'm just guessing. Yeah, no doubt some of it's learned. But also I don't know. My immediate thought is like, maybe there's a component of morality that leads us to wish that when we're gone, you know that during our lives we would have had a positive impact and left some kind of some kind of trace that you know, benefited the world or just
the people around us. You know.
That's a kind nice answer.
It's the best I could do.
No, it's you managed it. Shelby Vonn wants to know how has studying neuroscience informed your philosophical work and what is your favorite weird end of the world potentiality. So neuroscience and philosophy. Yeah, and what's the best way to go out?
Yeah. So the reason I was interested in neuroscience to begin with was because I was focusing as an undergrad on philosophy of mind. And this was kind of shortly after Patricia Churchland published her book on neurophilosophy, and she holds a view about folks psychology, beliefs, desires.
Okay, so this is a philosophy. In a very very tiny, tiny thumbnail, Nutshell asserts that things we think we understand up of the mind, like that we believe in things or desire things not really real because they're poorly defined, and the behavior should just be judged on biological levels.
So I was pretty intrigued by that, and I thought maybe it would be worth learning a bit more about the hardware, you know, and seeing how that might inform philosophizing about the wetwear, you know, the higher level of conscious experience or you know, just cognitive functions.
And then what's your favorite apocalypse scenario?
Okay, So there's this amazing polymathic scholar at Oxford University named Andrew Sandberg, and he recently responded to cora question, which was what would happen if the Earth suddenly turned into high density blueberries. Huh. And he took he took the question seriously and did the math and ended up responding with a paper that is up on archive and it's it's a really technical, really technical, fantastic sophisticated article that you know, I couldn't get through parts of it,
but it was really quite entertaining. And so I think that's my most favorite fantastical eschatological scenario.
I'm ready for the blueberry death.
You're blowing up like a ball, like a blueberry.
Yeah, I'm so ready for it. Lindsay Freshmouth wants to know. Number one, are you familiar with Harry Potter? Not really, Okay, she wanted to know if you're Slytherin, but something told her that you're a raven claw. They're different houses. Maybe could go take that, who knows. But my last two questions, Yeah, worst thing about your job? What sucks about studying the apocalypse? That's such a that's that could be either that's such
a broad question. But what is the worst thing about studying the apocalypse?
Yeah, well it's not the most soporific topic, that's for sure.
Okay, soporific just means inducing drowsiness. So no, the end of the world not a sleepy business. Also, yes, I looked it up.
I do enjoy. I mean it's it's meaningful, uh work for sure. I think that's what kind of enables me to spend days, you know, just you know, just really cogitating some particular you know, dark scenario.
Cogitate to think about or meditate upon. Toss that in your little word tool box. It's a good one.
I don't know. In terms of downsides, I mean, it's hard to get grants, you know, it's it's that's a bit of a struggle. I think that's the worst part getting grants. Yeah, getting grants.
I love that you study heat, dead of the universe, starvation, extinction, And the worst is applying for grants. That's the darkest part, because do you ever just get a stamp back that's like big stamp, like boom, what's the point? Like I was like, you've convinced me and your grant that the apocalypse is coming. Ergo I will not fund it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I imagine there are some studies, some papers that could be written that you know, might present a really compelling case that that the end is imminent, and that would deter no doubt. Yeah, the garnering of further money.
They're like, where did I take this money. We're gonna buy a yacht, We're gonna throw a party because it's all coming. What's the best thing about your job? What do you love the most about being an eschatologist?
I think it's what I gestured out a moment ago. I find it really meaningful. And this gets back even to the uh to the the sort of to use the term a bit loosely, the kind of paradox of the field. How it's it's extremely important topic whose importance is, as I said before, is just very parasitic on the importance of all other things, you know, poetry and sports and literature and so on. It is it is meaningful.
I mean, it's you know, this is work that aims to improve the lives of of the next generation and also to ensure that the great experiment called civilization continues and this multi generational project of science and philosophy and so on can perhaps reach some kind of you know, there will be good ending to the to the narrative of human existence. So yeah, that's I've that deeply satisfying. If you're a young person you happen to also care about human survival, then this is a good field to
go into. It's a growth field. Also, as colleagues say, it's not going away anywhere anytime soon.
There's never been a better time to be a doomstare awesome.
Thanks a lot, appreciate it.
To find more of the brilliant and delightful fil tors work, you can see the website Risk and Religion dot org. He is x Riskology on Twitter. I'll link those both in the show notes, and his books are The End What Science and Religion tells us about the Apocalypse and last year's release Morality Foresight and Human Flourishing and Introduction to Existential Risks. So do get your myths on those ologies is at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward with one L on both, so do follow along.
Ologies merch dot com has shirts that you can maybe use as a tourniquet during the chaos of an extraterrestrial alien invasion. Thank you Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis and the Ologies podcast Facebook group is great, wonderful people, new friends you can meet before we all die. Thank you. Aaron Talbert and Handle Lippo for admining. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music for this. He's in a
band called Islands. And this was edited by Life Saver Stephen Ray Morris, who also hosts the podcasts The per Cast and See Jurassic Right Now. If you stick around to the end, the end, the end, you know I tell you a secret every episode. So this week's secret is that right before I started recording these asides, I got a text from my dad on the family thread about how there were thirty nine earthquakes on the Santadres fault yesterday.
That's great.
Start with the so that's scary. But my first reaction to that was like, well, no one would expect you to return emails for a few days, so that'd be pretty sweet. And then also, it's not as bad as an asteroid, So maybe this apocalypse stuff is uplifting. Maybe we should laugh about it just a little more and live life in a way that's like, eh, fuck it, cut bangs, singing some karaoke, dance in a park, just
do your thing. It's all gonna end, okay, Bye Bye. Pacodermatology, hobbiology or doo zoology, lithology, yeah, zechonology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, seriology, elinology.
Class day is the syncre is now the class women Nish stay to make in.
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