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Hello and welcome to Technically Speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest, share knowledge, and satisfy some curiosity. I'm Laura and I'm joined by Antonia to talk about what we would do if we had infinite research funding. What sort of science or engineering grand challenge we would want to solve? So Antonia, this was kind of your idea initially for a conversation. So what sort of grand challenge would you want
to address? So I thought about this when I was well choosing a degree and thought what do I actually want to do with my life and I liked problem solving and then I kind of latched on to climate change and trying to work to solve that problem. I'm working on it in a very small part um advising companies on how to use less energy and therefore uh reduce their carbon emissions. But the more I look into it, I go, I think the technology is there. It's more of a social issue.
Ah, so if it's not technical stuff, would you then put it on to I guess trying to convince people to do what we would say is the right thing to switch to zero carbon emissions just overnight just do it? Yeah, maybe maybe that is the challenge. It's not all about the technology. I've often heard that it's an economic challenge as well because imagine if we did turn off all of our fossil fueled power stations and stop driving all of our cars that are fueled on petrol and
diesel and all that sort of thing. What would life look like and how would we function as a society without the internet and cars and whatever else? It probably would be quite the logistical nightmare. Economic collapse. Yeah. Although this isn't an economics podcast. It is however science engineering podcast. So, uh, I assume you did then look into some of the social stuff to see if there's any sort of social science that might help solve this or start off this research, I should say.
Yeah, I did try. I mean, this is someone who didn't do very much um, learning about social sciences. I did an AS level in psychology. So, uh, yeah, it was a bit of a challenge for me to try and research how you would solve it from a social point of view. I started from the point that it's like we know logically what to do but what forces behavior. Okay. So we have an idea that we should stop running around in petrol fueled cars but then we do it anyway. Yeah. I mean people have come up with
theories isn't it? It's that bias of well I'm only one person so I don't do that much harm but it's a whole collective problem. So I had the same thought as you thinking right climate change is a big problem and then I went even bigger and ended up with a solution to it. We we have infinite resources such as food and energy so no one needs to worry about those sorts of things and this would create more equality so it would make these social challenges sort of less challenging I guess. Does that
make any kind of sense? I feel like I'm just kind of rambling a bit. Essentially I'm saying my research would be to have infinite resources and how the hell do we do that? So I went with let's brainwash everyone to do what they should do and you went with well why does anyone have to do something that they don't want to do if they have everything they need effectively. Yes. Your your solution sounds better than mine.
It might be slightly more tricky to achieve though cuz when I thought about it so we we had that episode about critical minerals a while ago. what is needed to create technology. Cuz what we find is as our technology gets more complicated or more advanced, we need lots more different chemical elements and then things like rare earth elements become this huge economic thing where everyone wants them and few places on Earth have them. Yeah.
In large quantities, I should say. And then that creates this whole economic thing. What if we could do away with that? What if everyone had all the rare earth metals they would ever need? So what if we had a replicator as in Star Trek? But did it truly replicate everything? Could it replicate any chemical from another chemical? Can it just generate mass out of nothing? That is the ultimate question, I think. I mean, I guess so ultimately we're talking about what do we want to achieve
with the research, right? Do we want to have some sort of infinite almost like a perpetual motion machine is what you're talking about there? You just create infinite energy and infinite mass whenever you want it. Yeah. Because ultimately if we understand the laws of physics, energy equals mass, mass equals energy. So it has to come from somewhere. So do we just have to get enough that meets the needs of humanity? But then are we taking it away from somewhere else in the whole universe?
Do we really care about that though? If it's a part of the universe that isn't known to have any life, should we care? I suppose we are limited by our technology. We don't know that there isn't other life that cares. Maybe our circle of influence is small enough anyway. Yeah. So I guess what I want to achieve is some way of having a world that is more equal where there isn't any food scarcity or critical minerals for technology like solar panels and smartphones are really abundant. That's
my ultimate achievement. But I guess that's slightly different to yours if you're focusing more on the climate change aspect. Yeah. I guess I've I've imagined a world that we know what the solution is to food scarcity and energy security and we understand that we have enough resource to get to net zero on planet Earth. Okay, but we just aren't doing it. That's my standpoint. We probably could make it work with what we have. It's just it's distributed across the earth in
different places. But if we could all work together, then boom, it's it's solved. It's not a problem, is it? Okay. So, how do you get everyone to work together? Yeah, that's the big question. I don't know. We've we've had a lot of conferences to try and get pe get countries to agree, but they're not agreeing. So, then you said you did look into the social research a little bit. Did that give you any ideas of how you'd go about
doing the research? because you said for climate change you'd want to look at behavioral science and to me as a professional science communicator I do hear the occasional thing from colleagues about um ways to change behavior and there are things to do with about how embedded a belief is within a person within their world I should say so is this about what influences people and what the barriers to action are or did your dive into the research come up with something else
I couldn't really get to the crux of what really influences beliefs. I instead tried the take of is it in the brain chemistry that influences our beliefs. Oh yeah, that was really hard to um actually try and find an answer to in a short period of time. I can imagine. Yes. Where we are with the science so far is maybe we can understand human behavior better because we now have better MRI technology to scan brains and understand brain structure and maybe that will correlate with human behavior.
So you're thinking that our brains are essentially just computers that can be programmed in some way to have a particular outcome. I'm making this sound really simplistic. That was like my idea is like you know our brains are computers in a way and we have decision making going on. How does that actually work on a like sinapses firing level? If you're looking at how our neurons affect behavior Yeah. and using technology to influence that are you essentially wanting to brainwash
people? I'm not trying to I'm just trying to understand like if you go from a logic perspective you go right well the result of how we think is our behavior. How we think is based on sinapses. So if we understood how the sinapses work you get to human behavior right that should be easy to to predict. It's just like a computer model. So, I remember the conversation earlier in the year, I think, with uh Ellie, where we were talking about how the gut influences behavior as well.
See, it's just the body doing things we don't understand yet. Well, that's it. It sounds like it's really complicated. There's more than just the brain. There's also like bacteria in your gut give off chemicals that are then received by something in the body that then sends a signal to the brain that then makes you hungry, say, or makes you anxious. Yeah. like is that bacteria creating hormones or is it creating something that then creates hormones? I think either way it could be possible.
There honestly wasn't a lot of specifics about this when I tried to look into it. So once again, we don't know how it works. The research I was reading just seemed to suggest that this is obviously a thing. We know it's a thing and didn't look into the very detailed step by step what happens on each thing involved in that path. Yeah. So I was trying to understand how even um emotions are linked to the
brain. You know, you kind of hear about you get dopamine and you get serotonin, different chemicals that are released, but then it's also about how they're received. So like the neurotransmitters that actually accept them and transporters. sort of newish research, I say, have found how a specific gene expresses and regulates emotions to the point that it kind of goes into mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. So, you said a lot of science words. Oh, sorry.
So, you said that a gene regulates certain moods effectively there. Yeah. Variations on a protein gene. Okay. So this gene codes for a protein and then this protein does something in your brain to pick up certain chemical signals. Is that right? Serotonin signals which is often called the happy hormone I think isn't it? So serotonin is kind of your general mood and then maybe you could call dopamine like joy or pleasure. Oh, okay. So they have similar effects.
One's just slightly more enhanced. So either one could be worked on to generate a happy response I suppose or suppressed to create a not great response. I guess it depends if having less of something influences behavior or does it just sort of stop behavior. Uh like you kind of do something less because you have you know you know kind of when people have less serotonin and dopamine they kind of do less whereas if you had more then it might actually influence
the positive behavior that you want. So effectively it is corresponds to energy levels of a person how much effort they're willing to put into something. Yeah. So then if this is all to do with did you say it was a genetic variation? So one gene that can make proteins of slightly different shapes depending on how much genetic variation there is. Yeah. So does that mean that you could then genetically select people to have a particular propensity for doing something or a particular behavior?
Could you genetically select people to care more about climate change? I mean, maybe that's the ultimate goal for a climate change scientist. This is really like taking deep turn of when you go, I'm just going to change a light bulb, but first I've got to find a torch. Oh, but the torch has ran out of batteries. So, I've got to go to the hardware shop to get batteries to change a light bulb. You know, it it feels like we've taken so many steps away from the
original thing. But yeah, maybe you could selectively choose how someone behaves. But then I realized actually it doesn't matter because it's all about the collective, isn't it? It's not about an individual action. This is true. You need to select an entire a global population, I suppose. Yeah. And this is just one gene, right? And there are probably lots of other
different ways. So actually doing all the genetic research to figure out what influences behavior plus all the gut bacteria research to have this particular outcome you're saying is probably not quite where we want to go with this sort of uh behavioral research. No, I think it's it's almost like it's too late. The brain is or the body has those genes already. So I guess then we just need to go into understanding how populations decide what to do. So moving outside of the brain, did you
do any research into that area? I didn't get round to doing loads, but it kind of reminded me about the episode we had on tackling misinformation and how we tell if something's true because we did find that there'll be things that weren't true, but it was hard to kind of break that wall once the information was out there. I guess going back to what I was saying up top about having this belief system.
it becomes embedded in beliefs and just becomes part of the social background and you kind of accept it without really questioning it because it seems to be so well known. Yeah. And so I don't know if we don't know enough about humans as a collective. I think we don't know how to change it though. We understand that people have herd mentality and and things like that. Okay. So I said maybe about five or 10 minutes ago that we're both looking at different aspects of sustainability.
Yeah. Yeah. and you're looking at sort of the human influence on sustainability through looking at climate change. My feeling is that my research which is more about having infinite resources which makes things more equal and therefore having a more sustainable society is probably slightly more practical or engineering than the
behavioral science research. I mean almost certainly I I would say that is probably more on the engineering and science side and I think there is already some research in this area cuz there's things like 3D printing of food and if you could print any sort of like a muscle structure say then you could have meat that isn't derived from animals or you could have well we already have particle accelerators that can turn one chemical element into another and nuclear
reactors that can do the same thing so you can produce produce more chemical elements than you would have initially. So where do we go from there? Do we do we just keep funding that research to get to the end point of we have enough for everyone and so there is no inequality? I think so. The challenge with these things though is they're quite energy intensive and I can't figure out how you would get to be able to produce infinite energy cuz all of the current technology
we have has limitations. You know, solar panels only last for about 30 years, and their energy output declines gradually with age. Nuclear reactors have a design life of potentially a hundred years, but again, they still need to be replaced and they still need fuel. Whether it's fish or fusion you're looking at, they still need to have fuel that comes from somewhere. Fusion is probably the closest you'd get because you get a lot of energy out for what the amount of fuel you put in.
Yeah. So, I guess you maybe need to figure out some way of regenerating that fuel whilst you're creating that abundant amount of energy. And even so, fusion is seems to be perpetually 20 to 50 years away. It never seems to come any closer despite all the research that's been done. I suppose if you put enough time into it, surely it would be solved if we keep thinking we're almost there. And it's not that fusion itself is
difficult to achieve. It's that at the minute it requires more energy to put in than you will get out, which is the opposite of where we want to get to. Yeah. That's not the uh infinite or vast quantity of energy we wanted compared to how much we put in uh dream, is it? Do you know how much energy we could get from fusion if we achieved it? Ooh, that is an interesting question. I actually
don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some calculations somewhere in some research articles that would give a theoretical amount per I don't know a mass of fuel or for the size of the accelerator cuz I guess it's not just the amount of fuel that's important eventually if if we do work out fusion then my job will be unnecessary. Um well if we could genuinely get to the point where we've got infinite energy resources. I'm still not too sure that
fusion alone will manage it. Maybe there's some other technology we've not even imagined yet that can do it. But what if we've discovered what is infinite for today, but imagine we have even more requirements that what we thought was a lot, it goes even bigger. Sort of like how computing power is more than exponentially increased. Well, you're not really talking about something being infinite then. You're talking about it being able to exceed demands.
Yeah. So effectively, if your job is redundant, you don't need to tell people how to be more efficient with energy use. Do we then just keep increasing how much energy we want because we think we've not hit that limit yet? That's it. So then I go back to my my research thesis which was about climate change but is now about human behavior and actually we need to teach people to be empathetic so that they wouldn't ever take more than they need. I feel like a lot of people do do that,
don't they? Most people, well, most people I know tend to live within their means. But then you get some people like rich billionaires that can't seem to spend money fast enough, I suppose. Yeah. And then there wouldn't be a need for infinite food and infinite energy because everyone is just sharing what they have. There's this idea that there is still finite resources in the world though,
aren't there? Um, I mean, there was an idea, I think it was back in the 70s, that we were eventually going to run out of food to feed the entire world because our population kept growing, which is one of the reasons that farming became so energy um, so intensive to produce more food for a growing population. And then that's had the knock-on effect of damaging the ecosystem. So, I don't think it's necessarily about just
sharing resources equally. I still think you would need to have enough resources for a population that seems to keep on growing like more efficient methods of generating resource as well. I guess so. Yeah. But then you have to balance that with environmental concerns. So if intensive farming is about a more efficient way of producing food but completely harms wildlife, which then has a knock-on effect for the rest of the environment, you can only be so efficient, right? How do you be
efficient whilst protecting nature? Do you just have us all eating background proteins? I think maybe it's it's seeing nature as part of the world we live in and it's not about pulling from it too much and actually how do we put them as part of the equation of who do we need to look after and satisfy. Yeah. I think the only way of doing it is to be effectively let nature do its own thing and be less almost reliant on it and just grow our food in the lab. Big reactors.
As much as I like growing my own food, I at some point in the future, there's a lot of talk about this about having to find non-ebased ways to sustain society, I suppose. So, we should research terraforming. Oh. And go off planet or ways to live outside of the natural environment essentially. Yeah. I'm sure we had a conversation
about this a while ago. If we run out of like the earth surfacing and we keep having to build buildings that are taller and taller, how far removed are you from nature then if you're in this massive skyscraper that's like a mile in the sky? I think we've come across with new issues because we're finding with some of our high calorific food which is also processed. We're having other issues with ultrarocessed food. I've never quite understood the problem with
ultrarocessed food. I think it's just haven't looked into it much is the idea that it's got a lot of nutrients stripped out. So although you might be getting a lot of calories, you're not getting anything else that your body actually needs like minerals. Yeah. So it has lower nutritional value, but it has calories. Pure energy. Is that how we solve the uh problem of finite energy?
That's the thing. We don't really understand how that is unhealthy for us because, you know, you say you take fruit and veg, you mash it up, make it a smoothie, and suddenly it's less healthy than if you just had the fruit and veg. I still don't believe that argument. Uh the point is meant to be that it releases the sugars more easily when you blend it so that you can absorb it more
readily. But I still think if you ate a smoothie that is actually made from a complete fruit rather than extracting bits from fruits. If you ate that along with some other starchy food, say then it would be the same because you mash it up in your mouth anyway. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah. I don't know if people are talking about, you know, smoothies where they've taken out all the fiber and all the tough parts, but then wouldn't they call that juice?
This is a marketing thing, isn't it? Cuz lots of smoothies are like still, I don't know, 70% juice and only a tiny amount of a whole fruit. It's just a naming convention. And I think then that that advice you were you just stated that you should only drink small amounts of smoothies effectively because free sugars are bad is just applying a blanket statement to all smoothies. I think someone should do an experiment on this. I think it's definitely worth But how
would you control for it? Could we test the pure components of it after it's been blended in the smoothie because it would still look the same on like a mass
spectrometer? Oh, well, see, I was thinking you just get someone to eat a bunch of fruit and then you'd also get someone to drink the same amount of fruit after it's been blended and just getting through that over a sustained period of time and control all other aspects of their lifestyle to see if they then start having, I don't know, blood sugar changes or they start putting on weight or any other differences that that potential increased calorie intake would lead to.
Well, I'm sure plenty of people would sign up for that cuz it seems like a fairly simple medical study. Would you rather be in a fruit eating study group or would you rather be in the smoothie group? Oh, it depends who's made the smoothies. I do like smoothies and but I do still adhere to the vice having said that I don't believe it. I still adhere to the advice of only drinking so much in a day just in case. Fair enough.
I feel like having started to talk about infinite research funding and what we do with it and that we want to solve some grand challenges to do with sustainability that we've kind of stopped talking about that now. So maybe that's a good place to leave it. Yeah, I think we were kind of saying that considering climate change and a need to somehow have infinite resources, these are two huge grand research challenges
that we would want to solve. We've come up with some ideas around social influencing and brain research as well as some more practical research into printing of food and transmutation developments and fusion research to solve two quite meaty uh sustainability related topics which we also think is no small task because there's a lot more research to do but then I guess that's what any research with infinite funding
would look like. it would be some huge mammoth task and when you ask two people who were so interested in equality in society as well as science and engineering that's effectively what you end up with this massive research proposal. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. The views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them. They do not represent any industry or
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