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Isaac: My usual philosophy on the simulation hypothesis is that the question isn’t whether or not we live in a simulation but whether or not it matters. Now I tend to think that the rules for simulation will likely be self-consistent you would have physical laws in that simulation that you would expect the simulation to tend to follow because otherwise kind of gives away the game and you know you divorce the rules we observe whether this is the view of us or not we probably should be assuming that me most about how likely life is to evolve, to begin with, and to get to intelligence and technology. Oh, we’re just a lot less probable than we think they are and I I don’t see us trying to tell from all as much you know forming and people think of it as oh we take this planet make it livable this process that is inherently destructive and I mean seriously. Mountain changing type of procedures that takes centuries to take place whereas while it sounds strange building your own habitats building giant orbital habitats like an O sound or might turn out to be much cheaper than trying to tear form an equal amount of space and then most importantly you’ve got the entire planet moaning. It’s a table form that entire plan to make a livable something like an O sound it’s just an island in space you build and expand or add another one as need requires and you can perfectly tail them if you know you can get the same gravity the same weather temperature lighting etc

Matt: If you’re a bit of a nerd excited about space exploration interested in the Fermi paradox or curious about our collective future this episode is absolutely for you Star Wars, Star Trek, a galaxy far far away we are diving deep into the world of space today we have Isaac Arthur from science and futurism was Isaac Arthur, the largest and most successful YouTube channel on futurism they have over 270 thousand subscribers 20 million views and a legion of loyal insightful fans including his own subreddit Arthur covers a wide range of futurist and science-fiction ideas including cyborgs androids artificial intelligence the Fermi paradox interstellar war dyson sphere’s mega scale engineering quantum teleportation and faster than light travel typically exploring hypothetical scenarios extending out to the distant future by way of background Arthur’s experience is both as a physicist and a futurist and he is an incredibly interesting gentleman having him on the program today was quite a bit of fun and we dive into a ton of topics including the future of interplanetary travel what you didn’t know about the Fermi paradox how humanity is likely going to evolve as we explore space the reason we probably won’t terraform planets where we’ll live instead why material science and meta materials maybe the most important technology of this decade the effects of genetic engineering on society the two paths to free energy for all the reason Isaac thinks were close to a post-scarcity world why Isaac thinks cybernetics and human enhancement is more likely than gene editing the reason man-made structures are the habitats of the future how likely AI is to evolve and why our education system is failing and how we can fix it this is a fun one guys without further ado I give you, Isaac Arthur

Matt: What’s your story?

Issac: Well I guess you could say I was kind of born and bred for it my parents named me Isaac el but all thoughts say a fan of Newton and Einstein so I pretty much been into science since Carl Sagan’s day is way back in the early 80s it’s been a passion of my life so

Matt: And how did you make that into a profession now I mean you run one of you run actually probably the largest sign futurist related YouTube channel?

Issac: Mostly by accident I had I been in the army football I took out of grad school and when I got out I got involved in local civic governance and administration and they you know. There-there was a lot of wool clay to be done they feel good about but I wasn’t really getting to do the science thing much. So, I had stayed fairly active on the field and I decided one day to try out some piano PowerPoint presentation and I just picked a random topic because I want to show you something would walk and that was megastructure was the whole website at one suggest. Even watch it but that was kind of pilots someone’s later I ended up doing another episode on different topic the Fermi paradox and then it was another one and I thought there was a need for another one and the next guy know there’s a channel it’s just been growing since then

Matt: And it’s taken off so why megastructures why did you start there?

Issac: I think in that case it was really just because I had to talk about involved in a world-building forum on Facebook, a sci-fi ward barian form and people so often focused and in science fiction with a writing books on is this as mostly authors rang out there on you know this planet or that plan now, I said in science fiction there’s so much focus on the planets but that’s probably not the future that we’re going to see we’re more likely a build our Ward’s to live on you know same as we all live in caves we live in skyscrapers and I felt that they were really missing the opportunity to explore those. So, I figured that would be a good table to look at cuz it’s discussed with a lot of Hugh and they oh and I just felt like I was alt repeating myself Justin let’s do a video on that there was some good alt walk out there from Steve Bowser to Ryan’s home and that’s pretty much how that started then, of course, yo they killed inside our time was alien so I discussed the Fermi paradox and it just kind of rolled out from the

Matt: Let’s talk about the Fermi paradox for people that are unfamiliar

Issac: Okay brother. For me paradox is basically the idea that as we moved into the modern era we saw the universe was this huge place just mind-boggling huge and it was very old too and we knew that the world was much more than originally thought as well and people looked out there and said well if this place is so big and so well there’s gotta be other life and there’s gotta be I you know this is something even suggest in the past but never taken too seriously when you take a look at the universe and see just how big it or what it is it goes from maybe this happening to this kind of feeling that it absolutely must be happening over and over again so there should be civilizations out there then I’ll just ancient and been around forever in a day and spread all out and yet we don’t see that and so there’s a pay on paradox between the size and age of the universe and its apparent absence of intelligent life is what we call deform a paradox

Matt: And there’s so many different reasons for why we could be observing this the one that I’ve heard the most interesting would just be the actual probability of life occurring I’d like to what are your thoughts on the different the different reasons why we haven’t heard something

Issac: Well we’ve got basically we usually divided into four camps we’ve got variations of the rail earth camp which says we don’t see anybody because they don’t exist maybe life isn’t that common maybe doesn’t get smart very often maybe it’s even all artificial nature for us we like divine intervention or the simulation hypothesis then you’ve got the categories. I think most people tend to subscribe to not myself that I’m actually that forced camp which is that they were all over the place but we just don’t hear them we will missing their signals maybe they use fashion like communication that kind of thing thawed camp is there all over the place and we just don’t believe them when we see them that would typically be things like UFO was landing on a planet or engineer lien astronauts and of course we have a fourth category for the various miscellaneous ones and sci-fi tends to make us think it’s number two or number three that they are there and we either just not missing them or we don’t believe them but I tend to feel the strongest camp is the one that says they aren’t they are because we were just a force on the scene in this region of the universe and the difficulty with that is that we it seems counterintuitive this universe is ancient it’s huge how can we be the first it seems a or and yet the more you look at the scenarios for how you’d expect alien civilizations to behave there’s something we call exclusivity we say well they might be doing this and that’s why we don’t see them but would everybody be doing that and the more you poke at the less believable it becomes that all these guys are doing something that’s gonna hide them from us and so we tend to fall into the city rail or the Rio civilization camp which I should that does also include the possibility that we don’t see them because they happen with you enough but they just kill themselves off with technology

 

 

Matt: Which is that which is the Fermi filter in terms of not wanting us to see them you could also see very easily a space league of sorts with rules or don’t contact stupidly unintelligent alien civilizations?

Issac: And that’s what we are the prime directive or the zoo hypothesis more generally the prime directive being a joke on the one from Star Trek and that’s exactly what we mean by exclusivity you could say that makes sense but when you think about it it is so easy to send a radio post to a planet like ours or just land and unless they’re willing to leave all mottos in place to just constantly filter these things out block them shoot down ships to try to land then you know you have this is every civilization going to not only agree to this and agree to this in perpetuity but actually be willing to enforce this with a degree of effort that would be necessary to essentially quarantine a planet it’s not a case where you can say they’re just leaving us alone because they’ll want to talk to us that don’t really walk on inspection is the idea that they are actively seeking to keep us quarantined and that just doesn’t work as well when you when you start kind of poking around at it [Inaudible]

Matt: When it comes to human game theory in terms of what we would want to do or in terms of actual possibilities?

Issac: Well, you can look it from the game theory perspective but I’d say just in terms of you know human psychology we have isolated tribes on this planet that we sail uncontacted and we often point to those but in point of fact they all have been contacted it’s just they they drove us off and we said we’re not going to come back they do know we exist and they don’t really understand what we all I assume but they do know of us and I mean it might be a try but you’ll be missed but by Loes these folks do know we exist and we have made attempts to to contact them so and there was, of course, a lot of spliff don’t know whether not we should do that but whether or not we believe we should how do you stop somebody from going and visiting them are you willing to laugh they are tribal areas around so with with forces to keep someone from coming in and all you willing to detain or shoot somebody whose side I’m gonna talk to those folks and that’s a bit different than just having a policy where you say we’re not going to

Matt: It’s like the rare rhino policy of trying to protect them poaching it’s significantly more complicated when there is conflicting parties so you’re on the line of simulation theory I would imagine

Issac: No. I my usual philosophy on the simulation hypothesis is that the question is whether or not we live in a simulation but whether or not it matters now I tend to think that the rules for simulation will likely be self-consistent you would have physical laws in that simulation that you would expect the simulation to tend to follow because otherwise kind of gives away the game and you know universe the rules we observe whether this is the universe or not we probably should be assuming that Nemo so much about how likely life is to evolve, to begin with and to get you intelligence and technology oh we just a lot less probable than we think they are

Matt: And that would be the the largest order of magnitude difference in terms of what the percentages would be and the largest uncertainty?

Issac: Yeah!

Matt: The other things are much simpler

Issac: With Drake’s equation you’ve got the astronomical terms and you’ve got the biological terms and you’ve got the psychological sociological terms we know the astronomical ones pretty well we’ve guessed them too with an over of magnitude pretty much from the get-go the problem we’ve been nailing those down and we’ll find you then but that’s that’s the problem is those are like one in ten type of odds they’ll you know maybe you’d have to sort through a hundred systems at Wars to find one that was suitable astronomically for life and that makes us look at the other tones in Drake’s equation the ones deal with just general odds of evolution and society is and you tend to think well if those well one and ten then these should be two but for all we know the odds of life arising in the first place might be one in a quintillion you know they’re almost BOTS been very nice it’s probably not but that could be it we assume evolution is this pathway to intelligence and from telchines to technology but we don’t really have any evidence to back that claim up and indeed a lot of biologists think that’s that’s not good reasoning at all that you know intelligence is a very bizarre trait to evolve and often counterproductive and look at us we just covered fire a million years ago there’s only ten thousand years ago and got about easier for more than cooking food tottery metal walking that’s all recent so maybe it’s one of those things where they all millions of civilizations the galaxies that are hanging around caveman level maybe it’s one those things way on most planets all fungus and algae and nothing more complex we don’t know yet but odds are pretty good that’s where the photo is actually at

 

 

Matt: Yeah! But much earlier I mean if you’re looking at survival humanity was much luckier than uh than a lion for instance and being able to survive we had a lot of things happen that allowed us to survive that is not guaranteed

 

Issac: Indeed and in many ways of the power you have that is so much of our technology and cultural comes around us trying to fix or deal with things that we were actually not very good at you know we don’t have claws we don’t really have good for climates that kind of force us towards technology but if we were just a little bit less survivable we probably wouldn’t be the apex species now and if you a little bit more survivable we probably would have invented a lot of that stuff

Matt: Yeah it’s it’s an interesting paradox how do you choose topics to focus on you’ve done quite a lot.

Issac: You know where there are so many ways we come with episodes early on I would just generally I did a top again I felt like it wasn’t complete so I would do more and later I start asking Yanni is what topics do you think we should cover we do polls sometimes I ask so the folks who volunteer to help our channel what they want to do and sometimes as episode just comes me I’ll be meeting a comment and some be like hey let’s do an episode on colonizing the oceans or say that that sounds so cool we’ve got you an episode on that?

Matt: So, How would how would colonizing the oceans work and how does that how does that impact looking forward to worlds that potentially are only oceans

Issac: Actually I probably shouldn’t use that one because that was the one that most recently came to mind and we haven’t written the draft script for that up yet was to a research phase at the moment though what we probably wind you do you know the earth is a quarter land and most that land is not good land it’s mountains pose things like that the oceans are most of space we have and you know that’s a lot of room to expand lots of sunlight for plants to grow but they don’t grow in the deep ocean because there’s not much nutrient so you probably see a lot of floating cities that will actually artificial reefs of themselves here the soil and nutrients that plants need to grow and they might tell themselves but you know to the bottom of the ocean but they probably have engines near to move out of way of a storm then you could see them deep down to now there’s lots of reasons to floating islands I’m a little less sure about colonizing deep or down and that’s that’s where those topics I’ll be exploring myself for the next month or two in order to look at it more on the episode we have looked at a little bit more for place like Europa or rogue plants deeper in the outer solar system but I asked for orth itself he always talked about colonizing the moon on Mars both those are harder to colonize than a Nautica but for the most part we haven’t colonized and on ok yet so expanding outward a little bit let’s talk a little bit more about becoming interplanetary what some timelines are what some steps we need to do to get there and what are your overall thoughts you know I often follow the NSS roadmap and the national space size roadmap for the some of the basic milestones they use but the ones we tend to use on the channel usually don’t give dates in terms ad but more like 20 years after we figure this piece out for instance if we got a compact fusion drive you know we don’t even have a fusion yet but if we got a compact fusion drive within a decade you would be able to send people pretty cheaply to other planets alternatively if we got a won’t temperature superconductor that lets you do things like or buildings or laughs trim loops actors support you know very high towers almost right away and it’s wonders where to wait till the technology is closely under horizon for you can really give timelines for it now I mean ever since Apollo we’ve always had this well one of these days we’re gonna get up there but in the last 10 years I think we’ve actually at that snow ball point where we’re gonna start seeing a lot more stuff developed up there so it is it is finally here that snowball plane was gonna be so much more in space but it’s still gonna be fairly slow I think we’ll start actually seen for-profit industry in space in the next 20 years

Matt: Do you think the only thing that would accelerate that would be potential at a cataclysm?

Issac: No. You know actually I was always looking at how we say what industries in space could be enough of avenue that they would justify a major space program and only motive li recently got hit on power satellites as the one which I know of you with newer paths power satellites anything’s down as microwaves the advantages he has launched costs are dropping so we actually stopped putting them up there for less than the cost of meals to make them that is a ten trillion dollar a year or sectoral at the global economy we talk about something like manufacturing things in zero-g or you know maybe filmy movies up there that could be a lot of money but that’s still billions the energy sector is huge it is a massive chunk of our economy and it’s one of our biggest bottlenecks so if you can produce energy up in space and beam it down to earth safely which it looks like we will be able to do once that hits that point where it’s profitable just viable because there’s completely renewable because there’s no fossil fuels involved or spent new cure items or even eat toxin tears from the solar panels in space themselves for like a trash dump that gives you a power source that opens up that bottleneck and you’re speaking beams down so much power and it’s such a huge sector of the economy at that point I think you could actually justify keeping up you know many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets in space as opposed to you know why now we send up millions of dollars well the stuff it costs us billions for fuel you know in rocketry

Matt: Yeah! That would be very interesting so the idea would be to beam down to beam down energy allow wireless charging the problem one of the problems I would see is human-human testosterone and sperm levels are going way down just from a lot of the radio waves that are and a lot of the products that we’re consuming every day I wonder how that would have an impact on society do we become a purely a purely female and egg driven IVF society

Issac: Oh! hi! you know we talked about that some time with Generation ships if you should send all-female crews they’re all debatable effects of radiation especially non ionizing radiation on human fertility rates all cancers and that is one of us seems to be obviously want to study a lot but it wouldn’t be wouldn’t be up an essay to switch on which we’re a non gender or not we’ve dr. system with that because you could take samples of people as spawncube – who’s to implant them when they want to have a kid and we’re already shifting towards both control systems that make pregnancy typically speaking a planned event rather than just on accident and so I don’t really see there being a you know that’s one of those things where you can fight a potential problem with technology we should be able to switch over to society within pop you in the next twenty or thirty years way or pregnancy is one of those things that happens only when both parties want to happen and never on accident and there could be some concerns that a lot of people would put off having families later and thus get population jobs but we’re also seeing a lot of technology towards potential life extension and vital life extension to not just letting people live long ago as old people but basically just aging slower and if you have both those technologies come into play then then people could wait till they were 50 to have a family and have their curio nice and stowed it up and just in general I tend to feel that these all examples of problems biotechnology gives us new problems but also gives us the pathway to solutions to them

Matt: That’s how technology always works new problems and typically better problems not always

Issac: I can’t be afraid open Pandora’s box and so far every time we’ve opened it’s it’s given us a bit of a jolt but a jolt but it has its children us a few times too we’ve always managed to solve all problems and come out battle for it

Matt: What uh what are some of the biggest problems that you see right now based off of your research and your urine test?

Issac: in terms of localized palms, of course, we got the climatological ones and the energy one is a huge one because that’s such a such a drawn us is that bottleneck for energy how much we can get how quickly we can get it how cheaply we can get it and is damaging ice mom we get it sorry I generally Tennessee energy as the biggest single problem that we’re facing but they’re all so many of them we have got privacy and Cryptologic and cryptography issues for people it can you use your stuff online safely and can you keep things private at all and that I think is one of those more existential things we have civilizational on regardless but is it the civilization that we want so I would probably say energy and personal privacy are the two big ones that we’ve got to deal with in the next 50 years

Matt: Personal privacy and control you’ve built your you’ve built your channel and Empire on YouTube who could technically take it away overnight are you terrified

Issac: Of them no we got all the episodes saved up we could move more like Vimeo or something almost the channel support does not come from YouTube for that reason and in terms of ad revenue we get mostly from donations with sponsorships which baffles us against II mean they do now YouTube’s got a somewhat bad reputation which is not entirely unjustified but I they worry about them knocking each analyst at least not mine at the same time yeah I think you know not to speak out against monopolies in general sometimes they be useful but uh there’s kind of a defect on monopolies they or not I generally tend to feel that’s not good and long-term that there should be some more competition in mail

Matt: There definitely should be that’s a that’s an entirely different rabbit hole and I want to jump more into the the rabbit hole wormhole side of space so as we as we do start to explore more outwards how do you see humanity and civilization going you’ve talked a lot about different types of structures about different places to live in about different ways that humanity can evolve for those places what do you see as some of the most likely scenarios.

Issac: I would try to think the most likely just from my best guesstimate of how technology allowed is that over the course the next century we will visit malls and poppy Venus and some other places too with manned expeditions but we’ll be building up our infrastructure in orbit low orbit high orbit and on the moon and I think that while we will probably set up our force permanent base on Mars for anyone on the moon but then on Mallis 20 wells I suspect the asteroid belt is more the place we’re gonna want to be at and I I don’t see us trying to tail form all as much you know tail forming and people think of it as oh we take this planet make it livable this process that is inherently destructive and I mean seriously Mountain changing type of procedures that takes centuries to tak take place whereas while it sounds strange building your own habitats building giant orbital habitats like an O’Neill sound or might turn out to be much cheaper than trying to tail form an equal amount of space and then most importantly you’ve got the entire planet mowing it to tail form that entire plant to make it livable something like an amoeba so no it’s just an island in space you build and expand or add another one as Nev acquires and you can perfectly tailor it you know you can get the same gravity the same weather temperature lighting etc and just knowing people I feel that most of us would be much more comfortable in an environment that we could completely escape to only AIDS as opposed to a kind of having whatever the local planet forced on us

Matt: So, do you think with that there’s terraforming but then there’s also genetic engineering by bio bio forming that’s that’s the correct term where do you see that I know with a technology we obviously are still a ways off but we’re kind of reaching that inflection point so to speak with genetic engineering?

Issac: To some degree the pathways that you choose just depend on what technology you get forced if we get much better with genetics before we get better with something like fusion then we are very likely go to bio formula out one thing how is stress of course is that we’re not required to do one of the other you can do all these at once and I do tend to feel that the future of humanity is a high Oh divorce and diversity of the various pathways that we choose so I think some people would choose to live on Mo’s with its alien environment as opposed to a nice orbital habitat and I’d be cheap one nice or bio for me though is a bit of an issue because it’s often would allow very extreme adaptations and it’s same with cybernetics and we would usually consider anything we do have called transhuman pants to be more or less same what’re you doing with robots oh but genetics there was a very great similarity a cyborg and a genetically engineered human are still kind of in many ways the same thing and in any case you all gonna have to go that pathway if you want to damp somebody you can’t really tinker with someone’s genetics to let them live on Mars you might better get microbe to do that but not a human however you could cybernetically enhance them so they could walk around they don’t need oxygen, for instance, they don’t need to worry about pressure you know there was are things that will be more the cybernetic routes but there’s a lot of you know change mobility between those two and I do think a lot of people will go that route I was not sure they will do it as a normal thing else but that will tend to be a small extension population

Matt: What about in terms of the implications of that is people do start to edit themselves change themselves enhance themselves in different ways and how that affects us also living different places it really it really complicates having at civilizations of the speak

Issac: O sure! and two degrees yet think about what do we mean by civilization you know this planet has an awful lot of different civilizations on it but would you tend to afford to it as our civilization and I think that you tend to see that too you would see differences but I think you know you see demonstrate more was in a lost population but you know we shouldn’t be too immodest about this thing miss ponds all you’d have civilizations on Mars that differed from each other more than they did for several civilizations that exist on earth or Venus as same as on Dancing North America or South America you have countries that differ much more for each other they might some country Africa Europe and I would say the biggest threat that you have going on with that though is that a lot of people might feel obliged to embrace genetic engineering or cybernetics because you’ve got that issue of well we went got my kid in hands so they’re smarter now and athletic and you don’t have to that was gonna force you but if you want your kid to be a success you probably better give them that that that old you know to bump up and I think that could be one of those problems cuz a lot of people say no I’m not going to do that and I don’t want you to either because that puts me in an unfair disadvantage and then you have the other people all get me very lightly back that it’s them their body or their child and they suddenly had the light to give them an advantage so I think that’s probably more those big arguments we have in the near future along with for you know privacy that is gonna be a debate for the 24th century then we probably can’t kick that road too can down the road too much

Matt: Is that anything you could stop though I mean it will just become it’ll just become black market if there is that much of an advantage to be gained eventually to become black mark and then I’ll have to be Levi’s?

Issac: Some of it could be black market but the thing is something like that’s pretty tactical I mean if someone can see in a different range of frequencies and and of course thing about black mocha see you have to hide that you’re using it and a lot of people who might want to make you something like that will decide it’s it’s one step too far I was thinking though you know it’s really more the ethics issue you can you can never ban something like that completely install Trek in D space 9 and you know they had a doctor of Julian Bashir I he turned out to be genetically enhanced he wasn’t allowed to be installed for you because of that and that I’m so divs the be kind of a dual impression than the one hand it’s a bad thing yeah I had he should be blamed for his pay instead and I think that is one of those arguments that we’re going to have to have is whether or not that’s actually true is it light to Horton against somebody who’s gotten these implants they say someone got on the black market it’s illegal and they give it to the kid do we have any right to give that child limitations because they’ve been engineered illegally they didn’t choose to do it I’m at the same time they all still disadvantaging people so as one of those examples where I see on the channel we can sometimes guess with the future we like but I don’t have any solutions on that well it’s quite the ethical dilemma

Matt: It’s hard to punish people for being better than you

Issac: Yeah!

Matt: Doing that sometime so there’s a history of doing that um what are your thoughts on artificial intelligence where we’re headed and possible implications

Issac: It’s a bit of a strange one is I tend to feel that we all going to get more official intelligence in the next 10 to 20 years but I suspect progress on that will actually start to slow down you know 20 years ago people saying this is something we should ask you’ve been looking at we willwe are the dangerous but we need a lot more research on it now you see more and more people out of that field now that science saying well let’s slow down and be more careful at still having these conversations now in the past it was a sci-fi danger we knew about it to me knew we had to deal that one day now it scheme the point where we actually have to start thinking about it more seriously and I think in the next 10 or 20 years Craig it’s like we went to really seriously think about it because they’re all so many ethical not to mention genuine dangerous to humanity that that can be attached with artificial intelligence and it’s just my opinion that that will probably see it slowed down a lot most the resources are not gonna want to do that in isolation in you know without support so I’ll be illegal at it and I think most governments will regulate the ability to resource that field you know stop putting security into place or limitations in it in the long term though I do think if there’s a bit of an inevitability that we would see intelligence that wasn’t born as humans all and that could be everything from a human mind that was uploaded to a computer and is still basically human but it’s not official intelligence doesn’t mean I can uplift a character that had human level intelligence or just a machine that wasn’t born as a human and was grown from scratch saw that was intelligent or even more intelligent and he’s hard when you have a

Matt: When you have a weapons of mass destruction type race though we’re one side getting an advantage can mean the doom of the other side it’s hard it’s hard not to the arms right?

Issac: Sure! And we often point to nuclear weapons on that but a better example is nuclear weapons it would be biological or chemical war heavily biological warfare most of the superpowers who had the industrial my for that focused almost all of their research on defenses against biological weapons not creating them and that is a good example where something can be a weapon of mass destruction and people do not have a race for it they do not want to deploy these they do know most countries that have nukes do not want to use biological weapons will keep them because they are not precise now under your weapon isn’t that precise but here you go to hit a nuke on a city you know where it’s ladee you know what it’s doing you lease a virus and it’s just likely to kill your own people or neutrals and the kind of same applies for an artificial intelligence or fuse about that don’t come from the advantages it gives a country it comes from the fields of what it’s going to do if it goes rogue and you know especially in this year of computer viruses people already know what a danger that can be I can’t see a lot of governments to sigh and say well we have to have this forced or we’re going to lose I think they’ll be more likely or the biological weapons right will they say well we definitely need to look into this but we need to control it we’ve got other options and you could see people saying as we do with what nukes law countries don’t keep biological weapons so they say if you use biological weapons on that we will reply with a nuclear weapon we’ve been not gonna try to counter violent you could see the same with AI if country says we’re gonna do this research a people could point bombs and say well if you do and it gets out of hand well nuking yeah you know that’s how it is and whether or not that will be effective is hard to say but I do think that’s the pathway that’s more likely to take place

Matt: I think it’s more like cybersecurity and hacking though they’re there’s so much that’s going to put into defense it’s so much easier to play offense

Issac: It is but I mean that’s the case for a lot of weapons too is it’s almost always better to be on the offensive but unless you actually want to be on the offensive you give me an issue line now the cyber security cyber attacks thing is still relatively new and kind of difficult for people to do in an organized fashion the government level as that changes a country’s can to worry about each time it gets ID Tory’s not considered to be the you know you don’t have to know that was definitely them to apply what your own covert attack and in the end any weapon that can do more damage than it is easy to fend against you need more to defend to a payor that takes to deploy it puts people in that Mexican standoff situation we have with weapons of mass destruction in general daddy you tend to see the same kind of policies in place we don’t know for sure with you we can’t prove it in a court of law but just so you know if all stuff starts going down u.s. probably will too and that is you know the options people have available for them on that and I think that is the route that we’re probably gonna see more of in the future

Matt: The new classic Mexican standoff what technologies are you most excited about today in terms of what you’ve looked into the past and then what you’re seeing today

Issac: Time out let’s do a listener challenge I dare you to take out a piece of paper and guess what Isaac’s going to say here you’ll never guess what’s coming next it’s a very transformational technology and it’s one that we’re not frequently talking about wait for it wait for it okay you’ve had enough time just for this decade I’d say that we’re going to remember this decade mostly for metamaterials in last decade probably more for things like graphene as terms of where they got started I’m going to head men amateurs have so many options and then that would seem to not so much break normal physics as get us around a lot of limitations we’ve had with a lot of electronics in the past and that’s one of the things we are I think history will remember this decade for metamaterials but most of us will not personally do so you were kind of in them all kill you of that I know but graphene capacitive super capacitor was gonna be a very big one that we probably had developed you know in the commercial play in the mostly near future now we can bulk produce graphene for a reasonable cost and of course computer was always something with computers but I feel in the terms of physical technology is the ones that really be looking at our super narcos metamaterials and I’m not sure how you classify a graphene but super intense IR ones or the ones though super conductive of thermal energy too

Matt: So, you think we’re gonna move more towards more towards of physical revolutions of the speech in terms of our goods and Zoey’s?

Issac: Chemistry I think is gonna be very big factor in the near future this is the digital age though and nothing to change that but this is a lie now we’re Lessing material size going to be very large

Matt: And it’s interesting trying to try to fuse that together with the existing ecosystem a lot of a lot of money a lot of focus currently is put into easier money tasks so software artificial intelligence they’re not necessarily easy money but it’s obvious money e-commerce thinks things that are dealing much more directly with direct impact how do you see the role of investors entrepreneurs creator scientists in pushing forward positive technology

Issac: The biggest one, of course, is getting the funding they owe to the place that actually needs it and will use it effectively and that’s that’s so much easier said than done we often hear things like now so nothing’s is well we should invest more in research unfortunately on the money not really being there or the interest not only being there many times this kind of approach that amounts to let’s throw money at it is not just less productive where you Domitian with Torn’s but can sometimes even be counterproductive because you have people rush into a fjord for glam or wealth who as opposed to phone appeal research I don’t think that happens too much for things as is but we are pretty tight with our budgets on research venture capital courses remains a big factor in that government research funding big factor for that but I think it’s it’s one as soon so I think we can see a lot more crowdsourcing strangely enough for a lot of pure research true degree we can only do that with shareable foundations a foundation raises money for something and gives away to this of that research project but I think we’ll see more crowdfunding I think we’ll see a lot more people saying I want to mount an archeological expedition to this island in the Mediterranean that’s under explored and I want to raise funds for we can go to the universities or the government or to this cheerful foundation but we decide to crowdsource it and we are going to film things while we do it and we’ll give you a kilo updates and go for $2 a month subscription you will help us support this trip and I don’t think we’ll replace the classic approaches by do you think I see a big boom in crowdsourcing as time goes on and so will content creators do you think patreon or something Similar.

Matt: Oh! Yeah. I know I patron is the major source of funding for my own channel and it’s a big one for a lot of other ones and that’s that’s really new but it’s very effective it’s a very good way to raise funds directly with people and that is an example way or you know people all happy to support something but they need to feel secure they need to know that their money is going to be used properly then I informations out gets it all over the place so place like a Kickstarter or patron that basically just put the mechanism in place I have really helped with that because you could always send people a check in the mail for something but this is a secure way of doing it that’s easy and safe and that’s that’s the big thing that Klaus or see is that people don’t have to feel like there is a safety element speaking

Issac: of safety element how close are we in your opinion or are we moving towards post-scarcity [Inaudible] something similar where we have a society that’s less driven by pure capitalism in Virgil

Matt: Well I think we’re post-scarcity is concerned it all depends on how you define it technically in a finite universe you can never truly have a post-scarcity existence and so we put together terms that you know a kind of a check sheet of what you need to qualify as what people really mean by post-scarcity which is kind of utopistic and utopian and I think that we are getting very close to that but I have it actually go as far as say we’ve already gotten there except that we do have that energy bottleneck as long as you can’t constantly fuel your stuff or that there’s a limitation on how much you can fuel then you can’t really become post-scarcity at the same time in robotics and automation or the other big factor on that if you have either of those two you are arguably pushed into a post-scarcity existence probably a little bit more limited than the stall track fast replicator approach but you’re basically they are and I would say most Western countries if it wasn’t for that specific energy bottleneck and pollution and so on would probably already qualifies post-scarcity

Issac: Interesting I think we are definitely moving towards that but to become an intergalactic or interplanetary species is it possible with government and capitalism with multiple governments

Matt: Can make the system walk with anything you could probably operate a country using an Ouija board if there’s enough wealth fair enough prosperity there and it’s easier to produce it then all that’s required is that the citizens feel comfortable with the system is like it so if it’s one of those ones where they randomly select ten people to rule each here from a hat and they decide all decisions where it’s 60/40 or less split by a coin flip that can walk if people all feel confident in it and I think in the future that you would just see you know you would see a capitalist society or calm you say you’d see both, not you know in the same places of different locations maybe moses capitalist and Venus’s communist maybe you dis asteroid by nico is called mulch Phil and the one next to it is called scourge and you know that’s the thing is this planet right now is from capitalist or communist it’s got everything you know and I think that we’d see more of that I would hope that would see a lot more democracy so very big fan of that but even then maybe not maybe some call these will be classic aristocracy’s or kingdoms maybe some of the theocracies is or autocracies or plutocracies or there I think about a hundred aqua seas and I would be not surprised if they all had at least one or two walking examples in the future

Issac: And potentially new things we haven’t thought about yet I do like I do like reinventing democracy a bit the coin flip and random people thing seem to be better than what we have

Matt: We do the clinic actually that’s like for I came here I finished out of meeting where I got a point as the chairman of a local board of elections and we do have to decide things by coin fabrication if elections closed although some places they do that with Java call if it’s tie you got to have a ran, in fact, oh and we use a coin but there was room for decisions like that and say if you want to make sure you’re not predictable with a system you can always set up a random factor that would aside things when they’re close not time but close you say this election than 1% so in 7b in a recount we have enough to a coin flip you know so doesn’t have to be exactly tied and I could see somebody using a system like that well you know every issue where it’s close we decided randomly because that way people feel like even though they lost by one percent they still had it you know they still represent all the same level people as the others did and that helps to avoid some of them tyranny of the majority issue or tyranny of the minority issue and or systems.

Issac: And the winner-take-all who wouldn’t take all that anyway

Matt: what are what are some common myths in the fields of work that you’re most focused on.

Issac: The biggest one of course is I hesitate to say that it’s a myth but is the idea that everyone’s gonna live on different planets in the future when they live out in the galaxy this we usually am more likely to uh between the building those into what we generally would use a Dyson swarm the other two ones oh that will have fashion might travel and we have to have that to get the colony here to colonize things as it were first night travel I don’t see the codes but my attitude is if we get it great we’ll take advantage of it but if not they are if it’s not there but turns out to be something it’s impossible we still can go ahead and colonize the galaxy if you can colonize other planets and so great if we get it wonderful same toy aliens if we meet aliens out there that’s great I’d love to meet some aliens that presumably not that hostile or we don’t even kill it off

Matt: You don’t remember me but we used to work together.

Issac: I never worked in a funeral home there’s somebody you slick

Matt: Okay. Straight to the point you are a former agent of a top-secret organization and monitors extraterrestrials on earth with men in black we have a situation and we need your help there is a free mental health clinic at the corner of violet and Easter Valley

Issac: But I don’t think that they are going to be out there and I don’t think we’ll find a lot of space anomalies out there to enjoy the Star Trek exploration then and the philosopher take is even though these things from science fiction probably aren’t gonna be there it’s still something we want to do it’s still something that we can do and it’s still something that we should absolutely embrace and go forward within

Matt: Science fiction it’s one of the best ways to have creative ideas can you break down can you break down a Dyson [Inaudible]

Issac: Okay! Well, there’s the Dyson Sphere and there’s the Dyson swarm although that lease feel was originally the swarm itself the Dyson Sphere is usually represented in fiction by basically unchanged and forded planets shell around a star way oh it’s just all land area and you are you know taking advantage of that and the idea there is that Earth only gets about one billionth of the light the Sun gives off most of it goes to waste if you know all the other plants combined you’re still not even like you start even taking up a millionth of the energy the solar system the Sun puts out so you build with a shiny encoded sphere around the Sun to take that light in and that’s the conceptual example and unfortunately a lot of sci-fi writers thought that was the actual example that particular one does not walk for gravity reasons you don’t fall into the Sun which if drowned but we have something called a Dyson swarm which is the original concept and that’s where you just make a big cloud of artificial habitats and power satellites around to stall to take advantage of all of its energy.

Matt: Interesting and would you say what would you say is the most likely habitat for humanity going forward would you say it is the Dyson swarm would you say it’s a live tree what would you go

Issac: In many ways the Dyson swarm should be thought of more like a metropolis or you know the Atlantic seaboard? It’s not really a structure so much as it’s a collection I think the one that people would tend to live in would be the [Inaudible] cylinder possibly not that exact sighs but it think about big can in space and you live on the inside of it and it spins around with artificial lighting inside I’m out official land and you can build those to various sizes depending on how how big you want it and how big you material allows and usually be saying you don’t want to go much bigger than something about the size of Long Island there’s no real need to when you just build another one and starts putting stresses on the materials that would make it very difficult to make sure it was safe but you can’t potentially know those gigantically huge there’s an example called the McKendree cylinder using [Inaudible] that is basically on par with a continent but the onio so again more like a large island and you have tons of these and they were surprising people say well when they all crash into each other but the thing people forget is that you know the value of space we call the habitable zone of the solar system is huge even if you had a billion tons of population or living on all these things trillions of them most then we’ll still be hundreds of kilometers away from each other very very thinly spread out and so there are no real problems with collisions or anything like that.

Matt: And then you would have some type of propulsion units that you could move.

Issac: Absolutely, Yeah! What do you probably have most commonly those strange enough would be I’d likely have lasers on board to help push ships around or vaporize debris but they probably have swarms of like you know 10 or 20 of them where they all connected together with a tether and they’d actually just pull on that tether you could travel around that tell these will be ones a little closer together and use that for travel for high-speed communication as opposed to signalling and you could also yank on that because again you have an ocean of space where you know gravity you could yank on that to move one of the stations if you need to.

Matt: If you yank on it’s hard to stop it from moving.

Issac: Yeah! Exactly.

Matt: That’s one problem professor always puts that you can’t push the lip of a rope.

Issac: But the thing, of course, is the other zone too has been yanked to so the whole structure would have maintained its momentum so there’s to be on the same auto path but yes you would need to counter oh yeah I got it from slabby it’s gone from port hot to it.

Matt: That would be sucky we make incredible technology and then the probability would just bounce off each other they quite story fair to say to say it’s like dropping a can of beer unless it’s too pressurized so what if you had unlimited funding what technologies or what problems would you focus.

Issac: Oh fortunately!! I I would definitely focus on the material science of very strong materials and superconductors along with fusion to me those are the ones that I most want to see attack or because I’d love to see more automation to make it so we had to walk as much but I’m happy with people still having something to do to walk on I would almost be able to build these things this morning they are so the launch systems and the energy systems to me are the most important part

Matt: What would you give fusion in terms of percentage probability that it’s doable?

Issac: Oh wow! It’s definitely doable the Sun does it and of course if people forget this we invented controlled fusion about 60 years ago you can set off and you a bomb inside a very large model reactor and tap that energy. It’s just nobody really wants to build something like that because that’s that’s quite large you know you want to hollow out a hole around ten miles across to fill it with water or seal it off with lead so it can leak out and then detonate nukes it with the turbine on top that’s fusion that does what we want something more compact than that and every time we’ve made steps towards it we’ve not yet we’ve made progress people forget that we’ve made tons of father-son fusion bombs. [Inaudible] with little tiny extra pounds we didn’t know about and we’re getting closer but the horizons moved a little bit for the back on us each time and I say it’s the future or twenty years from now but I’m tested at [Inaudible]about like now I’d say probably 2030 we have something that can do it and maybe 50 to 100 years where we actually see that completely replace our power grid but of course it could turn out that that’s not doable one problem with Fusion is is the sort of thing that is always done best at a long scale and if it turns out that the absolute minimum you can make one of these things is a milder class know some giant taka map that takes the size of a city you might say screw we’ve got we’ve got an entire Sun doing fusion will just use again power satellites for that but we’ll have to wait and see on that I post the in day out to mr. about fusion for the 24th century

Matt: Okay interesting. That said I imagine most people that were involved with fusion 20 years ago probably said it was 20 to 30 years off now.

Issac: Most time actually this is I actually I blame General Atomics on this one we discovered how to make nuclear power plants and how to make you throw bombs all about the same time the original hay bombs it wasn’t that long if we misunderstood innovative activity so we had the h-bomb invented they’re like well we’ve got the h-bomb now fusion should be right around the corner one generation most twenty years where a fusion and that was the mistake there almost nobody said that afterwards we explore like wow this could take a while but every so often some will come out and say it and the media always latched onto a reporter and so we’ve had 60 years now where people always say it’s 20 years away but it wasn’t the scientific community actually saying that that was just something you know what time I said back in the day when that’s made sense you know forgotten do the a bomb and fission power plants working ever so quickly surely if we got the h-bomb we’d have fusion soon  generally speaking since then the consensus science has been this is still a ways off and now allow them all coming out and saying yes this could be 20 years and there’s a lot of them saying that just a couple of people kind of topping out the side of the mouth.

Issac: How would you redesign education for the 21st century um you know personally as a pet project I’m very fond of hands and I’m teaching apprenticeships you have a lot people say well I’ve got life experience and you got book experience they were if you’re doing it properly eat both eat your hands on things and walk on them get experience but you’ll also benefit from that that book centered or learning sort of thing where those books were written by exports of that topic and I would like to see a lot more that I like to start seeing kids as soon as they’re old enough that we feel safe having them you know away from the school you know walking out say the local garage helping out with calls or doubt Hospital running errands candy-striped and whenever I am a very big fan of apprenticeship. I feel like if you spent Tuesday and Thursday we’re gonna have you in the classroom but Monday and Friday you’re gonna be apprenticea your main skill and Wednesday your secondary skill you’re gonna have two of those is that if the means go goes away. I hate it used to got another skill you developed I would like to see that more as direction we take education in terms of the scientific or technological angle I think we want to see a lot more interactive software and video Tydfil minutes ago we see on YouTube develop and I think that ideally we’ll start having systems that are able to tail or themselves to [Inaudible] individual at the time so the computer looks at you and says well Bobby’s not really paying attention to sentence we look at his eyeball with while you rather send and he kind of zoned out so we are going to repeat the sentence again changed around a little bit yeah okay there I click now next sentence you know so that a great loans at their own rate and then we see a lot more endurance in the classroom it’s the individual who’s just in a classroom violence they can keep an eye on on them make sure that run off the playground and I think that we will see a lot more you know active technology that is able to actually tell when a student is loaning or paying attention to very least and can then retail all the information a little bit to show it to them metal you know it knows right was they take the test this person missed that question when they’ve just finished writing down the answer and it can fly yet and say it’s wrong this is you got the wrong answer you’re not waiting a week late forgotten what the question was it says right then you’re wrong and and we forgives them another question that is very similar at explain what they did wrong and see if they catch it on the spot I think in that way we can seriously confess the amount of learning that people do so they are picking up faster and better.

Matt: I would think so and would hope so some of the challenges I would think is I’ve seen studies that show that engagement and learning drops signal frequently. When dealing with recorded content so and absolutely anything that’s not live with live interaction so the best is with the teacher or one-on-one then a class then doing a virtual class but there’s actually a teacher there and then recorded content being far in the way to far and away the worst

Issac: You always kind of chilling these around forced what’s most effective and second what’s most economically effective and I’m sure that a history teacher talking about World War two is much more effective one-on-one than he is for the class were 300 and more affected with the classroom were 20 than these were 300 but is he worth 15 times more during one-on-one for class twenty ten years for group Authority is a video for a million people more effective than one that’s for ten people and the easier gets for us to do customized stuff the metal and of course people don’t like to talk to machines don’t like to look at recordings to some degree but we just gotta have to try to find out at every step what can we actually do economically enviably and West most effect when just costly trying to balance those out and prove them for each area some heylia’s that’s a lot easier you know a lot of people would say well I don’t have a history teacher we say we’re gonna give you a game of phone style history show it’ll be accurate too.  I think a lot of people who enjoy that more than even one-on-one discussion assembly so and those are options we have on the table we spend. I have no idea how many billions dollars on education in the United States and award every event showed it is is quite long. I’m sure there’s also quite a lot more than all by itself all so we do and the option make some really high-quality material out there and the more I think we said my 10,000 poor students in the United States just on average I don’t know how much people spend on Netflix or at the cinema but I know it’s less than that.

Matt: Yeah it’s it’s a bit crazy. We may have to take it out of the hands of the government because they’re very inefficient almost everything they do well now what-what classes. Yeah what classes would you add and what classes would you remove?

Issac: I would love to see a good well mostly I’d like to add I really don’t feel that anybody is getting topics you know I obviously am a big fan of math and science. And I feel we don’t emphasize them as much as we should and I would hate to see those decrease to extend those to other areas but I tend to feel that we need to spend more time in the morning I don’t mean stuffing students into a classroom for eight hours day and says six or knocking out to ten or including summer people get saturated well we have to increasingly ship people understand is that school was not something you do in your kid education is something you do for your entire life and what we need to be giving people is is what they need to be a basic solid healthy citizen and I do think that means reading writing arithmetic I don’t think that really does have to include things like your civics your all to you you don’t have to be understanding out of drum maybe you have to learn how to do one music speak one other language you don’t to be great with them but you should be exposed to that so I am a very big fan of you know your style is old you know to educate the whole man approach of liberal education but we do have to be careful with that because often that comes at the expense of so what we call one of the core areas and nothing scares me more than a student who doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook well he had a high school you know there’s something any no they need to be able to do that basic arithmetic and I do feel though that in many ways we don’t have to extend the amount of my amount of schooling in time we have spent on these guys get this to happen we just need to be more effective with the time that we have and I do feel there was a very strong role for technology in that

Matt: I would definitely agree there I would like to see more of a focus on creative problem-solving I think that one of the most important skills that go across all mediums

Issac: And critical thinking

Matt: It’s God and critical thinking and how to identify fake news and

sometimes you get a bit of water when I’m getting close to 40 you find yourself so say all those things you finally say like back in my day everybody was this tall but I know I think our teachers worked very hard for the most part in a very uphill battle and I think we want to give them everything we can to support them but at the same time we are not getting the job done right now we throw a lot of money at education and it’s not getting us it’s getting us very diminishing returns now that doesn’t mean the answer is still cutting back on that funding but we do need to be used in the most effective manner possible and that’s that is exactly where technology comes in you know I’m not trying to replace the teachers with a robot but you all trying to make sure they have everything they need to get that information the kids heads in the most effective manner possible

Matt: And less information and more solving I think there’s a way to yeah I mean you’re not gonna out in town raising Google

Issac: Now the force and that is nothing you say don’t don’t memorize stuff you get to learn here it’s more important how to search for stuff online a list I’d be out of memorizing it but the first year to teach people before you even teach them critical thinking which is far more pointy and image or forget teaching critical thinking but for sure teach them to love boning they have to learn to love it once you’ve done that you don’t actually have to do anything else there’d be how I do is give them a little bit of guidance and what they should be learning if people get that passion still that’s it’s why the parents are so impossible. I know it’s common to you know get on the pants about not doing their job with education but at the same time you know the best teachers in the world can sometimes magic get a student enthusiastic about knowledge when their parents want but most of the time. If the parents didn’t get that kid with an enthusiasm for knowledge a young age it’s so much to work for that for that student and for those teachers to try to overcome that and it’s usually a feeling a feeling pathway and even when it does walk it is taking time away from other students who already have that and we don’t want to neglect all folks who are enthusiastic about learning just because we’re focusing on once you all gotta be able to do both you know

Matt: Yeah you either have a high average or you have an end a low ceiling or you have a high ceiling and low average

Issac: Yeah and we want to have a very high average and we want to have kids who have you know we have to make sure parents had all the tools they need to be able to educate their kids and and that they themselves appreciate it that’s the most important thing you can do for your kids not having a great child or that helps it’s having a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge and boredom because they will never be a way that goes on yeah

Matt: That’s how it work.s I know I know we’re running close to when we need to start shutting things down where are what are the most important resources for you where do you look – daily weekly basis to stay informed that that continued learning?

Issac: I mean I keep up obviously with the lobby I will give a shout out to Paul Gill store Centauri dreams and one of the best sites keeping up on astrophysics and astronomy which obviously begat my channel along with the Universe. Today facial Cannes a publication very big fan of that for a long time but then I mean you just have to look through the journals sometimes over the good paper will come out I can’t put salt in the forum a paradox by a direct slow and ampersand both came out recently was a great one for that tough and people want to explore the form a pair doubts more. But you know you gotta keep up the articles you got to keep up with [Inaudible] this is the big one can read a lot of papers but the new ideas for the future come from talking to people are you on like my own form, for instance, there are a hundred people discussing his ideas and I get a lot of my good ideas from them they are you’re one people great thing by an export. You’ve only had great thing you’ve been doing it cuz you trained up but you know one head not as good as a million heads all looking at something try to figure out new ideas a million good heads looking at sometimes even some bad heads and I’ve had some great ideas come out of people who can just a truly ridiculous and stupid idea but I say they set something off the major thing.

Matt: That’s that’s how it works there’s convergence of ideas convergence of technology where is the best place for people to find you online Isaac and connect.

Issac: If your Facebook user science and futurism with Isaac Arthur on Facebook and on YouTube it’s just eyes Agathe on YouTube. So, I never rename the channel and then we do have a forum on reddit’s on patreon and on discord so far but I’m fairly often too and typically speaking unfortunate or not a lot of Isaac all those out there if you google Isaac although you’ll find me all main source, of course, is YouTube

Matt: and if you guys enjoyed this episode you definitely need to check it out incredibly high-quality videos very well produced something that any type of creator would be pretty honored to put out thanks for coming on today, Isaac

Issac: Thank you [Inaudible] on

Matt: And the most important thing I forgot a challenge for our listeners what would you like them to do look into or take action on.

Issac: Launch systems get more involved interested in things like SpaceX and a lot of the other companies they’ll get themselves interested in that these days.

Matt: Launch systems are incredibly interesting we can’t go anywhere until we get out somewhere so uh thanks for coming on today Isaac.

Issac: Thank you!

Matt: And, thanks guys hopefully this has been fun. Cheers!