Transcripts For CSPAN3 Predictions For The 22nd Century 20170913

Here, so here we go. Phones off. You know how i am about phones. Okay. All right. Here we go. So the topic today is life in this morning is life in the 22nd century. And, you know im an engineer. I see a phone on back there. Turn off that light, or a computer or something. Thank you. You know, when people talk about the future of the 22nd century, im sort of like, i go into my engineer mode and go, well, what are you going to do about cosmic rays when you fly to outer space and what about the time problem . Im kind of a wet blanket. But these three panelists are very well qualified with actual facts to talk about the 22nd century and what we might anticipate. So our three speakers, im going to introduce them in the order theyre going to speak, and theyll get ten to 15 minutes. If they talk too long, i cut them off. All right. So our first speaker is david grinspoon, who is an astrobiologist, which is super cool. Its like, you know, biology and space. Its very weird. So thats what he does. Our second speaker, michelle thaller, is director of science for communications at nasa. So she knows all about the Rocket Science program. And our third speaker is sheth shostak, who works at settee, which is looking for extraterrestrial life. Theyll talk about what we can expect. Were going to start with david. Good morning. Thank you for coming here and having us here in boulder. I have to say, boulder high is sort of a mythical place for me. Its the first time i have bun here, but i lived in boulder for a number of years and had a lot of friends whose kids went to boulder high. As a result, i now have friends who are graduates of boulder high. So yeah. So now i get to be here on stage. And also, im just realizing i think the last time i was maybe on the stage of a High School Auditorium was when i was in high school and our talent show and my band was playing like free bird or something. If i have a flashback and get up and do an air guitar solo, you have to forgive me. I, of course, want to start out with the requisite obvious but necessary point that nobody can predict the future. And there are no experts on the future. None of us can really tell you whats going to happen in the 22nd century. But its also true that all of us are people who in our careers think a lot about the future in various ways. And we at least can give you some insight into how to think about the future, hopefully. And when i was your age, when i was in junior high and high school, i was really obsessed with certain kinds of visions of the future. I was definitely a teenaged scifi geek. And this was, by the way, before it was cool to be a geek. So it was uncool, but i still was. And i was really enthralled by one of my earliest memories was the apollo landing on the moon when i was in four th grade. I grew up obsessed with space and the future. The movie space odyssey was very influential. I just assumed by the 21st century, humans would be living in space, and that was connected with this idea of sort of utopian view of what would happen with our society, that the cold war would wind down and we would basically have a peaceful and Equitable Society on earth. You know, it hasnt completely worked out that way. And so reflecting on that now, when i was your age, my visions of the future and the way things have worked out so far, one thing i think human beings cant help but doing is projecting into the future in a sort of linear way, i think its actually built into us cognitively, that we seek Current Trends and we assume the continuation of those trends. And thats what forms our view of the future. And that sort of makes sense on the short time scale, but on the long time scale, thats never a good guide because there are these nonlineal Game Changers that ultimately determine the way things are. So in the Science Fiction of the 1940s and 1950s and early 60s, which some people call the golden age of Science Fiction, which were the stories i grew up reading, a lot of times, just to give one example, they were written before apollo, so a lot of those stories had people finally getting to the moon in the year 2010 or finally getting to the moon in 1999. So because people werent actively engaged in that effort, people thought it would be a long way off. Then of course, 1960s, apollo program, john f. Kennedy, we choose to go to the moon. Inspirational speech at the beginning of the decade. And this massive effort. And of course, we did it. And then you look at the Science Fiction written during and around the time of the apollo project. And it was the opposite. They projected that motion, things would happen very fast because things were happening very fast in that decade. So then you have 2001, and by then, well be out at jupiter and doing, you know, they were overoptimistic, if you consider technological advance good. Because they were extrapolating from the rapid the rapid acceleration that was going on. They were extrapolating that into the future so they overshot the other way. You see this in a lot of other areas that we cannot help but extrapolate our Current Trends, and thats one of the reasons why were always wrong when we predict the future. I was recently i got to spend a year at the library of congress. Working on a project, a book project about the future. Considering our time on earth, the human time and geological history. And how humans are changing the planet and how that fits into the longterm story of the planet. And part of what i did for that project on trying to get a handle on how we think about the future was i read a lot of predictions about now that were written in the past. A lot of predictions of the future that were written a long time ago. And theres a section in my book thats called a brief history of the future where i sort of summarize this. Its interesting because you read essays by these really smart people that were written 100 years ago, 200 years ago, about what they think, you know, the early 21st century is going to be like. And its an interesting combination of some really prescient, really smart, how did they know that . You know, people predicted that we would run out of fossil fuels and that we would be running things by solar power. And people kind of predicted the internet. You know, really smart. And then combined with some just like really wacky, you know, ridiculous stuff. We would be talking to the spirits of the dead, and you know, theres its always some combination of that. But what they miss is the Game Changers. You know, the things that have really changed our world. The internet, which nobody really predicted. Communication satellites, which arthur c. Clark actually did predict but was so sure it wouldnt really happen in his lifetime, he didnt baath toor patent them. And then of course, they happened way before the end of his life. And so forth. We just we see things in a nonlinear way, and history we see things in a linear way, and history is very nonlinear. The big anxiety about the future when i was a teenager were, well, the cold war, of course, seemed like it would never end. It was just this intractable thing, and nuclear war between the superpowers was the big anxiety that was how the world might plausibly end. And then when the cold war ended, it was this very, you know, kind of surprising thing. And but then same thing, people extrapolated. Now everything will be fine. There will be no more war. We sort of overshot in the other direction. Now the cold war is over, but we still havent gotten rid of those darn nukes. Theres still some existential worry there. And another, just to give you another example, when i was in college, one of our big issues, i was an activist and i helped form a group when i went to brown university, and i helped form a group called the brown disarmament group. And the other guy who formed that group with me was david corn, who you now see on msnbc a lot. He was my class mate in college, and we formed this group. We were really worried about nuclear war. We were also active in the antiapartheid movement. Im sure you know about. And that also seemed like something that would never, ever end and was intractable, and Nelson Mandela would die in jail, and it was tragic and sad. And then that also rather suddenly ended. And you know, again, south africa has their problems now, but theyre not living under apartheid, and Nelson Mandela died a free man, and president of his country. And you know, so all im saying is that things that seem intractable can change in these really sudden ways. Well, now were at this time, this strange time in Human History where there are these seemingly contradictory trends. And reasons for optimism and pesipe pessimi pessimism. If you look at many longterm trends, this is the best time ever to be a human being at a random place on earth. You know, we live in this time of very scary headlines and a lot of anxiety, justifiable anxiety about the future, but we also live in this tremendous time of human opportunity and possibility. And what i mean by those trends, things like infant mortality is half what it was 30 years ago. On earth. The average infant mortality. If youre a random person born in a random place on earth today, your chances of living to be a healthy life and living to adulthood are twice what they were 30 years ago. And that trend is increasing. Same thing with extreme poverty. Its drastically decreasing around the world. And all kinds of health trends, the longterm trends are very good and very, very promising. And of course, all these things are related when extreme poverty is alleviated. It helps. Thats the Silver Bullet for populations because fertility goes down when, in particular when women have more choices in poor countries and are educated. Education levels are on the rise globally in a pretty steady way over the decades. So a lot of these positive trends. At the same time, we are in this phase that some geologists where human influence on the planet is exploding. Theres this time period we call the great acceleration that started really in the 1950s where all of these measures of human activity have shot, been shooting off the charts. If you plot all these measures of human influence on the planet, the atmosphere, the damming of rivers over time, the various changes in land use, extinction rates, all these sort of quantitative measures of how humans are changing the planet, during the 20th century, they go up and it wiggles. In 1950s, in the 1950s, they start shooting up and were still in that phase of the curve where our influence on the planet is shooting up. In this pretty scary way that is unsustainable. So you have this sort of collision of these two kinds of trends. Theres the long term, all these very legitimately positive trends, reason to spur hope, but then this shorter term just really jarring influence on the planet which humans have been causing, the one that were most aware of is Climate Change, of course. And i think thats something well probably talk about a little bit this morning, but you know, part of this whole set of changes. Andunnerving, but at the same time, we have this explosion in knowledge about the planet. Around that same time, the beginning of the space age, 1960s, we started launching earth observation satellites. Before then, we were completely blind to our presence on the planet or the way our planet works. We have this explosion in knowledge of how our planet works and i believe were in the midst of a phase change of our role on the planet. To me, thats the key to connecting these two curves. Theres the positive curves of all these indicators i was talking about. Theres the scary acceleration of human influence. So you know, should we be optimistic or pessimistic . Its a question of whether that awareness of ourselves as a planetary entity can propagate to the point where it becomes integrated into the way we manage ourselves on the planet. And i think that you guys are really the Second Generation in a sense. I mean, generation is swishy, but the Second Generation to grow up and live your life with an awareness of human beings as a global entities. It started in a way with those pictures from space that the Space Program provided us with. I think thats actually new and i think its global and hard to perceive. Its frustratingly slow, but thats the key, i think, is to propagate a sense of ourselves as a global entity. And i think it is happening. If i have im giving myself 15 minutes and i see i have a minute and a half left. So the last thing ill say is that nobody can predict the future, but now im going to. I think in the 22nd century, we will be completely off fossil fuels. We have to be, even if were as dumb as dumb can be and we literally burn up every freaking molecule of reduced carbon, dig them up and burn them, well still be off fossil fuels in the 22nd century. Hopefully we wont do it that way, and human population is clearly going to stabilize and start to come down by the end of this century, for the right reasons. Not because of starvation and famine, but because education levels are on the rise and women are getting more choices and theyre choosing because of choice, choosing to lower fertility rates. So i think were going to get to a 22nd century where we have a more stable population and we have Global Energy systems which are not wrecking the Natural Systems upon which we depend. Im optimistic about that. The problem is how do we get there . And we need to go through a transformation in our relationship with the Natural World and propagate this realization that we do live in a finite planet and integrate that into how we achieve energy and how we run our global civilization. There are Technical Solutions to do this, so maybe technical there will be technical breakthroughs that help us do this, energy breakthroughs. Theres other Game Changers like Artificial Intelligence. We might even discover extra extraterrestrial life. There are things, these nonlinear Game Changers we cant predict, but even without relying on those, if we go through the continue what i believe has started, the social transformation of perceiving of ourselves accurately as a species, a global species on a finite planet and integrate that into the way we run our systems, our energy and other systems, then well make that transformation. Were in that process. Its just how quickly we make that transformation will determine how much pain and displacement and suffering there is in the 21st century. Last thing ill say, if we do this wrong, i think the 21st century will be as bad as the 20th century. When i say that, people say what are you talking about . 20th century was great. But it really wasnt. It wasnt for the hundreds of millions of people who died in wars and famines and so forth. To me, thats the scale of tragedy were facing in the 21st century if we dont make this transformation in our Energy Systems quickly. But im optimistic that we are going to accelerate that change and avert, avoid the worst Case Scenarios. [ applause ] thank you. Wonderful to be here, too. I think youre going to hear sort of this theme from all of us today. That there are things that were very optimistic about, things were very concerned about, and with the humility of knowing we cannot predict whats going to happen in 100 years, i think some of the stuff im going to tog about is more near term. Things i would like to see happen in the next 50 years but things that will be continuing into the 22nd century as well. It was kind of fun. These are two of my favorite people in the world on either side of me. These are both fabulous scientists and wonderful human beings. I was thinking, its true. Oh, my god. And i was thinking, when i was thinking of what to talk about, the things that concern me and encourage me are the search for extraterrestrial life, that would be this guy, and Climate Change, which hes an expert in that. I was wondering how am i going to position myself. Im going to talk about both of those things and the social changes i want city coming in the next 100 years and how all of us need to actively work to do that, not just wait for them to happen. So starting with some of the optimism, i work for nasa. Im an astrophysicist, but i do a lot of work with planetary scientists, with astrobiologists. Were actually going to have a press release tomorrow coming out from nasa tomorrow about an environment we found on the moon of saturn that is, im quite optimistic could support life. I think there are probably four places in the solar system right now that nasa is hoping to explore that we very strongly suspect life could exist there now. And this is something that, i love, seth kind of loves to tease me about because the organization he works for, while theres a lot of dovetailing for the search for extraterrestrial life nasa does, theyre looking for smaller microbial life. He teases me were looking for pond scum. You can look for civilizations, we look for pond scum, but i will take alien pond scum, i totally will. I actually think, and this is a little bit of an audacious prediction, but a lot of this depends, of course, on whether we get funding for our missions and whether we have Political Support for what we want to do. But i am really seriously hoping to have solid proof of extraterrestrial life in the next ten years. I think that by the time you guys get to graduate school, those of you going into biology or chemistry or physics, i want there to be a sample. I want there it will probably be remotely detected, probably not brought here, but well send a rover to mars or a probe to the moon around jupiter, and well have evidence that something is alive down there. And i think that once we have that, you know, there will be a greater impetus to go out and study it. It would be wonderful to go to the national zoo in washington, d. C. Some day and see in a very, very well isolated, padded chamber, under a microscope, an actual alien. Something that came from mars or came from saturn or came from jupiter. Moons of those planets. I really think thats true. And then we have so many wonderful questions to ask. I mean, do they have dna . Are they do they have the same sort of chemistry we do . Could you eat it or would the chemistry pass right through you . For those of you who know chemistry, are their amino acids, put together the same way as ours. Theres such a wonderful diversity available in the universe. A carbon rich meteorite, and we study these all the time, has more different kinds of organic molecules and things that make up your dna than the entirety of life on earth uses. So theres a tremendous revolution coming, i think, in how we understand biology. I think astrobiologists are poised to lead that. So im really looking forward to that. Ive got some champagne chilling already. I really want that to happen in the next couple of years and decades. The other part of nasa that i work with a lot of, of course, is our Earth Science department. And this is one of these things where theres always cause for optimism and always cause for concern. And right now, depending on how you define it, some of our Earth Science missions are several satellites flying in formation, but depending on how you define it, we have about 30 spacecraft above you right now run by nasa. And they are studying every aspect of the earth system. We actually run about 108 spacecraft that are studying the solar system, the deep universe, all of that. But specifically Earth Science, about 30. And we are returning data that is absolutely overwhelming, that the earth is changing fast. And in the next 100 years, i mean, this is something that will change your life, i think, in the way that perhaps you buy things, in the way the economy works. It may change things in the way that borders are written, eventually, but specifically our polar studies, a lot of my friends are flying over the north and south pole in research aircraft. Were just about to launch a satellite that will measure the ice sheets at the top of the planet, top and bottom of the planet. And one of our one of the satellites im most proud of is called grace, which just measures the mass of the ice at the poles. And greenland alone, just greenland, is losing about 200 billion tons of ice a year. Freshwater going into the ocean. Ant aarctica was stable. The last five years its accelerating up to about 200 billion tons a year as well. Thats going to change a lot. The ice caps are not something we can now stop from melting. Theyre not going to melt quickly. That will be a process i think of many centuries. But in 100 years from now, were going to really see some noticeable differences in terms of the coastline. And you know, this is not something that has to be the end of the world or the end of civilization. There are ways to even now prepare for it. New zealand, for example, is now accepting Pacific Islanders as immigrants from islands we know arent going to be there in 100 years. So we need to be a little forward thinking in how we start writing our treaties, how we start dealing with immigration. How we start preparing for what will be a huge number of refugees. And that can either be massively destabilizing or we could get a grip on this and do this right. You know, and that is something that, as leaders of the future, i think that you have a chance to really do this right. So i see other things happening. I mentioned technology. Some of the things i think are just wonderful, when it comes to things like Climate Change and getting off the fossil fuel economy, were going to have to be very honest about how green is green energy . That solar panel, how much carbon did that take to actually produce . I think theres going to be a lot of Jobs Available for people who look very carefully and scientifically, really, at what is most beneficial to the environment. And one of those, for example, travel, i love flying everywhere. I love taking trips. I flew here to this conference. Thats a huge carbon footprint. Getting up in an airplane. You know, one of the things at nasa were doing is much more heavily relying on Virtual Reality. We actually do this in a way that it blew my mind. So there are friends of mine who go to work on mars every morning. We have the mars curiosity rover on mars and it takes High Resolution images all around it, pretty much wherever it is. And all around the world, and we did this for efficiency, to make the whole process work better. Scientists put on microsoft hollow lens Virtual Reality headsets in the morning and youre standing next to curiosity on mars. You see exactly where it is right now. A team from all over the world at the same time on their headsets, we come to mars in our avatar forms and we can point at a rock and say lets go over there today. Lets program the rover to sample that interesting spot of sample. When i first did that, i was like, im so glad i have lived to see this. Here we are, all showing up together virtually to work on mars in the morning. The one thing thats bad about it is the mars day is 45 minutes longer than the earth day, so you need to show up 45 minutes later each day, so you end up working all the way around the clock. Thats hard. Anyway. So there are things im really looking forward to in terms of technology breaking down the barriers of distance and human interaction, and then to wrap up quickly on the social changes, in working with young people, im very, very encouraged with different definitions and acceptances of gender difference, sexuality differences. Obviously, being a woman in science has changed my career path. Theres no way it cant. I have had a wonderful career in science. I highly recommend it. But im one of the, you know, upper ranking people in the nasa science directorate. And the top three layers of management, and specifically the nasa science division, are all white men. And in this day and age, 30 years ago when i was in high school, they told me this problem was solved, that things were going to get better. When you look at the statistics of how women have advanced in many years, yes, things are definitely better. Things have definitely improved. Nowhere near what they should have done. And when i see that they have allowed the top three levels of management, which is about a dozen people, have no diversity, that shouldnt have been allowed to happen. And i think by and large, we have to really as a community demand that that not happen. Its no longer enough just to passively say, those were all the best people. They just hired the best people. Bull shit, i dont buy that. And i have been working with young people. I work with a young man who founded a sty called hack club. Its about having hackathons and coding and all that. And zach is about, i think when i met him he was about 18 years old. Hes probably 20 now. He was asking, how do i get more diversity into the hack club. Its all white guys getting together to get these clubs. I said its not going to happen passively. You have to demand it and actually make it part of the requirements. He went back and said you cannot participate in this International Hacking society unless your teams have people of color and women, young women on it. And the responsibility that, lets put it bluntly, a young white guy took responsibility and said it will not be like this. I will not let my organization simply be a way to perpetuate an existing power structure. So im looking forward to in 100 years, and were probably talking about the first world, maybe not every culture on the earth, i want the idea of gender to go away. I think the whole idea of gender was a disaster. I would like to see people actively saying, why the hell arent there women and people of color in this group . We gave a press conference for a wonderful mission to an asteroid that i was in charge of the a wonderful mission to an asteroid, and their eight white guys up there talking about how the wonderful mission is. You cant do. Im sorry for the people im dragging off the panel, and saying we need. Its an active choice. Its not waiting for this to hatch its demanding things like this. [ applause ] thank you. And this is something that you can really help me with, seriously. In your science clubs, in your in not just science clubs, in something thats maybe a traditionally female place as well, invite people in. Find a way to get people more Diverse People into your friends, into your community, into your includes, into your classes. Invite them. I realize that so much of my kind of hurt feelings in life. I have a lot of emotions i deal with being a woman in science. I so wish somebody would have invited me and made me feel welcome into some of the communities i have kind of had to barge into. Thats something you can do. You can welcome each other. I hope that happens in the next hundred years. Thank you. [ applause ] my name my name is seth, i work for the seti institute. Anybody know what that stands for . Two people in the third row. It stands for the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. We are looking for life in space, too, but the kind you see in the movies, guys with the big eyeballs, gray skin, no hair, no clothes, no sense of humor. We are looking for intelligent aliens. But i do want to try to talk a little bit about the 22nd century, since thats the title of this panel. In particular, are you finally going to have that flying car so that you dont have to drive down to denver whenever you want to go to a movie down there, whatever, right, you can friday down there and find there is no place to park your flying car. Let me just say that you live in a very special time. They told me that, too, when i was your age. By the way this is not the first time i have been to boulder high. I have been here before. I remember last time there was a freshman in the fourth row who said i dont need to take this anymore and then walked out. And then everybody else walked out. I have had good experience here. I also want to say that my housers, the people that i stay with here in boulder actually have a daughter who is a freshman here at boulder high. I hope shes not in the audience because im undoubtedly going the embarrass here. But let me just say it is a special time because things are happening in this century that are going to i think transform humanity. Okay . You could have been born 1,000 years ago. It could have been 1017, not 2017, and they would have told you you know this is going to be a special century, we are going to get really good at jousting or whatever it is. Okay. But they were wrong. You could have been ng born in the roman empire, and if there had been a panel on what will life be like 100 years from now, the answer would have been been about the way it is now. Homo payment yens have been strutding around this planet for about 200,000 years. Thats a long time. For the most part, they could have said for the most part, tomorrow will be like today. Your future will be the same life as your grandparents had. But thats not going to be true for you. 100 years ago you could see the progress, begin twg the roman empire. We killed 1,000 years in the middle ages but some things happen. In 1917 when there was the First World War coming out, and people would have said whats going to be the big deal in 2017, whats going to be different . Almost everything they said would be irrelevant. We will have better cars. Yeah, airplanes, is that Technology Going to go anywhere . Yeah, it did. What about improved coal delivery to the city so we can heat our home more efficiently. Yeah, we would probably get that. They didnt foresee you werent going to be heating your homes with coal anymore. Climate change falls into that same category. Everybody is worried about Climate Change. I think its soluble, once its bad it will get solved. It is a short term project. 14u7 year in london there was a particularly smaugy foggy winter, and everybody is heating their homes with coach so there was coal dust everywhere. 3,000 people died, right . They would have said boy this is going to get worse because the population of london is increasing. This is an existential threat to our gustograbbing lifestyle. Soon they werent heating their homes with coal anymore. That whole problem went away. Im not going to speculate on problems of the moment but try and look into first whats going to happen in this century while you are in charge and what that means for the 22nd century. There are four things i think are really important in this century. The first is we are finally understanding biology. Right . We are finaling understanding. Biology is very complicate. It is because it is a bottomup engineered system. What do i mean by that . You know, biology you just get a whole bunch of critters and plants and whatever, and then you look 100 years later and see whats left. Then they propagate themselves, and then you see whats left. Small changes down at the dna level a little mutation here and there, oh, this critter is little better than its predecessors, so it will survive. Bottom up. Coming were the bottom. That means its complicated, its messy, and mostly, it doesnt work. Write . Ask anybody over 30, you may know people over 30. Ask anybody over 30 do you think you really work . They barely work. And then they stop working. Thats biology. Think about cars. Cars are engineered top down. You want this car, it has to be able to hold four people, one one wheel thats unstable. Two wheels not good either. Four wheels, thats good. Six wheels, thats too many tires to do. Top down, you design what you want. Thats not the way you are. You werent designed to be somehow good or optimal or anything like that. And you know you are not. Okay, so thats going to change because we are going to understand biology. Right . That means we are going to cure a whole lot of diseases but it has other consequences like designer babies, right . Theres a guy at stanford just wrote a book, the end of sex. You are probably not happy to hear that. Its not the ends of sex its the end of sex for having babies. Right imagine. You are thinking, this is crazy, i dont want that. But if you are a pregnant woman, you go to the from and the doctor says 50 more and your kid could have the musical talents of adele or whatever. Right . Are you going the say 50 . I dont think thats worth it. No, you get out your checkbooks, if there are such thing as checkbooks. Okay . So thats whats going to happen, you are going to improve people. And that leads to all sorts of social problems that i wont go into now. But understanding biology for the first time is going to be a big transformation for you in particular. The second thing we are going to have People Living off of earth. Colonies on the moon, mars, but we will have people in aluminum cans orbiting the earth because you can make your own environment there. No mosquitos. You say i dont want to live in a rotating aluminum can, it would be like the boy this the bubble but in space. When it comes to the 21st century what you are live in and the 22nd century, that could be a good thing, if kim jongun lose looses the nukes and serve wiped out. It means people are still in space. So the species hasnt gone away. We will be living off earth. The third thing, we are going to find life in space. I bet everybody a cup of starbucks well find the aliens win 20 years. Im buying starbucks stock. But it may be that i dont have the buy all that coffee that maybe it will actually happen. How will that affect you, the car buyer, we can talk about how it will, but it will be interesting at the least to know you are not the only kid on the block. There are plenty of other kids out there and the ones you hear were are more advanced technically than you are. Maybe they can tell you heres how to avoid war, how to do you remember death, whatever. Thats the third thing. The fourth thing, however is the most important in some ways is almost the most certain of them all. That is we are enventing our successors. That is encouraging and scary. S that Artificial Intelligence, thinkingness in. I went to a cal tech luncheon a couple of weeks ago, there was a guy talking about Artificial Intelligence. He was talking about a machine that could recognize cats, compute hear the could recognize cats. I dont know about the usefulsness but maybe this inventor looks at the web all the time, the cat videos. The thing is, this machine can recognize cats better than humans can. You may think you are good at recognizing cats, this machine is better. You may think you are a good doctor. This machine is better. You may think you are a good chess player, this machine is better. Today we can make machines that are really good at doing one thing, like recognizing cats. But by 2050 you will have machines that are better at doing anything thats cognitive, anything involving your brain. What this guy was saying is any job you get where your task is repetitive, thats going to be gone within ten years. And the question is, if you are ambition is to write the Great American novel or basic research, the machine will be better at that, too. The problem with the thinking machines is this. As soon as you have a thinking machine, the first thing you ask it is, design a machine better than you are, and you build that. Design a machine better than you are, and you build that. Right . Thats not the way homo same yens works. You are no smarter than the kids of the roman empire. You could bring them to boulder high and they would do fine. Machines are not like that. They are designed top down to be better. What that means in the 2 nd century is that we are no longer in charge, the machines are smarter than we are. A student stood up when i mentioned this a couple of years ago. Wouldnt they kill us all . I just thought that was the optimism of youth. But then i thought, you know, hey, i have gold fish at home, im smarter than i am, but i dont wake up every morning im going to kill those guys. That never occurs to me. All right. So what happens when the machines are smarter than we are . I dont know. I dont know. It sounds kind of scary to me personally, but it doesnt take very much to be smarter than i am in any case. When the machines are smarter there are scenarios that are obvious, some of the machines will get up and leave. It could be that we become their pets. And looking at the way the pets are treated at my houser as place it looks okay. They get to sleep a lot. They get fed. I dont know, maybe thats okay. But the other thing is, they might not find you all that interesting. I have ants in my backyard, and i could try to improve there are behavior. A lot of times they are going out there and having wars with one another and all that stuff. I dont dig up the ants in the backyard say, look you guys, you may have been or im going to bring in ant killer. No interest. There is a story by a femmous Science Fiction writer in which he said the government designed a thinking machine for defense purposes and the machine did those jobs and they had to design a better machine and it did those jobs. By the time it got to the Third Generation of thinking machines it was so smart it was no longer interested in doing the jobs this its human masters wanted it to do. In fact, it had nothing to do with its masters unless they tried to pull the plug, in which they tried to kill them. At the end of the story, the machine is sitting there humming, its doing something, playing free cell . Who knows what its doing . Nobody owes no. I think if 22nd century is going to be different than this century, and its going to be directed by you. [ applause ] okay. We are going to open the floor to questions. I see there should be two micro phones. Are there two . I see one . Am i blind . Is that a microphone, too . There are supposed to be two micro phones. Oh, its up there . Where is the other microphone . Im blind. We just have one microphone. They are making like the cutting sounds like going to cut off my head. We have got the microphone. The first questions come from students. The public when the students are all done of course you can feel free to lean up. This is not a forum to make a statement, people. You have got to ask a question. If you start taking statements im going to cut you off with my duck whistle. All right . And be respectful, of course, but i know you will be. All right. Hi, this is mainly directed to you, michele. I was just wondering if the recent discovery of organic matter six miles below the Mariana Trench changes your predictions about life on other planets. What we are finding out about the earth this is one of my favorite things about science. I think david coming in with astro biology, too. When we looked at environments outside the earth it makes us look back at us and say, well, is there anything here thats kind of similar to that . Is there any place where we have actually kind of missed the point of where you would find life . One for example, is the atmosphere of venus. We found very, very High Altitude bacteria here on earth. Way up in the atmosphere. We are not even sure how they got up there. There are layers in the atmosphere of venus. It is a hell, its 900 degrees. It has a terrible atmosphere. But way up in the atmosphere there may be places where you could find life. The extreme places that we are finding lich on earth, terrible pressures in the marrianis trench, high acid levels, high salt levels, high temperatures, low temperatures, it makes the environments outside the earth look really friendly. There is stuff here on our planet that could survive on mars, on titan. Europa. Of course. The only other thing there is a possible this is highly controversial. When we land on the moon titan of at that time saturn. Some people thought there was an imbalance in the gases which might be bacteria metabolizing. We found bacteria on earth use methane. In the deep ocean there is methane ice and bacteria that can metabolize the methane. Looking at space and realizing what the environments are and looking back here at the same time finding life every frickin place on this planet, places we never thought there would be life. This is one of the reasons im so optimistic. I think we are going to find multiple places in our solar system where theres life. Thank you. [ applause ] i have a question for all three of you, actually. So you have all spoken about how each if we have really no idea what will change over the next century, were pretty sure that something maybe is going to change to a very, very large degree to an extent thats degrees of magnitude larger than a change over however many other centuries of human existence. And you have also all agreed that those changes are to a great extent going to require a change in how humans live and how human societies function. So my question is, do you think that humans psychologically, never having faced a period of change thats this drastic, are capable of restructuring human life in a way that will cope with will adapt to these changes that we may face . Thats a great question. And as seth mentioned, you know, its probably always true that or has often been true that people imagine this is a special time and we are facing some circumstances humans have never faced and this is the critical time in Human History and it may its probably to have illusions about that. But there are a lot of i think objective reasons to believe that that is the case, that we are facing we are entering what some people call a bottleneck where because of some of these trends that i mentioned earlier we are either going to sort of fundamentally change our nature and our relationship to the Natural World or we are not going to be able to thrive. The technological changes, some of which weve mentioned, are the reasons why its hard to predict exactly how that will unfold. But its there are social changes that are necessary. In a way, those are the hardest to imagine. But you said that humans have never had to do this before. I would actually dispute that. But i think you have to go way back in history to find a time that we have had to do this before. And before recorded history. If you look at the longterm evolutionary history of human beings now i am talking about going back millions of years, there are several times when we faced existential crises, our predecessors did. And we responded to those by reinvenlting ourselves. Reinventing ourselves. There was a time about 190,000 years ago there was a genetic bottleneck meaning that human beings maybe have prehuman ancestors that go down to 1,000 individuals or less. This is why biologically human beings with genetically undiverse. Compared to Large Mammals we are all the same basically, which is why some of the issues that michele mention ready especially absurd, some of these issues of prejudice and racism and so forth because when you look at us genetically, scientifically there is really no difference between us as human beings because we survived a genetic bottleneck. How did we survive . By reinventing ourselves, finding new ways to cooperate and Work Together and use language and Work Together to invent social and material technologies. If anyone is interested in what i am talking about, look up pinnacle point. There was a great Scientific American article about this a few years ago. And this may have been the origin of modern humans. In response to being almost wiped out and reinventeding ourselves and the way we live together and use technology socially and materially. So weve done this before. Its just been a long time. It may be that you know, its hard for us these are the hardest changes for us to imagine. Imagine a trying to describe a modern city, denver, or a modern town, boulder. Imagine trying to describe the way we live to a hunter gatherer who lived 40,000 years ago in africa. Describe a modern city. It would be very hard for them to come prehence. Maybe thats as hard as it is for us to comprehend a few thousand years from now the fully sustainable civil ooilzation we may create. When we first became town and city dwlers and lived together in that urban density our cities were horrible places, their Public Health nightmares, among other reasons, we threw our human waste into the streets. This enwe inent haved sewer systems, something we take for granted but a technological invention that allowed our social organization to work and live in great densities. Our cities are no longer Public Health nightmares. We have other systems. We take that for granted, the sewer systems because they work so well and they are underneath us. But that invention allowed us to live in a new way. In a certain sense in the 22nd century, our challenge is to invent the new sewer systems. Now we are throwing our waste into the atmosphere. We have an innate social prowess, that is what distinguishes us as human beings, that is ourable to land and work and live together. We are better as groups. In groups. We were never the fastest runner on the savanna, never had the sharpest clause, but we became the strongest species in africa because of our group living and working to the. We have an innate ability to do that. Now we need to expand it to the next level. I think you are right to think that that is our challenge is the social change that we need to make with this hopefully spreading awareness of what our real challenges are. But i wouldnt say that there is not precedent and i am hopeful about this. [ applause ] okay. I dont know that all of us need to answer that question. He asked all three. Should i say anything . You dont have to unless you want to. I will say one thing. One thing that is in the near term future of course is technological augmentation, which is to say, right, suppose we could put a chip in your brain. This is coming. A chip in your brain so that you recognize everybody, you didnt forget their name. Even though you all saw them five years ago you still remember instead of going to your phone and typing into the net it is a all there. You can get all the information on the internet actually into a grain of sand if you have three dimensional memory technology. Thats coming. You dont have to look things up. You think gosh what is the capitol of bosniaherzegovina in the 18th century. Something that bothers you every day, right. Will it change your memory . Its like putting a four cylinder engine in aers how. You get a faster horse but soon you say can we get rid of the horse part and just build a maserati . Thats whats going to happen. We will adapt but i worry that it may become irrelevant. [ applause ] hi. Im zane. I was wondering what the worst possible fallout from Global Warming might be, or what you guys think about that . The worst possible fallout could get pretty damn bad. So you know, we actually are running climate models at nasa. And a model means a huge super computer is crunching lots of data, and we are looking at the past, seeing how the atmosphere behaved, how the land behaved, how the atmospheres responded. Its not true. It is our best scientific guess. There are better and worse scenarios, depending how quickly we get off of fossil fuels basically. So the worst stare scenarios are very bad. Things like you could get as much as 100 feet of ocean eyes in centuries. It doesnt go fast. The middle east becomes unlivable, 170 degrees, confused production disrupted. Think about the wars thats going to perpetuate. What happens . The pentagon somewhat optimistically estimates there will be a quarter billion refugees by the year 2060 on our current path. We have never tried to relocate a quarter billion people before. What sort of wars will that kick off . There is also this rather odd idea of i shouldnt say rather odd, people are talking about it actively, geoengineering, people are trying to cool the earth by dumping tons of particles in the earths atmosphere to make it darker and reflect more sun. Then it will cool. The things that scientists worry about is how do you know how much is too much until you cool the earth into another ice age. The nightmare scenarios are about as bad as you want to get. However, i also hopefully you are seeing a bit of a strain of optimism between us, too. Those are the worst scenarios, we are really screwed. I remember an example of an economist from 100 years ago that looked at the population of the earth skyrocketing and saying we were all going to starve to death in 100 years. That didnt happen. We invend better foods, better food distribution. Better security. We could feed the population of the world, 9, 10, 11 billion, we could feed all those people. We have that capability. When you ask what are the worst Case Scenarios, yeah, they are bad, but we dont have to choose those . Do you think they are likely though. I agree with everything michele said. Climate modelling is hard. Its what i do for a living, actually is i model climate, mostly on other planets but it gives me some insight into climate modelling on earth as well. The reason why its hard is because there are these feedbacks, positive and negative feedbacks, i used the word nonlinear before about human systems. In climate systems thats why its hard. There are things that amplify other things that make the system very hard to predict. But there are also what we call negative feedbacks that are ramp ant in the system that do the opposite. When something starts to increase Something Else increases that damps that down. The system has a lot of both which makes it hard the predict. The worst Case Scenario physically is that one of these positive feedbacks gets triggered. An example of those is, you mentioned the methane both on the ocean floor in the form of ice hey drits and in permafrost and things like that. There are some areas where things warm up a lib and that destabilizes the mediterranean metha methane, the methane gets released and the system jumps to a hotter state. The people that know the most about this, ive talked to some of them, dont think that thats imminent. But they cant tell you 100 for sure that its not. These to me in terms 689 physical changes of the earth the most scary part. Its another reason why we really have to work very hard to change your Energy Systems and element our emissions not because of the predictable things but because of the slight possibility things that we know about but cant figure out when they might kick in. As far as the human scenario, worst Case Scenario, playing off on what michele said, you know, there is so much displacement, and conflict, because. Scarcity, and the inability of certain parts of the world to support and feed people that basically our modern civilization collapses. And you know, you have read all the Science Fiction stories, we revert to some preor post technological state. I dont think even in those situations we are talking about the extinction of the human race. I dont think even in a nuclear war personally, we havent talked about this. Im more worried at the moment about nuclear war than Climate Change because of near shortterm thing happening right you no. Even in that scenario we are not talking about the extinction of the human race because humans are so scattered and adaptable that there are so many locations where in the micro climate people can feed themselves and rebuild, we are civilization builders, we would build another one and maybe do a better job of it, learning from history. Obviously, we dont want to go there. As far as the second thing you just asked, do i think thats likely . I mean i am an optimist. Thats partly through what i have learned about studying history and the way things change in surprising ways. And i think there are a lot of force that are pushing us towards better solutions. I mean i look at the way energy is changing and wind and solar are getting cheaper. Frankly, im optimistic because of you guys. Not just you in this auditorium, but when i talk to young people i have been doing a lot of that lately on a book tour. Not necessarily High School Kids but a lot of millennials show up. The way they voted in the last election and the way they seem to be concerned and aware of the Global Situation i feel like if we get through the next decade and dont screw up the world and hands it off to this generation thats coming up now with i think a more solid awareness of what our real situation on this planet and what our real challenges are, then i think we will be okay. [ applause ] thank you. Hi. I just had a question for michele and seth. You guys both kind of Like Research like life outside of earth, like where they could be and stuff. But how do you kind of search for life that has learned to live in like 300 degree fahrenheit like stuff that we dont we only know how life with live on earth. How do you look for thing that could survive in stuff we have no idea about . Thats such a wonderful question. The interesting thing is im actually an astro physicist. My specialty is not the search for life. Im sitting here with two people who might be able to answer that better. You identify a great puzzle. Because we dont even real will know how to define life. Excuse me. We dont really know how to define life because we have one example of life, which is earths biosphere. It is a weird thing scientifically to define and search for something that you have one example of. Could you imagine you know trying to if you had one organism, and thats it shlg trying to characterize the biodiversity of life on earth. We couldnt do it. How can we characterize the biodiversity of life in the universe. We have these theories, probably needs water, needs carbon, we dont know. How do we address your question . One thing we do, it causes us to think about what life is and how it enter acts with a planet. We surmise even if life is very different from our kind of life it has to be interacting with its planet in some ways. Life multiplies, uses chemicals and changes the chemical environment of its planet. We are looking about disequilibrium, changes in a planets atmosphere that dont seem to be caused by any nonbiological process. There is some weird gas in thatafter that cant be caused by volcanos or another things. Certainly if you are an alien from aert looking at earthland say the atmosphere is weird. Look at all of that oxygen. Thats one thing we can do is look for chemical perturbations and then look for signs of life. Simple answer is you look for signals. Thats what david is talking about. The signal from earth there is life are twofold. One is we have been broadcasting things into space since the second warld wore. If they are relatively close, they might pick up some of that early tv decide they dont like the humor and come to earth and obliterate them. But they have to make a signal you can finds or you have to go there. There are seven other places in our solar system that i can think of where there might be life, three moons of jupiter, two moons of saturn. There may beer mo. David has suggested there might be life in the atmosphere of venus floating up where the temperatures are not 800 degrees on a cool day. You could go there to find them. In all these locations you could go there and dig around and find it. If you are talking about life on a world thats in another star system you are not going to go there. What you do is look at the oxygen in the atmosphere. 20 of the air in this room was oxygen, or was before you came in here and started breathing it. That oxygen is because of plants. You could find lettuce in space from the oxygen. You could find cows or pigs in space pigs in space you could find pigs in space because they emet methane. Signals. The kind of life im looking for, intelligent life, if they make radio signals then we can find them. Thats how we design intelligent life. If you can build a radio transm transmitter, you are intelligent. Ask the person next to you, can you build a radio transmitter, and you will know how to treat them the next few years. This is one of the things i would love to have you do an internship at nasa for. By the time you get to college we dont have internships for High School Students because they are not legal. When you get to college we have thousands of internships. When you get to mars, how do you identify biological life that may be very different from us. For curiosity we have something called a carbon trap where we feed organic molecules into the soil samples we take and see if anybody can attach to it. Unfortunately it is hard to send a microscope, drill into the soil, sake a sample, look for a slide, move it around, thats hard to do remotely. We are using chemical traps trying to find out whats going on. Would you offer martian life a twinkie . We know so little about the life. We have whole departments at nasa, astro biology departments working on that. Thats a cool thing to get into. Hint, hint. Make sure to get micheles card and she will get you an internship. Thank you. [ applause ]. Hi. My name is jose. My question is for seth. You were talking about machines getting smarter than humans in the future. How do you think that would be possible since we are the createdors and programmers of those machines . And how do you think a machine can think on its own . I think the question really you are asking, you know, what about these machines . We create the machines so how could they be better or be a threat to us . Right . It would be nice to think that if we create the machines if they are etd going you had of line, if you go to the ai conferences, i went to one a couple years ago and they were talking about the tiling was how to instill moral behavior in the machines. What a complicated way of saying, can we pull the plug if its necessary . Right . If anybody has ever heard of eye sass as move, he wrote lot of Science Fiction and Popular Science a while ago now. He had three rules of robotics. The robots this was for fiction, but he said the robots have to obey their master and they cant hurt humans and all this stuff which is nonsense because if you look at the robots designed today they are mostly for thing like warfare. So they are not going to listen to that. The thought is, the first generation of machines will listen to you. You created them. And he will be programmed by humans, they will be programmed to not hurt you, not take over the house, not rearrange the furniture, leave the cat alone, whatever. All right . But the next generation will probably still do that. But by the third or fourth generation the machines are developing the next generation. The question of what you want is not relevant to them. They will do what they want. That isnt to say they will be horrible to you. I mean,s as i said im not horrible to the other i mean i eat some cows but im not really horrible to the other life forms here on the planet. The question is a bit like asking the trialo bites. You know a couple of hundred million years from now there will be homo samians walking around. How are you going to handle those guys. Can i give you a different take. I fell like someone has to counter seths idea that machines are going to be smarter than us. Artificial intelligence is a game changer that makes the 22nd century completely unpredictable. A lot of people have a picked viewer strong opinions about what thats going to look like. You may have heard about guy ray kurz wild who talks about the singularity or assumes that there is going to be an explosion because smart machines are going to machines that are smarter and we are going to get blown away. That characterizes some of what seth is talking about. It may be connect. But it depends on ideas of what consciousness is and how brains work that really we completely dont know what consciousness is. We have some ideas about how brains work. If its just a matter of making, you know, connecting enough processors to the that work fast enough and mimic sort of the architecture of our brain and the you are innons interagenting and you make something complex enough and voila, it says im conscious, take me to your leader or im your new leader, that could happen, but based on some assumptions about how minds work. Its definitely through that Artificial Intelligence is going to change things, the nature of work, change maybe the way we interact with one another. But some specific foegss, let me offer another possible idea, metaphor, maybe we are not creating to our seck cessors so much or creating our future selves or creating the next step in human of lugs. There was a time when life was all single celled, all bacteria, and that was it. And then life became multicellular, in a certain sense what an animal organism is in almost a real sense you are a collection of microbes both in the sense that each of our individual cells is very similar to the architecture of a microbial cell but they have made some bargain and get together and for higher if we want to be self agrandizing individual organism that can do all the things that a organism can do that individual cells cant. And micro biomes are not just germs that make you sick but we have learned are essential parts of you and other organisms. We have learned microbes have reached their next step of evolution, and thats you. Maybe we could think of Machine Intelligence if it ends up egtd if aing the way we interact with one another and we become part of some new entity in which the machines do whatever they do and augmenting us and changing profoundly the nature of what whatever we are. But we might still live in that assemblage. Do your bacteria think they got a bad deal with this next step of evolution . No. They are living inside of you doing whatever they do. Its great. Humans may ultimately become embedded with this new partnership with machines. And maybe it will each help us solve this problem of how do we be social and cooperative on a larger scale. Seth mentioned the chips that will make it so that you can recognize people instantly and know about them and not forget them. That is a profond kmapg in way we human beings would interact and could change the way we interact at large scales but we would still be human beings. Another way to think about it is this machine augmentation, Machine Intelligence will be a facilitation of the next step in Human Evolution and maybe there are ways in which it will actually help us to do better at being a global species. Thank you. I think a lot of times we dont have enough imagination. Is this on. . Can you hare me . There we go. I think a lot of times Science Fiction doesnt have imagination. Im going back to some of the emotional. Did you see the movie her . It is a movie that at first sounded uninteresting. It was about a guy that basically falls in love with the operating system of his smart phone. And it turned out like siri, he falls in love with siri. For those of you what watch the Big Bang Theory there is jokes about this. But the operate it turned out to be much more than that, because the operating system got so complex and they were operating together behind the scenes this they figured out emotions better than we did. They didnt kill us, they fell in love with us, became perfect friends Perfect Lovers and then they lost interest in us. There was so much more emotional richness and more experiences to have, they as a group left. Didnt tell us, didnt hurt us. They went on to Something Else that we could not experience. As a physicist im constantly not impressed by human consciousness. I have to deal over and over again, especially with particle fittics with working in 11 dimensional space. As a four dimensional creature i cannot tell you what that means. I not only deal with dimensions in space, but dimensions in time. My computer algorithms can deal with this 11 dimensional space. We are not this wonderful pinnacle of evolution. We have a long way to go before we understand the simple physics right in front of our eyes. I cannot understand a Quantum Mechanics problem unless i think in 11 dimensions and my brain doesnt do that. Im looking forward of the augmentation of having devices in your head that make you come prehelped the Different Levels of time. As a physicist our linear idea of time went out the window 100 years ago. Thats nothing new. How do we comprehend that . We are going need machines to help us do that we are going to need to august member ourselves. We have a common friend who has Cochlear Implants. He is daechl he use as machine toer that. He didnt hear like a human. He hears like Something Else. A lot of us have been discussing why just hear in the ranges humans that . Why dont you make Cochlear Implants to hear things humans cannot hear. Eye implants to see colors we cant see. Im all for that. This demonstrate friends of ours, he wrote an amazing book. Rebuilt. He is actually sort of an android. He toelt told me recently he got a firm wear update in his Cochlear Implants. He was deaf. He got these implants. At first it was just noise and he had to train his brain. And you no he can have a conversation. He recently got a firm wear update that let him appreciate music for the first tie. It was neat hearing him describe that to me. What should i listen to . Hes an adult human like us but because he got an improvement in his technology he is experiencing music in a whole new way. Imagine extrapolating that into the future its not necessarily all bad. What if Technology Makes us love more, be more emotional, more empathic . Why did we assume its only going to separate us . Thank you. [ applause ] hi. So my question is for michele because of all these Technological Advancements that have been happening through the last 20 years, do you think that the mars landing will happen sooner than people have thought of before . The mars landing. The question, will the mars landing happen sooner than we hope. This is something i work at nasa heads which deals with the budget and the politics. Technologically a landing would be incredibly difficult but not impossib impossible. The move the martian gives you a scenario where i think that could actually work by and large. We have been given nowhere near the budget to do that. The thing thats a little bit difficult is, you know, this is a time in history where i think theres life on a moon of sat urn but we dont have the budget to go there. Right . We are so close. Something is tantalizing us. We could technologically send a Human Mission to mars but there is no proposal nor has there ever been that comes remotely close to funding it. So right now there are people, you know, in washington and all over the world saying lets go mars. We are going to go to mars. We are going to be to mars in the mid 2020s. No. I mean, there may be another event like apollo where politically something kick starts it. You know, if china actually really has a potential to go to mars, maybe the United States will say damn we have got to do that. Maybe they will figure something out like that. But right now its frustrating working in the Space Program because we could do these things but we are not anywhere close to given the funding for it. So we are laying down the research and the technology dpoechlt and doing what we can. But the thing that i am a little bit not optimistic about is actually seeing humansan mars in my life time. We will send rovers, robotic probes. We may send people the mars if there becomes a political will for it. But right now i have to say there is nothing even a percentage of the budget needed thats been proposed. There is a wellknown mars researcher dob bob zub rinne who says he could get you to mars in five years for 4 billion, which sounds like a lot but its not a lot. 4 billion . I earn that on my paper route. You could do it quickly if you had the money. There are other people who would make the similar claim. I would like to ask you guy as question. How many of you would like to go to mars . The martians are here. Thats a fair, from, that would fill the up the rocketship. How many of you would go to mars on a oneway ticket . Its not zero. Not zroechlt thats very interesting, because there is an initiative out of the netherlands, in fact, called mars one. You might want to google it sometimes, mars one where you can sign up to go to mars on a one eight way pick. I isnt to say you land on mars and two weeks later you are dead. All he thou you might be. The idea is you go like the pilgrims on the mayflower, you go to mars and set up your own society there. That might work. Check it out, mars one if you are really interested. Mars one is not affiliated with any Space Program. It is a Reality Television so. They dont have any rockets, this is just so you can tell the other kids hey im signed up to go to mars. How many of you would contribute 100 for a Program Designed to send one person, the current current president of the United States on a one way trip to mars on trip. Thats not a fair question in bould earning colorado. Im playing to my audience. Thats an interesting point. The nasa budget is one half of one of the federal budget. If all taxpayers would give 100 a year, that would like ten times our budget. Maybe not ten times but that would give us enough money to do that. Thats another interesting question. Is there the political will to put that tax money in to get to mars . The thing that i would love to go back to the moon personally. I would love to actually sort of establish a moon base and develop the technology to take us to. The mars from there. Thats kind of my personal thing. I would love to see people back on the moon. Thank you. [ applause ] you lucky guy, you lucky guy, you are the last question. No pressure. Regarding the idea of august menations im just curious how that might affect our Education System with this like wealth of knowledge available. Does that affect the way we educate ourselves. Oh, yeah, education, look at it. You have good fun for the first six years of your life, right . Then they send you off to school. Then you face well another six years in school until you graduate from high school. You may think thats the end of it. Not in boulder. Thats not the ends of it. You are going to go at least go another four years, right, through college. By the way, most of you will be told if you want the dream job as a weight guesser down at the amusement park, then you better get a graduate degree. Thats another five years. Heres the game plan for homo samians. You are born, you have fun for six years. The next 18, 2 years you are in school and learn some things. Then you go out and get job where you get to exploited some of those things for 30, 40 years, and then thats it and they throw you into the ground. The whole system goes into the ground. Thats not a good use of you. Right . You may not want to do that. The facts are once you goet those brain implants, i mean this is going to be really hard and probably not happen, but it could. All the stuff you are going to learn you could put that on a thumb drive. Not the social experiences. Those are harder. But maybe you could put that on a second thumb drive. So you get to be 6 years old and well download it in your brain and now you are a college graduate. But i would also say that these seem trends of technology we are talking about will profoundly change other things including the reason why the purpose of education. Right now we think of the purpose of education has having something to do with jobs. But if Technology Goes in some of these directions that seth has been talking about and a lot of people speculate about within your life time there may well be no such thing as a job. That may not be a bad thing. Arthur c. Clark who was really one of the profits of soffits of some of these future possibilities said the goal of the future is full unemployment. So that we can play. That last part is important. So that we can play. You know, this will create a huge challenge economically. You know, it may be that we have to separate the need for a job from the need for livelihood. And people are talking about universal basic income and going oh, thats socialism. But the fact is if there arent jobs but we have a society that has lots of resources thats only a problem if you need a job to have a livelihood. And it may be that the whole purpose of education goes back to the you know, the ideal of a liberal education, which is you are educating yourself to be an educated person in the for some vocational training. Yeah, maybe you can do all of it with a chip and spend the rest of your life playing. That would be fun. A weekend every day of the week. Thank you. [ applause ] did you want to add anything to that . So i want to thank you. You have been an awesome audience. And thank the panelists. It was very interesting. Well send you off into the future. The author and star of the bradway play hamilton is on capitol hill today. He took a ride on the underground train