Tweet us, twitter. Com booktv. Or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Good evening, im chief of Community Programs here at the museum, and its my pleasure to welcome you to an evening with david grinspoon. We help promote understanding of the Natural World and our place in it, and we aim to inspire dialogue around the important scientific issues of our time. Tonights program is one of our after hours offerings. These include film screenings, lectures, conversations like tonight and game nights. In our evening lift series, it features leading researchers and thinkers in conversation with the museums director and paleontologist kirk johnson. Many of you have already joined us for these engaging conversation between kirk and speakers or guests like evolutionary biologist e. O. Wilson, journalist ed young, Science Exchange director ann merchant, philanthropist dade rubenstein David Rubenstein and president of the university of marylandbaltimore college. Our final Evening Program of this season will take place later this spring and will feature Florence Williams as she explores the science of awe and the Important Role that nature plays in our everyday or lives. At this point, id like to thank David Rubenstein not only for participating in the series, but for making this series possible. Thanks to his generous gift, were able to host tonights conversation and continue our Public Engagement programming. Before we get started, id like to take a moment to encourage you to complete and turn in your surveys. We learn a lot from your input, and we use the information to develop our programming. So thank you in advance. Also, please, remember to turn off cell phones. And now id like to introduce our featured gift, dr. David grinspoon. Davids an honesttogoodness astrobiologist, an awardwinning science communicator and a prizewinning author. His latest book, earth this human hands, explores the transformative role humans have played in this period and provides solutions for better due wardship of the earth. Stewardship of the earth. David will start off with a short talk, after which hell be joined on stage by kirk johnson for a short conversation, and then well open the floor to questions from you, the audience. And then well conclude with an opportunity to purchase davids book and have him sign it in the gallery outside the auditorium. So i think youre in for a treat. And now id like to welcome david the stage. Please join me. [applause] thank you so much. Thanks a lot for coming out tonight. Its a thrill to be here at the magnificent smithsonian, and im looking forward to talking with kirk johnson, someone ive known for a couple of decades and whose work ive long admired. So what i want to do now for the next half hour is tell you a little bit about whats in my new book, earth in human hands, why i wrote it, lead you through some of the ideas and then ill stop and well talk and then well hopefully hear what you guys have to say. So why would an astrobiologist write a book about humans on earth . After all, were the people that study the possibility of life elsewhere. Well, i do feel that this perspective, my day job as a planetary scientist, someone who models the evolution of other planets in comparison to earth and thinks about habitability of other environments and how planets gain and lose habitable conditions, i do feel that that gives me a slightly different perspective on earth and even on the human presence on earth that i decided was worth trying to put down in some pages. I want to read you a little bit from the very beginning of the book where i try to address this question of why astrobiology is relevant. First, is this working . Yeah, i want to also tart off with this quotation start off with this quotation from dr. Martin luther king that i just love where dr. King says if we are to have peace on earth which i also take to mean if were to build a sustainable civilization our loyalties must become, hues transcend our must transcend our differences and we must develop a world perspective. I teal that one of the i feel that one of the messages i try to get as cross in this book is that if we really look at ourselves honestly through the lens that science can give us and see where and who and what we are on this planet with the multigenerational and global perspective that Planetary Science naturally leads us to, then that knowledge does lead us towards developing a world perspective. So that is one of the things which if you do read the book, i hope youll take away. Now, why would an astrobiologist write about humans on earth . Going to read you just a little bit from the very intro of earth in human hands. Gazing over the countless fluctuations and transformations in earths multibillion year history, i am struck by the unique strangeness of the present moment. We suddenly find ourselves sort of running a planet, a role we never anticipated or sought. Without knowing how it should be done. Were at the controls, but were not this control. This book is how my view of how we got into this situation and where that leaves us now. We are witnessing and manifesting something unprecedented and completely unpredictable, the advent of selfaware geological change. As an astrobiologist, i study the possible evolutionary relationships between life and the planets that hay host it. I see that may host it. I see the anthropocene as a tricky new step between the earth and the biosphere that has been going on for tour billion years. There are those who object to this name as being too selfaggrandizing and serving a destructive, humancentered viewpoint. But this epoch is well named because it represents a recognizable turn oring point in geological history brought about by one species, an throe. And our growing acknowledgment of this inflexion can be a turning point in our ability to respond to the changes weve set this motion. I believe that more than the extreme and undeniable physical changes to the planet being caused by human influence, it is this daunting selfrecognition that is really fundamentally different and, ultimately, promising about the anthropocene. Many species have changed the planet to the debt criminate or been fit detriment or benefit of others, but there has never been a geological force aware of its own influence. And i have another little snippet here about the planetary perspective. The planet tear perspective allows us to step away from the noise of the immediate present, to see ourselves from a distance in time lapse. When we do, what we see is not just a problem facing our civilization, but an entirely new evolutionary be stage in the development of life. In seeing ourselves as a geological process, we also see the planet entering a phase where cog thinktive processes cognitive processes are becoming a major agent of global change. Earths biosphere gave birth to these thought processes which are now in turn feeding back and reshaping its changing planetary cycles. A planet with brains . Fancy that. Not only brains, but lens with which to manipulate and build tools. We are just beginning to come to grips with this strange new development. Like an infant staring at its hands, we are becoming aware of our powers but have not yet gaped control over them. Gained control over them. The planetary perspective provides us with a kind of outofbody experience, hovering this orbit and watching ourselves sleepwalk through a slow disaster of our own making. Now, can this experience help us to shake ourselves awake . For virtually all of its history, earth has evolved without us, and we have always seen ourselves as autonomous actors on a path of planetary backdrop. But now we are beginning to see that our futures those of humanity and of planet earth are tightly con joined. If human civilization is to persist and thrive, we will need a completely new and different view of our planet and of ourselves in which we acknowledge both our deep dependence and our increasing influence. We need visions of a future in which we have a broader infinite creativity to the task of living on a finite be world where we have embraced our role, become comfortable and proficient as planet shapers and learn to use our technological skills to enhance the survival prospects not just of humanity, but of all life on earth. My name for this vision is terrasapiens or wise earth. A recent scientific breakthrough enriches this story, the excoplanet rev exoplanet revolution. This universe is full of planets orbiting nearly every star. It is close to inconceivable that we could be the only life and only technological intelligence in the universe. An interplanetary perspective on earths current dilemmas incites us to wonder whether parallel dramas may have unfolded on distant worlds. Do other planets also grow invent i brains that end up causing themselves problems . Do other species develop technology and build civilizations that create dangerous instabilities on their planets . How do they cope . Do planetary biospheres become selfaware . The anthropocene leads us to look at another version of intelligence, how we fit into our planet and what kind of future we dare imagine. 100 million years from now what will our time have been . A brief climate spasm that earth shrugged off and largely forgot be, leaving a thin layer infused with bizarre plastic objects . [laughter] or the beginning of a lasting new phase when the biosphere finally woke up and adjusted its grip on the planet. So thats all from the intro. Excuse me, it helps, hopefully, give you the perspective that im advancing, attempting to advance. And then the first part of the book is called listening to the planets. And i trace the, some of the history of this relatively recent ability that earth has to send little bits of itself back out into the universe from whence it all once came and explore. After four and a half billion years of earth evolution, one species evolved this strange ability to start launching little bits of earth stuff circling the planet, observing ourselves canalso visiting the neighbors and also visiting the neighbors and sending signals back. And what have we learned from all that . A lot that can fill books. But what i focus on here is what weve learned about earth from our explorations elsewhere that may be useful in our task to manage ourselves and our relationship with the planet. There are many insights that weve gained into earth, profound, fundamental insights about how our planet works that have only come from leaving and examining other planets, getting other examples, getting some perspective on whats going on here. Its like t. S. Eliot said in that famous poem that i will now slightly mangle about at the end of all our exploring, we return to the place we started and see it as if for the first time. I think t. S. Said it slightly better than that, but you get the idea. [laughter] hey, im an as to biologist, not a poet. [laughter] but there are many, many of these insights. And i have a section in the book where i detail this, but they involve ideas about earths geology and the way the surface relates to the currents moving in the interior and how all that is bound up with climate evolution through these great cycles of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen that unite the atmosphere, the surface and the interior of the planet and the role of the other planets and the rest of the solar system in affecting earths evolution both by impacts the tact that the earth has been hit repeatedly like the famous asteroid that did in the dine stauers 65 million years ago, but many other events as well. And the way in which our climate has been affected by the gravitational twerking from other planets. So many of these connections came out of this, in large view, from interplanetary exploration. But one of the most profound insights has to do with the role of life on earth. By comparing earth to our, apparently, lifeless neighbors venus and mars weve gained an appreciation of the deep and profound extent to which earth has been transformed by life. Early on in its history each of these three planets went through a kind of catastrophe, a catastrophic change. Venus became an oven, mars became a freezer, and earth came to life. And it was completely transformed. Not in obvious ways, the composition of the atmosphere is strange to other planets because of the influence of life, all the oxygen and methane and other things. But the surface of the planet, the composition of the oceans and even the interior of earth we now believe over the long run is affected and maybe even controlled by life. So in a really deep way, its hard to separate the living and nonliving parts of earth. Andearth is, in a sense, a living world. Earth went down a path, a junction that the other neighboring planets didnt take. Were still trying to figure out why completely, although we have some ideas. But earth went through a branching point early on in its history x. Theres a planet theres a chapter in the book where i discuss this, its called can a planet be alive about the profound role of life in determining the nature of our planet. And in a way thats a bit of a setup for the next part of the book where i talk about human influence. Because i contend that we are, in a sense, at another branching point in planetary history, we could be, that may be as equally profound as the origin of life was in transforming our planet. The origin of to cog thinktive life or cognitive life or life that is influencing the planet through cog thinktive systems cog thinktive systems. So the next part of the book is where i sort of summarize human influence from the earths point of view, if you will are. And this sections called monkey with the world. And i want to read you a little bit from the very beginning. Of this section, monkey with the world. Its called something new. It starts off, of course, with a grateful dead quote. [laughter] who can stop what must arrive are now . Something new is waiting to be born. Have you noticed that something strange is happening to earth . Take a good, long look at this world. A dazzling blue orb festooned with spiraling clouds, spinning through starflecked darkness. Dayside glinting in slowly brightening sun. Winter white pulsing between north is north and south as earth ambles through its orbit. Now imagine you are a very patient alien regarding earth over the eons. If youve been watching carefully for, say, the last several billion years you seen a lot happen. The brown continents drifting around the oceanic globe, coalescing and breaking apart, animated pieces in a mayoring spherical morphing spherical puzzle. The polar caps advancing and retreating as climate rocks between ice age and hothouse. Throughout all these changes, the night side remains a nearly unbroken black, and the day side continents are the stark, dull gray of bare rock. After four billion lonely years, a green fringe first edges over the land, and the night starts to sparkle with occasional forest fires. Still, for the longest time the unlit hemisphere remains as black as the starry space surrounding it. The dark interrupted only by these fleeting fires and by occasional flash of lightning or splash of aurora. Until, very recently, in the last few hundred years just a twitch in the life of the planet, whoa. What is this . Something new. Suddenly, the planet lights up in a peculiar spiederring pattern that spiderring pattern that seems to reflect an organic process but Something Else as well, manager cognitive. Starting in a few isolated River Valleys and coastal areas, glowing points appear abruptly dotting the night, then stitching together and spreading along bright beening and widening webs. Hugging the shores and eventually growing in loose pat perps across the interiors of the lands. On the day side, a mesh of dark lines becomes visible, winding between these night lights, each swiftly surrounded by a grid of novel, angular geometry. Soon, regular movements of small wavegenerating objects start crossing the oceans and bright linear clouds start streaking the skies. At the same time, a host of other accelerating changes are observable in the atmosphere, the land, the oceans and the ice. Finally, just 60 years ago a blink and you missed it interval in this fast forward view. A curious antiaccretion with small bits of earth stuff jumping back into space. Little insectlike constructions of refined metal bristling with sensors, thrusters and radio antennae be started leaping back off the planet, first to the nearest worlds and then to those farther afield, sending pictures and other information home to their inquisitive builders. Signaling the arrival on earth of curiosity and gravitydeifying technology. Yes, after gravitydefying technology [laughter] yes, after billions of years of geology as usual, something new and strange is definitely happening here. What is the meaning of these new changes . And then i tell you. [laughter] i make an attempt to characterize whats happening on earth now from a planet point of view. And one thing we learn when we do that if you study the long history of the earth is that earth has been through a lot of catastrophic changes. This is not the first catastrophe to befall earth, whats happening now, and its even true that we are not the first life form, the first species to radically transform the planet. For instance, these little guys about two and a half billion years ago completely transformed the planet, and, you know, they may not look like planet wreckers, but they are. They, these guys discovered a new Energy Source. And in exploiting that Energy Source widely, they polluted the entire atmosphere with a dangerous gas, and they destroyed the climate, led to mass extinction. They look innocent enough, dont they . But what they discovered was solar energy. They perfected photosynthesis and learned how to use solar energy to break apart Carbon Dioxide in water, spit out the oxygen, make organic stuff, and in the process they polluted the planet with this dangerous stuff, o2. Now, of course, we love oxygen. I know i do. [laughter] good stuff, good stuff. [laughter] but thats because weve evolved to power ourselves with these intensely powerful exo thermic energyreleasing reactions that happen when organic molecules meet oxygen. When oxygen first appeared, organic life was defenseless against those reactions until we involved respiration. Youve got a power plant in every cellular body that uses those reactions. Thats how we live. But when it first appeared, not only was it poisonous, but it crashed the climate probably. We think there was a methane greenhouse keeping the planet warm, and the oxygen destroyed that and led to probably the greatest global glacier its the planet has ever known where the planet became completely frozen over. So these guys did a lot of damage. But when we hear this story, of course, we dont say, oh, those irresponsible bacteria. How could they . What were they thinking . Because bacteria dont think, theyre just bacteria, right . But at the same time, we see ourselves behaving in a way that is perhaps analogous and, of course, those of us that are paying attention feel a great sense of responsibility about this and concern. So what is the difference . This an effort to probe that question a bit, ive looked at all the different kinds of catastrophes that can befall be planets, and ive decided that perhaps they fit into four categories, four kinds of planetary change categorized with respect to the influence of life. So what i call planetary changes of the first kind, these are just the random things that happen when bad things happen to good planets. [laughter] an asteroid, a big burp of absolutely canism, these are catastrophes where life was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all planets in the universe, to some degree, will have this kind of catastrophe. The second category, what i call biological catastrophes, i already gave you the example of the bacteria. This is when some species or group of species is so successful at doing what they do, multiplying and living, that they change the Global Environment in such a way that leads to disaster for other species. There are many examples of in this earths history. In the eithers history. What i call planetary changes of the third kind, this is where the cognitive processes start to come into it. This is inadvertent catastrophe. This is, in a sense, what were finding ourselves dealing, doing to the planet now. We are causing inadvertent catastrophe because this is what happens when you have influence that extends beyond your awarenesses. I symbolize this with traffic because if you look at this, here you have a species thats doing a great job of solving local survival problems but is not aware of the Global Effect be of those local solutions. These people are just trying to drive home from work. And each car is driven by a person with agency. They can steer around obstacles, they can hit the brake, it works really well. But then you can ask who is driving the Global Transportation system, the whole system, and the answer is kind of, nobody. Were participating, but we dont necessarily have a sense of agency. This is what i call the an anthrpocene dilemma. Like a child that could do themselves or other creatures harm simply by not being aware of what the extent of their influence and smashing into things. Now, an example, an obvious example of inadvertent catastrophe is the one that weve heard a lot about, the fact that we are jacking up the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere with our internal combustion and other means of burning fossil fuels x this is a great and this is a great animation showing where co2 comes from and where its going. And youve heard a lot about this, the Keeling Curve on the left, the rise of co2 over the decades rising about 30 over my lifetime, not a minor change. And all the things that have happening as a result of that, the alarming decrease in the arctic sea ice. Im not going to dwell on that now because you know about this, although its something we can talk about more. Another example of inadvertent change is the to the ozone hole which we discovered in the 70s. Largely at first, at least in part, because we were exploring the planet venus, and we noticed there was some weird interaction happening with chlorine and oxygen compounds, and some smart scientists said wait a minute, i wonder the if that could uhoh. [laughter] and realized that these cfcs that we thought were safe and nontoxic, we werent clever enough to realize when they diffuse up into the stratosphere, they do Something Else. On the Global Effectwere having , not that its going to be this easy in every case. In fact there are reasons why there are other problems harder than this but it shows i think it demonstrates something important. There is another way that this kind of problem can be responded to by humanity. Other possible examples of intentional change, in the short run the main problem is our need to deal with transforming our Energy Systems in such a way that they do not destroy the Natural Systems we depend upon. This is a transition that is underway. Its alarmingly and frustratingly slow like right now, we can get back to that but we are clearly moving in that direction. And we surely will be at some point, thats inevitable, its a question of how fast can we do it and how much damage do we do in the delay but if we look on a longer timescale, and i feel like one of the points i make in this book is that were obligated to look on a longer timescale because now that we find ourselves at the geological force, you have to consider ourselves on a range of timescales and think about what kind of world where we are leaving for our descendents and have a longterm plan, a longterm vision. If were going to think on long timescales, once we get over our planet vandalism, then what . Then what are our responsibilities on the world . There are longerterm threats we can see coming and if we can see them coming and have a chance and the ability to over them, i feel it becomes our responsibility to do so so im talking about things like asteroid impacts, the one that got the dinosaurs will not be the last one and even ice ages in the long run. We know that our solar system is full of lots of stuff. This is data showing earth crossing asteroids. Each one of these is a known object that can impact the earth. This is vastly set up so dont lose sleep over this. I could tell you other things that are more appropriate for you to lose sleep over although you probably dont need my help right now but in the long run, this will get us but it doesnt have to. Unlike the dinosaurs, we have a space program. We know how to deal with this problem. Theres also the fact that over long runs, climate is not benign. Quote, socalled natural climate. We have this illusion everything will be fine if we leave the earth alone and if climate left to itself will be a paradise forever. Thats an on illusion because we come along and unusual time in our history of warm and stable climate in about the last 10,000 years when weve been building civilizations. That will not last. And we dont want to try to live through another ice age. Our civilization would not survive. A lot of other species would not survive. This is not a problem in the next 10,000 years, maybe 50,000. Its nothing to worry about except for i think we do have to worry about what is the role we envision for ourselves on the planet. Its not enough to think of the things we want to avoid in the short term. Can we picture ourselves cutting some kind of longerterm, more constructive role in the planet and thats where we have to think about this kind of thing. Now, going into the farther future, considerations and i want to wrap up here because i want to get into the conversation phase but the last part of the book i talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and i do that because its a way of thinking about our far future. If you look at the literature on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence its all about the longevity of civilizations. It turns out that the crucial unknown factor in the equations of how many species there might be out there to talk to has to do with how long technological civilizations can last and people have been thinking about this since the late 1950s , actually but theres an interesting convergence where i think were realizing that the central problem, the central conundrum that confronts us facing our future is the same as the central question of as eti, namely is it possible for a civilization to devise a longterm sustainable relationship with the planetary biosphere . When we think about the geological timescale and you see pictures like this, we think about the path. Its interesting to think about the future as well where appropriately theres lots of . On this version because like, like jim morrison once said the future is uncertain but people tend to think of the answer but seem as the new ecopy. Epoque come and go. They last 10 million years or so, there are fluctuations in earth history which are often accompanied by mass extinction. Theres only been, if you go to the left there have only been for eons. Eons are major transition and planetary history so there was the etienne back when everything was hellacious, it was impacting and nothing could live, you wouldnt will have wanted to live. The archean which is marked by the origin of life, this boundary more or less and then the protozoan which is when microbes took over the planet, when that oxygen catastrophe happened and chemically took over the planet and finally theres the fence result is where we live now which is when life became complex. And were still in the fence result but i what i wonder is it this transition is happening now with cognitive life becoming part of the workings of the planet potentially and beyond the boundary. Is it a significant not just a fluctuation but a transition in the way life relates to the planet which is what all these other boundaries were. In order for it to be an a on it would have to last a long time. We wont know for millions of years whether it turned out that way but it gives us a way to think about whats happening now which is that we as cognitive living creatures are in a fundamentally different kind of relationship with the planet and thats an aspirational term, it means a time of wisdom so we will it will only be and jan if it lasts and it becomes a sustainable thing and therefore it can only be an eon if it is the iliopsoas so those are some thoughts. I want to end on, i want to read you one last passage from the very end of the book. The last chapter i talk about the human relationship with climate. The longterm human relationship with climate which and i draw up on some, the work of one of the scientists here at the museum named rick potts whos done some very interesting work on Human History and you learn about this in the whole of human origins but one thing we learned is that Human History is indeterminate by climate for a long time and theres something encouraging about this because theres a way of interpreting this that we evolved as Climate Change survival machines and we continually reinvented ourselves in the face of existential threats that have often come about through Climate Change and in large our ability to cooperate and invent our way out of situations. One way of looking at where we are now is we need to do that one more time and and large our circle to become global in our inventiveness and our social prowess to find a new way to be in relation to the world so in this chapter i talk about testing is a pessimism and optimism, the power of negative thinking. And i warned against the sort of toxic state of the doomsday scenario that can become so widespread in our assumptions about the future that they can become dangerous selffulfilling prophecies and i break down and talk about constructive pessimism versus what i see as destructive or toxic penalties submit and the very end of the book which i want to review a passage from now, i talk about a taxonomy of optimism. I thought this would especially be appropriate because were at the beginning of the earth optimism summit so im going to read you almost the end of the book. Accept or im not going to review the last two paragraphs. Because i want to leave it on a cliffhanger so youll read it. All right. Right now, the subject of the future is right with anxiety. Visions of apocalypse dance in our heads. The topic of the anthropocene is associated with doom and gloom, is the earth ruined mentality. This is understandable but its not the whole story. Lets not dwell on these processes to the point where they do become selffulfilling. I propose that on the contrary, the two anthropocene is something that should be welcomed. So is yet only in its infancy, it can be glimpsed. Dont fear it. Learn to shake it it is the awareness of ourselves , this geological change agent that once propagated and integrated will provide us with the capacity to avoid doom and take our future into our own hands. Understandably we are uncomfortable with our role as reluctant planetary engineers. Discomfort sometimes manifests as self loathing and denial. But this is our task and we cant afford to wallow. Its time to human off. We have to stand in and face it, get up on our big bipedal frames and look in the mirror. Wake up to find out that we are the eyes of the world. Earlier in this chapter i describe flavors of pessimism , there are flavors of optimism too. Theres cosmic optimism sending from a belief that the universe in its vastness spins toward life and intelligence and that what happens here doesnt matter anyway because where we come from, theres datadriven and historically based optimism which focuses on positive indicators of which there are many. Poverty, malnutrition and infant mortality are in retreat globally. Levels of education are on the rise. Medication continues to become cheaper and easier. Population is laudably heading toward stability. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and will continue to do so. These are all trends toward human freedom and environmental sustainability. Theres pragmatic optimism. We really dont know what is going to happen so why not spread hope and encourage engagement. Exponential technological innovation is transforming our world in surprising and accelerating ways. Possibilities that until recently seemed magical are now imminent. Rendering the future frightening and exhilarating but above all, unpredictable. Where there is uncertainty, there is also hope and choice. And room for faith in ourselves. I believe were just Getting Started on this planet. Nobody knows the odds of our being able to navigate the evolutionary obstacles before us but there is a real hope and it is this. That our evolving technological capacities can allow us to maximize our innate social prowess. Equipping us to meet the novel threats you have exponentially created and to become something new in the process. We have done this before. And thats it, thank you. [applause] nicely done. Which side would you like . Will go this site. Thats my water. Hello everyone. This is a great book, i really recommend that you buy it and read it. Ive really enjoyed it. I didnt get to the final paragraph before i got here but i am taking these little notes as im reading this book is full of these really cool phrases that are a real fun twist and its clear that he had ample time to write this book and i know this because i hired david in my previous job as that museum, the first curator of astrobiology. And the collection was very small. The gastro biologists study of life outside of earth which is yet to be discovered so. Were working on it. He was a top curator because he had no collection so he was free to roam near the end of my tenure there came to me and said ive got this job as the astral biologist of the library of congress and im moving to washington dc and i said thats pretty cool, off you go. And two months later i followed him here to this job so its been fun to watch. And this book as our time has moved forward and bought what i find so compelling about the book is that it takes all of this global angst we are struggling with and places it in spatial and temporal context which is very useful. On way to take the problem is to stand back and look at it from different angles and he spreads out the timescale so its impossibly long and one of the things i love is that he puts us in the middle of time, not the end of time. As a people we have a tendency to put ourselves into this timeframe like next tuesday or Something Like that. And he says he does a good job of stretching time out and realize that no, time is going to keep going on, were just on a journey on this planet and then spatially, it parses in our neighborhood in the solar system where there are multiple experiments of what it means to be a planet and the different neighboring planets which have these different climate histories and his work as an astrophysicist comparative plant ecologist of the last to look at the climate history of venus, the climate history of mars. And it kind of diffuses the discussion about Climate Change when youre talking about Climate Change on mars or venus or other planets so its fascinating, one thing he says, it took one part in the book that struck me and when i think about these things, he said the majority of kids born today will never see the milky way. Which to me is like a really sad statement and it has to do with our urbanization but talk a little bit about how the way we live is changing the way we think about our planet. Yeah, that struck mewhen i heard that. That statement and i havent actually sort of check the math but it makes sense because we are increasingly urbanized. That trend is accelerating and of course the right solution is a problem. Although its interesting there, people are fighting back and trying to deal with this solution and i fantasize that part of this longterm vision of what it might mean to be a healthy civilization might involve leaving parts of the earth on urbanized like the williams concept and maybe that will always be true. It is, its a little strange to think that the stars have been such a huge huge part of Human Experience and its strange to think of kids growing up and never seeing the milky way but i guess thats just emblematic of the fact that we are really moving on a different planet then really any generation of human beings and its an open question whether we are very well equipped for it but one thing ive learned from ricks work and others is how incredibly reinvented the human species is and that gives me a lot of hope that when i say weve done this before, there are some amazing moments in Human History where we all got wiped out. Theres this bottleneck of 190,000 years ago we might be down to 1000 people or less and it seems as though we survived that by finding completely new ways to get food and build things and be social so maybe we need to do that again. Were moving quick, thats for sure. Being a layperson and trying to convince people that nature is wonderful and exciting while sitting inside a building in a big city is , thats a dilemma. Youre one of very few astrophysicists whove ever worked in a museum and does it inform your thinking at all . It did. I love the interdisciplinary nature of it and i love the challenge of being an astral biologist in a museum, youre right, i come in and people are like wheres your collection, half. I have some fun job answers to that, one was its in the basement but its classified and the other is, i got a cabinet of goofy alien toys but in reality i also realize that in a certain sense, all the collections are astrobiology collections in that astrobiology is an interdisciplinary field and what is that the study of it, its been called a scientific subject but thats a valid accusation but you can also say our subject matter is the history of life on earth as well as the environments outsourced so then all the geology collections and even in a sense all the biology and paleontology collections become relevant to the story were trying to teach together about evolution and being in a museum was a great experience in that sense because i learned so much from the fellow curators and all the different fields and plus the opportunity to interact with so many different kinds of audiences. Its a wonderful experience as a scientist, i recommend it. Youre welcome back anytime. You talk about the twisted gift of Global Warming. Yes. So one of the themes in this book is that our task is to recognize that we are planet changers in the way that weve reached that point where we dont have an option do not be planet changers i dont think. There are possible futures, one can devise where drastically we reduce our numbers and go back to some very nonintrusive agrarian societies but if you want to say okay, lets reduce human population to a few million, where are you going to start . Thats not realistic. Were going to be a species of billions of people for some time so therefore were going to be planet changers because we need to feed ourselves so were going to have to manage this planet. The Global Warming is the first lesson in that. Its the first thing thats happening that is making us aware of what is going to be our role but it wont be the last, i guess thats my point so that the twisted gift of Global Warming is that its waking us up to the reality of ourselves as a planetary force and you know, like a lot of things that are happening historically now that i wouldnt wish upon us, theres a Silver Lining of awakening and i think that arguably in the long run when we look back and we solve this problem which i think we will, we will see well, that was the time when we woke up to our planetary natures you looks like you punched just a little bit. Its a growing experience. I have this feeling and am curious, were basically the same age and when we were born there were 3 billion people, theres 7. 5 billion now andthe next 33 years lc another 2 and a half billion join us. We are in this moment. I want to know what kind of an optimist youare, using your own taxonomy. Well, in my taxonomy i guess i would say all of the above a little bit. I have some of the cosmic optimism where i actually find comfort in the knowledge that i think whats happening here is not completely unique and i dont want to get all mystical on you but i feel that the universe has a tendency to create life and intelligence and that there are wise civilizations out there and it would be nice if we could sort of join that party. Thats where, my other sort of pragmatic optimism comes in, i think i do believe that because there is this huge range of uncertainty, that those who process certain doom are wrong, theyre overconfident in their knowledge and therefore is healthy and valuable to promote positive visions and i imagine all these positive indicators, there are reasons to think that if we can get over a few gnarly homes where , that we are confronting now that the longterm trends are good. I think that hundred years from now will be completely off of fossil fuels. Whaling, we did thata little too long and wish we had not done as much but we stopped and theres no some whales. So it would be damaged. And our population, you mentioned population, it is going to stabilize. And itll start to come down so we are going to get to this other world where we have a Better Energy system and a stable population. I think thats inevitable, its a question of how much damage we do along the way and im concerned about the 21st century but my optimism partly comes from my longterm timeframe and my belief i would say even knowledge that there will be a 22nd and 23rd century and we will solve some of these problems. I want to talk about the fact that kids born today will see the 21st century and there will be 21st century citizens and its stabilizing the population and fixing the energy thing and youre pretty much on to the races area. But. Its a minor problem. You know, in the cosmic scheme of things, which again is why i like the book, you can look at it like, you can think of it as this overwhelming and difficult to solve problems or not. Or you can electrocute about enduser brains we have to move forward. Im curious as a side question, what do you think the chances are that we discover some signature of extraterrestrial life in the next five years. . Well, five years is a pretty short timescale to predict. Seven. Okay. Now youre talking. What ill say, im going to wriggle out a little bit but not completely. What ill say is that this is the propitious time for this search because our knowledge is expanding rapidly in certain ways so if it is just a matter of searching a little bit more and a little bit better, there are several environments that are going to become known to us soon or one thing , the most important point is that because of this xo planet revolution, we discovered as i mentioned that the sky is full of planets, we didnt know that when you and i were kids. We do know it but we still dont know anything about what those plans are like but we are developing the tools so were going to start to be able to say that once got an oxygen atmosphere and methane, thats weird. Were going to look for biased signatures and thats right around the corner. I would say next five years but in the next 20 years and we have these missions in places in our solar system where we still have to check closely enough. Your robot, the ocean, there could be like there so iyears , we have to get lucky. Within our lifetime, assuming we stay healthy and oxygen and all that. The red wine, then i think we have a decent shot. But the first xo planet a few years ago or five years ago. The first ones were in the late 90s but they were weird. Planets allstars and things, it was the Kepler Mission which, about a decade ago we started really saying oh, theres a planet and now we know about thousand. So this whole idea that we can geoengineer our way out, i like this thing about the frn and the cdr. You about those . Geoinherent is a term that makes a lot of us go, shutter. As it should. Its a daunting concept the idea that we think we know enough to fix the planet by engineering a solution. But i have a somewhat different take, while i talk about these, so what kurt just mentioned, fellow radiation management is the idea that we would fix Climate Change by courting some stuff intothe stratosphere , the silver oxide particles. And simulating what happens after evil can a corruption where the climate does cool down and youve got to stop the stratosphere and then theres this Carbon Capture idea that you could do Something Like throw a lot of iron into the ocean and cause algae bloom and suck the co2 out of the atmosphere. These things work on paper but in my view, its dangerous for us to take her to that extent when we dont understand the system well enough. The system is really complex and were still at a point where theres about , theres a lot of unknown unknowns and you know, so neither of those would work to the extent that we can say well we dont have to worry about our co2 emissions. We dont know of any x that is safe. So that we cant get out of that problem of having to change our Energy Supply but my different take on geoengineering is that in the long run i see it as our obligation to learn how to engineer this planet. To transition to being intentional kinds of planetary changes, weve done it a little bit, i mentioned the ozone. As a form of geoengineering to correct the problem we introduced but even i would say when we plant trees to try to help co2, thats very benign but its geoengineering in the sense that its a conscious intervention in the planet. So to me its a spectrum from planning letting a tree to doing something really obviously intrusive life stopping an asteroid thats going to hit which i think would not be a bad thing but to me its all a spectrum of different kinds of ways of thinking of ourselves as consciously intervening in the planet and we dont want to get ahead of ourselves and try something we dont understand the consequences at the same time i think we are obligated to learn more about the planet and how to handle our role on it in the long run, that probably will mean more intrusive geoengineering. I like this concept of getting over this, and the phrase you use, moving spare objects around the solar system, the idea that you could devise ways relatively simply to redirect all those things that are spending allowed. Theres a lot of junk out there and we already think we know ways to change orbits in a relatively benign way. What you dont want to do is if asteroid is heading toward earth even though it makes for a cool or cheesy movie, you dont want to send bruce willis with a new and blow it up because then youve got a radioactive swarm heading toward earth but what you can do, it wouldnt make as exciting a movie but you could have a rocket or a grab contractor, socket with a heavy object but uses gravitational pull to push it a little bit so its going to slightly miss the earth and that is something that i think in time, we would be able to do and the good thing about these asteroids that we probably would buy time, weve seen decades. When i first met dave at a Cocktail Party in denver in 1989 or Something Like that we immediately started chatting because i studied what happened life on earth when the asteroids to kill the dinosaurs struck and he said he asteroid, he was a bullet and that was the target andwe immediately , but given the recent developments in the korean peninsula, im curious about your thoughts of Nuclear Winters well, im scared of Nuclear Winter. I was going to use an excellent if that ill just say im scared and you know, when i mentioned dont lose sleep over asteroids, there are other things you could lose sleep over, i think that Nuclear Winter is something that is not always included in the calculus that decisionmakers think when they think about whether, these things are not weapons. They are suicide machines and its the case that if you explode a few of them anywhere in the world, enough of them and it doesnt take much, smallscale exchange, you would cause a drastic Climate Change around the planet. The knowledge of this came out and did something to talk about in the book, came out of studying the planet mars. Scientistsworked out a theory of Nuclear Winter , where studying dust storms on mars and they said this is weird, when you fill up the whole planets atmosphere with particles, this thing happens to climate, is thereanything that could make that happen earth . They looked at the impact , the same scientist model the dust cloud of an asteroid and they said what could cause that happen in the future and they started looking at Nuclear Weapons and said oh. Thats what led to the publication of Nuclear Winter. Its aconcern. Ironically it would cool the earth down. It would be a temporary fix to runaway Climate Change but its not recommended. Its a real effect and its one of those possible game changers, what would be the end of our species . Number be the end of our civilization . Possibly even if it was a smallscale explosion because it would, it would do in agriculture. For a few years. I dont know how we would do the math. Its been 72 years since nagasaki so we have people who lived through and experienced that and even the tests that went through the 50s, are fading into memory and its just the horror of those things and its one of those things that does keep you awake and that these unintended consequences of our technology that weve developed but we havent fully extracted ourselves from. I read about these people in hiroshima. Who are working with the survivors and they are individual persontoperson fx where there are people who are taking this role where they will assign himself to an individual who survived that and talk to them and learn everything they know about him as best they can to carry on that memory so its a very haunting description of people trying to keep out alive because its so important. We have the same thing in washington at the holocaust museum, the last survivors are passing, the direct memory passes into the space of museums which are forever places and thats one of the roles of museums is to own time and we own the time and it would be highly remiss of me not to mention this exhibit called the time that we are building, weve been building it for the last seven years and it opens up stairs in the 779 days. On june 8, 2019. At that time is going to pass in a flash, i guarantee you but its a very cool exhibit because its the entire history of life on earth, and formation of the earth and it comes up through and includes the recent ice ages and the evolution of humans and goes into the future. It actually takes you some distance into the anthropocene and you can look back from the future at the full art of life on our planet and see yourself as a human as part of that story. And most prehistoric exhibits actually distance you. Like the mammoth, the dinosaurs, theyre all dead things but in fact, our goal is really to park people in the middle of that story where they fully belong and everything we do is functioning so that 779 days, mark your calendar. But i think we will be a little party, dont worry. This is the role of museums i think is to help people deal with time because were so fastpaced, were worried about the future in the senseof whats for lunch and not much more than that. But the idea that we would worry about 33 years from now for 70 years from now , that doesnt really click with people and i think thats one of the things. We found tools to make people do b time travelers . Yes, i think its one of our Biggest Challenges is to lose that illusion that all that we need to care about is whats happening right now, when we are alive. And create a sense of being embedded in that timestream and related to our ancestors and our descendents and involved in projects with them. I dont know if i have any magical tools, i think storytelling is really important and i mean, the reality of what weve learned about our existence connects us with this longterm history and therefore by extension with a longterm future so i think just communicating that stuff like our role, i feel my role as a scientist is to communicate what i know, what my colleagues and i learned and how that relates to this project of trying to build a more sustained and healthy presence here. I do think its funny as you said that we often tell the story of time with this is the end. When i came to one of these evening things earlier this year, maybe it was late last year, and it was great talking, such a good speaker in his book, i could say multitudes it so good but he did this thing that ive done before where he walked across the stage and said this whole stage is the history of the earth and he said heres 1 billion and who hears 2 billion and the very end of the stage was now and ive done the exact same thing with students and i thought im going to do that sometime and say heres now in the middle. Because like, the rest of the stages the future and carl sagan as a cosmic calendar where he says the beginning of the universe was january 1, what was happening here and here but now its december 31 and what about tomorrow . I think we have to be careful to implicitly defined time as just happening in the past. Apocalypse is coming. You know, i grew up in a religious family and we had people who, they were like dennis and stuff who knew the end of the world was going to happen sometime in the next three or four years so they were making Financial Decisions based on that. That fatalism is not useful at this time, we need to be optimistic about a long future. To that end, this ismy last question and will move on to the audience and if you want you can ask a question , i would arrange yourself behind one of these microphones. How do you want people to feel after they read your book . I want people to feel hopeful, engaged , i think also entertained. I want them to feel like its a worthwhile experience reading it. Provoked, to think about things in a new way. To me, the hopeful part is important because i feel like were getting tunneled with these messages that can suck hope out of us and thats actually not productive. And maybe not even true. So yes, i would say hopeful, engaged. You want them to do anything . Yes. I want them en masse to transform human consciousness. [laughter] so what you think about the march science. Im excited about it. Is a little puzzling, i was taught that that science is value neutral, that was something iheard when i was a kid. And it will that was great about science is it completely subjective and as you are a scientist, youre not married to or attached to any goal or result, youre just interrogating nature, just the facts and you know, and there was a sort of a, i say science could remove itself or be above the fray but now we find ourselves in a world where number one, science is so relevant to these questions of Climate Change and policy questions and the nature of objective facts and objective truth is under attack. So i think it puts science in strange territory. And so im injury and im kind of site. Im psyched to see you comes and what they do and what the science signs say and i personally want to go out there and make it known that im concerned area there is an attack on science going on. Its a strange thing to experience but i feel like im kind of inspired by the fact that people want to respond to that. So we got some questions, over the microphone. Its on, it doesnt seem to be on. Must it be turned on . Might be a switch. Robbie will look for the switch. There we go beautiful. Thank you for your talk and for the wonderful book, i think you certainly achieve a lot of the goals you just mentioned. Youve also touched on specifically my question which is one of the great facets of your book is it does seem very accessible to all opinions and perhaps political affiliations. Just some thoughts perhaps on how we can actually back to a place where we can agree on things like facts and where we should go from here, particularly policy decisions , climate studies at nasa and things like that. I think how can we find agreement on some of these basic things we need to find agreement on when we had this polarized set of reactions. Its very difficult and its very, verychallenging. Because were so entrenched. And its very easy to just say well, those people are idiots, they dont think when i think and even though they are, no. That doesnt get us very far. Paleontologists. So one way is to try to change the context of the conversation. One thing that ive been thinking about your instance is im going to try to stop using the word climate denial is because i think it actually is an accurate description in a certain way. Of people who they use to call themselves skeptics but we dont like that term either because its like theyre not really being skeptical but the word deny a list, its a pretty intense word because its comparing them implicitly to holocaust deniers and there is a certain truth to that because well, denial of history, denial of science, you cant make up your own history, you cant make up your own science but the problem is if you use that phrase, theres some people that are not going to listen to what you say next because youre really insulting them and i dont believe that everybody who doubts Climate Science is evil or greedy. I think some of them have been consuming other information that the information that i believe is correct. So i would love to, im searching for ways to communicate with other people who dont think what i think, i think its important. One way is to, i had success and we were talking about this earlier talking about other planets because people, people think nasa is cool, even some people that consider themselves in the i dont believe in Climate Change but i like Space Exploration so theres a certain credibility there when i think you know what, these models work, not just for earth but they work for venus and they work for mars and you take it out of the context and approach it in a police way, thats one way to do it. Obviously i dont have the magic bullet here or id be out firing it or getting a better metaphor. The magic seed, idea planting them. But i do think listening is very important and being conscious of the way we see things so that we are not insulting and turning off people from the conversation. Question over here. Thank you for coming to talk to us. Comment and the question. The carl sagans point about the calendar, i didnt take it as fatalistic, i thought of it as a comparison of Human History to the great expanse of history in general of the earth. My question is, as an astro biologist, what do you think about our responsibility for diversity of species . You talked about this being an essential teapot change, and that description in the great extinction thats going on so. Great question, first of all on your comments, i agree with you about the cosmic calendar. Is great, its a great comparison, i didnt mean to disparage that at all. I grew up on that stuff. And you know, he did an Amazing Service by explaining to the masses the new way to think about time by using the cosmic calendar so its wonderful. Its more just like a footnote on my reaction to it that i go thats weird, were at december 31, what does that imply but i love the cosmic calendar so you know and i love carl sagan. The question about species and our responsibility is an interesting one because its clear that the shortterm obligation is to stop the mass extinction that we are threatening. We have not yet caused this mass extinction. There have been five mass extinctions defined by if you look at the history of extinction, it goes up and down but theres five main spikes and we might be causing, one of which was that dinosaur hit. We might be causing the next one if we continue at our projected rate of species destruction so we have to stop that but then thinking again longer term, what are the implications the faster we stop that . Heres something we group. What do we do about extension after that . Lets say we get through this and the transition were talking about is 22nd century, weve changed our energy and stabilized our population. No longer causing a mass extinction but whats the right rate of extinction, if were incontrol, do we say it should be zero . If we do that, were causing a massive change , thats a massive intervention and a fact of life thats been here for billions of years. If we dont say it zero, then who knows . You . Are you in charge of that . I think the long run, once we get over our immediate obligations are sort of clear ethically and in the long run it raises interesting questions about what our role is. Wes thats 22nd century dilemmas. Theres a question over here. I have 1 million questions but ill ask one but im stupidly excited because back in 2500 Lonely Planet and it made me go back to school for science. And theres been questions i wanted to ask you forever. With all, when we started seeing xo science and started seeing these high jupiters and all those things we didnt expect and then we see Traffic Systems and we say wow, thats great. Theres this new hypothesis that their gravitational he lost in other hypotheses that theyre transforming and then theres all the stuff like, we can look at these things with specter scope and say we see these kind of signatures or that chemical signature but you know, if we look back at our past, you wouldnt have seen that signature with science bacteria at the time when before they built up and like, is there some kind of chemical signature that just because we have such a small sample size and such a vast universe and were so narrowly focused on our own biology that were not going to recognize that chemical signature . Great question. Thank you so much for sharing that you read Lonely Planet and it made you want to study science. I love hearing that. Its kind of the type of thing that makes writing these things worth it so thank you. [applause] about your question, yes. Our search for bio signatures, the signature for life is inherently highest in many ways. We dont really know anything about life in the universe, we have one example of a biosphere. We talk about biodiversity, theres cosmic biodiversity, how can you drive solutions from one example . As a selector in the paleontologist, what would you do there . The schematics of life, exactly. So we have to be careful in our assumptions and youre right. When we look for oxygen, and then we imagine yes, if theres a planet just like yours its going to have to oxygen. Its worth mentioning the point you made, that there was a long time, maybe a couple billion years of evolution where earth had a complex biosphere but didnt have oxygen in the atmosphere so our search for bio signatures is based on true guesses. Another way to approach it that i think we will approach it is just more broadly the search for anomalous atmospheric signatures. For things that seem to be out of equilibrium that may not be what were predicting, it may not be oxygen, it may be Something Else life is generating but if theres this suspiciously large amount of gases that dont seem to be lightly produced by any geological process, that doesnt prove life but makes us pay a little more attention to this planet and see what we can observe about it. Cool, thank you. [applause] i have this comment that i hope you can respond to. It seems behind a lot of what you have said tonight is the idea that were all in this together to quote bruce springsteen. Nobody wins unless everybody wins, theres this concept of Team Humanity that we all share. But that idea is actually of recent historical vintage and is far from universal today and its possible that there are people who dont think in terms of Team Humanity but instead think in terms of the survival of team trunk or whatever, pick a name out of a hat. A random one no less. So it seems to me that its not just a question of consciousness area but the idea that were all in it together which i share is a question of convincing. Its not a fact, its ethical but it needs to be, people need to be convinced, carefully taught. Absolutely. Youve identified one of the really tricky problems here. Its not enough to have a solution that you and i could agree is a great solution. You and i and the people in this room might all come up with a plan that really would solve Global Warming and solve some of these other problems. In fact, i think there are such solutions that exist but thats not enough. How are we possibly going to get global buyin when our world is so fragmented and there are especially we are living through this moment thats seemingly of resurgent nationalism, its hard to tell whether thats the last gasp of some old worldview. I being somewhat of a perennial optimist as though it is the last gasp of an old worldview. I see kids growing up with a much more global perspective, not just here but in other countries as well, being more connected, seeing this as global citizens. So that transformation is not going to come overnight. But it also doesnt have to be perfect. It just has to beenough. Im reminded of, theres some documentary i saw about the 60s where they had Abbie Hoffman talking about when they surrounded the pentagon and tried to let the data in and all that and he made the point that when they basically, the Antiwar Movement ultimately one. But he said we were never the majority. We were just very visible and we said how many of you were there really . And he smiled at the camera and he said enough area and i think that its a matter of, it doesnt necessarily mean that we all have to become global altruists as much as i would love that to happen. Its, people have to just connect the dots and you can look at it as a kind of selfishness or enlightened self interest most people dont want to destroy the world that they and their children are going to live in. Once they have those connections, they become clear to them and you can see even now as we see some of the powerful players in the world are starting to realize they need to get in line with a new way of thinking. Im very encouraged by the chinese that they are planting coal plants and funding alternative energy not because they suddenly become global ultras but because you cant breathe in beijing anymore. Reality doesnt have a way of biting you on the behind if you ignore it long enough. And the same thing in this country, there are actually coalitions of corporations and Business People and even coalitions, bipartisan coalitions now of you know, not at the highest levels of our government right now but at other levels, state, local and even some federal of people realizing hey, we need to deal with this, its not going to be good for business if we trash the Global Climate and i think that in an alignment of sort of wider self interest, with the need to not destroy the world we live in, it is something that will come around as these connections between our choices and the Global Environment become more apparent. If we wait long enough they will become apparent the hard way. To ask those of us that are thinking about this, is to try to make it as much as possible the easy way, true foresight, not through tragedy. Humans have a way of learning some i wanted somebody other and we like it as much as possible not my tragedy, is going to be some combination of the two. This is something i think about a lot in the museum where museums are basically curiosity factories that are run both by the creation of new knowledge through discovery and the communication of that knowledge through excitement and beauty. And thats what we do, thats the way people perceive us as a kids place because kids have curiosity, they come here and at the same time in the back rooms there are hundreds of scientists doing amazing things. Last year a scientist described 384 new species and five newlanguages. Its like its happening in this special discovery of new knowledge, the basic uncovering of things wedidnt know which is what science is. Somehow it seems to me that the urgency of the present time is distracting us the joy of discovery, that in discovering itself, that probably the solutions we are looking for and so many amazing discoveries were unexpected in the fruits of those discoveries were useful only in retrospect. And i know that you as a scientist breathe and speak but im curious if it occurs to you more effective ways to describe the value of simple curiosity and the value of simple discovery. As opposed to this lets solve the problem kind of thinking were involved in now . I like, im intrigued by that point you made that we are sort of distracting from the joy of discovery by the sense of urgency. We really do need both. There certainly is urgency in the scientists feel i think rightly obligated to try to be part of the solution and the ways but science also does thrive in environment and with an attitude of curiosity. Learning things for the sake of learning and everything is to apply, we are not necessarily going to be our best science and so thats a tough one. One thing i do like to do is make the connections, show, tell stories about how many curiosity driven projects resulted in and some stories that people dont know, i mentioned the one about the ozone. People were just studying the atmosphere and they wanted to know what the atmosphere was light and there was this puzzle that they said there ought to be , we know its mostly co2, thats been broken up by life so there ought to be a lot of oxygen coming off of that but there is any, where is it . Some other scientists said experiment, i think lori automatically destroys oxygen and this graph and said theres chlorine there, thats whats happening and these other scientists, that was curiosity. The other scientists read the paper and said i wonder if this apply to earths upper atmosphere and they been curious about is a problem, they would take us longer to discover the ozone hole and we wouldve anymore trouble. There are examples like that where we do our best science a lot of times when were just trying to figure stuff out. And trying to solve the puzzle. And somehow we have to have i think its healthy for our society to support science. Just simply driven by wanting to know and not being forced to justify what theyre doing by saying heres this immediate societal benefit, heres what is going to invent and give you this funding. It should be enough to say heres an interesting problem that nobody saw. The last question. I wanted to ask you, to expand slightly, i love your sort of method to approach the nihilists or whatever, in using a different math way and i thought it would be helpful but you started out talking about the comparison with mars and venus and the earth, there was that model, that was a good way to do that. I wonder if you would share that with us and whats the 92nd version . Thats all you got to talk to trump. In 90 seconds. Yes. That would be a hard pitch to make. I think id be fired but no, were given to give you 90 seconds here. I think the fact is, you can, you could ask how do we know it all that our climate models work, theres a small, theyre just computers, what do they have to do with the real world but the fact is we went to venus and we measured the surface temperature. We found it was 900 degrees. These guys did a climate model using the same physics we use to predict on earth first principle they said that if its all co2, its going to be 900 degrees. There are a lot of examples of this. It shows by stretching our ability to model places that we have never been before and had to predict what we would find, it verifies that we know what were doing. That the physics is real, that the modeling is real and off by presenting it that way we can take it out of context where people already have their defenses of because they think theyre being sold a political argument. 43 seconds. [applause] so whats going to happen next is that david is going to sprint off the stage before you even have a chance to jump up and read him and rushed to a table on the hallway where he will be selling and signing books and you should all buy at least four or five copies and give them to friends and family and please keep your eyes open for future events coming up soon. Their fun events and i enjoy doing these events and i appreciate you taking the time to join us and please join me in thanking david grinspoon. [applause]. [inaudible] cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan wascreated as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Next on after words, physician and journalist Elizabeth Rosenthal examines the business side of healthcare in her book in american sickness, how healthcare became big business and how you can take it back. Doctor rosenthal looked at the rising costs for medical