00:00:00.000 Welcome to Topcast Chapter 17 Unsustainable from the beginning of Infinity series.
00:00:16.440 This is part four of that particular chapter and we'll be the last.
00:00:20.560 We will get through to the end of the chapter today, possibly a little longer than the
00:00:24.520 previous chapter and next time I'll be back in my studio where I can do the final
00:00:32.480 But for now, for a few parts now, we've been talking about the Easter Islanders, but
00:00:39.320 The culmination, if you like, of their civilization, their primitive civilization, David
00:00:44.520 writes, we do not know what horrors the Easter Island civilization perpetuated in the course
00:00:50.640 of preventing progress, but apparently its fall did not improve anything.
00:00:59.680 The sustained creation of knowledge depends also on the presence of certain kinds of idea,
00:01:05.680 particularly optimism, and a negotiated tradition of criticism.
00:01:10.520 There would have to be social and political institutions that incorporated and protected
00:01:14.520 such traditions, a society in which some degree of dissent and deviation from the norm
00:01:19.560 was tolerated and whose educational practices did not entirely extinguish creativity.
00:01:27.960 Western civilization is the current consequence of achieving it, which is why, as I said,
00:01:33.040 it already has what it takes to avoid an Easter Island disaster.
00:01:36.840 If it really is facing a crisis, it must be some other crisis.
00:01:41.040 If it ever collapses, it will be in some other way, and if it needs to be saved, it
00:01:51.360 At the end of the last chapter, I was riffing on the idea of civilization being this unfathomably
00:01:58.360 complicated system that we know contains in explicit knowledge, certainly our Western
00:02:07.200 civilization contains in explicit knowledge of how to maintain stability while undergoing
00:02:14.480 We don't know all the reasons why this happens, why we are able to maintain peace and
00:02:20.760 relative harmony, relatively good wealth creation, relatively fast knowledge creation.
00:02:27.280 We're able to come up with vaccines and new technologies, relatively quickly, certainly
00:02:31.840 at a rate unprecedented throughout human history, but we don't know all the ways in which
00:02:37.600 And I neglected to refer to David Deutsch's excellent analogy of this way of viewing a civilization
00:02:47.760 with people being on a submarine, and he mentioned this in one of his podcast with Sam
00:02:55.760 He basically said, look, people who want to upend Western civilization, who want to
00:03:02.000 tinker with the long-standing institutions which maintain stability, they don't know what
00:03:09.480 It's basically like they are passengers on an extremely technologically advanced underwater
00:03:16.000 nuclear-powered submarine, but they don't know that they're on a nuclear-powered submarine.
00:03:20.880 Instead, they think they're on a yacht or some other kind of boat, and they want to open
00:03:25.920 up all the hatches in order to get a better view.
00:03:28.760 Okay, so that's the situation that we're kind of in.
00:03:35.600 Passengers on this submarine, passengers on this amazingly sophisticated, complicated piece
00:03:41.640 of societal-level technology, call it a civilization, call it Western civilization.
00:03:47.120 And there are some people who just ignore the fact that it has taken a long time, lots
00:03:53.000 of philosophers, leaders, scientists, people, a culture gradually evolving, gradually trying
00:04:01.800 things out, finding out what doesn't work, and preserving those things that work and enable
00:04:11.080 These traditions, especially these traditions of criticism, are so important and so underappreciated.
00:04:17.280 That many people think that, well, the problems we've got in society are so bad.
00:04:21.000 It's because of the society, and so we need to undo society in order to improve it, have
00:04:26.400 a revolution, burn everything to the ground, start again.
00:04:34.960 We don't know how to maintain stability, progress, moral, ethical, legal, and scientific
00:04:45.760 progress without the kind of institutions that we have slowly and painfully managed to
00:04:53.440 create, managed to evolve over time through difficult trial and error.
00:05:00.440 Because the historical state of things, I wouldn't like to say the natural state of things,
00:05:04.880 the natural state of things are striving to improve things.
00:05:08.400 But historically, the state of humanity has been tribal and the violent, and not making
00:05:14.200 any progress, and everyone being just mired in poverty and disease.
00:05:18.320 And if we did burn everything to the ground, that's what we should expect would come back
00:05:26.200 It would be the kind of thing that David is about to talk about that certain intellectuals
00:05:34.840 It's not going to happen unless people deliberately try to undo the institutions and traditions
00:05:42.560 I've heard some quite prominent and influential intellectuals that I respect on many other
00:05:51.000 matters, dismissing the importance and indeed the centrality of tradition within our culture,
00:05:59.840 Tradition is just so important, the way in which we have done things hitherto.
00:06:04.120 It's not to say that those traditions cannot be improved or should not be improved, but they
00:06:08.360 should be only incrementally improved, slowly improved.
00:06:12.800 Let's take away one part we don't particularly like, replace it with something that we think
00:06:16.760 might be better, but let's be careful about it and be very reasonable in our criticism
00:06:21.080 of whether or not that change has affected an improvement and an objective improvement or
00:06:27.880 Because what we might find is many of these traditions that people might think are silly quirks
00:06:33.080 of just a historical accident might contain within them important in explicit knowledge
00:06:40.120 about how to ensure that everyone can coexist peacefully and continue to make the kind
00:06:46.640 of progress and improvements that we have become accustomed to.
00:06:57.960 The institution of marriage, the traditional institution of marriage.
00:07:03.000 Some people want to undo it or some people want to apply it to an entire spectrum of
00:07:11.720 The tradition of marriage has gradually evolved over time and improved over time slowly.
00:07:18.200 Now, we might think that either doing away with the institution of marriage altogether
00:07:23.320 might improve things or allowing anyone to marry anything might improve things as well.
00:07:30.680 Well, that would undermine what has traditionally been the institution of marriage.
00:07:35.400 I'm not saying the institution of marriage needs to be kept in the same way that it has
00:07:41.360 But if we're going to tinker with something like that, we do it at our peril to some
00:07:46.440 extent and we need to be very careful, carefully calibrate the changes that we make to
00:07:55.120 If we change this particular part of marriage, this way in which marriage works, let's
00:07:59.600 see how it works, let's reflect, let's not keep changing, changing, changing, changing
00:08:03.440 marriage until such time as families and societies, communities begin to fall apart and
00:08:09.800 In retrospect, we look back and go, oh, perhaps we shouldn't have completely undone what
00:08:17.400 This is the sense in which certain kinds of traditions are important to preserve.
00:08:22.160 Even if we think that that institution might have aspects which are prejudiced or discriminatory,
00:08:29.560 sure we don't want to discriminate against people, we might want to change certain institutions,
00:08:34.600 but let's do it slowly via an incremental evolutionary process rather than a completely
00:08:41.440 revolutionary one, one which undoes what for so long the overwhelming majority of people
00:08:52.920 It's not meant to be Brett Hall's opinion on the way in which the institution of marriage
00:09:00.360 needs to be kept in exactly the same way for evermore, merely saying that the institution
00:09:07.400 of marriage has worked in a certain way to a certain extent for a long time in order
00:09:15.440 to enable, for example, families which are important units within communities and then
00:09:22.000 broader civilization to ensure that children are, for example, raised well.
00:09:28.000 It doesn't mean that they can't be raised better, of course children can be raised better,
00:09:32.560 but doing away with certain institutions that have allowed society, hitherto, to raise children
00:09:39.040 well, well as a relative term, should not be toyed with, should not be used as a political
00:09:46.240 football in order to allow different sides who want to either maintain the status quo
00:09:52.000 for evermore or to completely upend and revolutionize things.
00:09:59.120 My only point there is that traditions are important, even if we personally individually
00:10:04.200 or even as a large group sometimes can't see how, even if we can't see how the institution
00:10:10.680 is important, we need to think very carefully about undoing the institution just because
00:10:15.320 we can find single problems with the institution, doesn't mean the entire institution needs
00:10:19.560 to be thrown in the bin, metaphorically speaking.
00:10:22.040 Okay, let's go back to the book and I just want to flag here that we're about to come
00:10:29.280 I think I like to call it the parable of European and it's a wonderful example of
00:10:36.040 all the ways in which people who argue that resources are going to run out ignore the fact
00:10:44.120 that it's not so much about particular resources running out as about knowledge being scarce.
00:10:50.000 And at the same time, ignorance being this infinitely deep will from which people draw their
00:10:55.920 ignorance and then conclude on the basis of their ignorance that therefore disaster is going
00:11:01.320 to come, that disaster is going to strike because they're ignorant of all the ways in
00:11:05.640 which that resource might not run out or might be easily replaced by something else.
00:11:10.200 Okay, so let's go back to the book and here David is about to talk about when he was
00:11:15.080 at high school and so I'll have some remarks about this comparing it to present day high
00:11:20.560 Okay, and David writes, in 1971, while I was still at school, I attended a lecture for high
00:11:26.760 school students entitled Population Resources Environment.
00:11:31.680 It was given by the population scientist Paul Erlich, I do not remember what I was expecting,
00:11:36.920 I don't think I'd ever heard of the environment before, but nothing had prepared me for
00:11:42.040 such a bravara display of raw pessimism, just pausing there and my reflection on that.
00:11:49.480 I guess that David would be absolutely horrified with what goes on in schools now.
00:11:55.720 No doubt he has some knowledge, no doubt people watching this have some knowledge, I have
00:12:00.680 a little bit of inside knowledge. Today, children do not need visiting experts to scare
00:12:08.200 them about how their futures are basically some apocalyptic hellscape.
00:12:13.720 They don't need visiting experts because their teachers do that and not now and again, it's
00:12:20.040 basically daily or weekly, they're getting it from every corner.
00:12:25.520 In geography class, they will talk about all the impacts on population of population,
00:12:32.880 all the impacts on communities of pollution and of all the ways in which resources are
00:12:41.360 In science class, they understand how carbon dioxide is heating up the planet and causing
00:12:48.960 This is a huge part of the curriculum for a rather esoteric part of science.
00:12:54.840 It forms a vast amount, a consumes of vast amount of the science curriculum, it's looked
00:12:59.520 at from all angles and of course, there's the moral aspect there as well in science class.
00:13:07.720 Mathematics class in many places does indeed consist of the rates at which, for example, you
00:13:13.800 might have a study of the rates at which the polar ice caps are melting or the rate at
00:13:18.600 which the temperature is increasing or the rate at which there's deforestation going on.
00:13:24.800 And of course, it's all captured in terms of this is the fault of people, okay?
00:13:29.920 This is the fault of human beings simply existing and that previous generations have caused
00:13:36.480 this damage and it's going to be left to the children to try and fix the damage, but there's
00:13:40.560 little hope of that because we don't talk about the solutions, of course.
00:13:43.880 So it's just an anti-human, anti-technology, certainly anti-energy, anti-so-called waste,
00:13:53.960 So David got this once from a visiting scientist and students today get something similar
00:14:07.600 Now and again, of course, they might have a guest come in to say how it's much worse than
00:14:13.720 Well, I smile and smoke a little bit, but it is quite disgusting and terrible, to be honest.
00:14:20.560 And then putting aside concerns about whether or not schools need to exist in their present
00:14:27.400 form, it would be wonderful if there was just a little optimism somewhere or other.
00:14:35.040 Even the traditional parts of schooling, even if you go to a religious school, you will
00:14:40.120 And of course, we know that religions, like, for example, the Catholic Church are pivoting.
00:14:44.560 That's the modern word, are pivoting towards a pessimistic view of humanity.
00:14:49.560 In an institution, otherwise, otherwise concerned with the sacredness and the uniqueness
00:14:56.840 of human beings are beginning to talk about the evils of human beings.
00:15:04.680 Erlich starkly described to his young audience, the living hell we would be inheriting, half
00:15:10.360 a dozen varieties of resource management catastrophe were just around the corner.
00:15:14.960 And it was already too late to avoid some of them.
00:15:17.480 People would be starving to death by the billion in 10 years, 20 at best raw materials
00:15:23.800 The Vietnam War, then in progress, was a last ditch struggle for the region's tin, rubber
00:15:29.840 Notice how his biographical explanation, politely shrugged off the political disagreements
00:15:36.960 The troubles of the day in American inner cities, rising crime, mental illness, all were
00:15:42.080 a part of the same great catastrophe, just pausing there.
00:15:46.160 Now, first, just notice that least it could easily be drawn from the newspapers today.
00:15:51.680 So this is back in 1971, all the problems with American inner cities, I mean, I never
00:15:58.400 stop hearing about how terrible, terrible things are in Los Angeles, and this pretends
00:16:05.120 And of course, right now, we're supposedly in the midst of a mass extinction of a kind,
00:16:11.880 the Holocene extinction, as it's called, all due to us, we are the murderers.
00:16:17.400 We are genocidal species, level genocidal virus of a kind.
00:16:23.200 We just spread out across the planet, wiping out other species.
00:16:34.080 They do learn about the current great extinction events, and it caused bias.
00:16:42.320 We are just irredeemably evil on this view, back to the book.
00:16:46.440 All were linked by ehrlich to overpopulation, pollution, and the reckless overuse of
00:16:53.200 We had created too many power stations and factories and mines and intensive farms, too
00:16:58.640 much economic growth, far more than the planet could sustain.
00:17:02.760 And worst of all, too many people, the ultimate source of all the other reals, in this
00:17:07.760 respect, ehrlich was following in the footsteps of malthas, making the same era, setting
00:17:12.800 predictions of one process, against prophecies of another.
00:17:17.040 Thus, he calculated that if the United States was to sustain, even its 1971 standard of
00:17:22.440 living, it would have to reduce its population by three quarters to 50 million.
00:17:27.720 Which was, of course, impossible in the time available.
00:17:30.040 The planet as a whole was overpopulated by a factor of seven, he said.
00:17:34.000 And Australia was nearing its maximum sustainable population, and so on, paused their
00:17:39.440 So I have an article inspired by this called Cosmological Economics, which I've kind
00:17:44.160 of turned into a video, which you can find on my channel there, or the Cosmological
00:17:50.280 Economics, which is Google, that typically comes up now under my name.
00:17:56.760 We have this fellow in Australia, the Paul Ehrlich of Australia, if you like, his name
00:18:02.000 is Dick Smith, he runs a chain of electronic stores, and he's otherwise a reasonably good
00:18:06.800 science popularizer, but like everyone else of our age almost, he's a terrible pessimist
00:18:13.800 And he speaks in exactly these kind of terms that Australia is overpopulated.
00:18:17.760 If you've been to Australia, especially if you've flown in over the top of Australia,
00:18:21.840 you will see it is very hard to even spot a community that'll learn the overpopulation.
00:18:28.560 The place is barren, it is barren, it's largely a desert.
00:18:34.720 Although not entirely, even the desert parts have become green almost every year.
00:18:40.920 We have rains out there under desert, we're constantly being told we're in a drought or
00:18:46.400 It simply isn't the case that the earth is overpopulated.
00:18:50.200 These claims of overpopulation are typically relying on the assumption that no new
00:18:58.400 knowledge will be created, and the rate at which we are consuming resources will remain
00:19:04.320 the same as the population increases, it's the same old Malthusian argument that population
00:19:10.200 increases exponentially, resource consumption increases linearly, we're not going to find
00:19:15.360 any new resources, we're not going to solve any new problems, we're just going to run
00:19:20.680 out of the resources we have, we're going to begin to starve, so on, et cetera, et cetera.
00:19:24.320 It's been said for centuries, it is tiresome for optimists, generation after generation after
00:19:33.500 generation to encounter these same people, to win the argument but for no one to ever
00:19:38.680 notice that the argument has been won many times before.
00:19:43.840 This is my pessimist coming out, even though Paul Erlich has gone, even though Dick Smith
00:19:48.560 will go as well, even though Gretelenburg and the people who inspired her or follow her
00:19:55.800 will go, there will be more, there will be more that will come and so the debate never
00:20:02.240 seems to be won, because it's a powerful argument and people have to learn the refutation
00:20:07.680 of the argument as well, and so it is this arms race between the people who argue the
00:20:12.920 resources are going to run out and can point to all these scientific ways in which it
00:20:17.680 leads clear the resources going to run out and the optimists coming along and say we understand
00:20:22.800 that argument, however it's flawed for reasons x, y, z, namely we're going to solve those
00:20:27.160 problems, we're going to create the knowledge, we're going to find new resources, we're
00:20:30.040 going to be able to sustain, more people on the planet, we're going to be able to support
00:20:33.840 more people on the planet at a higher standard living than ever before trying to explain
00:20:40.720 That's the story of history and there's a reason why things get better because we continue
00:20:45.720 to improve our lot because we live in a culture of criticism where we literally do improve
00:20:50.600 things, we do solve our problems, we aren't simply a product of our environment, we shape
00:20:58.680 This is a complicated argument, I realise that it's a subtle argument and so it's seemingly
00:21:04.480 going to be the case that we just have to keep defending this thesis again and again and
00:21:08.800 again and explaining and hopefully at some point we achieve escape velocity and we leave
00:21:14.160 behind the pessimists as a small minority of naysayers.
00:21:18.600 At the moment they're still in the ascendancy, they're still in the majority, they still
00:21:23.720 control the culture, control the media, control politics to a great extent but there's
00:21:30.720 light because more and more people are coming on board and it becomes just impossible
00:21:37.360 to deny the reality of improving standards, improving technology, the fact that we were
00:21:44.520 able to come up with a vaccine to what would have otherwise been a terrible global pandemic
00:21:51.200 that killed far more people than what it had in a much shorter amount of time than it did
00:21:56.200 but our knowledge was able to solve that problem and it will continue to solve problems
00:22:00.960 at a never faster rate into the future, we'll never run out of problems and we'll never
00:22:05.440 run out of resources, that's the optimistic part, pessimistic part is we'd have to keep
00:22:10.520 on having the argument for a long time yet, okay let's go back to the book David's talking
00:22:16.960 about how he's sitting in school, listening to the visiting professor and he writes, quote,
00:22:23.680 we had little basis for doubting what the professor was telling us about the field he
00:22:26.680 was studying yet for some reason our conversation afterwards was not that of a group of students
00:22:31.760 who had just had their futures stolen, I did not know about the others but I can remember
00:22:36.200 when I stopped worrying at the end of the lecture a girl asked Erlich a question, I have
00:22:41.120 forgotten the details but it had the form, what if we solve one of the problems that Erlich
00:22:45.800 had described within the next two years, wouldn't that affect your conclusion, Erlich
00:22:50.920 reply was brisk, how could we possibly solve it, she did not know and even if we did
00:22:56.600 how could that do more than briefly delay the catastrophe and what would we do then?
00:23:02.960 What a relief, once I realized that Erlich's prophecies amounted to saying, if we stopped
00:23:07.680 solving problems we are doomed I no longer found them shocking, for how could it be otherwise
00:23:12.640 quite possibly that girl went on to solve the very problems she asked about and the one
00:23:16.200 after it, at any rate someone must have because the catastrophe scheduled for 1991 has
00:23:22.200 still not materialized, nor have any of the others that Erlich foretold, pausing their
00:23:27.320 my reflection, so it looks as though David Deutsch, when he was in high school, was the first
00:23:34.360 optimist in the sense that David Deutsch talked about off the missile, right there where
00:23:39.920 he says, if we stopped solving problems we are doomed, he was no longer worried because
00:23:44.880 how could it be otherwise, so he understood even then that we would just continue to
00:23:49.640 solve problems, so we don't have to worry because if someone says how can we possibly
00:23:54.160 solve that, if they don't know, it doesn't matter, someone will solve it, someone is going
00:23:58.720 to put their mind to that and they will come up with a solution, we don't want to not
00:24:04.560 solve certain problems, especially the civilization level destroying problems, we are going
00:24:09.160 to turn our minds to it, so don't worry, we are going to get through, David Deutsch understood
00:24:15.680 that then, back to the book, Erlich thought that he was investigating a planet's physical
00:24:20.520 resources and predicting their rate of decline, in fact he was prophesying the content
00:24:25.400 of future knowledge and by envisaging a future in which only the best knowledge of 1971
00:24:30.800 was deployed, he was implicitly assuming that only a small and rapidly dwindling set of
00:24:36.320 problems would ever be solved again, furthermore by casting problems in terms of resource
00:24:41.560 depletion and ignoring the human level explanation, he missed all the important determinants
00:24:46.640 of what he was really trying to predict, namely, did the relevant people in institutions
00:24:51.760 have what it takes to solve problems and more broadly what does it take to solve problems,
00:24:57.320 okay, so just pausing there my reflection here, we have been at pains to point out
00:25:04.320 throughout this series that resources in the general sense, in the broad sense are not
00:25:10.720 infinite, of course pick any one resource like naturally occurring crude oil, it's going
00:25:16.560 to be finite because the planet is finite, as far as we know there's no other oil out there
00:25:20.920 in the universe, as far as we know, so particular resources are going to be finite, but
00:25:27.080 far more important factor is that our knowledge is the scarce resource that we need, whether
00:25:32.480 we know how to replace the oil once it's run out or once it's running out, that's
00:25:37.840 the important thing and how, for example, we might mitigate problems that oil creates along
00:25:43.760 the way, of course oil solves more problems and it creates far more problems and the problems
00:25:48.480 that it creates are far better problems to want to solve, then the problem that the oil
00:25:53.800 solved in the first place, namely keeping people warm, helping us to generate electricity,
00:25:59.600 helping us to get from A to B faster than we ever have before, these are really, really
00:26:03.600 important problems to solve and along the way oil creates a few little problems, it creates
00:26:08.640 some pollution and we can solve those problems of pollution, but simply turning off the
00:26:15.360 supply of oil because we're concerned about the problems that it causes, it causes
00:26:19.960 way worse problems than it solves, enforcing someone to replace oil before they're ready
00:26:25.160 to, before it's cheap enough for them to do so, is likewise a recipe for increased suffering.
00:26:31.800 So ultimately, for any one resource, of course, it might run out, but ultimately the resources
00:26:37.880 won't run out, it has to be the case into the future, we know this that we can have something
00:26:42.120 like a 3D printer where the ink is single atoms and you just assemble the atoms Lego
00:26:50.000 like into literally any device that you want, so you can create any resource you want,
00:26:54.320 you can create any piece of technology that you can think of, anything that you can program
00:26:57.440 the 3D printer to build, in other words this thing would be a universal constructor,
00:27:03.760 it would be able to build anything, including building things that can build anything
00:27:09.520 But of course, we're not there yet in the meantime, we're going to have the profits and
00:27:14.600 the dune size and the naysayers and the pessimists all, we have to deal with them, we
00:27:20.440 have to deal with trying to refute their claims that the catastrophe is looming and so that
00:27:30.320 I think my favourite anecdote in the book, it's the one I use, whenever anyone talks
00:27:36.280 about this particular point, about the scarcity of particular resource and I like to
00:27:41.280 counter with the scarcity of knowledge versus the bottomless pit really, that is our ignorance,
00:27:48.080 I shouldn't say pit, it's just a well, it's a well of ignorance, it's an infinite well
00:27:52.520 of ignorance, we have an infinite amount of ignorance, but some people like to draw from
00:27:55.640 the well of ignorance and try and plead for slowing down progress, so that we don't get
00:28:01.120 ahead of ourselves lest we run out of some resource, they think that they're found is
00:28:05.440 about to run out and that deep well of ignorance is an important well today, if your
00:28:12.000 university PhD student working in the natural sciences or the environmental sciences
00:28:18.920 in particular, identifying any old thing that a human civilization happens to be relying
00:28:25.200 on right now, calculating how much of known reserves we have of that thing, the rate at
00:28:31.600 which we're using it and then of course concluding with a prediction about the horrors
00:28:36.600 that are about to unfold when the disaster strikes, when we actually run out of this thing,
00:28:41.480 so this is effectively refuted by what we're about to talk about here and what we might
00:28:48.680 subtitle the parable of European, so let's go to that now, and David writes.
00:28:55.840 A few years later a graduate student in the then new subject of environmental science explained
00:29:00.880 to me that colour television was a sign of the imminent collapse of our consumer society,
00:29:07.880 Because first of all he said, it served no useful purpose, or the useful function of
00:29:13.120 television could be performed just as well in monochrome, adding colour at several times
00:29:21.200 That term had been coined by the economist, Thorstein Viblin, in 1902, a couple of decades
00:29:27.360 before even monochrome television was invented.
00:29:29.880 It meant wanting new possessions in order to show off to the neighbours.
00:29:34.040 That we had now reached the physical limit of conspicuous consumption could be proved,
00:29:38.040 said my colleague, by analysing the resource constraints scientifically.
00:29:42.920 The cathode ray tubes and colour televisions depended upon the element European to make
00:29:50.480 European is one of the rarest elements on Earth.
00:29:52.760 The planet's total known reserves were only enough to build a few hundred million more
00:29:58.520 After that would be back to monochrome, but worse.
00:30:01.640 Think what this would mean, from then on there would be two kinds of people, those with
00:30:08.120 And the same would be true of everything else that was being consumed.
00:30:10.920 It would be a world with permanent class distinction, in which the elites would hoard the
00:30:14.920 last of the resources and live lives of gaudy display, while to sustain that illusory
00:30:20.000 state through its final years, everyone else would be laboring on in drab resentment.
00:30:25.160 And so it went on nightmare, built upon nightmare.
00:30:34.080 It is so common today, it is just what intellectuals say, especially with the advent of
00:30:39.920 any technology, but particularly AI, if AI comes along, there will be the haves, the
00:30:45.320 people who can afford the AI's and who never need to work ever again.
00:30:50.480 And those who can't afford the AI's and no longer have any jobs, because the AI's
00:30:54.080 have long since taken them, there will be two kinds of people in the world, the haves
00:30:58.520 and the have nots, the AI quadrillionaires, and the people who are unemployed and destitute.
00:31:06.160 And also think of any medical technology, the favourite one that people refer to these
00:31:11.560 days, of course, any longevity type medicine, any kind of technology that might come along
00:31:18.360 and increase our lifespan by a significant amount.
00:31:22.240 Let's say you have this pill that can cure all the ills, let's say, that might kill you
00:31:32.120 So anyone who can afford to buy this pill can live between 200 and 300 years.
00:31:37.360 Well we're going to have two sorts of people to begin with aren't we, we're going to have
00:31:40.840 the people who are going to afford this pill, which no doubt these evil pharmaceutical
00:31:43.960 companies are going to charge people untold millions of dollars in order to get a hold
00:31:51.760 And the other people, they won't, they won't be able to afford it at all and they'll
00:31:56.040 In fact, the cost of medicine just might generally go up because the rich people who live
00:32:00.320 forever are going to demand all the additional treatments and resources for medical facilities
00:32:06.560 No one ever acknowledges the fact that whenever a new technology comes out of course, of course
00:32:11.520 there is a transition period, a short, increasingly short, transition period where, yes,
00:32:16.960 only the very wealthy can afford it, only the very wealthy can travel into space at the moment,
00:32:22.000 commercially, but eventually the price comes down, it used to be the case that the first
00:32:25.640 automobiles could only be afforded by the most wealthy in the world.
00:32:28.440 It used to be the case that only the most wealthy in the world could afford the most fashionable
00:32:35.960 The first computers, the first home computers, rarely owned by the most wealthy, but the
00:32:41.360 costs come down, the cost will always come down, but you need to have this initial investment
00:32:50.000 It is good and right and in a certain sense, heroic for the wealthy people to try out these
00:32:56.640 new technologies first to pay a premium for them so that then the economies of scale
00:33:08.480 Okay, let's go back to the book where again, just to recap David is talking about how
00:33:13.240 European was about to run out according to his colleague, this other student who's studying
00:33:17.640 environmental science, and he writes of his colleague, I asked him how he knew that
00:33:27.640 He asked how I knew that it would, and even if it were, what would we do then?
00:33:32.360 I asked how he knew that colour cathode ray tubes could not be built without European.
00:33:37.000 He assured me that they could not, it was a miracle that there existed even one element
00:33:42.720 After all, why should nature supply elements with properties to suit our convenience?
00:33:49.480 There aren't that many elements and each of them has only a few energy levels that could
00:33:52.760 be used to emit light, no doubt they had all been assessed by physicists.
00:33:56.560 If the bottom line was that there was no alternative to European for making colour televisions,
00:34:02.800 Yet something deeply puzzled me about that miracle of the red phosphor.
00:34:07.040 If nature provides only one pair of suitable energy levels, why does it provide even one?
00:34:12.280 I had not yet heard of the fine-tuning problem, it was new at the time, but this was puzzling
00:34:18.560 This meeting accurate images in real time is a natural thing for people to want to do,
00:34:24.560 It would not have been puzzling if the laws of physics forbade it, just as they do forbid
00:34:28.760 faster than light travel, for them to allow it, but only if one knew how, would be
00:34:36.200 But for them, only just to allow it would be a fine-tuning coincidence.
00:34:40.560 Why would the laws of physics draw the line so close to a point that happened to have
00:34:46.600 It would be as if the centre of the earth had turned out to be within a few kilometres
00:34:49.880 of the centre of the universe, it seemed to violate the principle of mediocrity.
00:34:54.760 What made this even more puzzling was that, as with the real fine-tuning problem, my colleague
00:34:59.240 was claiming that there were many such coincidences.
00:35:01.960 His whole point was that the colour television problem was just one representative instance
00:35:06.360 of a phenomenon that was happening simultaneously in many areas of technology.
00:35:13.480 Just as we were using up the last stocks of the rarest of rare earth elements for the
00:35:17.160 frivolous purpose of watching soap operas in colour, so everything that looked like progress
00:35:22.240 was actually just an insane rush to exploit the last resources left on our planet.
00:35:27.320 The 1970s were, he believed, a unique and terrible moment in history.
00:35:32.840 He was right in one respect, no alternative red phosphor has been discovered to this day.
00:35:37.400 Yet, as I write this chapter, I see before me a superbly coloured computer display that
00:35:45.720 Its pixels are liquid crystal consisting entirely of common elements, and it does not require
00:35:50.160 a catered ray tube, nor would it matter even if it did, for by now enough European
00:35:54.640 was being mined to supply every human being on earth with a dozen European-type screens,
00:36:00.440 and the known reserves of the element comprise several times that amount.
00:36:04.800 Even while my pessimistic colleague was dismissing colour television technology as useless
00:36:08.640 and doomed, optimistic people were discovering new ways of achieving it, and new uses
00:36:13.240 for it, uses that he thought he had ruled out by considering for five minutes how well
00:36:17.560 colour televisions could do the existing job of monochrome ones.
00:36:21.400 But what stands out for me is not the found prophecy, and its underlying fallacy, nor
00:36:28.800 It is the contrast between two different conceptions of what people are.
00:36:33.160 In the pessimistic conception, they are wasters, they take precious resources and
00:36:40.680 This is true of static societies, those statues really were what my colleague thought
00:36:44.680 colour televisions are, which is why comparing our society with the old culture of Easter
00:36:49.160 Island is exactly wrong in the optimistic conception, the one that was unforceably vindicated
00:36:56.600 People are problem-solvers, creators of the unsustainable solution, and hence also of the
00:37:01.720 next problem, in the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease
00:37:07.360 for which sustainability is the cure, in the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease,
00:37:12.880 and people are the cure, cause they're my reflection.
00:37:17.600 That is beautiful, wonderful, and needs to somehow permeate the zeitgeist.
00:37:25.280 It really does, of all the messages here, the counter-cultural message is that people are
00:37:32.480 the solution or the cure, it is only people that will solve the problems of tomorrow, only
00:37:39.680 People are not the problem, overpopulation is not the problem, it's insufficient numbers
00:37:43.920 of people that's a problem, because people are the things that generate ideas, we need
00:37:48.560 more ideas, we need creative people to come up with solutions to our most pressing problems,
00:37:55.040 they're not causing them, at least they're not causing worse problems, every solution
00:37:58.840 that a person finds is going to generate new problems, but those problems are better, more
00:38:05.040 They enable us to explore a greater range of possibilities, and to do away with the problems
00:38:12.280 We need more people to cure the diseases that we're going to discover tomorrow, as well
00:38:19.560 We need people to figure out new resources, as other ones begin to be depleted.
00:38:23.760 We need people to figure out new technologies so that we can communicate better, so we can travel
00:38:31.240 People are the solution, they provide the solutions, the only thing that provide the solutions,
00:38:36.640 the problems, the worst problems are those ones thrown at us by a hostile universe.
00:38:43.480 It's the universe that's not really helping us out.
00:38:46.200 We have to eke out our existence as I continue to say, we are the ones just scratching
00:38:51.960 the surface of a reality, which is ever more unexpectedly, throwing floods, fires, earthquakes,
00:39:03.720 natural disasters, diseases, comets, cosmological events, etc and so forth.
00:39:10.000 If we don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, and if we don't want indeed other species
00:39:13.880 to go the way of the dinosaur, we'd better have more people working faster, not to sustain
00:39:20.880 the way things are, not to try and ensure that resources don't become depleted, or that
00:39:28.040 These are inevitable, inevitable problems, problems are inevitable, but as we know, all the
00:39:33.760 way back in chapter one, these inevitable problems have solutions.
00:39:37.760 If we try to find them, if we put effort into finding them, and if we encourage people
00:39:44.600 to find those solutions, rather than having people fixate upon problems, and all the
00:39:50.240 ways in which we can slow down progress, because in this ridiculous pessimistic worldview,
00:39:56.680 it is faster and faster progress that leads us closer and closer to the end times, and
00:40:02.800 that's precisely the wrong way to think about it.
00:40:05.520 End times become closer and closer, the more we slow down, the more we try and ensure that
00:40:10.240 what we do is sustainable in the environmental sense.
00:40:13.680 We need fast progress and error correction, we'd need knowledge, creation, we need more
00:40:20.480 Okay, back to the book, just reading the last bit there, David said, quote, in the optimistic
00:40:28.480 one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.
00:40:31.960 Since then, whole new industries have come into existence to harness great waves of innovation,
00:40:38.400 and in many of those from medical imaging to video games to desktop publishing to nature
00:40:42.480 documentaries like Edinburgh's, colour television, proved to be very useful after all.
00:40:47.920 And far from there being a permanent class distinction between monochrome and colour television
00:40:52.000 users, the monochrome technology is now practically extinct as our cathode ray televisions.
00:40:57.880 Colour displays are now so cheap that they are being given away with magazines as advertising
00:41:02.680 gimmicks, and all those technologies far from being divisive are inherently egalitarian,
00:41:09.160 sweeping away many formally entrenched barriers to people's access to information, opinion,
00:41:14.440 art and education, just pause down just a little comment on that.
00:41:18.960 Color television is becoming so inexpensive, and the associated technology is so inexpensive
00:41:24.600 audio systems, huge flat screen televisions that go into the cinema is becoming redundant.
00:41:32.520 I mean, you can have a cinema experience inside your house, you can exceed what a cinema
00:41:39.280 can do in many, many cases, so you can have your own projector and your own sound system
00:41:44.200 in the comfort of your own home, for a fraction of the cost overall as to what frequently
00:41:50.240 going to the cinema would have been in days gone by.
00:41:53.480 And yet this is not undermining the movie industry, or at least that the audio visual industry.
00:42:01.840 There is a renaissance of a kind with television, all of the ways in which people who we
00:42:08.680 thought were going to lose their jobs because people weren't going to the movies anymore
00:42:13.680 All the people who are actors and who work on sound and vision and whatever else, they
00:42:18.960 now have many new avenues on many different streaming services, sort of making movies of
00:42:26.120 and television shows of higher quality than ever before.
00:42:28.840 The art is improving because the technology is improving and becoming cheaper and all boats
00:42:38.800 The optimistic proponents of the Malthusian arguments are often, rightly, keen to stress
00:42:44.080 that all evils are due to lack of knowledge and that problems are soluble, prophecies
00:42:48.560 of disaster, such as the ones I have described, do illustrate the fact that the prophetic
00:42:52.960 mode of thinking, no matter how plausible it seems prospectively, is fallacious and inherently
00:42:59.080 However, to expect that problems will always be solved in time to avert disasters would
00:43:03.640 be the same fallacy and indeed the deeper and more dangerous mistake made by Malthusians
00:43:08.840 is that they claim to have a way of averting resource allocation disasters, namely sustainability.
00:43:14.000 Thus, they also deny that that other great truth that I've suggested that we engrave
00:43:18.640 in stone, problems are inevitable, just pausing their just my reflection on this.
00:43:22.440 Now, having heard David be interviewed many times over the years now about the beginning
00:43:27.360 infinity, one of the common misunderstandings that people seem to have on this point is
00:43:35.000 the idea that problems are soluble, which is true, problems are soluble, that this somehow
00:43:40.640 means it is inevitable that the problems will be solved and that progress is inevitable.
00:43:46.520 This is not what's being claimed and David has never said this, but it is a very common
00:43:54.400 We have to work hard to solve problems and because problems are inevitable, that undermines
00:44:00.680 this thesis that therefore progress is inevitable.
00:44:03.160 No, there will be problems coming along and if we don't choose to work really hard to
00:44:08.480 try and solve these problems, then progress will falter.
00:44:12.400 We can go the way of the dinosaur, there's nothing in this worldview of David Deutsch
00:44:19.160 He can't say whether we will go extinct or not, no one can say we will go extinct
00:44:23.880 There's a possibility that we won't go extinct.
00:44:29.400 It is certain, as certain as anything can be, that well, given our current knowledge,
00:44:35.960 we can predict that absent us, absent human beings, every species that exists on this planet
00:44:46.280 We know, okay, if it's not going to be the sun expanding into a red giant and evaporating
00:44:53.760 all the oceans and consuming the Earth in a massive fireball, then other asteroids will
00:44:59.840 hit, other comets will hit a supernova or go off nearby, massive volcano or go off, something
00:45:05.440 will happen that will wipe out all life on Earth.
00:45:08.280 It is going to happen, but the fact that we're here means that there's a chance that
00:45:15.360 not only will that not happen, but that we will be the ones who are able to survive.
00:45:22.360 But we can survive if we choose to create knowledge and if we choose to solve the problems
00:45:28.440 in time, but there's no guarantee of that at all.
00:45:32.240 David has been at pain to say that there's no guarantee of this.
00:45:35.840 It's just that we have the chance of doing so, a chance that no other species hitherto
00:45:43.960 We are the one possible, possible exception to the rule, so we need to emphasize that.
00:45:50.400 Things are soluble, but it's not inevitable that they will be solved.
00:45:53.720 It's only inevitable that they will arise, and that if we want to, we can try and solve
00:45:59.680 Back to the book, and he writes, on this point, a solution may be problem-free for a period
00:46:05.880 and in a parochial application, but there is no way of identifying in advance, which problems
00:46:10.600 will have a solution, hence there is no way short of stasis to avoid unforeseen problems
00:46:15.240 arising from new solutions, but stasis itself is unsustainable, as witnessed every static
00:46:21.760 Malthus could not have known that the obscure element uranium, which had just been discovered,
00:46:26.800 would eventually become relevant to the survival of civilization.
00:46:30.040 Just as my colleague could not have known that, within his lifetime, color televisions
00:46:36.520 So there is no resource management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no
00:46:41.200 political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method
00:46:46.680 that provides only true theories, but there are ideas that reliably cause disasters.
00:46:52.440 And one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned.
00:46:58.360 The only rational policy in all three cases is to judge institutions, plans, and ways
00:47:03.880 of life according to how good they are at correcting the mistakes, removing bad policies
00:47:10.000 and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.
00:47:14.720 Okay, now I'm skipping a bit in this chapter, and David talks about how, for a whole
00:47:20.320 bunch of solutions, there's always been the naysayers, so antibiotics, you know, someone
00:47:26.040 will say, oh, this is only temporary antibiotics, which kill bacteria, just you wait, just
00:47:30.640 you wait until the antibiotic-resistant pathogens come along, then we'll be in trouble.
00:47:37.160 And so people like to talk about how all we're ever doing is post-boning disaster.
00:47:42.000 So every solution, I'll just you wait, something will come along, which for which we will
00:47:49.400 Let's just go to where he talks briefly about climate change, where he says, quote, we face
00:47:57.280 the prospect that carbon dioxide emissions from technology will cause an increase in the average
00:48:01.120 temperature of the atmosphere with harmful effects such as droughts, sea level rises, disruption
00:48:05.920 to agriculture, and the extinctions of some species.
00:48:08.920 These are forecasts to outweigh the beneficial effects, such as an increase in crop yields,
00:48:13.560 a general boost to plant life and a reduction in the number of people dying of hypothermia
00:48:18.640 Trillions of dollars and a great deal of legislation and institutional change intended
00:48:22.200 to reduce those emissions currently hang on the outcomes of simulations of the planet's
00:48:27.160 climate by the most powerful supercomputers, and on projections by economists about what
00:48:32.440 those computations imply about the economy in the next century.
00:48:35.840 In the light of the above discussion, we should notice several things about the controversy
00:48:41.960 First, we have been lucky so far, regardless of how accurate the prevailing climate models
00:48:47.000 are, it is uncontroversial from the laws of physics without any need for supercomputers
00:48:51.560 or sophisticated modeling that such emissions must eventually increase the temperature, which
00:48:59.880 Consider, therefore, what if the relevant parameters had just been slightly different and
00:49:03.760 the moment of disaster had been in, say, 1902, Veblen's time when carbon dioxide emissions
00:49:09.600 were already orders of magnitude above their pre-enlightenment values, then the disaster
00:49:14.240 would have happened before anyone could have predicted it or known what was happening.
00:49:18.240 Sea levels would have risen, agriculture would have been disrupted, millions would have
00:49:22.160 begun to die, with worse to come, and the great issue of the day would have been not
00:49:26.760 had to prevent it, but what could be done about it?
00:49:30.000 They had no supercomputers then, because of Babidge's failures and the scientific communities
00:49:34.040 misjudgments and perhaps, most importantly, their lack of wealth, they lacked the vital
00:49:41.200 Mechanical calculators and roomfuls of clerks would have been insufficient, but much worse,
00:49:48.560 In fact, the total number of physicists of all kinds was a small fraction of the number
00:49:55.560 From society standpoint of view, physicists were a luxury in 1902, like color televisions
00:50:00.520 were in the 1970s, yet to recover from the disaster, society would have needed more scientific
00:50:05.960 knowledge and better technology and more of it, that is to say, more wealth.
00:50:11.520 For instance, in 1900, building a seawall to protect the coast of a low-lying island would
00:50:15.840 have required resources so enormous that the only islands that could have afforded it would
00:50:19.600 have been those with either large concentrations of cheap labor or exceptional wealth as
00:50:24.280 in the Netherlands, much of whose population already lived below sea level thanks to the technology
00:50:30.440 This is a challenge that is highly susceptible to automation, but people were in no position
00:50:35.000 to address it in that way, or relevant machines were underpowered, unreliable, expensive
00:50:39.520 and impossible to produce in large numbers, and an enormous effort to construct a Panama
00:50:43.680 canal had just failed with the loss of thousands of lives and vast amounts of money due
00:50:48.400 to inadequate technology and scientific knowledge.
00:50:51.400 And to compound those problems, the world as a whole had very little wealth by today's
00:50:56.520 Today, a coastal defence project would be well within the capabilities of almost any coastal
00:51:01.600 nation and would add decades to the time available to find other solutions to rising sea
00:51:10.480 That is a question of a wholly different kind, which brings me to my second observation
00:51:16.520 It is that while the supercomputer simulations make conditional predictions, the economic forecasts
00:51:22.920 make almost pure prophecies, for we can expect the future of human responses to climate
00:51:28.920 to depend heavily on how successful people are at creating new knowledge to address the
00:51:35.840 So comparing predictions with prophecies is going to lead that same old mistake, supposing
00:51:41.080 they're just my reflection, just we really need to emphasise this, so there are scientific
00:51:46.800 predictions of what is going to happen with climate change, scientific predictions, derivations
00:51:52.480 from good explanations, using supercomputer modelling.
00:51:56.000 Of course, there's going to be errors with these, and yes, they change now and again,
00:51:59.400 but this does not change the fact that there really is a scientific theory about how, for
00:52:04.840 example, certain gases, like carbon dioxide, like methane, really do interact with certain
00:52:14.040 kinds of light, so for example, the bonds in the carbon dioxide and molecule just happen
00:52:20.000 to be right to resonate with certain photons of light and then they re-emit that light
00:52:23.960 in all directions, including towards the ground, as infrared radiation, and so this cause
00:52:29.080 that we know, the mechanisms that cause climate change, it really is a real thing, and you
00:52:33.840 really can make reasonable predictions about these things.
00:52:37.640 All that aside, putting all of that aside, knowing that climate change is a real phenomenon
00:52:42.880 and it really is affected by the burning of fossil fuels, for example.
00:52:47.760 Those predictions are in a completely different category to what will happen economically
00:52:52.760 as a consequence of that possible natural disaster, what would be a natural disaster
00:53:01.960 What we will do something about it, as it becomes more clear to politicians, industry leaders
00:53:08.280 and so on and so forth, things will be done, things are being done already, but trying
00:53:13.720 to suggest that this is going to mean economic tragedy, that it's going to require certain
00:53:21.360 economic tweaks and changes to the economy, is all based upon not scientific prediction,
00:53:28.520 but upon pure guesswork, pessimistic guesswork, about the future ways in which people
00:53:35.400 will trade one with another, but this is to do with their free choices and what knowledge
00:53:43.760 Again, suppose that disaster had already been underway in 1902, consider what it would
00:53:49.320 have taken for scientists to forecast, say, carbon dioxide emissions for the 20th century,
00:53:54.680 from the shaky assumption that energy use would continue to increase by roughly the same
00:53:59.800 exponential factors before, they could have estimated the resulting increase in emissions,
00:54:05.360 but that estimate would not have included the effects of nuclear power.
00:54:09.680 It could not have, because radioactivity itself had only just been discovered and will
00:54:13.720 not be harnessed for power until the middle of the century, but suppose that somehow they'd
00:54:18.400 been able to foresee that, then they might have modified their carbon dioxide forecasts
00:54:22.800 and concluded that emissions could easily be restored to below the 1902 level by the end
00:54:27.480 of the century, but again, that would only be because they could not possibly foresee
00:54:32.040 the campaign against nuclear power, which would put a stop to its expansion, ironically
00:54:37.160 on environmental grounds, before it ever became a significant factor in reducing emissions
00:54:42.000 and so on, time and again, the unpredictable factor of new human ideas, but good and bad,
00:54:49.360 would make the scientific prediction useless, the same as bound to be true, even more so,
00:54:55.000 of forecast today for the coming century, which brings me to my third observation about
00:55:00.320 the current controversy. It is not yet accurately known how sensitive the atmosphere's
00:55:05.360 temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide. That is, how much are given increase
00:55:11.040 in concentration increases the temperature. This number is important politically, because
00:55:15.120 it affects how urgent the problem is. High sensitivity means high urgency. Low sensitivity
00:55:19.720 means the opposite. Unfortunately, this has led to the political debate being dominated
00:55:23.840 by the side issue of how anthropogenic human caused the increase in the temperature to date
00:55:29.560 has been. It is as if people are arguing about how best to prepare for the next hurricane,
00:55:35.280 while all agreeing that only the hurricanes one should prepare for, are the human induced
00:55:39.440 ones. All sides seem to assume that if it turns out that a random fluctuation in the temperature
00:55:44.760 is about to raise sea levels, disrupt agriculture, wipe out species and so on, our best
00:55:49.840 plan would simply be to grin and bear it. Or if two-thirds of the increase is anthropogenic,
00:55:54.800 we should not mitigate the effects of the other third, trying to predict what our net effect
00:55:59.560 on the environment will be for the next century. And then subordinating all policy decisions
00:56:04.680 to optimizing that prediction cannot work. We cannot know how much to reduce emissions
00:56:10.200 by, nor how much effect that will have, because we cannot know the future discoveries
00:56:15.680 that will make some of our present actions seem wise, some counterproductive, and some irrelevant
00:56:21.840 nor how much our efforts are going to be assisted or impeded by sheer luck, tactics to delay
00:56:27.240 the onset of foreseeable problems may help, but they cannot replace and must be subordinate
00:56:32.800 to, increasing our ability to intervene after events turn out as we did not foresee.
00:56:38.120 If that does not happen in regard to carbon dioxide-induced warming, it will happen with
00:56:42.240 something else. Indeed, we did not foresee the global warming disaster
00:56:46.320 by call it a disaster, because the prevailing theory is that our best option is to prevent
00:56:51.280 carbon dioxide emissions by spending vast sums and enforcing severe worldwide restrictions
00:56:56.640 on behavior, and that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. I called it unforeseen
00:57:01.960 because we now realized that it was already underway even in 1971 when I attended that
00:57:06.800 lecture. Ehrlich did tell us that agriculture was soon going to be devastated by rapid climate
00:57:11.320 change, but the changing question was going to be global cooling caused by smog and the
00:57:16.960 condensation trials of supersonic aircraft. The possibility of warming caused by gas emissions
00:57:22.360 had already been mooted by some scientists, but Ehrlich did not consider it worth mentioning.
00:57:26.920 He told us that the evidence was that a general cooling trend had already begun and that
00:57:31.160 it would continue with catastrophic effects, though it would be reversed in the very long
00:57:35.120 term because of heat pollution from industry, and a fact that it is currently at least
00:57:39.000 a hundred times smaller than the global warming that preoccupies us, causing my reflection.
00:57:44.320 A planet like Earth, geologically speaking, is active. It is geologically active. It is
00:57:50.720 kind of alive in a geological sense. The outgassing of volcanoes coupled with rain, which
00:57:58.880 absorbs those gases in the atmosphere and then causes the acidification of oceans, which
00:58:04.960 can then cause precipitates to form at the bottom of those oceans, which then carried
00:58:09.920 into the core of the Earth and then re-arrupted back into the atmosphere by those same volcanoes.
00:58:16.960 This process, this constant process, this carbon cycle, this natural carbon carbon dioxide
00:58:21.720 cycle, coupled with the way in which we orbit the planet would mean that even if there
00:58:30.720 was no anthropogenic climate change, there wouldn't unless be climate change, it would
00:58:35.680 be absolutely astonishing if the climate did not change, if there wasn't a trend of
00:58:40.360 heating or cooling. So regardless of where the humans are doing it or not, regardless
00:58:45.240 of that, let's say we find that there is climate change, but the humans aren't doing anything
00:58:52.600 at all to contribute to it. It's not the case at the moment, but let's say that it was.
00:58:57.280 Let's say that scientists come to a consensus tomorrow and the United Nations begin to
00:59:02.040 tell us about how, hey, guess what everyone, the fossil fuel thing isn't what we thought
00:59:07.200 it was. There's no human-induced climate change. There would still be climate change.
00:59:12.800 There would be climate change via the factors, and that climate change will eventually cause
00:59:18.520 problems for humans. It'll either cause the sea levels to rise or cause the amount of
00:59:22.960 ice to increase or cause the temperature change in uncomfortable ways for people living
00:59:26.680 in certain places. And we should want to mitigate that. We should want to treat the planet
00:59:31.280 like we treat our homes, sometimes they're too cold, sometimes they're too warm. We should
00:59:35.840 want to, regardless of whether humans are causing the climate change or not, want to control
00:59:40.840 the climate. And even if the almost impossible was to happen and nothing ever changed on
00:59:47.800 planet Earth, we'd respect to the climate, we should still want to change the climate.
00:59:52.120 We should still want to make the places that are barren, fertile. We should still want
00:59:57.680 to change the certain places in the poles, which are too cold, to be somewhat warmer.
1:00:03.720 If we can do that, we should. This whole idea of living in a pristine natural environment,
1:00:08.560 or we've counted that, we don't like that. The natural environment is not a good thing,
1:00:14.680 even for the species that's sort of evolved there, because the environment is hostile
1:00:20.480 in very many ways. Okay, so let's go back to the book. And David's about to write what
1:00:26.600 he says in one of his TED talks. He says, there is a saying that an ounce of prevention
1:00:32.000 equals a pound of cure, but that is only when one knows what to prevent. No precautions
1:00:36.320 can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. To prepare for those, there is nothing
1:00:41.720 we can do, but increase our ability to put things right if they go wrong, trying to rely
1:00:46.880 on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that
1:00:51.880 we would eventually fail without the means of recovering. The world is currently buzzing
1:00:56.720 with plans to force reductions and gas emissions at almost any cost, but it ought to
1:01:01.360 be buzzing much more with plans to reduce the temperature or for how to thrive at a higher
1:01:06.720 temperature and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. Some such plans exist, for
1:01:12.720 instance, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a variety of methods and to generate
1:01:17.680 clouds over the ocean to reflect sunlight and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb
1:01:22.240 more carbon dioxide. But at the moment, these are very minor research efforts. Neither
1:01:26.800 supercomputers nor international treaties nor vast sums are devoted to them. They are not
1:01:31.880 central to the human effort to face this problem or problems like it. This is dangerous.
1:01:38.200 There is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle, which would really
1:01:43.000 mean achieving only the semblance of sustainability. But even the aspiration is dangerous.
1:01:49.520 For what would we be aspiring to? To forcing the future world into our image endlessly
1:01:54.600 reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes, for what would we be aspiring
1:02:00.280 to? To forcing the future world into our image endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our
1:02:06.000 misconceptions and our mistakes. But if we choose instead to embark on an open-ended
1:02:11.480 journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed
1:02:17.520 by the next, if this becomes a prevailing ethic and aspiration of our society, then the
1:02:23.360 ascent of man, the beginning of infinity, will have become, if not secure, then at least
1:02:28.960 sustainable. The end of the chapter. There we go. A wonderful way to end up the sustainability
1:02:35.280 that we want, the sustainability we want, and need and require, in order to survive,
1:02:41.600 its constant change is this open-ended journey of creation and exploration. Each step of
1:02:47.680 which is unsustainable, we can't stay there at that step just doing that same thing over and
1:02:51.680 over again. It's not sustainable. What is sustainable is change, this rapid progress, this
1:02:57.560 journey of creation and exploration. And so we come finally to chapter 18, to the conclusion
1:03:05.000 of the book, which I think will take some weeks to get through. There will be many episodes
1:03:11.760 based on the beginning, which is chapter 18. And it's appropriate that it's called
1:03:17.720 the beginning, because this is, as I said before, the beginning of the beginning of infinity,
1:03:22.360 the beginning of spreading these ideas of finding new ways in which to promote the understandings
1:03:28.920 and the learnings that are within this book, the messages that are in this book, because
1:03:32.800 this is civilization level important as we've just learned from that previous chapter.
1:03:39.440 We need to counter the prevailing narratives about all of these topics. And it's simply
1:03:47.000 a good way. The book is a good way of having a touchstone, a way of summarizing what this
1:03:54.160 worldview is. The worldview is clearly summarized and encapsulated within the book, but it's beyond
1:03:59.320 the book, of course, of course. And there's many more people and communities that need to
1:04:04.160 spring up and have an optimistic view of humanity and problem solving. But for now, until
1:04:11.880 next time, bye bye. Just to thank you to my Patreons. And if you'd like to become a patreon
1:04:18.320 of mine, I would greatly appreciate it. You can find me at patreon.com forward slash
1:04:23.400 topcast or simply Google, um, topcast patreon or even Brithall patreon. And something will
1:04:30.360 come up there for you. Or you can go to my own website, www.brithall.org. And you'll find
1:04:36.960 a link there to a PayPal link. And so you can donate. There's a donate button. It is greatly
1:04:43.880 welcome. I greatly appreciate it. Any contributions that anyone can make at whatever level.
1:04:50.520 Thank you so much. Until next time, bye bye.
