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so I want to encourage you to faint big because we humans have again and again
and again underestimated not only the size of our cosmos discovering that
everything that we thought existed was just a small part of a much grander
structure a planet solar system a galaxy a universe maybe even a hierarchy of
parallel universes but we've also repeatedly underestimated the power of
our human minds to understand and even improve our cosmos now to understand
what i mean about the first part under estimating the size of things we have to
remind ourselves or what we humans have managed to figure out so far about our
place in space
let's do that by going for a little ride together here let's start in the
Himalayas and head up a little bit when ancient that cave dwellers looked up but
at those sparkly white dots in the sky we had beautiful myths of course what
this was all supposed to be but i think many of them at the same time felt a
little bit melancholy figuring that they would never be able to know for sure you
know what the stars really were but they were wrong they have really
underestimated the power of our human minds because we've subsequently
realized that we could figure out the stars we didn't even need rocket power
but just mental power letting our minds fly and with pure mental power
Eratosthenes over 2,000 years ago cleverly figured out the size of the
earth to be 40,000 kilometers in diameter and since then the same kind of
ingenuity is actually given us rocket power we see here exactly to scale where
all the satellites are orbiting our planet right now the near-earth comet
satellites in green and then geostationary satellites and others
farther out this is fully to scale rendering made by the American Museum of
Natural History in New York and then as we zoom out farther and the moon's orbit
starts coming to view where is the moon can't even see it because this is
just exactly to scale this is not like in one of these kids books where things
are expanded this gives us a sense of how fast things are our son you see here
we all know it takes about eight minutes for the light to reach us from it just
to get a sense of scale and as the planets come into view here with seeing
things are so big that it takes hours for like three inches from the outer
solar system now I would like you to raise your hands if you know anybody was
born before 1925 see a lot of hands these people that you're not thinking
about the innocence were born in a much smaller universalist they didn't know
back then there were other galaxies what's coming into focus here amid the
Milky Way with hundreds of billions of stars and its majestic spiral structure
span stretching a hundred thousand light-years from side-to-side it only
became clear that there are other galaxies in 1925 when Edwin Hubble
discovered that and yet this much grander structure they were all part of
now no of course it's also just one out of one billions and billions of other
galaxies which together form even larger structures groups clusters superclusters
enormous filaments and we see here this loan great wall and I and my colleagues
discovered in this enormous 3d galaxy map which is up $PERCENT billion
light-years from side to side and that too is in turn just part of an even
grander structure we affectionately call our universe when we start when
astronomers talk about our universe we don't mean everything that exists even
all of space we just mean the spherical part of space from which light has a
time to reach us so far during the 13.8 billion years since our big bang because
stuff outside of that if it exists if there are more distant galaxies here no
telescope could see them we would have the weight billions of years more for
the right to have time to get here now so far most of what i said is pretty
intuitive the farther we look course the more stuff we see but what on earth is
this round ball and with all these funky yellow and green and blue colors
to appreciate and understand that it's not enough to talk about our place in
space we also have to explore our place in time
fortunately that's remarkably easy in astronomy because looking into the sky
is like looking into a time machine we already talked about how we see the Sun
not the way it is now but the way was eight minutes ago
if you see some stars this evening if the rain clears up you'll see them maybe
hundreds of years ago somebody out there looking at us they wouldn't see us but
they might see the american revolution or something
Shakespeare doing his things and if we look really far out with a good
telescope here we see many galaxies the way they were billions and billions of
years into the past so by simply looking at different distances from Earth we can
actually watch how cosmic history has unfolded now what have we learned from
this
well we've learned something very very surprising and to fully appreciate how
surprising these things are like you for a moment to just imagine that each one
of you is a galaxy and i'm looking through my telescope here what do I see
first I see something really funny which is all of you guys here in the front
seem like you're about 90 years old and then I see a bunch of people here but
it's 70 60 and 50 and I see up way up there are always just teenagers and then
I see a bunch of toddlers and that second last row is only infants and very
last row is exists entirely empty and as if that weren't surprising enough that
the whole back wall of this lecture theatre is glowing ask me with a strange
glow of microwaves and it's more puzzling still because for some reason
you're blushing you guys hear a little bit pinch but those of you in the back
look positively tomato red this is exactly what we see when we look at
these galaxies out there with telescopes so what on earth does this mean well
first of all why did you seem to order yourself by age as you walked into the
lecture theatre
well we've already talked about how
the farther we look like the longer ago we're seeing things happen so that means
that the galaxies that we did I see the near me here are galaxies which are
quite old almost 13 which I've been around long enough to mature and grow up
and become beggin look much like ours where's if I look really far away
I'm looking so far back in the past galaxies haven't had time to grow up and
mature we see juvenile and really far away just these tiny baby galaxies and
if i look really far away
corresponding to the last row of the lecture theatre i see no galaxies at all
because I'm looking and what happened so long ago the galaxies had not yet had
time to form
why were you are blushing are you embarrassed to be here tonight with me
well we know that if you go down to the highway and you listen two cars here
them go in in the they do not sound you this is because what we know is a
Doppler effect where as you know something going away from you as its
frequency lowered in and the exact same thing happens with light so if the
galaxies flying away the light frequency will be lower which means its color
would look redder we call that red shift in astronomy so the fact that you're
blushing means that all of you guys for some reason are flying away from me
which is what we mean when we say their universe is expanding I can figure out
how long ago you for example we're right here by just taking your distance and
dividing it by your speed and remarkably when Edwin Hubble did this for the first
time he found that the answer he got was pretty much the same for every galaxy
because galaxies that were twice as far away were flying away twice as fast
that's why those of you in the back look more tomato red those nearby woods
blushing a little bit so and when you do the math you find out that about 13.8
billion years ago or pretty much all the galaxies we see were more or less in the
same place so there were some grand calamity that took place back then we
don't know exactly what caused that
or exactly what happened we have a fancy name for it we call our big bang we can
come back and you can ask me much more about it later if you like but we have a
very good idea of what happened during the 13.8 billion years since because we
can see most of this with our telescopes
so what's the last strange thing I mentioned the fact the rear wall is
glowing
how can we understand that well all this black stuff in space pictures which I
used to think was vacuum when I was a kid can't be empty space because the
galaxies must have formed from something right and we now know that this is how
mostly hydrogen gas gravity the greater later clump together into galaxies now
if everything is expanding then so as a gas and you know if you expand the gas
it cools off
that's how your refrigerators and air conditioners work so as we go farther
and farther into the past this gas must be hotter and hotter and hotter and if
we take a nice Cuban we heat it up it turns into liquid water if you heat up
the water it turns into have one of the kids answer what does it turn into here
for heat up water enough
yeah steam very good now what if i take a gas like and I like steam and heat it
up more what it turned into
grown-ups can answer to for this one plasma exactly which means that the
electrons get porn off from the atoms now a plot so a plasma is opaque not
transparent like this gas so it looks to us like beyond all those galaxies and
beyond the empty last row where there were no galaxies we see a plasma screen
glowing at us but it's going to look of course exactly the same whatever
direction we look if you look that far into the past so it actually looks to us
like we are surrounded by this plasma screen we can photograph from inside and
here are some of these remarkable photos of this plasma screen made by the
Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe satellite I had a lot of fun working
with data from the one of the more successful NASA missions ever
revolutionize cosmology for for a cost of about twenty five pence per per
american and
it that it's a i just mentioned that since so many of my American colleagues
seem to think that they're spending these enormous sum of money on science
we're actually not now that you have to ask yourself though when you take
pictures of what happened 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was only
4,000 years old
how do we know that they're correct this is a really hard measurement well you do
another satellite which is even better and you compare and the European led
plug satellite which just released its data last year
give us this even sharper image and it's just astonishing well it agrees look at
anyone spot here and it's still there except now it's not 3-megapixel but 50
megapixels fantastic fantastic data so in summary we humans have kept
discovering more and more things about our cosmos and have a pretty good
understanding of the last 13.8 billion years but it's important to not get
hubris we have to be modest also how much we still do not understand for
example we've come to realize that we have no clue what ninety-five percent of
our universe is made out of and that the part we don't understand at least two
separate mysteries dark matter and dark energy you can ask me more about that
afterwards we would really like to know particularly with the dark energy is
because it's going to determine the ultimate fate of our cosmos whether it's
going to keep expanding forever or come crashing back on itself in a Big Crunch
or or something else
we also like to know more about what really happened early on in this bag Big
Bang what caused etc there are many things we would like to understand
better so how can we do that
fortunately we have only harvested a tiny fraction of all this data yet it's
this data which is transformed the field so much from when I was a grad student
and we argued about whether universe was 10 billion years old or 20 billion years
old until now when you argue about whether it's 13.7 billion 13.8 billion
so let me show you how much data we have left to try to collect if you look
inside of this the same scale these beautiful baby pictures of the Cosmic
Microwave Background the plasma screen the cover less than a percent of the
volume just yellow
Bill's surface here and all those galaxies you flew around an earlier or
just a stinky little stuff in the middle here again less than a percent of the
volumes of the most of this is uncharted territory
how can we map that we can't look here with an ordinary telescope and looked at
the galaxies because the whole galaxy so far they haven't formed yet
fortunately there's a very very cool technique which can do precisely this
which can actually image simply the gas itself and see what's up to where there
are clumps of etc because hydrogen gas turns out to give off radio waves there
21 centimeters long when they were admitted and by the time they get here
the expansion of the universe stretch them the longer wavelength so by looking
at along there when they get here we can figure out where they came from make
amazing 3d maps you in principle very hard
no one has succeeded yet a bunch of teams across the planet or competing to
try to do this we have a part of this competition at MIT and i want to show
you just two minutes
how how to build your own radio telescope
yeah
that was easy huh
thank you the it's one of the most fun things with being a scientist is to get
to work with so many awesome students and other researchers are just so
inspiring and then another thing you notice about this is there were no
moving parts at all in this telescope it doesn't look at all in fact like one of
the big radio dishes but so have you seen that raise your hand if it's all
gold and I the bond movie for example when the Arecibo telescope within its
because we discovered that using a technique that the George Royal here in
Britain invented you can instead of building expensive dishes just buy a lot
of mass-producing small antennas and cover large filled with them and this
measure the volts and all of them and then feed all those volts after careful
amplification into some really massive computing equipment and have the
computers just figure out what the sky looks like and this computer so much
cheaper now it turns out to totally be the way to go
building really large radio telescopes like this we can image not just a small
part of the sky at a time like traditional astronomy by pointing your
telescope we can look at figure out what the whole sky looks like boom all at
once and here is a bunch of the friendly students who worked with the bill this
and when are joining forces with some more colleagues are to build one of
these hopefully the covers about a tenth of a square kilometer which should help
tackle further many of these open mysteries that i mentioned earlier about
dark matter dark energy our origins and narrow ultimate fate now I told you in
the beginning that i feel we humans have been the masters of underestimation and
how we have again and again realized that everything we thought existed was
part of something bigger but how the same time we had underestimated
ourselves and our ability to understand things and it really is quite remarkable
to think that those kids same k people maybe you didn't think they could ever
really know what the stars were where no smarter than they are
we've now managed to figure out why
some detail what happened during the last 13.8 billion years so why is that
how we humans been able to figure out so much partly of course it's because the
human mind turn out to be even more amazing and versatile and then then they
thought after all they hadn't even imagine that you could do such a thing
is right thing and so on
let alone invent telescopes or program computers but i think is more to it as
well we've discovered two extremely powerful ideas in science and both of
them or innocence first really established firmly here in London and
partly here in this building
the first one was doing experiments and the second was once you've done
experiments use mathematical modeling and try to describe the data that you
see and we can almost gotten so used to this and signs we forget to ask why this
works but i want to ask why this works explore this lot of the book and I think
the reason it works is because nature turns out to encode all these hidden
mathematical patterns and shapes and regularities so this approach of
experiments in mathematical modeling it helps our minds find these Clues these
mathematical clues which we can use to predict the future better to develop new
technologies and so on and this is a very old idea of course Pythagoras over
2,000 years ago said that numbers into rule the universe in some sense and
about 400 years ago Galileo said that our universe is a book written in the
language of mathematics but where is all this math that these guys are talking
about
I mean I look around the room I can't even see any numbers anywhere and when
we look at Delia's quote here though we see that although many people i think
mass mostly is a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers or maybe like my
mom think that it's a sadistic form of torture invented by school teachers that
you make yourself feel bad about ourselves that generally oh you think of
math in a broader sense he talks here about shapes and patterns and we of
course geometry is a key part of mathematics and modern math books don't
often don't even have any numbers in the middle now much more abstract than that
and shapes and patterns is certainly something we have a lot of nature and if
we throw an object and it moves under Earth's gravity it always moves in the
same shape what we call the shape of a parabola exactly and it's it described
by a very simple equation like y equals x squared whenever we look in the sky at
things moving under gravity again they are moving a simple shape regardless of
whether they were being a star or a black hole or something else what we
call this shape and the lips exactly and obeys again a very simple equation and
moreover these two shapes are related because if you look at a very tiny part
of an ellipse it's very well approximated by a parabola and if you do
this traditional school math problem of figuring home object moves here more
carefully you see it's actually not the parabola it's actually exactly a piece
of an ellipse which Isaac Newton first showed and I'm then I have a very bad
habit because I'm a physics professor which I love giving unannounced pop
quizzes so you're gonna get 12 now but don't worry it won't contribute to your
final grade is just diagnostic so so here are three discoveries discovery of
Neptune discovery of the radio wave discovery of the Higgs boson what tool
was it that triggered the discovery of these three things
any takers group quiz yes I just shout out matham mass exactly it was maths or
if you want to be really finicky you could argue that it was technically the
pencil because they were all predicted from from mathematical calculations
atoms here in Britain and delivery and France realized that the planet uranus
was just not moving according to Newton's equations quite exact is it was
supposed to it so he they calculated and calculating calculated and one of them
wrote a letter to this astronomer gallon
your lid and said hey . your telescope it's such a direction in the sky at such
a time and you'll find a new planet
I don't know what kind of thought when I got this letter maybe thought that this
letter writer must be cuckoo for cocoa puffs but he was certainly curious
enough to try and don't know there was Neptune predicted to mathematics and the
just a few decades later here in Britain james clerk maxwell was studying
electrical relays and unify all of electricity and magnetism in the Maxwell
equations and he did more calculations and predicted that if you built a
certain kind of device then you can use it to send information at the speed of
light through empty space through walls etc the devices of course built and you
all know the results they raise your hand if you have a cell phone in your
pocket
yeah predicted through mathematics again and most recently of course Peter Higgs
took the most advanced mathematical description we had at the time of nature
the so-called standard model of particle physics and calculated and calculated
and predicted that if we humans built the most advanced scientific instruments
ever built in Geneva and use the crash particles together near the speed of
light in a certain way we were there
discover a new particle you know the rest we built it
boom there was the Higgs boson and he got a free trip to my hometown of
Stockholm as a result and it's not the power of mathematics isn't limited of
course to just these three examples which there is an incredible wealth of
predictive power and math much of which is summarized in equations of physics
like these here and some people have been so impressed by these equations
that they even put them on her tombstone like like sharing her and it's not just
equations either it's even numbers just pure numbers in my book you'll find this
table here with 32 numbers pure numbers with no units on them which remarkably
can be used together with those equations the cactus every single
fundamental physical constant ever measured in the history of science you
can make more than a hundred thousand different measurements of various
numbers to do with what colors of light come out of atoms for instance can
calculate the mall
from these 32 if you want to know why is it that the proton is 1836 times heavier
than electron can calculate from these numbers and so with any other constant
you want
so why you know everything I've said so far is pretty uncontroversial but this
is where it gets controversial what do we make of this by 1960 eugene wigner
also puzzled by this vote the famous essay we argue that this this is
enormous usefulness of mathematics in Natural Sciences is really something
bordering on the mysterious and he said there's no rational explanation for it
in the book I explore the whole spectrum of possible answers to this from a lot
of people say it means nothing to people who say well it's very useful that's
what it means that we but that's all really we can say about it to people
think maybe somehow it all about something with our brains maybe we
invent math but also explore the opposite extreme that it really means
that nature is deeply mathematical truth in particular
explore the hypothesis that universe isn't just described by mathematics but
that it is mathematics in the sense of being a mathematical structure which I
and explain the carefully in the book what i mean by so crudely speaking this
hypothesis is that our world doesn't have it doesn't have merely some
mathematical properties but it has only mathematical properties we know that we
can often take a complicated mathematical structure and described by
approximately with some simple math just like we can approximate Einsteins really
awesome theory of gravity with Newton's simpler theory of gravity pretty good so
if this picture is correct then what we physicists have unwittingly been doing
all along is finding better and better math approximation for the correct
equations that we haven't found yet but hopefully one of the younger talent here
in the audience can find another correct theory of quantum gravity that
everything else we've done is just trying to approximate
now this sounds pretty crazy saying that nature has only mathematical properties
because that's the absolutely not how it seems right so to address this a bit
more head-on
I want to introduce you to mr. Hoggins mr. muggles is a ground hog or a
woodchuck and some people prefer to call him and he lives in our backyard
actually he would probably claim that we live in his backyard and then he moved
in first he if you ask what are his properties they don't seem like very
mathematical properties for me maybe the property of cuteness the property of
passion for a grass-eating your obsession with taking hold in our lawn
or her business yet as physicists we know that mr. Hogg goals and everything
else in our universe is ultimately made up of elementary particles like
electrons and quarks and what properties there's an electron actually have an
electron doesn't have the property of cuteness it doesn't even have a color or
smell or texture the only properties that the electron has as far as we can
tell and as you can see in this table here are properties like minus one and
one-half and one and now we physicists have come up with geeky names for these
properties like electric charge and spin and lepton number but the electron
doesn't care or we call these properties because they are just fundamental
mathematical properties their numbers and the best of our knowledge and the
same goes for every other elementary particle that makes up everything in our
universe that they have there purely mathematical objects in the sense that
they have no properties at all except for mathematical properties now if all
the stuff in space is purely mathematical in that sense what about
space itself you know what what properties of space have it has a
property three
that's the largest number of fingers they can hold perpendicularly to one
another right we have a nice nerdy name for that too in science
tried what we call it the what the
don't be shy what is three that that's the dimensionality of space but again
space doesn't care what we call it the property it that's human language we
invent what we did not invent this the fact that it's three the property itself
Einstein discovered that space also has some more properties called curvature
and anthropology which also purely mathematical properties mathematicians
studied so it and to the best of our knowledge and space itself also is a
purely mathematical structure in the sense that it has known mathematical
properties that we've been able to find so if we take seriously this idea that
both space itself and everything in space has no properties except
mathematical properties it starts to sound a little bit less than saying the
idea that maybe everything is in fact purely mathematical also to come back to
the main theme here I've said both the humans have kept under estimating the
size of our physical world and also that we kept under estimating the power power
to understand it and i've argued that the reason we have been so successful in
understanding the world much better than we ever anticipated is because of all
these mathematical patterns were hitting the nature that the cave dwelling
ancestors haven't noticed yet so what does this all mean well if this
hypothesis that it's all mathematical is wrong then it means that physics is
ultimately going to be doomed for one day going to hit a roadblock on which we
can proceed because we've discovered all the mathematical patterns the world to
discover and the rest of the stuff that we still don't understand we won't get
any more hints about we're stuck
whereas if this is correct if it really is all mathematical that means very good
news of physics there is no roadblock we still might not be creative enough to
figure everything out but at least we will know that there is nothing that we
are in principle incapable of understanding and our ultimate ability
to figure things out better about our world
will only be limited by our own imagination
we obviously don't know which of these two possibilities for actually facing I
think it's actually pretty good working hypothesis to assume that it is possible
first to understand more and try our best because you all know that there's
no better recipe for failure in any enterprise that assume just from the
get-go that what you're trying to do is impossible and therefore never really
try your best
now if there's nothing fundamental preventing us from understanding things
better and better and better
that means really that there is nothing in science it's totally off-limits to
most mathematical understanding for example consciousness if consciousness
can actually be understood as particles that are moving in in beautifully
complex patterns and process information then that would be in that I should be
ultimately mathematically describable as well and it was really interesting for
me a few weeks ago when I was organizing a physics conference because we had some
newer scientists became Giulio Tononi interest of car and they have this
fascinating idea now that they can't run but they can understand why arose as the
fragrance of a role is and why the color red looks red in terms of mathematical
shapes to do with the information processing that the particles in the
brain do and we don't of course know yet whether whether the their ideas are
going to turn out to be correct or not but this is the sort of thing which it's
going to be really fascinating to see how it plays out the see it how will
they succeed because this this hypothesis that it's all mathematical it
makes the firm prediction that there isn't that are known on mathematical
properties so if any scientific endeavor can identify some aspect of nature and
show that this cannot be described math that killed off the whole idea and ruled
it out now we've talked about what this all means for the future of science
future physics but I want to end today was discussions by talking about what it
means also for us humans and for the future of our life
here in the cosmos we are in a place where is very appropriate to talk about
this because was very vulnerable history and when we look at the our path ahead
here the fact that we've discovered that our cosmos is so much grander than we
thought you know some people take that to be depressing because they think they
all it means that I'm much smaller relative to everything but I thought
that hurts my egos or whatever to me it's actually the opposite me this is a
very positive thing to me the fact that we live in a much grander cosmos is
actually wonderful it means we have much more potential than we thought
it's much better to be in a really big universe than the final you're trapped
in this puny little place that you can't get out of sight
we have 10 to the power 57 times more volume at our disposal for life
maybe one day spread into we have not hundreds of thousands of years the
future we can dream about but billions and billions of years so what's gonna
happen
well you've all seen a lot of books and movies that have speculated about what
might happen there are a lot of optimistic scenarios some dream but life
one day spreading and making much of the cosmos come alive then there are others
who have more this topic visions of the future because the same technologies
that have enabled us to fly into space then cure a lot of diseases also of
course giving us very creative ways we can annihilate ourselves completely we
could have an accidental nuclear war we could build a superhuman artificial
artificial intelligence which some people think would be awesome and other
people have this but have conjectured will actually destroy all of human life
and everything we care about and there are significantly more realistic
scenarios and this kind of bad movies for how I could happen and we have many
other ways in which we could mess up our planet as well so in the last part of
the book i take a broad view of all the most common of the discussed threat to
our survival as a civilization and it's very interesting that if you organize
them like this by how far into the future they're most likely the pose a
great risk to us
what you find is that all of the most urgent risks the ones on the left side
here the clypeus out the soonest are threats that we cannot blame my mother
nature like asteroids or the Sun about boiling off the oceans our universe
collapsing or these sort of things but rather things we can only blame
ourselves for human-created risks now this is also encouraging in the sense
that it means if we can avoid wiping ourselves out by getting their act
together we have a vast amount of time to take on these various other risks and
if you ask me at the end i can tell you about for quite promising technical
solutions that exist that pretty much all of these problems including the Sun
getting too hot then enormous asteroids striking earth as long as we can get
past this immediate crunch ship now I told you I confess to you that physics
professors tend to have a lot of bad habits and i already gave you a pop quiz
another bad habit I have as i'd like to give grades unsolicited so I decided to
give humanity a grade for risk management one-on-one based on how we're
doing so far so I asked some friends what they thought was a fair grade + b +
was a suggestion the argument being that yes you know we humans have been pretty
reckless many times like the Cuban Missile Crisis was probably playing
Russian roulette a little bit too carelessly you know but we're still here
you know
B+ but i decided to actually give us at the minus I don't know what that would
be a translate into in the British grading system can someone help me out
here
the minus two so it's okay and i'm still known as a pretty lenient grader at MIT
you should know so I why is this
well you know different it's very hard to estimate the probability that we're
gonna wipe ourselves out in any given decade
some people say it's very unlikely maybe only a thousandth of a percent each
decade other people think it's more likely you know maybe one and ten Martin
Rees has written in his famous book that he thinks maybe about one and ten
these kind of numbers might be considered acceptable back in the old
days when you know when a hundred years or a thousand years seems like a really
long time and we had no clue how much time we really had on this planet but in
the cosmic perspective we have now where we have this enormous opportunity in
billions of years but this is just absolutely ridiculous to be taking these
kind of risks is no way we're gonna last a billion years before this is careless
so de- now it if you ever it give somebody a low-grade they will come and
complain immediately mascara justified of course so I thought I need to justify
this a little bit better i'm gonna justify it was very very simple
comparison between these two gentlemen here over which one of these two guys
more famous the usual answer I get is who is I see the arkhipov music and that
they're clearly a lot more people have heard of Justin Bieber even though today
would actually have been received the occupants birthday it had been alive so
it's very appropriate
that's right showing him today but we should ask a second question to which
one of these two people should we really thank for us all being alive here
tonight because he single-handedly stopped a Soviet nuclear attack during
the Cuban Missile Crisis have to be hit
he's not it's not Canadian ok and and this is this reflects a pretty seriously
screwed-up priorities i feel for us humans but something so important is not
unless deemed to be just so irrelevant that we don't even bother teaching about
in schools are making me nearly a big deal it is a big deal about it is justin
bieber so why is this why are we so short-sighted you know we humans have
figured out so much cool stuff about our universe we have so much opportunity yet
we we spent very little resources on actually safeguarding our future and
trying to be good stewards for a planet
why is this well the most common answer I get when I ask people is all we just
don't have the money you know the economy is tough you know and if we had
more money we would get ashore but can't afford it but I'm kind of a numbers guy
so let's look at some numbers
there are some organizations I talk about in the book in england and the US
etc whoo-hoo try to raise money and do what they can to reduce these kind of
risks the future of humanity Institute here in Oxford is one such organization
the cambridge center for existential risk is another such organization
the roses are the Royal Institution the Royal Society also to put some effort
into these things
the biggest the best one the best-funded one is probably the union of concerned
scientists in both in boston in the u.s. cambridge they get about 20 million a
year that they raised which sounds like a lot of money but let's shrink that
down for 20 million dollars represents these few pixels here and look at what a
few other things that Americans spent money on last year really important
things like plastic surgery I was ten billion dollars per year or maybe air
conditioning and that's just air conditioning for US troops only 20
billion last year that's what about the this is really important smoking hundred
billion last year
don't get me wrong I'm all for personal choice if you one of you guys wants to
light up you know
fine by me but does this really reflect the relative importance of these two
activities the relative sizes of these things I don't know and I couldn't even
fit on my slide here the biggest budget item for the US last year because it's
too large so i have to actually shrink everything down to fit the military
spending so clearly lack of money is not the real reason why else could it be
that we're so careless about our all these future opportunities
well it and not another answer it very often get especially in the u.s. is that
it would simply be responsible for us to spend resources on risks that have not
been proven here a lot of people especially on a particular US News
Channel say it's irresponsible to spend money combating global climate change
when it hasn't been scientifically proven
ok so if you think about that for a moment the easiest way to see the
logical flaw in that argument is just imagine that you are in a store shopping
for baby carriage for the baby of a really close friend of yours okay and
this very good
slick salesman comes over and says hey I have this really really nice robust
stroller here for only only 49 pounds ninety-nine Pence and it's it's it's
been on the market for over 10 years we haven't had any reported safety problems
with it all I'm solid by but then only 39 pounds nine pence can tell you this
one I know there have been some media reports about it sometimes collapsing
crushing the baby inside but they haven't really been substantiated and
honestly nobody has ever been able to prove in court that any of the deaths of
these babies were actually caused by you know manufacturing floods by the
manufacturer and it wouldn't be responsible for you wouldn't be
responsible to spend twenty percent more money on this risk which hasn't been
proven so which one are you gonna buy well if you feel that it's serious silly
to say that it's irresponsible to spend money and risks are unproven and if you
feel that it's rather the other way around that it's irresponsible to not
spend money on risks unless we can prove that they're not dangerous when the life
of one child is at stake
surely you'd feel the same way if we're talking about the lives of all children
not just all chilling on the planet now but all future generations that could
live during billions and billions of years right
so in summary we've talked about how research and cosmology has made very
clear that we have much much greater potential for the future life than we
thought but we also have and also have much more power to really make a
difference from a better understanding between some pretty happy outcomes and
some significantly less happy outcomes so in summary what I would like you to
take away from this is that even though we humans are small you know we really
have a great power to understand and improve the world around us so let's
make a difference
thank you
quantum mechanics suggests that if if anything future is more like a branching
tree where there are many different ways it could go so I wouldn't lose any sleep
about not having free will I would continue feeling good about your mind
knowing that the thought process you go through is actually exactly what it is
it's make making a meaningful difference Subtitles End: mo.dbxdb.com