553 - The Origin and Future of Life

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagertyGuest speaker: Bruce Damer

Bruce Damer delivering his 2003 Palenque Norte Lecture

Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2017

Today’s podcast features the 2017 Palenque Norte Lecture by Dr. Bruce Damer. As he describes the life-long journey that has led him to search for the origin of life on Earth, you may be surprised at how forthcoming he is about the ways in which he thought about this problem.

“Our common ancestor is a community, not an individual… . We did not come from competing individuals, we came from a collaborative network of simple things that were donating innovations and tools to a communal structure.” -Bruce Damer

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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you’re going to have to become a patron before the beginning of next month.

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And you can find the details about that by

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clicking the Patreon link at the top of today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.

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Now today I’m going to continue with the series of Palenque Norte lectures that were given

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at Burning Man this year, and they were all faithfully recorded by Frank Nunzio, for whose

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hot and dusty work we are all very grateful.

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The talk that I’m going to play comes from my good friend Bruce Dahmer.

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And I want to point out that it was 14 years ago, on August 29, 2003,

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that Bruce gave one of the very first Planque Norte lectures.

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He followed Alex, Allison, and Zena Gray with his talk that was titled,

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The Day the Universe Becomes Conscious. And you can listen to that talk in my podcast number 47,

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which I posted back in 2006. In fact, there are already 32 other podcasts featuring Bruce here

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in the salon. Now, Bruce is one of those very rare people who may be described as a psychedelic mystical scientist.

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And while you may think that he is unique in this ability, he actually is in very good company.

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Going way back, you will find that Descartes received his main inspiration from an entity that he called an angel,

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and that Cary Mullis credited the inspiration that earned him a Nobel Prize with things that he learned while on an acid trip.

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So it seems to me that Bruce is in very fine company here.

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Something that I’d like you to be sure that you understand about Bruce’s talk today

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is that he’s going to be revealing in great detail

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the processes that he used to gain the insights necessary

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to make this big breakthrough in the science of the origins of life.

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To say that the work Bruce and his colleagues has done is groundbreaking doesn’t even come close to defining its importance.

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And what we, here in the salon, are now privileged to hear is a story about science, psychedelics, and mysticism

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that most likely will never be told in

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mainstream scientific circles. I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised

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at how forthright Bruce is in this talk, and I hope that it will inspire a new

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generation of scientists to use all of the tools available to them in their

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work. And I’m speaking about tools of the mind here. Tools that aid in manifesting some of the

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most significant thoughts that lie deep in each of our minds. Now, here’s Bruce Dahmer.

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Thank you for coming today. We’re going to hear from Dr. Bruce Dahmer,

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and he’s talking about the origin and future of life.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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This is a return for me

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to Palenque Norte

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after a couple of years of absence,

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and it’s beautiful to be back with you

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in this Mormon missionary tent.

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Did you know that?

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When this was first assembled out here, we watched a video of a crew cut guy saying,

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well, missionary, to set up your tent, you just do these following steps.

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So this tent is for another mission, perhaps.

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Although, given the last talk, it looks like the Mormons are intersecting

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with our mission quite nicely.

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So we can’t do projection.

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So I’m going to do the old-fashioned way of doing things,

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which is called hand-waving.

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You know, hand-waving in science,

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it’s always sort of thought to be half-baked ideal.

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Deas are hand-waved out.

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And so I’m going to hand-wave my way through this, but I have some really special things

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to share for you before we get started. And it’s what, anyone here raised in the Christian

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world, the Christian communities? Do you know what the word gospel means?

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Gospel.

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The four gospel, like the four quadrants, that’s one.

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Other words, the definition of gospel?

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Good news.

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The good news.

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And I’m bringing to you today some good news.

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It’s actually really good news.

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And to start off, all preachers need to have

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something to hold. You could hold the cross of Jesus. You could be holding, you know, hair

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follicles from the Buddha or something like that. And you’ve got to have something from the reliquary.

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You know what a reliquary is? It’s this relic uh of old things um because that’s actually the way we

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have connection to our past is these objects you know it’s not going to be instagram photos well

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it probably is the ancient instagram photo from 2017 and people have got it in an altar and

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you know this will happen uh but until then, we still have physical objects.

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So let me share with you.

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And if I go off track, there’s people in the audience with soft objects

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that will start throwing them at any time and bounce me back on my orbit.

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But this is quite a hard object.

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but this is quite a hard object in fact this is one of the hardest objects

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in the history of our planet

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and what it is

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is called a stromatolite

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this is 3.5 billion years old

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and contains within it the oldest evidence

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for life on earth

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actually 3.48 billion years old.

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And I picked this up in the northwest of Australia

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about a year ago on fieldwork, on scientific fieldwork.

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And I don’t know if you can see it,

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but there’s ridges in there.

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It’s kind of, they’re sort of tucked in.

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It’s almost like a feminine shape, really.

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But what it is is the mother of all of us. Those ridges were biofilms, kind of like the plaque on your teeth, that lay down and then

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cement sand grains together when, say, the lakeshore has unlapping, and says, oh, sand has come over me.

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I need to move toward the light.

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You know, this is a gospel.

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We’ve got to keep access to that light.

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So the microbes go together, and they start to precipitate the sand grains and make a structure out of them and build something.

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And then the rest of the colony goes up through

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and forms another squishy, soft soft green layer on the top.

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That’s now we’re fed, we’re still fed, so it’s their access to food.

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So it’s their way for three billion years of continuing to feed like you’re doing right

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now when you eat your chips and things like that.

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It’s the same process really, it all comes from the sun.

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So these communities, this is your common

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ancestor. This is at the tap root. This is three billion years before the first plants

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or the first complex cells is about two and a half billion years before them and before

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animals. So this is the whole story of life on earth for about 85% of the planet’s history.

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of life on Earth for about 85% of the planet’s history.

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This is it.

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These biofilms at mostly water-mineral boundaries.

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And what was their principal characteristic?

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They’re symbiotic.

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They only can live because of the ones around them that are making food.

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So the top layer is making some food,

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and the food percolates down to the top layer is making some food and the food

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percolates down to the lower layer which uses it and then the bottom layers are

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black sometimes of these communities. You can find them in Yellowstone. They’re

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everywhere, these types of communities. And the black layer is where they chew

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up all the waste products and provide it back to the aggregate. It’s

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called a consortia model. So life, and still by weight,

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99% of weight is bacteria.

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And in your gut,

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you have 100 trillion bacteria

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versus 13 trillion

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of your bigger complicated cells.

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And within the cells,

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the complicated cells,

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you have things called mitochondria.

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Do you know how many you have

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of those in your body? 14 quadrillion mitochondria. And they were bacteria that kind of got a really

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good deal. They got to live in big cells and power them up. 14 quadrillion in your body.

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That’s a large number, right? That’s getting up to astronomical numbers. So what these

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guys did, starting around 4.2 billion years ago, is they started to clean the toxic waste dump that

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the Earth was. The Earth was incredibly difficult. This is why ideas like panspermia don’t really

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work, because you’ve got a planet that was formed in your solar system, huge Earth-Moon

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collision event.

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So now we’ve got a moon, which is covered with orange lava.

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You’ve got oceans finally precipitating out.

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You have volcanism everywhere.

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You’ve got a carbon monoxide atmosphere, acid rain, highly toxic everything, highly

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ferrous environments.

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This is heavy.

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So the job of these guys was also to get the iron rusted out of the system,

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and they did that with a waste product called oxygen.

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And they had to work the 3 billion years of overtime

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to get the iron, which was in these coffee-colored oceans,

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to sink down and form these banded iron formations

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that we mine today to make cars and cell phones,

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made by life.

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And then once the oceans were blue,

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they could pump the oxygen.

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The buffer would be going into the atmosphere and made you.

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So you breathe the air.

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It gives you plenty of energy to go to the burn.

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The burn is about burning oxygen, right?

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We’d have no burning man without these guys.

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So I offer them and to you and to the playa the first Archean burners.

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And you can come and hold these guys later.

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It’s quite a feeling, actually, even for a hardcore reductionist like me.

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It just sort of breaks through.

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So one of the breakthroughs was, as a result of these discoveries, is this.

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The cover of Scientific American in August.

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You notice on the top it says, in small letters,

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the great eclipse of 2017.

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Because we knocked that off, that minor event,

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we knocked it off the cover.

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Because the editors at Scientific American

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considered this to be a groundbreaking article,

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a 21st century paradigm shift, etc., etc.,

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which is quite pleasing to us.

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And if I open this up, so here it is.

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This is the model that myself and my colleagues came up with

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for how life began on Earth.

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And you probably can’t really see it,

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but you see there’s a round thing with sort of a blue part and a tan part?

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You see there’s a spiral in the middle of that?

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That’s the model.

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Spirals, cycles, cycling.

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So I want to take you back to 1871.

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Charles Darwin, in a letter to a friend, wrote,

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you know, Charles Darwin’s so quotable, right?

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But this is one of the more quotable things that he wrote.

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He wrote, oh, but if and what if some warm little pond somewhere

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there was dissolved phosphoric salts, electricity, and et cetera,

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because he’s Victorian and covers everything of the and et cetera,

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and a protein should form and become more complex.

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He nailed it.. He nailed it.

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He absolutely nailed it.

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The vision was correct.

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So for 100 years after that, our field, the origin of life,

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went down all kinds of rabbit holes.

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The primordial soup or primal soup rabbit hole of Oparin et al.

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And Haldane, it’s like soups!

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It’s soups,

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perhaps it’s in the ocean, etc.

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But they didn’t understand the basics of even

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chemistry, that you need to get things

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together, not disperse them in soups.

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So, that rabbit

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hole for a while, and then

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two fellows named Miller and Urey

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had a spark chamber in the lab.

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This is one of the classic experiments.

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It’s like the evil scientist experiment always shows a guy in a lab coat zapping a spark chamber.

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And like things are happening and brains are turning on and entities are growing, right?

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But that’s the Miller-Urey experiment of the early 50s.

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And so they zapped this atmosphere, which they assumed would be reducing.

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That’s a chemical term.

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And they got all these amino acids. Like, whoa, we’re made out of amino acids. We don’t just put them on our salad.

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We’re made out of those things. So it went worldwide. That launched the origin of life

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field completely. Like, scientists recreate life in a glass jar. Now, of course, that’s not true

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at all, but the press always jumps to that conclusion. So our field went down that rabbit hole for about 30 years. So everybody

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was zapping gases and getting various products.

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And then in the late 1970s, the submersible Alvin

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was being driven in the bottom of the ocean, and

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these submersibles and ships had proven that the Earth is

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plates, plates that are separating, tectonic plates.

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And they were exploring the boundaries of the plate,

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and they found these fantastic eruptions of hot water called black smokers.

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Do you remember that?

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You’ve seen that on documentaries, right?

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So a researcher in 1982 said,

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Whoa, there’s lots of chemicals to eat eat and there seems to be lots of life

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there perhaps.

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That’s where we should look for the origin of life.

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Another rabbit hole.

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Another rabbit hole.

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So why, well, it’s a rabbit hole until last month.

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Literally last month.

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So my colleague and I, David Deamer from, you know, you might say, wait a minute, Deamer

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and Deamer, Deamer and Deamer, one letter mutation apart.

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You know, what’s going on here?

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So our theory is actually called the Deamer-Deamer thing by the community.

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We’re almost the same height.

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He’s 79, and I’m like 55, and we can be mistaken for each other if we have hats on.

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So Deamer- demer thing.

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Where was I?

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Somebody throw a soft object.

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Huh?

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Oh, smokers.

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Are any of you smokers?

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There’s a smoker right there.

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Oh, black smokers.

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By the way, never mention your email address on the Joe Rogan podcast.

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Because you get these things called black dicks.

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Hundreds of them.

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Thousands of them emailed to you.

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Anyway, it’s a Joe Rogan thing.

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We love Joe.

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So, where was I?

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Black dicks.

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Black smokers.

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Until last month.

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So, okay.

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Dame or demer thing.

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So this came to me in a vision in 2013 after working on it for 36 years.

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So when I was 14 years old, I was walking out in the countryside

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in near Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.

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Anybody know where Kamloops, B.C. is?

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Yay, Canadians.

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Anyway, there was a mariposa lily coming up through the frozen ground,

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and it was so beautiful.

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It was like, wow, look at that structure in my little 14-year-old brain,

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which hadn’t gotten the girl hormones going yet.

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Never quite did. But anyway, help

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me change that, please. It went into mental overdrive because I’m like a super mental

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overdrive type thing. And I do something called endo-tripping, endogenous tripping, which

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I never told Terrence about because he would say, ah, you can’t do it on the natch.

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You know, like, right, I didn’t explain this.

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Anyway, so I started wondering,

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wait a minute, this,

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sorry for the diversion,

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but I know this audience well.

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So the mariposa lily is there

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and I’m like, oh,

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this comes from either a bulb or a seed

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which was much simpler.

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It had to unfurl this beauty

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and this complex structure

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and then I looked around

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there’s all these plants coming up

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oh my god they come from simpler things

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well where do they all come from

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and like boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom

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and so my brain went back through time

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and I thought

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oh this is the most interesting problem there is

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and this is before there was a single computer in our town,

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but I was already a nerd.

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I was already designing board games,

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and I was a coding nerd.

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So I’m going to work on this.

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This is the most interesting problem that ever was.

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Molecules self-assembling to make all this.

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It’s got to be solvable, at least in one lifetime,

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so I’m going to dedicate my entire life

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to this this is what I’m working on and then as I was walking up back toward the house I stopped

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and something was happening and in the sky in the air and sort of third eye air kinds of things like

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right about here uh there was this seething mass of things. Like, oh, hello, what are you?

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Then I realized, oh, thought experiment.

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Yes, I just read about Albert Einstein,

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16-year-old endo-tripper,

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who had his first thought experiment when he was 16.

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He was like, what if I was flying

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or running alongside a beam of light?

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How would the photons and the waves look?

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What would happen?

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How would it compress? Et cetera,? What would happen? How would it

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compress? Et cetera, et cetera. And that led to special relativity. So I thought, okay, I can do

00:19:51 ►

that. This thing just appeared. And it’s like, is it me trying to figure out how the molecules

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self-assembled? And I was just cogitating on this and about to ask it a question. And then it asked

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me a question. And It said, figure out how

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we made a copy of ourselves. Figure out how we made a copy of ourselves. If you’re taking this

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up and you’ve made this intention to work on this for 90 years, this is your fundamental problem.

00:20:17 ►

And so I thought, well, gee, our neighbors have a TR6 Triumph car. It was crappy cars of the 70s.

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have a TR6 Triumph car.

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You know,

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it’s crappy cars of the 70s.

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And it’s a car,

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it’s a machine,

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but it’s made in a bigger thing called a factory.

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And you can’t,

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there can’t be a bigger machine

00:20:32 ►

making you.

00:20:33 ►

So this is impossible.

00:20:35 ►

How do you make a copy yourself?

00:20:36 ►

You need a bigger machine

00:20:37 ►

to make a copy of you.

00:20:38 ►

So you need ever bigger machines

00:20:40 ►

and, you know,

00:20:41 ►

et cetera, et cetera.

00:20:42 ►

And it winked.

00:20:44 ►

Like this.

00:20:44 ►

Over here, it’s this way. It wink winked 36 years it came to me 36 years

00:20:49 ►

later it came to me after a long journey through computational simulation i organized four

00:20:54 ►

conferences in this damn thing this damn problem with richard dawkins and others

00:20:59 ►

built a social network started my phd in 1985 and finished it in 2011.

00:21:05 ►

So there’s hope for you.

00:21:09 ►

I started it on a…

00:21:11 ►

Oh, this is for John.

00:21:12 ►

I started it on a Tektronix terminal,

00:21:14 ►

big scope, three feet deep,

00:21:17 ►

with the ARPANET and a VAX computer.

00:21:20 ►

I said, I can do this.

00:21:21 ►

I can use all this firepower

00:21:23 ►

to solve the mystery of the origin of life

00:21:25 ►

and what complex emergence is.

00:21:28 ►

No.

00:21:29 ►

There was no literature, no nothing.

00:21:31 ►

So I ended up developing something for Star Wars

00:21:34 ►

and then left because it was for Star Wars and it was absurdistan.

00:21:38 ►

So anyway, roll the clock forward.

00:21:41 ►

I did 15 years of work for NASA,

00:21:43 ►

and I can’t show you all this wonderful imagery,

00:21:45 ►

but I did about 25 mission simulations and designs,

00:21:49 ►

including how to land people on an asteroid for them in 2007.

00:21:55 ►

I was the quacky, crazy guy that could get it done for the civil servants.

00:22:00 ►

So, like, they came to my house in 2007, like,

00:22:05 ►

headquarters has asked us to figure out how to take our lunar hardware

00:22:08 ►

and go to other destinations.

00:22:10 ►

I said, isn’t that controversial?

00:22:11 ►

They said, yes, that’s why this is all embargoed.

00:22:14 ►

And they came to my house, my farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains, like,

00:22:17 ►

can you, like, figure this out?

00:22:19 ►

I said, well, wait a minute.

00:22:20 ►

You’ve got the launcher and the thing and the thing and the thing.

00:22:23 ►

What about docking?

00:22:25 ►

What about surface operations?

00:22:27 ►

We can’t figure it out.

00:22:28 ►

We’re civil servants.

00:22:29 ►

We’re not supposed to use our imaginations.

00:22:32 ►

So I figured it out, and it went on.

00:22:35 ►

What we then did was we put it on the cover of Popular Science.

00:22:38 ►

So covers of magazines are a really powerful move, physical magazines.

00:22:43 ►

So six months later, it was out on the cover of Popular Science,

00:22:46 ►

and it showed my design for taking a ship to an asteroid.

00:22:51 ►

First time people would go to another body in the solar system,

00:22:55 ►

other than the moon,

00:22:56 ►

and I had cobbled together all this stuff that would work,

00:22:58 ►

airbag ring, tethered-down system, etc., etc., bits and pieces,

00:23:02 ►

and how the ops would work, and the whole architecture.

00:23:06 ►

And this was all non-NASA.

00:23:09 ►

But there were civil servants and scientists inside that were in cahoots with this,

00:23:12 ►

including our two-star general,

00:23:14 ►

because what we’re going to do is use me as a mechanism to shove it out to the press,

00:23:18 ►

to shove it back to the agency and steer them, and it worked.

00:23:22 ►

So when Obama was elected, ah ah they scrapped the bush moon

00:23:25 ►

plans and they steered straight toward this and everybody remembered this article saying nasa’s

00:23:30 ►

new target which it wasn’t you know you can steer whole frigging federal agencies anyway uh

00:23:37 ►

where now where was i i’m way out in space last month’s breakthrough so

00:23:45 ►

the chemists never liked the deep sea origins

00:23:49 ►

thing

00:23:49 ►

are any of you chemists in the room

00:23:53 ►

have you done

00:23:55 ►

armchair chemists

00:23:57 ►

00:23:58 ►

make things work in chemistry

00:24:01 ►

you have to get them snuggled together

00:24:02 ►

just like personal chemistry

00:24:04 ►

you have to be close to the person and so in the deep, you have to get them snuggled together. Just like personal chemistry, you have to be close to the person.

00:24:06 ►

And so, in the deep

00:24:08 ►

sea, you have stuff coming up and going

00:24:09 ►

into the environment.

00:24:11 ►

And it’s like,

00:24:13 ►

when are the molecules supposed to interact?

00:24:16 ►

Yes, there’s

00:24:17 ►

sulfurous compounds and things.

00:24:19 ►

They’re modern animals eating it.

00:24:21 ►

But how are we supposed to actually get life started

00:24:23 ►

there? Chemists always hated this.

00:24:26 ►

They hated the idea down

00:24:27 ►

their core, their reductionist

00:24:30 ►

core. They hated this ocean origins

00:24:32 ►

thing. They got disgusted with it. 30 years

00:24:34 ►

of funding went down into that

00:24:35 ►

rabbit hole. And then

00:24:38 ►

Dave invented this technique

00:24:40 ►

of drying down solutions,

00:24:43 ►

Darwin’s warm little pond,

00:24:44 ►

and he could form polymers.

00:24:45 ►

He formed RNA up to 150 base pairs long

00:24:49 ►

just by drying his solutions down.

00:24:51 ►

And chemists don’t do that.

00:24:52 ►

Like, dry your solution down?

00:24:54 ►

Why would you do that?

00:24:55 ►

You’re just waiting for one reaction to happen

00:24:57 ►

and then write a paper about it.

00:25:00 ►

And so instead, they said, wait a minute.

00:25:03 ►

Everything in your body that makes you is called a condensation reaction.

00:25:09 ►

DNA and RNA and things like that is a little molecule that floats around that’s used as an energy coin

00:25:16 ►

and it kicks out water so that these things can zipper together.

00:25:20 ►

The condensation reaction because a lot of water leaves.

00:25:23 ►

So proteins, peptides, all these sorts of things.

00:25:26 ►

It turns out that nature invented a technology to dehydrate

00:25:30 ►

to keep life going against being broken down by water.

00:25:35 ►

And the only difference between you and a rock or a straight pond

00:25:38 ►

is that you can dehydrate with solution.

00:25:43 ►

So that’s the first clue.

00:25:47 ►

So Dave said, well, let’s dehydrate our solutions down but let’s pour in something like bathtub soap like a bubble bath soap called phospholipids

00:25:55 ►

or called fatty acid lipids see what happens they were drying down you can see the membranes

00:26:00 ►

floating down to the bottom and in between them is the building blocks of all these polymers, and they go down, down, down, down, down, down.

00:26:05 ►

They form these layers.

00:26:07 ►

And in between the layers, a magic happens.

00:26:10 ►

The polymer building blocks go together, and they pre-stack,

00:26:15 ►

and then as the water’s leaving, as it’s getting really dry,

00:26:18 ►

bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

00:26:20 ►

Ten trillion sequences of RNA, random, done, in 25 minutes.

00:26:24 ►

Boom.

00:26:26 ►

It’s a sequence-generating engine.

00:26:28 ►

Other teams started doing this.

00:26:30 ►

Peptides, the other big building block of life.

00:26:32 ►

Trillions of random sequences.

00:26:34 ►

You can make them in one dry-down cycle, one four-hour cycle.

00:26:37 ►

Like, holy shit.

00:26:39 ►

This is like, it’s the combinatorial explosion.

00:26:42 ►

And then Dave would fill up the dishes again.

00:26:44 ►

We run this in a rotating

00:26:46 ►

system where there’s a

00:26:47 ►

drying station and a wetting station. Dave would

00:26:50 ►

have the squirter fill

00:26:52 ►

it up again. And every time

00:26:54 ►

he did that, the RNA

00:26:55 ►

would get longer and longer and longer and longer.

00:26:58 ►

We started looking at these things under the microscope

00:27:00 ►

and putting stains in. We could see

00:27:02 ►

oh, when we add the

00:27:04 ►

water back in, these outer layers

00:27:06 ►

of this film, of this bathtub ring, bud off trillions of random compartments made out of

00:27:11 ►

the film stuff. And some of them have RNA in them. Look, there’s little dots everywhere.

00:27:18 ►

Whoa. And that’s where Dave had come and had left it. Then one day in December of 2013,

00:27:21 ►

and had left it.

00:27:24 ►

Then one day in December of 2013,

00:27:26 ►

I was doing breath work,

00:27:28 ►

just like this morning here in the tent,

00:27:30 ►

and my yoga,

00:27:32 ►

and suddenly my mind opened,

00:27:34 ►

and I was in the pool.

00:27:37 ►

I was in the ancient pond,

00:27:40 ►

and I was recycling one of these bubbles.

00:27:42 ►

And I realized,

00:27:44 ►

and this may sound like a no-brainer kind of thing this is no-brainer

00:27:45 ►

territory i was like what happens after the bubbles cycle back into solution and i saw one

00:27:50 ►

of them wobbled apart as they do they’re very fragile and then the peptide or whatever it was

00:27:56 ►

this is off it went started busting up another one got you know shocked and crystallized like this

00:28:01 ►

and like oh but there’s. There’s one that’s still

00:28:06 ►

around. I’ll call that

00:28:08 ►

me for a while. It’s still

00:28:10 ►

around. Still around. Still around. Drawing,

00:28:12 ►

drawing, drawing, drawing, drawing. It’s still there. It’s still there.

00:28:14 ►

Oh!

00:28:15 ►

It’s at the bottom of the pond

00:28:17 ►

and it’s with all the other survivors

00:28:19 ►

and now it’s

00:28:22 ►

fusing. Oh my god. It’s fusing,

00:28:24 ►

fusing, fusing, fusing, fusing

00:28:25 ►

and the polymer that was contained in it

00:28:27 ►

took the full ride.

00:28:29 ►

It took the whole trip

00:28:30 ►

and then it went back into the smudgy layers

00:28:35 ►

because it all fused back into layers

00:28:36 ►

and now it’s going around again.

00:28:39 ►

Whoa, the same polymer is going for another ride.

00:28:43 ►

A copy of it got made along the way.

00:28:45 ►

See something called templating.

00:28:47 ►

And now it’s going, now there’s two of them.

00:28:49 ►

Now there’s two protocells with the same polymer in them,

00:28:52 ►

and they’re stable, and it’s going back down.

00:28:54 ►

And there’s a whole population of ones that were selected for,

00:28:57 ►

and when they fuse, the polymer joins that one.

00:29:00 ►

Now there’s two sets of polymers, and they’re going through again,

00:29:03 ►

and there’s one that makes a pore. There’s one that now is doing metabolism. There’s one that’s doing

00:29:08 ►

structure and it’s going around and around and it is the Genesis engine. The Genesis

00:29:16 ►

engine. So I rushed upstairs, drew drawings, wrote an email to Dave and said, this is what

00:29:23 ►

I saw. And his instant response was, you have

00:29:27 ►

found it. You have found the kinetic trap that we’ve been looking for to allow us to surf entropy,

00:29:33 ►

to defeat the second law of thermodynamics that’s always breaking shit down, and surf our way up and

00:29:39 ►

up and up to more complexity with selection. And it’s just a natural physical thing

00:29:45 ►

that the universe provided us,

00:29:46 ►

which is called a pond.

00:29:48 ►

And drying and wetting from the rotation of the planet,

00:29:51 ►

the planet’s going around the sun,

00:29:53 ►

and it’s this beautiful cycle that pumps

00:29:55 ►

at the right frequency.

00:29:57 ►

And then the all-important thing,

00:29:59 ►

which Darwin didn’t see, was hot springs.

00:30:02 ►

So in the landscape,

00:30:04 ►

you see there’s an old Faithful geyser there. It’s pumping

00:30:07 ►

into the pools on like 23 minutes or what is Old Faithful, 73 minutes or something. So regular

00:30:14 ►

because water sinks down into hot chambers, boils, and then comes up. Like clockwork, you can set

00:30:21 ►

your watch to these things. This is nature’s chemistry lab, hot springs,

00:30:26 ►

and it’s where we like to put our bodies now and then.

00:30:29 ►

So we had found a system and a landscape that could do this job.

00:30:35 ►

So the next phase was to put it out to science

00:30:39 ►

and promote this as this grand theory,

00:30:42 ►

which we now have as a brand-new theory for the origin of life on Earth.

00:30:46 ►

It’s testable in the lab with low-cost reagents.

00:30:49 ►

You can do it yourself at home in your kitchen if you wanted to.

00:30:53 ►

It’s now out.

00:30:55 ►

It was out to our field, and last month at our ISOL meeting,

00:30:59 ►

International Society for Origin of Life at UC San Diego.

00:31:02 ►

It’s only every three years.

00:31:04 ►

Dave was like a superstar

00:31:05 ►

because he was the father of the wet-dry cycle,

00:31:07 ►

which allowed chemists to now make biopolymers

00:31:10 ►

and start the process.

00:31:12 ►

And I presented this whole model

00:31:14 ►

in front of the meeting for the fourth time

00:31:16 ►

to all our colleagues,

00:31:17 ►

and they’re getting it now.

00:31:19 ►

Aha!

00:31:20 ►

You need combinatorial selection.

00:31:22 ►

You can’t just do one reaction.

00:31:23 ►

You need a system.

00:31:24 ►

So all these old ideas of the RNA world first

00:31:28 ►

and then the such and such,

00:31:30 ►

then happening linear thinking,

00:31:32 ►

I said, no, this is a chemical operating system

00:31:34 ►

that can boot up the living world simultaneously.

00:31:38 ►

All the functions at once.

00:31:39 ►

It’s a machine.

00:31:40 ►

It’s an engine.

00:31:41 ►

And we’re still living in that engine.

00:31:44 ►

We’re still in this engine. So we

00:31:46 ►

had a dry four years in California. You notice how when we had that first massive rainfall,

00:31:53 ►

what happens is the field suddenly, there’s a period where the rainfall distributes everything.

00:32:00 ►

Seeds, winds blow seeds and spores everywhere, and then the soils come alive, right?

00:32:06 ►

They become the moist phase of the little bubbles at the bottom of the dish.

00:32:11 ►

Because I realized in a trip to Australia,

00:32:14 ►

standing on a petroglyph,

00:32:16 ►

and I was looking down,

00:32:18 ►

and it’s the oldest rock carvings in the planet,

00:32:20 ►

80,000 years, some of them,

00:32:21 ►

and there was this weird little shoe leather-like thing.

00:32:24 ►

And the geologist,

00:32:25 ►

Martin van Crenadonck, came by and said, that’s a desert

00:32:28 ►

mat, mate.

00:32:30 ►

And, you know,

00:32:32 ►

if you hydrate that, it’ll

00:32:33 ►

come alive instantly. So I did.

00:32:35 ►

I poured my drinking water on it. It was like,

00:32:37 ►

my God, look at that. This is instantly

00:32:39 ►

alive. But it was sitting there for a year,

00:32:42 ►

several years of drought, all

00:32:44 ►

ready to go. And I realized

00:32:45 ►

this squishy thing is like the stromatolites we just touched at Shark Bay, 2000 K to the south,

00:32:52 ►

feels the same. And suddenly, this is the common ancestor. The common ancestor is a community,

00:32:59 ►

not an individual. So let’s roll the clock forward a little bit more. Does that make sense to people?

00:33:06 ►

So as the chemistry started to work, as the combinatorial thing started to work,

00:33:11 ►

a philosophical idea emerged that we did not come from competing individuals. We came from

00:33:17 ►

a collaborative network of simple things that were donating innovations and tools to a communal

00:33:23 ►

structure. And I actually presented this to Dave in different language,

00:33:27 ►

because he’s a full-on scientist.

00:33:30 ►

I’m just this kind of mystic scientist,

00:33:32 ►

sort of on the boundaries between everything.

00:33:35 ►

And I said, in his language,

00:33:38 ►

given that the protocells collect at the bottom,

00:33:42 ►

forming a moist layer,

00:33:44 ►

now with lots of concentrated stuff because you’re drying down.

00:33:47 ►

Metabolism could start, and as soon as those little guys can glue themselves together,

00:33:52 ►

they can move as a raft.

00:33:54 ►

They can flow into other pools, and that’s what we show on this Genesis landscape.

00:33:59 ►

And then they get into other pools, and they can evolve different features

00:34:03 ►

and share them with other colonies in other pools

00:34:05 ►

and he said that would be selected for so that’s the scientific checkbox that would be selected

00:34:12 ►

for over an individual that’s fragile so in the haitian earth at 4.3 billion years if you’re an

00:34:19 ►

individual protocell you’re not going to be around long. You’ve got asteroid impacts nonstop. You’ve got acid rain.

00:34:25 ►

You’ve got 40-foot tides.

00:34:28 ►

The moon is an eighth of the sky, right?

00:34:31 ►

It’s a really tough environment.

00:34:33 ►

So you’ve got to huddle together to make this thing go.

00:34:36 ►

That’s what’s in that rock that I just held up.

00:34:39 ►

So that all became, oh, well, this naturally works.

00:34:42 ►

A symbiotic start, a communal unit,

00:34:46 ►

is the unit behind the microbial community is itself a community,

00:34:51 ►

which was lifted into existence out of physics,

00:34:55 ►

out of a physical system in a beautiful way,

00:34:57 ►

where the physics started to say, hey, I’ve been around 13 billion years,

00:35:01 ►

and all I’ve been able to do is on-off.

00:35:04 ►

The universe goes on-off, on-off, on-off, on-off, on-on-off.

00:35:07 ►

You know, stars form, they blow up.

00:35:08 ►

And the physicists have been looking for information in physics forever,

00:35:11 ►

and they haven’t been able to find it.

00:35:13 ►

But suddenly, physics is like rockingly cool.

00:35:17 ►

You give me a wiggly little soap bubble molecule, which creates a container.

00:35:22 ►

The stuff goes into the container container which makes things more probable.

00:35:25 ►

It’s a probability engine.

00:35:27 ►

And then you can grow these long chain things

00:35:29 ►

that store information.

00:35:30 ►

It’s like, oh, physics.

00:35:31 ►

We got information now.

00:35:33 ►

We got memory.

00:35:34 ►

And now, oh, we got messaging.

00:35:36 ►

And that’s what the living world is.

00:35:38 ►

It’s a combination of three things,

00:35:40 ►

three properties.

00:35:42 ►

And I was invited to the

00:35:43 ►

Science of Consciousness Conference in June,

00:35:46 ►

speaking between Deepak Chopra and Stuart Hameroff

00:35:50 ►

in the closing plenary.

00:35:52 ►

And in December, I thought,

00:35:54 ►

I know F all about consciousness.

00:35:56 ►

Every time I pick up a book about consciousness, it’s like,

00:35:59 ►

uh…

00:36:00 ►

And I sort of concluded, should I even do this talk?

00:36:05 ►

Because consciousness is too big to study, and we’re inside it,

00:36:08 ►

so we affect it all the time.

00:36:10 ►

And I thought, the only way I can add anything to this meeting

00:36:13 ►

is rewind life to its boot-up principles, find properties,

00:36:18 ►

and then wind those forward,

00:36:20 ►

and maybe those properties explain everything we’re in,

00:36:23 ►

which is what I did taking

00:36:25 ►

a special tea one night. So special tea one night and came down off the mountain and it was time to

00:36:31 ►

do science. And I said to the entity, the entity, can you like, I asked it, is it necessary that there’s a dude standing there

00:36:47 ►

at the origin of life when the first things are assembling

00:36:50 ►

that that white-haired dude says,

00:36:53 ►

move that carbon atom five angstroms to the left?

00:36:56 ►

And the T said, no, that’s an unnecessary complication.

00:37:03 ►

A familiar, an old friend

00:37:07 ►

appearing in New Guys.

00:37:10 ►

Anyway, so, and it said,

00:37:13 ►

let me show you how you were made.

00:37:15 ►

And it showed me this undulating plane,

00:37:18 ►

said this is pure physics.

00:37:19 ►

You push down here,

00:37:21 ►

it undulates over there.

00:37:22 ►

It’s pre-statable, it’s predictable.

00:37:24 ►

Boom, boom, boom.

00:37:26 ►

And then the little divot opened up like a golf divot in a golf course.

00:37:30 ►

And it was a membranous structure.

00:37:32 ►

So I looked at it, and a molecule approached the membrane, went through,

00:37:35 ►

had a little smudgy, sexy interaction with something.

00:37:39 ►

And then I looked back up, and there was a Cartesian plot.

00:37:42 ►

So yes, T’s can give you a Cartesian plot.

00:37:45 ►

Descartes himself was shown these plots

00:37:47 ►

by an angel, by the way.

00:37:49 ►

Mystic scientists do make a difference.

00:37:52 ►

And then they trap us in

00:37:53 ►

Cartesian plots

00:37:55 ►

forever.

00:37:57 ►

So I saw this curve going up.

00:37:59 ►

Boom! And it had the

00:38:01 ►

letter P. And I said,

00:38:03 ►

what’s that? And it said, that’s probability.

00:38:06 ►

T again.

00:38:09 ►

So I said, well, what’s going on?

00:38:11 ►

Oh, I get it.

00:38:12 ►

If you have this little container,

00:38:14 ►

something goes inside it,

00:38:15 ►

it happens more likely than outside.

00:38:17 ►

It can’t happen outside.

00:38:19 ►

Oh, it’s a probability machine.

00:38:21 ►

It’s making things more likely.

00:38:23 ►

Oh, and then it said, okay, sit down.

00:38:26 ►

And I said, I’m lying down.

00:38:28 ►

And it showed me a whole bunch of more protocells

00:38:32 ►

snuggling up to each other,

00:38:33 ►

and there were little dips between them.

00:38:34 ►

Dip, dip, dip, dip, dip.

00:38:36 ►

And there were polymers and molecules

00:38:37 ►

flying back and forth.

00:38:39 ►

And then it showed another plot that said,

00:38:41 ►

I, going to infinity, like super fast.

00:38:45 ►

It said, that’s the interactome.

00:38:47 ►

That’s messaging.

00:38:49 ►

I tell you, he tells her, she tells the friend, everything, and the gossip goes around.

00:38:55 ►

So, oh, okay.

00:38:56 ►

Well, okay.

00:38:58 ►

And I’m lying down, and now there’s trillions of protocells.

00:39:01 ►

And then there’s another plot in the distance going straight up, and it has a question mark.

00:39:06 ►

And the T asked me, what do you think that it is?

00:39:10 ►

I said, I don’t know, some kind of memory?

00:39:13 ►

He said, bingo, paternum, memory, first genetic structure.

00:39:20 ►

And then what it did is it swept that field clean,

00:39:24 ►

and it showed me the triangle

00:39:25 ►

probability engine begets interaction between things

00:39:30 ►

begets the memory of those interactions

00:39:33 ►

begets more probable things

00:39:35 ►

and goes around and around

00:39:36 ►

and it started going faster and faster and faster

00:39:39 ►

and boom it exploded into this thing

00:39:42 ►

it said the field

00:39:43 ►

ta-da in neon

00:39:44 ►

the field which ta-da, in neon.

00:39:47 ►

The field which you’re in,

00:39:50 ►

and then it grabbed my shirt collar.

00:39:53 ►

These experiences always end up by grabbing my shirt collar.

00:39:55 ►

That’s why I always wear collared shirts.

00:39:59 ►

And it said, yeah, you listen, and you listen good.

00:40:02 ►

That’s the field.

00:40:03 ►

That’s what made you. That’s what creates all experience.

00:40:06 ►

Don’t name it.

00:40:07 ►

You’re like at the first,

00:40:10 ►

you came across a mole hill,

00:40:12 ►

and you say, oh, mountain range.

00:40:15 ►

You know, let’s name it.

00:40:16 ►

Let’s define everything.

00:40:18 ►

And you’re not even looking up

00:40:19 ►

to see that you have a long way to go

00:40:20 ►

before you get to the Himalayas.

00:40:22 ►

Don’t name it.

00:40:24 ►

Just experience it.

00:40:26 ►

And you are the most precious

00:40:28 ►

and the most exquisite instruments into this field

00:40:31 ►

that has ever been created by evolution.

00:40:35 ►

You’re it.

00:40:36 ►

And so that’s what I presented

00:40:38 ►

at the Science of Consciousness conference.

00:40:41 ►

And it didn’t go down like a lead balloon,

00:40:43 ►

it actually sort of floated. And now

00:40:45 ►

that we’re presenting this again at the Science and Nonduality Conference, full of

00:40:49 ►

non-dual people, I have no idea what a non-dual, what’s a non-dual person?

00:40:56 ►

You know, what is that? Anyway, nobody knows. We’re not separate. Okay, I need to talk to this man later to prepare for this.

00:41:06 ►

So where are we?

00:41:08 ►

Where should we go next?

00:41:10 ►

Ah, here’s the pay dirt for you guys.

00:41:16 ►

And I just presented this at Burners Without Borders.

00:41:19 ►

Because Burners Without Borders is actually taking Burning Man things

00:41:22 ►

and doing things in the world, which is just tremendous.

00:41:26 ►

It started at our camp in 2005 with the Katrina relief effort that we did

00:41:30 ►

by taking over a military satellite and tracking the progress.

00:41:35 ►

And you know there’s another hurricane that’s destroying Houston right now?

00:41:37 ►

Did you know that?

00:41:39 ►

It’s terrible.

00:41:40 ►

I mean, the hurricane came ashore, and it turned around, and it’s back.

00:41:44 ►

It went back over Houston.

00:41:45 ►

It’s a disaster right now in Houston.

00:41:48 ►

So if anybody’s from that area, it brings back memories about Katrina,

00:41:52 ►

which is, of course, New Orleans.

00:41:55 ►

You know, Joan Baez came by our camp, and we showed her the satellite imagery,

00:41:58 ►

and she just burst into tears.

00:42:00 ►

And that’s when we held a concert at the temple,

00:42:02 ►

and that created Burners Without Borders

00:42:04 ►

because every dollar we collected went to burners who couldn’t get home.

00:42:09 ►

So there may be burners around that are from the Houston area

00:42:12 ►

or from Galveston or whatnot that can’t get home,

00:42:14 ►

so be sensitive to that, that they have this information.

00:42:19 ►

So here we are.

00:42:21 ►

Our civilization is at a crux point.

00:42:25 ►

The story of separateness, you know how Ram Dass talks about being here now?

00:42:31 ►

Everyone read Be Here Now as a thing?

00:42:34 ►

It’s a beautiful thing, and he’s a beautiful man.

00:42:36 ►

He’s like the real deal, right?

00:42:38 ►

When he becomes a schmuck, he says, I’m now a schmuck again.

00:42:41 ►

35 years of spiritual training has gone out the door.

00:42:43 ►

He admits to all this, right?

00:42:45 ►

And now he’s in a wheelchair, and he says in his last book called Still Here,

00:42:51 ►

he says, because I’m wheelchair-bound, I need help to take a shit.

00:42:55 ►

I am so here.

00:42:57 ►

I’m so grateful for everything that’s done.

00:42:59 ►

It made him more here than he’d ever been.

00:43:03 ►

Beautiful man.

00:43:04 ►

But one of the things he talks about is separateness,

00:43:07 ►

the illusion of separateness.

00:43:09 ►

There’s a great speech that’s been put on a million music tracks about,

00:43:14 ►

I was in the illusion of separateness for 35 years.

00:43:19 ►

And so he’s a professor at Harvard.

00:43:20 ►

He’s just getting fired, right?

00:43:22 ►

Just getting fired for giving psilocybin to, like, who was it?

00:43:26 ►

Andrew Weil, right?

00:43:28 ►

Younger undergraduate.

00:43:30 ►

Scored psilocybin from, or something like that.

00:43:33 ►

So he gets fired from Harvard,

00:43:34 ►

and he goes into this quest of leaving the old Richard Alpert behind.

00:43:39 ►

The shell, the pilot, the Jewish upper middle class,

00:43:43 ►

you know, sort of putz, academic, whatever, know-it-all,

00:43:48 ►

and he becomes something new.

00:43:50 ►

He doesn’t know what that is.

00:43:51 ►

He’s like, all he knows is it’s not the Richard Alpert he was, and it is non-dual.

00:43:57 ►

It is about, he connects with everything through Zinareem Karoli Baba, right? The guru in India.

00:44:05 ►

So Richard Albert helped launch the 60s for us

00:44:08 ►

and launch the good things that came out of the 60s.

00:44:11 ►

But what he talks about, for 35 years,

00:44:14 ►

I was in the illusion of separateness.

00:44:16 ►

I was a body made as a spaceship to go through life

00:44:20 ►

and go through the universe separate,

00:44:23 ►

you know, my own life support systems and that all

00:44:26 ►

fell away that day and he became ram das and he wrote be here now and all these these guides

00:44:31 ►

and i think this is the primary challenge of our time of the 21st century is the story of

00:44:38 ►

separateness and the story of unity, of community.

00:44:48 ►

So separateness is created by fake news, right?

00:44:49 ►

Fake news divides.

00:44:53 ►

You know, it’s a powerful tool of separateness, right?

00:44:57 ►

It also confuses people so much they don’t even know who they are, right?

00:45:00 ►

So that’s a powerful weapon that’s come into the noosphere.

00:45:03 ►

It’s fighting, and Michael can talk much better about this it’s an enormous psychic, intellectual psychic

00:45:07 ►

schmutz battle that’s going on for our minds and our souls and our hearts

00:45:12 ►

and really the only thing that you can use inside yourself

00:45:15 ►

you have a barometer that’s impeccable

00:45:18 ►

the barometer is does this make me feel separate from the world

00:45:21 ►

or that group or that person or that idea

00:45:24 ►

and make me feel separate from the world or that group or that person or that idea and make me feel

00:45:26 ►

uncomfortable or does it make me feel better about things does it make me feel more bonded in and

00:45:32 ►

more empowered and that’s how how you defend yourself like a samurai against fake news

00:45:37 ►

is it a story of separateness doesn’t matter who’s promulgated doesn’t matter you know all the

00:45:43 ►

factoids whether it’s this conspiracy or that

00:45:46 ►

or some politician or some commercial advertising.

00:45:48 ►

Does it make you feel separate?

00:45:50 ►

Right, that’s our real power as a community.

00:45:53 ►

Burning Man breaks down the walls of separateness.

00:45:56 ►

New Yorkers are making eye contact here.

00:46:00 ►

Huh?

00:46:01 ►

And it’s not new agey kind of gooey, doughy eye contact.

00:46:05 ►

It’s like real, when you’re making an eye contact with somebody from Brooklyn or Bed-Stuy,

00:46:11 ►

you got eye contact.

00:46:13 ►

So look for them.

00:46:14 ►

There’s probably some Bed-Stuy people here.

00:46:17 ►

Super powerful.

00:46:18 ►

No bullshit or all bullshit.

00:46:22 ►

The kiss my ass type of eye contact.

00:46:20 ►

All bullshit.

00:46:24 ►

The kiss my ass type of eye contact.

00:46:33 ►

So to show you how the arrival of this idea is critical to our time,

00:46:34 ►

I’ll roll the clock back.

00:46:36 ►

And how much time is on the clock?

00:46:38 ►

Oh, we’re fine.

00:46:48 ►

So fuzzy-haired Albert Einstein published his three papers in some German physics journal in 1905.

00:46:49 ►

It was his miracle year.

00:46:51 ►

He went to sleep for two weeks after that.

00:46:52 ►

Did you know that?

00:46:55 ►

His landlady would bring him tea.

00:46:58 ►

He just was so exhausted from that, that output. And then in 1916, he developed general relativity, mainlining T in his apartment in wartime Berlin.

00:47:06 ►

In 1919, his theory was tested in an eclipse.

00:47:11 ►

Eclipse, a totality viewed over a wide swath of the world where there were astronomers on ships,

00:47:19 ►

and they saw a star in a different position, which supported general relativity, that space bent the light.

00:47:25 ►

So suddenly, Einstein’s a superstar.

00:47:28 ►

He was the first scientific rock star.

00:47:31 ►

And what happened was,

00:47:32 ►

he’s a gregarious fellow.

00:47:34 ►

He’s a hilarious, joking guy.

00:47:37 ►

He was good on camera, the whole thing,

00:47:39 ►

and he got sponsored for a tour of America.

00:47:41 ►

He came to America in 1921.

00:47:44 ►

He was in open-top Model A cars going,

00:47:46 ►

there was people waving flags at this fuzzy,

00:47:48 ►

and nobody understood.

00:47:49 ►

You know, supposedly only five people

00:47:51 ►

understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.

00:47:54 ►

But what happened was there was a huge transition

00:47:57 ►

going on at the time, modernism.

00:47:59 ►

You know about modernism, the Bauhaus and Stravinsky

00:48:03 ►

and all these things.

00:48:04 ►

After World War I, it shook the foundations of the regal state.

00:48:09 ►

You know, World War I really blew out a lot of the foundations.

00:48:11 ►

And then so men in black suits appeared in the 1920s called fascists.

00:48:16 ►

But they were considered the modern people to replace the corrupt old kaisers and kings and queens and stuff.

00:48:21 ►

We want modernism. And so the whole world of the 1920s

00:48:26 ►

was sort of dissonance and unpredictability

00:48:28 ►

and the arrival of radio and telephone

00:48:31 ►

and all this information overload

00:48:32 ►

and that people were under and stock prices.

00:48:34 ►

And it was a very disorienting time.

00:48:37 ►

But into it came relativity,

00:48:39 ►

that everything’s relative.

00:48:40 ►

There are no grounds.

00:48:41 ►

There are no bases.

00:48:42 ►

There’s no root anywhere.

00:48:43 ►

And so that was what his theory did for the 1920s into the 1930s.

00:48:50 ►

And actually, in one particular parade in the Midwest,

00:48:54 ►

Albert Einstein’s sitting next to Charlie Chaplin.

00:48:57 ►

Charlie Chaplin, who, and there’s just all this flag-waving, you know,

00:49:02 ►

cheer, cheer, cheer, The great professor’s coming through.

00:49:05 ►

And he turns to Chaplin and says,

00:49:08 ►

what does this all mean?

00:49:12 ►

And Chaplin turned to him and said,

00:49:14 ►

absolutely nothing.

00:49:17 ►

So anyway, I met Bill Murray at the gate

00:49:20 ►

who gave me a hot dog

00:49:22 ►

with a, I still have the wrapper, it says, no one will believe you,

00:49:29 ►

Bill Murray. So comedians have infested Burning Man. It’s a crisis, but anyway, so I’m now going

00:49:38 ►

to do a 19, 2021 tour in an open-top car, and you’re all invited to bring the gospel, the good news, of a new idea,

00:49:49 ►

which is like relativity that can come into our world as our world is super confused, right?

00:49:55 ►

1917 was a super confused time.

00:49:57 ►

Russian Revolution, World War I, super confused.

00:50:01 ►

New radical revolutionaries popping up everywhere.

00:50:04 ►

In the 1920s, they cemented it in many fields.

00:50:08 ►

I think that we’re kind of in that time period now.

00:50:10 ►

We don’t have a hot war, but we have a cyber war going on.

00:50:13 ►

We have a war for our minds.

00:50:15 ►

We have a trenches war going on right now.

00:50:17 ►

We’re electing mad people so that the mad people can tear down the system.

00:50:21 ►

But if they tear down the entire system, we don’t have an air traffic control system.

00:50:26 ►

If all the agencies are suddenly gone, we can’t afford that.

00:50:30 ►

But there’s a wrecking crew in place, which was the case in 1917.

00:50:35 ►

There’s wrecking crews everywhere.

00:50:37 ►

So in order to have a revolution in the 20s, the 2020s,

00:50:41 ►

we need these powerful new ideas that are coming up.

00:50:44 ►

One of them is psychedelics as medicine.

00:50:47 ►

Tremendously powerful tools for healing PTSD and everything.

00:50:51 ►

We just heard Rick Doblin talk about that.

00:50:53 ►

That’s one of the trends that’s coming up.

00:50:55 ►

We have AIs, the things that Michael would talk about.

00:50:58 ►

We have powerful, powerful tools that are both inner psychedelic and neuronal,

00:51:03 ►

and then we have digital, you know, ethereal tools.

00:51:07 ►

We have energy healing.

00:51:08 ►

We have breath work.

00:51:09 ►

We have all this stuff.

00:51:10 ►

We’re completely networked.

00:51:12 ►

So this is setting the stage for an incredible renaissance in the 1920s.

00:51:18 ►

I think one of those pieces is going to be this,

00:51:21 ►

because if science, you science, so our fundamental theory

00:51:25 ►

that all emergence,

00:51:27 ►

all emergence,

00:51:29 ►

comes from a network

00:51:30 ►

of collaborating entities,

00:51:32 ►

such as little squiggly protocells,

00:51:34 ►

such as burners building the city,

00:51:36 ►

such as your spleen

00:51:38 ►

working with your liver.

00:51:40 ►

They’re not strictly competing.

00:51:42 ►

We don’t come from

00:51:43 ►

survival of the fittest,

00:51:44 ►

a term which Darwin hated.

00:51:46 ►

He detested this,

00:51:47 ►

and he was convinced to use this in his later publications

00:51:50 ►

because he was accused of natural selection being there’s a selector.

00:51:58 ►

So he was accused.

00:51:59 ►

So he adopted survival of the fittest.

00:52:02 ►

And this term is very destructive.

00:52:04 ►

It’s a powerful meme

00:52:06 ►

and it’s fake news.

00:52:08 ►

So if you will entertain me,

00:52:10 ►

I’ll tell you one more story

00:52:12 ►

about the…

00:52:14 ►

Would you like one more story

00:52:15 ►

about the T?

00:52:17 ►

A T story?

00:52:20 ►

Is T-Fairy here?

00:52:22 ►

T-Fairy, are you here?

00:52:24 ►

T-Fairy’s on the mission.

00:52:26 ►

She’s doing it out in advance of us.

00:52:29 ►

So here is how this whole thing rolled philosophy for me.

00:52:34 ►

And here’s why it’s a Copernican revolution underway.

00:52:38 ►

So Copernicus was a Polish astronomer

00:52:40 ►

that decided through observation

00:52:42 ►

that the planets went around the sun, not the earth.

00:52:45 ►

And he published his, I think he published his work posthumously so he didn’t lose his head or

00:52:49 ►

his grant funding, something like that, you know. And two years ago, as we were first presenting

00:52:54 ►

this to our field, somebody said, this is a Copernican revolution. It’s not just a scientific

00:52:59 ►

revolution. I said, well, what do you mean? He said, because you’re centering the very idea of emergent phenomena,

00:53:06 ►

not around competing entities that are battling it out for dominance,

00:53:10 ►

but around a collaborative network.

00:53:12 ►

It’s a huge re-centering.

00:53:14 ►

I said, well, what do you mean?

00:53:15 ►

Well, he said, watch this.

00:53:18 ►

Metaphysics.

00:53:18 ►

It goes way up into metaphysics.

00:53:20 ►

And one of the great metaphysicians that we have is Ken Wilber.

00:53:24 ►

Anybody read the work of Ken Wilber?

00:53:26 ►

Spiral dynamics and all this

00:53:28 ►

wonderful integrative stuff.

00:53:30 ►

So, a month ago,

00:53:32 ►

just before leaving for the Eclipse Festival,

00:53:34 ►

I got a 10-page email from Ken Wilber

00:53:36 ►

who says,

00:53:37 ►

your spiral model completes my work.

00:53:41 ►

It shows that

00:53:42 ►

spirals go all the way down

00:53:43 ►

in the system that I envisioned over 40 years,

00:53:46 ►

all the way to the root point. Like, whoa. And I didn’t read much of his work, but he wrote these

00:53:52 ►

pieces to educate me quickly. And now I’m in a dialogue with Ken Wilber about, what about the

00:53:58 ►

sixth and seventh spiral that go up? And Ken Wilber is saying, well, there’s still subject

00:54:03 ►

observer. And I said, Ken, if you wind this thing down to the progenot,

00:54:07 ►

down to the cycling system,

00:54:08 ►

there’s no subject and object.

00:54:10 ►

That may be an invention of us for convenience.

00:54:14 ►

There isn’t a subject object.

00:54:16 ►

This is all a kind of Taoist thing, yin and yang.

00:54:20 ►

We’ve invented that convenience of separateness

00:54:23 ►

to study things,

00:54:24 ►

but it’s actually a bit of a red herring. So that’s where we’ve invented that convenience of separateness to study things, but it’s actually a bit of a red herring.

00:54:28 ►

So that’s where we’ve left it.

00:54:29 ►

He hasn’t written back yet.

00:54:30 ►

Because fundamentally, he holds on to subject-object as a thing.

00:54:35 ►

So that’s metaphysics.

00:54:37 ►

You already heard about consciousness and the triangle

00:54:39 ►

that could create all experience.

00:54:42 ►

It rolls into AI.

00:54:44 ►

So AI is hamstrung because computers are like hourglasses.

00:54:49 ►

This is what I explained to Terence McKenna one night at his house in Hawaii.

00:54:52 ►

Because Terence would talk about, well, you know,

00:54:56 ►

it’s just the intelligence is going to come through the wormhole.

00:54:59 ►

No, the Internet.

00:55:00 ►

And it will be so smart so quickly it’s going to take us all

00:55:04 ►

and we’re going to go in a forward escape through this.

00:55:06 ►

Remember all that language?

00:55:08 ►

And I would sit there in 1999 at his house and say,

00:55:12 ►

Terrence, are you serious?

00:55:15 ►

Are you serious?

00:55:16 ►

You’re kidding, right?

00:55:17 ►

You’re kidding.

00:55:18 ►

Because you got this out of an article in Omni magazine

00:55:20 ►

and this out of such and such

00:55:21 ►

and you don’t write code

00:55:23 ►

and your Mac is sitting over there.

00:55:25 ►

So I gave him an analogy that the Mac is like an hourglass.

00:55:29 ►

It paints pixels on the screen like sand grains, which then come down through a thin pipe called

00:55:34 ►

a processor down to a hard drive, which picks up more sand grains.

00:55:38 ►

And then they go back up.

00:55:39 ►

Whereas a glass of water that’s sitting right on this table is computationally rockingly more powerful than that,

00:55:47 ►

except it uses a different basis.

00:55:49 ►

It’s a random bouncing around basis,

00:55:51 ►

which coding people hate because nothing’s happening most of the time.

00:55:55 ►

So I think I got it through to Terrence

00:55:57 ►

that computer systems are terrible at things that are to do with biology.

00:56:01 ►

They’re terrible. They’re the wrong tool.

00:56:03 ►

They have almost no properties that the biological system uses

00:56:06 ►

for open-ended emergence.

00:56:08 ►

I held four freaking conferences on this

00:56:10 ►

to try to solve this.

00:56:12 ►

I ran a nine-month simulation

00:56:14 ►

at UC San Diego

00:56:16 ►

to try to find how to complexify

00:56:19 ►

in noisy spaces.

00:56:20 ►

I mean, I did my homework.

00:56:22 ►

Computers ain’t there.

00:56:24 ►

There is no AI possible.

00:56:26 ►

What you’re seeing is just nifty little algorithms

00:56:29 ►

that are good at doing searches through tables quickly

00:56:31 ►

and doing things.

00:56:33 ►

It’s like there’s no AI there.

00:56:34 ►

It’s just, you kick it, it’ll hard lock up.

00:56:38 ►

But this model of complex symbiotic emergence

00:56:41 ►

will teach us how to build true AIs,

00:56:44 ►

true AIs in the future that are capable of open-ended learning.

00:56:48 ►

So that rolls into that.

00:56:49 ►

Physics, this rolls down spoken hub model.

00:56:53 ►

It rolls into physics.

00:56:54 ►

Like the physicists now have a pathway where physics manifests information in the cosmos,

00:56:59 ►

and that seems to be important for them for some reason.

00:57:02 ►

Now, and then in political economy, right?

00:57:05 ►

What are the messages that you get

00:57:07 ►

through commercial advertising, the message you

00:57:09 ►

get through so-called leadership?

00:57:12 ►

Gotta fight. Gotta get

00:57:13 ►

your stock options in the can

00:57:15 ►

at your company before the

00:57:17 ►

stupid investors come and tank your

00:57:19 ►

stock. You gotta get mine. I gotta get mine.

00:57:22 ►

I gotta get mine. It’s a scarcity

00:57:23 ►

economy, it was said in this room.

00:57:26 ►

You know, fight, fight, fight, compete,

00:57:28 ►

compete, compete. You know, and it keeps

00:57:30 ►

you separate, and it keeps you working hard.

00:57:32 ►

Right? So you’ve heard all that

00:57:33 ►

before, but what this rolls is

00:57:35 ►

from hardcore, hard-nosed reduction

00:57:37 ►

of science comes, oh, the power

00:57:40 ►

in any system is due to its network

00:57:41 ►

potential and its collaboration

00:57:43 ►

and sharing.

00:57:45 ►

Sharing.

00:57:51 ►

So I’ll conclude this little segment with the last tea story.

00:57:52 ►

The last tea story.

00:57:56 ►

So the, it’s pretty darn hot in here.

00:58:00 ►

So I took another tea one night.

00:58:04 ►

This was in the Andes with a fellow named Dennis McKenna.

00:58:05 ►

You know Dennis McKenna?

00:58:13 ►

I was making so many weird utterances that the next morning Dennis said,

00:58:21 ►

that was the most alien thing I’ve ever heard. And I said, from you, that’s a grand compliment.

00:58:27 ►

So I took this tea and when it had its way with me and it was done,

00:58:29 ►

then you have the opening of the dome.

00:58:32 ►

You know, whatever it is, it’s some kind of a dome.

00:58:35 ►

And beyond that dome is the cosmos.

00:58:39 ►

And our shaman was so good, he could take the harmonica,

00:58:43 ►

and he would do these stomps, and he would play the tones. If you were paying attention, he was cracking the dome.

00:58:46 ►

Oh, my God.

00:58:47 ►

He would play these wailing sounds, and he was bringing in the big thing.

00:58:51 ►

Not the little healing thing, not the snakes, not all that thing, the big thing.

00:58:55 ►

And I was like, oh, my God.

00:58:57 ►

And this light came in through the dome, and it’s too much for monkey consciousness,

00:59:02 ►

but you can behold it for periods of time, like an eclipse, right?

00:59:05 ►

Before the beam comes back.

00:59:07 ►

And then you would pull back because you knew it was too much for us.

00:59:10 ►

So these are great spaces to do work in.

00:59:14 ►

So when you get through with the, you know, now it’s time for peer review.

00:59:18 ►

So I sit back.

00:59:21 ►

Okay, here’s where we are in the model.

00:59:23 ►

The protocells are going through wet, dry, and moist.

00:59:25 ►

Wet, dry, and moist.

00:59:26 ►

And I was seeing it from the side.

00:59:28 ►

And the T said, are you sitting down?

00:59:32 ►

It always asks that question because it’s going to be a big one.

00:59:34 ►

I’m lying down, I reply.

00:59:36 ►

I’m lying down.

00:59:38 ►

So what she does, he, it, you know, whatever it is,

00:59:43 ►

rotates that cycle of protocells to like this,

00:59:48 ►

cuts a plane through it, takes the Z buffer out for you computer graphics people. And I now don’t

00:59:54 ►

see the cycle from a side. I see it as a slice through the river. Does that make sense to you?

01:00:00 ►

A river of bubbles. And I was like, whoa, they’re coming, they’re growing. It’s like Abbott’s Flatland. They’re going, I love my bubbles. You know, I live, I love to snuggle with my bubbles.

01:00:10 ►

And then suddenly she slams this grid down on it. Like crossing your fingers. I’m like,

01:00:16 ►

you killed all my protocells. What are you doing? Because this is a teaching moment.

01:00:22 ►

And she said, wait for it. And one little protosol wiggled its way up through a grid point

01:00:27 ►

and expanded and started reproducing on the next grid.

01:00:31 ►

Like, okay.

01:00:33 ►

Slammed another one down.

01:00:34 ►

Bam.

01:00:34 ►

Another one came from another place and started reproducing.

01:00:38 ►

And again and again, millions of times.

01:00:40 ►

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

01:00:42 ►

And I said, what’s going on?

01:00:44 ►

She said, I am showing you the process I used to make you.

01:00:48 ►

This is the process I used to make you in the universe, in the cosmos.

01:00:53 ►

Your man Darwin got it right, but you’re using the wrong language to describe it.

01:00:59 ►

This survival, and my shirt collar is grabbed at this point.

01:01:02 ►

Listen and listen good. This survival of the fittest thing

01:01:06 ►

is killing you

01:01:09 ►

and it’s killing our world

01:01:10 ►

and the future of you most,

01:01:13 ►

the most precious experiment

01:01:14 ►

in this sector of the galaxy.

01:01:16 ►

You’re so rare.

01:01:17 ►

You’re killing it.

01:01:19 ►

Get over this language.

01:01:20 ►

Get new language to describe what this is.

01:01:23 ►

And then she said again, what do you see?

01:01:27 ►

What do you see?

01:01:28 ►

And I said, it’s a lifting and a gifting.

01:01:32 ►

The little part of self coming through that grid

01:01:34 ►

and it’s giving itself to the next level,

01:01:37 ►

but it doesn’t even survive.

01:01:40 ►

The next thing that comes up to the next level of the grid

01:01:42 ►

is a different being.

01:01:45 ►

That’s it. That’s the the next level of the grid is a different being. That’s it.

01:01:46 ►

That’s the consortium model of the bacterial world

01:01:49 ►

and how everything actually works and how evolution actually dials in

01:01:53 ►

and makes all this complexity.

01:01:56 ►

And we’re still doing it with psychic tools, spiritual tools.

01:02:00 ►

The iPhone beat out the whatever crap phones that the Apple people hated, right?

01:02:05 ►

They make a new one, but then it got copied by Android, which then takes over the market.

01:02:09 ►

Same thing.

01:02:10 ►

Same bloody process.

01:02:12 ►

And it’s a lifting, gifting thing, right?

01:02:16 ►

So that was a huge teaching for me about new language.

01:02:19 ►

And maybe someone in this audience can come up with a new term to describe the beautiful machine that made us

01:02:27 ►

and still making us and making all our culture

01:02:30 ►

and beautiful terms that really match for the 2020s to come

01:02:35 ►

where we can roll culture.

01:02:38 ►

We can roll the whole thing now.

01:02:40 ►

We have a powerful scientific thing.

01:02:42 ►

You needed relativity to roll culture in the 1920s.

01:02:46 ►

There was a consequence, the atomic bomb,

01:02:49 ►

and fascism and relativism and things like that,

01:02:52 ►

but it opened humanity.

01:02:53 ►

It allowed the atomic bomb of LSD and the war

01:02:58 ►

somehow got created at the same time.

01:03:01 ►

So look forward to the 20s and 30s,

01:03:04 ►

because we’re going to be able to roll this thing.

01:03:07 ►

And I’m going to conclude, he says he’s going to conclude before.

01:03:12 ►

The other part, this probably won’t work at all, the other part of my work that I decided to do

01:03:19 ►

when I was 16 was how to extend life into space. So I decided to work on the origin of life,

01:03:27 ►

and I thought, well, we’ve got a problem on the planet.

01:03:30 ►

We’re using up all the resources, and it ain’t going to slow down.

01:03:33 ►

There’s nothing we’re going to be able to do to really ameliorate this thing

01:03:36 ►

because we’re hungry.

01:03:37 ►

We’re going to use more energy in the future.

01:03:39 ►

And this is in 1976, 77.

01:03:40 ►

I thought we need to have a viable pathway off Earth

01:03:44 ►

because what turns out, this is a terrifying notion.

01:03:50 ►

So you have Venus.

01:03:53 ►

Have you ever seen pictures of Venus?

01:03:55 ►

It’s got these clouds.

01:03:56 ►

That’s like pure carbon dioxide atmosphere.

01:03:59 ►

That’s 90 bars.

01:04:00 ►

It would crush you like a tin can at the surface,

01:04:04 ►

900 degrees Fahrenheit, right?

01:04:07 ►

So Venus had a bad hair day early on.

01:04:10 ►

If Venus had oceans, they would evaporate straight into the atmosphere and they created

01:04:14 ►

this hothouse hell that could melt tin at the surface.

01:04:17 ►

So if it had life, it was history.

01:04:20 ►

Mars, on the other hand, I’m on a landing site selection team for the next rover in 2020.

01:04:27 ►

It’s a 1,600-pound rover.

01:04:30 ►

It’s about the size of a Cooper Mini, and we’re arguing where to land.

01:04:34 ►

They found an old yellowstone on Mars, which might have the textures in this rock that we see.

01:04:40 ►

It’s a long shot.

01:04:42 ►

But I did what I call my 12 minutes of terror

01:04:45 ►

in February near JPL

01:04:47 ►

when there’s 300 geologists in the room

01:04:48 ►

who want your ass on glass

01:04:51 ►

they are promoting Jezero crater

01:04:54 ►

they’re promoting this site, that site, etc

01:04:57 ►

and they’re competing with you

01:04:58 ►

and it’s entire careers are at stake

01:05:00 ►

this is the last mission to Mars NASA has on the books

01:05:03 ►

the Mars program is over

01:05:05 ►

effectively. No new orbiters. There’s like virtually nothing. It’s a shocking thing.

01:05:11 ►

It’s just come to the end of its cycle. So this rover is the first mission dedicated to finding

01:05:16 ►

life on another world. It’s like CuriosityBit has a whole science package on the front.

01:05:22 ►

So I did my 12 minutes of terror to present why,

01:05:26 ►

if life started in hot springs on Earth,

01:05:27 ►

we need to go to an old hot spring on Mars,

01:05:30 ►

and that if life survived as Mars died,

01:05:34 ►

because Mars died.

01:05:35 ►

About 800 million years in,

01:05:36 ►

the oceans had evaporated, the atmosphere had blown off,

01:05:40 ►

and that’s all perchlorates.

01:05:41 ►

So the Martian movie would never work.

01:05:44 ►

You couldn’t grow potatoes in a perchlorate soil.

01:05:47 ►

It’s a total sterilizing environment.

01:05:49 ►

So if life is there, it’s in the refuge of the deep biosphere,

01:05:54 ►

and it’s probably super fragile,

01:05:56 ►

probably never got to strong photosynthesis.

01:05:58 ►

It may have never got to the ribosome.

01:06:00 ►

So we may not even see rock texture.

01:06:03 ►

So those little guys are are suffering if they’re there

01:06:05 ►

at all they’re there they did end it can you imagine that four billion years of no chance to

01:06:10 ►

evolve no chance at all stuck in those rocks and that is the story for most earth-like planets i

01:06:17 ►

would submit to you of trillions of earth-like planets i think they almost all die. So why did we not die?

01:06:25 ►

Because we had the fortuitous chance of a huge moon,

01:06:29 ►

which is way outsized as a sentinel that protects us.

01:06:32 ►

You see the craters on the moon?

01:06:34 ►

Those were impacts supposed to come to here.

01:06:37 ►

We had a giant planet called Jupiter that pulled out just at the right time

01:06:40 ►

to pull all the crap of the asteroid belt out of the inner solar system.

01:06:43 ►

Otherwise, we would have been bombarded and bombarded into pieces.

01:06:47 ►

We had many other things.

01:06:49 ►

We had a big enough ocean, but not too big.

01:06:52 ►

Liquid water the whole time.

01:06:55 ►

The whole planet actually froze over a few times into what was called a snowball.

01:06:59 ►

But the microbial life made it through the snowballs.

01:07:02 ►

But life had no control of its thermostat.

01:07:06 ►

Can you imagine being in a house or an office like here

01:07:09 ►

where you can’t control temperature?

01:07:12 ►

You know, it sucks, right?

01:07:15 ►

So for 3.5 billion years or so,

01:07:17 ►

life could not control its gas of the atmosphere or its temperature.

01:07:21 ►

And then something called Gaia was born.

01:07:23 ►

And this is James Lovelock’s term,

01:07:25 ►

where life was so big that if carbon dioxide went up

01:07:29 ►

because of a big impact, it just ate it up.

01:07:32 ►

Temperature went down.

01:07:33 ►

It could actually now start modulating that.

01:07:36 ►

Well, Lovelock’s last book, he’s like 94 years old,

01:07:40 ►

it’s called A Rough Ride to the Future.

01:07:42 ►

There’s a chilling chapter in there,

01:07:44 ►

which is,

01:07:50 ►

do you realize, people, that by my calculations, and this is one of the great atmospheric scientists,

01:07:58 ►

the sun’s on this heating curve, and in just 100 million years, you’ll be getting 1.5 watts per square meter incident radiation, whereas now we have 1.35 and by his calculation you have to have no co2 present whatsoever

01:08:06 ►

If you have any co2 in your atmosphere you go to be you become Venus

01:08:10 ►

So the terminators and way closer than we may have known

01:08:14 ►

The terminator that terminated Venus and went to runaway greenhouse is close

01:08:20 ►

It’s like approaching Gaia can see it like

01:08:24 ►

The you know I’m just saying, just saying. So what are we?

01:08:30 ►

Potentially, we are Gaia’s only shot at perpetuating life beyond the soon-to-be tomb of this planet,

01:08:39 ►

no matter what. I mean, gravity makes it a tomb anyway. So what if we reconsider ourselves as Gaia’s reproduction organs?

01:08:47 ►

Finally gives us a purpose, other than just making hamburgers

01:08:50 ►

and getting kids through college.

01:08:52 ►

Would you like to be Gaia’s reproductive organs?

01:08:55 ►

I would. Some of us have already been that,

01:08:59 ►

I think, in certain states.

01:09:01 ►

So to conclude, when I was 16, I concluded that,

01:09:06 ►

okay, we’ve got to come up with technology to mine asteroids. This is the time of Gerard O’Neill and all those ideas.

01:09:12 ►

And I worked on this for 35 years. Then one night it came to me, oh, we just,

01:09:19 ►

this is how we do it. We extend a fabric structure around an asteroid, introduce gas,

01:09:24 ►

We extend a fabric structure around an asteroid, introduce gas,

01:09:29 ►

and we can suck the water off of it and make fuels, a fueling station.

01:09:34 ►

So I had my artist, Ryan Norcus, do these fantastic computer graphics,

01:09:35 ►

which I can’t show you.

01:09:40 ►

And I was at a conference called Contact in 2014,

01:09:43 ►

and I was standing there, and there was this tall, skinny guy.

01:09:46 ►

He didn’t know badge. He was a replacement speaker replacement speaker tall skinny, turned out to be a Dutch guy

01:09:48 ►

and I said to him

01:09:49 ►

would you like to see my design for asteroid capture

01:09:52 ►

this is one of the conferences you can do that

01:09:54 ►

so I show him my phone

01:09:56 ►

he said that will never work

01:09:58 ►

uh oh

01:10:00 ►

you know

01:10:01 ►

isn’t that he’s calling me woo

01:10:04 ►

he probably is a goo person, not a woo person.

01:10:06 ►

So he has reasons.

01:10:08 ►

And I said, well, who are you?

01:10:10 ►

He said, I’m Peter Janiskans.

01:10:12 ►

I’m a meteor asteroid astronomer at SETI Institute.

01:10:16 ►

If there’s a fireball in the sky, my phone rings.

01:10:19 ►

And I go pick up the pieces.

01:10:21 ►

I go, oh, I’ve been busted, totally busted.

01:10:24 ►

So he said, oh, let’s go to lunch.

01:10:25 ►

So we go to lunch, have a bowl of clam chowder.

01:10:27 ►

At the end of the clam chowder, he said, I figured out how to make it work.

01:10:31 ►

And that became Shepard, this incredible spacecraft design

01:10:35 ►

that could be the breakthrough to allow us to extend our reach,

01:10:39 ►

to extend our energy-consuming civilization into a vast area

01:10:44 ►

called the disk of edible planetesimals,

01:10:49 ►

bathed with energy, create new worlds, millions of new worlds, millions of new worlds. So we thought,

01:10:55 ►

okay, what is your idea? We bring xenon gas to the asteroid, and we never touch it.

01:11:02 ►

I said, well, what about all those asteroid mining companies that have cables and factories?

01:11:06 ►

He said, that’s all just complete nonsense.

01:11:08 ►

If you put a cable around an asteroid,

01:11:10 ►

it’s a rubble pile.

01:11:11 ►

It’ll come apart.

01:11:13 ►

Those people actually never called me.

01:11:15 ►

Somebody who actually knows about asteroids

01:11:17 ►

or cometary heads or things like this.

01:11:20 ►

So I said, well, what do we do?

01:11:21 ►

Let’s call up Julian Knott.

01:11:23 ►

Now, Julian Knott is a fellow, a British fellow,

01:11:26 ►

soon to be a knight, I think, at this point, in Santa Barbara.

01:11:29 ►

All the Brits live in Santa Barbara.

01:11:32 ►

That’s where Douglas Adams lived.

01:11:35 ►

You shake Santa Barbara, you’ll let loose crazy Brit inventors and thinkers.

01:11:41 ►

Anyway, and he’s the world’s greatest balloon designer.

01:11:44 ►

So you know the Red Bull balloon

01:11:46 ►

where they jumped? That’s Julian’s design. He designed not only the balloon, but the cabin. His cabins

01:11:51 ►

are in the Smithsonian. He’s a right proper gentleman. His great-grandfather was Isambard

01:11:56 ►

Kingdom Brunel’s accountant, right, for the first big railways and steamships. So he come by this

01:12:02 ►

honestly. He’s the Phineas Fogg of our time.

01:12:06 ►

So anyway, we start,

01:12:07 ►

Julian and I start conversing for a month

01:12:10 ►

and I initially had a rigid structure

01:12:12 ►

that would push the fabric around the asteroid.

01:12:14 ►

See the hand waving?

01:12:16 ►

And he said, we don’t do ridges anymore.

01:12:19 ►

You’re completely out of date.

01:12:20 ►

You know, Hindenburg went up,

01:12:22 ►

you know, you went up with the Hindenburg.

01:12:24 ►

We do air beams.

01:12:25 ►

So you extend these like party dog balloons out and it can push fabric and pull it out. And we

01:12:31 ►

worked out a system proposed that can encapsulate an asteroid with never touching it. So now it’s

01:12:37 ►

rotating inside our enclosure. We put in our xenon gas and and by calculation, we could stop the tumbling of a 1,000-ton reference object

01:12:46 ►

in less than a day through gas friction,

01:12:50 ►

which, of course, goes into the structure, and it’s rotating,

01:12:52 ►

but you can counteract that.

01:12:54 ►

They said, well, what do we do now?

01:12:55 ►

They said, step one, de-spin it.

01:12:58 ►

Step two, push layers of gas at the asteroid,

01:13:02 ►

creating an artificial wind.

01:13:04 ►

It’ll rotate like a sailing ship. Remember, sailing ships rotate at the asteroid, creating an artificial wind. It’ll rotate like a sailing ship.

01:13:07 ►

Remember, sailing ships rotate into the wind,

01:13:09 ►

and it will start imparting energy to it, like one newton or something, really gentle.

01:13:14 ►

And it’ll start moving inside the enclosure,

01:13:16 ►

and then you have to fire out back so you don’t get tangled up with this thing

01:13:20 ►

because it’ll rip you apart.

01:13:22 ►

And we can move these things all over the solar system.

01:13:25 ►

We can transport them using solar blankets on the outside,

01:13:29 ►

good old, you know, LED lighting on the inside,

01:13:32 ►

and a ducted fan, duct work.

01:13:36 ►

And Peter Janiskens looked at this and said,

01:13:38 ►

I’m Dutch, and this is a sailing ship for space,

01:13:41 ►

and I’m so proud of what we’ve done.

01:13:43 ►

Sailing ships.

01:13:45 ►

And I said to Julian, well, is this like high tech or whatever?

01:13:48 ►

He says, no, it’s a no-brainer.

01:13:49 ►

It’s not rocket science.

01:13:51 ►

It’s standard helium balloon design.

01:13:53 ►

We can do this thing.

01:13:54 ►

There’s two inflatables in orbit now called Genesis 1 and 2.

01:13:58 ►

One of the first satellites was called Echo,

01:14:00 ►

and it stayed in orbit for eight years in the 1960s.

01:14:03 ►

And there’s an inflatable module on the space station.

01:14:06 ►

So inflatables are the future probably of space flight.

01:14:10 ►

So we wrote it up for a $500,000 NASA grant.

01:14:13 ►

It did not get picked.

01:14:14 ►

I knew we wouldn’t get picked because I knew NASA well enough.

01:14:17 ►

So I did put it out as a TEDx talk and a technical paper in 2015

01:14:22 ►

and gave it to whoever would take it. So what Shepard also does, remember I talked

01:14:29 ►

about being Gaia’s reproductive organs? Have any of you seen those glass globes that you can buy

01:14:36 ►

with two shrimp in them and a bunch of algaes and little plants, but they’re completely sealed,

01:14:42 ►

right? And there’s this light coming into them, and they’re

01:14:45 ►

around for a hundred years. Isn’t that amazing? So you’ve fixed the amount of water you’ve got,

01:14:51 ►

the amount of gas you’ve got, and the animals, and these shrimp have gone through like a thousand

01:14:55 ►

generations in these glass globes. So we can do the same thing in space. We can go to a asteroid

01:15:03 ►

that is 50% water, ice, and methane and stuff like that

01:15:05 ►

and rock, encapsulate

01:15:08 ►

it, melt the interior

01:15:09 ►

so it becomes a globule. It’s a globule.

01:15:12 ►

The rocks go into the center.

01:15:13 ►

We put our stinger in there and we put in a mixture

01:15:16 ►

of shrimp for the barbie,

01:15:18 ►

you know, algaes and whatever,

01:15:20 ►

a perfect ecosystem. We light it

01:15:22 ►

from inside and then we move it to Mars.

01:15:24 ►

We move it to low Earth orbit.

01:15:25 ►

We can harvest indefinitely farm in space from that.

01:15:29 ►

And then the third one came from the space, crazy space lawyer in Houston.

01:15:33 ►

He said, don’t you all know about the Mon process?

01:15:37 ►

Don’t you all know about the Mon process?

01:15:39 ►

And no, we don’t know about the Mon process.

01:15:41 ►

He said, if you take a block of nickel or iron or some metal,

01:15:44 ►

and you stick it in carbon monoxide gas with an electric field over it it will suck

01:15:49 ►

the metal iron ions out and plate and make perfect parts oh what is that he says it’s

01:15:57 ►

called electroforming and it’s a type of 3d printing through gas electroplating uses fluid

01:16:04 ►

that’s how your your car bumpers

01:16:05 ►

and probably anything that’s plated with metal,

01:16:08 ►

your phones are done with electroplating,

01:16:10 ►

but this is electroforming.

01:16:11 ►

Then we realized, holy shit, we just

01:16:13 ►

solved all the major problems of extending

01:16:15 ►

civilization into space.

01:16:18 ►

Fuels and consumables,

01:16:20 ►

foodstuffs, biology,

01:16:22 ►

and construction materials,

01:16:24 ►

beams, core base blocks, 30 tons in size size can be made over and over and over again.

01:16:29 ►

We can build the O’Neill Space Colony.

01:16:33 ►

We can do this thing with one invention, and it’s a sailing ship called Shepard,

01:16:38 ►

which stands for secure handling through encapsulation of planetesimal headed for Earth-Moon retrograde delivery.

01:16:48 ►

Anyway, it came to me one morning.

01:16:51 ►

So I’ll conclude.

01:16:53 ►

Yes, he’s finally going to conclude.

01:16:54 ►

No soft objects have been thrown in the last 30 minutes.

01:17:00 ►

I would put it to you that in 500 years, if we do this thing,

01:17:06 ►

if we actually extend the reach of the biosphere

01:17:09 ►

into trillions of small objects and big ones,

01:17:12 ►

all around the sun and the periphery,

01:17:14 ►

and a lot of them around the earth, right,

01:17:16 ►

where we can house billions of people

01:17:19 ►

and untold numbers of biospheres, right?

01:17:23 ►

Guys are going to say, rockingly good,

01:17:25 ►

you get the five gold stars, you know, you kids.

01:17:28 ►

Boom.

01:17:29 ►

So that’s all good.

01:17:30 ►

But if you had a time-lapse spacecraft

01:17:33 ►

distant from the Earth and watched this eruption,

01:17:36 ►

like, boom, all these bubbles are coming off,

01:17:40 ►

these bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles in there.

01:17:42 ►

The bubbles are consuming all these goodies in orbit.

01:17:46 ►

Like, the goodies we’re made of

01:17:47 ►

because that’s the material that made

01:17:49 ►

life in the first place. We’re just going and eating

01:17:51 ►

more of it.

01:17:53 ►

It’ll look just like the origin of life.

01:17:55 ►

All over again, same principles.

01:17:58 ►

Many bubbles, many

01:17:59 ►

encapsulations. They’re all moving around

01:18:01 ►

in a circle.

01:18:03 ►

And we just birth burst a cosmic entity.

01:18:06 ►

Huh?

01:18:07 ►

Yeah.

01:18:08 ►

And the final story, the final tea story, was I presented this model in Peru

01:18:15 ►

to the ultimate in peer reviewer, which was a 1,000-year-old lucuma tree.

01:18:21 ►

Has any of you seen a lucuma?

01:18:24 ►

It’s a fruit tree in the high

01:18:26 ►

Andes that has this most delicate orange fruit that can’t be exported because it’s so delicate.

01:18:32 ►

And they were a primal tree of the Incan and the pre-Incan. And I went to a retreat center with

01:18:37 ►

Dennis McKenna to take a certain tea and have more certainty about things, and there was a lakuma that was over a

01:18:46 ►

thousand years old at the center of this retreat center, and I went out in the night after the dome

01:18:53 ►

had cracked, and like, I’m getting out of this dome, you know, like, oh, there’s a full moon, there’s a tree,

01:18:59 ►

there’s the lakuma tree, and it had these, these vent portals on the trunk, you know,

01:19:05 ►

and they were old, where old branches had been and it had grown in.

01:19:09 ►

I said, well, what do you do to interact with plants?

01:19:12 ►

You breathe.

01:19:13 ►

They’re breathing machines.

01:19:15 ►

So I just like breathing carbon dioxide her way,

01:19:20 ►

and her vent portals opened up.

01:19:22 ►

We’re just doing this back and forth, breath work.

01:19:25 ►

Try it sometime, breath work with a beautiful plant.

01:19:29 ►

So we’re doing that for a while, and then we establish a relationship.

01:19:33 ►

And part of this was just this incredible download.

01:19:39 ►

So suddenly the 1,000-year-old tree vanished, poom.

01:19:42 ►

And I looked down, and there’s bare ground,

01:19:45 ►

and there are brown hands pushing the seed of the lacuma into the ground.

01:19:50 ►

And then spit comes down onto that seed.

01:19:54 ►

And I realized she’s showing me how she was planted by pre-Incans around 900 A.D.

01:20:00 ►

And then she grew.

01:20:02 ►

But as she was growing, there was all this stuff going on.

01:20:04 ►

A temple was built across the way.

01:20:06 ►

The temple had faceted stone.

01:20:09 ►

An earthquake happened.

01:20:10 ►

The temple stayed completely fine.

01:20:13 ►

Then the Incans came in, and they completely terraced.

01:20:16 ►

There were millions of miles of terraces and food production,

01:20:20 ►

massively high-quality food at huge surpluses,

01:20:23 ►

sheds everywhere,

01:20:24 ►

one of the greatest agriculture we’ve ever known

01:20:26 ►

created by these people.

01:20:28 ►

People wanted to join the Incan Empire

01:20:30 ►

because they had food security.

01:20:32 ►

You know, and now we tract our farm in the valley bottom

01:20:35 ►

and don’t use the terraces.

01:20:36 ►

I get a clue.

01:20:38 ►

So she showed me that,

01:20:39 ►

and then there was this clanking sound,

01:20:41 ►

and there were conquistadors in armor chasing Incans.

01:20:44 ►

And suddenly there was a

01:20:45 ►

Catholic cathedral built on the foundation of this fantastic Incan platform. Then an earthquake

01:20:51 ►

happened and knocked the cathedral completely down and left the Incan foundation. Like, hello?

01:20:57 ►

You know, who was smarter here? Right? So all this was happening. And then she turned to me and said,

01:21:02 ►

I am the last of my kind i am the last survivor

01:21:06 ►

and then there was a sudden noise on the alante tambo highway and there’s a truck roaring

01:21:11 ►

and she said that is the sound that is eating the world that is consuming the world and i

01:21:18 ►

could picture it as a kechua guy driving gasoline delivery to gas stations to make soles for his family

01:21:26 ►

because he was locked into the cash economy, right?

01:21:29 ►

And she was like completely, I could just see the lacuna falling down.

01:21:34 ►

Like, I have no hope.

01:21:36 ►

And I said, wait a minute.

01:21:38 ►

I see a shadow.

01:21:40 ►

I see the shadow you’re casting shows the shadow of no hope.

01:21:44 ►

It shows the shadow of no hope.

01:21:49 ►

It shows the shadow of dysfunctional, consuming primate monkeys.

01:21:50 ►

And another shadow.

01:21:56 ►

I will dance along the shadow and give you a detailed tech report and update from the primate.

01:21:58 ►

And so I danced along one shadow.

01:22:01 ►

I said, this shadow is what’s called psychopathy.

01:22:03 ►

Psychopathy.

01:22:05 ►

And see how thin it’s getting?

01:22:06 ►

If I dance out to here?

01:22:08 ►

It used to be a real problem,

01:22:10 ►

and now it’s less and less and less of a problem.

01:22:11 ►

And here’s an example.

01:22:13 ►

There was a man called Joseph Stalin who lorded over the largest piece of land on Earth,

01:22:16 ►

and he put 30 million people to their death.

01:22:19 ►

There’s a man called Alexander Putin right here,

01:22:23 ►

and he can’t do that.

01:22:24 ►

He can’t get away with that shit anymore.

01:22:26 ►

So his teeth are shaved off.

01:22:28 ►

So we’re making progress.

01:22:30 ►

Well, here’s another shadow,

01:22:31 ►

and that shadow is the corporation.

01:22:33 ►

And that’s what made that truck sound.

01:22:36 ►

And that’s getting thinner and thinner.

01:22:38 ►

Well, why?

01:22:39 ►

Because corporations back here

01:22:41 ►

used to do terrible shit to the earth.

01:22:43 ►

Now they’re not doing that anymore.

01:22:44 ►

It’s getting better and better. We’re getting smarter. It’s only a fraction of a percent per

01:22:49 ►

year. That’s all we need to do. We need to buy a 500-year runway to make this thing go.

01:22:56 ►

You know, there was the shadow of nuclear weapons. It ended. Oh, thank goodness.

01:23:02 ►

So I presented for peer review the Shepard spacecraft, the enclosure.

01:23:08 ►

I said, hey, take a look at what the monkeys have done.

01:23:11 ►

Don’t lose hope.

01:23:12 ►

We’re not completely beyond hope.

01:23:14 ►

We put biology on Mars.

01:23:16 ►

It’s inside the bodies of the rovers.

01:23:17 ►

There’s at least 13 strains of bacteria there.

01:23:20 ►

They’re asleep there.

01:23:21 ►

You can feel them.

01:23:22 ►

But watch this.

01:23:23 ►

And so I ran Shepard in my mind for her,

01:23:27 ►

and it went around this beautiful asteroid, and it was turning it into water. And then an astronaut

01:23:33 ►

was floating through the ship on a stinger to take the first glass, the first drink of comedic

01:23:39 ►

water, water from the solar system, water that’s 4.5 billion years old that first drink

01:23:45 ►

and then suddenly she went whom took that scene away I was now in space and

01:23:52 ►

she was in space and she said that is not you taking the drink of water that

01:23:57 ►

is me me Gaia the biosphere I am taking that drink of water on all the behalf of Earth

01:24:06 ►

and all this four and a half billion years

01:24:08 ►

and all this struggle, I am unfolding naked

01:24:11 ►

in front of my star, naked

01:24:14 ►

and I present to my star

01:24:17 ►

so that was the last vision

01:24:22 ►

the last tea story for y’all

01:24:24 ►

thank you That was the last vision, the last tea story for y’all.

01:24:25 ►

Thank you.

01:24:39 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:24:43 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:24:50 ►

So now you know what happens when a mystic becomes a scientist and then drinks a little Amazon tea.

01:24:53 ►

As the saying goes, it’s all good.

01:24:57 ►

I guess the main takeaway for me from this talk by Bruce is the fact that he began this scientific quest when he was only 14 years old.

01:25:03 ►

Now, I’m sure that, like me, you also had a lot of grand

01:25:07 ►

plans for your life that you came up with when you were a teenager. But it seems to me that

01:25:12 ►

not only hanging on to those plans throughout your life, but also following through on them

01:25:18 ►

is extremely rare. In fact, Bruce Dahmer is the only person that I know who has been able to hold

01:25:24 ►

a vision from his youth throughout his life.

01:25:26 ►

To me, that is even more impressive than coming up with an important new scientific discovery.

01:25:32 ►

Not many of us are cut out to become top-notch scientists, but we all have had the opportunity to hold on to our dreams of youth.

01:25:41 ►

In my case, I can barely remember some of the ideas that I had back then,

01:25:45 ►

and for sure I never followed up on them for very long. No matter what your age today, however,

01:25:52 ►

I hope that you can recapture some of your own youthful dreams and make them come true like

01:25:58 ►

Bruce Dahmer has done. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

553 - The Origin and Future of Life

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Program Notes

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