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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio. Man,

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Speaker 1: welcome back. We're back with doctor Bart costco his book

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Speaker 1: Cool Earth, his website linked up at Coast to Coast

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Speaker 1: AM dot com. Bart, Let's get back to the Arthur C.

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Speaker 1: Clark story. So you two started conversing, and what was

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Speaker 1: that like, George, Well, it was a lot of fun.

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Speaker 1: I mean, Arthur was a great mind. I think one

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Speaker 1: of the pioneers. Grandmasters are certainly science fiction, but I

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Speaker 1: think fiction more generally, and hard science fiction, George, not

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Speaker 1: fantasy stuff. And of course the great example is a

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Speaker 1: story Sentinel, which became two thousand and one of Space Audust.

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Speaker 1: That's right, a lot of other stuff, and part of

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Speaker 1: that was this great sequence of novels which everyone should read,

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Speaker 1: called the Rama Novels. And you find out at the

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Speaker 1: end of all these novels that the purpose of the

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Speaker 1: universe is to that we're in a simulation and a

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Speaker 1: godlike figures running simulations looking for harmonious universe seeds. And

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Speaker 1: then comes the big mistake. Her was like me, obsessed

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Speaker 1: with not making technical mistakes. He said, this godlike figure says,

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Speaker 1: I'm looking for a closed dense set of universities. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's mathematically trivial, and he meant opened dense set. I

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Speaker 1: couldn't resist pointing that out to Arthur, and as there was,

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Speaker 1: I mean, it's an extremely fine point. It's putting mathematical hairs.

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Speaker 1: He was not trained into apology and so it's not

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Speaker 1: his fault. So when I told him that I had

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Speaker 1: I also published fiction. I had a short story coming

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Speaker 1: out in a magazine where Ray Bradberry had gone. First

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Speaker 1: it was a men's magazine, and then after Ray Bradbury

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Speaker 1: was Harlan Ellison. Then met and he said, I got

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Speaker 1: to see it, and so wow, you know, so he

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Speaker 1: wanted to see the galley proofs, and I faxed him

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Speaker 1: the galley proofs. Remember he lived in Sri Lanka, in Colombo,

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Speaker 1: Sri Lanka, and Arthur came right back. He oh, he

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Speaker 1: liked the story, he liked the writing, and he caught

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Speaker 1: a big hole and he really addressed this professor down.

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Speaker 1: Take a seat in the back of the class. He

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Speaker 1: just gave a total payback and totally justified. And what

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Speaker 1: do you do, George, when you got Arch C. Clark

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Speaker 1: catching a big hole in a science fician stories Coo

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Speaker 1: Earth coming out already typeset. In those days. It was

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Speaker 1: magazines who was very complicated changing. Will you take it

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Speaker 1: to the editor who happened to be a big fan

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Speaker 1: of Sir Arthur, and you say, look, I got to

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Speaker 1: be able to fix it. And I was able to

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Speaker 1: come up and get real creative and fixed the problem.

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Speaker 1: It was in the background. I was all caught up

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Speaker 1: in the characters and the story, but it was a

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Speaker 1: real problem, and that made a huge difference. Maybe it

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Speaker 1: fixed the story, but I then had a chance. Over

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Speaker 1: the following years, only decades. You think about it, you

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Speaker 1: hike about it, the characters collide in your mind's eye,

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Speaker 1: and it grew into this current effort, the complete drama

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Speaker 1: of cool Earth, which by the way, is what we

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Speaker 1: call a real time drama. You don't see a lot

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Speaker 1: of those. So if there were a film, and I

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Speaker 1: must say that there is a lot of Hollywood interest

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Speaker 1: in this, if there's a film, the one hundred and

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Speaker 1: twenty minutes or so of the film or the one

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Speaker 1: hundred and twenty minutes of the story, and so the

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Speaker 1: very few cases in the Kubrick case that was with

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Speaker 1: Doctor Strangelove or High Noon was a case Hitchcock's rope

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Speaker 1: more recently than movie gravity. So it's a real time

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Speaker 1: thriller that's taken many years to evolve, and it's well,

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Speaker 1: it's it's not for the squeamish. It is the end

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Speaker 1: of the world as we know it well. And you

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Speaker 1: gave us sixty years on of it. You gave us

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Speaker 1: to twenty eighty to get this thing, to get our

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Speaker 1: act together. You got till twenty eighty. There's a lot

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Speaker 1: of simple steps we can take now, and it's unclear

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Speaker 1: whether we're going to do it. It looks like the warming,

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Speaker 1: which had slowed, is definitely speeding up again. Just in

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Speaker 1: the last year, the last ten years was the hottest

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Speaker 1: decade on record, twenty nineteen was the second hottest year

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Speaker 1: on record, twenty sixteen was the hottest year record. The measurements,

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Speaker 1: George are getting more accurate. So whatever the politics, and

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Speaker 1: it's ugly of global warming, let's call it what it is.

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Speaker 1: It's warming, not just climate change. You change up or down.

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Speaker 1: We're changing up on average. The laws of large numbers,

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Speaker 1: as we call them in statistics, are converging more and

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Speaker 1: more in the simulations. Is more data come around, we

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Speaker 1: just know a lot more about this than we did

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Speaker 1: even ten years ago, and the trend is up, appears

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Speaker 1: to be accelerating, and there are certain tipping points, including

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Speaker 1: the melting of the Arctic ice. Now the Arctic is

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Speaker 1: warming about three times faster than the rest of the atmosphere,

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Speaker 1: and that opens up a lot of possibilities for cooling strategies,

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Speaker 1: which not everybody's on board with. And but that's one

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Speaker 1: possibility here. The other thing is, as you warm up

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Speaker 1: in the Arctic and the Antarctic, you begin to fall

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Speaker 1: the permafrost. That's a very big deal because you have

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Speaker 1: about twice as much carbon that's in the atmosphere now

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Speaker 1: frozen in the permafrost. But worse, you begin to release methane.

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Speaker 1: I think there was a show last year it came

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Speaker 1: out called Fire on Ice or the Ice on Fire,

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Speaker 1: And you're finding this in Siberia. They have sinkholes and

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Speaker 1: other places. When you release methane in the amomstor that

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Speaker 1: is a much more potent greenhouse gas than as carbon dioxide,

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Speaker 1: and you're going to get accelerations. When you melt the

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Speaker 1: Arctic ice, there's nothing but dark water beneath it that

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Speaker 1: warms it. Versus the Antarctic, which has land beneath it,

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Speaker 1: and so forth. So what can you do. Well, One

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Speaker 1: thing you can do is have a carbon tax. I

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Speaker 1: think most economists agree with that. We are creating what

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Speaker 1: the economists call a negative externality, the sort of thing

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Speaker 1: you do when you pollute. But this pollution stays up

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Speaker 1: in the atmosphere potentially for one hundred to so years.

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Speaker 1: A lot of it enters the ocean. We're acidifying the ocean.

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Speaker 1: They're warming. They're real tough to cool that, and we're

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Speaker 1: free riding. Country's free riding on one another. China is

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Speaker 1: by far the biggest polluter. We're second. We've been reducing emissions, actually,

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Speaker 1: but we still don't have a rational pricing of carbon.

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Speaker 1: And then we're all free riding on future generation. So

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Speaker 1: it's a really vexatious problem. George is like that. The

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Speaker 1: COVID is a kind of run up to it. How

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Speaker 1: we deal with this and many other pandemics. Can we coordinate?

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Speaker 1: We're not coordinating real well far, but it's you know,

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Speaker 1: it'd be a lot tougher in the case of warming.

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Speaker 1: The other thing we can do is keep all the

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Speaker 1: options on the table, and that includes nuclear energy. Now

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Speaker 1: there's been a lot of problems with that and the

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Speaker 1: older uranium reactors, and a lot of a lot of

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Speaker 1: scare movies like the China syndrome. But nuclear is a

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Speaker 1: long term, renewable, reasonably safe. It's got I know, it's

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Speaker 1: got problems in the waste products, but we've we've been

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Speaker 1: addressing that. And that's the uranium nuclear reactors. That's not

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Speaker 1: the new thorium reactors underway in development in China and India,

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Speaker 1: for example. It's interesting remember the Democratic Canada Andrew Yang,

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Speaker 1: and he proposed, which is I think it odds with

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Speaker 1: much of his party investing fifty billion dollars in research

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Speaker 1: on thorium reactors to jump start that the thorium fuel cycle.

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Speaker 1: Thorium's ninety on the periodic table, uranium is ninety two.

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Speaker 1: It's much safer, there's a lot more thorium. You don't

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Speaker 1: have kind of meltdown risk. The bomb potential is a

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Speaker 1: lot less because it ends up not with plutonium two

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Speaker 1: thirty nine like our current reactors do, but rather with

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Speaker 1: uranium two thirty three and right down the line. But

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Speaker 1: it'll take there's a lot of engineering to be done

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Speaker 1: and and just improving using the newer models of uranium

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Speaker 1: reactors are out there. And finally, George cooling experiments what's

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Speaker 1: known as geoengineering. Now something as radical as moving the

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Speaker 1: Earth Moon system like in cool Earth. That's the absolute

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Speaker 1: worst case. Hopefully we'll never get there, but there's a

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Speaker 1: lot of things you could do local experiments here in California,

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Speaker 1: the Mojave Desert with putting sulfates in the air what's

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Speaker 1: sometimes called a designer volcano, and maybe going to the pole,

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Speaker 1: especially the Arctic, to do a little bit that it

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Speaker 1: is a form of pollution. It can have some acid

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Speaker 1: rain effects. It won't affect the acidification of the ocean,

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Speaker 1: but it will buy time and it's I think a

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Speaker 1: prudence saying to at least be developing it. Right now,

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Speaker 1: there's largely a moratorium on geo engineering, but if the

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Speaker 1: acceleration increases, I think that has to be a rational

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Speaker 1: item on the table. And my bigger point, George, from

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Speaker 1: an engineering point of view, every engineering option has to

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Speaker 1: be on the table. You can't have an ideology limiting

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Speaker 1: these things. The ideology can help put it the issue

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Speaker 1: in front and center. But this is going to be

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Speaker 1: a vexing problem a long term generational problem again, and

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Speaker 1: the incentive is just a punt it, just to kick

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Speaker 1: it down downstream. But we may not may not have

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Speaker 1: that luxury so relatively inexpensively a few billion dollars a year.

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Speaker 1: It looks like, well, it goes well. You could spray

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Speaker 1: almost like in a garden hill. This is even in

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Speaker 1: the book for Economics years ago. By the way, you

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Speaker 1: could spray from the sulfur aerosols, especially say over the Arctic,

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Speaker 1: and different simulations have become up different results. But if

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Speaker 1: you could veil or shade that about twenty five percent

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Speaker 1: from the sun, that's a dramatic chain. If you still

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Speaker 1: are allow the temperatures, you sure can. What is Google

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Speaker 1: in your eye that you would talk about in the book.

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Speaker 1: We're going to keep shrinking down these search engines, George.

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Speaker 1: And right now you're using your fingers, and then you

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Speaker 1: can have the touch pad, and increasingly that's going to

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Speaker 1: be where you quote will it a sense of will.

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Speaker 1: But where you're going to store that, I think it

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Speaker 1: inevitably goes in your retina, and there's a blind spot

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Speaker 1: in your retina. There's a way to do it, and

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Speaker 1: it's fairly easy to energize really without disrupting our vision

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Speaker 1: that will be I mean they'll take some work, but

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Speaker 1: I think you can have it in there and using

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Speaker 1: some distributed parallel distributed in effect screen heads up type

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Speaker 1: to screens. The other thing is, as we increase the

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Speaker 1: interface with the brain and the chip, everyone's working on

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Speaker 1: this around the world. Maybe that internal picture can be

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Speaker 1: done differently, but I think you can have it there.

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Speaker 1: The other thing is the energy source can be in

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Speaker 1: different places. You can get solar energy from it, and

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Speaker 1: you could also have backup, for example, on your arm.

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Speaker 1: You might have a backup hard drive, but a lot

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Speaker 1: of what you have on your computer. I think that's

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Speaker 1: going in you at some point and quite likely in

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Speaker 1: our lifetime here, and once that starts happening, I don't

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Speaker 1: think there's any turning back to it. When you were

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Speaker 1: putting this together, I mean this was based on years

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Speaker 1: and years of your experience with all your other works.

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Speaker 1: Was a difficult or was it easy to come up

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Speaker 1: with the scenario of the book. You know, the scenario

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Speaker 1: I thought of years ago and it really worked out.

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Speaker 1: The story while skiing one night looking at the moon,

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Speaker 1: because the moon gets cracked at the end of the book.

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Speaker 1: But these other technology aspects, as you suggest, really come

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Speaker 1: out of my publish results, and everyone's welcome to view them.

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Speaker 1: I just post another paper on my web page. It

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Speaker 1: will appear in the journal Neural Networks in September, which

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Speaker 1: I think in terms of the mathematical theorems in the

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Speaker 1: appendix or the current state of the art, at least

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Speaker 1: for a week or two and that fuel but I

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Speaker 1: had a chance to think about a lot of things

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Speaker 1: in those regards George and including efforts on pattenting with

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Speaker 1: USC and we're with my colleagues. I think of a

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Speaker 1: pretty good feel for where the literature is, like, I

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Speaker 1: have a series of papers coming out of conference AI

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Speaker 1: conferences next month and now we're in July, but in

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Speaker 1: July and in August, and as a consequence, you get

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Speaker 1: a sense of what's doable and what's not doable, and

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Speaker 1: how these things can go wrong. It may be really

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Speaker 1: terribly wrong. This is one of those years bart people

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Speaker 1: just want to go away. It's been a tough one

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Speaker 1: and it may get tougher still, and then they have

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Speaker 1: a very contentious election on top of it. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: oh my god, year to remember absolutely with everything you've

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Speaker 1: been writing about over the years, what got you into

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Speaker 1: this area. You must have seen something, whether you looked

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Speaker 1: into a crystal ball or what. But I mean, you

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Speaker 1: have been able to put your thumb on a lot

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Speaker 1: of futuristic things that have come true. How do you

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Speaker 1: see these things? A lot of what I did, George

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Speaker 1: was teaching. So the best way to understand the subject

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Speaker 1: is teach it. And we often tell students just try

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Speaker 1: to explain what you learn today or you think you

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Speaker 1: learned today to your roommate or someone else. So there's

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Speaker 1: that aspect. The more you teach. For example, was known

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Speaker 1: as Maxwell's equations, the four equations that completely describe electricity

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Speaker 1: and magnetism, and that leads to modern quantum theory and

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Speaker 1: general relativity in some sense, and many many other things

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Speaker 1: that you just get a deeper feel for that, and

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Speaker 1: once it's embedded in your synapses, you start to create

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Speaker 1: with it. You see a problem, you think of different solutions,

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Speaker 1: and as a professor, I think we get to focus

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Speaker 1: on those kind of abstractions and a paid way, and

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Speaker 1: much more than the average person does, and more so

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Speaker 1: than the average person doesn't. In a laboratory, and that's

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Speaker 1: where it's largely come from. But you know, George, I

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Speaker 1: actually started out writing music. Was a scholarship student to

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Speaker 1: USC on a music scholarship writing film music. And to me,

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Speaker 1: that was one of the hardest things I ever did.

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Speaker 1: To come up with something new, as tough as oh

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Speaker 1: my God, as it was, and as tough as mathematics,

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Speaker 1: and mathematics just a language, but to come up with

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Speaker 1: a new theme, new chord progression, it's very tough, and

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Speaker 1: it's just a discipline of creativity. The other thing you

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Speaker 1: learned from doing that, George, You know whether you've got

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Speaker 1: a big result or a little result. I used to

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Speaker 1: write a lot of classical music and so and get

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Speaker 1: a result, well, maybe this is good enough for a

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Speaker 1: violin and piano sonata. This something bigger, This really warrants

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Speaker 1: a string quart tag which I did a lot of

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Speaker 1: it the kid. Or this one is so good that

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Speaker 1: it's big enough you could build a symphony on it,

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Speaker 1: and I did the kid, And so you get the

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Speaker 1: same sense. With science, I'm very hesitant to publish, and

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Speaker 1: I usually don't do it lest I have I consider

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Speaker 1: at least one major mathematical theorem and I go over

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Speaker 1: it and it just grows in time. I take a

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Speaker 1: long time to bring results. Or the book cool Earth,

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Speaker 1: you know, it really took years of development and write it,

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Speaker 1: set it aside, and come back and part of that.

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Speaker 1: For example, I just published a paper since I last

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Speaker 1: talked to you, it came out number on quantum annealing. Now,

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Speaker 1: this is a powerful way to search bumpy surfaces of costs,

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Speaker 1: trying to find a low cost solution for certain services.

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Speaker 1: It's the fastest known way, and some people have called

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Speaker 1: a super AI or AI supremacy. We can achieve that.

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Speaker 1: But one of the applications of this would be searching

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Speaker 1: genomes at minimum, trying to come up with versions, say

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Speaker 1: of your genes, that have a much lower chance of

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Speaker 1: getting cancer. But once you open that door, George, once

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Speaker 1: you turn loose the powers of still Moore's law to

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Speaker 1: some degree, the ever exponentiating exponential powers of computers to

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Speaker 1: search a genomes, you're going to do a lot more

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Speaker 1: than worry about your health. If you got to worry

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Speaker 1: about how you look and the like. And the novel

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Speaker 1: Cool Earth explores that. So, for example, if you want

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Speaker 1: to make a child, well, we have a way of

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Speaker 1: doing that, now, le'll say you and your wife or

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Speaker 1: your spouse, and that child is a kind of statistical average.

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Speaker 1: Of course, there's many other richards are known as brothers

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Speaker 1: and sisters. Once you found that average as a kind

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Speaker 1: of dot in what we call genome space, we can

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Speaker 1: then do random searches around that dot, and we can

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Speaker 1: constrain those searches. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM

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Speaker 1: every weeknight at one a m. Eastern and go to

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast am dot com for more