Sean Carroll

It’s also a stepping stone, of course, once you’re in space at all, once you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere, you’re halfway to Mars, you’re halfway to Pluto, or whatever. And it’s actually more efficient to do electrical into kinetic in terms of the unit mass, however you need your own power source when you’re doing the electrical conversion, chemical carries the power required within the reaction, and so there is a trade-off there, and it’s also a bit slower. And there’s a lot of things happening if you’re following the space force and the things happening in the Pentagon versus what’s happening in the Air Force, and a lot of changes right now. And I think that personally, since I don’t think that we’re gonna go faster than the speed of light, but I also don’t necessarily think that that should be an obstacle to going to other stars.

So anyway, I’ve taken a big long detour from your original question, but the point was that I always liked math, but I did like the math of the real world, or at least the sort of semi-real world that we study in classes, like physics class. Well, I’m asking that they don’t correct me, the neuroscientist and the physicist, so you’re allowed to say that you’re not an expert on… 0:35:20 SS: That part I’m not sure, but I am pretty confident that if you ask most brain researchers now they’ll tell you the binding problem is solved by synchronization. And so, what’s interesting about this mechanism, we called it shortcuts, is that the shortcuts really make the world very small very quickly, though you don’t sense it, because you don’t realize you’re connected to everyone in the classical music world. Like I say, it’s an interesting thing, like in the history of science, that sometimes you’ll have a prejudice about what you think the way the world should be, and you deliberately don’t let yourself entertain another possibility ’cause it strikes you as ugly, or too simple or irritating in some way.

So in these myths, and I’m talking about myths popular, very famous, beloved myths like Jason and the Argonauts, stories about the sorceress, Medea, and the bronze robot, Talos, who guarded the Island of Crete, the legendary craftsman, Daedalus, and Prometheus, who was known as the fire bringer, and then Pandora, the artificial female who was created by the god of Technology and Invention, Hephaestus. That’s right, but what’s really interesting is that I think I cited a study in my book that shows that people still have that kind of vision about electricity or the body, but especially like electricity I think that’s a really important distinction because it really draws the line between, as you say, human, non-human, artificial, and natural, and I think that they’re really emphasizing the manufactured nature of Talos and then Pandora. 0:18:14 I haven’t read that one, I’ll confess, but I think you make the case that the myth of the Amazons was based, to a surprising degree, on real life events.

And I thought this can’t be right because in fact, what matters for all of these animals is not the static volume but the sweat volume through time so as you… Because they’re searching for empty space or relatively empty space for food for live prey, and it turns out the sweat volume for the electric fish was almost identical to this pie wedge shaped sweat volume that the visually-guided fish have. 0:25:53 1:02:53 SC: ‘Cause if you don’t care that much about people far away then… 1:02:55 MM: Then you act the way we are know. 1:14:09 SC: Climate change is the obvious example of our failure to think on long horizons, but my favorite example is actually solar flares, I don’t know if you’re very familiar with this idea, but… 1:14:17 MM: I’ve heard you talk about this. And so, when they are thinking about how do I portray this AI breakthrough or this roboticist, they’re gonna take off things from the show, which are probably things that they saw in movies and stereotypes that they have from pop culture actually and don’t track with what is a much more interesting and fine-grain sort of thing that’s going on in reality.