Science, Faith, and Intelligent Life | Qasim Rashid, Human Rights Attorney

Qasim Rashid is a human rights and civil rights attorney, author, advocate, and the founder of Let’s Address This. His work focuses on justice, democracy, human rights, and public discourse, but this conversation turned into a wide-ranging exploration of science, society, faith, sci-fi, and the future.

Expect to learn how an astrophysicist and a human rights attorney ended up talking about alien life, Project Hail Mary, relativity, intelligent whales, faith, the Quran and astronomy, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, space law, human rights in future space colonies, and why curiosity matters in an age of anti-intellectualism.

We also talk about The Expanse, Interstellar, Contact, The Last Question, The Space Traders, whether intelligent life might exist in our galaxy, and one biology fact about mitochondria that still blows my mind.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What's good, everybody? Welcome back to the Dr. Star Kid podcast. It's your host, Dr. Star Kid. I know you could tell by my voice and my face that that's who I am. So this episode's a slightly different. I recently did a live stream with Kasim Rashid, who's a civil rights and human rights advocate, attorney, and author. Very, very cool conversation, very cool guy. We ended up having a fun and interesting combo that went beyond what you may expect if you mix together an astrophysicist and a human rights attorney and author. We talked about science, technology, society, curiosity, whole bunch of other topics, sci-fi, basically just nerd it out for a while. And I thought it was too good to just leave as a live stream. So I wanted to upload it here as well as a podcast episode for anyone who missed it or who wants to listen back or who just like generally enjoys nerding out on some shit because you know that's what I like to do, and that's really what we like to do. That's the whole point of all of this. So I hope you all enjoyed this conversation. And as always, lead with curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Uh, if you guys are tuning in, I'm Kassin Rashid, I'm a human rights lawyer. I run Let's Address this, of course. Dr. Dakota Tyler, everybody knows him extraordinarily well. And and I'm just gonna say for the audience, I've been following your content for a while now, and it's been exciting because it's phenomenal content on science and on like just the meaning of life, but then also it's cool to see your platform grow, which in kind of the anti-intellectualism age that we're in, it's great to see an intellectual uh and have its platform start to kind of you know blow up in a good way. So I appreciate that about you.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Yeah, I uh thanks, that means a lot, and it's it's great for me to realize and come into contact with so many other people that are just out there and also interested in science and interested in asking these questions and interested in um thinking more critically, interested in thinking about astrobiology, space, yeah, sorts of things.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot we can talk about. You brought up astrobiology. Uh, what did you think of the Hail Mary project?

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Oh, I thought it was dope. I thought it was great. I thought there were so what I really liked about it. I mean, it was fun, you know, it was a it was like a fun family family movie. It what I liked about it was Rocky was a very alien alien. It wasn't it wasn't like another, it wasn't like a person in a green suit, you know, with pointy ears. It's this thing that thinks differently and like doesn't understand some of the nuances um that we have as humans. And I thought it was cool that they didn't uh have because they their planet, so they live in I forget what it's called, Iridian. They're the Iridian, so it's on this planet that's basically like a super Earth or sub Neptune that has this super thick atmosphere, and it's like so thick that uh light doesn't really penetrate through, so they didn't know about uh certain types of radiation, yeah. But and it was just very interesting, and the spaceship was like it was a very different type of space, it was very alien, and I appreciate that because so much of sci-fi seems like we're just very much projecting ourselves and telling the exact same stories, and it's just humans, you know, that look like uh wharf or something like that. What'd you think about it?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah, I I I enjoyed the fun part of it. I like Ryan Gosling, I thought he was a good role for that. My friends who read the book have said the book is better just because it elaborates more, and you know, the human imagination, I guess nothing can uh, but but I want to echo that, right? The you know, I think they said that Iridia or whatever has like 20 times the atmospheric pressure as Earth, and therefore, you know, their physical bodies are rockier and whatnot, and they're the fact that light doesn't get through, they don't rely on visual as much as they do on auditory. I that's a cool concept. I I wanted to ask you a question, a scientific question about that. I looked this up that they're using the this you know superfuel to travel like 94% of the speed of light, and due to the theory of relativity and everything, uh you know, due to relativity, uh the 12-year light year journey ends up only being four years for him. So the question I have is in that scenario, if he's awake halfway through and he's you know gone six light years and he's only experienced two light years, if he were to send a signal back to Earth and then they get it and then respond to him, would it take the full six light years back and six light years to get to him, or would he receive it in four light years, if that makes sense?

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Yeah, okay. So as he's you're saying that while he's on his way going to to the um uh where were they tal Seti, I think. Yeah, uh Tal Ceti. Yeah, and he's traveling super fast, so he sends a message back, right? And this is the this is the cool thing about relativity is that from wherever he's at, like when he sends it, that message is going to be moving at the speed of light from the perspective of the humans on earth. Like that's relativity, it's like time changes in these funny ways, but the thing that's always constant is the speed of light is the same. So there will be, you know, I'd have to like do work it out in some way to see what the transition is from you know him moving and sending it, but like once the message is going, it's moving at the speed of light, and it should take way however many. If he you know, if you said if he's six light years away, then it should take basically six years to get there. Now, the message going back is gonna take longer because he's traveling so fast, right? So, yeah, but right.

SPEAKER_00 5:47

But but my point is, would he experience the full let's say 12 years, or let's even say he went halfway um and then sent it and came back. Would would his time dilation be beneficial in receiving a message faster, or does he still have to wait the full time that it would take for light to travel there?

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Does he have to wait the full time?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Because his time is slowed down, right? Like now we're really getting into like the the the yeah, like his time is slowed down, and so he's only experiencing time at a third the rate, right? Instead of 12 years, yeah, four years, right? So my point is, would he also wait a third as long, or would he still wait the full time that it takes for light to travel there?

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Oh, I see what you're saying. Because he's experiencing time more slowly, yeah. Is he having to wait? I don't know. I'd have to, I'd have to like sit down and work and work that out.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Okay, okay, good. That's a good so it was a good question, right? Because I'm like, I feel like I should know this, but I'm like, I'm like, let me ask somebody smarter than me and they can figure it out for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Yeah, no, it is the and that's that's like this the very strange thing um about about relativity is that it's it doesn't make sense unless unless you do the math, it makes like perfect sense on paper. And when the things don't really make sense to us, we call them paradoxes, like there's the twin paradox or the Andromeda paradox, and it's because it the way that we you know operate, there we're not dealing with relativity for the most part, you know, unless you're like dealing with um satellites that are flying around the earth, but on paper it makes sense, like the equal because the equations are close to right, so it works, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Uh let me ask you another uh question. If if you had to bet something, yeah, 20 bucks, right? And then you you had to pick one or the other, and I'll give you the two options, and then you press a button, and it definitely gives you the correct answer. Okay, would you bet that in our galaxy there is other intelligent life or there's not?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

What define intelligence?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Uh uh life that has volition, life that can choose. I don't just mean like a like a like a single-cell organism, but you know, like this is what the difference between us and a monkey, right? Yes, we come from the same evolutionary chain, uh, ultimately, but monkeys don't have choice the way we have choice, right? Like we think you well, I mean, a monkey's not gonna get up and be uh uh a lawyer one day, right? It's not gonna decide to be uh an accountant, right? It's gonna be a monkey, and it has choice within its instinctual experience or within its natural habitat, but it's not gonna go beyond its instinctual nature in that sense, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Have you ever seen this is a good question. This is a little bit of a derail, but yeah, have you ever seen this um documentary on Netflix called Chimp Empire?

SPEAKER_00 8:41

I've heard of it, I haven't seen it. Is that the one that Marshallah uh Ali narrates?

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Uh yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

It's so it's it's so good, and in that you see this one troop of chimpanzees that for some reason there's like a mutiny and they split off into two factions. So there's this big, the big uh legacy faction, like the progenitor group, and they have one um alpha male who's literally like he's like the beating on his chest, running around, everybody's scared of him. And then in the smaller faction, they have less people, so they're kind of strapped for resources, and they have close to a 50-50 split male-female. And in that smaller faction, they're very egalitarian. The males and the females both do equal amounts of work, they both patrol, they make decisions together, they share everything. But in the bigger troupe, that's not how things are are run. Basically, the alpha male, I think his name was Jackson, chooses who gets meat when they kill like a little monkey. They don't let the females do any of the patrolling and fighting and that sort of thing. And it's like you see the I the reason I love that show so much was because you see this incredible range of behaviors in the same troupe. This isn't even chimpanzees on one side of Congo and the other side of the Congo, they're in this, they were they came from the exact same group, and you see these like wide variety of behaviors, and so it's like I it feels like animals have much more range than we than we tend to give them, but because I feel like I know what you're saying, yeah, like our let's just say like our level of society or something like that in the galaxy. I'm at the the I'm at the limit where I think that maybe there's one or two in per galaxy. I think that that's the occurrence rate. So if you forced me, I would probably say that there may be a couple other in our galaxy. If you expand it out to like a bubble that included 10 galaxies or so, then it's 100%, yes. But I'm wow, I'm more conservative on what we have specifically because I think it's easy. I mean, it happened once on Earth, right? There's been so many, so many species, yeah. But so far, there's only been like one group that can create Substack in the internet, and that's that sort of thing, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:00

And and that's what's just fascinating to me about the human experience. And um, I think part of the conversation lends to um, I don't know if animals have a concept of a higher power. Um, humans do, some humans accept it, others reject it. That's kind of the free will I'm talking about. Like, are there uh in the in the chimpanzee empire, would there be one group that said that there's a higher power and the other group says there's not?

SPEAKER_01 11:23

Yeah, if you okay, so if we reframe it like that, I'm not confident that some cetaceans, like some whales or dolphins, don't already have something similar. Um, and the reason that that I say that is there are these um researchers that study whales and uh sperm whales who have the largest brains on the planet, and they're enormous, but the the brains are huge. They um they make these these clicks in the water called kodas, and it's like how they communicate. Um, in a way, it's much more efficient than us talking to each other because um sound travels way faster in water because the molecules are closer to each other together, exactly. Yep, right. And so they've studied these kodas, and one thing that's cool about uh any human language is it follows this thing called zips law, and it's basically a power law. If you plot out every word in the in the human language by frequency, you have some words that are used all the time, a and the pronouns like i you, and then you'll have words that are rarely ever used, um, you know, like whatever whatever they are, xylophone or something like that. And it follows this this beautiful power law. And if you do this with any human language, it always follows that. All of them follow. And when you do it with the codas that the sperm whales use, it follows that exact law. Wow, so there are some clicks that they use that must mean certain things, sure. And so now you're a you know, it's suggestive. We you we can't definitively say, oh, this must be a language, but there are groups that are trying to do that. There's actually a group trying to um build LLMs to communicate. I saw your post about that.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

That was fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

It's crazy, and so I would say that if you have if we have like this very advanced, intelligent group of of whales that are using language, and you know, they have certain names and certain words mean certain things. Like, how do we know that they don't have culture and that they don't have these sort of beliefs? So, I mean, I couldn't, I it I don't know if that if we're defining it in that way, then I'm not even sure we're the only ones on earth that have that level of intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

That's wild. That'd be that's interesting. Um, a a whale prophet, um, you know, a whale Jesus. I mean, who knows, right? I mean, it's it's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

What stories do they tell? Like, what are their what's their cultural lore? Um, I who knows?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

I mean, the orcas are definitely coordinated enough to attack these boats over and over again, and um, and and it's because they're pissed off at the pollution. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

I mean it could be, and but they're and and they're careful, I think. Well, you know, this is now I'm speculating, but there aren't any recorded orca attacks on humans um in the wild, which is pretty unique. I mean, lots of animals will kill a human, um, you know, by chance, yeah. But orcas won't. And I oh, and I wonder, you know, this is me like getting it way out there and putting the cart way ahead of the horse, but I wonder if in the past something like that happened and the humans like enacted revenge or something, and they they like developed something, they developed like some sort of cultural norm or rule where it's like, no, we don't do this thing because bad things happen, and now it's been you know generations and generations later. Now, you know, that's that's very speculative, but sure.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

I mean, the alternative could just be that they're intelligent enough to realize that that this creature is not food and therefore leave it alone. This other creature is food, and that's the one we should be going after as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Well, I think even like sharks do that. I'm I'm um sharks. I think all every time a shark attacks, I think it's usually a mistake, yeah. Um and but you know, yeah, so I mean who knows? Uh hip we're not food to hippos, but a hippo but hippos will attack humans though, will attack humans like you know at the drop of the hat. I think they're the they're one of the most deadly animals besides like mosquitoes to use.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, yeah, hungry, hungry hippos is no joke. They they come after you, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

What do you think? What do you think? What's your overunder on intelligence?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Oh, I think 100%.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

Yeah, if I if I was a betting man and you could press a button and it would give you a definitive answer, I'd I'd bet the farm on it. I don't own a farm, but if I did, I'd bet it.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

What wait, how many though? How many?

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Um, you know, I I think the number if if we work under the theory of even the observable universe is what, two trillion galaxies, give or take?

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Yeah, and that's that's the part we can see.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

That's the observable universe, right? And who knows what that is relative to the actual universe, right? I mean, past the event horizon of the universe. Um, you know, we should talk about whether the universe is actually infinite or not. But if it's two trillion galaxies uh that we can observe, and each galaxy has anywhere from 100 billion to a trillion stars. I mean, I think the number could be infinite. Uh, I mean, it I think it's uncountable. Um, and I think just the the sheer distances, right? Like one of the most, and if you're watching, you can Google this image too. One of the most striking images that I've seen is a picture of the Milky Way galaxy, and it says everything you've seen in the night sky, or everything we've reached through our communications, is a tiny little circle the size of like a dime, and the in the galaxy is the size of a sheet of paper. It's crazy to think about. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, if there's out there, we just don't know because we don't have the tools to reach them.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

I so I agree with that large scale, like observable universe, we probably can't pinpoint a number. But what about in the galaxy though? Because then you have to galaxy, then you have to get like a little bit more specific about how frequent you think it happens.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, I mean, in the galaxy, I I would say I I I would I would give it more than 10. More than you yeah, you're talking how many stars in a galaxy? About 400 million in the milk?

SPEAKER_01 17:22

No, uh more than that. I think for the best estimates is somewhere between 100 to 200 billion in the milk game.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Yeah, I mean, I think double digits for sure. Double digits. I just think it has to be, yeah. I I I mean, I don't have anything empirical to validate that. Um yeah, nobody does. I don't, yeah, yeah, but I I just feel like it's um yeah, yeah, I I I I think so. And I mean, I and part of it is is driven by faith. Part of it is, I think, driven by just a a desire to want it to be true. Um and that's not really a good, you know, maybe it's like it's like Mulder in uh in the X Files, right? Like, I want to believe that that there's something out there.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Faith in faith. Uh so that's interesting. Faith in what? Like faith in that somebody with our level of intelligence could like get it right and go beyond what we've done? Or like what's the what's the faith in?

SPEAKER_00 18:16

So um this is not an often discussed topic, but I'm I'm a Muslim. That's often discussed, but this part is not often the Quran actually has some really interesting uh statements um uh related to science, related to astronomy. Um, uh and and one of them, two of them I'll I'll point out that have kind of been validated by science is the idea of big the big bang theory. Um that it the Arabic root word is Ruktan, where it talks about a closed-up mass, an infinitely small closed-up mass. And then God says, out of this closed-up mass, we created everything. Now, this was revealed to an unlettered man named Muhammad 1400 years ago when that idea of a big bang didn't really exist in any kind of meaningful way. Um, and then the Quran goes on to say that out of water we created life, which is another you know scientific kind of confirmation that didn't come till later. Um, and then also talks about the expansion of the universe as well. Um, and then there's a verse in the Quran that talks about all of God's creations, all the things that He's created. And it refers to the creation of creatures on the earth as well as creatures in the heavens. And some people interpret that to mean like, oh, it must mean like spiritual beings and angels. But the Arabic, if you look in the lexicon, it refers to physical beings that exist on other planes that would necessarily be in this universe. And the craziest part about it though is that it also goes on to state that if God wills, he will create contact between us and these beings out there. So this is what I mean is faith, because I have no evidence of this, right? But my my faith is driven by it talks about the Big Bang, which science has proven true, it talks about the expansion of the universe, which science has proven to be true, and then it makes this very deliberate usage of words that can only refer to physical beings that live outside of Earth. It doesn't refer to angels, it's not spiritual beings, it's not ghosts, it's not, you know, goblins, it's actual physical beings. And so from that faith standpoint, I'm deducing that something has to be out there and it has to be, based on our knowledge of science and travel, close enough that there could somehow be contact, maybe physical, maybe communicative. I don't know. But that's to answer your question, the faith aspect of it, that's kind of what is driven by.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I think that in a lot of ways, I would make a similar faith-based argument from the science, uh, like just the known, the known statistics. You know, we could run how frequently we come across planets. Um, you know, some fraction of those planets are necessarily going to be at a right a favorable distance from their star. We know that water is everywhere, it's literally everywhere. We send probes to asteroids and take scoops of them, and we find amino acids and and nucleobases like the building blocks of DNA. So the stuff is everywhere. Um, if it was just a crapshoot that was super unlikely, it seems like it would still happen all over all over the place. So, yeah, I mean, I think that I would I would make uh a similar argument. And then it's you know, we talk about the observable universe, and we we can't say much about if there's something beyond that, but it there's no reason to think that there wouldn't be, and probably just more universe and like how far, how how uh how long does that go? And that's not a question that we have an answer to.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Yeah, and I don't know if we ever will, right? I mean, it's uh at least at the rate of technology advancing right now. I don't know if we ever will. But if you think about a thousand years ago or whatever, 2,000 years ago, the extent of the universe was just what we could see in the night sky. And then you know the Milky Way was discovered, and then Andromeda was discovered, and we're like, oh shoot, the Milky Way galaxy is insignificantly small compared to Andromeda. And then you see galaxy clusters and then the observable universe. There's no doubt in my mind that it would go beyond that as well. The one data point I learned recently that blew my mind, I'd love for you to talk about this, is that um the Plangt, I just thought, yeah, it's a really small thing. I didn't realize how small a Planet actually is, that it is to a hydrogen atom what the hydrogen atom is to the universe. That's yeah, insane to me. How does that get calculated? How does that get understood?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

And how does that apply in our everyday life, or does it so I don't think that it really applies in our everyday life? Um, but it's uh it's a theoretical calculation, right? So it's not it's like not something that you could measure. Like there's no we can't have we can you know, we can't uh create a ruler that has plank length notches on it. It's it's it's sort of something that emerges theoretically from this space that we understand physics very well, and you know, there's like this limitation of the smallest meaningful unit of distance, which again is like impossible to imagine because you could think of the um like the famous calculus example where uh you you're like standing from a wall and you cut the distance in half, and then you cut that distance in half, and you can I mean you can do that forever, right? And never reach the wall, right? But if the plank length is indeed the shortest meaningful like unit of separation that anything could have in the universe, then you actually do come to a point where you can't you can't do that anymore, like you can't split it in half, and it's the plank length, and I forget exactly what it is, but it's 10 to the minus I don't know, I don't even know, minus 31 or something like that. It's it's it's completely yeah, it's completely ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 23:59

So so how does that fit in with uh because I saw one of your videos, I watched a lot of your videos. Uh I uh with the concept, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Same thing.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Um, because I saw one of your videos talking about a black hole and how it's not one, it's not a hole, obviously, but then also it's not like a physical structure either. Um, but you can have different sizes of a black hole. So like that seems kind of contradictory language that it's not a physical structure in the traditional sense, but you also have you know, the the biggest ones have uh 66 billion solar masses versus a smaller one with 10 million. How does that measurement happen?

SPEAKER_01 24:34

So there's the you know, the it not being a physical thing, like a physical structure that you can touch, is really in reference to the event horizon, which is the black part, which is what we call the black hole, right? Right. So the thing that we're seeing isn't like a black stuff, right? That you could it's it's it's the it's the absence of light because all the light that's within that radius is headed towards the center of the black hole. Sure. Now, as you add mass, the black hole becomes more massive, and conceivably all that mass goes to, I mean, if you believe the math, it goes to like a one-dimensional, infinitely dense point in the center. Um, I don't think that most physicists believe in a singularity, but that is what the math says. Sure. And as you pack that infinitely dense thing with more density, uh-huh, with more mass, which also like doesn't necessarily make sense intuitively, then the event horizon grows. So the black hole is getting larger with mass, even though physically it's not like material is building out in that way. And you can actually have a black hole uh if uh with anything like I could take you and compress you enough to create uh a black hole. I could take the earth, and I think if you compress the earth to like the size of a marble, something like that, then it would become a black hole. You could do it with the sun, and then you know, these these multi-billion solar mass black holes have like billions or hundreds of billions of stars worth of material packed in there, so you could have a you know a black hole of any size. Um, some of the more interesting ones, there's this so dark matter is this stuff that we can see the gravity for, but we don't really know what it is. It's it doesn't seem to be normal matter, it doesn't really interact with light, but we can see it kind of pulling on things. And there was one hypothesis for dark matter, I don't think it's the most favored anymore, but it's still a uh a potential source for dark matter, are these primordial black holes. So when the universe was really young, um, like I said, make creating a black hole is really about shoving a bunch of energy in a really small space. Yeah, if you you could just like fundamentally think of it as a bunch of energy, mass, whatever, in a tiny, tiny, tiny space. Well, the young universe had a ton of energy and it was a lot smaller, and it was a just a very different environment. So you could imagine that it was easy to create countless of these tiny black holes, right? They didn't have to be some big, enormous, massive thing. Although, in the early universe, um, it's possible that that's where supermassive black holes were also created. Uh, but these I've always found it interesting that potentially dark matter could be these tiny black holes that are just left over from that event early, right? That early in the universe, and they're um, you know, they're black, they're black holes, right? So we can't see them, they're spread out, and then light would interact, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

So then what would be the difference between, given that theory or otherwise, what's the difference uh between dark matter and dark energy?

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Completely different things. Dark energy has to do with this accelerated expansion of the universe. So, like one of the fundamental rules in physics is that energy is always conserved. It's one of the first things that you learn. We know it intuitively, right? Like, if you stop eating food, you'll run out of energy to do things, right? Um, if you don't put enough gas in your car, it's gonna stop. It's not right. Uh, we people like fantasize about zero point energy and infinite, and it's like it's all it's basically magic. Yeah, energy is always conserved. We've never seen that to be violated, however, the universe is not just expanding, which you would expect to it to continue to if it started at some point, it's speeding up in its expansion, and it's like, why where is that additional energy coming from? There is no it's not being doesn't appear to be being recycled from something else that happened. It's is it leaking from another universe? Are we in a black hole that's getting larger? Like, what's we don't and we don't know, which is why it's called dark, and it's confusing because dark matter we're we're calling both of these dark because we don't know what they are and we can't see them, but dark matter is different. Dark matter is really like just this extra source of gravity that we're that we're seeing, um, but it's you know, it's not like a mystery energy source necessarily, like dark energy is.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Have you uh I know you like love reading. Have you read The Last Question by Isaac Asima?

SPEAKER_01 29:29

I haven't.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Is it okay? Oh my god, it's it's like a 15-minute read. It's a short story, it's a 15-minute read, and it is one of those short stories that the last sentence took my breath away. Like I audibly gasped with the last, and so I'm not going to spoil it for you because it's that good. And I think knowing your love of this stuff, you're gonna devour it. But we'll do this again after you read it and we'll talk about that. For sure. Um, the other other uh short story, uh, I can't remember the name of the author. Um, is The Space Traders. Have you heard of this one?

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Uh I haven't heard of that. Space Traders.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

There's another fascinating one, it's a short story, and I'll tell you the premise of this one. I won't even tell you the premise of the last question because it'll ruin it for you, and I want you to enjoy it. Like, you know how like my favorite movie is Interstellar. I wish I could watch it again for the first time, right? So that's why I never want to, but but same with the last question. I wish I could read it again for the first time. But the space trader is a really fascinating one because it is uh it was written in the 1980s, uh, with the idea that this is the not-so-distant future, where um climate change has destroyed uh Earth. Um, there is economic injustice and wars and famine and disease. And these aliens arrive, okay, on Earth, and they say that we will give you technology to fix your climate, we will cure all diseases, and we will give you enough um uh minerals to fix your economic problems. And all we want in return are all your black people. It's written by black author, and it's just a fascinating read. Uh, I I read it in uh in college in in English class, and it's a phenomenal read. I think you'd enjoy that as well.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Yeah. That that does sound that does sound interesting. That's a good hook.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Yeah, yeah, it is a good hook. They need to make that into a movie. Uh it's because it's that good. It's really, really good. It's just an excellent commentary on the human condition.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

Yeah. Yeah, definitely gonna read that. And then what was the other one? So space traders and then the last what by last question. Last question.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Last question. Yeah, it's free online. You can just Google it and read it online as well. You haven't got to buy it. But it's uh Isaac Asimov, it's it's just fascinating. I I love it. I love it. It's it's related to the you'll see what I mean when I say that it's related to the conversation that we're having uh right now. What so just to kind of uh go back to where we started the conversation, what are some of your favorite fiction sci-fi movies out there or books?

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Uh Interstellar is definitely uh my top one. I think Interstellar is well, movie. Well, I don't even know if Interstellar has a book, but the movie Interstellar, um, one of my to this day, I think I'll probably rewatch it every six months. It's just one of my favorite movies. Um uh it's it's it's so beautiful. Uh, you know, they people talk about it really sticking to the science, and it's like it does touch on some real um physics, but there's also a lot of you know, a lot of cinema in it, yeah, which we can forgive. Now, one of the ones that I really enjoy is um ones where aliens are very uh unpredictable, like are very alien, and I think that three body problem is interesting in that way because the uh tri solarians, the the um the aliens in the beginning are that because they evolved in a very different system, they have like a very different psychology, yeah. And they're like some things that they didn't evolve to be able to do, like lie, and they have to they like don't understand that concept, and I think that that's a little bit far-fetched because I think lying is clearly a thing that's that can help you survive. Like if you're thinking about um like deceiving, right? An animal can just deceive another animal and like get its fruit or something like that, yeah. So it's it's so helpful, so it's hard to imagine, sure. But but presumably there would be any number of psychological, mental um habits or patterns that we have that another intelligence wouldn't have, or vice versa. And I think it's really interesting to explore those things. Or like, how does how would a species be different that evolves on a planet where the gravity is so high that you have to be careful with every step that you take because if you fall, you may never be able to get back up or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Have you have you watched uh the expanse?

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah, I love the expanse.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

Oh, I thought it was great. I it was I'm I'm disappointed that they didn't go all nine seasons, but I thought the expanse is an excellent example of um of kind of what the world could look like in 200 years. Um I I know that the writers try to stay true to actual physics. Actually, you're the perfect person to ask the science that they showed, aside from like the big thing with uh the proto molecule, that was the rest of the science in the travel, does it science or is it is it too much gobbledygook?

SPEAKER_01 34:30

No, I think it's pretty good. I think it's I think it's pretty good. You know, they have this scene where uh Captain Naomi uh shoot jumps out of an airlock in in space, yeah, and survives. And I thought that that was that I've seen the best representation of what it would most likely be like to be naked in space. Um, it's you wouldn't just instantly freeze, uh, and you wouldn't necessarily like die right away. You couldn't last long because you didn't have any any air, but you should be able to survive that if it's a very short amount of time, maybe. And um, you know, there were some things that she did. I think she jabbed herself with a pin that gave her more oxygen or something like that. And I thought it was really cool because I think that they nailed at least hypothetically what we think that that would actually be like. You wouldn't just instantly explode and you wouldn't just instantly freeze. I think that's a lot of what we see.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

Yeah, I I love that we got several hundred people watching this and enjoying this. Um, I I don't do these kinds of conversations often. Um most of my stuff is around human rights and social justice and heavy stuff. I love talking about this because I feel like if we solved all these stupid political wars and problems, we could focus on the important stuff like uplifting humanity and exploring the stars and investing in in that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 35:50

Absolutely. I you know, I feel the same. I and there's like a lot of optimism there and like hope and ah, like it could be great. Like if we we could get these things straight now, it could be great. I have a question about um I guess this is both space rights, but also human rights as it pertains to the new space industry/slash revolution that's upon us, because there's really not there really isn't like legal frameworks for anything. And exactly it's almost it's like the wild, wild west. I wonder if you have any like insight or um opinions on the development on that front.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Yeah, it it's I mean, we have precedent for it actually, because um, as people began, as colonizers effectively began to expand out, there was law that needed to be written. So, how do we address maritime law in new waters that you know weren't historically recognized by uh Europeans? Um, how do we acknowledge uh what merger is in the colonies when it was clearly you know a crime in Europe, but is there sovereignty here? Um, and we see that today as well, right? With new technologies coming out, how are we regulating AI? We have no idea, right? And like there's some really bad law out there as well. How are we regulating crypto? Um, like one really dark chapter of the late 20th century was uh CSAM, child sexual abuse material, where it was actually considered free speech up until about 1984. And only when it was then demonstrated that this is actually harming children in a meaningful way, that it was finally said, okay, this is not first amendment protection anymore. But then there was a loophole because um what about the CSAM that already existed? And they the the ruling at the time was basically, well, what's done is done, we can't do anything about it. But then technology advanced and VCRs started to help spread that uh filth even more. And then it wasn't until 1991, Ohio versus Osborne, where the Supreme Court said, okay, even possession is considered a crime. And so uh it's horrifying. Uh and in hindsight, we're like, yeah, well, obviously it's a crime, but this is the stuff they struggled with because it wasn't something that had ever been asked before. And so, you know, if we live long enough, we're gonna see the first, unfortunately, murder in space. We're gonna see the first child be born in space. What does that mean? Are they a citizen of Earth? Are they a Martian? Are they a lunar being? Like who knows? But that's that's kind of you know, we have the precedent from what happened here, but there's gonna be a case of first impression, and it's gonna be fascinating to figure out what that means. Uh in this scenario.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

I guess in this case, the stakes also feel much higher when you're talking about be, you know, the the power, the technology to go in these places. Um, we people who are gonna be like wielding weapons in space that have uh like the ability to kind of reach anywhere on earth. And I guess we sort of already have that. Space force, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We already we already kind of have that ability, but um, yeah, it just feels it feels like uh a bit scarier because the stakes are are so high.

SPEAKER_00 39:04

Yeah, and and and that's the point, right? Like the the impact and the precedent that's gonna be set is gonna be long lasting. It's gonna be extraordinarily difficult to change a precedent once it's been set, and so that's why the first precedent-setting decision has to be exactly right. And I mean it's it's extremely difficult to overturn that. And so it's an exciting time to be alive. Uh, I I think. Um, although I will say, you know, uh somebody said this, and it might have been somebody famous, so forgive me if I'm not uh giving proper attribution, but somebody said that this is the worst time to be born because uh we're done exploring the earth, but we don't have the technology to explore the solar system or the galaxy. And in in in one respect, that that is kind of painful um because I would love to explore the stars. Um, but as we kind of wrap up, I wanted to ask about kind of the development of technology. Um, James Webb has obviously changed the game in a lot of respects, and we're able to see things we couldn't see before. How far away are we from the technology to actually be able to see the surface of planets in other solar systems?

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Uh I would say that well, I I would say that it depends. Um, and to uh trace back to what you said, in my opinion, the James Webb Space Telescope is the single most impressive like piece of technology in terms of what it can do, I think that humans have have ever made. I mean, you can literally see the first starlight that ever was released. Yeah, it's a it's it's insane to think about. Yeah, um, now there's there's there's two problems. There's seeing a planet, and then there's uh resolving the surface of a planet, and like what does that actually mean? Because to resolve anything, you need an enormous telescope. Um, there's there's like a simple equation. Uh, you can use something called the Rayleigh criterion, and it's basically like the the smallest unit of what you're going to be able to resolve is directly attached to the size, the diameter, the size of your of your telescope. So I've been I was like playing around with one of these the other day and thinking about a um an alien in the Andromeda galaxy on a planet there, and they wanted to see on Earth and see a human. So something that was about a meter in size, and they needed to have a telescope that was um like one and a half to two light years in diameter, which you know it's like stuff. You there isn't enough, you can't find enough stuff to make something that big. If we're talking about an exoplanet that's just in our galaxy and not even that far, um dozens of light years, you still need something that's like as large as the Earth's orbit or you know, the orbit of one of the gas giants, Jupiter or Saturn. And it's like there isn't enough stuff. We could go to the planets and deconstruct all of them. Let's just give us give ourselves that power. There isn't enough stuff to make a telescope, chat big. Like you just kind of run out of things, so we'll never be able to see onto a planet from Earth uh in like the detail that we'd want, right? We're never gonna be able to zoom in and you know check out something. It's never, it's never gonna be like that, but we are not far at all from having the ability to directly image planets, which I think can be helpful in a different way. So instead of like being able to zoom in high-res, you could maybe resolve um a couple pixels or something like that, and uh you use this technique. There's this telescope that hopefully gets launched in the 2030s. Um, not optimistic because they cut a whole bunch of funding for a whole bunch of stuff over the past few years, but called the Habitable Worlds Observatory is basically like this giant coronagraph that we're gonna put out in space, and it can block out the starlight, and then hopefully you can see the planets orbiting. And the projection is that for a system that was maybe 20 or 30 light years away, you'd actually be able to see an earth-like planet that was an earth-like distance away from its star. I mean, insane, right? And so I I'm I'm very optimistic, you know, within I'll call it uh two decades, that we're taking pictures of planets, and it, you know, it's never gonna be like what it looks like when the astronauts took a picture of the earth, but even getting a pixel of a rocky planet in another solar system would be insane, and there's so much that you can learn from that. You can do all sorts of spectral spectroscopy on it to try and learn about the atmosphere and see if there's biosignatures and that sort of thing. So we're a couple decades, I think, away from from that.

SPEAKER_00 43:45

See, if I was a billionaire, that's what I would be spending my money on. I'd be like, I'd like NASA, here's 20 billion, go figure it out. Find me a planet and and let's take a picture of it.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Yeah, well, hopefully you're uh up next for billionaire status.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

I despise billionaires. I'll I'll give money away before I become a billionaire, but uh people like you who can help us figure out this kind of stuff as well. Um, dude, this was great. We got to do this more often. This was like I don't know, for sure, it's hypnotic for me. Even the comments people are like, I needed this. Is this a good conversation that I didn't know I needed as well? So um, I think people really enjoyed this as well.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

Absolutely. Yeah, man, this was great. I love this stuff. I love nerding out like this.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

Yeah, oh yeah, so it's the best part. Uh I I I'm fortunate that even, you know, we grew up pretty low income, but I'm fortunate that my parents uh never ever uh ever um stopped me from buying a book or stopped me from stopping getting me the books. And I I was, you know, I lived in the libraries. And uh because one, when you're poor, that's really all you can afford to do, but also like I genuinely enjoyed it and just read everything I possibly could. And um, you know, I think the first the first movie I ever saw in theaters uh is another movie I I see often is Contact. Um favorite films. I I have a theory that Contact is actually the prequel to Interstellar, um, or Interstellar's sequel to Contact. Have you heard this theory before? No, I haven't. So think about it, right? So my theory is in Interstellar, uh, his wife's dead, she died, and in contact, right? They Jodie Foster and he get together at the end, and she thinks that she's experienced something. Uh, and as the audience, we know she has, but she has no proof of it, and he's a man of faith. And so he says, I believe her. And then the the theory is that uh we're like in this post-apocalyptic world, so it's like 20, 30 years in the future. She's died of cancer, he's lost his faith and tried to find, you know, pursue what she was doing of what's out there, and then it ends up you know becoming him actually going out there and and and finding proof of whatever she was looking for that entire time as well. It it actually fits to think about it.

SPEAKER_01 45:51

Yeah, yeah. I could see, I see how you could like kind of massage that into the same into the same universe.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

Okay, it could it could, it's it's not impossible because they never actually tell you where he is or or what he's doing in Interstellar. You're kind of just assuming he's somewhere in a in the United States, but you're not really sure where uh where it is either. So yeah, yeah. Well, cool, man. Let's let's figure out a time to do this again. This is a lot of fun. If you're out in Chicago, we'll do it in person. If I'm out in LA, we'll do it in person as well. But uh definitely you'll be out in LA soon, right? I'm yeah, we're we're gonna we're we're trying to plan something out right now. Actually, I'm gonna announce this thing pretty soon. We're we're gonna so for anyone watching and you're interested, we're gonna be doing uh a civil rights march for voting rights pretty soon through the south. And uh we'll have a whole thing up and people can participate. It's gonna be a lot of fun. But before we go, um a science fact uh that just blows your mind that that you can share with all of us so we can enjoy that.

SPEAKER_01 46:46

Ooh, a mind-blowing science fact. So this is uh this is one that that continues to blow my mind. It's more of a biology fact than uh than a space fact. But um, you know, the mitochondria, which you know, everybody remembers the powerhouse of the cell, it generates the energy that's that cells use to do things. Um, all evidence suggests that those mitochondria are descendants from a bacterium that got eaten by uh uh some other cell billions of years ago. And for some reason it like didn't it was unable to dissolve it and they both survived and uh continued on. So your mitochondrial DNA is different than your DNA. It's it's got a different set of like bacterial DNA that is separate from your DNA as a person. And uh uh the people that study this uh think that all mitochondria from all eukaryotes, from me, from you, from the whales, the dogs, uh, the fungus, the plants, all eukaryotes all stem from one capture event, from one specific one billions of years ago that was eaten by one cell, and that has led to all the animal plant, plant, and fungus that that we have today. And I think that blows my mind. And that that's also like one of the reasons that I think I'm skeptical that the really advanced life is so popular, it's so common because that's it happened once, like that could have not happened, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:17

Right, and it didn't happen for billions of years, right? And then it happened once, right? Yeah, yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, I didn't realize that. That's actually really fascinating. Um, that's a much deeper conversation. I'm gonna have to read up on that and and pick your brain with questions on that one next time as well.

SPEAKER_01 48:32

For sure, for sure. This is excellent. Yeah, anybody uh that wants to check me out, I have a a podcast where I talk about this sort of stuff all the time and interview um other scientists, microbiologists, astrophysicists, uh, all sorts of things called Dr. Star Kid. It's on all the platforms, and you check me out on YouTube as well, Dr. Dakota Tyler on YouTube.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

And your Facebook is Fire as well. So hopefully we'll get you more here on Subtack because there's a I'm not sure watching the comments, but there's a super robust conversation happening in the comments. People are loving this, so very on here more often, too.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And uh, I guess also Dr. Star Kid on all all the uh platforms. So Facebook, um, TikTok, IG, all that good stuff. No, this was sick, man. This is this is this is what I love to do.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Yeah, I'm down, I'm always game for this. Always game for this is cathartic for me. So we'll do this again soon, man. I thank you all for tuning in. Really appreciate this. Make sure you subscribe to to Dr. Star Kid and hit subscribe here for me as well. And uh, we'll see y'all next time. Peace.