Arthur Byron Cover

Transcription

MALE SPEAKER: Scientist, a best selling author whose future-oriented novels include "The Postman," and "Earth." His "Uplift" Hugo Award winners include "Star Tide Rising" and "The Uplift War." "The Postman" inspired a major film; I guess it wasn't that close the book so it's only inspiration. He's also known as a leading commentator on modern technology trends and his nonfiction book "The Transparent Society" won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. His newest novel, "Existence," explores the ultimate question-- billions of planets may be right for intelligent life, so where is everybody? OK, so I'll hand it over to David. [APPLAUSE] DAVID BRIN: Nice to be back. It's nice to see some familiar faces. Thank you very much Mike. It's great to see your director of research sitting here, the great Peter Norwig. Let's just start with something that will give me time to get my jacket on. This is a little something that shows you how marketing is now being done for books. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [END VIDEO PLAYBACK] DAVID BRIN: The art of the-- [APPLAUSE] Oh, thanks. The great Patrick Farley is a treasure that our civilization doesn't make enough use of because he never finishes a damn thing. This was the first piece of video that he ever finished. Some of you might be familiar with Electric Sheep Comics, and you should look him up because he finally has finished a couple more things. The variety of his talent is amazing. Those are all hand painted images from the novel. I got him cheap because civilization hasn't been employing him well enough. So you could snatch him up. In any event, it's nice to be here at one of the centers of human civilization. Came up here all the way from the lower left-hand corner, San Diego. But we're all sort of on the lower left corner of the continent, which is why everything loose kind of rolls down this way. And we're proud of it, aren't we? In any event, down there in San Diego we just started the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. An amazing center of trans-cultural, trans-academic study of this fundamentally human notion that is seeded here the prefrontal lobes just above our eyes. The seat of what Einstein called the Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment. Which is that which-- there are three seats here. There's a more here if you'd like to come on up. Don't feel you're disturbing anything. These prefrontal lobes are the seat the thought experiment, which is what we do when we think what will my boss think if I present this idea, what will others think if I wear this, what might happen if I try to run this yellow light. It's where we, largely, give the answer to this question, nah, I better not do that. How many of you guys have had to say, nah, I better not do that within the last five minutes? Then the rest of you aren't honest. The notion that imagination is part of this process of creativity and that it's important for us to start understanding what it is, how to enhance it, but also how to help train our children and our neighbors to be able to tell the difference between what they imagine and what's real. Because what is the fundamental human quandary? It's the seat of much of our glory, much of our greatness, and also much of our tragedy, ever since recorded time began. That is our propensity for delusion; our ability to deceive ourselves. As Richard Feynman put it, the easiest person to fool is yourself. And science is one of the four great arenas that we found in our recent enlightenment that empower us to find our mistakes before they become lethal. If you look across the last 6,000 years of history, it's been one relentless litany of horrible errors of statecraft and delusions of grandeur, or delusions of impotence, delusions that have left a trail of lost potential across thousands of years, and almost all continents. What are the four arenas, that we have that Adam Smith recommended, that take advantage of the greatest creative force in the universe, which is competition. It made us in nature. But can we harness this force without the incredible inefficiency and pain that features natural competition, the incredible lost opportunities, and the violence and death. Where the losers have to lose big time, in order for winners to incrementally improve and get better. You may think you have an angle on what my politics are just because I talk about Adam Smith. You'd be wrong. The point is that we have developed four great arenas based upon the competitive provision of the only thing that cuts through our human propensity for delusion, and that is reciprocal criticism. You cannot see all of your mistakes. If you're scientifically trained, you're among the few people in the history of our species who are at least trained to find some of your own mistakes, to have a habit of saying the words, I might be wrong let's find out; which are the great words of human maturity that took us thousands of years to develop. But do you honestly believe that you catch all your mistakes? Who catches them for you? This is why we get married. I know who catches most of my mistakes, either before or after I make them. But who really catches your mistakes? Collaborators? Good. That's good. Your grad students? That's good. How about your enemy's? This is the ultimate irony. The people who will supply for you the criticism that you need in order to become even better; the people who supply you with the grist you need in order to improve; the ones who can be relied upon to provide you with this absolute necessary ingredient for your success are your enemies. But criticism is the only known antidote to error. [INAUDIBLE] And yet we hate it instinctively, reflexively. We avoid it whenever possible. And this reflex explains most of human history. If you're at the top of a pyramidal social order and you have the thugs, and you have the swords, then the natural tendency for a human male is to repress criticism. Napoleon! Napoleon! Your emperorness, that sounds like a great plan except I hear they have snow in Russia. It's a gift economy. Your worst enemies will supply the criticism that you need. And here's the point, they'll doing it for free. And you'll happily reciprocate the gift. There's always a positive spin on everything, and I just put a positive spin on the give and take of the hate fast. But it doesn't have to be a hate fest. Think how you are empowered if the next time your enemies are criticizing you, you say, "Yes, tell me more about that one. Uh huh, very interesting. The first four points you made are utter bullshit, idiotic. But five and six, I think you've just helped me to be even better, and I'll be better able to defeat you now. Thanks!" Can you think of a better win-win than the look on your enemy's face when you say that? When you've actually paid attention to the component-- it may be just 5%, of what that idiot was saying-- that was good, that was valid, that was useful? And you had the strength of character to say, "Huh, idiot, idiot, idiot. Thanks!" Can you see how strong it makes you look and can you see yourself actually doing it? It's kind of iffy. When I teach writing I emphasize workshop, workshop, workshop so that you can get the criticism, and get the pain that leads to success. But to find pain attractive. Well we're a generation that at least is familiar with the notion of going to the gym. I've been a little less familiar with the notion lately. I still got some guns though. My son's are 17 and 21 and the one thing they don't dare do is meet me in a-- I'm 63-- meet me in arm wrestling. So they look at me and they say, "so, catch me!" In any event, I am a member of an industry that utilizes this spectacular propensity for delusion because it is also the source of art. It's the source of some of our greatest things and that's why we developed the Arthur Clark Center for Human Imagination down at UCSD. Think about what I do. Does somebody have a book here? Let me hold that up. You probably never heard of this book, except I did this great big sales pitch at you and called it art. What do I do? Magic, if you look across history, magic is the use of incantations, and familiarity, and images, to create belief in subjective realities in other people's heads. What do I do? I create incantations of strings of black squiggles on pressed vegetable matter, or now as lumens rising up from a screen. And you are so well trained, and so brilliant, that you can scan these chains of black squiggles so fast that you forget there are black squiggles there. You decrypt the incantation into star spanning explosions; and deep human insights; kissy, kissy, kissy, love, love, love. And you do it with your own creative imagery. None of you see the same thing when this incantation decrypts. But with good quality control-- and at the end of every one of my books there's 50 names of people I circulate my manuscripts to. I'm supposedly a modern master of science fiction, and yet I circulate my manuscripts to 50 people in advance in order to get industrial quality control. Because I'm always trying something new. I'm trying something daring. There's so many ideas packed in here that I wouldn't be able to juggle it all if I didn't get feedback from people. I take care of most of the criticisms first, before the industrial product comes out. But it's industrial grade magic; creating incantations that reliably can cause subjective realities in your hands to unfold. Well when you look at it that way, I am one of the guild of a few thousand master magicians who've ever been on this planet. Now that is a strange thing for Cal Tech boy to claim. But I was always considered a bit of a razzle dazzle, song and dance man, even there; Gilbert and Sullivan. The point is, that we deal in the world in which the subjective and the objective are always in flux. All the great minds of the past-- well not all of them, but a great many who come down to from the past, Buddah, Jesus, Socrates, Laozi, you look at all of them and they all said, Plato especially-- they all said the same thing as a premise. The premise is objective reality is really hard to grapple with, and even harder to improve. In Plato's "Allegory of the cave;" give up, you can't see what's actually real. You don't know what this is, you just have an impression. And therefore, they all said give up on the temporal world and seek a more transcendent truth. And then they split up via abstraction, or logic, or prayer, or the abnegation of the self. The specifics vary, but the prelude-- this is a filthy world that you cannot get leverage on. Galileo answered, "you are right. My vision is feeble, my touch is unreliable, my descriptions are even worse. I cannot know precisely what this is. But with the help of tools of science, and the tools of the mind, and above all the reciprocal feedback that I get in inter-playing with colleagues and competitors, we can gradually carve away all of the things that this is not, and that is enough to incrementally, and gradually make things better." Now has that driven off all the transcendentalists who say, "we don't like to hand we've been dealt. We need something else something elsewhere, something better." Of course not. This is ingrained in all of us. And I'm not just talking about the religious people in our culture. And by the way, I'm not, strictly speaking, an atheist. But we all know some of the guys who are the new kind of people who are saying, here's a new way to a better reality. We're talking about the post humanists; the singularitarians. Raise your hand if you don't know what the singularity is. Raise your hand if you do. Liars. [LAUGHTER] You don't have a clue, and neither do I. All I know is that I'm a contrarian. I'm ornery. Whenever I am around people who do not believe that we can transcend and get better, I sound a lot like a singularitaran. But whenever I'm around the singularitarians, I'm the grouchy guy. I'm the one who points out to Ray Kurzweil that there may be intracellular computation. And if there's computation taking place inside the neurons and even within the glial cells that support the neurons, and between the glial cells and the neurons-- there is preliminary evidence for all of this-- then the number of Moore's law doublings between us and the 60 trillion synapses in the human brain is a lot more, if for every synapse there are hundreds or 1,000 calculations that take place inside the cell. The good news is that makes us even more spectacular. Now we're talking quadrillons, quadrillions of floating point operations inside this little three-pound piece of muck. Yes I said that-- don't-- it was a metaphor. But the bad news being, poor Ray Kurzweil, the number of Moore's law doublings that it would take to simply emulate quadrillions it may take us to the 2080s, 2090s if that's your faith in AI. It turns out there are 6 or 7 different general categories of approaches to AI. In my novel "Existence" I talk about one that I think is a very, very little understood, but I think you here at Google come closest to it. We all know some of them, the approach taken by IBM, the approach of modeling human brain and software, the approach that gets most of the science fiction movies, is emergent properties. It emerges out of an increasingly complicated set of hardware called Skynet. [IMITATING TERMINATOR] I'll be back. Or the Matrix, or that sort of thing. Personally I am very afraid of that kind. It's the kind that sneaks up on you. And we should be afraid of it, but I don't think it'll come from the military. Who can tell me where more money is being poured into AI than the top 10 universities and Google combined? It's being done in secret, and the AI that they are forming is absolutely based upon fundamental precepts of predatory behavior, parasitism, secrecy, and voracious insatiability. AUDIENCE: Advertisements and Wall Street. AUDIENCE: Hedge funds. DAVID BRIN: Wall Street we're dialing in. Most of it's being done by Goldman Sachs and its partners-- what specific kind of program at Wall Street? AUDIENCE: High speed training? DAVID BRIN: What? AUDIENCE: High speed training. DAVID BRIN: High speed trading, high frequency trading. Vast majority of the trades taking place in our equities markets are quick, predatory, I sense this trend, I sense this trend, and they're spending more on the development of artificial intelligence than anywhere else without any public supervision, any supervision whatsoever, entirely in secret. Does that like a plot of a Michael Creighton story? And by the way, all Michael Creighton stories are based upon one premise, and that is secrecy. This is of course what my book "The Transparent Society" is about, which is the notion that the new era that we're going into is fraught with the potential for disaster and the only way we will cross it, is if we can see where we're going. But there are so many temptations. By the way Michael Creighton is a character in this book. Not quite the same name, he died toward the end of my finishing writing it; I was not going to change the character. But there's a character who's based upon him in the book, and he-- would it give away too much if I told you he's the guy who gets the girl? I don't know. [LAUGHTER] How can we get across this critical juncture? Within 10 years, blatantly and obviously, we will lie detectors; functional lie detectors. There will be fMRI based methods for tracking certain kinds of thoughts and at least attempts to engage in deception. In my novel, "Sun Diver" in 1980, I had using eye tracking as a lie detector and as a method for detecting deception and other personality traits. It seems more and more likely to come true. Under those circumstances, if we tumble into any form of Big Brother, it will be forever. But under those circumstances, if we can avoid Big Brother and apply those tools to all of our politicians, and our oligarchs, and our aristocrats, we will never get Big Brother. And this critical crossing of the next decade or two is what I try to write about in "Earth" and in my near term, grownup, science fiction like "Existence." You always have to watch out for temporal chauvinism. Temporal chauvinism is saying, "This right now. This time. This is it. This is the most important time." And if you had asked me, my 30-year-old self, I would have said 1980. But the fact is that the trends are like this. These four great accountability arenas that enable us to apply reciprocal criticism to each other, and competition, and thus find decent products. What are they? Well I used the word products, so therefore the first one that comes to mind is markets. And Adam Smith recommended that we keep a flat, open, equal opportunity market system, so that competition results in good goods and services. Those of you on the left of the spectrum, you have been doing yourself and Adam Smith a great disfavor by not really reading him and realizing how heavily he emphasized the flat and open part. And how in 1776, he demanded free public education for all children. Those of you on the right, you have done him and yourself a disservice by assuming that he said, "oh, it doesn't matter how much money anybody has. Let anybody become a Lord and then meddle in markets." Well he never said such a thing. He and the American founders rebelled against that. And we're facing this issue, this problem of the recurring zero-sum game of success that destroyed past markets in the past-- past Renaissances of freedom. In 99% of human cultures, those who won for whatever reason, whether they won by delivering goods and services or using swords, what would they do? They would immediately kill their immediate competitors and make sure everyone else was too afraid to try to compete with them. Because they wanted their sons to own other people's sons. And that's your pyramidal social structure that dominated 99% of human civilizations. What is the shape of our social structure, and I'm not saying perfectly. What is the shape of our ideal social structure? A diamond. A flattened diamond, with is empowered, confident middle class. And some people get rich, ideally fairly. But they cannot send out thugs to prevent competition the next time. And that's the notion Adam Smith was talking about, that constant churn. That in this diamond, even if you were born at the bottom you don't necessarily inherit the position of your parents. And if anything is systematically causing you to inherit the position of your parent, then something's wrong with the system and it needs tweaking. And the well-off outnumber the poor. Is this ideal? Do we live up to it ideally? Of course not. But the ideal is in our hearts and when we consider there to be unfairness going on, this is what we aim for. I had a paper, an essay, that was syndicated by Bloomberg about four weeks ago, that pointed out a little bit of mystic numerology. The last three centuries all appear to have started on their 14 year. It's very interesting. 1714, the War of Spanish Succession ended and started what was called the French century, which ended in 1814 with the fall Napoleon. Which led to the great century of colonization and industrial growth and the vigorous optimism that crossed the 19th century, from 1814 until-- AUDIENCE: 1914. DAVID BRIN: 1914. What happened in 1914? The curse of Queen Victoria; three microsyphallic lunatic grandsons of hers ended what was pretty much the greatest peak of hope the world has ever seen. In the preceding decade people had been getting into their increasingly middle class homes; automobiles, refrigerators, radios, telephones, electric lights, gas ranges, plumbing. And then they would all leave their home as quickly as possible when they heard one sound. What was the sound? A flying man. Knowing, while staring up there, within 10 years we're going to be doing that. Everything was looking like it was on its way; filled with optimism. Then we entered what I call the concave century, because wanga! Even though progress continued-- progress continued! But boy was our mood foul. And deservedly so, down to the pit, the nadir of 1943. And since then climbing out, climbing out, climbing out, climbing out. And you see this curve? What does it remind you of? Starts with a S, everybody sing. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] DAVID BRIN: Kind of looks like that, doesn't it. But what about our mood? Foul, foul mood. Maybe not you guys in this room, you work for Google. But just the horrible mood people are in. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. It's 2014, it's time for a change of mood. Do you know what it's time for? What it's time for? Its time for [SINGING] The dawning of the age of-- Oh, you're all too young. Somebody ask some of the old farts here what I was trying to say. No. All right, some old farts have gotten good rejuvenation. Whatever you're taking, I'll take some. We don't know what it's going to be this year and probably it's just numerology. But it would be kind of cool if we snapped out of it. Maybe somebody will slip the right drug to Rupert Murdoch. That could do it. The other arenas-- markets, democracy, science, and justice courts. It's masked from us how similar they are in basic process, because they have very different products and therefore very different superficial rhythms. Markets, we can afford a huge error rate. Personally, I'll take Beta-Max even now. Huge error rate, but huge fecundity; huge productivity of new ideas. Democracy can afford less of an error rate than markets, but it still has a very large one. It's filthy, and noisy. Science, has a fairly low error rate, but science is special. Science has a god. Science has a god, it's called objective reality. You can go to the scientific conference and everyone can say, you're wrong. And you just say, wait, objective reality will prove me right. What an irony that science has this solace of faith that if know you're right, someday you'll be proved right, so you can be relaxed. Justice courts can afford almost no error rate, and still they have it. But that's why they're prim, meticulous, totally uncreative. But they all have the same rhythm. There is a centrifugal period when you can organize and coordinate your forces and your product in safety, in your company, attorney client privilege, your tenured lab, your political party. But then there is an irresistible unrefusable call to ritual combat in the marketplace, in the courtroom, at the scientific conference, in the election. And this rhythm keep things going. But what is the fundamental ingredient they all need? Light. They all work best when most of the people involved know most of what's going on most of the time. And to whatever degree shadows exist in these four arenas, to that degree, they fail. Now I fly east to Washington, DC every spring. It seems there are people back east in these agencies who are smart enough to know they need to consult science fiction authors. So I fly east to DC, so does Werner Vingy, so do the other hard science fiction guys. And they say, "show us some scenarios about how enemies could really screw us up. Scare us." And they always go, "yeah, like you can scare me." And they always leave the meeting going, "agh." One fellow at one of these meetings, he said, "I know how to destroy the United States. Come up with a drug that turns all of our science fiction authors into enemies of the United States." One of the nicest compliments I've ever received. Actually if you want to compliment an author, the best thing you can say to the author is, "damn you, damn you. I almost lost my job because of you." Because the fundamental thing, what are we trying to do? It's a sadomasochistic relationship. We want to make it almost impossible for you to feed the cat, do your report, do your homework, or feed your children. If we have made this trouble for you, and made you almost miss a deadline, or almost miss your job, or whatever, here's the thing-- you'll buy our next book. We've settled what you are in this relationship. So I should rip out this outer and underneath I have leather on. I don't think that's an image you really want your head. No, no, no, no, no, in fact I've never thought of that before. I would have to get it here at Google. I've just come here from a four-day meeting at Stanford, of the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts Group, where I'm on the board of advisors. Some of the wonderful, wonderful concepts that we saw at this event show that ingenuity is not forsaken, especially not the United States of America. It's in trouble. It's always in trouble. The war on "science," quote unquote, isn't helping at all. The inability of our political cast to work out their differences and restore a process of negotiated consensus, which has been killed primarily by a set of foreign oligarchs. This is a bad thing. And yet there was amazing news last year that the press didn't know what to do with. I'm going to tell you two amazing pieces of news from 2013. One, the courts ruled decisively, and the Obama administration Justice Department declared decisively, that is settled law that any citizen may record their interactions with police. It is probably the most important civil rights decision that's been made in 30 years. It is of spectacular importance because at the street is where we get used to our notions of what is allowed. And there is nothing more important to an average helpless citizen in their interactions with authority than access to the truth. The immediate result was an awful lot of cell phones and cameras being broken my mistake, and by accident. But how quickly things happen. I predicted all of this in "The Transparent Society." How quickly the next card falls. Before 2013 was out, we had the image of a big man in an orange prison jumpsuit and shackles being sentenced to three years in prison for breaking the camera of someone he was arresting and lying about it, because someone else across the street caught him doing it. And you have to bear this in mind. You have to say, what happens if this continues. It's called Brin's corollary to Moore's Law, and people are crediting Sergey for it. [LAUGHTER] DAVID BRIN: My son has the same name as his son. My son had it first! Hear that Sergey? But the point is that my son will never have trouble making dinner reservations. OK. OK. All right, it works out. The corollary is this, the cameras get smaller, cheaper, faster, more numerous, and better every year at a rate faster than Moore's law. I portray this in my novel. How are you going to banish them? How are you going to do the thing that's the initial reflex of almost all people when faced with internet age problems? When you're looking at next year, you're not looking at 10 years from now. When the cameras are so cheap children will peel them off a roll of stickers with battery good for a year, or even a little solar charger to stick them on a lamp post and they have their own address on IPv6 and they are there forever. As Clint Eastwood said at the end of the wisest film ever, or at least wisest moment in a film ever, "Magnum Force," he squints and he says, "A man's got to know his limitations." Recognize your limitations and this reflex to say to authority, stop looking at me! Do you honestly think that you can find any point in the history of our species when the elites allowed themselves to be blinded? Here is an assignment for you. Go to the zoo with a pointed stick, Climb into the baboon enclosure, and poke out the eyes of the biggest baboon. Tell them I sent you. Here is a clue-- he won't let you. And after you're done treating all your scratches and cuts, then realize this he will grudgingly and reluctantly let you look at him. What is it that we have to fear from authority? That authorities of commerce, or criminality, or the state, see or know something about us? Good luck stopping that. What's important is restricting permanently, and forever, and ferociously, and militantly what they can do to us. And in order to do that, we have to emphasize not hiding from authority, but stripping authority naked and telling them you are my watch dog, you are not a wolf. And in order to do that, you don't blind the dog. You need him. He's sniffing around for dangers. But you need him to remember that the citizens are in charge. And to do that takes supervision. And that's what we should be militant about; and that's what that news was about this year. The other piece of news that came out in 2013, I'll bet that none of you even heard of it. Can anyone tell me which country on Earth scored highest in adult science literacy? AUDIENCE: Israel? DAVID BRIN: Israel was up there in the top 10. AUDIENCE: Singapore? DAVID BRIN: Singapore was nowhere near. None of you are even capable of imagining it. You can't even wrap your minds around the possibility that it was the United States of America. Not only number one, but double the adult science literacy of number two, which was Canada. Now how can that be? Our children are all idiots. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] from all those other countries. DAVID BRIN: I'll explain it to you; and no pundit explained it therefore it was just erased off the radar, it just vanished. It's actually fairly simple. The word adult, remember these prefrontal lobes, they really only start kicking in around age 20. By age 25 most people have got them, but I've just explained teenagers. Trying to grasp the consequences of their actions and all that, it's all abstract to them. Most scoring systems for the success of schooling measure memorized knowledge, and memorized skills, and procedures, and these have to be beaten into kid. And we don't beat our kids so we score badly. But meanwhile they're learning verbal agility. What are the kids do mostly in high school? Argue! Argue with the teacher, argue with each other. It's class discussion, class discussion, who cares what you memorize. So when they go to college and they take the same course again, they say, this is kind of familiar. And a new part of their brain is saying, maybe I'll pay attention this time. What is the difference between the American baccalaureate degree and the degrees in most parts of the world? Most of the world it's a three year bachelor's degree in which the student specializes at age 17. Most Americans don't even know this. When I asked overseas when I lived overseas-- and most Americans haven't lived overseas-- but when I lived in Paris and I lived in London and I asked, why is our bachelor's degree four years and yours is three? And the answer was almost universally, because your students are so stupid. When in fact the reason is because we have a whole year's worth of breadth requirements. If you're a science major, if you're a nerd, you have to take a fair amount of history, English, and all those things. And what is the result? Our nerds have experience with these subjects and they say, gosh, that was my easiest course. I could get an MBA. And you are sitting in the valley that that attitude made. But more than that, humanities, arts majors, you have to take three or four science survey classes in college, after your prefrontal lobes have kicked in. And that is enough to explain the wispy, wimpy, ridiculously, horrific 23% adult science literacy that Americans scored so much better than the rest of the world. It's horrible. And it's better than the rest of the world simply because our bachelor's degree is what we instinctively know bachelor's degree ought to be; that is a time for you to explore and become, excuse me, a gentleman who can then learn anything. And that's what you're supposed to be. Now does it sound like I'm painting this rosy picture of everything? We're going to take authority! We're going to look back at power! Our kids are wonderful! Human beings suck. I'm accused of being this incredible optimist, when in fact I know what is likely to happen. This diamond shaped social structure is almost certain to collapse, as it did of the few other times that it was tried, back into the old pyramid of power. And when that happens, the oligarchs will do-- and I don't care whether they're oligarchs of the left or the right, whether their commies or bazillionaires-- they will do what they did after the Athenian democracy of Pericles. They will make it their number one priority to make sure it never happens again. Only this time they'll be equipped with the technologies that you're providing them. You! You! Shills of the oligarchy. Or you liberators of all humanity. And more than just humanity is at stake here. I was going to show you a whole big slide show. I was going to show you all sorts of things, and I just shook hands with Frank Drake just an hour ago because he was also an adviser at this SETI panel. Who can tell me the most famous thing about Frank Drake? AUDIENCE: The Drake Equation. DAVID BRIN: The Drake Equation. What is it? AUDIENCE: Predicts intelligence in the universe. DAVID BRIN: It's a method by which we calculate a general notion of how many other intelligent life forms there should be in the galaxy. You've all seen it, right? It takes a number of stars in the galaxy, multiplies it by a fraction, percentage. Which fraction of them are stable and solitary; which fraction of those planets; the number of planets that orbit in their Goldilocks zones. 15 years ago we knew almost nothing about that. We knew of no planets outside the solar system. Now we know of well over a thousand. 2,000 more are candidates. And just down the road they're building the successor to Kepler, which should find us 10,000 more. So that part of the equation is starting to fill in, but the fraction of those that develop life is looking more plausible all the time, but we don't know. The fraction of life bearing planets that develop intelligence, don't know. I've spent the last 30 years cataloging explanations for what's called the Fermi paradox, and that is that this equation seems like it ought to result in a galaxy filled with noise, and sound, and commerce, and communication. And the SETI Institute, just down the road here, they are very confused. There doesn't seem to be anybody out there. It's quiet out there, maybe too quiet. And this is a point that I raise, because I've been in this for 30 years and I'm one of the dissenters out there who are very critical of the recent trend for impatient radio telescopers to say, OK, we're not hearing anything transmit. Maybe we should wait a little bit. But among these things is the notion of is intelligence of our kind difficult. And there's recent reason to believe this. How many of you've heard of the recent news about prairie dogs? That parrots, and crows, corvids, have vocabularies and can use tools. Sea lions, otters. That so many species are just behind the chimps and the dolphins in the number of words in their discursive vocabulary, or their ability to parse out problems. Prairie dogs, it now appears, they have analyzed the barks of prairie dogs and it contains human passing through the town, female wearing a red sweater. Sweater isn't in there, but the word red is. Now what does this mean? First, it's spectacular! Our natural tendency to enjoy the notion of the spreading around of categories, and appreciating otherness is improved. That's great! But they all crowd against a glass ceiling that appears to be all that Darwin and Mother Nature will allow. And there's every reason to believe that maybe the velociraptors bumped against that same ceiling that's easy to reach. And why? One of the biggest of all questions, why did we pound through so vastly beyond anything that we might have expected. Not only just beyond to become masters of this planet; because all we needed for that was 100 word vocabulary, stone tools, and fire. "Ogric wave. Fire. Chase goat this way. Me stab." And we went so far beyond that. And then we developed glass lenses, and we could see more; and printing presses, and we could know more. Vastly more than anybody would have imagined. Match And then schools, and then you guys, each generation getting a new fire hose to drink from. These are the questions that a lively civilization needs to be asking. And with that, I think I'll give you all opportunities to buy some books. And I'll be happy to sign them. Do I have time for any questions? MALE SPEAKER: Maybe 1 or 2. DAVID BRIN: One or two, I went over. Here I thought I was being so good. Thank you so very much. [APPLAUSE]