Transcription
Ever since we've recorded the history of human conduct in what we call civilization and even before, there have been people who didn't get along on a level where it wasn't simply a matter of, "Let's talk over our differences." It's, "We cannot resolve our differences, so therefore I must kill you." This, as a mode of operation within our species, within civilization itself, is disturbing.
So, let's go way back when it's just fisty cuffs. What's the most damage I could do? I can, like, maybe harm one person, possibly kill one person at a time. Now I have a bow and arrow. I'm one person and I can take out 10 people at a time. Notice this ratio is getting steeper and steeper. I now have a gun. Actually, it's a musket gun. Initially, I could take you out at 50 yards. I don't even know what you look like and I can kill you. Then have automatic weapons. One person can take out 20 people. You reload, take out another 20. A missile. You fire a missile. I can take out hundreds of people. War continues to, quote, advance. What else can I have? Oh, bombs. Yes. So now one person can kill thousands.
Once you have an airplane, you can fly over someone's head. It renders the trench warfare obsolete. Airplanes can go over cities. You drop bombs on people's heads, whether or not they're combatants. So now you just make more and more powerful bombs. Now the bombs are no longer just explosives like with gunpowder or anything. It's nukes. Nuclear weapons. A birth at the end of the Second World War. Now one person flying an airplane can kill tens of thousands, even millions. Tens of thousands initially with the atom bomb. These are the fission bombs that split uranium and plutonium atoms into lighter atoms, releasing energy in the process. Those were the two bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The first and only two times nuclear weapons were used in warfare. The bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima were like 20 kilotons, something like that. Kilotons. What is, what unit is that? Oh. Oh. Huh. We don't have a way to measure the energy of atomic bombs. So you, you measured in terms of what the previous explosive powers were. TNT. TNT is dynamite, discovered by Alfred Nobel, by the way, got rich, put in money to create the Nobel Prize. Kilo is thousand. We all know ton is a ton. Thousand tons of TNT. Not just one stick of dynamite, thousands of tons. You take that, ignite it in an instant, you incinerate everybody below you. And we have magnified the power of that weapon by 100. We call them hydrogen bombs. Just the way the sun makes energy, taking hydrogen atoms, bringing them together to make helium atoms. That also releases energy, way more energy than you'd get by fissioning heavy atoms. No longer is it kilotons. It's megatons. Not just thousands of tons of TNT, millions of tons of TNT.
Now, one person who pushes a button or has a rocket to deliver ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missiles. I can sit here in the comfort of my chair, control a missile on my sovereign land. It'll enter suborbital because it leaves our atmosphere. It can't travel that far without resistance through the air. It leaves our atmosphere, goes its distance, comes back out of the sky, hits its target, you can kill a million people. Clearly, that's a highly unstable situation because now we are beholden to the sanity of anyone who has access to that button. Given the neurodiversity of our species, not everyone has the rational capacity to make a decision that would be in the interest of the world's health, wealth, and security. I'm old enough to remember MAD, mutual assured destruction. It was the realization that if there's a first strike while the weapons are airborne, spaceborne, while they're leaving the atmosphere, that's enough time for you to launch your weapons. If the country wants to really get at you, they'll attack you and your allies. So now everybody starts launching weapons. If you have total nuclear exchange and you ignite the forests and the vegetation of the world, this converts living plant tissue into carbon soot that goes into the air, blocking sunlight. This was the famous nuclear winter that was described in the early 1980s. Computing power was just becoming good enough to address the question of what happens if you darken the skies all around the world. The temperature of the earth drops. Plants that depend on sunlight die. Animals that depend on plants die. Animals that depend on animals that depend on plants die in sequence. And you have nuclear holocaust, not only affecting earth life but plant life and other animal life as well. The nuclear winter scenario, it assumed that the weapons would be equally distributed on Earth's surface. That's generally not how this works. If you're launching nukes, you're going to launch it at the missile silos that might have other nukes that haven't launched yet. And you're going to launch it towards cities with multiple nukes coming into the same city. So you don't, you won't get the spread that that initial calculation had presumed. But what it did do was birth an entire science of long-term climate modeling from assaults on the environment. And out of that, we got to have great confidence that the dinosaurs were taken out by an asteroid. An asteroid the size of Mount Everest that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, uh, off of Mexico, cast dust into the air, plunging Earth into darkness, rendering 70% of all species of life on Earth and in the ocean extinct. The world quickly realized how deadly this is. It's not just a bow and an arrow. It's not just fisticuffs. It is an asymmetry in warfare that had never been seen before. I'm reminded of a quote from Albert Einstein. "I don't know how World War II will be fought, but I know that World War III will be fought with sticks and stones." That's where war and the science of war has taken us.
Scientists have historically been complicit in the waging of war. Governments, uh, be they warmongering or otherwise, have always reached for the ingenuity and creativity of scientists and engineers of all stripes. You know, where do you get chemical weapons from? You go to the chemist. Biological warfare. You go to the biologist. The astrophysicist. We don't make bombs. We don't. No. But we care about multispectral imaging in dark places. We care about coordinates on Earth and in the heavens. We care about timing. What is a physicist an expert at? It's matter, motion, and energy. And what is a military battle of any kind? It's, "I have energy over here and I want to put it over there." It could be, "I have a bullet here sitting in my gun, but I want to put that bullet over there with energy that I give it." I have a bow and arrow. I pull the string, pumping potential energy into the bow. When I let go, the bow springs forward, the arrow goes, sending kinetic energy over here to over there. That is the basis of essentially every military conflict. There is no war that is won without the exploitation of science and technology at its center.
A little bit about me and my history. I grew up in the 60s and 70s. All I ever knew was the Vietnam War. I grew up in an era where war is bad. War is bad. How could war ever be good? But meanwhile, I'm still observant and I look around town and there's statues to war heroes, military servicemen standing proud. And I said, "How is it that I could think war is bad where apparently at all these other times, not the time coincident with the Vietnam War, but at all these other times, war was commemorated with pride and dare I say even celebrated?" What's that's what kind of Memorial Day and Veterans Day is all about. You are celebrating those who fought in wars and commemorating those who died in wars. This is a celebration, a recognition. Whereas in the Vietnam era, there was none of that. So that's where I was forged. My sense of war was forged, but my rational mind was saying, "What is the rest of this about?" There are occasions where, yeah, war is necessary. A bad actor rises up whose interests do not comport with what we might think of as civilization. The preservation and prolonging of civilization as we have built it and as we have come to embrace it. Easily who comes to mind, of course, is Adolf Hitler. Yes, there are times when you are fighting evil forces, but you have to ask, who defines who's evil in starting and making a war? Not the right is what matters, but victory. The strongest has the right. It's hard to argue against the idea that to protect freedom is a good thing and the fact that freedom isn't always free. It reminds me, I saw a comic long ago where two people are facing each other with a bow and arrow pointed right at each other's necks, and each one says at the same time, "The harder I pull, the safer I feel."
It's like, really, as a scientist, when we disagree with one another, uh, we might argue our case vociferously. Some people are a little more emotionally invested in their ideas than others. So it can get heated, but at the end of the day, you know what we say to each other? "We need more data." When more data come in and then it resolves the conflict, then we agree, go out, have a beer, and then move on to the next frontier question. That's the brainwiring of a scientist. There's not the brainwiring of politicians or many other sort of sectors of society where they need to interact with others. I've had some exposure to military operations and I never served in the military. Uh, not as a, as a soldier, but I did serve on a board of the Pentagon, the Defense Innovation Board. It was an attempt to alert the military that the strength in armies going forward, the strength of nations going forward, is not measured by how many soldiers are on the ground. It's not even necessarily measured by how many nukes you have in your silos. It could be measured by how clever you are with either computing or calculations or or strategies that come from a place that's not just, "How big is your weapon?"
We look at the reasons why people have fought wars over the years. A common one is access to limited resources. "I want what you have. I need what you have. Oh, you're not going to share it. You're not going to give it to me. Therefore, I'm going to take it." Well, you can only do that. You can only threaten to do that if you have the resources, the financial resources, the scientific resources, the engineering resources. Other reasons why people fight with limited access to resources. Yes. Uh, religion. Again, I come to it as a scientist. If there's a batch of scientists over there who say E doesn't equal MC squared, E equals MC cubed, are we going to go to war over that? No. I would say, "Now let me show you why that is not true," and I would demonstrate it with experiments and examples. That doesn't work as well when you have belief systems. If you come from a belief system, then what you believe doesn't have the evidence that science would normally require to establish what is objectively true. That's why they're called belief systems because you believe that something is true. Now, you may believe it so strongly that you know it's true, but that's an internal emotion that you carry. Belief systems are such that it may be true for you, but it's not really true for other people unless you convince them of it. And since it's based on belief, rational arguments tend to not work. You need methods of coercion or force, ultimately threat of violence, perhaps even threat of death. And so some of the most violent encounters civilization has ever had with itself is when one warring faction has a belief system that differs from that of their adversary.
It's interesting to ask of ourselves in society, is there anything you would die for? You get one chance in life. What I have found is that the less tangible the thing is you're fighting for, the more abstract it is, the less evidence there is in support of it, the more willing people are to die for it. And so war always seems to be this glorious thing at the beginning, and then the body bags start coming back, and not only, uh, military casualties but civilian casualties, just trying to live their lives, who are now susceptible to decisions made by people in power who generally are not themselves the same people who go do the fighting. I find that dismaying, just being human in civilization as a scientist, but it's real and it happens. And that's how the world is put together, with or without the League of Nations coming out of the First World War, with or without the United Nations after the Second World War, with charters that are signed, Geneva Conventions. At the end of the day, you can ask the question, can we just all get along?
Let me end on a slightly more positive note. All the UFOs people have been seeing in the sky, lights that we can't explain. I'm glad some part of the military budget is going to investigating them, 'cause people have been seeing them for decades. I've never seen anything that I couldn't identify. I know a lot about weather and climate and sky conditions and planets and moons and what they do and weird things that they do. So, I've never seen anything I couldn't explain. So, it was all IFOS to me. But maybe some of these UFOs would pose a danger to us, again, to our health, our wealth, or our security. Maybe. So, I'd want the military to check it out. And if it's a threat from space, maybe the greatest task of all would be to protect Earth from aliens. In fact, in the 1980s, President Reagan, addressing the UN, said just that. He said, "Here we are with all of our differences." He was still in the Cold War, by the way, with all of our differences. "Imagine how close we would be together if we had to fight a common enemy, such as an invader from space."
>> Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bound.
If that's what it takes for us to get along, I, I guess so. But I still believe, yeah, I believe in the power of conversation and the power of coexistence because that's what makes a beautiful world, that we can all be different but yet all be together with common causes, common goals that are sensible, rational, sane, and will feed the future of our health, our wealth, and our security. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep looking up.