Neal Stephenson is a sci-fi writer (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and new book Termination Shock), former Chief Futurist at Magic Leap and first employee of Blue Origin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Neal's Twitter: https://twitter.com/nealstephenson
Neal's Website: https://www.nealstephenson.com/
Termination Shock (book): https://amzn.to/3HhmDKi
Snow Crash (book): https://amzn.to/3H7yFFW
Cryptonomicon (book): https://amzn.to/3C01HDF
The Diamond Age (book): https://amzn.to/3wxUF83
Seveneves (book): https://amzn.to/3kkhveg
The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1 (book): https://amzn.to/3koMW7n
Innovation Starvation (article): https://bit.ly/3mYLSJ2

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:43 - WWII and human nature
9:28 - Search engine morality
14:06 - Space exploration
31:07 - Aliens and UFOs
39:30 - SpaceX and Blue Origin
46:52 - Social media
51:19 - Climate change
1:03:09 - Consequences of big ideas
1:07:50 - Virtual reality
1:30:58 - Artificial intelligence
1:45:57 - Cryptocurrency
1:58:35 - Writing, storytelling, and books
2:21:13 - Martial arts
2:30:31 - Final thoughts

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The following is a conversation with Neil Stevenson, a legendary science fiction writer exploring ideas in mathematics, science, cryptography, money, linguistics, philosophy, and virtual reality.

From his early book, Snow Crash, to his new 1 called Termination Shock.

He worked at the space company Blue Origin for many years, including technically being Blue Origin's first employee.

He also was the chief futurist at the virtual reality company Magic Leap.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, here's my conversation with Neil Stephenson.

You write both historical fiction, like World War II in Cryptonomicon, and science fiction, looking both into the past and the future, so let me ask, does history repeat itself?

In which way does it repeat itself, in which way does it not?

So I think human nature kind of is what it is.

And so we tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again.

And so it's kind of the exception rather than the rule when something new happens.

What role does technology play in the suppression or in revealing human nature?

Well, the standards of living, life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within the last, particularly the last hundred years.

I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification, the internet, these are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health and longevity that exceed anything that was seen before in human history.

So people are living longer, they're generally healthier, and so on.

But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns, some of which are not very attractive.

So some of it has to do with the constraints on resources.

Presumably with technology, you have less and less constraints on resources, so we get to maybe emphasize the better angels of our nature and in so doing, does that not potentially fundamentally alter the experience that we have of life on Earth?

You know, until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think, but, you know, people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch that they have got.

And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of Germany prior to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler, at least partially, by just the misery that people were living in at that time.

Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living.

And that sounds like a plausible explanation, but There are economic troubles now for sure.

and there's stagnation in some people's standards of living but it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years just strictly on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad.

So without being political in a divisive kind of way, can we talk about the lessons you can draw from World War II?

This singular event in human history, it seems like, and yet, as you say, history rhymes at the very least.

Yeah, being who I am, I tend to focus on the curious technological things that happened in conjunction with that war, which may not be where you wanna go, but.

Well, there's several things, and sorry to interrupt.

So 1 in cryptonomicon is more like the Alan Turing side of things, right?

And then there's the outside of technology, first of all, there's the tools of war, which is a kind of technology, but then there's just like the human nature, the nature of good and evil.

Yeah, well, so 1 of the things that emerges from the war and from the extermination camps is that we're never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature.

So you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person and you have to know that that even in a supposedly enlightened, civilized society, people can become monsters quite easily.

Did you agree with Solzhenitsyn about, what is it, The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager, because my grandfather had it in his house, because he was 1 of these Americans who was obsessed with the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat, and wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened.

And so he had those books lying around and I would read them.

And it's a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war, you know, this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.

To me, it's a story of how fear and desperation combined with a charismatic leader can lead to evil, but it's also a story of bravery, of love, of brotherhood and sisterhood, and basically survival.

You have like a man's search for meaning, which is the stories of a man in a concentration camp, basically finding beauty in life even under most extreme conditions.

So to me, World War II is not necessarily a bleak view of human nature.

It's a little moment of evil that revealed a much bigger good in humanity.

So I'm not so sure that it leads me to a pessimistic view of the world, the fact that somebody like Hitler could happen, the fact that a lot of people could follow Hitler and get excited and maybe even love the hate of the other for some moment of time.

I think that's, all of us are capable of that, but I think all of us also have a capacity for good.

And I think, I don't know what you think, but I think we have a greater desire for good than evil.

And it seems like that's where technology is very useful, as a guide, as a helping hand.

So I give you examples of futuristic technologies, and I can give you examples of current technologies.

Current technologies, knowledge, in the form of very basic knowledge, which is like Wikipedia and search the original dream of Google that I think is very much a success, which is making the world's information accessible at your fingertips.

That kind of technology enables the natural, if this axiom, this assumption that people want to do good is true, then letting them discover all of the information out there, false information and true information, all of it, and let them explore.

That's going to lead to a better world, to better people.

Futuristic technologies is, I personally, I mentioned to you offline, sort of love artificial intelligence.

And so AI, that's an assistant, that's a guide, like a mentor to you.

That you can, in the way that Google searches, but smarter, where you can help send it out and say, this is the direction in which I want to grow.

Not authoritarian lecturing down from the algorithm of telling you, this is how you should grow, but almost the opposite, where you use it as an assistant, a servant in your journey towards knowledge.

That sounds like an easy thing, but it's actually, from an AI perspective, very difficult.

this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about a book that essentially does that.

And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of building that thing from different directions for, ever since the book came out, basically.

And so, I kind of have a, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the level of difficulty in realizing that goal.

So that book is in the 90s, so as Google is coming to be.

It's essentially, not Google, but the search engine, the initial search engine, which gave birth to Google, essentially, in contrast.

Right, yeah, yeah, that was still in the era of AltaVista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines.

And yeah, I'm pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point, that would have been

And then, of course, the social networks followed, which is another form of guidance through the space of information.

Yeah, well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them.

And so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that, you know, 20 years ago, if you had Googled Pythagorean theorem, chances are you would have been taken directly to a page explaining the Pythagorean theorem.

If you do it now, you're probably gonna, the top hits are gonna be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme, right?

They're like trying to sell you math tutoring or they're working some kind of marketing plan on you.

So the traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational purpose, that doesn't mean that they can't, it shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones.

First of all, to defend the people with the angle, right?

They're trying to find business models to fund oftentimes, which is funny you went with Pythagoras.

Like you went at math, those greedy bastards.

How can we monetize the Pythagorean theorem?

It has to figure out like, people who love math education, for example, love it purely, not purely, but very often love it for itself, for just teaching math.

But then they start, you know, when coming face to face with, for example, like the YouTube algorithm, they start to try to figure out, okay, how can I make money off of this?

The primary goal is still that love of education, but they also want to make that love of education their full-time job.

But I see that sort of that dance of humanity with the algorithms as it finds this kind of local pocket of optimality or sub-optimality, whatever.

And, but I see that pocket is way better than what we had before in the 80s, right?

But like, and now we're now, this is also human nature.

We start writing very eloquent articles about how this pocket is clearly a pocket, it's not very good.

And we can imagine much better lands far beyond.

But the reality is it's better than before.

And you have to wait either for lone geniuses or for some kind of momentum of a group of geniuses that just say enough is enough, I have an idea.

And it's too easy to be sort of, I think, partially because you can get a lot of clicks in your articles, being cynical about being in this pocket and we are forever stuck in this pocket.

And then like coming up with this grandiose theory that humanity has finally, like it's collapsing, stuck forever like a prison in this pocket.

But reality, it's just clickbait articles and books until 1 curious ant comes up with the next pocket.

Yeah, tunnels through the barrier or gets enough energy to jump over the barrier.

And eventually we'll be, as you've talked about, I mean, we'll colonize the solar system and then we'll be stuck in the solar system.

And then people will say, well, we're screwed because when the sun energy runs out, there's no way to get to the next solar system and so on, it goes on until we colonize the entirety of the observable universe.

Yeah, I think getting out of the solar system is gonna be a hard 1.

So can you, you mentioned this, can you elaborate why you think, back to sort of a serious question, why do you think it's hard to get outside of our solar system?

It's just an energy, I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want, but the idea of getting there in 1 lifetime or multiple, a few lifetimes requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate.

And then as soon as you get halfway there, you need to expend an equal amount of energy to decelerate, or you'll just go shooting by.

And so that means carrying a lot of energy.

And there's ideas like Yuri Milner, I think is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion to send something to another star system, a small object.

But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.

They never talk about that part, like how do we slow down.

It's a quick flyby, you take a good picture, I guess.

Yeah, you better take some good pictures on your way by.

So, and that's great if it happens, I'm not knocking it, but the amount of energy that's needed is just staggering, and there's other issues like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation, How do you prevent people from going crazy?

What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light?

What about sort of some combination of expanding human lifespan, but also just good old fashioned, stable society on a spaceship?

Yeah, yeah, the generation ship, yeah, yeah.

It would have to keep going for a long time.

And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty solar system.

Like we can try to do some advanced survey, but I mean if you get there and all the planets in that solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind of a big letdown for this like thousand year voyage that you've just been on, right?

So I mean we have a pretty narrow range of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with.

So that sets a bound on the size of the planet and what we need in the way of temperature and atmosphere and so on.

So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell of a lot better.

It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say, for making that journey.

1 of the things I like about the Expanse is the fact that the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religious reasons.

I think that's the only reason that you would do it because economically it just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.

Well, isn't everything done for religious reasons?

Why do we go to the moon again and do the other things?

What is JFK said, is because, not because they're easy, but because they're hard.

I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement.

Yeah, so the conflict between nations is a kind of...

Not exactly a religion, but it's what you're talking about.

I mean, and that meaning isn't found in some kind of, it's hard to find meaning in mathematics.

It's found in some kind of, in music and religion, whatever, art.

I mean, some people do, but those are probably not enough of them to.

Well, people that find meaning in mathematics,

they usually find meaning between the lines nevertheless, not in the actual proving some kind of thing.

So from a cost perspective, do you actually see a possible future where we're building these kind of generation ships and just why not launch them 1 a year out like wandering ants out into

It's just, like I said, it's got a, the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual or kind of non-tangible calculus.

So from a business model perspective, you don't think there's a business model there?

1 of the many fascinating things you've done in your life, you were, at the very beginning, you were the person that convinced Jeff Bezos to start a spaceship company, a space company, you were there at Blue Origin for a few years in the beginning, working on alternate propulsion systems, and at least according to Wikipedia, alternate business models.

Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing.

He'd been thinking about it since he was 5 years old and it was an inevitability.

But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work, explore the corners of the space of possibilities.

And so that's what, that was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin.

And so it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years.

And I think it was about 2003, 2004 that it swung decisively towards the direction it's been following ever since, which is using basically existing aerospace technologies and models to make chemical-fueled rockets for space tourism.

I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just an accident of history.

So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard.

But then Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can't quite reach it and the Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized.

So he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation of resources.

But so it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic.

But that's the situation that existed, so they built these rockets, that's the V2.

And then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic bombs being developed in a completely separate super weapon program.

And so suddenly the existence of the bombs creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist before.

Because if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them.

You can do it with bombers, but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side of the world on the top of a rocket.

So suddenly, rockets which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.

And it is a complete, you're right, for some reason never thought of this.

It is an accident of history that nuclear weapons are developed at a similar time.

First of all, nuclear weapons didn't have to be developed at the same time as World War II.

And the fact that, okay, so then Hitler started using rockets, that's an accident.

That's a fascinating set of coincidences.

Yeah, and which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way, but by the time these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating that nobody really wants to use them.

But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb.

So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.

to be in the meeting where the first guy brought that up as an idea.

Why don't we strap a person to the rocket?

Well, it probably was, because they did it first, right?

And they had perhaps less respect for sort of safety protocols.

They're a little bit more willing to sacrifice the life of an astronaut or to risk the life of an astronaut.

This is basically the story of how through all of this competition and because of these historical accidents, you know, trillions of R&D dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical rocket technology, which is, you know, now advanced to an incredibly high degree.

But there's other ways to make things go really fast, which is all that rockets do.

That's all orbit is, it's just going really fast.

And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets.

And so 1 of the first things that I learned, kind of trying to explore new possibilities, was that I could put all of my brain power to work and be creative as I could and invent some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast.

And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math.

And so, at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and just go poking around trying to find those guys.

So there's a number of ideas that we looked at.

You know, some are crazier, some are less crazy, but the direction that that company eventually took was chemical rockets.

Is there something you can comment on possible ideas?

So first of all, I mean, you could use nuclear, so nuclear propulsion.

Yeah, so that's, I mean, you've probably heard of Project Orion, which was Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators had a scheme to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs behind it.

And so 1 of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George Dyson, the son of Freeman.

And he found an old film that they'd shot on a beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by like lumps of C4.

So that was an idea, but for a private company, obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was probably out of scope.

There's a conceptually similar approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur Kantrowitz and some others where you take a pulse laser and you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice on the back.

And the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma.

And plasma is opaque because it conducts.

And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice.

And then you wait a moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again.

So it would just kind of vibrate its way.

Like it sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing like rubber-soled tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration.

So there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse than you could get by burning chemicals.

Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr.

Jordan Kerr, that just would heat up a heat exchanger by converging, many converging solid state lasers from the ground.

And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that.

I spent a while looking kind of semi-seriously at giant bull whips.

Just a whip, just a, you have them here in Texas, right?

But how does that have to do with propulsion?

If you think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the speed of sound.

So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people with no technology have been able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick.

Just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this.

So that's the thing I still think about from time to time.

You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials that just kind of stand up under their own physics.

So you imagine using the same kind of physics of a whip, but have at the end of it a spaceship.

Yeah, that would detach at the moment of maximum

So part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question.

It was more almost a symbolic way of saying, look, there's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet, it's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets.

It's just that more money's gone into chemical rockets.

Can I ask you a question on propulsion that's a little bit more out there?

So I don't know if you've seen quite a lot out of recent articles and reports and so on about UFOs, like the Tic Tac aircraft.

I keep seeing a lot of chatter about it, but I haven't gone deep into it.

So the DoD released footage filmed by pilots and there's a lot of reports about objects that moved in ways they haven't seen before that seem to defy the laws of physics, if we consider the aircraft that we have today.

And so the reason I asked you that is because it kind of, to me, whatever the heck it is, it's inspiring for the possibilities of ideas for propulsion.

If it's like secret projects from foreign nations or it's physical phenomena that we don't yet understand like ball lightning, all those kinds of things.

Or if it is aliens or objects from an alien civilization.

I most likely believe if it's an object from an alien civilization, it's gotta be like a really dumb drone that just got lost.

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Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #240