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I'm thrilled to be talking to you
by this high-tech method.
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Of all humans who have ever lived,
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the overwhelming majority
would have found what we are doing here
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incomprehensible, unbelievable.
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Because, for thousands of centuries,
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in the dark time before
the scientific revolution,
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and the enlightenment,
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people had low expectations.
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For their lives,
for their descendants's lives.
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Typically, they expected
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nothing significantly new
or better to be achieved ever.
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This pessimism
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famously appears in the Bible,
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in one of the few Biblical passages
with a named author.
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He's called Cohelet,
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he's an enigmatic chap.
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He wrote, "What has been is what will be.
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And what had been done
is what will be done.
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There is nothing new under the sun."
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Is there of which it is said,
"Look, this is new."
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No, that thing was already done
in the ages that came before us.
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Cohelet was describing a world
without novelty.
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By novelty I mean something new
in Cohelet's sense,
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not merely something that's changed,
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but a significant change
with lasting effects,
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where people really would say,
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"Look, this is new,"
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and preferably good.
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So, purely random changes aren't novelty.
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OK, Heraclitus did say
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a man can't step in the same river twice,
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because it's not the same river,
he's not the same man.
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But if the river is changing randomly,
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it really is the same river.
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In contrast,
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if an idea in a mind
spreads to other minds,
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and changes lives for generations,
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that is novelty.
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Human life without novelty
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is life without creativity,
without progress.
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It's a static society, a zero-sum game.
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That was the living hell
in which Cohelet lived.
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Like everyone, until a few centuries ago.
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It was hell, because for humans,
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suffering is intimately
related to staticity.
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Because staticity isn't just frustrating.
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All sources of suffering --
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famine, pandemics, incoming asteroids,
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and things like war and slavery,
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hurt people only until we have created
the knowledge to prevent them.
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There's a story in Somerset Maugham's
novel, of human bondage,
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about an ancient sage
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who summarizes the entire
history of mankind
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as: he was born,
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he suffered and he died.
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And it goes on:
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"life was insignificant
and death without consequence."
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And indeed, the overwhelming majority
of humans who have ever lived
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had lives of suffering and grueling labor,
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before dying young and in agony.
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And yes, in most generations
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nothing had any novel consequence
for subsequent generations.
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Nevertheless, when ancient people
tried to explain their condition,
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they typically did so
in grandiose cosmic terms.
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Which was the right thing to do,
as it turns out.
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Even though their actual explanations,
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their myths, were largely false.
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Some tried to explain
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the grimness and monotony
of their world
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in terms of an endless cosmic war
between good and evil,
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in which humans were the battleground.
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Which neatly explained why their own
experience was full of suffering,
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and why progress never happened.
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But it wasn't true.
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Amazingly enough,
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all their conflict and suffering
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were just due to the way
they processed ideas.
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Being satisfied with dogma,
and just-so stories,
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rather than criticizing them
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and trying to guess better explanations
of the world and of their own condition.
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Twentieth-century physics
did create better explanations,
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but still in terms of a cosmic war.
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This time, the combatants were
order and chaos, or entropy.
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That story does allow
for hope for the future.
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But in another way,
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it's even bleaker
that the ancient myths,
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because the villain, entropy,
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is preordained to have the final victory,
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when the inexorable laws of thermodynamics
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shut down all novelty
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with the so-called
heat death of the universe.
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Currently, there's a story
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of a local battle in that war,
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between sustainability, which is order,
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and wastefulness, which is chaos --
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that's the contemporary take
on good and evil --
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often with the added twist
that humans are the evil,
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so we shouldn't even try to win.
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And recently,
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there have been tales
of another cosmic war
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between gravity,
which collapses the universe,
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and dark energy, which finally shreds it.
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So this time,
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whichever of those cosmic forces wins,
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we lose.
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All those pessimistic accounts
of the human condition
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contain some truth,
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but as prophecies,
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they're all misleading
and all for the same reason.
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None of them portrays humans
as what we really are.
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As Jacob Bronowski said,
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man is not a figure in the landscape,
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he is the shaper of the landscape.
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In other words,
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humans are not play things
of cosmic forces,
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we are users of cosmic forces.
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I'll say more about that in a moment,
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but first, what sorts
of things create novelty?
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Well, the beginning
of the universe surely did.
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The Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago,
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created space, time and energy,
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everything physical.
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And then, immediately,
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what I call the first era of novelty,
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with the first atom, the first star,
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the first black hole,
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the first galaxy.
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But then, at some point,
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novelty vanished from the universe.
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Perhaps from as early
as 12 or 13 billion years ago,
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right up to the present day,
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there's never been any new
kind of astronomical object.
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There's only been what I call
the great monotony.
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So, Cohelet was accidentally
even more right
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about the universe beyond the Sun
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than he was about under the Sun.
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So long as the great monotony lasts,
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what has been out there
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really is what will be.
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And there is nothing out there
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of which it can truly be said,
look, this is new.
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Nevertheless,
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at some point
during the great monotony,
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there was an event
inconsequential at the time,
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and even billions of years later,
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it had affected nothing
beyond its home planet,
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yet eventually, it could cause
comically momentous novelty.
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That event was the origin of life.
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Creating the first genetic knowledge,
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coding for biological adaptations,
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coding for novelty.
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On Earth, it utterly
transformed the surface.
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Genes in the DNA
of single-celled organisms
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put oxygen in the air,
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extracted CO2,
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put chalk and iron ore into the ground,
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hardly a cubic inch of the surface
to some depth has remained unaffected
-
by those genes.
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The Earth became,
-
if not a novel place on the cosmic scale,
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certainly a weird one.
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Just as an example,
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beyond Earth,
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only a few hundred different
chemical substances have been detected.
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Presumably, there are some more
in lifeless locations,
-
but on Earth,
-
evolution created billions
of different chemicals.
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And then the first plants, animals,
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and then in some ancestor species of ours,
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explanatory knowledge.
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For the first time in the universe,
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for all we know.
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Explanatory knowledge
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is the defining adaptation of our species.
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It differs from
the nonexplanatory knowledge
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in DNA for instance,
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by being universal.
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That is to say,
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whatever can be understood,
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can be understood through
explanatory knowledge.
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And more,
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any physical process
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can be controlled by such knowledge,
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limited only by the laws of physics.
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And so, explanatory knowledge too
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has begun to transform
the Earth's surface.
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And soon, the Earth will become
the only known object in the universe
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that turns aside incoming asteroids
instead of attracting them.
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Cohelet was understandably misled
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by the painful slowness
of progress in his day.
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Novelty in human life
was still too rare, too gradual,
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to be noticed in one generation.
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And in the biosphere,
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the evolution of novel species
was even slower.
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But both things were happening.
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Now, why is there a great monotony
in the universe at large,
-
and what makes our planet
buck that trend?
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Well, the universe at large
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is relatively simple.
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Stars are so simple
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that we can predict their behavior
billions of years into the future,
-
and retrodict how they formed
billions of years ago.
-
So, why is the universe simple?
-
Basically, it's because
big, massive, powerful things
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strongly affect lesser things,
-
and not vice versa.
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I call that the hierarchy rule.
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For example,
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when a comet hits the Sun,
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the Sun carries on just as before,
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but the comet is vaporized.
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For the same reason,
-
big things are not much affected
by small parts of themselves,
-
i.e. by details.
-
Which means that their overall behavior
-
is simple.
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And since nothing very new
can happen to things
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that remain simple,
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the hierarchy rule,
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by causing large-scale simplicity,
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has caused the great monotony.
-
But the saving grace is,
-
the hierarchy rule is not a law of nature.
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It just happens to have held
so far in the universe,
-
except here.
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In our biosphere,
molecule-sized object, genes,
-
control vastly disproportionate resources.
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The first genes for photosynthesis,
-
by causing their own proliferation,
-
and then transforming
the surface of the planet,
-
have violated or reversed
the hierarchy rule
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by the mind-blowing factor
of 10 to the power 40.
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Explanatory knowledge
is potentially far more powerful
-
because of universality,
-
and more rapidly created.
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When human knowledge
has achieved a factor 10 to the 40,
-
it will pretty much control
the entire galaxy
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and will be looking beyond.
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So humans,
-
and any other explanation creators
who may exist out there,
-
are the ultimate agents
of novelty for the universe.
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We are the reason and the means
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by which novelty and creativity,
-
knowledge, progress,
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can have objective, large-scale
physical effects.
-
From the human perspective,
-
the only alternative
to that living hell of static societies
-
is continual creation of new ideas,
-
behaviors, new kinds of objects.
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This robot will soon be obsolete,
-
because of new explanatory
knowledge, progress.
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But from the cosmic perspective,
-
explanatory knowledge is the nemesis
of the hierarchy rule.
-
It's the destroyer of the great monotony.
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So it's the creator
of the next cosmological era,
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the Anthropocene.
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If one can speak of a cosmic war,
-
it's not the one portrayed
in those pessimistic stories.
-
It's a war between monotony and novelty.
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Between stasis and creativity.
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And in this war,
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our side is not destined to lose.
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If we choose to apply our unique
capacity to create explanatory knowledge,
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we could win.
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Thanks.
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(Applause)