00:00:00.000 Okay, so this is an experiment. This is chapter 3 on that side because I'm
00:00:05.240 nowhere near home at the moment but I've got a few minutes to go through at
00:00:09.640 least part of chapter 3 which is called the spark. I'm not going to get through
00:00:13.680 the whole lot because it's a much longer chapter than what chapter 2 is. So the
00:00:19.020 spark is the famous chapter with the two stone tablets that we'll get to
00:00:23.760 eventually. These are mentioned in one of David's TED Talks. So the spark is
00:00:31.400 about knowledge but knowledge from the Enlightenment essentially. So the kind of
00:00:37.200 culture of criticism that we've spoken about previously, it is the thing that
00:00:41.440 sets fire to the rest of civilization. It is a thing that allows us to create
00:00:46.400 knowledge that is without bound and that which can have cosmic significance.
00:00:52.680 Okay, so the spark begins by talking about how ancient myths were largely
00:01:00.320 anthropocentric. They were about us. So our first attempts to understand the
00:01:04.680 world were always centered on what human beings were doing and what human
00:01:10.520 beings were capable of doing and how the rest of reality was he for us was
00:01:15.040 he had to try and attack us or he had to try and preserve us in some way. So this
00:01:20.600 idea is called anthropocentrism. So let me begin at the very beginning of
00:01:26.120 chapter 3 and we will read through at least part of it. So it begins. Most
00:01:33.600 ancient accounts of the reality beyond our everyday experience were not only
00:01:37.280 false, they had a radically different character from modern ones. They were
00:01:41.480 anthropocentric. That is to say they centered on human beings and more broadly
00:01:46.520 on people, entities with intentions and human-like thoughts which included
00:01:51.720 powerful supernatural people such as spirits and gods. So winter might be
00:01:56.600 attributed to someone's sadness, harvests to someone's generosity, natural
00:02:01.600 disasters to someone's anger and so on. Such explanations often involved
00:02:06.080 cosmically significant beings caring what humans did or having
00:02:10.120 interactions about them. This conferred cosmic significance on humans too.
00:02:15.440 Then the geocentric theory placed humans at the physical hub of the universe as
00:02:20.640 well. Those two kinds of anthropocentrism, explanatory and geometrical made
00:02:26.600 each other more plausible and as a result pre-enlightenment thinking was more
00:02:31.960 anthropocentric than we can readily imagine nowadays. So here's the idea that
00:02:37.720 the geocentric theory has put humans at the hub of existence, a physical
00:02:44.320 center of human existence, but the word hub there is important. But as David
00:02:50.000 is about to explain what modern science did was to undo that misconception
00:02:57.920 and it took human beings the species away from being some kind of special
00:03:05.720 entity astronomically, we aren't at the center of the universe, nor some kind
00:03:12.520 of special entity biologically we evolved from lower forms of animals. This has
00:03:21.160 led to a whole bunch of misconceptions about people and knowledge and their
00:03:26.200 significance of both. So although it was right literally that we are not at the
00:03:31.800 center of the universe, the removal of humans as being significant to the
00:03:36.880 universe is wrong. And so this new view that we're going to get from David is that
00:03:43.680 knowledge has cosmic significance and one kind of entity creates explanatory
00:03:51.480 knowledge that's people. So he's about to explain that people are special so
00:03:58.120 therefore the earth is a hub. This is the amazing contribution,
00:04:04.200 the amazing and surprising thing that David said during one of his head
00:04:08.440 talks. David then begins to speak about astrology and how astrology makes the
00:04:15.880 logical case that because, well I'm not sure that he says this, but this is the
00:04:20.360 fact that it makes logical sense that the stars control people's lives
00:04:25.720 because indeed things that happen in the sky do have effects on the ground on
00:04:32.280 people's lives. When the clouds open up and it rains that has a very direct
00:04:37.840 effect on people growing crops and if the sky doesn't rain that also has an
00:04:43.440 effect. People may have seen all sorts of things coming from the sky that
00:04:50.160 affected their lives, not least of which the change in seasons can be
00:04:56.680 predicted by looking at the constellations on the sky. So it makes perfect
00:05:02.120 sense. The sky controls what goes on here on earth. Of course it's false in
00:05:08.920 many many ways. The particular pattern of stars happens to correlate with certain
00:05:17.320 events that happen here on earth. But the reason why we get changes of weather
00:05:22.200 over the course of a year and why those changes are periodic and they are in a
00:05:27.520 sense foretold in the stars. They correlate with the stars but are not caused by
00:05:32.560 the stars is because of the axis tilt theory and the axis tilt theory is the
00:05:37.800 thing that explains why the stars happen to be in different places over the
00:05:40.720 course of the year and repeat their positions over the course of the year. But
00:05:44.600 you can draw a reasonably logical straight line from common sense to astrology.
00:05:52.320 The David says of course, now we know that the pattern of stars and planets in our
00:05:58.160 night sky has no significance for human affairs. We know that we are not the
00:06:03.680 centre of the universe. It does not even have a geometrical centre at all and we
00:06:08.560 know that although some of the Titanic astrophysical phenomena that I have
00:06:12.680 described play a significant role in our past, we have never been significant to
00:06:17.680 them. We call a phenomenon significant or fundamental if parochial
00:06:25.240 theories are inadequate to explain it or if it appears in the explanation of
00:06:30.120 many other phenomena. So it may seem that human beings and their wishes and
00:06:35.120 actions are extremely insignificant in the universe at large.
00:06:39.360 Antropocentric misconceptions have also been overturned in every other
00:06:44.720 fundamental area of science. And knowledge of physics now expressed entirely in
00:06:49.400 terms of entities that are as impersonal as Euclid's points and lines, such as
00:06:53.920 elementary particles, forces and spacetime, a four-dimensional
00:06:57.680 continuum with three dimensions of space in one time. Now the wind has picked up
00:07:02.600 here so much. I'm going to have to move. Okay, we're talking about natural
00:07:07.280 forces thwarting human affairs. I've moved. We'll continue for another 10 to 15
00:07:13.680 minutes. I think the light will hold out and the wind shouldn't be too bad.
00:07:18.840 So I was up to the part where David has just defined what significant or
00:07:25.200 fundamental happens to be. So let me continue and he is now going to explain the
00:07:38.320 issues with abandoning anthropocentric ideas but also the important move
00:07:49.280 forward that abandoning those anthropocentric ideas happens to be. So let me
00:07:56.760 read. He says, so fruitful has this abandonment of anthropocentric theory's
00:08:02.400 being and so important in the broader history of ideas that anti-
00:08:06.200 anthropocentrism has increasingly been elevated to the status of a universal
00:08:10.720 principle, sometimes called the principle of mediocrity, which says there is
00:08:16.640 nothing significant about humans in the cosmic scheme of things. As the
00:08:21.440 physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are just a chemical scum on the
00:08:25.160 surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star on the outskirts
00:08:29.240 of a typical galaxy. End quote. The proviso in the cosmic scheme of things
00:08:35.200 is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special
00:08:40.080 significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral
00:08:44.480 values. But the principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric.
00:08:49.800 They explain our little behaviour of the scum, which is itself in significant.
00:08:54.960 It is easy to mistake quirks of one's own familiar environment or perspective
00:08:59.920 such as the rotation of the night sky. For objective features of what one is
00:09:03.840 observing, or to mistake rules of thumb, such as the prediction of daily
00:09:07.760 sunrises, universal laws, I should refer to that sort of error as
00:09:12.600 parochialism. So this idea of parochialism where we are making the error of
00:09:19.920 assuming that what's going on in our local environment happens to be of
00:09:26.480 universal importance. And that's a mistake. He continues, anthropocentric
00:09:34.160 errors are examples of parochialism but not all parochialism is anthropocentric.
00:09:38.960 For instance, the prediction that the seasons are in phase all over the world
00:09:42.800 is a parochial error but not an anthropocentric one. It does not involve
00:09:47.280 explaining seasons in terms of people. Now David goes on to explain a little bit
00:09:53.520 more about spaceship earth in this idea that the planet earth is an exceedingly
00:10:00.880 fragile biosphere that is here to try and keep us and everything else on board
00:10:06.640 alive. So it is a spaceship that is taking us on a journey around the sun and
00:10:12.480 in turn journey through around the galaxy and in turn a journey into the future.
00:10:21.280 But the earth is here in an attempt to sustain us and to sustain life.
00:10:26.400 This is what this concept of spaceship earth is. And David undermines this and I
00:10:31.760 think he does one of the best jobs of this that anyone has ever done in print,
00:10:37.280 anyone has ever done in person. And he's going to explain something really
00:10:41.360 profound which is this idea that the earth is not here to sustain us.
00:10:46.560 It's not trying to sustain us. If anything of who are going to say that it was either a
00:10:51.840 force for good or a force for evil towards human beings, we would have to argue
00:10:57.360 it's pretty much a force for evil. We have to do what we can to try and protect
00:11:02.000 ourselves from the environment, from the planet earth. Sure it is the
00:11:07.920 friendliest place for human beings in all of the existence that we know of.
00:11:13.360 No one's thinking of going to Venus for a holiday. There isn't much in
00:11:18.800 interstellar space that's going to sustain us. So the earth is
00:11:22.400 more sustaining than other places but it's not a friendly spaceship.
00:11:29.440 It is a place of hostile weather and hostile climate
00:11:34.480 of disease and pestilence, of pollution in the water that we have to
00:11:40.720 try and filter out. It is forever trying to starve us,
00:11:45.360 or to burn us, to blow us away, to drown us, to earthquake us to death.
00:11:51.600 It is not a friendly place. The other organisms that are here and
00:11:55.280 not particularly friendly, I'm here in Australia, there is
00:11:58.160 a larger number of species of spider and snake that can kill you here I think
00:12:02.800 than just about anywhere. So the earth is not our friend.
00:12:06.320 It's also not our enemy but it's just in a nerd rock in space
00:12:11.760 that happens to be our home and we have to do our best with what we can
00:12:16.240 with the resources that are here in our backyard to try and protect ourselves
00:12:20.880 from the planet. It's not that it's an enemy, it's just unfriendly.
00:12:26.640 Okay so let me continue with chapter three, David writes,
00:12:31.840 The spaceship earth metaphor and the principle of mediocrity have both gained
00:12:36.400 wide acceptance among scientifically minded people to the extent of becoming
00:12:40.560 truisms. This is despite the fact that on the face of it
00:12:44.000 they argue in somewhat opposite directions. The principle of mediocrity
00:12:48.480 stresses how typical the earth and its chemical scum are
00:12:51.840 in the sense of being unremarkable, while spaceship earth stresses how
00:12:55.680 untypical they are in the sense of being uniquely suited to each other.
00:13:01.280 Skipping a little? Both oppose arrogance. The principle of mediocrity
00:13:06.000 opposes the pre-enlightenment arrogance of believing ourselves
00:13:08.640 significant in the world. The spaceship earth metaphor
00:13:12.000 opposes the enlightenment arrogance of aspiring to control
00:13:15.360 the world. We should not consider ourselves significant
00:13:19.520 they assert. We should not expect the world to submit
00:13:23.040 definitely to our depredations. Skipping a little more.
00:13:28.560 If you were seeking Maxim's worth being carved in stone
00:13:32.000 and recited each morning before breakfast you could do a lot worse
00:13:36.080 than to use their negations. That is to say the truth is
00:13:40.720 that people are significant in the cosmic scheme of things and
00:13:44.640 the earth's biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.
00:13:49.520 So that's remarkable. In my own words the principle of mediocrity is this
00:13:53.360 idea that we are in no sense on the cosmic scheme of things
00:13:58.880 in a particularly special place. That planet earth is just a
00:14:03.280 typical planet orbiting a typical star. And more and more that we learn about
00:14:08.880 science we kind of understand that this is true in a sense.
00:14:12.560 The Kepler data from the space telescope has revealed
00:14:17.200 that the overwhelming majority of stars that are out there have planets
00:14:20.960 and they have terrestrial planets kind of like the earth
00:14:23.360 possibly in what they call the habitable zone or the habitable zones of
00:14:27.040 rather useless concept given that well what is habitable
00:14:32.800 depends entirely upon the technology that you have or what indeed
00:14:36.160 for talking about lower forms of biology exactly what their temperature
00:14:45.680 exist at temperatures well higher than the boiling point of order
00:14:48.720 and well below the freezing point of order so this idea of the
00:14:59.760 possibly a the solar system is possibly going to turn out to be
00:15:04.960 a rather typical kind of structure in the universe
00:15:09.040 that there are planets like earth out there and not exactly like earth they
00:15:13.360 might not have human beings or animals of biology at all
00:15:21.040 it might be pretty unremarkable so this is the principle of mediocrity
00:15:27.120 that the earth is typical and yet on the other hand
00:15:30.960 the spaceship earth idea is that the earth is not typical
00:15:36.160 in any way it's the only thing that can sustain us we have to preserve it
00:15:39.760 otherwise we're in all sorts of trouble because there's nowhere else to go
00:15:44.400 but David is saying here that two things actually are true
00:15:50.720 it's not the case that the earth is the only thing that can sustain us
00:15:54.320 indeed it doesn't sustain us the majority of the
00:15:58.640 species of animals that have ever existed have gone extinct
00:16:03.120 we know this 99.9 something or other percent of animals that have ever existed
00:16:08.400 on this planet have been wiped out exterminated by the very planet
00:16:16.720 if humans want to be different the exception to that rule we have to use the one
00:16:20.960 feature that we have that is superior to every other animal
00:16:25.600 on this planet and that is our special relationship
00:16:29.920 to the construction of the explanatory knowledge
00:16:36.800 it's not going to support us only we can do that
00:16:40.160 and moreover the same thing that allows us to support ourselves here on the earth
00:16:49.120 what makes us significant in the cosmic scheme of things
00:16:53.440 because we can create explanatory knowledge we create that thing
00:16:58.960 which allows us to transform the environment around us
00:17:03.440 and we will start local we will spread global and then we will move cosmic
00:17:09.840 and so there is absolutely no law of physics preventing this
00:17:14.400 the only thing that prevents the growth of knowledge and hence the
00:17:18.400 spread of people throughout the universe to make the universe a more
00:17:21.440 friendly bio-friendly place is our desire to do so
00:17:28.640 our wealth and capacity to do so and our knowledge of how to do so
00:17:34.640 so let's continue David writes we are an uncommon form of ordinary matter
00:17:43.920 the commonest form is plasma atoms dissociated into their electrically charged
00:17:48.160 components which typically emits bright visible light
00:17:52.160 because it is in stars which are rather hot we scums
00:17:56.240 are mainly infrared emitters because we contain liquids and complex chemicals
00:18:01.040 which can only exist at a much lower range of temperatures
00:18:05.040 it then explains that the majority of the universe has a temperature of
00:18:09.120 2.7 degrees above absolute zero which is 270 degrees colder than the freezing
00:18:16.560 point of water only very unusual circumstances here right
00:18:24.480 the cosmic microwave background radiation of 2.7 Kelvin
00:18:27.600 nothing in the universe is known to be cooler than about one Kelvin
00:18:30.880 except in certain physical laboratories on earth
00:18:35.280 there the record low temperature achieved is below one
00:18:38.560 billionth at a Kelvin and he says and this is quite
00:18:43.120 remarkable as well to think about that if you had some technology which
00:18:48.960 allowed you to measure the temperature on some other planet
00:18:53.440 we kind of can do that but with the with the level of fidelity required that
00:18:56.880 we could determine exactly what the temperature was in
00:19:00.400 some small region on that planet if we found a place on that planet
00:19:08.160 then we'd have to presume that there were people there
00:19:11.360 because we know of no physical process that naturally could do that
00:19:15.600 the only way that it could be done the only way to remove heat
00:19:18.480 down to a millionth of a Kelvin above absolute zero would be via some
00:19:23.120 technology and so if you discover in the universe somewhere
00:19:26.560 that is very very very very close to absolute zero
00:19:30.960 and certainly some quite distance from 2.7 Kelvin above absolute zero so
00:19:35.520 something really really cold you found aliens quite remarkable
00:19:40.800 David then goes on to go through the story about what a typical
00:19:47.120 place in the universe is like and this is that wonderful part of his
00:19:59.120 do at an immersive rendering of what it's like in intergalactic space
00:20:04.880 and everything goes dark, impeccably dark because that's what
00:20:09.680 interstellar into galactic spaces like there's not much matter there
00:20:14.720 and he says this is a typical place in the universe
00:20:17.760 he writes cold dark and empty that unimaginably desolate environment
00:20:23.200 is typical of the universe and there's another measure
00:20:26.160 of how untypical the earth and its chemical scum are
00:20:30.000 in a straightforward physical sense the issue of the cosmic significance of
00:20:34.160 this type of scum will shortly take us back out into intergalactic space
00:20:38.240 but let me first return to earth and consider the spaceship earth metaphor
00:20:42.320 in its straightforward physical version this much is true
00:20:46.800 if tomorrow physical conditions on the earth service were to change even
00:20:50.640 slightly by astrophysical standards there no humans could live here
00:20:54.000 unprotected just as they could not survive on a spaceship
00:20:56.880 whose life support system had broken down yet i'm writing this in Oxford
00:21:01.200 in England where the winter nights are likewise often cold enough to kill
00:21:04.960 any human unprotected by clothing and other technology
00:21:07.680 so while intergalactic space will kill me in a matter of seconds
00:21:10.800 Oxford's year in its prime evil state might do the same in a matter of hours
00:21:15.200 which can be considered life support only in the most contrived sense
00:21:19.040 there is a life support system in Oxfordshire today
00:21:22.480 Oxfordshire Oxfordshire this is my Australian difficulty with that word
00:21:27.440 there is a life support system in Oxfordshire today
00:21:30.400 but it was not provided by the biosphere it is being built by humans
00:21:34.320 it consists of clothes houses farms hospitals and electrical grid
00:21:38.480 a sewage system and so on knowing the whole of the earth's biosphere in its
00:21:41.840 prime evil state was likewise incapable of keeping an unprotected human
00:21:45.280 alive for long it will be much more accurate to call it a death trap for humans
00:21:49.680 rather than a life support system even the Great Rift Valley and Eastern Africa
00:21:53.520 where our species evolved was barely more hospitable
00:21:56.480 than prime evil Oxfordshire unlike the life support system in that
00:22:00.880 imagined spaceship the Great Rift Valley lacked the safe water supply
00:22:04.400 and medical equipment and comfortable living quarters and was infested with
00:22:07.760 predators parasites and disease organisms it frequently injured
00:22:11.040 poison drenched starved and sickened its passengers and most of them died as a
00:22:15.840 result it was similarly harsh to all the other organisms that lived there
00:22:20.640 few individuals lived comfortably or die of old age and the supposedly
00:22:28.640 most populations of most species are living close to the edge of
00:22:32.080 disaster and death there has to be that way because as soon as some small
00:22:35.120 group somewhere begins to have a slightly easier life
00:22:43.440 that is no accident most populations of most species are living close to the
00:22:47.440 edge of disaster and death it has to be that way because as soon as some small
00:22:51.360 groups somewhere begins to have a slightly easier life
00:22:53.840 than that for any reason for instance an increased food supply
00:22:57.360 or the extinction of a competitor or predator then its numbers increase
00:23:02.480 as a result other resources are depleted and then David speaks about just how
00:23:10.400 terrible nature happens to be so there's he writes there's rampant
00:23:15.600 disabling and killing of individuals by starvation exhaustion
00:23:19.040 predation overcrowding and all those other natural processes
00:23:23.200 that is the situation to which evolution adapts organisms
00:23:26.880 and that therefore is the lifestyle in which the earth's biosphere
00:23:30.080 seems adapted to sustaining him so the only way in which
00:23:35.360 we could make the argument that the earth seems to sustain us is because
00:23:42.160 organisms have adapted to the earth to whatever the the
00:23:46.560 whimsical nature of the environment happens to be any particular time
00:23:50.400 based upon climate and so when the climate is altered over geological
00:23:55.520 timescales then or or some other environmental factor simply causes
00:24:03.680 the balance of species to change predators increase or decrease
00:24:10.160 competitors increase or decrease food supply goes up goes down
00:24:13.440 then so do the fortunes of the animals that happen to live in that area or the
00:24:21.040 so it's not like the earth's sustaining us the animals that are here now the
00:24:26.400 plants that are here now the organisms broadly that are here
00:24:29.760 on the earth now are well suited to the environment as it happens to be
00:24:35.040 but we know the environment cannot possibly remain the same
00:24:39.120 this is the lesson from geology and biology together the only reason that we
00:24:43.280 have evolution by natural selection is because of changes in the environment
00:24:46.480 if there were no changes in the environment there would be no selection
00:24:49.760 pressure and there would be no change you would have random mutations
00:24:54.480 but there would be nothing to select those random mutations
00:24:58.640 David writes the biosphere is not a great preserver of species
00:25:03.680 in addition to being notoriously cruel to individuals
00:25:06.880 evolution involves continual extinctions of entire species
00:25:10.480 the average rate of extinction since the beginning of life on earth
00:25:13.120 has been about 10 species per year the numbers are only very
00:25:16.640 approximately becoming much higher during the relatively brief periods that
00:25:24.400 the rate at which species have come into existence has on balance only slightly
00:25:28.160 exceeded the extinction rate and the net effect
00:25:30.720 is that the overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed on earth
00:25:37.760 okay so David speaks about how it just emphasizes how
00:25:42.720 hostile the environment the biosphere the planet is to
00:25:48.640 organisms generally and to human beings in particular
00:25:54.080 he writes today almost the entire capacity of the earth's
00:25:57.440 life support system for humans has been provided not for us
00:26:02.560 but by us using our ability to create new knowledge
00:26:07.360 there are people in the great great rift valley today
00:26:10.800 who live far more comfortably than early humans did
00:26:13.920 and far greater numbers through knowledge of things like tools farming and
00:26:18.000 hygiene the earth didn't provide the raw materials for our survival
00:26:22.160 just as the sun has provided the energy and supernova provided the elements
00:26:25.920 and so on but a heap of raw materials is not the same thing
00:26:29.600 as a life support system the life support system requires
