Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk to Ryan North about how to use science to become a supervillain
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Hey Daniel, do you remember when we did that episode about supervillains.
The one where we worked through the physics of listeners hypothetical nefarious schemes?
Yeah?
Are you sure they were hypothetical? Do you know if anyone actually did any of them? I didn't follow up with any of them.
But I guess we probably hear about it on the news if anyone actually managed to turn off the sun or build nuclear power ants.
M that makes me you think that maybe we should have done more.
Are you worried we didn't help them enough? Maybe we should like write a book with step by step instructions.
Yeah, maybe nobody should write that book. Sounds like a bad idea. It might be too late. I am poorhand made cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi. I'm Daniel.
I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I seriously hope nobody takes over the world.
What if it's a really good person you mean, like a physicist. No, that's the opposite, I mean at all, right, I mean a great person, not just good enough. Must be a cartoonist, then that's right, someone with a sense of humor and artistic skills.
I think Plato suggested that right, that all societies should be ruled by philosopher cartoonist kings.
Yeah I could be a king, sure. But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to explain everything we do and do not understand about the universe to you.
We dive into the details of.
How quantum particles move, about how hurricane swirls, and about how galaxies form. We seek to enlighten and to explain and to illuminate, and not to arm you with the tools to take.
Over the world. That's right. We don't try to take over the world. We try to explain the world and talk about all the amazing things in it, because it is a pretty wonderful world that if we understood more about, maybe we can appreciate it more and not try to take it over. That's right.
The express goal of physics is not to build the next generation of clear weapons or arm you with nuclear powered ants, but to show you how the world works, to take it apart bit by bit and try to digest it into little mathematical stories that make sense to the human mind. But of course, along the way sometimes we do accidentally gain bits of knowledge which have practical consequences.
That's right. That's not the intended purpose of science, but it's kind of a side effect. Sometimes it does kind of give you the ammunition you need to change the world and to do amazing things in it, and maybe terrible things too.
That's right, and it's transformed the world for the better in many ways, in some ways.
For the worse. I'm sure people would argue, Well, that is a super big question, and it's one that people have been asking themselves for a long time, like, if you had the means and maybe the science and the knowledge to do incredible things here on earth, should you do them?
Does physics and the rest of science equip you with enough power to control everything?
This is a pretty big question and a pretty complicated one. Fortunately, Daniel, you and I have a friend who has written a whole book of at.
This fortunately or unfortunately.
He's written this book, fortunately because I didn't really want to write it. So I'm glad that he did it, and then he can take the blame if something bad happens from that. That's right. And so today on the podcast we'll be talking about Ryan North how to take over the world with science, with science science, Now, just to be clear, with science is not the part of the title of his.
Book, that's right, though he does dive deep into realistic scientific approaches to how to solve these problems. So it's a bit of a tongue in cheek. It's come for the supervillain schemes to take over the world. Stay for the scientific understanding of how the world works.
Yeah, it is a pretty interesting book. It's kind of like how if you want it to be a super villain, Like, what are some of the possible schemes and how would you make them work if you wanted to do it.
Or maybe you're a government regulator and you're wondering how your citizens might turn into supervillains and you want to know how to stop them. Also an excellent resource.
Oh man, you went pretty dark there. You went right into like big Brother. I would see. Maybe also it could be a good guy for superheroes, Like if you wanted to stay one step ahead of the super villains, what would you need?
Are you saying government regulators can't be superheroes? That's what I was imagining Superman working together with the FBI.
That's right. The NSA stands for New Superman Agency. Well, you don't want to hear from us.
We have not done any research into how to take over the world, which is why we invited Ryan on the show to talk to us.
And so here is our interview with author and cartoonist Ryan North.
So it's my pleasure to introduce to the program Ryan North. He's the author of Dinosaur Comics, Adventure Time Comics, and Squirrel Girl. He's won the Eisner Award and Harvey Awards, and has been a New York Times bestseller. In addition, he is an academic background in computational linguistics and a dog named Chomsky.
Ryan. Welcome to the program.
Hi, thank you for having me.
We had Ryan on the show several years ago to talk about his book called How to Invent Everything, which is a piece of science communication in the genre that we hear the podcast like having humble titles like this podcast, and his new book continues that theme, and it's called How to take Over the World. So my first question for you, Ryan is why should we take world domination advice from someone who was famously trapped in a scaming pit with only an umbrella, a leash, a phone, and a dog.
It's true I did get stuck in a hole with my dog and we were there for about an hour before Twitter helped me escape. But the sort of secret about the book is it is called How to take Over the World, and it is using that as the kind of the candy coating to get across the nonfiction inside. But the plots in the book are really used as a lens to explore the actual science and technology and interesting ideas contained within it. So while you could use the book to take over the world, I hope you use it to learn more about the really interesting world around us and the ways we can make it better.
I guess you could use it to learn about the world so you can take over it.
Yeah, you could.
I mean I priced out every plot in the book and it comes in at a little under fifty six billion dollars. So if you have that kind of cash kicking around, I know a way you could spend it.
You probably already run the world. Is that what you're saying? Okay, Ryan, But do you think it's a kind of a bad idea to give people instructions like that about how to take over the world? In other words, should we stop the publication of this book?
I hope not.
I'll tell you something I consider right, like, is this a dangerous book? And I don't think it is, because the truth of it is that what we're doing is learning about the world, Like with how to invent everything? The premise was you've gone back in time, your time machine is broken, and we're going to use that fictional premise to learn about how to rebuild civilization from scratch. And so with these world domination schemes, they're all lifted from comic books. There are things that Doctor Doom or Lex Luthor would do, like having a secret floating base, or floating a dinosaur so you can ride around on it and scare people. It's digging a hole to the Earth's core so you can hold it hostage. That sort of stuff, which in real life doesn't tend to get done, because if you have the kind of means to dig a hole to the Earth's core, you are probably already using that to do a lot more direct world domination things, if that's what you're interested in. So let me put your listeners at ease and say that I don't think it's a dangerous book, but I am also the guy who wrote it, so I am therefore extremely biased.
Well, I mean, how many copies of this book do you plan to sell? How many supervillains can the Earth tolerate? You know what, if this book creates several supervillains and they have competing tunnels to the center of the Earth.
If this book produces several competing super villains all digging to the Earth's core, I would argue that the actual good science that would come out of actually reaching the Earth's core or with a tunnel would probably be worth those leading villains trying to do it as quickly as possible.
Also, you don't need actual supervillains to read your book. You just need aspiring super villains.
Yeah.
I had a friend who was like, you know, I never considered myself to be a super villain, but part way through reading your book, I started thinking.
This feels like self help.
This feels like I'm becoming more and more convinced that I could become a super villain and I could take over the world if I really wanted to, which I counted as a success.
Yeah. Well that kind of brings up the next question we have, which is it, do you think scientists or like writers like yourself have responsibility for how their technology is applied? I mean, like, do you think it would be Daniel's fault if the leac, for example, accidentally creates a black hole and destroys the Earth.
I would personally blame Daniel for that. Yes, absolutely, but seriously, I think there is there's always a discussion, right of what do we owe each other and how responsible are we the things.
That we do when we produce.
And my angle on this is growing up in the eighties and nineties and studying computers, and at the time, there was this idea that I fully subscribed to you that the Internet was an intrinsic good. It was good by its very nature because it would let people talk to anyone in the world, and communication was good by its very nature, and whatever the Internet did, it had to be positive for the world because we were connecting humans like it just felt like it was. You accept it as true because it was so obvious. And of course, twenty years later we see things like Facebook inciting genocide and Mayanmar, all these ways in which human communication has been weaponized and used to accomplish some very bad things, and that was nothing that we foresaw at the time. Like we all thought it was great, we didn't realize that anyone in the world being able to talk to you meant that if you were in any way marginalized, you'd have to be constantly defending yourself against an effectively infinite array of strangers. Always calling upon you to justify your existence like there was these downsides we didn't see. And I don't think you can call up, you know, Tim Bernards Lee and say, hey, you invented the World Wide Web. I'm holding you responsible for this, but I think there is a responsibility to try to foresee the negative ways technology can be used. And that's that's a very serious answer to a probably not that serious question.
I apologize for that.
No, I think it is a serious question and it needs a serious answer. So thank you for that. And I'm also glad to hear that you're relieving most scientists of the responsibility for their actions except for me. I'm responsible for the black hole. In case the lac eats the Earth.
And that microsecond I have before I get sucked into the black hole, I'd be like Daniel exactly.
I haven't spent a whole lot of time preparing my defense for the post Earth has been destroyed, you know, Hague trial in which I'm called into justice.
You're probably fine, probably, but you.
Know, it is an important topic and it's something that I personally have thought about a lot, having grown up in Los Alamos, where the development of nuclear weapons, you know, literally has changed the nature of human society. I definitely shied away from any kind of physics research which had immediate applications and tried to imagine that, you know, particle physics was basically useless to humanity except.
That its scratched our itch.
You know that it satisfied some curiosity about the nature of reality. But I think it's fun in your book how you very directly connect these ideas of here's some knowledge about how the universe works, and here's how you could use it for your own personal gain at the expense of the rest of humanity.
I introduced this idea of what I call enlightened super villainy, where you're helping the world by helping yourself. I think the best example of that is in the chapter about becoming Immortal, where we explore all the different ways that people have tried to reach for immortality in the past, and a lot of them feel really goofy from our current point of view. Like there was an idea popular in England in the sixteen hundreds where if you drank all these medicines which are really toxins poisons, then your hair would fall out and your nails would fall off, and we recognize this as like a very crude form of chemotherapy, but they saw that when the hair grew back and the nails grew back, if you survive the treatment, then you'd be reborn as a baby and you'd live for longer by surviving this really crude form of amateur chemotherapy. And it feels goofy now, but at the time they're like, yeah, this might be a way we can become immortal. And sort of the conclusion of that chapter is that if you did become immortal through any sort of medical process, then that would be really bad for the world, right because if it's a medical way to become immortal, it's not some magical thing, it's some scientific thing you're doing to yourself. Then that takes money, that takes resources, and not everyone can have it. And now you've produced a world in which you have a class of immortal humans who won't die and everyone else who will die. And that's like cartoonish levels of dystopia and inequality. And the way you get around that perfectly is you keep it a secret. Only you become a mortal, you're the only one who does. Is you're the only one who knows about it, and then you have these benefits of immortality. You can study something for hundreds of thousands of lifetimes and the rest of the world doesn't need to suffer for it, and that feels like a benefit. But also there's clearly something villainous in becoming immortal and keeping it all for yourself, and that narrow space is what I call enlightened supervillain. I feel like it's where a lot of the book operates and has fun with.
Well, I guess I have a more general question and now, Ryan, which is what kind of inspired the book for you? Like, what made you think to write a book about how to take over the world.
That's a good question. It sort of came from me writing stories for Marvel and DC comic book Adventures. And in those stories, you always have a hero fighting a villain. That's the rule of a genre, superhero comics, and the best stories have the heroes winning at the last second. Right in a sports game, if your team dominates the whole match, it's not very exciting because you know how it's going to end. But if they come into the last second and double overtime and that's a really good game, that's super exciting. And so I realized that we were writing these stories where the villains always lost at the last second, and what happened if they didn't have to lose, what happened if we structure the story so that they could win. And if we could do that in a story, what's to stop us from doing it in real life? And so part of writing the book was me trying to convince myself that this is fine, this is safe. No one is going to blow up the moon or do any crazy stuff. And part of it is, well, if someone was trying to actually pull off supervillain schemes, like if they really wanted a floating base, how close can we get?
Can we do it?
If they really wanted a dinosaur to ride around on, what's the state of the art for that? How close are we to de extinctifying which is definitely very scientific term these sorts of animals, And there's a lot of really interesting things happening there. So it ended up being this fun exploration of the sort of current edges of science and research. All through this lens of I want to take over the world, like doctor Doom, What can I do?
One thing that excited me but also terrified me was how realistic some of these schemes sort of are, especially in the category of like geo engineering. It's certainly possible that somebody fairly wealthy could decide they want to change the climate of the Earth and do something about it, you know, where one person makes a decision essentially for the whole planet. I don't know if you've read their recent novel by Neil Stevenson, Termination and Shock, and which this is sort of explored. Can you talk about how somebody could actually impact the climate, how an individual, fairly wealthy person could make a decision about geoengineering for the whole human population.
Yeah, that was actually one of the chapters. That was the chapter where I was most aware of. We're all having fun here with this book for super villains, but I want to make it clear that this is probably not something we should be doing. Don't go off and do this on your own. So the basic idea is that the Earth's climate is changing, and one way we could fix that if we can't get rid of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes a greenhouse effect, is just have less light hit the earth. And if we reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the surface, of the Earth by two percent. That could bring global temperatures down to pre industrial levels. And one way you can do that is you go up to the stratosphere and you spray sulfur dioxide into it, which is white, and it reflects light back to space. Everything's fine, and then that sulfur dioxide falls down as acid rain. Don't worry about it.
That sounds fine, It's probably fine.
And you could do this with a fleet of not that strongly modified airplanes change so that they can fly to the stratosphere and disperse this this sulfur dioxide. And the cost for that would be about as seven billion dollars US initially and then two billion dollars a year ongoing because of course this sulfur dioxide falls down to Earth and needs to be replenished once a year. And you know, the plus side is, yes, this this would reduce global temperatures down to where they were pre industrially, but the downsides are pretty significant. It's something that needs to be maintained. So if we stopped it, then suddenly you have two hundred years of climate change happening in one year, which would obviously be catastrophic. But of course, like we also rely on fertilizers to feed all the humans that are alive on the planet, So there's some precedent for doing this. But the real objection I see is that if you do this, you're not just changing the global climate, but you're also changing global weather, the weather patterns, and that means, you know, when a tornado strikes somewhere, we call that an act of God because we can't control the weather. But when you have modified the weather, there's no more acts of God. There's just acts of you. And there's also the concern of if there is to be a global thermostat, why is one person controlling it. Who's to say it can be controlled or should be controlled by that one person. So you get these really thorny issues of culpability, especially if say, these tornadoes only happen to affect one part of the planet that you're not in, maybe you'll decide that's fine. Like it gets so messy so quickly and doesn't actually fully address the problems with climate change. It addresses the temperature thing, but there's still extra carbon dioxide causes coral reef bleaching and things like that. So it's not a perfect solution, and it's not even a consequence free solution, but it is a surprisingly achievable thing for someone with nine billion dollars kicking around to do if they were really motivated. And I don't think the answer there is to pretend it doesn't exist. I'd like for people to be aware that this is something that's out there, and this is something that someone might try to do one day, or a government or a country might try to do, and I wouldn't want us to be surprised by it.
Well, I'll admit that I was terrified as I was reading this, imagining what if Jeff Bezos is reading this book, because this is something he could do. He could like push a button and do this and decide, hey, you know, I'm sorry I blew away your country in tornadoes. But I decided it was for the best.
It really helped Amazon's bottom line in America, so we went for it.
All right, Well, we have lots more questions for Ryan, but first let's take a short break. With big wireless providers, what you see is never what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price, your thoughts you were paying magically skyrockets. With Mintmobile, you'll never have to worry about gotcha's ever again. When mint Mobile says fifteen dollars a month for a three month plan, they really mean it. I've used Mintmobile and the call quality is always so crisp and so clear. I can recommend it to you. So say bye bye to your overpriced wireless plans, jaw dropping monthly bills and unexpected overages.
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Or maybe in a way you do. You want people to be more informed and you know, make better decisions with the book.
Yeah, I do.
I think there's a interesting angle in science communication where like, these schemes have not been fully created by me. It's just me looking around at what's there on the ground and how it can be put together. And if me, a simple cartoonist put them together in these ways, I'm sure others have too. So I feel like, you know, let's beware of it, let's look at what can be done. And I also don't want to make it sound like it's all dire and bad, like the scheme for bringing back dinosaurs, I think is a lot of fun and could be a great benefit for people. The argument there is less of you know, let's clone dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park, and more let's look at chickens, which are a distant ancestor of dinosaurs and use a bespoke development environment to bring out arms instead of wings, and a snout instead of a beak, and a rounded butt instead of a tail, and produce very dinosaur like chickens which we could then drag in with ostriches. And then there's you're a dinosaur to run around on. And yes, it's not technically a dinosaur, but it looks like one and it would probably sound like one if it worked.
But it would it taste like a dinosaur? I don't know.
I think probably pretty close. I'm going to go on record and say I think dinosaurs are delicious. Yeah, dinosaurs tastes like chicken.
I'm thinking about all sorts of tie ins with fast food restaurants. You know, you get your Jurassic nuggets. I mean, it sounds fantastic. I don't know why you didn't base the whole book on that, but tell us a little bit about that, you know, is Jurassic chicken actually a possibility. Is this something that you know, scientists could actually accomplish if they decided it was a good idea.
It's interesting there are some scientists who think it's a great idea. One in particular, Jack Horner wrote a book called How to Build a Dinosaur where he was like, this is what needs to be done, and we could do it. And there's other teams who have been working on this who have sort of gone up to the line and then stepped back. There was one team that was working on snouts and produced chicken embryo in an egg that had a snout with teeth, and then they didn't allow the egg to develop as they thought, you know, there's some definite ethical and moral implications with what we're doing, and let's avoid them by just not hatching this more dinosaur like chicken.
Are you saying that they thought about the ethics after they had succeeded in creating a mini dinosaur.
That seems a tiny bit late in the game.
Better late than never, I feel like better late than never for sure. But the new thing about this process is we're not genetically engineering chickens to be dinosaurs. We're just expressing different genes in their development to make them more dinosaur like. And so if one of these Chickenosaurus is actually hatched, it would have the same DNA, the same genetic code as a chicken, and if it could reproduce with another chicken, which probably would be unlikely, but if it worked, you wouldn't get more chicken asauruses. You'd just get regular chickens because they hadn't had their development environment altered.
So it feels safe.
There's no escaping the park and taking over the world angle here, and if they do escape, like you said, there's lots of companies dedicated towards reading and frying these animals for delicious consumption. So I feel like it's like pugs, right, Like dogs are wolves that we have bread into being something cuter and more acceptable to us. And pugs are a strong example because they have these short noses that are not great for respiration, Like that's not what the animal would want if it was choosing itself. But we love these animals, we care for them. We give them all the attention and care they could need so that they're not affected poorly by these snouts. So we do what we can for these animals we love, and I feel like had we created or if we created a chicken dinosaur, it would absolutely be one of the most cared for and celebrated animals in the world. I think we would have a pretty good life.
I'm still stuck in the idea of a dinosaur giving birth to a chicken and the trauma for that poor chicken that has to have a dinosaur mom. Like, you know when your parents look different from all the other parents, Like, Wow, that's gonna be a difficult chicken childhood there, I.
Mean, the ugly duckling. Still that's try. It's happy on you, isn't it? Or is that no, the ugly duckling. The duckling grows up to be a swan and then like beats up the other ducks. Right, it's a really mean fairy tale.
I recall, all right, well, Danye and I really loved your book, Ryan. But one thing that is pretty cool is that it's for a wide range of people. So the book was a big hit in my house, was a big hit in Daniel's house, and our kids also got into the book. So we have a couple of questions from Hazel, Daniel's daughter, and a couple of questions from my son.
Sure, this is great, all right.
So here's a question from my daughter, Hazel.
If hypothetically a twelve year old wanted to take over the world and didn't have access to a lot of resources other than her dad's particle accelerator, what would you recommend, hypothetically, Hypothetically.
Hypothetically, that is a great question, Hazel. I would say that you're in a great position given this access to a particle accelerator. I feel like I'm not really best qualified to tell you what you can use a particle accelerator for in terms of world domination. But with the particle accelerator and a very treadulous father, I think you could trick him into doing stuff. But just just ask him, like, you know, Dad, what should I definitely never use that particle accelerator for because I want to be super safe. And he'll tell you, and then you know, do.
It, and then he'll say, go ask your mother.
If mom says it's okay to make a black hole, then I guess it's fine.
I think it's great deniability here because you can just google what not to do with a particle accelerator and just tell the FBI, like what I was trying to be safe.
That actually brings me to my son's question. So, my son really liked your book. He read it, and he wants to know how many times did you use Google to get all the information for the book. I think he was so impressed by all the information in it, he was like, how do you how do you do you even get all this stuff?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think anyone these days uses Google. But it's not like you can just type in what should I put in a book called how to take Over the World? PS it's an emergency and have it work. So what I do, I think what all of us do going through the world is we're always keeping our eyes peeled for interesting things and remembering things that surprised us or that we thought were unexpected. And so when you sit down to write, you have all this stuff you remember of, Oh, you know, I think I've read somewhere that plastics aren't eaten by anything alive on the world, and so they'll last a really long time. And then you google that and you think, oh, you realize, oh no, there was an animal that was discovered in the early two thousands that does actually or can actually eat plastic, but still most animals don't, so it's a really long lasting, non biodegradable product in certain scenarios. Then you say, well, if nothing eats plastic on the ocean floor, then you could use an engraved hunk of plastic and put it in the ocean and it'll last ten thousand years. And you know what, if you put that maybe near the Mariana Trench, because that's the deepest part of the ocean, so it's naturally interesting, just like Mount Everest is naturally interesting for us, then that might be give it a better chance of being found in that time period.
And then you.
Google how fast the maria in a trench plate is being subducted. You realize, oh, it's fifty three millimeters a year. So if you put it like five kilometers away in the right direction, it'll be right where it's at the most interesting point on the planet at the time period we want. And then you've got a scheme for sending a villainous message centuries thousands of years into the future. I think it all starts from just being curious about the world around you and remembering the stuff that you find interesting, and then you can put it together in different ways, like little villainous lego blocks.
So it sounds like the answer is one hundred percent Google.
I think he's saying it's how you use Google right, Like use it in the right way you can get to interesting places. Every nonfiction book these days is curated Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia.
Actually it's surprising. I wish it were, because it'd be so much easier. There's still lots of information in books that you can't find online, and you can't just search for what you want. I do love that a lot of the older out of Copper books are online, so you can find like these what on the chapter immortality. I found all these schemes from the mid fifteen hundreds onward that were written down in these books and published and forgotten, but then someone scanned to put them online. I can read these original ideas of here's how you make this juice that makes you immortal. And you look at the recipe from our modern era and you're like, this is ludicrous. This will at best not kill you. Would come close.
Well, technically not killing you is extending your life.
Yeah, I guess if you continue to not be killed for long enough, then you can live forever.
That's the trick, as I just avoid a hoax, he cures and you might live forever.
Speaking of cures, my daughter had this moment Hazel realized the power of Google. We were watching this show All Creatures, Great and Small and PBS, this wonderful show. But he's trying to save some cow and he's looking through books for an answer. He's like desperately doing research all night long. And Hazel's like, Wow, too bad he doesn't just have Google. And I think she'd like click for her or the power of being able to search through all these texts simultaneously defined an answer. I want to come back to something you talked about earlier, about sending a message into the future. You know, why do you think this is such a powerful theme in supervillainy being immortal or not being forgotten?
Well?
Is it such an important theme? And what are some of the schemes you have in your book for not being forgotten?
Well?
It ties into ego, right, like the best villains are always super eutistical. Your doctor Dunes and lex Luthors are very convinced that they are the best humanity has to offer. But since they are human, they're going to die one day and that feels unfair to them, and they want to either cheat death by becoming immortal, or at least ensure that they're never forgotten and find at least some flavor of immortality. It's fascinating how often this idea shows up across human cultures, and you look at it just from like first principles, it makes sense, right, Like humans begin as an egg and sperm cell, and then from those two pieces we build up an entire baby in nine months, which is incredible, it's a magic trick. And then somehow just maintaining that body is what kills us. We can build a human being from two cells in nine months, and then just keeping it around is one hundred percent fatal. That feels like there's something wrong there, like there must be some mistake and we can fix this. So I get the implication for why you'd want to be immortal, and when that fails, I absolutely understand this idea of, well, let's at least make sure people always remember me. I want to send a message to the future so that they know I was here. And I feel like that's also very, very common in humans, this idea of we'll build something so that people knew we were here. And in the book, I look at different time ranges, so one year, ten year, one hundred year, one thousand year, And as we go for larger and larger periods of time, we start getting greater and greater problems. Right, we're looking at ten thousand years into the future. It's not impossible to get an object to survive that long. But the fact is that no human language has survived that long. And so you start getting into well, maybe we can use a subset of words that we believe evolve more slowly than other words, so very common things like like face and numbers and letters. But even that doesn't get you far enough. They're like, well, maybe we can use symbols and communicate with the universal language of pictures.
But comic.
Yeah, but the problem with comics is that even they're culturally interpreted, like a skull and crossbones we would see as being a symbol of death, or maybe it's piracy, or to a medieval alchemist, it's the bones of atom that promise eternal resurrection, and comics are reading them left to right or right to left, like we don't know the culture that these symbols will be interpreted in so we can't. Actually they're not nearly as reliable as we'd like.
We need like an ikea manual for how to read the comics.
Well, people have tried it. People have because that's such a tantalizing idea.
Right.
If we can come up with a symbol, a set of symbols that any human can look at and understand, then we've got a universal language. And especially in the seventies, see a lot of efforts to try to build this universal pictorial language. And as soon as you get to something even a little bit complicated, you start making these assumptions that a circle is good and a square is bad, or green means go and red means stop, and all these things that you can't actually bake in. So it starts to get very very challenging. But when you're looking at say one hundred thousand years or even a million years in the future, at that point, all you can do is leave the Earth and be like, you know what, We're going to put a satellite in orbit, like NASA did with Legios, which is a four hundred million dollar satellite nineteen seventy six and a polar orbit that's expected to last about a million years. Before it degrades. And so you could launch a very similar satellite with your message on it and maybe it won't be understood, but the fact that it made it are million years in the future, that's remarkable on its own.
Are you saying that NASA launched a satellite just to send a message to the future, that's the primary purpose of this satellite, or it's an auxiliary purpose.
It's an auxiliary purpose. I've recently done it on purpose. So this satellite was used to initially measure continental drift. It's basically imagine a giant golf ball, and if you fire a laser at this satellite, it reflects it back to you and you can use that to measure distance very accurately, which you can then use to measure the very slight movements of the continents. And so it was used to sort of nail down this newer theory of continental drift naturally get measurements for it, and it worked. And it was only when they were launching it, well not just when we're launching, but as they were launching it, they realized, you know, if this stays up for this long, this is a chance to talk to life on Earth. Millions of years in the future if it's understood, and so what they did trying to figure out this problem of language. They did the numbers one to ten in binary to show that we knew what numbers were. And then there were three pictures of what Earth looked like around eight million years ago, we think from continental drift, what it looked like when it was launched, and then what it might look like around eight million years in the future. And that was basically a little more than a guess because we hadn't yet precisely measured how the continents were moving, but it at least says can give you some idea of this is about when this came from, and this is about what we were trying to do. If you know what the Earth looks like. But that's a pretty big if, right, if the Earth even looks like what we think it'll look like. So you don't have anything guaranteed. But I think the fact that it's possible to try and to maybe succeed is absolutely wild, right.
I think if humans look at that thing in a million years, there'll be a big group of people who think it's a fake, like it must be a hoax. There's no way NASA actually did that a million years ago.
Well there's the for ae hundred million years. What I suggest is based on this satellite, the Echo Star sixteen, which there's a type of orbit called the graveyard orbit. So if you're in geosynchronous orbit, it's really useful for satellites because you're always in the same place in the sky. But when the satellites exceed their useful lifetime, they're pushed up about three hundred kilometers higher to what's called a graveyard orbit, where they just orbit in this graveyard indefinitely. And on this Echo Star sixteen satellite, this artist Trevor Peglin talked him into letting him put on a silicon disc that had one hundred different pictures of Earth, Portraits of humanity, he called it. And we're all familiar with the Voyager record, which had these images of humans and humanity chose by NASA, and they were all very it was.
Like Earth on a good day, right.
These were images we'd put in our dating profile if we were a planet or a species looking to meet other species. But what Trevor chose I thought very interesting because he just chose images that showed all these different aspects of Earth. There was a screenshot of the text adventure game Zork. There was what you might expect, like pictures of beautiful buildings and stuff, but also, here's a picture of a factory farm. Here's a picture of a predator drone taken from the ground in Iran. Here's pictures of children who were born with deformations caused by Agent Orange, like stuff that we wouldn't normally want to remember. He also put on this satellite where it might last one hundred million years or more. And I actually got to speak to him, and I was saying, well, what do you think this means? And he was saying, look, there's all these forces on Earth that we can't control, that are beyond us, that no one human can influence. But that doesn't mean you don't have to try, you don't have to participate. And he recognized that if these were ever found, which is not super likely, it's even less likely that they'd be understood. But just because it wasn't likely didn't mean he couldn't stop himself from trying. And he wanted to put art into orbit where it might be seen one hundred million years from now. And I think that is part of the beauty of it too. Like as much as his project or the Voyager Record is us trying to speak to the future, trying to speak to distant aliens or anything, it's also us speaking to ourselves, right. It's humans speaking to humanity and saying, some of what we've done here might survive, some of it might outlast all of us. And I think that is really comforting in a way. It's inspiring and comforting. It makes me feel like, no matter what, there's still this Voyager Record, there's still these portraits of humanity on the Echo Star sixteen satellite that will be there probably long after all of us are gone and at least have something to say about who we were and what we were doing.
Yeah, And I think one of my favorite parts of your book are these questions that really do touch everybody. I mean, not everybody necessarily wants to be a geo engineer, but everybody thinks about death and mortality and whether they'll be remembered. And so one of the things you talk about in the book is how to be remembered, how to leave a statue of yourself or a message that might be remembered.
But you actually talk.
About also literally curing aging There's this quote where when you talk about a scientist who says that they can cure aging in lab mice in ten years and in humans within just a decade or so, more, tell us a little bit.
About the trajectory. There are we on the verge of curing aging? Haven't they been saying that for the last thirty years.
There are absolutely people who will tell you that the first immortal human is already born, already walking alive, and just doesn't walk around doesn't know it yet. I in the book and in real life take a more skeptical approach to that. Usually, I feel like these shots of immortality, things like cryonics are uploading your brain to a computer. As soon as you look at them in any sort of detail, they kind of really fall apart. Royonics, especially where it's this idea that if you freeze yourself and keep your body frozen, you'll be thought out and rejuvenated in the future. And it sounds great until you realize that, Okay, well you have to not only sure whatever disease you were dying from, but also cure it if it's advanced so much that it's literally already killed you, and you have to keep this body frozen for so long, and it feels like, is there anything we can point to that says this is possible? And the closest example I could find was this practice of chantry in medieval times, where when you died, if you were rich, you'd pay people to sing for your immortal soul to get you into heaven. And this evolved into this thing called perpetual chantry, where you'd give the church land and they would charge rent, and that rent on the land would pay for someone to sing for your immortal soul forever, so you'd be definitely getting into heaven. And this is the same scheme of cryonics, where you make the living do something to keep the dead around, and it has avantage over cryonics that all you had to do was sing and pray, and it still lasted less than four hundred years until a king was like, you know what, I'm taking this land. It's mine now this is over. So I don't see it very likely, but that the quote you were mentioning was from doctor Aubrey de Gray, who believes that there are treatments just around the corner that could make effectively immortal humans. And when I say that, I mean not they won't die, but just they won't die from what we normally call old age. They accidents might do them in and a long enough timeline that is probably true. We're driving around cars, they got to hit someone. But he believes that it might be possible to cure aging, not by figuring out what aging is, so you don't really know what it is, but just by figuring out how to address the symptoms of it. So if there's a problem with tissues becoming inflexible, well let's find a way to make them flexible. If there's a problem with cancer killing people, well then let's solve this problem with cancer. And the way he suggests is basically, cancer happens when cells divide without limit. They just keep dividing, and they can do that because stem cells have this thing called telomerase, which allows telomeres in the cell to reproduce infinitely. So telomeres are repetitive parts at the end of chroma zones the end of DNA that shortened every time a cell divides, and so there's a limit on how many times a cell can divide. But if you have, like stem cells, do telomerase, then you can do this indefinitely. So he proposes, let's remove the ability to produce telomerase from every cell in the body, which effectively lets sterilize every cell so it can no longer reproduce. It can only produce a finite number of times, and then it will have to die. And then to prevent this from being fatal, he suggests, we can genetically engineer special stem cells with really long telomeres so they can't produce telomerase, but they can divide enough to last, say ten years, and then every ten years you get a new injection. And this is wild, right, Like, this is effectively saying, I will kill my body's ability to reproduce at the cellular level, but get topped up with cellular gasoline every couple of years to keep myself alive. And you know, in theory, maybe it could work in practice. There's an awful lot of very complicated things that we've just glossed over there in an effort to, at the end of the day, just make an individual live forever. And I find it not a very convincing argument that an individual should live forever. I think there's lots of individuals. You look at your Genghis's cons your Hitler's where it's a bad thing if they would live forever, and the fact that we all do die has some really positive things for society. It's what encourages billionaires to be philanthropic, to give money way through end of their lives and try to get some sort of better angle for posterity because they can't take it with them. But you can't take it with you. Doesn't mean a lot if you never have to go.
Right.
So I've been writing this book, I've kind of come down surprisingly in favor of death. Now a person who thinks death is good for society and civilization.
As a whole.
You're starting to sound like a super village, right.
And this is the beginning, Like this is this whole thing has been a villainous monologue where I start saying death is good and we should embraces you.
Sound like the speech by Thanos in the Avengers movie. He's going to be a guest next week on the podcast.
Sorry, that was a very long answer to a very simple question. But I think it's so it's such a fascinating topic and it gets into these deeper questions of like what life is and can death have an upside?
Right?
Like I don't want to die. I don't want anyone I love to die. But at a larger level, I get it right, I see the benefits death gives to society and to our species as a whole.
We'll be fascinating also if you then had an option, if some people could say, you know what, I just want to live eighty years or one hundred years and I'm done, and other people be like, no, I'm going to do three hundred, or I'm going to do ten thousand, or I'm just going to go forever. It'd really make for a really fascinating sort of segregated or stratified society if that happened. But my real question is, in this scenario, is this one doctor the sole source for this sort of cellular gasoline and then eventually becomes a gazillionaire because everybody's reliant on his one pipeline of regeneration.
Yeah.
And my pitch for this is you do it yourself, and you split it up amongst different scientists workers so that no one can quite put together all the pieces, and then you're the only one who does it, so you can become rich if you want. But I would encourage you more just to use this time you have this now effectively unlimited time to do whatever you want to do, things that you can accomplish in one human lifetime, Like I know, like I love linguistics, but I can't bet on more than one hundred years if that on this world. And there's more linguistics than I could ever hope to learn in three hundred years, Like you could learn something beyond what any human can learn today. And I think that's the appealing part of striving towards immortality for me, is to exceed these limits on what we can do as one person. But then I see the downsides of this ludicrous you know, inequality.
Well, that's kind of an interesting angle, this idea, like maybe what if we've run out of space in your brain? Like how many memories can your brain hold?
Yeah, I think that's the common thing we forget when we fantasize what immortality is that the brain is not infinite. And I'm sure if I lived five hundred years, I would remember the last twenty pretty good, but I wouldn't better remember in the first thirty with any number of detail. This is kind of a sidebar to that, But I was really fascinated by the idea of childhood amnesia where we don't remember our first couple of years of life. And I was wondering if this was something that was unique to humans or other animals. And I talked to a neuroscientist friend of mine and I was like, here's my theory. Tell me where I'm wrong. Humans are born effectively premature, where we need a lot of care but for several years of our lives. But horses are born and they're running around within the hour they're born, and they're ready to go. So can a horse remember being born? Can an adult horse remember being born? And he, to his credit, took my question seriously and was like, well, what seems to happen. I'm putting future science terms for you, is that when we're young, we address our memories in a certain way, and as we get older, we change the addressing scheme, so we lose access to those memories. So I don't think an adult horse remembers being born.
But thank you for the question, And also, would you want to remember being born? It doesn't sound like a very pleasant experience.
That sounds painful, But I think I think all this to say is that our brains are finite, and when we fantasize what lig forever. We forget that we can't remember everything, and if you live forever, you might just remember effectively one human lifetime on a sliding scale through time.
But you talk in your book also about the possibility of uploading your mind into the simulation, and it makes me wonder if there's sort of a hybrid there. You know, I already have some extension of my brain on this device I carry around because I don't remember any telephone numbers or email addresses or stuff like that. Isn't there a possibility where we store these memories somewhere on the cloud, and then when you want to remember your thirteenth birthday, you just have to, like, you know, go and fetch it and download it back into your brain, and then you can relieve the trauma.
I mean, you're describing a video clip, I think.
Exactly. So we are living in the future right now.
You're seting there you go, there you go?
Did you just invent YouTube? That's right?
I want my cut? Guys, where's my cut of YouTube? I just invented it.
If we could externalize things that happened with some sort of motion picture.
Deep thoughts by Daniel Whitson.
All right, I got lots more questions for Ryan, But first let's take another break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times the same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us Dairy dot com slash Sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, we're back and we're talking to the author of the book How to take Over the World, Ryan North, who has not yet successfully taken over the world, but instead decided to write a book about it.
How do you know? How do you know he's not the one pulling all the strings behind the curns.
Let's just say you'll all be surprised. In a couple months.
I guess you would be a lot busier and have more important things to do than to be on our podcast.
Well that's my question, set of jokingly aside. Having thought about all of these schemes about how to potentially take over the world, what do you think the prospects are that somebody in the future might actually do it? You know, it's been the goal of real life villains Alexander the Great and Napoleon Hitler for a long time, but nobody's really pulled it off, actually taken over the entire world. Do you think it's something that somebody in the future might be able to accomplish.
I don't.
The reason for that is that, in one sense, it's kind of self defeating, because once you've taken over the world, the only thing left to do is to lose the world, right, Like, there's no political human political system that lasts indefinitely. And the other reason is that it's an appealing goal to a certain type of person, Like what if I controlled everything? But the reality is the benefits are very limited, right, Like you get to boss some people around, I guess, but there's no way you can effectively boss around every person on Earth. There's always resistance, there's always people who want to do something else and what you want them to do. So if anyone came up to me and sincerely said, Ryan, I want to take over the world, I think my first instinct would be to not take them seriously, to laugh, because I don't think they would have thought about it in enough depth to be a credible threat.
You're saying it's not a job anyone would want.
Yeah, I don't think it's a job you want. I think if you think about it for a minute, you'd be like, you know what, that sounds like a lot of work for very little benefit, a lot of destruction for very little benefit.
Maybe I won't.
That's how I feel about becoming department chair, Like, why does anybody want that job?
Much much smaller scale.
Yeah, it looks good, on a resume, but surely you want to do something else with your time.
Well, Ryan, what were some of the ideas that did not make it into the book about how to take over the world?
There was one that I really liked. So the idea was, let's have a chapter on throwing your enemies into the Sun. And it's a great idea. The issue is that it's not actually that hard, surprisingly, so that the trick with it is that if you want to throw your enemy to the Sun, you need a rocket, obviously, but if you just launch them away from Earth, the challenge is that the Earth is rotating around the Sun very quickly and you've got all that momentum, and so if you launch someone off the Earth, they're going to also go into orbit around the Sun. If you want to actually be thrown into the Sun, you need to slow them down an awful lot to get close to the Sun and not just orbit around it. And so you can look at NASA's solar probe, the Parker Solar Probe that was in the news recently for doing that. It did orbital flybys to slow it down off of Venus and eventually it's close enough now that you can enter the outer outer layer of the Sun.
So you could use that sort of process.
Do some orbital flybys to slow down this, I guess corpse of your enemy you've thrown into space enough to actually impact and be burned up in the sun. But the challenge there as an author is that this is not super complicated. Surprisingly, this is just the costs are well known, the orbital mechanics are well known. It's just a matter of some someone willing to spend the millions of dollars it takes to do this just to fire someone who's already dead because it's not a survivable trip into the sun. So it sort of reaches this level of impractical but still really really appealing.
So it's not in the book.
But if anyone wants to spend a couple million on launching their enemies corpses in the sun, give me a call. I can send you over the spreadsheets.
I see it's in the appendix as well.
Well.
It sounds like something you might want to do just to send a message, you know, like if you are ruling the world, you want people to take you seriously and not you know, rebel against you.
Yeah, but the other downside is it takes a long time because you're having to fly out. The initial plan for Parker was to fly out to Saturn, and the modified one was to use a couple flybys of Venus. But this still takes years and years and years, and it's not super scary to send the message to be like, if you cross me, well you just wait five years, because when five years are over, your dead body will be cremated in the sun.
Maybe depends on what do you do to them on the on the way there, like maybe I don't know, on some bad television on the on the rocket ship to the Thune.
Oh, you're assuming we're keeping them alive. Well, it's much more expensive keep them alive for that journey. I was assuming we just you know, kill them on Earth or just stick them in the shuttle alive and then launch them in a space and they'll die when they get into the cold vacuum space. But keep them alive for five years, Yeah, then it's worse. But then I feel like you're in like Geneva Convention torture violation territory.
I like that you think so carefully about the budget for each of these schemes. You know that's important because it's like a it's like a shopping list, you know, think about how much money you have before you want to take over the world.
Well, I feel like the fun of it, the fun of going through these thought experiments is the logistics, right, Like with How To Invent Everything, the premise was, you've got a time machine that's broken, which is clearly fictional, but let's use that to explore the science. But I also wanted to be like legitimately what it says in the cover. Wanted to be a real book that could actually work if you were trapped in the past. And so with this book, I wanted to be like, let's have legitimate schemes here. Yes, they're going to cost billions and billions of dollar, but well, most people use them to learn about science and technology and history in the world around us. Let's make it so that these are viable, credible schemes. Like, let's let's have the fun of actually pricing things out and thinking about logistics and if we do want to do this, what does it cost, what do we need? How is this going to blow up at our faces? That sort of thing.
So it's I think it's fun.
Maybe you should write a book called how to be a supervalain's accountant.
It's a less catchy title. Maybe we can use it for the paperback.
That's like selling pick access to the gold miners. Well, in terms of credible schemes, I was expecting to see something about like leading an AI revolution, because I feel like AI is going to take over the world anyway. Is there some way you can think of to like lead that charge, you know, be the first conspirator, the first collaborator to join the other side and use the power of AI to take over the world. Why did you reject that kind of idea?
I felt like it's it's hard to get into specifics with something like AI because the ais we have now are nowhere close to that at all. And I sort of touched on that in the mind uploading section, where the issue you encounter if you're going to upload your mind to a computer is well, it basically boils down to who cares, right, Like, if I've uploaded my brain to a computer, I can't prove that it's me there. There's no way to prove that I'm conscious. And we've all had, you know, computer games, so we've loved and played for hours and hours and then forgotten about and then later deleted or even just not to be just left them on a hardware and throughout the computer. And I think the same sort of thing would happen if you had a computer that had ryandot Ex on it. You probably have fun with it for a while, and then you might mess with me for a while or try to get me mad or try to provoke a reaction. I think that's called torture, and then eventually you get bored with Ryan dot Ex and delete it or whatever. But you're not going to keep it running for four hundred years. Like, I don't think that is something that is likely to happen, or if it does, I had to be giving you some sort of benefit, some sort of profit, some reason for you to keep me running when you could be running you know, Doom dot Ex or some other games.
Maybe you can pay the church to keep a computer running and you know in the back of the server room.
Yeah, So for an AI revolution, it's sort of the same thing where I think if such a thing happened, I doubt they'd have much need for a human at that point. Like, if there's a place where they can take over the world, do they need a human collaborator to like let them in the front door, or can they just do what they want?
That's the next book, How to take Over the AI World. Speaking about keeping computer programs running, I always remember my dad who did his thesis on a computer that required punch cards, and he kept his thesis around as a hard copy, and he liked saying that it was the last kind of hard copy that you could actually run, where you know, printing out the program was actually also the program you could insert back into the computer and make it run again. That's something we've lost with more modern technology.
That's fascinating. I saw in our program the other day where someone had recorded every operation a Nintendo Entertainment systems when playing Barrio three for three seconds, and then printed those out in a book. And there are these three giant bound books of just assembly code instructions that tell you everything that happens in the first three seconds of Mary Brothers. But it's such a different way of looking at the program.
Right.
Oh well, Ryan, I have a small request from my son, who apparently was really taken by geodesic spheres that you describe in your book. So his request is that you put more geodesic spheres in your next book.
I love a request that is straightforward. I'm happy to do it as much as I am possible. I will try to get some geodesic spheres in the next book.
Well, you know, for some reason he was really taken by your description of like making a ginormous geodesic sphere and how like even if it's just a little bit warmer than the era around that, it would float until you could create like a cloud city. So I guess he wants more of that.
Yeah, that idea comes from Buckminster Fuller, who was given the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he described this in brief in one of his book's Critical path where he was basically making the point that square cube law, the surface area of something and the volume of something grow very differently. And so if you had a giant geodesic sphere, the mass of the shell holding it in place gets negligible as the sphere gets larger and larger. And then you could just heat up the sphere a little bit above the surrounding temperature and it'll float and the numbers check out.
This makes sense.
The challenge is that to build a one point six kilometer diameter geodesic sphere. To float as a secret base, you need some extremely strong materials and we don't necessarily have those yet, but I don't see any reason why someone couldn't if you want to put the money into it. Also, the challenge is that it would be larger than the birds Khalifa, which is the largest building man made structure in the world, almost twice the size of it, which clearly has some engineering challenges, but I mean solve them.
These are just challenges, right, Yeah, And I think Jorge's son has a father who's a mechanical engineer, so maybe he knows somebody who can ask.
Yeah, well, I can draw it pretty good.
Friend.
It sounds like you've got your plot. I'll figured out, all right.
It sounds like I might have a little super villain here. It sounds like he wants to move out.
Hypothetically speaking sympthetically speaking, All right, Well, I want to say thank you very much to Ryan for speaking with us literally and hypothetically about how to take over the world, and encourage our listeners out there to go ahead and check out the book How to take Over the World?
Ryan. Where can folks find your book?
They can find it at supervillain book dot com and they can find me at Ryan North dot ca or on Twitter at Ryan to North.
And if we have questions for your dog Chomsky, where should we send those?
All questions can be sent to nom Chomsky Chomsky with a P because he's a dog and he's a chomp.
Care of Ryan North.
All right, thanks very much.
That was my sincere pleasure.
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