The Science Fiction Universe of "Venemous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beauman

Published Nov 16, 2023, 6:00 AM

Daniel and Kelly chat with Ned Beauman, author of "Venemous Lumpsucker" a cautionary tale about applying free market strategies to preventing extinction.

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Well, you maybe don't realize the can of worms you've opened up if you go to a parasitology meeting. This is something that we actually fight about. But I'll just cut to the chase, because I'm sure what you wanted was a short answer. H And I would say that they are micro predators.

What predators? You're saying that these bloodsuckers don't just make me itch, they've turned me into their prey.

They do.

And you know, unlike parasites, they don't have like durable, long lasting interactions with your body. They just kind of take a meal and then they run off.

Does that mean that I don't have to feel when I swap one of them?

I don't think they feel bad when they're drinking your blood?

All right? Well, what if I was like going to kill all of the mosquitoes? Then should I feel bad?

Oh?

I feel like now we're getting into like philosophy. This is like a twisted version of the trolley problem.

Well, you know, if I could pull a lever to have that train kill every single mosquito, I would do it, even if it saved nobody's lives, even if it just saved us from some itches.

You don't need philosophy, you know, the answers, you go with your gut.

Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine and a deep deep hater of mosquitoes.

I'm Kelly wier Smith. I'm an adjunct professor at Rice University, and you know I'm also a deep deep hater of mosquitoes.

I thought that as a parasitologist, you were like the biggest advocate for the most hated species on the planet.

I'm an advocate for some parasites. But your mosquitoes kill a lot of humans, and I don't think that we really know what would happen if you took them out of the ecosystems. Maybe they play a role that we don't know about. But I feel like if you eradicated all of them and then no one got malaria anymore, we could probably find some way to fill in the ecological niches that they were leaving empty. I think it would be worth it to kill them all.

Oh, I think I know what purpose mosquitoes serve. They serve to limit people's happiness.

You feel like there's some mechanism on this earth where that's like a thing that needs to happen. I thought that's what Twitter was for.

They call it X Now, Kelly, they call it x Oh.

I'm sorry, I'm so behind.

Let's eliminate both of them, the mosquito of the Internet. Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the Universe, in which we dive deep into the joys of philosophy and physics and cosmology and think about everything that's out there in the universe. We want to understand how it all works. We want to make sense of the universe. We want to boil down all of those froth and quantum particles into a story that fits into your mind, that clicks together and goes ah. I understand how it works.

If only all questions were that straightforward.

Well, all the physics at least has a goal to tell you a story that makes sense to you, to incorporate into your mind a mental model of the whole universe. We don't dare to do that with chemistry and definitely not with biology, but sometimes we can take a tiny little sliver of physics and download it into your brain. My normal friend and co host, Orge can't be here today, but I'm very excited to be here with you. Kelly.

I am super excited to be here with you. And while I'm always super excited to be here with you, I'm particularly excited that we're a little bit more in my niche today talking about you know, ecology and species conservation, and it's going to be a good time.

That's right, because we usually talk about real science on the podcast, how the universe actually works. No, no, oh, oh, this is not a biology slam. I'm you are going the.

Way in the mosquitoes, Daniel.

Oh no, no, you totally no, no, let me finish. I was going to say that usually we talk about real science, but today we're talking about science fiction, not that biology is not of real science. I think you're a little too defensive.

Maybe I'm a little sensitive. I feel like physicists often look down on biology. I saw a talk by Freeman Dyson where he was certainly doing that. Anyway, I'll stop being so sensitive.

No fair point. Physicists have been guilty of that in the past. I think it was Rutherford who said all science is physics or stamp collecting, and I definitely do not agree with that. There is glory in chemistry and wondrous questions in biology. But today we are stepping beyond the bounds of all kinds of science into the worlds of science fiction, because one of the roles of science fiction is to think about the boundaries of science, what's beyond it, What other universes could we live in? What are the consequences of the technology that we developed? If science keeps barreling forward, does it change the way we live and what it's like to be a human being and the choices that we have to make. And I think that there's a very close connection between the work of scientists and the imagination of science fiction. So we have a series of episodes on this podcast where we read a science fiction novel, talk about the science in it, and then interview the author about how they wrote it and why they decided to build their science fiction universe the way they did.

And most of the episodes that you and I have done together with sci fi writers has been about being moved into a world that's totally unlike our own, and so it's sort of they build this brand new universe and you get to enjoy living in it for a while. What what's so exciting about today is that it's more near term and you're left thinking, oh, gosh, is this going to be us in a few decades, and so it's a little bit different than what we usually do, which and I really enjoyed it.

This is a wonderful book we'll be talking about today. It's called The Venomous Lumpsucker, a novel by Ned Bowman and asks a really intriguing question about the nature of extinction, what price we should have to pay to I have a species extinct, Whether we should care about species going extinct? For example, does the mosquito deserve to live?

Well, think that's something that he talked about in particular, But I did appreciate that there was a whole sort of speech about how we should be thinking about parasites and conservation, and that was very refreshing to me.

Yeah, it was fascinating. I thought about you as I was reading this book. Today on the podcast, we'll be covering the science fiction universe of The Venomous Lumpsucker.

What a great name.

Everybody I tell about this book invariably says the what are you serious? Who would name their book that?

But I also like totally bought it. Like when I first read the title, I thought, ah, I thought I knew about a lot of the weird fish, but venomous lopsucker I can totally buy there's a fish called venomous loupsucker, but I was wrong. But anyway, he came up with a really glorious creature.

He really did. So let's tell people the setting of the book and then we'll dig into what the story is. The book is set somewhere in the near future on Earth, and it's very much set in our universe. This is not the kind of book where they invent all sorts of new physics, and the universe is very different and we have fast and light travel. This basically takes place on Earth in Europe in about fifteen years, and it's facing the question of how do we cope with this massive extinction event, so many species, so many little beetles are going extinct every day, What should we do about it? What can we do about it? And this book paints this specific picture about how society might handle it.

And I thought he did a really nice job of creating a world that you could imagine, like, if we take all the wrong turns between now and like fifteen to twenty maybe thirty years from now, we could be there. And so you know, right now we use carbon credits, and companies can buy carbon credits, you know, to essentially pay for the right to release more carbon into the atmosphere. Here, he's created extinction credits, where if you're going to start some big new project that's going to result in the extinction of some species, you can sort of pay for that with extinction credits. And you know, there's like a sliding scale for how many extinction credits you need depending on some characteristics of the animal that you're going to have go extinct. But like, I bought that this is a path we could go down in a couple decades. What about you, Daniel?

I thought it was both inspired, creative, and also very realistic. We often have trouble figuring out like how do we solve a problem, and when we can't figure out what direction to go in, we basically just turn it over to capitalism. We're like, can we financialize this? Can we incentivize people to do the right thing by making it expensive to do the wrong thing? And I feel like that's sort of clever, like turn it over to the free market, but it also feels like sort of an abdication of our responsibility. But then again, we can never really decide on with how to do anything. So it's better to do something than nothing, I suppose, But this was really uncomfortable to read about. This like financialization of extinction. It really reminds me of like putting a price on a human life. You know, when the government has to make decisions about like how much to spend on things or should a come and they have to install seat belts, they do so if the price of the seatbelts is less than the expected loss of human life, you know, you have to calculate, like, oh, human life is ten million dollars. Makes me wonder, like, well, if I had ten million dollars, could I buy a murder credit to like kill somebody and then give that money to the family and be like I bought the right to kill your husband, right? That seems terrible. This is just sort of the same thing on a larger scale.

Yeah, I mean, I do think humans, for better or worse, feel more comfortable doing that with non human animals, and like we get more uncomfortable, you know if you're talking about like, well this chimpanzee really made me angry, Like people, would you know, maybe make you pay more to take the chimpanzee out than the like stink bug that lives on your curtain or something. But yeah, no, I agree, these things are complicated and uncomfortable, And I thought he also did a really nice job of sort of like weaving in the way that even our best intentions can get corrupted by things like, you know, the market doesn't always do what we think it's gonna do, even though we like maybe should have been able to anticipate the two thousand and eight you know, financial crisis, because what were we doing with the banking system and housing back then, But we didn't, And so, you know, things don't go exactly the way the characters thought they were going to go with these extinction credits and how they're going to pay out monetarily, and you know, this stuff doesn't always work the way we think it will, and so this is sort of a story about things going kind of horribly awry.

Yeah, it is sort of a cautionary tale. And I thought it was super thoughtful and creative. There are so many things that happened in the book that surprised me. And then as soon as I thought about I thought, you know what, that's totally realistic, Like that's exactly what could happen. And to me, that's the best kind of science fiction. Somebody who's like creatively thought about the consequences of some new technology. And you know the way in the book, lobbyists and special interests at like loopholes and exceptions and they end up like driving down the cost of extinction credits to make it like horribly cheap to send some caterpillar off to its final demise. I thought that was very realistic. Another aspect of the book which is super fascinating is the role of technology. He thinks about what it really means for a species to become extinct when you can record it, when you can record its genome and its behavior and get samples of it. And if it's possible to bring a species back, is it still extinct?

And this is a topic that's like near and dear to my heart. You know, the positive implications that we think will happen when we create a technology. So you know, right now people are working on de extinction, like can you bring back the mammoth and put it back in its and you know the permafrost habitats in Russia to try to make the habitat what it once was which would be better for all of the other species that were there. But you know, a lot of these technologies, even if they were envisioned with only positive implications, the way they get rolled out can often have some pretty negative implications. So here you see they're working on, you know, figuring out ways to store biological information so that you cannot only bring back sort of members of a species, but you could even bring back specific individuals. And I think, you know, I don't know what the original plan was in the book for the people who made these technologies, but I can certainly imagine on Earth people having really good intentions creating that technology, and then it makes extinction blurry, Like is you know, the beetle that you study really extinct if everything that you need to bring it back is in a computer and you could recreate it in a lab at some point. So, you know, these technologies that are meant to help, but like can get used in the wrong way and really mess up incentives is to me a fascinating topic that I felt like he handled really well in the book.

Yeah, and lots of really interesting questions that seem initially like they have obvious answers, like when is a species extinct. You might say, well, when there are no more living bits, right, and when there are no more living individuals, But then he walks you through these arguments in a really thoughtful way, like, well, if there's a few more living individuals but they can't reproduce because it's too small a group, or they can only live in zoos, then is that really somehow less extinct than another species where there are no living individuals, but we have the capacity to make more because of our tech knowledgy, and we could bring them back. Which species really is more extinct in that case? So it's very persuasive. It really changed my mind a lot of these tricky questions.

Yeah, at the book tackles a lot of difficult questions. So what is the story about, Daniel?

Yeah, so it's not just like here's a future Earth where everything is going wrong. It tells the story, and it's from the point of view of a biologist who's being asked to assess whether a particular species is intelligent because, as you said, it costs more extinction credits in this book to kill something if it's intelligent, which I guess makes sense, but also it feels really icky and her job is to assess whether the venomous lumpsucker is an intelligent species or not. And it turns out she has her own stake in this game. She wants it to be intelligent for her own reasons. And in the book, some corporation comes along and accidentally kills off all of the venomous lumpsuckers or do they? And in these places where people store these species, these biobanks then get hacked and the whole question of whether species are extinct becomes much more fuzzy and questionable. It's they're really exciting sort of thriller that takes you through this world.

Yeah, it's a totally fascinating world. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the science that was sort of created or forwarded for the story in particular?

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about it actually, because a lot of this stuff is biological. I mean, the core of technological innovations that exist in this world are the ability to preserve as species to im principle de extinctify it. And they do, for example, genome sequencing. Of course you've got to store the DNA, but they also do deep scans of the animals and they watch their behaviors, et cetera, et cetera. And as you said, this is something people are actually working on now. So it made me wonder, like, is it possible today or in the near future to actually do this to bring a species back from extinction, you know, or what would you need in order to make that possible.

So there are people who are way smarter than me who would say that the answer is definitely yes, we can bring species back from extinction. But to be honest, I'm skeptical that we're going to bring back the exact same thing, and maybe that doesn't matter. So, for example, they're working on, as I mentioned, bringing back the wooly mammoth, and different groups are doing this in different ways. So, for example, one group has was I think it's the genome from some elephant species, and then they're taking what they've been able to get from mammoths that have been like frozen in permafrost, what they've been able to extract out of their genome. They're tinkering with an elephant genome to try to make it look like a mammoth genome. But then there's all sorts of like you know, maternal effects that are missing, so that mammoth would have to be ges stated, given the science that we have now ges dated in the body of an elephant, And how does that like hormonal environment, you know, differ. And then I think, you know, some elephants and maybe some mammoths like eat feces after they're born to get the right microbiome. And so now you're not getting like a mammoth microbiome. You're getting like an elephant microbiome. And is that enough?

Did you say eat feces?

Sure did, Yeah, this is biology. Man, we get to feces in about five minutes.

You're saying it's not a mammoth, that it has been eaten mammoth poop when it was a baby.

You know, I wouldn't say that that's a line yes or no, but I would say that, like, you know, to some extent, these differences build up and like, so, yes, you have a mammoth. But the mammoth is now, you know, placed into an ecosystem that varies dramatically from what it was in before. It's social interactions might be different because will they act the same in a different environment, And is there something about their development that's missing that's going to change the way they interact with each other, and so like, yes, you have a mammoth, but you don't have the mammoth you used to have. And the extent to which that matters, I don't know. Maybe it's enough to just have a mammoth back in the environment and that does some good. But I think these things are complicated. And as far as MRI scans and like connect domes so that you can bring back a human who is exactly the same as the person you love to just passed away, I think we are way more than decades away from that. But I'm sure there are a lot of people who disagree with me. But it seems like when we first got the human genome, we were like, there's so much we're gonna be able to deal with it, and then we were like, oh, well, not really, because actually it's much more complicated, and that always seems to be the answer.

A friend of mine just completed the connectome of like the fruitfly, which has a tiny number of neurons compared to the humans, and it took forever, and it seems like we're never going to get to the connect home of the human brain. But you raise a lot of really interesting questions that I think touch on the deeper issue of like, what does it really mean for a species to be extinct? It's not really just about the individuals. It's about their entire environment and can they survive and propagate? And that requires much more than just the actual bodies, right, It requires the parents and the poop and everything around them and all this kind of stuff. And I think that's one reason why all the efforts so far in the real world to de extinctify have focused on things that are near relatives to existing species. Like you could have a mammoth baby maybe born in an elephant, and that's giving you something that's close to a mammoth. Or you could have like an extinct rat be born from existing rats. These kinds of things. I don't think it'd be possible, for example, to de extinctify species that was very distant from anything that was currently alive, you know, like a dinosaur, although maybe I guess you could grow one in a big alligator.

I don't know, Yeah, Like I don't know how you de extinctify a trilobite or something, for example, And maybe the question is, like, you know, if you could de extinct it, but it could only live in a zoo because you've like destroyed all of its habitat and it just can't the things that it needed don't exist anymore. What kind of a life is that? And I'm sure people would dramatically differ in their answer to that question, And so there you go.

Well, one of the fascinating things about the book Venomous Lumpsucker is he talks about the influence of this technology on decision making and if it's possible to bring species back from the dead, then doesn't make it less bad to make them extinct. That it sort of makes the question like fuzzier now, because what is extinct really mean? You know, it's sort of like saying, oh, I can upload you to the clouds, So what does it matter if I murder you? Like, well, I still don't really want to get murdered, even if I'm backed up.

Well, I mean, I guess there's also like nobody wants the physical pain of being murdered, and many layers of complication and all of these.

Questions, many reasons to not be murdered. By Kelly we Swift.

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And we're back.

All right, Well, we thoroughly enjoy this book. We thought it was very thoughtful, very interesting, very creative, but also very very funny. I laughed out loud many times while reading this book.

Okay, so, without further ado, let's bring Ned Bowman onto the show.

Well, then it's my pleasure to welcome to the program today, Ned Bowman. Ned, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into science fiction writing?

Well, this is my fifth novel, but it's my first real science fiction novel, and I think it was inevitable that I would write one eventually, because I read pretty much nothing but science fiction when I was growing up, and then kind of moved over into more mainstream literary fiction, but continued to read science fiction.

And to be honest, I always felt like, you know, it was.

A genre that I appreciated, but wasn't necessarily up to myself because I think it requires quite a specific set of skills. But eventually, you know, I tried my hand at various other things and.

I had done it.

I'd published a couple of science fiction short stories, and then with this one, I thought, okay, I'll give it a shot, put everything into it. Yeah, And that was how I ended up with venom as Lampsyca.

So you noted that you need to have a certain set of skills to write science fiction. How did you get those skills yourself? So like you got a lot of the you know, the biology in this book is fantastic as a biologist. Did you like pull out biology textbooks? What was the process of trying to blend science fiction with all of the appropriate science fact Well, all.

Of my books have been quite research heavy, you know. For instance, my second book had a lot about the avant garde theater in the Weimar era. You know, I don't think researching science is inherently any harder than researching that kind of thing, at least until you get into the really confusing stuff. When I say a specific set of skills, I mean more trying to kind of paint a plausible and internally consistent future world without leaving huge gaps and blind spots.

And I have.

Always so admired the science fiction novelists who were good at that, and with this book, I was very conscious it's set fifteen to twenty years in the future, and A, I don't specify the exact date, which makes it easier, and also B I think fifteen to twenty years is kind of the easiest place to put it because it's not so soon that you can get refuted in all your predictions really quickly. But it's also not so far away that you really have to make some big calls about like what's going to change and where things are going to go. So I think I was, you know, doing it sort of on easy modes in that respect, but that was the challenge. Whereas the science stuff, Yeah, you know, at this point, I'm just kind of used to being a dilettante, and with each book, I stroll through some new era of research, and I didn't really find it any harder than any of the stuff I've researched in the past.

Well, before we dive into the details of your book, we like to ask the same questions to every author to sort of put them on the spectrum of science fiction. So here's some generic science fiction questions, not specifically about your book. So the first one is, do you think that Star Trek style transporters kill you and clone you? Or do you think they actually transport your atoms somewhere else.

Well, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and then later read this book called Reasons in Persons by Derek Parfitt, which one reviewer actually noticed is an influence on this book by coincidence, which I hadn't.

Really consciously thought about.

But in hindsight, yeah, I think a lot of those ideas had implanted themselves in my head. And I think Parfit's answer would be that you need to start thinking about personhood in a way which doesn't have such strict boundaries. You have to think about a person as being a kind of soft entity which doesn't begin or and in a specific place, and if you look at things that way, then it's legitimate to say, is the person who beams down to the planet me sort of that person is semi continuous with me, not continuous to the extent that we normally think of ourselves as being continuous.

And yeah, I think path it would say that's okay.

There doesn't have to be a strict poinary answer to that, So I think that's probably what I would go with, because I really respect Parfit's concept of the world.

So it is you as long as you redefine you to be whatever you ends up on the other side of the transporter.

Yeah, I think it's fair enough to say it's sort of you in many ways pretty much you.

That's a great answer. So another tech question, what tech in science fiction would you most like to see become a reality?

I think the science fiction story that has had the most influence on me in terms of my sort of personality and outlook is this story called Reasons to Be Cheerful by Greg Egan, and that is a story about a guy who gets a brain humor which affects his ability to take pleasure in things, which kind of flattens his ability to take pleasure in things, and well, I have no choice but to spoil the ending bride. Any think it really spoils it. They eventually develop a device which allows him to adjust how much pleasure he takes in different things, so he's able to say, not do I like this, or do I find that beautiful? But do I want to like this? Do I want to find this beautiful? What is it that it would be most convenient or positive for me to take pleasure in? And he's able to adjust it on that basis. And I've always felt that would be so good, that would make it so much easier for us to adjust to the world.

What would you change about your response to the world first if you had this device?

Well, again, this.

Kind of comes up in the novel, and I'm sure again the novel was kind of influenced an unconscious way by this story. But basically, one of the two main characters of Venomous Lumpsucker is this guy who's a real foodie, but because of the effects of climate change in fifteen or twenty years, most foods don't really taste.

Of anything anymore, so he.

Has to take this pill, which means he doesn't care whether a meal is good or not, which is sort of the more destructive version of.

What I'm talking about.

The better alternative would be, you know, for him to go, well, what is still available to me, I'm going to decide that I will love that, and then I'll be perfectly adjusted to the world that I actually have as opposed to the world that I would like to be in.

I mean, there's probably a lot.

Of more profound ways, so you could use something like that, but that's probably what I would do, at least to start off with, because you know, I am quite a snob about like food and fabrics and all that kind of thing. Like you know, imagine if you could just take just as much pleasure and cheap, poorly esther as in Kashmere, or you could take just as much pleasure and a protein bar as in you know, a delicious meal.

Oh.

I mean, that's another one. Like I'm trying to be vegan, not very successfully. I would love you know, I would just adjustice so that I didn't even want meat anymore and enjoy chickpeas way more than I ever used to enjoy persuto if I could.

That's going to be tough.

Chickpeas are delicious I'm definitely pro chickpee on this question.

I'm pro check pee.

But as soon as you start eating vegan, you find yourself eating chickpeas like seven times a day, and it's too much.

No, there's so many kinds of beans out there. You should get into indigenous kinds of beans. We're members of the Rachel Gordo Bean Clubs and we get this shipment of heirloom beans every month. It's wonderful. Anyway, A big fan of Greg Egan over here. Love his stories so thoughtful and creative. Last generic question before we dive into the book is what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Why haven't aliens visited us? Or have they?

Oh? Yeah, I don't. I don't have a great answer to that. I mean, I don't see strong reason to believe that they have. I'm not particularly convinced by any of those hypotheses about how they know way here and they're what and they've chosen not to visit us or interfere. The answer to it that kind of grips me with the most like cold, implacable grip as soon as I heard it. Is just the idea that all advanced civilizations eventually destroy themselves one way or another, you know, before they leave their solar systems, if not before they leave their planets. So it could be that, But then you'd think somebody would have got as far as you know, self replicating probes, ornoying machines or whatever.

So I really don't know why we haven't had any of those. I can't explain that.

All right, So let's start jumping into venomous lumpsucker. I love this book. So the novel like so I'm an ecologist, and so top like climate change in the massive extinction event that we're living through right now, or topics that are near and dear to my heart. It fascinates you about these themes. Why did you decide that you wanted to write a book around the topic of extinction.

Well, it's a combination of you know, on the one hand, I am very concerned about the climate, and I love animals, and a lot of the sentiments in the book about how thinking about animals being driven extinct is so painful you can't even bear it, Like some of that is an exaggeration of how I feel. But then on the other hand, like I sail, I studied philosophy and I'm often frustrated by the way we have so many surface level debates about things which go round and round in circles and you never get anywhere around. I always just think this needs some real philosophy applied to it. And the question of extinction is really one of those, you know, because most people basically seem to agree that it's bad if a species goes extinct, but obviously there's no consensus on what we are willing to pay or sacrifice to prevent that happening. That's not one of those questions you can answer just by people sort of vaguely, you know, talking past each other about how they feel about it. I really think if we're going to talk about how much do we really care about preventing extinction, you have to look at it rigorously and ask, well, why is it bad if a species goes extinct? How much do we or should we care?

Why is the species valuable? Why should we prevent it?

And you have to look at those philosophically instead of just relying on intuition and assumptions and so on. So I thought that would be an interesting basis for a novel to start, not offering answers but at least asking some questions that I felt like needed to be asked that weren't being asked in a more serious philosophical way about this issue.

I totally agree, and I know that in your answer you gave sort of two questions. One was what price are we willing to pay? And the other was how much should we care for me? One of the most interesting things about the book was that it seemed to sort of sound a warning about attempts to legislate and financialize decision making. I've often heard economists say things like it's good to put a price on things, even if it's the wrong price. Do you think that there's a danger to try to assign a monetary value to moral choices like a human life or the existence of a species. Is that the right way for us as a society to balance these things?

I mean, I don't think it's intrinsically im moral to do that. You know, if you work in the government, you have to operate, at least in this country on the basis of they called QAL wise quality adjusted life years, and you have to decide is it worth buying this treatment for a rare cancer? And then you have to think well, how many people will live how many extra years longer? And you have to put a number on that stuff. So, you know, I find it very frustrating when people are like, we can't have bureaucrats putting a price on human life or whatever, when I think you have to. That's the only way you can make trade offs in it, you know, time of relative scarcity. But on the other hand, when the reason you're trying to put a price on something is because you're saying, well, a price signal is the only signal that the free market really understands. So the reason we're putting a price on it is so that we can plug it into the free market and then pull a few levers and then allow the freem it to work it's magic and solve this problem for us. Again, I don't think that's inherently I moral. Is just one of the things I'm saying in the book is it's not going to work because the thing that the free market is good at is rooting around any impediments to profit, and the free market the reason it works is it's you know, a collaboration of millions of very intelligent people all working together to solve this problem where the problem is someone who's stopping us from making enough money. And if opposed to them, you only have a handful of kind of well meaning people in government, then the free market is always going to outsmart the people in government. So that's why it's a danger. So that's why I think it's dubious to put a price on it, because if that price is meant to be a kind of you know, essentially translating it into free market language, you don't necessarily want it in that language because once you give it to them, you never get it back.

And what is the role of the individual and how these things all play out? You know, Like I recently purchased something like a new perse the other day made out of billboards, and I felt so great because I'm reusing something, But like maybe I didn't need that new person. To what extent do these like you know, credits and these you know, telling people that your company is greener than another, Like, to what extent is it's still the individual's responsibility when we have all these ways of making ourselves feel better that may not actually be doing anything.

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I really see by the size of this because on the one hand, you often hear people saying the emphasis on individual responsibility for climate change is just a way of distracting from the fact that we need enormous structural check changes at the level of governments and mega corporations to make any real difference.

And you know, I think.

It is literally the case that you know, polluters, via their think tanks and lobbyists and AstroTurf operations, have tried to move the climate change conversation towards people recycling their bottles or whatever, because it kind of changes the terms of it, which makes it easier for them to avoid these demands. But on the other hand, I am always very conscious that my carbon footprint, as like an affluent Northern European, is many times that of the you know, median global person, and that also does put me in a difficult moral position.

But then also I feel relatively smoke about that. The whole thing is like.

I don't drive, I don't have children, I've basically given up flying, and like I said, I'm trying to be the in and I live in five hundred square feet, so like it's pretty easy for me to look down on other people. I also think looking down on other people for climate reasons is bad and not helpful, but it does make it easy for me to say that individual responsibility is important, because if you look at my individual responsibilities, I come out looking pretty good, I think, although I do buy quite a lot of clothes. Of course, the answer is we have to do both, Like we have to have governments making huge changes. Then also realistically, in the future, all of us individually are going to have to make changes in our lives as well, because if all six or seven billion people on Earth live like affluent Northern Europeans, that won't work. But we also can't ask the majority of the global population to maintain a lower standard of living than we have because there's no reason for that. So we are going to have to smooth things out in some way. So I don't know, but yeah, I think, you know, we have to do both.

Of course, I think it's really fascinating the moral implications of turning things into costs. Though, if I'm willing to pay more for a banana that's very environmentally expensive, does that like make it okay that I'm eating this banana because I've paid for it, or like, in the world, do you constructed if I want a specific view from my condo. And I know that building a condo there meant some caterpillar had to go extinct, But hey, I'm willing to pay another ten k for that condo. Does that like absolve me of responsibility? Or am I just like seeding the responsibility for this choice to the algorithm of free market capitalism.

So there is this astitude that offsets are dangerous because they simply, you know, shunt the damage to someone else, and they relieve the pressure to actually make real changes, and we need that pressure. I don't agree with that, you know, obviously, the premise of offsets is that the free market is good at finding the most efficient method and time and place to accomplish something. And if the thing we want to accomplish is you know, not omit one hundred times tons of carbon, then we might as well do that in the most efficient time and place and by the most efficient method. You know, I don't think there's there's any reason why we can't move that out. But you know, as I write about in the book, the whole offsete idea since its inception and in every implementation of it, has been extremely.

Bedeviled by.

Loopholes and corruption and fraud and lies and so on. So in practice it hasn't really worked, But in principle I don't.

See anything wrong with it. You know, if the.

Fact that is it coldplay, who were like, our tours are going to be carbon neutral and some of the ways we're going to do that with offsets. If the offsets are real, I think has goods. I think our setting is good if the offsets are real. But the problem is again, because the free market is so nimble and devious, a fake offset is always going to be more profitable than a real one. So most of the offsets turn out to be fake. But if we can make them more real, great, But the free market is cleverer than us, so I don't think that will ever happen.

Yeah, these things are complicated and it all depends on their implementation, which sort of leads to the next question. So technology is an important feature of the book, and in the book they're working through the technology to maybe to be able to bring individual people back after they've died, and then a whole species back after they've gone extinct. And so you know, this sort of ties in with the extinction credits. You don't have to feel quite as bad if you think you can bring an animal back eventually. Also, so to you, what is the thing that makes extinction so terrible? Like if we still have it as a backup on one of our computers and we can maybe bring it back one data, is that make it less bad because maybe it's not completely gone? So what do you think about the role of technology and extinction and when is the species really extinct?

Yeah, as I right about on the book, in principle, we could get to a point where we have all of these threatened species in buyo banks and then the future we could bring them back. But will we ever bring them back? I just don't think we will. I can see us bringing back willy mammoths and stuff, but diverse majority of the species going extincts every year are kind of very obscure rainforest beetles or whatever, And I just don't think we ever will bring those back because who is going to pay for that, and who is going to keep them alive once they're brought back, and you know where.

Is that going to happen? And so on.

So I think the fact that we could doesn't mean that we will. We probably won't, which means we shouldn't put ourselves in that position of being like, well, we've still got them, so we could still bring them back, so they're not really extinct. But then when you start asking whether this kind of potential resurrected beetle is a kind of Ersat's version of the way real thing, that's when you do start to like wander into this fuzzier territory. You know, is there something inherently valuable about a beetle that has continuously lived in the habitat in which it evolved, and as it were, the kind of community and the ecosystem role of that species within the you know, broader web of species has continually existed from the first moment evault.

Is that more valuable.

Than hypothetically the species being brought back in a zoo in the future.

Well, it seems to me that it is.

But it is harder than to say, well, why, it doesn't really.

Seem to affect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's.

Life better, even if we're very invested in this beetle existing somewhere in the world, whose life is better because this you know, beetle has continuously existed.

It's like carying.

Deeply about your table being a real antique instead of a fake antique. If you're very into antiques, then of course you care about that. But why should I someone else care about that? In particularly, why should anyone else pay costs or give things up because you care about that. That's a niche interest. It does seem to me that it would be nice not to eradicate this beetle and simply have it in a biobank and clone it later.

But you know that's not how politics works.

You can't say to people, well, we all have to agree to do this because I think that would be nice.

So I think that's where philosophy comes in.

That's where you have to start thinking, well, well, I have reasons for thinking it would be nice, and once we dig into the reasons, maybe you would start to agree with me too. But then, of course the dangerous once you start digging too the reasons, the reverse could happen. It could be that I start thinking, well, actually, I don't even care anymore now that I've looked at it, you know, really harshly, I don't care.

I think there actually are more important things. The other thing I talked.

About in the book is that knowing that this technology is there sort of takes the pressure off. It's going to make us more lackadaisical because we have a plan be I think there is something to that, but I, you know, I don't think that's the reason not to build biobanks or whatever. Better to have them in case we need them than not to have them out of a fear that they would make us lazy or whatever.

I think it's fascinating the way having biobanks or the ability to resist to date species makes extinction itself less terrible, because it's the irreversibility of extinction that really gives it its moral drama. Sort of reminds me of You're answer to the question about teleporters, Like, if I murdered somebody, it's actually less terrible to murder them if I knew I could just recreate them somewhere else. And then I'd say, like, look, according to you know novelist Ned Bowman, you still exist and you as you even if I murdered you and recreated you.

Yeah.

I think that's a great analogy actually, because again I talk about this in the book. Yeah, the question of whether something is extinct or not extinct, it's simplistic to make that a binary. You know, extinction is arguably not a clear cut enough concept that you can use it in that way.

It might be more helpful to.

Start talking about species being sort of extinctish, although again in the book Yeah, I asked, is that gonna sort of expand our sense of how worried we might need to be about a species? Or on the contrary, is it gonna let us relax.

When we shouldn't be relaxing about it?

Well, then let me make the philosophical game of making it more personal. Say we could scan you and resuscitate you or recreate you later on. Would you want that to happen? And would that make it less bad for somebody to murder you?

Well?

Again, reading loads of Greg Egan when I was younger has been a huge some of my thinking about this, because he writes more interestingly than anyone else I've ever read about what it would be like to be an uploaded consciousness. And you know, of course, if you end up living on a computer, then you might live for well a you might live for another million or billionaears and be at that point you have complete freedom to alter yourself. So is the person at the end of the Billionaires who's been radically kind of expanded and altered and perhaps merged or split into two or whatever. Is that the same person as the person who was uploaded? Once again, I think it's preposterous to give a straight yes or no answer. You have to say, well, there's some degree of continuity in it being the sameish person, But I don't know.

So, you know, that's the why I always think it's.

A bit kind of rapid to say or would you want to be immortal or not? Because clearly the person who's there at the end of eternity is only in certain ways continuous with the person who is there at the beginning of it, Like is that person any more similar to you than your father is similar to you?

Or whatever?

So when I think would I want to live forever? Would that be terrifying? I was thinking, well, I don't think living forever is possible because the person at the end of forever is only partly you. All of that said, my answer basically is no. I think seventy to ninety years is ample. I really don't feel any need or desire to live several hundred or several thousand more. And also, you know, one of the things Greg Igan writes about and again this sort of reference in a different way in the book is like.

That's a lot of time to go nuts.

Basically, that's a lot of time to become obsessed with the wrong thing or to start valuing the wrong things. And obviously, if you're in this position way you can sort of edit yourself, then that can really turn into a spiral. Like if you spend a week thinking there's nothing more important than this thing that I've just got into, then maybe you think, well, I'm going to edit myself so I'm more committed to this thing that I've just got into. And then the person that you've become who's more committed to it thinks, well, I got to become even more committed to it. So you start editing your own consciousness so that you become more and more into this specific thing, and then you can.

Never get out of it.

And then you're just there for eternity, kind of shriveling up into this monomoniacal commuty consciousness. And you know, I'm already way too into Monster Hunter World for my Xbox, Like I dread to think how much I could get into it if I had complete control over my own consciousness and was going to live a billion years.

So no, basically I think safer to die of old age.

But I wish the best to anyone who's getting uploaded, and I completely think that's possible and they will be the same person at least in the short term. So I I encourage people to try it out, but not for me.

So, speaking of long term planning, what are your thoughts on are we going to eventually avert this extinction disaster at some point? Like, what do you think our prospects are for humanity in the next one hundred or one thousand years.

Well, again, this is why I didn't set the book any further in the future. I know people have become furious when this is said. I do think there is at least a possibility that when we build an AI that's like a million times more intelligent than any human being, the AI will come up with something that we didn't come up with. Like I do think that could happen. I don't think we should rely on that happening. And if that doesn't happen, I don't think it is looking very good. I actually listen to a different podcast recently with Peter Watts. The Canadian science fiction novelist. He's really brilliant and also famous for his pessimism and his take on it is that even with a lot of geo engineering, so much climate change is already locked into the oceans and so forth, that we can.

Avert the very worst. Maybe, but we can't.

It's already too late to avert the almost as bad, and the almost as bad definitely involves a lot of ecosystems being absolutely devastated and a huge chunk of the biodiversity of the Earth just going away, probably before we have the opportunity to scan and preserve it all. But then, you know, you've got to have a certain amount of intellectual humility about this stuff. Like every ten years you look at the grass and it's like the graph is not where it's supposed to be. Like sometimes it's worse, sometimes it's better. Like the whole thing about renewable energy having gone down in price point ninety seven percent or whatever it is over the past decade. So I really can't say it'd be nice if any I saved us, But I do want to emphasize I don't think we should like sit back and wait for that to happen. It would be if that was only the emergency plan and we came up with something better in the meantime.

All Right, we have lots more hard philosophical questions for a ned, but first we have to take a quick 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, Moost 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 maneuver 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 are channing with Nid Bowman, the author of Venomous Lumpsucker. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your writing process. You said you did a lot of research. Why did you decide to invent a fictional species for your book? Whereas the rest of it seems to follow the rules of our universe.

Well, the book had to be premised on a highly intelligent species, and most of the highly intelligent species that we know about are fairly well publicized, so the fact of whether they are endangered or extinct is a fact in the world that people know, which would have made it very hard to fictionalize it. So I had to come up with a fictional intelligent species that could plausibly have remained obscure.

And I didn't.

Really feel like it could be a mammal because if you look at the club of mammals, there aren't actually that many, Like there really aren't that many mammals, especially in Europe, and if there was an intelligent mammal, we would have heard about it, I mean, apart from the ones that we obviously already know about.

I really don't think there are.

Any very intelligent mammals that just nobody's noticed yet. That didn't feel realistic to me. So I made it a fish because there are so many fish, and fish intelligence is still pretty understudied, So it.

Was just about credible to me.

And hopefully to the reader, that there could be this fish there was really special, but just we hadn't really been paying any attention, and it had maybe gone extinct without anyone really noticing. And the other advantage of a fish is that fish are hard to find. Like, if it's a bird, you can just set up cameras or whatever. I mean, if you care enough about it, you can just set up loads of cameras. But if something is obviously in the ocean, then you know, it's very dark down there, so it's easier to believe that you could have a quest for this species that didn't just entail well we you know, send up one hundred drones with cameras to look for it.

So when I was reading the book, it sort of reminded me of some George Saunders short stories that I've read, Like it's sort of like wilded out there and oh my gosh, what are these people thinking? But at the end you're left positing all these big questions about society and humanity. And clearly I'm no literary critic, so I've done a horrible job of describing all this. But who outside of like your science fiction influences, who are your like straight fiction influences other than Egan?

I mean, I love George Saunders. Well I wouldn't really say He's an influence on me, partly because like so one as I think he talks about this, ultimately he's like very concerned with human feeling and human kindness and stuff like that, and like, I'm not interested in that kind of thing at all, Like that's that's not what I write normals about. So there's a there's a limit to how.

Much I can take from him.

So influences from outside science fiction, well, yes, party any of the names I would mention, I don't know how much you would see of them in this book. Well, actually, Graham Green is one. You know, Green's novels are all about putting kind of tortured people into terrible moral situations, and I think that was definitely an influence.

And what happens to.

Risaint in this book, and actually when now they think about it, when she talks.

About Catholics and you know how thorny their theology is.

I think I almost put kind of Catholics in the Grand Green novel or Catholic ground Green Readers or whatever.

So that's definitely in there. I don't know other than that.

You know, I'm not going to say of transcending my influencers or anything, but I would say that my earlier novels were very much a patchwork of influences and pastiches and even direct quotes, and I would happily go, well, this bit is from this person, and this bit is from this person.

But I don't know.

By the point of this novel, I'm still like totally in the shadow of all my influences, but I think I've at least found my own style and preoccupations to this to the point that I wouldn't say about this novel, Well, this novel is simply this writer and this writer and this writer mashed together in the way that I would have with the early ones.

So the book is really thoughtful. But I also want our listeners to appreciate, like how funny it is on the page, and part of that just comes from, you know, your particular turns of phrase. And as I was reading it, I was struck by this for one word which I had to look up, and I'm going to ask you to give us like a useful definition of it, because I need to know it in context. What exactly is an rgbargie?

Well, the thing is, as with any word like that. If there was an easier way of saying it than meant the same thing that I would have used that like, I think I'm pretty sure I remember having to think, like, what is a one word or one phrase expression for what I am trying to talk about here?

And I think it took me while to get to lgibargie.

Because argibidi is not a word that I would normally use in conversation. It's probably a word that I had never written out in my life before. It's not a word that you hear come up that much, but it is one of those English phrases with a specific meaning that is some combination of sort of fuss, commotion, disputation, hassle, argument, you know, all those kinds of things, but none of them quite capture it. And then if I remember rightly, it comes up when you know, most of the book is about like Australians and Europeans in Europe. That bit is a English character talking about something that happened in England. And it's in in England, which has kind of gone backwards, so it felt appropriate there to use a quite old fashioned, quaint, very English words.

So, but for example, is this something a married couple might do when they're you know, disagreeing about whose turn it is to have to do the dishes? Or is this something kid? This is a description of kids arguments on the playground. I'm just I'm lacking a concrete like understanding of what it means.

If you said, like, oh, I had a bit of argie bargie with the wife or whatever, that would sound condescending or at least kind of inappropriately jovial, because it slightly implies a sort of annoying, somewhat inconsequential obstacle friction that you just have to get past. You would have to say, like, during last night's argie bargie, my wife expressed some very real concerns which I listened to and took on boards like that simply wouldn't be compatible.

What about your kid for the one thousandth time didn't put their underwear in the hamper and you had a bit of an argi bargie with them about it? Would that be a appropriate like it is sort of inconsequential.

Oh again, it's it's so hard to articulate why. But it doesn't have that sort of kind of intimate interpersonal context. I think it implies more something that happens at work or I'm kind of imagining.

I don't know, this is a random example, like if a policeman.

Tells someone to move their bike or something, you know, or policemen don't carry guns. So I'm imagining like a slightly more benign version of that than might happen elsewhere in the world. I mean, I do think it implies two people who don't really know each other kind of snapping at each other, not really succeeding in communicating. But ultimately it doesn't matter and it may as well never have happened.

Oh so, like everything on the internet.

Yeah, but no, not really that I really am.

I know it makes it sound like argie bargie is as hard a word to define as personhood or extinction. And when I'm thinking about personhood or extinction, I am thinking about like, you know, vick Enstein famously.

Said, no one can define a game.

A game is just a kind of tangle of associated things. So that's why it's slightly ups said whenever we try and define anyone, because any word basically is a tangle of associated, semi continuous things. And I think personhood is definitely like that, and I think, unfortunately argie barge is like that, Like That's why I'm so struggling to define it is so it's so English, so contextual, and so hard to pin down exactly. It does have some implication of like bureaucracy, misunderstanding someone trying to exert or authority. Maybe they sense of impending physical scuffle, but the scuffle doesn't quite happen.

This sounds like a faculty meeting.

Yeah, but a faculty meeting would be unlikely to erst in argie bargie in that way.

I don't know.

But this is also maybe why I never use this word, because it's so hard to grasp.

Well, I think it's delicious how difficult it is to understand what the meanings of words are. Maybe we'll find somewhere a philosophy thesis on the topic of the rgbargie. But thanks very much for joining us today and digging into these tricky questions. We really enjoyed the book, and we really enjoyed our conversation with you. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm trying to say thanks a lot for having me.

And before we let you go, can you tell us anything about your upcoming projects or your next book.

I have such another novel, which is about how the most evil institution in world's history that has existed for hundreds of years is still in operation and thriving just west of London. It is too early to reveal what that anstician is, but people, welcome to guys.

Wonderful sounds delicious. We look forward to seeing it, all right, Thanks very much for coming on the program. All right, So that was a super fun conversation with Ned. I'm glad that he wouldn't consider that conversation an RG bargie.

I cannot wait to use that word on Zach And because he like loves old English stuff, and I can't wait to see if he knows what that word means. And I am going to use that word like five or six times a day until I personally feel like I know where it belongs in my life.

Well, I hope it doesn't cause any RG bargies. I'm going to use it on my brother who moved to the UK and might have heard it and actually have like a native understanding of it while remembering his American roots. So perhaps he can translate it for me.

Oh here, yeah, here's hoping, keep me posted.

Here's hoping. All right, Well, we had a lot of fun reading this book and talking to the author and talking to you about it. So I highly recommend the Book of Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Bowman. Go ahead and get it, read it, enjoy it. Thanks very much Kelly for reading this with me and talking about it.

Thanks for having me. You were right when you said you read that passage and it made you think of me. This was the perfect book for me. I enjoyed it so much. Thanks for the invite.

All right, Thanks verybody for listening, and tune in next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Instant, and now TikTok. And remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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There are children, friends, and families walking, riding on passing the roads every day. Remember they're real people with loved ones who need them to.

Get home safely.

Protect our cyclists and pedestrians because they're people too.

Go safely.

California From the California Office of Traffic Safety and Caltrans

Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe

A fun-filled discussion of the big, mind-blowing, unanswered questions about the Universe. In each e 
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