 I have straight up noon. Are we ready to go? Well, so, ready when you are, CB? All right, let's see. So, welcome everyone to the Science Circle and our continuing series of panel discussions. We have a little bit of something special for you today. A few weeks ago, Delia Lake approached me. Apparently, some people in chat had mentioned how much they liked the book, Ministry for the Future, and she thought it would be fun to have a discussion about the book. So, she approached me about setting up a book discussion, and I decided to somehow make that try to work with our panel discussions. So, that's what we're going to try to do today. And let's hope that this turns out to be fun. So, to discuss Ministry for the Future. Oh, wait, before I continue, I do want to make a housekeeping announcement that the Science Circle is a grant-funded nonprofit organization for developing virtual worlds as an educational platform. So, I want to remind everyone to be on your best behavior, please, and feel free to comment or ask questions in nearby chat and text. So, we have with us today Natalie Foster, who is familiar to us here in Science Circle, Mary Ann Clark, who is Max Chatnoir and Natalie Asumo, and we have Linda Morris, who is Delia Lake. And then yours truly, Baragon Betts slash Matt Burr. For those who are interested from this discussion, if you want to follow some additional resources about it, I want to point out there's a note card giver right here in front of me in Second Life that has a note card with a bunch of extra resources you could look into that was compiled for us by Shiloh. So, I want to thank Shiloh for that too. So, Ministry for the Future has created quite a bit of buzz. It's a what they call hard science fiction. This particular book is about climate change. The premise of the book is that under the Paris Climate Accords a new ministry is formed, an agency is formed with the idea, basically what happens is that the life of the future, or future life on planet Earth is bestowed with legal rights. And in order to protect and defend the legal rights of future life, the ministry for the future is created. So, it has legal and administrative authority to promote the interests of future life. And the book opens with a description of a traumatic climate change trauma, which is a heat wave in India that kills 20 million people. And this event is so traumatizing that it radicalizes not just people in India, but sort of radicalizes the whole world. And this sort of galvanizes the ministry for the future to act. And in order to fulfill its promise of defending the future it is, the ministry is increasingly pressured to undertake radical action increasingly radical action to get its accomplished. And this has to be done also with the complicating factor of rogue actors such as groups within India who have become radicalized and sort of act on their own, sort of as a terrorist group to fight what they consider sort of criminal polluters. Additionally, there is blowback by the power structures that are invested in the status quo. That blowback, that pushback from the powers that be becomes very intense also. So the book sort of that's kind of the sort of the dramatic context of the action that happens in the book. But the book also goes into just extraordinary detail about many, many issues that we would have to confront to really effectively address climate change. And that's part of the fun of the book is the really detailed discussions of all the different factors that we would have to address. So with that said, I now want to ask our panelists to weigh in also. I'm going to ask Sumo to start off and tell us a little bit about the author, Kim Stanley Robinson. And sort of kind of give you a little bit of context about where he's coming from. So Sumo, why don't you take over? Well, thank you, Burr. I really appreciate that. And I trust everyone can hear me. Yes. Yes. Okay, thank you. And first of all, before I launch into this, I really want to thank everyone in Science Circle for making me feel very welcome. I'm a bit of a newbie here. It's daunting to do this sort of thing, but you all have made me feel welcome and everyone in the group that I've met has just been delightful. So I thank you in advance. And I also want to shout out especially a thank you to Shiloh for the excellent set of references she's put together on that note card. The best ones I think are some of the book reviews, and I commend the reading of those to you as well as of course the book. Well, as has been said, Ministry for the Future is a book of hard science fiction, but really people consider Kim Stanley Robinson not a science fiction author so much as an author of what's called Realistic Fiction. He's always been much more interested in the political sciences as opposed to the hard sciences, but the man knows an incredible amount of hard science. He's up on just about everything that goes on. This particular book is in a subcategory of science fiction that's now referred to as Clifi or Climate Fiction. And the reasons for that will become obvious as we talk more and more about it. The New Yorker did a review of Kim Stanley Robinson back in 2014 where they posed the question, is he our greatest political novelist? Well, in a book review of Ministry for the Future that Bill McKibben wrote in the New York review of books in 2020, he finally answers that question and he says the answer is indeed yes. In terms of what goes on in this book, Robinson treats climate change really as a tool for moving the system and by the system he means by moving political will. And as Robinson says, because chemistry and physics won't be denied the way morality and justice can be denied. And so he uses climate change as the tool to move the system to make it deal with, as one might say, the whole wretched mess we've managed to make of things. This is not just the mess we've made of the environment, but the mess we've made of society as far as inequality is concerned and a variety of other items that come into play very, very strongly in the book. The other thing I think you need to know about Robinson is that he's not really a utopian but he's what Bill McKibben refers to as anti-dystopian. And I interpret that to mean that he's realistic to the very core. This book is set in the year 2040, so it's a scant 20 years ahead of where we are now. And as Burr already pointed out, it opens like a slow motion disaster movie. The first 50 pages I found incredibly difficult to read. And once I got through this horrific tragedy that takes place in India where 20 million people die because of an extraordinary heat wave, I had to put it away for a while because I was just really incredibly blown away by the whole thing. This initial disaster, however, gives rise to one of the protagonists in the novel, a fellow named Frank, who's a survivor of this heat wave because he was in India at the time as a worker and he ends up with just horrific PTSD as a result of his survivor guilt and just the trauma he goes through during this heat wave when all of these people die. Frank also comes into contact with a woman named Mary Murphy who is the chair of the so-called Ministry for the Future. And as Burr said, that ministry was formed as a result of the event in India that caused all the horrific deaths. It was formed by the parties who were members of the Paris Accord. In terms of where Robinson is coming from in writing this book, he got his PhD in Literature from UCSD and his PhD topic was the novels of Philip K. Dick. Now if you know Philip K. Dick, he's I think dystopian is fair adjective to describe him. He wrote Blade Runner, you probably know that movie. Blade Runner rather was based on a novel he wrote called Duandroid's Dream of Electric Sheep and this is what Robinson comes from intellectually. However in terms of this book Robinson who has 19 novels to his credit has really experienced an arc in his thinking that I think is described by several of the novels that I'd also like to refer you to. He did a series of three novels Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars in the 1990s that really involved the terraforming of Mars or the effort to terraform Mars by a small group of earthlings who decided to colonize it and it's really an essay on how humans can settle an uninhabitable place. It deals with a lot of the same science NASA was talking about at the time and it poses some very interesting questions about terraforming as well as about the sociological questions of how groups get together to make something happen. The next trilogy he wrote was in the early 2000s of range 50 degrees below zero and 60 days in counting these have now been put together in a volume called Green Earth where Robinson has taken out some of the explanatory things. I saw someone in chat talk about how he has sometimes sort of goes on and on about things but in Green Earth he's taken out some of the things that he now feels people are really up on so he didn't need to detail in the novels. These three novels detail with detail a scenario in Washington DC where first of all the whole city becomes entirely waterlogged and swamped because of a Katrina like event. In 50 degrees below both the US coast and northern Europe are subjected to an extreme cold snap and it's all again about climate change and how we deal with that and in 60 days in counting he talks about the political realities of trying to deal with an entire island nation that ends up being displaced because of sea level rise. He then in about 2015 writes a very elegant little book I thought called Aurora but literally what he talks about in there is why interstellar colonization won't work and I think that's a pivotal book because I think there's a danger in fantasizing about space travel and that it creates kind of a moral hazard. One begins to care less about the fate of our own world and I think that's why Aurora is an important book here because he gets us away from thinking about interstellar travel and indeed he even gets us away from thinking about terraforming Mars and colonizing another planet in that regard. The final book in the series of the 19 that he's written that I want to mention is one called New York 2140 where he starts with the observation that lower Manhattan is 50 feet lower in altitude than upper Manhattan so when the deluge comes lower Manhattan is gone up to about I think probably 20th street gone in the sense of being under water and it's an incredible book about how New York manages that and then how the world manages sea level rise. The final point I'll leave you with in terms of this arc that Robinson is on in terms of his writing is that in effect I think the book in large part is a challenge for us to get moving on some of these things. As one of the reviewers of the book said is his tagline for his review, if you're reading this you are the ministry for the future get back to work and I think that's an interesting point to hang on to here. Robinson is essentially a positivist I think he's essentially an optimist but he's also challenging us to recognize and value the planet we have and be willing to run some experiments to save it. So at this point after this brief introduction of Robinson and how he got to what he considers his capstone novel he has said in several reviews that this might be the last novel he writes I will now pass the torch I guess to Max who will chat with us about some of her thoughts on the book in general. Max? Do you mind if I interrupt for just a moment before Max begins? I don't mind. If Max doesn't mind Well I just wanted to forgive me Max I just wanted to quickly point out with respect to Clifi I just wanted to mention I think another author that fits in that category is Jeff Vandermeer who wrote the Southern Reach trilogy which includes the book Annihilation which was adapted into a really really interesting movie so I just wanted to mention that very quickly and then also just quickly I wanted to mention that I would love to between Robinson and Elon Musk about colonizing the solar system because I think that I think that could get anyway because I think they have diametrically different views about that so that would be interesting Okay so thank you for indulging me with that Max go ahead with your remarks Can you hear me? Yes Okay well ironically I was reading this while the big threes hit Texas though I had my own experience with climate disaster but this is a big complicated book while I was reading it I took about 40 pages of notes and I extracted a bunch of different topics that I thought were important and I just want to mention four of them one of them is population issues and he makes it quite clear that if we do not take that in hand nature will do it for us we can control our own reproduction or we can let pandemics and natural disasters do it which is much more unpleasant second thing is the problem of economic disparity with a tenth percent of the world population ordering or owning fifty percent of the assets that disparity has to be reduced somehow and there are some suggestions made in the book which I won't go into right now third thing is the importance of cognitive error we can look at the same set of events and see them in quite different ways and I think one of the most dramatic examples of that is the recent United States election and its consequences and the last thing I want to just bring up is one thing he brings up is the possibility of using carbon coins or carbon taxation as a foundation for a new economic system and I think that's all I'm going to say right now so those are four things that I thought would be worth discussing Yes Max I was very pleased that he did he was explicit about the population issue and also I found the blockchain mechanism very interesting and also one of the sort of surprising consequences of shifting the global economy to a blockchain system is the transparency that it creates so that all financial transactions globally are completely transparent and that this kind of keeps everyone in check and that was actually kind of a surprising idea to me so that was also the way he describes in the book the way he describes it is that instead of trying to convince the status quo financial powers to change what happens is that the pro-ministry factions simply create a parallel economy using blockchain and that this parallel economy just simply becomes so much more influential and gradually begins to dominate the economy it's kind of emerges sort of organically from the situation they don't wait to try to convince people they just act they create sort of a parallel reality they're just not going to put up with anybody's BS anymore so I thought that was all very interesting there is a lot of discussion about all of the world banks there certainly is and also sort of capitalism itself sort of how are we going to transform because in order to address climate change really at the scale we need to we really have to transform our economic principles and he doesn't shy away from any of those discussions it's very interesting Delia, please share with us your opening remarks. Okay so I want to do a couple of things here as you all know here in Second Life I work a lot with environmental habitats and I can do this primarily because most of my work in my adult career has been working with systems and so this book, The Ministry for the Future brings in for me a work that I have done for decades but the very first thing I want to do here is to help people imagine because if we can't imagine something we can't do anything about it and that's one of things that Max was referring to as the dissonance here so we have a cognitive disability and it is talked about various places in the book that we can know something but we can't imagine that it could happen to us individually yeah it could actually happen to you but it's not going to happen to me so I want to take you back to the beginning of the book and to what Simo was saying about India and the heat wave and this is described in very realistic terms but imagine when you have been hot in your life a time when you have been hot and sweaty and you can't get any relief no matter what you do there's no shade there's no water to drink there's nothing you're just standing there then sitting there then lying there in your own sweat and then all of a sudden you don't sweat because when the heat gets that hot when the sun is beating down that hard and there is no relief you do not sweat, sweat is the way that our bodies transfer out heat and when the temperature on the outside is so much hotter than our body temperature that whole biological mechanism shuts down and what do you think happens? You die people die and people die in masses and this has happened in Europe in summers this has happened around the world in summers already so while the scale of 20 million is beyond what we have had so far this is not only not out of the realm of possibility but if we keep going at the rate we're going it is likely Yes, you know that he talks about people pouring into lakes to try to cool off but the lake water is just warm too and provides no relief and then Frank notices that the lake is just full of dead bodies it's just you know it's horrifying it's horrifying this little meme that goes around in the consulting world that says that if you have a frog in a pot and you cook the heat the water slowly the frog will die because it won't jump out that's not true frogs will jump out but humans apparently won't and this is what we are doing to ourselves I also want to put into the chat here my favorite Philip K. Dick quote because I think it is relevant here and it fits not only this book but it fits our lives today so that reality is that which when we stop believing in it it doesn't go away sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane and that's what happened to Frank but reality that refuses to go away reality is that which refuses to go away so we have as human beings a really amazing ability of fooling ourselves believing that something will work out someone else will be able to fix this I don't have to act now it's not going to happen tomorrow it won't happen to me it won't happen to my family oh jeez the town next door was taken out by a tornado it wasn't my town and time and time again the Robinson is pointing out these things in the book yeah that's right you know I think it would be helpful here to describe really the pivotal in addition to the heat wave the other pivotal moment in the book so the ministry for the future is a woman is her name Mary Mary Murphy so Frank tracks down Mary Murphy and takes her hostage in her own apartment basically just engages her in a dialogue basically challenging her saying you know your job is to protect the future life of the planet and you're not doing anything or whatever you're doing is not working and so you have to be prepared to take extraordinary actions including for example you know targeted assassinations you have to be able to also really harm the financial centers and the gigantic corporations that are criminal polluters you have to hurt them where it's really going to be a disincentive for them to keep polluting and really make it count and he's I have to say this is a fantastic scene and Frank is incredibly persuasive with the power essentially of terrorism to effect change in a desperate situation and eventually the police come because they sort of tracked Frank on surveillance cameras to her apartment and when she goes down to enter the door with the police are there Frank escapes out the back and the dialogue with Frank lingers with Mary throughout the rest of the book and she continues to have a dialogue with him for the rest of the book and in fact she does essentially begin to implement sort of black ops operations to really put the fear of God into these criminal polluters and it predictably generates a backlash and they begin so the status quo power brokers also begin to use sort of black ops operations and it almost becomes like a war between the future and the present and it gets actually quite exciting so how did you all respond to that what do you guys make of Frank well I think there's more to it than that because the black ops have been going on all along but unbeknownst to Mary what is it the Shiva with the group in India children of Kali children of Kali yes which is essentially a terrorist group but also her that's right also her second in command yes that was fantastic when he sort of reveals to her what's been going on behind her back one thing here not only not out of the realm of possibility but it is the what is happening on the global scale with the agreements that countries have made and companies as well with the UN Global Compact is that we aren't making progress so that on every level sustainable development goals the report that came out a few months ago we're failing we're not only not making progress we're falling behind on poverty we're falling behind on zero hunger on some of the big things we're not making progress at all and this in action will bring a whole chain of events for us for the future do you think it's possible that sort of anti-globalist forces like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and even Putin let's say or maybe Modi in India that these anti-globalist and weak governments they sort of want chaos I mean do you think one of the motivators for this kind of what I consider just a bizarre philosophy is kind of the early inklings of the pushback against changes to save us from climate change and the activity for voter suppression is part of that I never really thought about it in those terms but it kind of makes sense when you think about it that they're terrified I saw that Ministry for the Future is in Barack Obama's list of favorite books but when I was reading it I was thinking man if I were a world leader I would be terrified of political action on climate change and a really persuasive manifesto and if I was a political leader I would be scared of it well I think there's some other things that we need to bring in here one of the words that keeps popping up throughout the book is just and the societies that we have developed around the world are anything but just and in various ways I have alluded to a number of these issues in the book that I wrote with colleagues the Sustainable Enterprise Field Book but one of the things I want to bring up here is an incident and there are little vignettes throughout the book a mine a rare earth minerals mine in Nambia it doesn't say which mineral or which minerals but all of our electronics that we depend on including here on our computers in Second Life right now require minerals that it's the lithium, the lithium mines in Namibia when they are and some of these are not actually rare minerals but they are not equally distributed around the world and they are in locations where the governments are not always reliable stable partners so he brings that in as a little vignette and these things contribute to what is going on in the book but also they have corollaries in our day to day lives right now so that looking at these and all of this taking this in the book from a systems perspective he's pointing out where some of the leverage points are where the inflection points are and where the any place in these scenarios something changes it's going to ripple through the entire system I wanted to bring attention or at least speak in voice for our recorded version of this. Stephen makes a really good point he says the author Kim Stanley Robinson in an interview wanted to be careful not to be an advocate of extreme terrorism even for a just cause so he made sure that the motivating event for the children of Kali was sufficiently scary but also he made them not killers but saboteurs and that's true in fact there's an extended monologue in one of the chapters of the book from some unnamed person I think from the children of Kali that specifically talks about that that they recognize that killing is a sin and a lot of what the children of Kali do is really throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery of capitalism for example causing systems to sort of break down and that sort of thing so I think that's a I wanted to make sure that point got made in voice. There's also another point I think that we're overlooking here is that all of the terrorism in the book isn't done by the children of Kali. There are several other unnamed groups or unattributed groups who do kill airplanes out of the sky until people don't fly anymore I mean there is a good portion of violence there. I just want to point out that there's a very interesting thing I think that that Robinson does in structuring these characters because he made, Mary Murphy is Jewish and she remembers, she's old enough to remember what would be called the troubles correct, so she knows and speaks very adamantly against terrorism and against that kind of taking of life but then she comes around at the end to recognize as you all pointed out that sometimes behavior like that can be the only thing that can change when things like morality and justice are denied. And Steven made a good point, Robinson doesn't endorse violence but he has to admit that it is effective in terms of generating change in some of the entrenched systems where change is necessary. So it's a very very complex look in that regard but I think it's no accident that he made Mary Murphy Irish and gave her then inherently this ability to think about terrorism in a way both experientially and otherwise that other characters haven't don't have that privilege, I'll put it that way. So I think it's very interesting structurally in that regard. I would agree with that. I agree too. I think also that we want to bring up here that he focuses on finance as a driver money and banks and that if we are going to make the changes that we have to engage the people who are controlling the commerce. Yes. So I was kind of struck by this idea and correct me if I don't remember correctly but I think it emerges out of India. One of the mechanisms for transforming the financial system is the adoption of sort of public ownership of capital and of technology and of projects they're owned by the public and this sort of gives everyone kind of a vested interest in making it work and the outcome and so forth and I found that his description of that transformation of the economy through public ownership pretty darn persuasive. Yeah, he starts off by talking about in one of his other little vignettes about the employee owned well, it's a whole series of companies actually a Mondragon in Basque country in northern Spain and the history of that. So he's talking about employee ownership of companies and that thread then goes again through various other little places in the book. Yeah, there's another book out now the name of which is eluding me and I apologize for this but Robinson deals with the same premise that that book discusses that you cannot expect industries whose profit is based on a public system to be the ones who affect the change but they can be part of the change and they can be forced to change. George said something about you know you don't make much money you don't make profits if your clientele are dead and that's absolutely right and you know Robinson gets into that issue of how you can force by public will and public outcry companies to do certain things you know I understand example you know quite frankly Walmart is on the record is saying they don't oppose a minimum wage and they wish we would enact a minimum wage because they'd like to pay their people more but then they're cutting themselves off at the past if they do that in a capitalistic system but if everybody has to pay their employees more then everybody you know that will be the tide that raises all boats then everybody will do that. They can't do it alone but they can be forced to do it by public action and I think that's one of Robinson's points he considers himself I think what one might call a democratic socialist with him not to Bernie Sanders but I think that's why. Yeah you know one of the things that always bugs me about this minimum wage discussion here in the states and also the COVID relief packages and so forth is that it's so weird that conservatives push back against that because it's so clear even from the days of Adam Smith that what you want to do is have money circulating in the economy and how do you get money circulating is you give money to people so they spend it you know the if the population has money to spend that's what keeps the economy growing whereas if you give tax breaks to the wealthy they just sequester the money out of the economy they suck money out of the economy this notion that the rich will invest their money in their plants or in their employees it's just a bunch of crap because those are costs to their business they're not going to increase worker wages because that just adds to their costs and they're not going to modernize their plants because that's just a cost and costs lower your profits so I do not understand the logic that making the rich richer is better than making the poor richer you know Robinson also does an interesting thing where he talks about the fact that there is enough there is enough in the world for everybody to live reasonably and he gives a couple very interesting scenarios that describe this and how one could achieve it and you know it's something that I think he addresses that's part of his forte in this you know that we do have enough and I think that's part of what we're getting at here and it doesn't necessarily mean everybody's so afraid of the word socialism it's like the S word now but you know there would be fantastic changes possible and fantastic quality of life improvements possible if things were just more evenly distributed and again he goes through this in considerable detail in several of the chapters the alternative is to have more people spending a little bit of money than to have fewer people spending more money which is better money itself has its own gravitational attraction in the sense that once you have some that quantity of money wants to have other money around it so it tends to become money for money's sake as opposed to money for any other purpose and I think that's a kind of humorous way to think about it but I think it's very true things here is that he touches on the modern monetary theory as well the MMT and that one of the premises is that everybody who wants a job should be able to have a job but I think one of the key areas that we haven't mentioned here because it relates to the civilization and what maintains a civilization or collapses a civilization and that's the issue of trust so without trust money has no value but without trust you don't have you have anarchy and you don't have a functioning civilization either. Now one of the mechanisms he talks about for creating kind of this what is it called the carbon coin for example he had a very interesting discussion about quantitative easing which I don't fully understand so if you all know more about it than I do but I do understand it's a mechanism for example that the Fed uses in the United States to basically create money out of nothing out of thin air and it's a way that you can regulate the money supply to for example to keep inflation down for example well Bear I think you just made you said the key word money is trust you know that's all there is to it I mean there is no difference in value in a raw sense between the one dollar bill in your pocket and the twenty dollar bill and the hundred dollar bill you may get if you the gamble at the casino let's say but the point is you trust that that piece of paper will be negotiable for some other item that you want so the whole thing is just based on trust and he builds up a sense of trust in this carbon coin that enables him to make certain other changes societally and also technically in the world to ease the climate problem so you know one of the problems we have in understanding money is the fact that we think it's real and it's not real at all money is just trust yeah all of the major currencies today are fiat currencies we're no longer pegged to gold that's yeah I love that term fiat currencies yeah we're you know one of the things I think he does really does really good in this book is kind of explode a lot of the assumptions we make about the way we live now and how how sort of ad hoc they are and they're not really grounded in any in any tangible reality they're just conventions that we've agreed upon and and that if we want to create a new future all we have to do is as one of the my the topics of one of my earlier panel discussions is have a paradigm shift yeah I'm going to put my favorite Philip Dix quote back again it's exactly there's some talk about it a group of people that agree to use no more than 2,000 kilowatt hours per year I think yes and I checked my electric bills and I'm way over that but I've been trying conscientiously to reduce the amount of power that I use it's incredibly difficult so I want to shift gears a little bit because while we still have time but I also wanted to talk about some of the some of the ways he talks about addressing the physical manifestations of climate change for example he has a lot a lot of the book takes place in Antarctica and one of the issues with the with the polar ice caps is that they're melting and the melt water runs down in vertical rivers to cracks in the ice cap down to the bedrock of the planet and then that water on the bedrock sort of spreads out beneath the solar ice caps and causes them to slide so one of the big projects that's undertaken in the book is to pump the water out so that the ice caps don't slide and that's just sort of one of the horrible problems that we're confronted with that again he doesn't shy away from it he goes all in talking about how we can address some of these really big problems I actually have a slide that speaks to that so I can get it to come up here I've forgotten what number it is so I'm fishing around here for it but the point is he spends it no no this isn't it this is the Arctic this is a different one but he spends probably more time in Antarctica on the science there than any other place in the world and Burr is right he talks the situation in Antarctica is that the glaciers are I'm sorry a little comic relief there is not what I wanted to go to the glaciers are moving faster into the sea and why is that that's because Antarctica as the Arctic as well is warming so more of the ice on the surface is melting that melt water goes down through fissures to the very base of the glacier one two kilometers down the glacier then instead of having to move over rock and dirt or whatever is the soil in Antarctica is now floating on that water despite all the pressure so he goes into considerable detail on how one can use the technology we already have that's available in Antarctica to stop this glacial melt and this picture that's in the lower left hand corner of the slide isn't the best one but it'll give you the right idea sure it is a situation that is really back here in this slide all along the the ground between the glacier and the surface is now this literally river of water and the glaciers are sliding along that river of water and that river of water is just increasing constantly in quantity because as the glacier moves faster the shear forces get higher and that causes even more melting down at that surface so you have increased shear surface increasing shear that improves the that causes the temperature rise which causes the glacier to melt more which makes more water between the glacier and the surface of the land and causes the glacier to move faster still so he goes into this whole business about applying the technology that the NSF has already developed to drill cores one and two miles long in the Antarctic and to sink in effect tubing down there that's heated once you hit the bottom and expose that water it's going to rush up the core that you've just dug because of the pressure and then what you do is pump it out and pump it further up Antarctica where you spray it out in the air and it immediately freezes and makes more snow so it's a very very interesting process he goes through and the way he talks about it is spot on in terms of how it actually works and the bottom line on this is when they talk about it this harkens back to the idea that well if you were to you could just pump water back up there and so you could take all the melt water and move it up there but that turns out to be like 600,000 cubic meter cubic kilometers of water and you can't possibly do that it would take more pipe than has ever been made and it would be outrageously you know people can't even conceive of doing that but if you just slow the glaciers down and you get that melt water off their bases so that they go back to grinding along at the old rate at which they used to it's not a complete fix for the problem but it's a it's a it's stopgap that buys you time to find ways to knock down the CO2 in the atmosphere so that the melt doesn't continue in Antarctica so that this problem ultimately goes away it buys you time to manage the problem and it's something that we've been doing for a long time you just switch your idea to pump out this subglacial water he does a really impressive analysis of the energy it takes to do this and he says oh you know he has the Soviets getting involved in this they bring down some nuclear submarines to provide nuclear power to run the pumps to pump the water up and and and spew it out over over the Antarctic ice cap and and where it refreezes again and he also describes how you can use solar power to do that as well as power from the nuclear subs and it's just an absolutely it's the the technology he spends more time on than any other in this system and it's really it's really fascinating and yes zig we're on a we're on a slippery slope here with these glaciers and he's he discusses very clearly the the the geoengineering fix to stop that slope from being so slippery and it's what he it's he does it very well and it's very compelling yes I was just going to say that that was that if you let those things get out of hand then addressing them technologically is really really really hard and really really really expensive yes and it's a it sounds like it might be sort of like sort of dry sort of engineering science fiction but it's actually quite exciting because you know the they not all of their efforts succeed and they kind of get stumped from time to time and they have to kind of figure out a you know a different approach or or get help from somebody or and things like that so it's actually quite gripping because it's there are times where you think oh my gosh this this whole endeavor is going to fail you know and then we're screwed kind of thing so so and you get you get pretty emotionally invested in their success well it took decades to start to get a whisper of success yeah and they do talk he does talk about the cost of this and what is it something with a lot of expensive dollars or something like that but as we've been saying in our conversation but also in the chat conversation that if society collapses if civilization collapses there is no amount of money that is going to bring this back so the sooner we make some of these investments the less overall cost there's going to be the sections he does on discounting the future and how you calculate these things I think are brilliant and marvelous in that regard and as he said in terms of this glacial milk thing 10% of the world's population is going to be displaced 20% of the food supply is disrupted you know coastal cities are gone beaches are gone marshes are gone put a price on that that discussion was fantastic because he talks about the future value of money which is a well known financial concept that you know $10 now it has a different value than the promise of $15 in the future and that kind of thing and so if you take into account the time value of money then what kind of value do you put on the future of all life on earth and that by one way of thinking about that is the future value of the life on earth continuing on into the future indefinitely is essentially infinite and since that value is infinite then anything we pay now to save it is worth it and he gets this down to the more personal as well and that is what's the future value of your grandchildren and hence the ministry for the future that's exactly what they're speaking to there was stuff he did about the Arctic that was also fascinating but he got into also a restorative agriculture that was all linked into the carbon coin business and that was a fascinating business too but I want to since our time I think is just about up the bottom line on the book I quoted here because I think it's I think it's really what the book is all about and in the very this is close to the last paragraph of the book he says Mary Murphy is realizing that there's no other home for us than here that we will cope no matter how stupid things get that the only catastrophe that can't be undone is extinction that we can make a good place that people can take their fate in their hands and then he says that there is no such thing as fate you know but the thing is this is why I say he's essentially a positivist and he's not utopian but he's anti-dystopian I think he really believes that and I think by the end of the book I think we all get the sense that you know we're not doing enough we can do a lot more and we have to because we've got to think as they also say in the book several times as many native cultures say you have to think seven generations ahead that's right and that's what Zieg said he was fated to say that I think he is but the point is I think this is this is really what he's coming down to with all of these topics it's all distilled in that sentence that there's no other home for us than here and that the only catastrophe that you can't undo is extinction so get to work and for all of these things for the political science as well as the science as well as the sociological and psychological topics that are raised in the book it's a marvelous read and I really think I really think everybody should read it and yes Obama does have this on his list of must reads and I think there's reason for it I really think everybody should read it I'd like to recommend the audio book too which is very good it uses a lot of multiple actor voices for all the various characters and it's very well produced so I recommend the audio that's the one I have too yeah well thanks very much you know I want to thank Adelia for bringing this to my attention and to Max and Sumo for I mean for all their hard work to prepare for this discussion you know our email threads over the last couple of weeks have been really intense preparing for this so and everyone just I really appreciate all your hard work about that and I feel like we still just barely scratch the surface but for now let's just say good morning good afternoon and good night to all of you around the world and maybe we can do this again sometime and maybe have a little more follow up discussion or something I don't know but I think there's a lot more to talk so thank you all and thank you Chantal and the Science Circle for hosting us today and promoting the discussion and good night I'll gavel this to a close thanks Matt thank you all thank you everyone and Mirgran thank you for moderating the panel here and being part of it and thank the audience for sticking with us Thanks Adelia for explaining block James oh I can if we want put onto the Science Circle that section from my book that talks I think that would be great I want a presentation on that sometime yeah we might need a presentation on Bitcoin and blockchain too at some point I don't know who could do that we need to find an expert but I actually know somebody who is very much an expert in this and I don't know whether you come back and talk with us but I will ask him we'll see alright that'd be fantastic alright I'm going to go ahead and hang up on the zoom call and go back into text chat thanks again everyone it was really fun yeah it was thanks bye everybody here we go it was really fun yeah it was thanks bye