 And then we'll open it up to you folks to pursue our question. And the question we're looking at today is we've got this lovely title from the Neolithic era to the apocalypse, how to prepare for the future by studying the past. And that's true. That's what we're going to talk about. But it really is, I think, to quote the Passover Seder, in every generation, there arises one who says the past doesn't matter. And we're here to see if we think that's true now, that there are, in fact, a large number of voices, particularly amongst those, some of whom may have been educated here at MIT, who are technological optimists, who think that the enormous changes that we've genuinely seen in technology recently do, in fact, represent a qualitative break with the past, as well as, obviously, a quantitative change in human capacities to manipulate their surroundings. So that's what we're going to talk about. Does the past still matter? The people I'm going to be talking with, people who are going to be leading all of us through this set of questions that emerge from that larger thought, are Charles C. Mann and Annalyn Newitz. Charles is one of the sort of signature science writers of my generation, at least. I think he's best known for his book 1491, very highly regarded for his more recent book 1493, two investigations about the state of the world, really, just before and just after European contact with the New World. I won't say discovery, because, of course, there were people here already who knew that the New World was not so new to them. He is currently at work on a project, The Wizard and the Prophet, a book about the future that makes no predictions whatsoever. And an early version, just to show how much of a leap he's getting on the rest of us, an early version of the introductory chapter to The Wizard and the Prophet was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Annalyn Newitz writes science non-fiction and science fiction. She is the founding editor of I09. She comes from the future. And she is currently the editor of Gizmodo, which I'm sure many everybody knows about. Wonderful blog about technology and its content. And discontents. She is the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember, How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. And she has a PhD that she told me not to trot out from the University of California in English literature. Yes? American Studies. American Studies. I should know that. And aside, my cousin had the single best academic title in all of the American Academy. He was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of American Studies at the University of Virginia. It does not get better than that. Anyway, Annalyn's writing has appeared in The New Yorker and Technology Review. It's appeared in 2600 and Lightspeed Magazine. She covers the universe. And her next book coming out, I hope, next year, yes, soon is a novel about robots, pirates, and the future of property laws. Please join me in giving a welcome to Charles and Annalyn. OK, so let's start walking. Annalyn, I want to start with you if I could. All right. And I want to go back to something that I sort of teased in the remarks I just made, which is we hear a lot, I think, these days, that this time it's different, that there have been so many changes in human experience from machines to our ways of living that the future is really deriving itself from the present, and the past doesn't have much to say about it anymore. And just as a sort of big, wide-open question, you believe that? No, obviously. And that's part of the premise of, I think, what we're going to be talking about a lot tonight. I think, I mean, as people who write about history, I think one of the things that we grapple with is the fact that history is incredibly complicated. One person's ideal history is another person's history of persecution and slavery. And I think that's the thing about the future as well. And I think, in fact, one of the biggest lessons from history that we can learn and apply to the future is that there is no one future. As William Gibson has said, one person's dystopia is another person's utopia. And they can be happening at the same time. There could be a future where some of us have become light-filled beings who live forever. And we've done it by enslaving half of the planet. And they get to live diseased, short lives without education and health care. And those are- I saw that movie. I think we've all seen versions of that movie. I mean, we've seen Mad Max. Hopefully, you've all seen Mad Max. So you know basically the outline of the future at that point. And I think one of the impulses is always to not have the future be complicated and not have the past be complicated either, right? Like we love just a perfect narrative where we start in one place and there's perfect progress. We get the printing press and then we get knowledge and then the enlightenment and then yay, computers and everything is great. And of course that's not how history works at all. And the future, of course, is also not simple like that. And there's still this urge, especially right now, I think because there's so much uncertainty about what is coming next. We want to have either, I think, an apocalypse because an apocalypse is super simple and kind of fun. Or we want to believe, or I should say, some people want to believe that we're in the middle of what has been kind of dubbed a long boom where we're all going to become wealthier and our lives will get better and everything will gradually improve in some definition of improvement which we've derived from Western democracy. And that's obviously not how history has worked. Things haven't just smoothly gone in any one direction. And so I think what I'd like us to think about tonight or what I kind of struggle against in my work too is this kind of strand of thinking that comes from sort of black swan ideas about the future, that the future is molded by unexpected events that you can never predict or plan for. Those events do happen, I'm not saying they don't. But there are many things that we can plan for and when I say many things, I really mean things like there's many possible futures, there's many futures that will be going on at the same time. And so I think we need to kind of veer away from thinking of the future as simply heading into a terrible place or heading into this wonder of post-scarcity awesomeness. But at the same time, to finish, what I would say is that just to make the future even more complicated for you and just to make history even more complicated, I've been saying that, well, there is this way that we can learn from the past because it is so complicated and because there's so many experiences that make up history, but at the same time, and that's something that we share with the present and something that the future will continue to exhibit. But at the same time, as many historians have noted, one of the greatest forms of difference that you can experience as a person is to contemplate what it was like to live at another historical time. That is the most radical form of difference because people who lived in other times, in other cultures, did not share our worldview. They had very different assumptions, very different ideologies, different religions. And so we have to respect that when we think about history and also when we think about the future, that there is this radical break. And so there's all these commonalities that we share. There's precedence in history for many of the things that we're going through, including things like climate change and increased mobility around immigration, even things like techno overload. There's historical precedence for that too, which hopefully we can talk about. But at the same time, there is this break. And so we have to, as I said, respect that history is a different place. And as we move into the future, there will be these kind of unexpected new vistas, but always connected to what I think we've seen before. Yeah, there's that lovely now cliche, but it's a great cliche that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Charles, if I can sort of ask you the same question I asked Annalie, but with a little bit of a twist to the screw. I mean, there are reasons to believe that we are living in perhaps not an exceptional, an exceptional era, but certainly an extraordinary one. I mean, there is, there are secular trends for the better that various people have noticed, the radical reduction in extreme poverty just in the last 15 years. You know, really unprecedented abilities to manipulate living things at very fine scales, machines, the human machine interaction, all these things have changed enormously in what's historically certainly a very short time scale, whether you dated from the end of World War II or the Henry Adams at the Dynamo at the World's Fair in 1900, wherever you want to sort of put the line, this is very much not the kind of world that some of the futurists of the past that we revere, you know, the first science fiction writers would have recognized. So accepting what Annalie just said about the importance of the past and the complexity of the past and the sort of persistence of the past, how much weight would you put on the idea that, well, yeah, maybe this time it is at least a bit different? Well, I guess I would say that every year is different, right? There you are in 1600, which we think of as the past, and their lives have been completely changed. If you live in Europe, this huge amount of money has just dumped into your lap from the conquering in the Americas, and vast quantities of silver, and suddenly Europe, which has been the sort of podunk place, is sitting on top of the world. It's a dramatic change in every aspect of their lives, and they're looking at it thinking, nothing like this has happened before. And I think you could go on and on. Every year is unique. So the question really starts starting, well, is this sort of more unique somehow, which is grammatically impossible, and also conceptually a little confusing. So yeah, it's unique, it's different, but so is every other year. And so is this somehow more different? You start to say, then you have to say, the questions, no, wait, then you have to say something else. The examples you all gave were technological, but human life is not really technological. And we know that one of the things we look in the past that say, take marriage, gender, sex, all those relations, wildly different from time to time. The lesson of history has been that these things are, as they say, socially constructed, and that's not going away. Whatever arrangements we have now are going to be socially constructed. They're going to be artificial in some way. And that's not a lesson that I can't imagine the circumstances in which that passes by. So I can say, okay, even if I grant you that our advances in biology really do make this different and so forth, there's these whole other vast realms of human life in which the history still has a lot to teach us. Okay, just as a sort of minor aside, are you either of you familiar with my former MIT colleague, Joe Haldeman's novel, Forever War? And one of the great things there, of course, is because he sort of takes his lead character out of time for a large chunks of time, he has to sort of re-enter with the relativistic time dilation. He re-enters substantially changed periods. And the social relations, of course, change greatly. But I guess what I was asking is, before we sort of go into more specifics, to drill down a little bit further and say, okay, the perception of unprecedented change is just a sort of, it's a solipsistic flaw in ourselves. We always think that we are the center of the universe and everything else is secondary. But what, do you have any sense of a typology of the ways history informs thinking about the future? Are you, I mean, before we sort of go into specific examples that where we can talk about that, is it's easy enough to say, yes, there is a human past and we did things and those events or those choices had consequences and we live those consequences and they'll continue to play out as we work against them. But is it simply a reflection of the fact that the choices we are making now are conditioned on some history of their own, sort of, we are pursuing from the theory of evolution to detailed chemical understanding, the mechanisms of evolution to technological power over certain kinds of transformations is one kind of history. Is there more of an intellectual history that it's a history of ideas that you are thinking of or is it really that kind of fine grained history of specific events connecting to events moving forward? I think it's both. It sounded to me kind of like what you were suggesting was that there's kind of a history of ideas which could be almost anything and then there's a history of technological advances and scientific understanding. You're sort of saying that there was like, well, we've learned a lot more about chemistry and like, but of course we haven't really learned about how gender works. Let me focus, I mean, the people who say now most often that the past is increasingly less significant to what we're thinking about going forward are people who are involved in technological optimism, technological, the sort of hard science fiction end of futurism, Kurzweil and Singularity, the accumulation of knowledge, all this kind of stuff. And that's a claim that the things we do with our machines and our specific intellectual processes are so much more powerful now and have a path that can be seen to be yet enormously more powerful that there really isn't a precedent for that. And you guys have both emphasized sort of social history as the box that any kind of technological change comes in. And I guess I'm asking for you to sort of play out the tension between those two views of what matters going forward. Take the Singularity. I mean, every time I read the Singularity it seems like we're going right back to Babylon. Think of the world of Singularity in which are these entities we don't understand that are radically changing our lives in ways that are beyond our comprehension. And you're talking about somebody in the fifth millennium BC thinking about thunderstorms, lightning, drought, and so forth, it's, you know, it's so old fashioned that I kind of hope, that was really a drag. You really hope we don't return to that. And yet, you know, it's also sort of weirdly deeply Christian in a way that Judeo-Christian with these godlike beings on there that I don't know, it seems so culturally blind in a way oblivious of its intellectual processes that it's hard for me to take seriously. It's also really paralyzing, right? Because it's all about how, well, machines will take over and we, there's nothing we can do, right? And they're unknowable machines, they're not actual machines, they're gods. They're not actual machines. And I mean, it's funny because I was talking to somebody about what's the difference between the kind of Singulitarian fear that the AI are gonna come and do something terrible to us versus, say, fears of atomics during the 1950s. And I said, well, the difference is, in the 50s, we had actually seen what atomic bombs could do. That was an actually existing technology that had actually killed lots of people and was really terrifying versus now when people fear AI, it's something that hasn't been invented yet. It's something that is theoretical. It's been theoretical for, you know, it's always 10 years out, right? Like we're always about to invent, you know, whatever type of thinking machine that you wanna call it, but it hasn't happened. And so it really does take on this religious glow. You know, it's the rapture of the nerds, as many people have said. And I think that the other thing about it is that it does place the engine of history in the engine, as it were. Like I think a lot about, in Walden Pond, by Henry David Thoreau, he has this really famous line where he talks about the railroad. He's quite concerned about how the railroad, like AI, is going to take over and destroy us. And he has this great line where he says, the railroad rides us. We don't ride the railroad, it rides us. The technology controls us, is what he's trying to say. I mean, he's trying to say lots of other fancy things too, he's very literary. But what he's trying to imply is that we're, it's not that we are the authors of our own technology, that somehow the technology itself will be driving us, which is a complete falsehood. Technology is a human tool. We use it, and we can use the most advanced technology we've ever invented, whatever synthetic biology you invent, whatever nanotechnology you invent, or whatever nanoscale devices you invent. And you can use those to enforce some of the most ancient kinds of human structures, right? Like you could use them to enforce patriarchy. You could use them to enforce slavery. You don't have to progress as a civilization, or what we think of as progressing as a civilization, just because you get fancy new technology. And technology doesn't drive us forward. It's really, it is social. And it's a combination of technology and social change, but you can't ever just claim that technology is the thing that will drive us to a new place. And the other thing is, I always think, maybe this awful thing would happen, but we would get used to it and kind of like it. And I think about many years ago, I used to work with a guy who had served during the Second World War. And he was always saying, think about it. Hitler won. What did he want? A world that was totally middle of the world to rise. A world in which everybody was constantly under surveillance. A world that police were everywhere and could do what they wanted and shoot minorities. Racial profiling. Racial, racial profiling. He would list all these things. He said, Hitler won. And I was like, oh, this is just my world, right? And so I sometimes think that there'll be some person like me living in the singularity and then some ancient person will be saying, this is just terrible. We warned you about this. And he said, that's okay. I like my augmented brain. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, plenty of people have noted that Osama bin Laden achieved much of the havoc he wished to wreak on the United States for minimal investment of relatively low tech. And it's the same argument your friend was saying. I'd like to talk on this level for a long time, but I'd actually like to sort of start pulling up some cases so we can see in more detail how you build the argument for a past interpenetrating the future. And one of the things I know you both have thought about a lot are cities. So there's a lot of writing that I'm sure we've all seen about this new age of cities, the intensity of urbanization, the scale of cities now at just the mega cities that exist in the developing world, all this kind of thing. And there are claims that this is in some sense a reorganization of the massive human society actually experiences daily life. When did the US go 50, 50 urban? It was like 1920, something like that. I can't remember which sense, 20 or 30. And now, of course, it's way off the scale. But urbanization's been around for a while. Does a, to our eyes now, a tiny little city like Athens in the 4th or 5th century BCE have, or how do you draw a thread from that to a New York or a Mexico city or a Shanghai? Well, I guess I would say, I think about it a little differently. One of the things that I'm most interested in is that archeology is telling us that our conception of what a city is isn't the only way they can be. And we think of cities as these sort of huge dominant forces with a much more emptier and poorer countryside or not necessarily poorer, but certainly emptier. And that's been pretty much the case forever. Even when the countryside had many more people in it, always the city's completely dominated it. But now archeology is telling us that the Amazon, for instance, had a completely different kind of urban structure in which they had these networks of smaller cities and the idea of a countryside and the city were very, very different. They were completely interpenetrated with each other. In a way, curiously enough, that the great urban theorist Ebenezer Howard kind of wrote about in this amazing book, Garden Cities of the Future. And there's a complete example of it covering large chunks of the Amazon. Or if you go into the Andes, they have these incredible show capitals in which there are vast cities. Basically, they had nobody in them and were done seen as religious and centrally. So the way we do it, again, history is telling us isn't the only way that they can do it. And I also feel like there's this, this is particularly important for environmental issues. And there's a kind of environmental modernist that feels like the way to save the environment is to pack everybody into cities. So there's 98% of the population is in cities. It's a little bit like this isocasmal of novels. And then, you know, out there, there's some robots farming and so forth. And, you know, again, what archeology and anthropology and history tell us is that those landscapes that, you know, then the idea is nature would return. But the idea that nature never had people in it, you know, hasn't been true for thousands and thousands of years. And so that that arrangement would be actually something new. And almost every case in which it's been tried has been disastrous. So, you know, there's, again, another way that it's kind of useful to think about the past. The other thing that, I mean, there's many things we could say about this, but one of the interesting things that's also coming out in archeology, although it's a huge subject of debate, is around the question of which came first, agriculture or cities. And it's starting to look now, like basically the answer is yes, they both came at the same time. There's actually some evidence that perhaps city-like structures existed maybe even before formal. From Quebec-les-Tepes. Yeah, exactly, which was kind of one of these symbolic cities that you were talking about, a kind of a city that people went to for religious rituals. This is in Turkey. And so that suggests to me that our ways of doing land planning are ways of feeding ourselves by planning farms and by planning agriculture, which of course goes into these questions around sustainability. And, you know, that that's part of cities. And so that from the moment that we started making cities, we were making these farms and we were thinking about how to remold nature. And that the city is part of nature in that sense. That we can't, you can't have a farm without a city. Well, maybe you could. You guys go try that. But there haven't been that for a long time. They haven't really. I mean, there are farming communities, but cities cannot exist without farms. And that's, you know, absolutely economically the case. It's the case just pragmatically. You gotta have some food. You can't just grow it on your roof as much as some environmentalists believe that you might be able to. And I think the other thing about cities that I think ties the mega city to really ancient past examples of cities is this is something that we're seeing a lot now which is building these massive monuments. One of the things that's happening in mega cities, right, is we're seeing a lot of incredibly huge towers being built. Just crazy tall, you know, every day you read about like another mega skyscraper, another huge floating building is being built in New York. And these are buildings that are not necessary. Like we don't need to have giant talls. But they're about wowing the yokels. They're about wowing the yokels. They remind me very much of ziggurats from Mesopotamia, you know, where you just build a giant thing to make everyone feel like the city is the place to be. There's this really interesting archeologist, Marion Benz, who has a paper about monumental architecture in very early urban settlements in Turkey, Neolithic settlements. And she studies an area called Kurtik Tepe, which is sort of contemporaneous with Shatal Ho Yoke and some of the other cool early settlements. And she believes that this urge to build monumental architecture is actually responding to a crisis in settlement. And that basically in early history and during the Neolithic people were going from being nomads to actually living a sedentary life, which was incredibly traumatizing and bizarre to suddenly be living just in one place inside of a box and having to see your neighbor every day and smell your neighbor every day. And, you know, this created a lot of tension and that people were kind of, I mean to put it simply, people were freaking out. And they needed to feel like something about their settlement was permanent. They needed a new symbolic language to help them just get used to living in these settled communities instead of just wandering around. And so they would build these megastructures. And this is just her theory, you know, shared with a number of other archeologists that this is kind of a reaction. And so I think when you look at these megacities, I wonder if that's a kind of psychological reaction to these new cities where you go to them and there's 15 million people, there's 25 million people, it's overwhelming. It's a kind of settlement that humans haven't had before. It is historically unprecedented. And so maybe we're inventing a new kind of urban language to deal with it. You know, that basically what I'm saying is all of these skyscrapers are about the fact that we're freaking out. Yeah, and they also, the other argument that archeologists make, which I don't think is at all against me is that you see these things like the descriptions that I ever think about are the first descriptions of Cahokia, which is this enormous native city that's near St. Louis. And you can see it from miles. And these Europeans came there in the late ancient century and they could see this thing, because it's flat there, these giant earthen pyramids for many miles. And they'd basically be right there and they'd sort of go, holy crap. And imagine what this was like when these things were really great. And what it filled them with was respect for the society. And that's when you have these giant pyramids, it makes you one of your citizen. To obey the rules, because look at this, right? And so it's a tremendous way of reinforcing social solidarity in a particular way. Yeah, especially at a time when maybe people are feeling unsettled about living in these new kinds of communities. So I do think we're seeing some continuity there between these ancient cities. I sort of think about this, a week or so ago I was in New York and I went into Trump Tower and both of these things, holy crap. And I could see it. I wanted to be, vote for him for president and he could do this. You know? Yeah. I just want to vote for the guy who built the ziggurats. There it is, it's a modern ziggurat and it's covered with gold. How cool is that? I know. I'm just gonna let that one sort of sit there. I'm intrigued though that, you both go to sort of deep antiquity to these examples that have enormous evocative power, but not a huge amount of records to sort of really reconstruct what's going on. I mean, what I'm thinking about the history of the city and trying to connect it to questions we may have about our own current decisions and their future. I mean, I'm really fascinated by the sort of transition from medieval to early modern. When between 1400 and 1600 or between 1500 and 1700, you get London and Paris shifting from being much larger than average, but not completely out of scale settlements to utterly dominant. I mean, by 1700, London has 650, 700,000 people in it and the next largest town has 30,000. It's bigger than London is more populous than something like the next 60 cities and towns. And that was a really, that was again a shocking, if you were in London, you were a Londoner and if you came from outside as not only people did but had to because the death rate exceeded the birth rate in London for a long time. It's population growth was all in migration. You were coming to a completely different, I mean, there was a significant differences in language and practice and means of living and all that sort of stuff. And you see a lot of apocalyptic responses but you also see this extraordinary kind of urban culture that really did not exist anywhere else in England at that time and you have a similar thing going on in Paris. And that seems more like what we've experienced over the last 50 years, particularly in some of the cultures that have seen mega cities really leap out of this enormous rural in migration in the developing world. And there we have the thing that's most striking to me is there is this huge immediate and we can see it because there's paper and cheap paper and printing and all that, all those good things. This enormous cultural response that really succeeds in defining the city as another place, some celebrate it like Samuel Peeps and some sort of regarded as this utter hell, the end of civilization, et cetera, et cetera. So how does your thinking shift when you move from deep antiquity where we're really trying to infer experience from a hugely different time where that leap of trying to understand the past is even more difficult than it is say what our grandparents experienced. Can you get us a little closer to the present? Different societies again have different ways because before London and Paris, the big cities were also to the south. And so at the time of 1400, Edo had a million people in it. Constantinople or Istanbul, whatever you're going to call it, had more than a million people in it, cities in there. And they were all organized very differently from European cities. And so in Edo, there's this great thing. This is an impossible mixture unless we have pretty rigid social control. And so you have a strikingly orderly city with different assigned crafts and so forth, different neighborhoods doing different things. It was really quite amazing what was going on there. And it's vastly different than London. And so to me the lesson again from history here is that we actually have a lot of choice about how these cities could look. And we sort of think like, oh, these cities, in the US we sort of spring up urban planning and all that, we don't really like. But we do have, they are planned in the sense that we have institutions that set them up. And we don't have to have the ones we have now. So the past is a source of license for the future. Yeah, in that sense, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the past as a series of experiments, right? I mean, that's what's really interesting about looking at cities is that even in one city, like Istanbul is a great example, because it's been, not only has it been named three different things, or maybe more even, but it's been so many different cities, it's had so many different cultures occupying it because it's kind of always been at the fringes or even at the center of different empires. And so you see one city being many cities over time. And so in trying different experiments and trying different ways of governing and different ways of building and different ways of funding how you build things. And so, I mean, that's what's really, I think what really joins, say the rise of London with today is that of course, as you know from your own work, what we're seeing is the rise of capitalism and how capitalism helps us build cities or helps us not build cities in some cases. And so that becomes something that's relevant to how we're building cities now since so many of the mega cities of today are built on global capital and they're built on a lot of the trade relationships that were established during that period. I'm a city buff, so we could talk city for the next many hours, but there's a lot more past and there's a lot more future. And one of the things that's obviously a huge question we have about the future from our current present is climate change and the role of climate change in relation to social change. And it's often said that the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere and global warming is unique because it is the first time that human beings have sort of done this completely global experiment on our circumstances of living. Not by everybody, you know. I know not. Yeah, I do know that. No, I admit that the argument made by a lot of climatologists is that we've been affecting the climate for eight or 10,000 years. Oh, absolutely. And there's a pre-human history argument that life has been, not argument, there's the fact that life has affected, there's this co-evolution of climate. What's different is that we know about it. We know about it and we can measure it and we have some confidence in the predictions of what might happen. Yeah, we have a clue of what will happen and kind of how we could fix it. Right, maybe, or at least respond to it. But in your own work, Charles may be starting with you, are there examples you can find in history where societies either recognized changing climate and still failed to adapt or perhaps more hopefully responded to changes in their sort of ecological circumstances with effect? I think I can say this. I'm not quite certain that this is true, but I think there is no large-scale society that is uncontroversially believed to have collapsed as a result of environmental issues. I don't think, you know, this definitely happened in some like islands, little islands and so forth, but a large-scale continental society, I'm not aware of any example of where people say this society fell because it failed, exclusively because it failed to adapt. When you have something like the Maya, they knew that drought was there. They knew that this was happening, but they had wrecked their institutions for coping with it by a 200-year civil war in the central part of this and precisely that area where they'd had the civil war between these two mega-cities or mega-collections of cities was the part that fell and the part that hadn't been involved up to the north and to the south did just fine also through the drought. And so, you know, that's actually a pretty hopeful thing is that if we really screw up because of climate change, it may be the first time we've been so stupid. I'm not sure if that's hopeful or not. So it is a radically different time. If we fail, it will be radically different, yeah. This is a test of destruction experiment. I'm not sure I like that. But also, we have had incidents where human beings, so increasingly, I think this is fair to say, the idea that the Little Ice Age, in this period of time when there was a global cold snap between roughly 1550 and roughly 1800, where all sorts of really crazy things happened in Europe and China and North America related to these extreme cold periods. And that's generally, I think, increasingly believed to have been related to the death of Native Americans and the cessation of burning all throughout the Americas and the regrowth of the eastern forest as a result. And both of which sucked carbon dioxide out of the air and pulled global temperatures down about two degrees C. So there is an example of a feedback. There is an example, and it was really bad. I mean, lots and lots of bad things happened. The collapse of the Ming dynasty is thought to be related to this. Many, many people starved in the peripheries of Europe. Lots of terrible things happened in Canada and so forth, and these are, so it was a dire event, but we managed to make it through it. Were you? I mean, not to bring us back to the ancient world again. It's all right. Painful for you, but one of the ancient civilizations that I'm really interested in is the Harappan civilization, which we don't know a lot about because we haven't yet deciphered their writing. Can you tell me where and when? So it's also called the Indus Valley civilization, so it was located in what's now India and Pakistan, and the height of it was around 2,600 to 1,700 BCE, so very long ago. And during the course of that civilization, which was quite a longstanding urban civilization, which was similar to Maya in that they had a lot of satellite cities. They had a few really large cities, like Harappa was one of them, and they had an extensive system of roads. People immigrated a lot, and that area where they built up this civilization was fed by a number of rivers that over the course of the thousands of years that the civilization kind of rose and fell changed their course. And so again, we can't say for sure, it was climate change that caused a change in the civilization. It went from urban to basically rural again, but certainly the fact that they were no longer fed by these rivers made it much more difficult to sustain an urban civilization. But there's a lot of things that were quite interesting about their culture, one of which is that they were traders, and we know that they traded with the Mesopotamians. They made these very characteristic blue glass beads that are found all throughout the whole region. And I think the thing, I mean I could actually talk with them forever, so please just go read more about the Harappan civilization, because it really is, they also had fantastic aqueducts. They were like among the first urban civilization to develop aqueducts. Harappa, just look up Indus Valley civilization, that'll be a good way to do it. H-R-A-P-P-A, wait, did I spell that right? Anyway. And, but anyway, there's a lot of controversy over how the civilization transitioned. And what I think is notable is that, again, it didn't fall. And in fact, if you talk to somebody who studies the Harappans, they'll get really pissed if you talk about the fall of the civilization, because that's an absurd term, like civilizations change, they don't fall, unless you literally have like the Borg come down and scoop them up and, you know, eliminate all aspects of their culture. So, but what did happen was, in order to cope with climate change, people immigrated away, they went back to smaller agricultural communities, and they retained their culture. And there's a lot of continuity between some of the icons that we see in Harappan culture that show certain yoga poses that later get used by other cultures in the region. And so we know that these people did kind of go out and, you know, blend into other civilizations that were in the area. So I do think that, you know, when we look forward to how climate change might transform our cities, you know, maybe we are looking at something where cities will evaporate and will change, or maybe we're looking at something where it's not that cities will go away completely, but they'll just look really different. Like our culture today will be significantly mutated. You know, that makes perfect sense to me. The one thing that I've been struck by, though, is, or rather, one of the claims for distinctiveness of the present that rings with a lot of credibility to me is that one of the changes now is we face many of the same challenges, and we're still human beings, so many of our responses will be similar. But we've built an awful lot more infrastructure in the way of natural changes. And you know, the old joke, there aren't any natural disasters. There are natural variations and human disasters, and the disasters are a result of the interaction of a hurricane with, you know... Brick. Brick. Excited to build with brick. Or the fact that we now have, you know, a continuous line of cottages at the high tide line on the Eastern USC board. I mean, these are things that weren't there 50 years ago or 100 years ago, and that means, you know, just if you're an insurance executive, you know that next year's hurricane of exactly the same strength as the hurricane of 1958 will do gazillions of dollars more damage and disrupt many more lives and just, you know, all that sort of stuff. Or the electrical grid and a solar storm. Right. So is there, I mean, I mean, I believe deeply into the bone in the continuity of human experience, and therefore the past matters. But I also really do think that there are, you know, it's important to note that it's not just continuity. There are some major changes that occur. I guess I would say, think of the Mayas, probably the most urban society that has ever existed. And, you know, basically the entire Yucatan, you know, the southern Yucatan all the way down to the middle of Guatemala, basically one city after another. If there was ever a society that hated nature, it was them. All the windows point inwards, nothing outside. There was, there's hardly any trees. It was all, you know, farm and these cities. This is, you can see it now. If you go to one of the Maya ruins, you just wander off the edge. It's not, you know, the, when you go to the edge, you're still in the city and you can want for hours and hours and hours and what happens, you go to another city. Right. And so it's the sprawl. Right. And it's, I think Houston, Houston in a sense. Right, right. Right. And if you think about it, this is this giant slab of limestone, the peninsula. There's no water. There's only one river worth speaking of in it's hearty. And then they have these wells that are many of which are toxic. So dealing with water is a major issue there and they have this very elaborate system of canals and reservoirs and these things called sock bays. It was an entirely artificially constructed environment in which they had enormously densely populated cities. And that persisted for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years in that state. And it fell when I think fall is really important and the central part is really actually appropriate in this case. It transformed. It transformed really bad. Okay, a bad transformation. Very bad transformation. When after this war, there weren't any engineers to keep up the infrastructure and to keep up adjusting it. And so I think the question isn't so much how much infrastructure we have because they had an incredible, there were more people living there then than now. They had this incredibly elaborate infrastructure. Question is whether they were able to keep it up. And sometimes that's what I fear. Yeah, yeah. The disruption of social knowledge. Moving on a little bit to something that Emily was hinting at, which is the notion of the movement of people. Again, one of the things that people point to in the 20th century is these enormous movements of people because of war or disruption or global change or decolonization or decolonization, all the different sources of a reason to move from where your parents and grandparents grew up and where you are. To me, that's the sort of most obviously historically deeply rooted human experience. But we're facing these, I mean just as a immediate today contemporary political question in this country and in Europe with the Syrian tragedy. We're seeing a new immigration crisis and we're getting these claims that this is somehow, if not unprecedented, unacceptable. It must be put to a stop. And again, I wonder what you would say beyond the obvious that this is just, there are lots of obvious things that one could say. But is there a way to construct a historical narrative that tells us either that we are in a very unusual period of human motion or rather that we're not, that this is sort of the basic pattern that we've seen for a while. Emily, I'm tossing that to you first because you were the one who brought it up. Yeah, no, I think that this is part of the basic pattern of human expansion. Even going back to the Paleolithic period, people move around and they move from community to community. And some of our greatest achievements as humans have come from immigration. And there's a myth about the Silk Road and natural reality to the Silk Road as a civilization, which was basically built on immigration between cities and trade between cities. And I think there's a really interesting book by Valerie Hansen, who's a historian, looking at the Silk Road. And I'm picking on the Silk Road just because it's, her argument in that book is that we think now, when we look at the myth of the Silk Road or if we read about the more recent electronic version of the Silk Road, and we think it was all about trade. And her argument, which is very persuasive, is that it was actually a road for immigration and that what mostly moved along this road, which really stretched from coastal China all the way into India, and eventually much later, kind of all the way into Europe, was that people moved on that road. People moved from town to town. And especially during what we call the medieval era, people didn't even think of it as like a big trade route where I make something in China and eventually it winds up in Rome or vice versa. They would think of it as just the road to the next city. And there's a lot of documentation, especially from like the 600s and 700s of people referring to this road as the road to Samarkand, which is an awesome ancient city, by the way, speaking of ancient cities. It's in Uzbekistan. It isn't quite as exciting as it was in the 600s. But in the 600s, it was really great. It was hopping. And there was an ethnic group known as the Sogdians who've been completely kind of eradicated, who lived there and who traded and who actually moved to a lot of cities all along the route, including into Western China. And they helped spread literacy by trading books, bringing books with them. And they helped forge a path that then a lot of scholars kind of traveled on, especially Buddhist scholars at that time. And so because of that immigration, because of people walking on that road and maybe carrying a few books with them or carrying a little bit of silk with them to use for trade, the civilization in that area was incredibly, the science was enhanced. People's belief systems were challenged. People learned new things. People learned new languages. People moved from city to city. And it was one of sort of a golden age at different points during the history of those trade routes. And of course there was not just one trade route. That would have been awesome if there had just been like one silk road that was just like totally cut right through China. Paved in Yellow Brick. Paved in Yellow Brick, exactly. But there were many different roads and at different times, different empires like the Han Empire and then much later Mongolians would actually put nice guard towers along the road and kind of keep things safe and keep people moving along and there was a great mail system for a while. And in fact, a lot of the artifacts from that time are actually letters that people wrote that kind of got lost along the way, including a famous Sogdian letter that a woman wrote to her husband calling him a dog. Because he had left her in this city and she was really pissed off. So that's what you've, so I think. That's the continuity part of history as opposed to the change. Yeah, it's actually, it's so great. Like if you Google Sogdian, like it's one of our only pieces of Sogdian writing. And it's just this really angry, angry woman. And so, I mean, she sounds justified to be fair. But so I think that was sort of a long way of saying that some of the greatest urban achievements, cultural achievements in human history have been associated with the movement of people between cultures and between cities. And I think if there's any kind of continuity, it's that we know for sure that immigrants make places better. That having immigration, having free movement between places is actually an improvement for the cultures that get the immigrants. And certainly, immigrants, when they're treated well, wind up benefiting too. And so. I guess you should probably step in here, right? Yeah, give us your expertise. No, obviously not. But that actually, basically I should say I have a bias that I think of as a Copernican bias is that nothing is special, right? That's what physics teaches you, right? That the moment you start thinking that something is really special and unique, you're fooling yourself, right? But there occasionally are unprecedented moments and that was one of them. When the Europeans came, diseases wiped out, two thirds to 90% of the inhabitants, so the Americas, the fifth of humanity, the only, it's the only demographic collapse like that as far as known in history, it's really an outlier and it had huge implications for everything that happened next, including the fact that Europeans were able to come here because otherwise it would have been pretty much kicked out by numerically superior, Aboriginal groups. So that is it. But it's such an outlier that I don't know if it actually invalidates what you're saying because that was a very weird, bad thing that happened. It is a weird, bad thing, but it actually goes to the point that I raised very early on, which is that history is complicated. There's not ever gonna be a moment where I could say, I mean, I was sort of praising immigration and I do think that in general, having borders be porous and allowing people to move between countries is a good thing. But of course, there are examples like imperialism, like that sucked for everybody who got colonized, like nobody liked that. Well, the imperialists liked it, they thought that was awesome. But it was not a good deal for people who were invaded and enslaved or turned into totes of the invading state or whatever. So, and I think some people would even argue that that's not the same thing as immigration when you have an invading force that comes in and takes over the government, that that's a very different structure than just letting people move between nations. But yeah, it's complicated, right? And even the history of conquest is, there is a... It's complicated too. It's one thing where you have the Roman Empire essentially making deals with the elites of cities that they quote conquer. And it's another thing when you have, the German forces rolling through Poland. These are very different experiences on all levels. I wanna open this up to the floor in just a moment. And I got many, many more questions. But I guess I'm gonna sort of truncate my series of questions with this, with really sort of a two-sided question. One is we've been talking for this hour about how the past really does have a variety of ways to inform our thing about the president in the future. And I guess I'm curious as to what you both might say about what it says about us now as we make claims that we are facing a future that has no precedent. Well, I think this is very human. I was just reading actually today. My daughter is considering going to MIT, so I live outside of town, so I came and I brought her and had the day. And I was reading about this project I'm working on, about the Guano Crisis of 1902. And at the time... Missed that one, so yeah. Now, at the time, it was actually here in Boston, so it's local news, there was a great conference about Guano, which was then mined from these islands off the Pacific coast of South America and also off the Atlantic coast of Africa. And it was the major fertilizer and they were running out. And this was regarded as a worldwide problem. And the meeting of all the great thinkers came and they said, civilization, we're living in this time of absolutely unprecedented prosperity, which is based on agricultural growth, which is in turn based on this fertilizer, that is gonna vanish and our civilization is poised on the precipice like nothing it has ever been on before. And so, I can't tell you how many of these civilizational precipices that are unprecedented that I think that there have been. And this one was a particularly enjoyable one to read about. Six years later, Gifford Pinchot, the pioneering forester, convened the first governor's conference, Teddy Roosevelt did it, to confront the cataclysmic shortage of wood that the United States was going to be completely deforested. There would not be a tree left and we're again on the edge of a civilizational precipice like in a moment like no other. And you read these enough and you realize that sort of these cataclysmic things arise about every six or seven years. And we seem as human beings to be incapable of learning from this. And Lee, do you have a thought on this? Yeah, no, I mean, I think, I absolutely agree with that. I think that there is a long history of teetering on the brink of collapse, of believing that we are. And I think one of the things that I always enjoy is reading treatises, especially from like the 60s and 70s about television. Television is gonna take over our minds. It's going to destroy children. It's going to turn us into brainwashed zombies. What else is television gonna do? It's gonna keep us from going outside. It's gonna make us antisocial. It might be shrinking our brains, we're not sure. And nobody says that about TV anymore, right? Because they say it about the internet. But now TV is good now. TV now, exactly, the whole trope about TV now is that actually it's good for you. It's artisanal. It's like a way of telling a narrative that stretches out. It's like the longest narrative you ever saw which makes it awesome because it's like a long read only with your, you know, even more. And that's the same kind of thing. And I think that when we consider these kind of singulitarian arguments about how computers are gonna take over our minds and we're gonna be victimized by machines, we have to remember that, yeah, every generation there's this crisis over some new kind of technology and the arguments are always the same. Yeah, always the same, but they're always very similar. They always focus on how our minds will be colonized and how our desires will be appropriated by whoever is making the pop culture that we're consuming. And so, yeah, I mean, that is what we have to learn from. We have to learn to stop being paralyzed by believing that we're so special and that we're poised on the brink of disaster or the brink of heaven and really start kind of coming up with tools to plan pragmatically and not keep predicting the end. So can I contradict myself now? Please. You're permitted. Okay, so what this led to, the guano crisis. Let's get back to guano. I'd like to go back to this. That was a national effort that they had to create artificial fertilizer and that led to the Haber-Bosch process. And one of the cool things about talking at MIT is there's probably at least some of you guys who know what that is, right? You know, the creation of artificial ammonia, which is creation of artificial fertilizer, which has led to an absolutely enormous amount, increase in the amount of fertilizer that's used. And Vaklav Shmil, this guy up in Manitoba, has calculated that something like 40% of the nitrogen in our bodies is actually created by the Haber-Bosch process. All this nitrogen, which has done so much for people, has also caused enormous environmental problems. And so, even at the same time that these, you know, that these crises happen, we always seem to find a solution. Those solutions always seem to create new crises. Yeah, the other feature of the Haber-Bosch process, of course, is it is what allowed Germany to make enough munitions to fight World War I when they were cut off from. And it's a major contributor to climate change. And so, yeah, it's... So the guano might have gotten us all, you know? Yeah. Okay, there's tons more to talk about. I have another page of notes to ask questions about, but that would be unfair. We have two microphones. Please use them for your questions, because we are recording this. And please just say who you are, what your name is. Off you go, please. Great to be back again at MIT. I did my studies here in the 70s. I'm aware of, I'd like, wonderful panel. I'd like you to stick your teeth in the idea. This is the first time where many instances, grandparents and great-grandparents can see the offspring. I also jotted down. We've gone from discovering the telegraph. I'm sure when the telegraph appeared, it was unbelievable beyond the Pony Express. Then came the railroad, which clearly changed things and then came airplanes. I'm very aware of today's conference, how many of the people who are presenting are about to fly to Portugal. They're coming in from Ohio a little late and so forth. These are all, also, our little cell phones or smartphones where I'm knowing exactly where my kids are doing in the pictures, what they're sending and so forth. And then, just about an hour ago, someone blew my mind by showing that the nuclear winter calculations were way off. If we had one of the Trident missiles with a cook, a board, firing some of the things, it would be 10 times worse than the calculations we saw back then. So that's a real discontinuity. Certainly, we are here. We realize that we have always escaped Armageddon and so forth. That was the first time we were totally connected and watching cooks do much more than just do terrible things in some part of Paris. So are you asking if it's unprecedented or are you claiming that it is? I have no reaction to this shrinking of the time scale. I used to plan, my parents always took me for three months in the summer to the White Mountains and then I used to go for two weeks. My sons can just work in three days with chopping our time into small and small segments as we're trying to do more and more. My sons were flying around a lot more than I did and I flew around a lot more than my dad ever did and came here as an emberman. So this shrinking of the time scale, can we learn something from that? Well, that shrinking has been going on for a long time. So it's hard to say that there's an actual line where it happened, although there's a terrific book by Tom Standage called The Victorian Internet which is about the changes in life that were caused by the telegraph which is the first time that communication could occur faster than, you know, electronic communication could occur faster than was possible for people to travel and he argues that basically all the changes that we see from today's instant electronic communications are in the telegraph and what the internet did is kind of democratized them and so there's an argument that if you look at history, you're seeing the slow process of acceleration but because the environment is homogenizing, you could argue that, you know, even though we're traveling more and more, the actual distance, the actual difference between one point and another is less and less so that it's as if we are not traveling at all. I've heard that argued, I'm not sure I believe it but so there's always available intellectual counter arguments against this kind of thing. It seems that the arguments may be true and I would just say that when I think about these ideas that it's unprecedented, I'm aware of how unlikely that is to be true. I just, just to, I know you're there but just to add to that one little bit. In I think 1998, I heard an after dinner talk by MIT's beloved and great film, Morrison and he was, we were preparing to do a series of television shows about the turn of the 21st century and again about how much everything had changed and so forth and so he spent his entire talk describing the connections to a global marketplace that a farm in the Midwest in 1900 had that the degree of awareness it had of the market price of wheat in, again Shanghai, London, you know, I mean just and the precision, the weather reports they got from all over the world, the futures, the way that they could do contracts, I mean all the kinds of things that we think are, you know, that the economic crashes of the internet mediated economic crashes of recent days are this sort of whole new thing in human experience and Phil just gave this great presentation, say in fact, no, the bandwidth was smaller but many of the issues of speed and immediacy and connection across space have been present for much longer than we give it credit for being. And I think that the, another important point which kind of goes to what both of you were saying is that it's not just about the technologies that we have for say getting around like airplanes or the technologies we have for measuring smaller and smaller increments of time like we go from measuring seconds to measuring nanoseconds it's also how those tools are used. So when we live in a culture that is focused so much on capitalist production basically which is kind of, you know, connected to things like say clocking in for example, you start to see that it's really a social force that is behind a lot of these changes because we don't have to compress our time that much. We don't have to be paying attention to futures for example but because we live in an economic system because of the demands of our labor then we start to think about how can we use our technology to make our time more productive or to expand our work time. And so I think it's always useful to step a little bit outside of the tech, a little bit outside of, you know, all of our new industrial devices and think about who's using them and how and kind of how that changes the way they impact us. If you go to the, one of the things that really struck me, I went to the, I'm like opera, one time I was in Milan and I got to go to the Giuseppe Verdi Museum and there they have a small fraction of the letters that he wrote in his lifetime, 40,000. And the reason was that Milan, like Paris and like many European cities at the time, had this system of pneumatic tubes and you could just write something and put it in this tube. He also had five mail deliveries a day. This guy had operas all over the world. He was part of this sort of global thing. He was monitoring productions in Europe, the United States and even Asia. He was getting, you know, he was living a life that's so close to, you know, what a modern business person is living that one hesitates to, I mean, this guy wrote a hundred thousand letters. That's surely more emails than- He was basically sitting on the internet all day. Yeah. He was just blogging. Yeah. Please. Thanks for giving your talk today. My name is Matt. I'm from California and I have a comment and a question. At a comment for Annalia, something that came to mind to me when you were talking about monuments as a response to crisis was a psychological principle called anchoring that some people see in trauma that if the doctor was to come to me and say, I'm sorry, Matt, you have cancer. Maybe I would reach out and be, not because I'm losing my balance, but I'm trying to find and touch and be grounded in what's around me. And so the idea of the monuments as a response to crisis reminded me about that. And Charles, I also had a question for you with the timeliness of your research with Christopher Columbus and everything. Columbus Day is coming up in the celebrations and everything. Do you have any particular thoughts or reactions to what's going on here with the weekend's festivities? You know, I always think about Columbus's, how weird it was that he accidentally, that he actually ended up here. Because the normal way, the way history should have happened is what happened eight years later when Cabral landed in Brazil to get around, you know, Europeans were going down the coast of Africa and to do that, the currents are such that you have to make a big, with a wind-driven vessel, you have to take a big swing around West Africa and the ocean's pretty narrow there and it was inevitable I think that somebody would get blown as Cabral did by a storm and land there and so that would have been the point of contact would be Brazil and that I think was sort of what should have happened. Instead this madman with these completely lunatic ideas about how the size of the earth and the abilities of the technology that it was at his disposal, meaning the ships, so that it's just another, since I'm contradicting myself, another perfect example of how weird and contingent these big events can be. And I look at this, I think, wow, what an accident. Kara? Hi, I'm Kara. Thanks for a really great talk. I'm really impressed with you guys, it's obviously knowledge of history and also your ability to sort of imagine the future and having all these centuries in your head at once allows you to take a really long view that tends to be like very even-handed and I appreciate that, I think it's great. But I also get kind of stuck on certain examples that you give like Charles when you were talking about how some of the Mayans were untouched by the drought but meanwhile others of them were in this constant civil war over water and I'm wondering if you guys ever narrow your scope and think about some of these people who like lose the climate lottery or whatever other lottery, like how does your knowledge help you think about those more specific cases where people just kind of get screwed over while the rest of them are okay? I mean, I'm really interested in the people who get screwed over. So, I mean, I think you can't tell a good history without looking at it from both sides and I don't know that, because you were saying do you ever narrow your focus and maybe look at something in a shorter time slice? Yeah, I guess just how does your huge knowledge help you with these smaller situations or help you understand these smaller situations? Yeah, I mean, I think that it comes back to sort of understanding that there are a diversity of experiences in any given time period and that's what makes the present so complicated too because you hear people saying now like everything is getting better, everyone is getting wealthier and like I guess that's true in some aggregate but at the same time there's parts of the world where that's obviously not happening at all and so I think that that is something that you have to hold in your head to understand history but also to understand where we're going that there's multiple timelines happening simultaneously and I don't mean that some people are in the past and some people are in the present, I just mean that people are actually leading very, very different lives with incredibly different circumstances on the same planet, which is really hard to account for. To go specifically to your my example, it's one thing to the central part of the Maya really had a bad time, let's not use the word collapse but it emptied and there are more people who are living there in 800 AD than there are now but just north of them were people living, speaking the same language, living in reasonably similar ways suffered from the same drought who did fine and that tells you there's some difference there and the difference is the social arrangements, I think and often you can find when you find these societies that something really bad happens, there's often a society right next to them that's not that different, that's doing okay and this is a gross generalization but amazingly often it seems to me what happens in the societies that are failing are elites hijacking the system and actually benefiting from the collapse and there's a guy here Darren Asimoglu who's written a whole book about this why nations fail, which makes this argument much more eloquently than I just did and so the long perspective also tells you something that if you see this pattern happening again of elites hijacking the wealth and productive capacity of the society in such a way that the bad things that are happening to everybody else are actually good for them, this is something to really watch out for and sometimes as I read the newspaper, I wonder if this is something we should be watching out for ourselves. Just to put a little bit of torque on what was just said first of all, one thing that you have speaking sort of dispassionately as a historian is when you have these disparate outcomes you have a kind of natural experiment, you can ask why there are such different outcomes I mean there's a lot of people who have studied Greenland through the little ice age and why the European settlements on it collapsed but the native peoples really didn't see a major change in either their style of life or their numbers and there are a bunch of different explanations for it but you have that lovely contained in a very small slice of time which is helpful and in a very small space, relatively small I mean in the case of the North Settlements on Greenland very small settlements. So you've got this sort of unusually for history nicely contained experiment and I think you're describing something similar in the Maya but in terms of craft in the writing of history there's something that you do where you try and shift focal length a lot you try and see these things that have these big sweeps and you look over large scales of time and place but it's all nice storytelling unless you can go into very specific moments and times and sets of evidence and say okay if my view of this particular historical transaction is correct, am I seeing it? What connects to that in the as fine-agreed account of the experiences of individual people, small groups of people, institutions that you can fix in a time or a place? So I've found in my own writing, I don't know if you two agree that in some senses I try and find shorter and shorter periods of time in more and more constrained places to populate as I make these more general arguments to populate the narrative. You can't do it with only one scale if you just stay on the very fine grain stale you're telling a great story and you may have wonderful characters and you have all these interesting things but you have no real way of gauging if it's of historical significance as it were as opposed to a historical novel where you're experiencing some of the vicarious thrill of trying to live through somebody else's alien eyes. Sir. Well we may not be talking on the point but many other species are. What's unprecedented right now is that we have seven billion people on the planet and by the middle of the century probably nine billion people and we're seeing mass extinction now that's probably not been equals in the last 200 million years much of a duty human activity so you know we have to ask ourselves in this type of an anthropocentric discussion here tonight that there is a natural history as well as a social history and a technological history and we have to ask ourselves how much do we value other species how many we're allowing to let expire? Do we value species as much as Thoreau did or as much as the Railroad does? Well actually the last mass extinction was about 65 million years ago so and we're nowhere near that level yet. You really have to have like 75% or more species die out before you've got a real mass extinction on your hands and we're not anywhere near that yet. We might be in a big extinction phase right now but we haven't reached mass extinction yet. We very well may, I definitely believe that we might be about to reach that level but what I would say is if you're gonna talk on a species level and talk about humans as a species and whether there's a precedent for the kinds of crap that we're doing there absolutely is. There've been other invasive species just like humans at previous points in geological history that have been terrible, worse than us. Cyanobacteria polluted the entire planet with oxygen which thanks for that obviously but it really sucked for all of the methane breathers at the time, they did not turn out well for them and there's also plenty of evidence that previous mass extinctions have been caused by invasive species taking over various environments. The Devonian mass extinction which is about 250 million years ago was likely caused by invasive species. It's one possible explanation. No one is ever quite sure what caused these previous mass extinctions that we've had but there are some indications that that's part of what happened. So I can't answer the question about how much we care about animals because that's obviously kind of a big other topic but in terms of humans having a precedent, yeah. And the precedent looks bad, right? Because we see these patterns of invasive species actually maybe being part of what precipitates mass extinctions. The big difference is that humans unlike cyanobacteria, unlike the sharks that may have been involved in the Devonian mass extinction, humans appear to be relatively intelligent and able to plan for the future and able to figure out that we are changing the environment as we're doing it. We don't, it doesn't appear that previous species figured that out. We don't know for sure but probably they were not aware of what they were doing but we are. And so that is a historically unprecedented thing too. We're an invasive species that actually knows that we're invasive and actually knows that we are changing the environment in negative ways for other species on the planet. And that actually weirdly gives me a little bit of hope because I think that we have a chance of doing something about it because we've actually figured it out. We'll see if there may be a collapse, but yeah. Hi, my name is Lucio Quinto. I'm a science writer, freelance and at the MIT age lab. And I have a question. So the MIT age lab looks at a lot of population dynamics in a lot of countries. I think as you know, populations are declining or failing to grow as fast. And I just, you know, I love this idea that this metaphor of collapse has been with us throughout history, but it sounds like it was often a Malthusian collapse. We're always worried about running out of wood or running out of guano. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the moments when populations were declining and if we can have any insights from those moments. Well, I mean like when in the Americas after? Yeah, or the black death. What you see in often, and there's three sort of known pulses of large scale reforestation in relatively recent human histories. And one after the Justinian plague of 600, one after the black plague, and one after the Columbus plague, I guess what we can call it. And the, and what they led to in so far as we know was the same phenomenon to a lesser greater extent in which reforestation comes and sucks carbon dioxide as followed by big spells of cold weather. Now that has to happen at a very large scale before you start to see the impacts. The other thing that happens is that all the survivors are much richer. And so that there's a whole lot of historians who argue that what happened after the black plague, for instance, is there's many fewer workers around. And so even feudal lords had to start treating their workers well because otherwise they would move. And so wages went up and there was a whole series of rebellions against this, culminating in the Protestant, Protestantism. So that these population declines are in the past really been associated with enormous changes. Just to complicate that a little, one of the things that happens after the black plague is you run out of workers, you need to find ways to hang onto them. So you start compensating them, which is a milestone in the history of money and exchange. So there's a whole, you know, I don't think the black death caused capitalism, but. But events that occurred in its wake are part of the history of capitalism. Also part of the prehistory of the labor movement too, because you had peasants organizing, like you said, having riots or some people might call them protests, maybe other people would call them riots and got living wages or better wages. Thanks, sir. I'm Phil Guerra from Sloan. One of the perplexing things about these kind of like big disruptive historical events are black swans is not that they're unexpected, but also the other side of the definition of a black swan is it's highly predictable in hindsight from the retrospective lens, like, you know, looking back on it, you're like, oh, of course that would happen. So the question here is, does history at all help us predict these things or does it just show us the failure of prediction? I guess? How dumb are we? Well, we do have a pretty good record of, or unmatched record of being poor predictors. But at the same time, I often feel if you take the long view, you sort of want to, you know, sky down. And so, you know, particularly for people in business, I'm amazed, you know, I'm not that old and I have been through numerous examples of the business cycle and at every single one of them, there's people who write best-selling books saying, this time it's different. And you sort of think like, or this time we have the business cycle licked and so forth. And wow, it's just never true. So I think that, you know, you can say that when you read those things, there's people I know, actually on Wall Street, he says, when that book times, when you see that book, it's time to get out of the market. There are like leading indicators of collapse that people are saying that everything's gonna be great. And so there is that sense that there are these cycles whose exact duration cannot be predicted, but whose existence are certain. I'll just tiptoe. I'm Jessica, I was an undergrad here, grad student, now staff, official lifer, I think, that makes me. My question is sort of like a wild card. I try to make sometimes ridiculous sense of the world by looking back at random data points. So things like this guy has a skit on like we were hunters and gatherers. That's why men are focused, they go into the store, they see the shirt they want, they walk back out. Women will walk in, they'll take inventory, they'll come back next week, they know what changed on the shelves. This kind of like using whatever we have in history to understand who we are today. Another one could be King Louis XIV was really short. So he would always make himself taller. So we still wanna be taller and have this like weird hierarchy of the man being taller and so that's still important to us somehow that probably also has to do with being strong. But anyway, I guess my question is could each of you give me two random, if you have them at all, two random sort of things you've thought about that maybe you don't have verified, but you wonder if it's at all correlated with a reason for why we are that way we are today? I'll tell you when, maybe I can answer this, maybe. Because I've actually- You gotta be tested, I don't have to have any validity. So there's a big argument going on now and intellectual argument between people like Steven Pinker on one side and a bunch of anthropologists and archeologists on the other side about whether human beings have an irreducibly violent nature. And then the argument that they make is things are getting better and better and better and that in prehistory, life was just awful. And what's interesting is that we have almost no skeletal evidence sort of before the realm of agriculture. The bones, just there's not that many bones. And so all the evidence stops. Most of the evidence stops about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. And so if you believe that people like Pinker, and 10 or 12,000 years ago, life was incredibly violent. This is right after the Neolithic Revolution in agricultural societies, they were terrible. So was that a new thing? Or was that something in human nature? And sometimes I'm reading the news from Syria, I think like, oh God, here we are, human nature again. And sometimes I think like no, actually there is so little evidence about this. And this would be an example of a question that I think history would be really interesting and worthwhile to know about. So I wonder what is that prehistory if we knew what it tell us about who we are? I guess I would point to something that I was talking about before with immigration, which is that I think there's a lot of evidence, but of course we don't know for sure, that humans evolved in a state of immigration basically. That part of what we were doing when we were evolving was wandering around and leaving the areas where we first hung out and hunted and kind of spreading upward out of Africa into other continents, and then eventually across the ocean. And so I think like your question about violence, I wonder if there's something in humans that makes us kind of wanna wander and wanna go to new places, and whether we've kind of constructed a culture and a set of cultures that are kind of preventing that from happening, and that that might be a bit of a problem. And my only reaction is to be sort of skeptical of the whole endeavor. It's so easy to make just so stories. That's fun. It's fun, and we all do it. But when there are active fields of study represented at great institutions all around the country, where they, where just so stories, I think are taken much, much too seriously, and when you get to things like gender roles or social hierarchy or economic systems, and you constructed just so story out of sort of the East India Company's directors figuring out this or that. It's just, you can justify, it's so easy to say history proves that what I want to be true is true. And you know. Well, it does. It does, of course, and that's why we do it. Especially if you're writing it. But it's also, I think, just to stick with being self-contradictory, I totally agree with what Tom is saying, and I think that there's a real danger in trying to say that we're doing certain things now because of how we evolved or because of how we were historically, because it does put us, again, in that kind of paralysis of saying, like, oh, well, we can't change. We're just that way. That's just, we are just violent, or we are just wanderers. And I think there's so much evidence that we can change, and that maybe culture is so much more important than. It's not just that we can't change. It's that almost anything you can imagine a human being or a human society doing as a way to make it through the day has been done. We aren't restricted to one choice in this is the way we are, therefore this is the way we will be. There are, you know, there's a huge decision space of things that people have managed to make it through the day on. And it's nice to tell us stories to say that, yes, in fact, it is possible actually really to write an original creative work in Starbucks that going to the coffee shop is not inevitably a way to pretend you're writing when you're not. And somebody has done that. Most people don't. But if you like drinking coffee in the morning and bringing your computer, tell yourself the story that you're writing the great, you know, modern novel and it'll make your day happier. Humans on the Savannah were drinking coffee and writing, and that's where it was from. Yes, the great Grasslands novel. Thank you so much for a great panel. I wanted to bring us back to something you said right at the beginning, which I thought was so striking that the most radical form of difference is historical difference and how that makes us think about people in the past as other, right? Totally other than we. But at the same time, we're talking so much about the continuity of the past and you guys keep saying like, oh, we're contradicting ourselves. But actually I just think you're just saying we need to balance those two things of recognizing alterity and recognizing continuity. And so I was wondering if you could talk about a point in your own research where you did that or you flipped from one to the other and you were surprised, you know, that you had been thinking of the past as the same, but then you flipped to alterity. But do you know what I mean? Like I just thought that was such a striking, it's come across like throughout the whole panel and then in the questions too that we're trying to balance that. I can give you a silly example. This summer I went to Highland Peru for a few weeks and so I was around Lake Titicaca, which is this huge lake up there. And in these villages, and I discovered that the men, these very macho guys were king hell knitters. And that, you know, you part of your prowess as a guy was what kind of knitting you could do. And if your stitches were really tight, and I had guys telling me essentially that their penises were extremely large, you could tell by their knitting. And, you know, on the one hand, I thought, oh God, guys are always talking about this. On the other hand, knitting. So that's a perfect example of how often, you're right, it isn't so much that it's contradictory is that the familiar and the strange are people find all kinds of ways to express something that apparently the need for guys to boast about the private parts is the universal, perhaps. And the, but the most amazing variety of ways that they can find to express this primal need. I'll give an example that's also based on a place that I traveled recently, which is that I went to the archeological site of Çatalhöyük, which is a Neolithic settlement, large settlement in Turkey, central Turkey. And it's kind of the mega city of its day. It was built at a time when there weren't really cities, but it's believed that possibly, you know, a thousand or more people lived in this one settlement, which is really big when you consider that most of the settlements were like 200 people. And so it's a very different city from what we would have now. There's no streets. It's kind of a honeycomb structure. All the houses are kind of squished up together and people entered through their roof. But at the same time, every house had, you know, a fireplace and we know that they cooked soup. We, you know, people have examined pottery shards and looked at the chemical signatures. And so they were cooking soup in their hearts. And I kept thinking, you know, it's just like now, like everybody has a kitchen and even though it seems so different. But one of the things that they did was that they buried their ancestors in their floor under their beds, which was really alien to me. And I think for many people in the West just sounds like totally disgusting. Like you don't put the dead under your bed. And they slept on kind of raised platforms that were plastered over. And so they would literally dig up their beds and put, you know, once their bones had been blanched, they'd kind of stick them in and they kind of unburied them and they sometimes would trade skulls. I like to trade skulls. And it just, it was that same thing where it's a radically different culture. Like you have to imagine like, what was it like to think it's completely normal that I buried my mom under my bed? Like that's just what you do. Everybody does that. Like, and if you don't do it gross, like why is your mom not under your bed after she died? But at the same time, it's so similar to like how we are now, like people were cooking and hanging out and throwing their garbage in the alley behind their house. Like that was a big thing that everybody did. And so it's just that, that's that moment of flipping back and forth. And you have, I feel like it's so important. And this is something that I like in your writing so much is that you have to respect that complete difference and not try to say, it's just like us today. You have to be able to say like, no, it really was frickin' different. And at the same time, we can still learn from it because it is this other experiment that's unlike our own. The one thing I'd add to that is my father was a historian, historian of China. And he started one essay late in his life where he said, you know, people have long, historians have long thought about the distinction between history, the history that people make and history, the history that people write. And, you know, the past is its own country. But we write about the past not out of their concerns, but of ours. And so one of the things you have to do when you read history is remember that the, a good historian is trying to make the best possible account of whatever they're studying. But the concerns and the questions and the sort of framework from understanding is what we care about. What that person writing, those readers, that community of people interested in this piece of the past. And that's one of the things that makes reading history writing history, it's not just transcribing what happened back then, it's creative act. But it also means that reading history is a creative act. You have to actually exercise, you know, attention and will and mental construction to try and figure out how you get through your presumptions, your interest, and into that world. Hi, my name's Reika, I'm CMS before there was a W05. Your loss. So, Annalie, you said something early on that was kind of relatively in passing, I think when you were talking about Thoreau and the railroad doesn't ride us and how technology doesn't shape us. At least that's how I heard it. And it sounded very, very uncomplicated. And I wanted to hear from both of you a little bit more texture around our current technological moment and how you see this and who's driving what. Because I think that it is right now such a major source of anxiety and utopianism and the lens through which a large portion of our society is looking at the future. And I think, I don't think you meant to say that human shape technology and technology doesn't have any impact back on us, but that's how it sounded. And so I would just love to hear a little more texture around that. I think it's definitely, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, I definitely think it's a dialectical relationship. That humans are creating technology, but then of course technology shapes our experience of our social lives, especially now. And it shapes our experience of the economy and it shapes our ability to produce things. But what I was pushing back against and the reason why I was sort of picking on that quote from Thoreau about the railroad rides us is that I think there is a temptation, especially right now, because we do live in a world of rapidly changing technology or at least companies would like us to believe that it's rapidly changing because like why else are you gonna buy the new Nexus? But, so don't buy it, I guess. But, but I think, you know, there is, I think there's too much of that simplistic idea that we are shaped by technology and what I want to do in my work and what I hope people can do when they hear that and when they read that on tech blogs say is think about okay, fine, if technology is shaping me, who is shaping that technology that's shaping me, right? Like who are the people behind marketing like a million different mobile devices to me and trying to tell me that like somehow it's like a giant step forward that like the Pixel now has like a tablet that pulls off from the keyboard. Like is that, you know, whose interest is it that's being served by me thinking that that's a big revolutionary change? Actually, if you could even tease that out more, like the power relationship between there is the slice of society that are the innovators and the marketers of the innovation and then there's so many people out there who really do feel like they're being ridden by the technology by simply feeling like being made to feel like they need it or actually needing it because of work or society. So just also is it possible that some people feel that they are being ridden by technology and some people are riding the technology? Are riding them. Well, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think people absolutely do feel that way and I agree with you that it's a source of tremendous anxiety and of course, you know, our social lives have been radically altered by the kinds of technologies we have access to like having a computer in your pocket or communicating with your friends on whatever social media platform you're using. But I think that it's important, like I said, to always remember that it's still a social relationship and it's people being ridden by people and yes, there's these technologies that are part of what we're trading with each other and part of what the most powerful corporations in the world are trying to entice us into thinking are like the most important thing ever. But it's never just, I think there's always a story behind that feeling of like I am being ridden by my Android device. You know, who's writing me? Like there's people that made Android, there's choices that Google made about Android and how it's gonna be marketed and what kinds of devices are gonna use it and whether it's gonna be an open OS or a closed one and how I'll, you know, anyway, I could bore you to death with Android. But I think it's important like that when we think, when we have those thoughts about how we're being ridden by technologies that we think about all of the social relationships that go into making those technologies and that go into making us feel like we're being ridden, like what's really at stake there. And without erasing the fact that of course, yeah, technology changes us all the time. Like medical technology made it possible for me to be alive and probably for many of you to be alive and that's a real genuine change. Like that's awesome in every sense of the word. But at the same time, tech is always embedded in social relationships of power for example and some people are getting rich off of your obsession with Android or my obsession with Android and some people are not. So. We have, we actually just have time for one last question. Okay, so speaking of being shaped by technology and you're the catastrophe person, you think, right? So maybe I'll address the question to you a little bit. And I wanna preface this by saying I'm an eternal optimist, I swear I am. Any scenario that you see that doesn't end in the evolutionary process and end up homo sapiens at the hands of super artificial intelligence? Yes. Yeah. We're done. Okay, yeah, plus one to that. In the early 1980s, when I was starting out, I was sent by science too, which I was running for to write about the wonderful advances in artificial intelligence that were being made by the AI lab. And this is, at the time the AI lab was being consumed by its fight between the two companies that it sort of had split into, I forget what their names were. And I was just completely baffled. Nothing, nobody there was doing anything that I could see that in any way remotely related to actual artificial intelligence. And they're fighting over Lisp. They're fighting over these languages. But every single person there told me that AI was gonna come before the year 2000. It was an article of complete faith. And I eventually wrote to it, I said, I can't write this, I'm gonna make them look like idiots. And it's mean. So eventually I wrote about the fight over Lisp or something like this. So I gotta say, it's done on me as I repeatedly attempted to cover something about artificial intelligence that nobody involved in artificial intelligence. Actually, they all talk about artificial intelligence. But what they're actually doing is making something that's super good at one particular purpose. And I don't think actually anybody wants artificial intelligence actually when you look at what they want. Because we have nine or seven billion intelligences around here. People are really good at that. So what you want are these machines that can do things that people can't. And so I'm just extremely skeptical of the, I would like to know what this would consist of except for some sort of magical invocation of Skynet. That would be some way that you would actually get to it from the projects that are now being done on the planet that doesn't involve some magical self evolution. And so that's one reason I think to be this. The other is that, again, this is a picture of a terrible thing happening in the future. And people are notoriously bad at figuring, at making predictions that actually hold true. And so the mere fact that this is held, and in fact, particularly academic elites have a terrible record of this. And the mere fact that, this is like the Wall Street guys who are saying that this time it's different. So I think all those, you know, obviously you can't predict the future, but all those tell you that in the past these statements have been made and they so far have always been wrong. And I mean also just to, I mean, I agree with everything that you just said. And I think also the fact that the predictions about what AI will do to us, the fact that it sounds so similar to these fantasies of Armageddon that we've been having since humans have started telling stories about the end times, always makes me suspicious. When it's- It's a vengeful God. Yeah, whenever it sounds so similar to like all the angels will come down and either they're going to elevate us to this state of bliss, or they're going to enslave us permanently forever in a hellfire. I mean it sounds so similar to what people say about what AI will do that it just, it comes to feel like it's just part of this ongoing mythology that we tell ourselves that's been enhanced by these present day anxieties about technology riding us. It fits very nicely with that fear that we are going to be enslaved to the technology. And again, I think anytime you hear that you always have to ask what would it, who is really, what are we really worried about? Are we really worried about a machine enslaving us? Or are we really just worried about being enslaved again by other humans? Because do you know who enslaves humans? Humans. But there's an, yeah. That's, we, and that is history people. And you know, it's funny that we keep projecting it onto our technology and saying it's not us, you know, the technology is going to be enslaving us. Well, maybe actually this is an anxiety about how slavery is going to return in a big way and maybe we should be thinking about that. Where can we write our books? Outside in the hall. We are, the, us talking to you, part of the program of the evening is now over. I want to thank all of both our guests, Charles Mann and Annalie Nowitz. I want to thank you guys for showing up. I want to encourage you to check out the books that are outside and the signing that will take place for those of you wise enough to make that decision. And I would like to ask you now once again to thank Charles and Annalie. Thank you. Thank you.