 But this has been a really, all I can say is a very fun two days, and this is a really excellent way to wrap up those two days. So my thanks to you for helping make this such a wonderful thing. Thank you to all of the speakers for, let's just face it, this is an academic dream right here. So I appreciate everything that everyone has done for us. There's a few more thank yous that I need to give. This morning, Dr. Gray thanked me for this, and I can only take a very small amount of credit for this. Chuck Neeterreiter got the ball rolling on this one. There's a committee of folks who helped steer it, and then once we had the ideas, Dean Wolland, who's been sort of in the background back here, say hi, Dean, has really made things run smoothly in terms of getting people where they need to be, making sure timing is working. Dana Lam, is she in here? Dana has made everything happen. We have a problem. We say, Dana, can you fix this? And it gets fixed. So we have an amazing support staff, not to mention all of the student helpers. You saw the army of people serving tonight. It's a lot of people that make this happen. So please give a warm round of applause to all of those other people. Last evening, I sent an email to Freeman Dyson expressing my sorrow that he couldn't join us, and just checking in with him. And he sent back just a few minutes ago a very nice email, and I wanted to read a little bit of that to you. Thank you for your moving words. I want to share your feelings, and I'm truly sorry that I cannot be with you today. If you have a good opportunity, please tell the people at the conference that I would really like to apologize for letting them down. I'm very sad to be missing this visit to Gustavus, a place where I have many, many friends and many delightful memories. And because he has been such a very special person to Gustavus and to science in general, but we have very fond memories of him at Gustavus, we thought we would still do a little bit of why is he important and why would we have invited him in the first place? So I'm going to turn it over to Chaplain Elvie, who has a lot of experience with him in terms of Gustavus. My name is Richard Elvie. I retired as chaplain to this college and chaplain to this Nobel conference in the year 2000. I was followed by Tim and Chuck and now Scott. It got bigger and better. Edgar Carlson told me that a phenomena like that proves the existence of God. In other words, that you were not God, that God was something larger. I remember how we sat in this Nobel banquet room each year. The rooms of Evelyn Young and Melva Lind and Elaine Brostrom. Before the proceedings would begin, we would search the faces of friends whom we saw once a year, marking their progress or regress through time in the lines of those faces. We could mark in the flickering candlelight and a vague color of flowers on the table, suffused by the romantic music of Edward Grieg's Holberg Suite every year. The festive mood of old grads and food and drinks set before them. The light of other days, the many eyes that shone, now dimmed or gone. The voices of other rooms now silenced or far away singing. At these dinners, we became for an hour more than an organization, busy about its tasks of talking and listening. Oh, there was good talking at the conference. Smooth in conception, smooth in development. The smoothness of absolute perfection and performance. But Nobel always had more, an informal gaiety. Slowly and steadily, suffused with lofty purpose. A peculiarly happy kind of dignity and an inner family feeling. One of the deep-blind faces, which I knew from this past, I'd hope to see here tonight. Freeman Dyson. But illness and age have kept him from us. I do not see Freeman in this three-dimensional space, but I can see him in a fourth dimension. Over the years, he made several visits to Gustavus. The last one late in my tenure here in 1999 as Rydell Visiting Professor over in the Science Hall. But he was also in chapel every day at 10 o'clock. I loved Freeman. I can see him still from my seat in the chancel. Out there, two-thirds of the way back on the left. One day standing between two guys who had their hats turned on backwards. With the hymno, singing all the verses, singing out, what was he thinking? Someone asked me when I reported that Freeman went to chapel every day. Well, perhaps of his gratitude for life. Or thinking about his Presbyterian minister daughter. Or about his grandchildren. Did he have any more metaphysical thoughts on religion than that? In fact, he did. They are in his book, which has rebel in the title. Page three, five, zero. And I give them to you briefly. Now, let me state, frankly, my own philosophical prejudices. As human beings, we are groping for knowledge and understanding of the strange universe into which we were born. We have many ways of understanding of which science is only one. Our thought processes are only partially based on logic and are inextricably mixed with emotions and desires and social interactions. We cannot live as isolated intelligences, but only as members of a working community. Our ways of understanding have been collective, beginning with the stories that we told one another around the fire when we lived in caves. Our ways today are still collective, including literature, history, art, music, religion, and science. Science is a particular bunch of tools that have been conspicuously successful for understanding and manipulating the material universe. Religion is another bunch of tools giving us hints of a mental or spiritual universe that transcends the material universe. To understand religion, it is necessary to explore it from the inside as William James explored it in the varieties of religious experience. The testimony of saints and mystics is the raw material out of which a deeper understanding of religion may grow. The sacred writings, the Bhagavad Gita and the Koran and the Bible tell us more about the essence of religion than any scientific study of religious organizations. Research into religion using only the scientific tool kit was designed for a different purpose. We always miss the goal. We can all agree that religion is a natural phenomena, but nature may include many more things than we can grasp with the methods of science. Now let us hear from Freeman Dyson. Hi there. I'm a student here at Gustavus. I'm a senior physics major and I was a student host for Freeman Dyson. A little disappointed that he couldn't make it, but I'll be delivering a little bit of a video that he did when he was at the Perimeter Institute in 2011. It will be about 8 to 10 minutes. Bear with me. We've had a little bit of technical challenges. I'll let you know and have a little bit more information as we go. I'll start off by just saying that this is about Freeman Dyson living through his four revolutions in science. We'll get started. Just ad lib and not to have a prepared speech. I want to give you an impression of what it was like to grow up in a time of revolutions. Because those of you who are young are in fact in a revolution too, so you might enjoy life as much as we did. And those of you who are older of course have kids and they go going ahead, so all of you have chances to do things. Here's the four revolutions I'm going to talk about, our space. That began in 1945. I was in London at that time and Verne von Braun you see there on the right was dropping his spacecraft on our heads. The V2 rockets were the first spacecraft, a wonderful technical achievement. And in addition to that, an enormous help to us. We were grateful to von Braun. Every day we heard these rockets coming down. Every one of those rockets was actually the equivalent of a high performance jet fighter, which the German Air Force desperately needed to fight the war. They were disarming themselves thanks to von Braun. The remarkable thing was Hitler himself was quite well aware of this. Von Braun had a conversation with Hitler during the war and told him about his program and invited Hitler to see the V2 launch for the first time. He was a magnificent spectacle of course, watching this rocket go up in the sky and something quite new and revolutionary. But Hitler understood. He said, what good is this? Hitler said, it's only artillery, if you have, Hitler understood what you need. If you have artillery you need millions of them, you don't just need thousands. So he said to von Braun, can you build me a million of these? Von Braun said, you have all of my fear and he lied in his teeth and Hitler never pursued the question. So von Braun of course knew very well he could never build a million V2s. In fact he built a few thousands and they had an absolutely negligible effect on the progress of the war, except unilateral disarmament of the Third Reich. Anyway, so that's the space revolution began then. He was in London and his relationship with Carl Sagan was worthy in the space station. And that he had really no effect on it at all and there was really no point in inviting him to decide that there were only two. We went on to talk about satellite communications and people that made more impact on the space, which began in 1945. So we will jump ahead to the nuclear revolution. Bombs, but also nuclear reactors, which was exciting stuff and so when nuclear reactors became open to non-military uses, which was around six years later I think, I forget just when, so maybe more like ten years later, more like 1955, civilians were allowed then to build nuclear reactors for the first time. And so we all were very excited about that. It was the new revolution. We were going to make deserts bloom and produce all kinds of wonderful goods by means of nuclear energy. So I decided this was something I'd love to do. I went to work for a company called General Atomic in San Diego and we built reactors. And the interesting thing was that the head of our program was actually Edward Teller, the guy who became notorious because he built the hydrogen bomb. But in fact he was also very interested in peaceful nuclear power and he understood the essence of the game. And it was Teller in fact who understood that nuclear power to be any good, it had to be really 100% safe. That was what it was all about if you wanted to do nuclear power. Make it really safe. And his definition of safe was you could give it to a bunch of high school kids to play with and they wouldn't get hurt. And that was the definition of safe. Of course that's conspicuously not true for any of our existing power reactors. Anyhow it was true for the reactor we built. So we built Teller and a team of people with him working in California built this little reactor for hospitals. The purpose of the reactor was to build short-lived isotopes, particularly technetium which is used a great deal in diagnosing various blood diseases and such things. And it's important to have very short-lived isotopes so you can inject somebody with the isotope and measure the radioactivity and then it's all gone in a few hours. That's much better for your health. But that means you have to produce the isotopes in the same place where they're used. So that's why you have to have them in hospitals. So we actually manufactured this little reactor and it was great fun to do. And I won't go into the technical aspects of it, it would take too long. But what was remarkable about this reactor was that we tested it really toughly. We had the most dangerous thing you could imagine doing with a reactor like that was to have it cold, because the reactor is most highly reactive when it's cold. So you'd start from a cold start and pull out the control rods explosively as fast as you possibly could and see whether it would blow up. And we did that a thousand times just to be really sure. The nuclear revolution, where he built a nuclear reactor, as he talked about, he later built and sold 75 more reactors. He talks about George Bush Seniors' contribution to taking away tactical missiles in the country, technical nukes, excuse me, and biological warfare. Next we'll talk about the genome revolution. It'll have to be done the same way, just by keeping the scientists out. Well, let's go ahead with the third revolution was the genome. And that is of course a wonderful story. The hero is Francis Crick. You see him here at the end of his life. He wasn't like that when he did his great work. But anyway, I knew him even much earlier than that. And so the genome revolution actually started with Oswald Avery, whom I did not know. He was a biologist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. He did the decisive experiment in 1944 proving that in bacteria DNA was, in fact, the stuff that carried the heredity. That DNA could be transferred from one bacterium to another. And that the second bacterium would then become identical with the first one. So DNA carried the information to tell the bacterium how to grow. So that started the genome revolution. And it was a huge revolution because everybody before that thought that genetics must be very, very complicated. That genetics must be some very, very clever arrangement of complicated molecules with organics of all kinds of organic components and so on. Probably proteins and other stuff. Well, it turned out to be the simplest possible molecule, the DNA, which was just a long chain of almost identical bases. And you could actually write down the sequence of bases so that the whole thing was just a message with a four-letter alphabet, much, much, much simpler than anything we had imagined. So that was a huge revolution. And Crick and Watson were responsible for that. Well, I actually tried to prevent that from happening and fortunately failed. Talks about the people that we don't know about in history that have made impacts, including John Randall, a physicist that he says caused the genome revolution, inventing the cavity magneton. And finally, for our last revolution. Almost everything that's happened. Here is John von Neumann, who I was not, I wasn't working with him, but I was watching him build the first electronically programmed computer. It wasn't the first electronic computer. What von Neumann invented, the first electronic computer was built in Philadelphia, the ENIAC, started running in 1946. Von Neumann invented software, that was essentially his contribution, that you could actually write the programs in the same language that you use for writing numbers. So you could handle the program with the numbers in the same fashion. So the computer could be programmed to change its mode of operation according to the numerical results as it went along. That's what software does. Alan Turing, who invented the idea of an abstract computer as a mathematical object, he invented computer science as an abstract discipline. Norbert Wiener, who pointed out the disastrous effects of computers, he wrote a book called The Human Use of Human Beings, which I think is still very relevant, pointing out that the result of computers would be, in fact, to deprive humans of any reason for existing. If you didn't use them carefully, they could make humans superfluous or redundant. And finally, Danny Hillis, who is the first to invent a parallel computing. Anyway, let me just say what's happened. Von Neumann and Wiener, of course, never really understood what they were doing. They always imagined that computers were going to be big and expensive, that they would get bigger and bigger and more and more expensive. Essentially, they would be tools of the big bureaucracies owned by the military or by departments of the government or by big industries. They never imagined what really happened after they built these first-generation computers. They rapidly got smaller and smarter and cheaper and ended up as toys for three-year-olds, which, of course, is what they are now. And in a way, it's been a great thing. I mean, quite against our expectations, computers actually turned out to be user-friendly and that they are actually empowering individuals in a very important way and connecting the world. So it's a double-edged sword, like most swords. No revolution is computing. I just want to say thank you for giving me the opportunity to share with you a little bit of the humanity and charisma and knowledge that has defined and continues to define the lifetime of Freeman Dyson. And finally, with a quote that he said in this, which I do recommend you watch the entire hour video, even if it's a little long, he said, create islands of meeting and the flood of information. That's our job. Thank you. I will have that link posted on the Nobel conference website under Freeman's name. Lest we leave you with a false impression, he's doing fine. He still can't travel, but everything is OK. So with that, I hope you get a sense of why we were excited to have him here in the first place. And in lieu of him actually being able to be here, I would like to invite our panelists up so that we can get at some of the stickier questions that were submitted during the question and answer periods. So there's a few that are on people's minds. And many of these kind of go to the more political things. And I think we can talk about that directly in a little bit, but a lot of discussion was on solar and wind energy. And I can't tell you how many questions I got on what about the birds. So everything from birds dying in the wind farms to what is it called? Bright source in California, which had some pretty bad press about they're a thermal solar collector. So they collect the solar rays and focus them and then boil water for a conventional steam generator. And it turns out that birds flying across would basically be incinerated as their path crossed where the beams were collected. So in terms of environmental safeness, environmental issues, what about the birds? There are microphones for you to. I think it's already on. Well, I think obviously you've got to try and protect the birds from going through. That should be possible to some extent. I mean, they may get caught, but. Well, and then you put hawks around them. It's something where I think it is a concern. I agree that it's birds, there's bats, there's all sorts of things. And but I think it could have a solution. It's not sometimes people see this and there's see something new and they say, oh, there's a downside to this. Maybe we shouldn't do this. So here's what I was thinking about birds and bats and things is that we have to think hard about how there's a wind farm and there's a soil farm and you want to steer them away. One of the things that is starting to happen is you're beginning to think about siding if you're in a migratory path, you don't put it there anymore. The other thing is once you've got it established, what you want to do is you want to scare them away. Now, you don't scare them away by putting bats on windows because although you may not realize this that about 10,000 or 100,000 more birds die by crashing into windows than wind turbines. But what you can do is you can make a process sound system or even a little laser light show, which you can make sure that pilots don't get in it. But things where you warn the birds stay clear of this area. The amount of area that it's in a solar farm or wind farm can, you can do these things. There hasn't been much thought put into it so far but they're beginning to do this. And so it's like everything else. Once you sensitize this, there could be a technological solution that will decrease the number of deaths of birds and bats. We don't really want to think about outlawing windows, right? But if you, again, remember 10,000 or 100,000, I figure what the number was. More birds get killed crashing into windows. So I think those are some of the things that one can do in order to minimize the impact. But again, like any new technology, what you have to do is you have to make aware of, okay, we have this issue and we should work towards minimizing that issue. Obviously people should get rid of the windows. That doesn't work so well in Minnesota. Especially in Minnesota. Several times we talked about the percentage of renewable energies that we would like to get to as a target. Can I, one more thing, the comment about the, that's the solar, the big, very high solar. Bright source. Bright source. Again, the first order of business is to try to scare the birds away from that area. There's also a pilot issue that the pilots actually, because when they put the panels, the mirrors, in a resting place, they put it as a plane. And what happens is if you have the sun coming in and reflect off essentially big, you know, acres of mirror and it goes into, that pilots have reported temporary blindness. And they can't see for a minute, you know. And that solution's easy. You just tilt them at all weenie-wacky angles, right? And so the first order of business, oh no, this is terrible, you should outlaw it because it blinds pilots. But you take each mirror and you put it like this and all of a sudden it's just scatters. So then it becomes like a snow top. Right? So again, the issue has a simple technical solution. The more serious issue, as you get to the top of these towers where it gets really hot, that is an issue. And you have to be able to have sound or something near the towers. Some obnoxious sound that the bird says, I'm not gonna go near here. I mean, that's another thing by the way. Sound is probably less intrusive and worrisome than lasers. But you can have these things. And again, you know, we can do this. One more final thing. With the risks of climate change and the risks of the loss of species due to that, that could be far worse. Okay, you also have to remember that. I get discussions when people wanted to take down dams in the Pacific Northwest to allow the fish salmoners to be restored. And we were actually putting in better turbines. So the fish were population, the salmon population was coming up. But the really hardcore people wanted us to tear down the dams. I said, if you tear down the dams, what are you gonna replace it with? Fossil plants. Salmon don't live in water warmer than 75 degrees Fahrenheit. So the precious salmon in a changing climate will just disappear. And that's, you have to think of the other things. If just clinging to what you had before and not realizing the world is going in a certain direction, no matter what. It's gonna go, it's like Yuli Berra said, you come to Fork Road, you take it. So it's not, I wanna go back 100 years ago. At some point in the discussion, we will get to the ethic of risk and how that's kinda wonky in our public policy. A number of questions sort of focused in on our goals for renewable energies. And even if you put the goal at 50%, what is the other 50% going to be? And a number of people asked, well, you haven't talked about nuclear. And we just heard a little bit from Freeman on nuclear. And I'm just wondering what your response to that might be. I think the other 50% will still be oil, gas, and coal. That's what I think. I'm actually- With some nuclear. Yeah, I- There will always be some nuclear. We're, for those of you who don't know, in terms of electricity generation, we're about 19% nuclear. In terms of electricity versus old generation, we're, I don't know, it's one-third, roughly one-third transportation round numbers, one-third, maybe 40% electricity. Rest is processed heating and processed in industrial sources. I'm in favor of nuclear this century at that level. I think it's going to have to be arms of energy on demand until we figure out, well, until Harry Gray figures out, liquid hydrocarbons that can be made very inexpensively with inexpensive solar or electricity from wind. Well, we'll always have, you know, this century will certainly always have some percentage of nuclear, but with the current situation with gas, we have, we bought some time, I think, with gas. Cheap gas, because now electricity from gas is the cheapest way to get electricity. And I think we'll continue to see that, so I see gas increasing solar when the other 50% is going to be gas and nuclear. That's my feeling. But 50% by 2040 or so, I think by 2070, we can go over and do better, because I'm carrying you, Harry, to. We're going to be there, and I wonder whether you think actually these big solar thermal installations are going to be temporary or very long term, because in my view, this is non-quantum solar conversion. The quantum solar conversions, which have the potential to be very efficient in photovoltaics or in storage in artificial photosynthesis, I think, will overcome the need for these big power towers, solar thermal, I think we'll always have, take advantage of the wind resources. The wind resources will always be with us, and they're very, very valuable. But I see the better solar, the quantum solar conversions overtaking and being much more environmentally friendly than the solar thermal. What do you think about that? I think the problem is we have a double-barreled problem. One is the economic perception, and the other is the people's perception about whether there's a danger or not. Well, by the way, I'm not going to kill any birds. As we, yeah, well. Just in graduate states. Whatever we do for killing animals. But the point I think I want to make is, as time progresses, it will gradually become apparent to people who are not belief driven that in fact we are a human impacting the environment and especially the atmosphere in a very, very serious way. There will be calls to action. I am hopeful that the populace sooner rather than later will become more convinced that we need political action. Politicians are never going to get out in front of this issue. You know this better than anybody. What we need to do is move forward with a panoply of ways to move alternative energy supplies to the front. As you have said, and as you have said, many of these are coming down in price and they are getting economically feasible. But it's very important that people realize this is a lot worse problem than the enlarging debt of the nation. We got a problem that's gonna impact life very seriously and if we don't do something about it sooner or later, I'm not talking just about the people in Miami, but they're a very good example of people who should wake up. So I think a political will will come and I am hopeful you guys are too conservative about how we can damp down. We're certainly, there's a momentum here even if we were to stop producing any CO2 in the atmosphere the temperature would still rise. IPCC says at least two degrees Celsius by the end of the century. So we've got a problem we really have to deal with. So the political will may start to exert itself and the politicians aren't ever gonna lead until the people demand it. Don't you think so? Oh, oh, there is one other thing I think and everybody is talking about nuclear, well nuclear and solar and these are part of our panoply. But I think fusion which has been on the horizon for so long may come into its own. I hope Livermore and others will be able to bring us to the stage where we have a sustained controlled reaction and can produce energy like the sun does right here on planet Earth. I've been to have something to say about that. Well, I do but I don't want to monopolize. My wife is there to keep me in my place. But I would say, first I agree with your point. For those of you who heard my talk yesterday, this analogy between cigarette smoking and climate change runs deep. The damage we have done while smoking cigarettes over multiple, multiple mutations is lung cancer and other forms of cancer. It's over many, many mutations. The damage could have been done 10 years ago but it's cell by cell division and so the thing about climate change is that the climate scientists don't really know what the glide path is. If we stop the meeting today, everything that, which is not ever gonna happen, what would be the damage done and how long would it take to find out there's a big debate but it's somewhere between 50 and 100 years. Just as if you stop smoking today, if you were smoking, you might have, say, laid the seeds for cancer 10 years from today. So it is a big uncertainty, a big debate but that risk is very, very real and that is the thing that I would give with you Gary. This is serious business. Regardless of solar thermal or photovoltaics, I think photovoltaics will win out in the end. There's high temperature in materials and heat engines and you can only push that so far but the other side, you can go to 20, 25, 30% conversion. So yes, I think in the end photovoltaics will win. You can even go to 40 and 50. Yes, the record is now 48 or something percent but in terms of really cheap practical, it's breathtaking. It's coming. Wait for it, it's coming. I'd like to see some fusion going because we need more helium. I'm gonna tell you a joke about fusion. But first, let me say something serious about fusion. Fusion is a long shot. It is cleaner energy for sure. The radioactive reactivity that you create with fusion can be much shorter lived. Actually, you can make much shorter live reactivity if you're willing to deal with fast neutrons, fifth of your plants, but that's another story. So, but the trouble is the Eater experiment is an experiment. It's not a prototype for deployment and it's a couple of decades behind schedule now and it's a couple of times over budget so the total cost of that experiment could be 30 billion, 25 billion. The cost of a plant of one gigawatt size would be at least 10 billion but we don't even know how to build a plant and we don't know how to do it either with laser fusion or with magnetic confinement. So it's a research project and with those two types of fusion there are neutrons that damage the material and within one year the atoms have changed place into steel containment vessels or surrounding things 100 times. And so, at least in the Eater plant, and no material can withstand that. So they're talking about putting metal liners so that they would have to take out as they would just crumble so the metal would absorb the neutron damage but that metal's radioactive and it's not like you're about to go in there every five years, take out some reactive stuff and then reinstall another metal liner, that's expensive. So it's research. Whether society should spend research money, I have no question we should because this is a serious problem. We should be spending research on a lot of things. Now here's a joke. A fusion scientist works for 30 years and he's an honest person and he doesn't try to oversell and people say, do you ever think this is going to be commercially viable, economically possible? To really, without subsidy, supplies for the energy, he says, I don't know, not my lifetime, but I helped so but I dedicate my whole life to this. He dies, he goes to heaven. He goes before St. Peter and says, St. Peter, I have a really burning question to ask God. I know it's on your, but please, may I? Peter says, you're right, it's very unusual but you had such an exemplary life that will allow you to do this. So he goes before God and says, God, I've been telling you all, I've been working on this all my life. I really want it to happen but will fusion become commercially viable? And what does she say? 30 years. I don't know, but not in my life. You know, Steve, I'm sure you know this but the Chinese are building gigawatts solar plants right now for a lot, a lot less money right now. And so the Chinese are gearing up and I think they're gonna show us the way with these big solar installations that are gonna power big cities. And when we figure that out and figure out there's the Chinese are really way ahead of us, I think even some of our politicians might come around. They've been the biggest installed renewable energy last year will be the biggest this year and will continue to be the biggest installer in their own country of renewable energy in the world. When I first got into government, my very first year in 2009 and 2010, they said, why are we doing this? The Chinese aren't doing this, why should we do this? And I said, no, no, no, the Chinese are doing this. My last year, they said, what have we been doing? The Chinese are getting ahead of us. Well, that raises the question, is this the modern Sputnik? Is this the thing that's gonna trigger in the national security vision of science? I gave a talk on that somewhere in the middle of my time and I compared it to Sputnik and let's say, so for those to remind you about Sputnik, 1957, the Soviet Union sets up this little basketball-sized satellite that's going beep, beep, beep and you can even see it with your naked eye in the Midwest. Okay, and just cut us through the core and we thought we were the technological leaders and Eisenhower was the president at the time and he got his science people together and then he comes out and gives a speech and he says, what we could do is spend a lot more on rocket development and military development but that's not the core issue. The core issue is that the Soviet Union scientists and engineers have caught up with us and will pass us by so we need to spend more investment in science and engineering education. This is one of the first two of five star generals who said this is the way to answer, okay, and he was right and I was, my science issues came, it was boosted by being in the Sputnik generation and I think- So was mine, I had been applying for an NSF fellowship and suddenly Congress after Sputnik went up and appropriated a lot of money. It just poured out. And I gave some of it to me. Well, we may all make mistakes sometimes. My education is really due to Sputnik going up and it helped me enormously. So the question is, would it be a Sputnik era? So I pose this question in Washington Press Club speech I gave, would it be a Sputnik era in either China realizes that the future is developing the technology for clean, renewable, sustainable, economically cheaper energy. That's gonna be the future of the world. And if they develop all that intellectual property, you know, are we gonna be left behind? In addition to, hey, there's this 800,000 pound guerrilla lurking in the room that might stomp on us or might not, we don't know, it's a risk. And so there was this sort of, is this a new Sputnik moment? And unfortunately, it got some press coverage, but it wasn't a sudden thing in your face you can see overhead this thing going. It's a slow, creepy thing. Now, for those who go to China, you can see in your face, they're racing ahead. And that's different. But it's not overhead in Omaha, Nebraska. Yeah, it's not Sputnik. We should hack into their systems. Steal their design. No comment. Well, that brings us to, there are probably more questions about this than there were anything else in the stack. And this one, I think, goes to everyone on the panel. And that is, you know, it really has to get at the politicization of science and how do we get around that when we have people who are misusing science, misusing statistics and just plain misrepresenting what the science says in order to drive an agenda that fits an ideology and not reality. I'm gonna leave it that open because I got such a variety of questions that that's as open as it really was. Who are these scientists that are publishing papers denying the anthropogenic influence on the climate? Very few of the people, there are... It's like 3%, right? Yeah, but they're not publishing papers. The papers that are in the peer reviewed literature, okay, those people, the deniers say, it's a big conspiracy, a conspiracy? How can you say that about scientists? Scientists are always looking for the fault in some existing paradigm. Anybody who does find it will get a lot of blowback. Eventually though, his or her or its name will be up in lights. They will have proven wrong the existing paradigm and we're often a new one. So the people that are doing this are doing it for other reasons. They're opposed to government intervention and intervention telling us how to run our lives or whatever. But most of those people are not publishing in the scientific literature. They may write books and pamphlets, but that's not the same thing as the peer reviewed literature. I think it will take a catastrophic event to turn this country around. I don't think politicians are able to make reasonable strategic moves and think ahead. They're always thinking short term. A catastrophic event, however, for example, completely covering Miami with water and wiping out Miami might do it. But it's gonna have to be something like that, something similar to Sputnik, which scares the daylights out of people in this country and scares the politicians at the same time. It's gonna take something like that to do it. I don't have any faith it will happen without a catastrophic event. You know, we do have a small analog to that in California and small reduction and reducing the pollution that was done by automobiles. For a long time there were other things, industrial pollution, burning garbage in your backyard. So what eventually they found out of most of the ozone and what not and NOX were produced and leaded fields were produced by the automobile industry. And so California, not with the support or favor of the auto industry, but opposed in spite of it, the people of California began to realize, oh, I can't see the mountains anymore. And they said, let's do something about it when it became clear. It had to be the cars we were all driving. And so we did it and the rest of the country said, not me and they were trying to pull off the pollution curbing devices, but ultimately the whole country went for it. And that's a case where we didn't, we had emphysema, but it wasn't thousands of people dying in the streets. So I think it's possible for people to distinguish between a insidious subtle problem. Once they are convinced that it is a problem and anybody who lived in LA in the 1960s knows that it's a problem. You go to the LAX in the afternoon to see the incoming flights and they all have their landing lights on at three o'clock, you know you got a problem. And so people realized that and we put in legislation that fixed the problem, not because industry was willing to do it, but in spite of the fact they said it couldn't be done. But we also had technology that did it. We had the catalytic converters which made a fantastic change in emissions. And we had, we developed a whole series thanks to initially to the Japanese, of very, very efficient automobiles. The combination of high efficient automobiles plus the catalytic converters to get rid of unwanted gases made the difference. And it was so, a lot of technology there happened at the same time, but also people got on board because it was almost a catastrophic event. I mean, if you live there as I did and played tennis at noon time, you had to stop. After two games, particularly if you were behind, you stopped. But for those of you, if you look back in the history and while this was being debated and the auto industry was absolutely rapidly against this, they don't want to be regulated. They said, these catalytic converters would cost $2,000 added cost to each car. In those days it may be $12,000 or $15,000. And they said, American people won't put up with this, they can't afford it, da, da, da, da. Did it ever come close to $2,000? Manufacturing costs, no. Did it ever come close to $1,000? No. There was lots of misinformation being sown. If you Google now catalytic converters after market, if you happen to poison yours, it's $200, which concludes the profit. But there was serious, serious years of propaganda saying the American people would not put up with this. And you know what, it sounds a little familiar that fossil fuel will always be cheaper renewables and a story forever. What are you messing around with the prosperity of Americans? And of course it was the same thing with safety belts. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. The point I was going to make is that you never see coverage about the huge success that we had in California, which has completely changed the air. I remember the first time I spoke at Caltech, I was sort of looking around. I couldn't see the fog that you had accumulated up on Pasadena was just huge. And today, we don't have that. Pretty clear now. But you don't have coverage of that success. Well, we're focusing on the climate issue, but it goes deeper than that. I mean, we talk about vaccinations, arguably one of the most important public health measures ever, maybe aside from sewers, but we have a lot of people, even though the science has been debunked. Pseudo-science, so how do we... I think there's a bigger problem in this country. And I think if you've been to Japan, you wouldn't dream of going by car from Tokyo to Kyoto. You've got a fantastic rail system. You wouldn't dream of driving a car in Tokyo. I live in three months a year back in the UK, and I've lived there all my life. I can walk to the station. I wouldn't dream of driving to London. It's an hour on the train. You wouldn't dream in general of flying to Manchester. You just get on the train. The real problem now is that cities like Houston and Los Angeles, and the town where I live, Tallahassee, there's no public transport system. Your big cities like New York and Boston, they've gotten in, you've got the concentration. The problem is that over the last 50 or more years, you're so spread out that public transport system is almost, doesn't make any sense. In Europe, you have the concentration of people in Paris that they go around on the underground. You wouldn't dream of going around any other way. What makes Japan very efficient is that it's one-dimensional. That one train can take you from one end to the other. The problem I see in America is that you're two-dimensional. I mean, they've talked about high-speed train from Tampa to Orlando. The problem is, if you had that train, what do you do at the other end? How do you get to where you want to go? So what people buy and buy is that, well, we might as well just get in our car and drive because we'll be there more or less, more quickly. You have a real, I think, geographical infrastructure problem which I don't see easily solved. You go to Italy, you'll find cars. You can put three of these cars inside one of your SUVs. I mean, the cars are getting bigger. There's hulks of iron and steel going around the road. I mean, Europe is going, the cars are getting smaller. Okay, they really are, particularly in Italy. I don't know that anyone can get into these cars, but these are rather big problems with regard to the car, it seems to me. Well, there is one corridor that could use a high-speed rail, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington. But there's no plan to do that. Amtrak runs at about, that's top speed, 75 miles an hour. And by comparison, Gene and I, my wife and I just came back two weeks ago. We went from Nanjing to Shanghai on a high-speed rail that goes, they tell you the speed on the little car. It was 305 kilometers an hour. It's like 180 miles an hour. Clean, quiet, doesn't jiggle, absolutely feels like you're in a jet plane with no turbulence. And it's just not once a day. It was, I don't know, five or six, eight, seven times a day. And so, that was in China. Well, California's one-dimensional. There should be a train from San Diego to all the way up to San Francisco, at least. I mean, in that sense, it's like Japan. And it should be quite easily possible. But there's no interest in doing this, and that's crazy. The entire discussion about a train from L.A. to San Francisco has become a comedy. It jiggles every minute. What does it take to put a 747 up in the air? It's an enormous amount of fuel. And it's just crazy to do it that way. I'm mindful of time, and I have one more thing that I'd like to at least mention and see if anybody even wants to nibble on this one. We talked about population growth as one of the factors to consider with sustainability. And the question kind of comes up, do we accept that as a variable that we're just going to let run free, or do we start talking about controlling population growth? Is that something that we want to even? And one of the key examples would be birth control, for example. Access to birth control in different areas of the world. You take that one back first. I don't know. Yes. Just to inject one thought, I think, isn't it the case that when everyone has had a population becoming more prosperous and more educated, fertility has gone down? So if you have people become having a more healthy and prosperous life, this might solve itself? It will if you get over that hump. And so in every society, every class, every religion, everything, once you get wealthy, you have fewer kids. A lot of it has to do with women education. A lot of it has to do with the fact that you no longer need a large family because you don't expect half of them to die in childbirth or childhood, that you actually expect them to live until they're 70 or 80. It has a lot to do with the fact that there's late night TV. It has a lot to do with the fact that. That there are other things to do. That's what I meant. It has to do with the fact, a lot of things. You have forgotten health, you know, the quality of health. Of course, it goes together with education and with wealth, but health. Now that's what I meant about childhood mortality. But there is this hump to get over and it is certainly true in terms of the sustainability of the planet. It's easier to have a middle class planet of nine and a half billion than it is to have of 11 billion. And the harder you push the margin, the harder it gets. So there's all these issues. Years ago when I started talking about climate change and this stuff that they would come up to me after it says you didn't get at the heart of the matter. We should have less people. And I said, well, that's a sensitive issue. Are you volunteering? But it's like eating less meat in the Midwest. You start ordering people to eat. No, you have to let them make these decisions and they've got to arrive at some conclusions. But there is this hump that we've got to get over. And it will be self-correcting after that but it is still a serious issue. Steve, that's exactly why we want to convert from solar electric to solar storage because then you would have electricity at night, which you won't with solar electric. When the sun goes down, you'll all be in the dark and the population will go way up. You think he's kidding. There was a northeast black on 2003, the whole northeast blacked out and for a day or two. And there was a mini baby boom nine months later. Well, this is a real effect. It's called the demographic transition. It takes about a generation or two for it to even out. But I think we can all agree here that at least 90% of us will stop having children now. How about that? Gary's volunteering. Oh yeah. Well, I thank you all very much. This has been really excellent conversation and I hope that the unresolved questions have been more or less resolved. Now I would like to turn the rest of this over to President Bergman and just for my part, thank you for a wonderful two days. Well, I'm not going to keep you more than a couple more minutes. I know it's been a long and wonderful day for everyone but just a few thank yous from my part. First of all, to Scott Burr, who really was the organizing influence on this particular conference. Thank you, Scott, so much. Also, thank you. Also, we were very privileged to have our previous directors here and involved, Chaplain LV, Tim Robinson and Chuck Niederreiter. Thank you, all of you for this history of 50 years. And I can't help but thank, from the bottom of my heart, our speakers who were here for these two days. What a privilege to have you here capped off by this evening with some dialogue. It's been an extraordinary experience and I think we would all agree that we are so grateful that you said yes when the invitation came to come back for our 50th Nobel conference. And then I must thank everyone else here at Gustavus who've helped make this all work. There's a tremendous amount of details, as you might know, our hosts, those in our dining service, those in our facilities who've helped, those who helped with all of the audio and visual. It's absolutely astounding to see how we can pull this off. And finally, our attendees, where would we be? This is not a party if nobody comes. So thank you all that you've been part of this, our students, our teachers, and all of our adult learners. One of the things we talk about here at Gustavus to our students is the importance of lifelong learning. And this is really evidence that lifelong learning, even in the sciences, actually attracts people and we make our minds think about new things. So we stretch our minds in new ways. So from renewable energy to climate change, to preserving our planet species, to the questions of the interactions between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, to the challenges related to our earth resources, to new challenges in theoretical physics, to recruiting a solar army and to exciting advances in nanomedicine, to neuroscience and neurophilosophy. Wow. This has been an intellectual experience beyond comparison. And so what else can I add to that, except to say bon voyage and come back next year to the 51st Nobel conference and we will be talking about addiction, a topic of course that is very relevant to society today and we'll explore that from various aspects as you might expect that we would. And so thank you once again everyone, safe travels and please come back to see us next year.