 Let's see what are the fronts that all of us can represent. I don't know. I'm an organiser. No, there are people here who could. We'll need a talk tonight. Yeah, come up with something. Can we call them? Can we call them? No, I wrote the list. Where's the audio? I'm sure they'll check soon. We'll make a Skype call in a second so I can speak to them. We'll make a little bit more quiet in the room so that it doesn't go through the speakers. Should we call first? Quiet in the room, please. Can you hear me okay? Wonderful. We're just getting started. I'm going to introduce you now. This is Matthew talking. It's a great pleasure to meet you on Skype like this. I am over. This is me. Where am I? Okay, well, I don't know if you can see me or not. Everyone, this on the screen is Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack, who have written an extraordinary book among other things called The New Universe and the Human Future, subtitled How a shared cosmology could transform the world. Nancy and Joel, this is the art and survival convening. Theater artists and activists and thinkers and scholars from our field, from all over the country, you are here today. You saw the itinerary for this convening and some of the material. I just want to say it's a personal sort of honor to meet you. I really appreciate you being a part of this conversation today. So thank you. It's absolutely wonderful to be able to talk to people who are like me, we're honored ourselves. Thank you. So just to give a little context, I did send a link to a TED talk that Nancy and Joel gave, but if you didn't get to see that, I'm just going to tell you a little bit about their work, a little bit about this book. I'm nervous. So Nancy and Joel, please interrupt me if I start by taking your material into some nonsense land. Well, they're already up seven of you. It's just a cable. Here we are. Okay, there you are, great. So just a little background, Nancy Ellen Abrams is a cultural philosopher and attorney and lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz has worked with the Ford Foundation and the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. Joel Primak here, Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC Santa Cruz is one of the principal creators of the modern theory of the universe on the grand scale. This book here, The New Universe of the Human Future, I was talking to a dear friend of mine about ancestral knowledge and sort of the feeling that there is a lack of connection to ancestral knowledge. Thinking about how in certain places where maybe tsunamis come in urban areas, they may get hit very hard, but I heard this sort of parable about a tsunami that had a giant urban area versus a small coastal rural place. And in that small coastal rural place, they didn't know why, but they did know because of the transference of knowledge in their culture and their community that when the waters went back, they should all go to higher ground. They didn't know why, but they had that knowledge because there was a system of connectivity. And in an urban area, not that far from there, there wasn't such connectivity, and there was more devastation and more death for that matter. And in talking about this with my friend, she said, you have to check out this book. The book I'm holding here, and I think it's connected to that, but it's actually much more. I'm going to read it from this flap. After a fourth century rupture between science and the questions of value and meaning, this groundbreaking book presents an explosive and potentially life-altering idea. The world could agree on a shared creation story based on modern cosmology and biology, a story that has just become available. It would redefine our relationship with the planet and benefit all of humanity now and in the distant future. Since the last couple of years, there's been several things that have been really inspiring me. One has to do the research into the faculty of optimism, which you spoke about. Another is Lewis Hyde's work that we talked about, about the gift exchange, many others, especially, most of all, your work, Nancy and Joel. I'm going to try and summarize it as best I can, or at least say something about it from my limited perspective. So the premise is basically, and part of this is quoting and part of this is paraphrasing, many earlier and still existing cultures have drawn strength from the belief that they matter in the universe, sometimes based on mythology, stories, cosmology, and other things. Today, we know more about the universe, its origins, its history, our planet, the solar system, more than ever before. We know that it's rapidly expanding due to the nature of dark energy while simultaneously galaxies stay connected together by dark matter. This is sort of beautiful paradoxical tension happening. We know that our planet is made of the rarest materials. Many of these discoveries about the makeup and history of this universe and the solar system of this planet have been happening over, especially in the 20th century, so a lot of them are quite recent. We know that these conditions that we all enjoy, and again, every time I read this in the book, it made me think about this question of artistic conditions, but we know that the conditions that exist on our planet are extremely rare. We know that we stand at an utterly unique moment in time, a sort of a middle ground of time, looking, we talked about the symmetry of time, especially in terms of the age of our solar system. We're about four and a half billion years in, and we have about five to six billion more to go before our sun is capuzzi. We know we are at the center. We know that humans on the spectrum of all sizes are also in the middle, the gigantic spectrum of size that exists from the tiniest sub-particles to giant galaxies, etc. We find ourselves in the middle of that spectrum, and that our intelligence and that our consciousness is extremely rare and also related to our special place in that spectrum of size. If we were two or three feet larger, we wouldn't have a larger bone density. Our muscles would need to be larger. Our blood circulation would need to go to those things rather than to the faculties of our minds, and we wouldn't have the consciousness we would have if we found ourselves in a different place on the spectrum of size. So this is all to say how unique and how special this awareness is, this capability to reflect, to witness, and to understand the universe that we're in, this place. The Double Edge has been very informed by the phenomenon and the movement of localization, which has metaphor biologically and economically and agriculturally and culturally. To me it's really interesting personally going from this research of the self that the artist must do to go inward, the inner work, which is the capital W word, has to have the same tension going outwards to its local community after its immediate community, and then ultimately into this sort of, not just national or our civilization, but even larger into this sort of cosmic realm, which is very inspiring I think. And that our place in this, in terms of time and size, enables us to be aware, and it enables these faculties such as optimism, such as imagination, and prayer, and memory, and the ability to conjure. This is our unique potential. And culture has always been an engine for these things, it's always been the engine for optimism, for the engine of imagination, and for human connection. All of human behavior is predicated by our beliefs. What we think we can do, what we think it's possible, and what goes on in these sort of special faculties, which we are quite rare to... That is the premise, and I just want to say also at this point in time, with the amount of population growth that's going on, the amount where we are in this history, and I love this part of the book, I'd like to read a quote, which is talking about the need for complex growth now versus physical growth. I'm going to read this whole paragraph. Another false assumption for many people, the end of growth is immediately interpreted economically as meaning the death of progress and freedom, but biologically the end of growth looks very different. We reach a certain size in adulthood. People whose bodies keep growing nonstop are suffering from the disease of gigantism, they become weakened up. The same may be true of an economy. This is the end of humanity's adolescence, this moment in time right now. It's a coming of age, and from here on the growth of complexity in human civilization shouldn't be physical any longer, but intellectual, emotional, artistic, relational, and spiritual. This resonates in terms of our field of theater, as we see modes of production changing. It resonates in terms of cultural organizing, that the resources are about complex growth now, and taking from a different mode that also privileges those resources, not having the largest marketing or infrastructure, might be a benefit if you have the largest capability of metabolizing complexity in a group, let's say, or in a community. And that right now, one last part of this book that I think is so interesting is that to quote, a stable period can last as long as human creativity stays ahead of our physical impact on the Earth. Could you read that again? Yes, a stable period can last as long as human creativity stays ahead of our physical impact on the Earth. Thanks. Nonstop creativity will be essential to maintain long-term stability. That's my summarizing and contextualizing of your work in terms of this art and survival convening, which has been talking about these questions in relationship to the artist, the artist's activist, and affecting change in large-scale and small paradigms. I'm wondering if you might be able to speak a little bit, well, of course, elaborate or clarify anything I've mangled, but if you can say it, speak to what you think the role of the artist is in your vision and in your work. That was really very nice of you. Not a problem at all. The role of the artist, let me just step back one little bit and say that our book is about cosmology, but there are two really different definitions of cosmology. One of them is the definition used by astrophysicists, and the other is the definition used by anthropologists. He did? The anthropologist was much older. So, in anthropology, the cosmology of a civilization is for a culture. It's the picture of reality. How everything fits together. Where do they come from? What do the gods expect of them? What are the gods? How does the world operate? All of that is the picture of reality that people share. And anthropologists like to figure out what that is. But in astrophysics, cosmology is the scientific study of the universe as a whole. As a single, evolving story. And it doesn't have anything to do with people. That's the big difference. The anthropological type of cosmology told people how they fit into their world. But scientific cosmology doesn't have anything to do with us people. It tries to disrupt the large-scale universe. What Joe and I are going to be trying to do in our books, the one that we just made from New Universe to Human Future, and there was four of that, a quote from the Center for the Universe. What we're trying to do here is to bring these two kinds of cosmologies together into one coherent story that's actually based on science. And it has never been possible until today, for the last couple of years, we've simply haven't known enough about the universe to be able to base me on it. And, oh, that's better than this one. Now, think of the first time that humanity has ever had a story of the whole entire universe that was actually based on data that was used in the universe before. So, having a coherent story about not only where the universe came from but how we as human beings fit into it and the fantastical truth that this is giving us is coming. And that's a thing that we're developing a global civilization with increasing conflict and misunderstandings that are embedded in that. And also the disaster of the changing climate, which is going to be causing tremendous amount more conflict as people fight over water, space. So, there are these two things that are happening at the same time. But that is this new story that could actually unite people around the world and this desperate need for such a story because we don't have any basis right now around the world for cooperating. We have no shared ground, no common ground. Partly anybody agrees with anybody. So, I mean, of course, around the world. So, this could be a great opportunity. However, the science is really weird and tricky and counterintuitive and not the kind of thing that most people can actually understand. So, all of our artists has to be to present it in a way that actually touches people and shows them how they fit into the universe in a way that's emotionally powerful and also accurate. Because if it isn't accurate, it's just impressionistic and it isn't really going to help. So, if you look at ancient cosmologies, Egypt, the world, let all the cosmologies up until modern cosmology, they've all been communicated through art. Rituals, theater, music, meditation. I mean, all kinds of, you know, God and meditation, prayer, imagery, all kinds is what has told people how they fit into their universe and how they're basically their religion sees reality. And we really need that. We need some kind of an artistic picture of this new cosmology so that we can understand how we fit into the universe. Let me say what Nancy said, how weird our modern picture is. I mentioned the one idea of reality that it's really important that people understand and that people mostly haven't even thought about. And then maybe a little bit about a company that's interested in drama could possibly exploit that. So it's so weird about the modern universe. Yeah, it's practically all invisible. We just think that the stars and the grand collections of stars that we see using our great help, what we now know, and we really know this, this is not controversial. We know many different ways. Yeah, let me see. All the stars in all the galaxies, all the things that absorb like planets and dust and things like that, all that are added together is about half of 1% of what's actually there. It's there when we detect it in various ways and directly. But it's not what we see. And it would be tricky to figure out how the whole story works. But my colleagues and I have created made a lot of predictions about the heat radiation in the Big Bang and how it's distributed, for example, and how galaxies are distributed nearby and also far away. And all of those predictions come true in kind of a safe detail. The predictions are pretty weird. But the fact that it hasn't contained it has agreed with the predictions without any exceptions. There are no contradictions at all. That was numbers all around the world. That this crazy theory based on dark matter and the universe together and also making it fly apart, that this is basic. All right, so it's an odd picture. It does take so much claiming. And probably, as Nancy said, it has to be presented to most people without the details of science, but with all kinds of artistic ideas that could spread. And also the biological world. We're now beginning to understand how all life arms are connected to each other, especially since we can sequence the DNA. And what we're learning is complicated and interesting and really important, but it's not being communicated. The idea is the idea of exponential growth. Just as the universe, it was particularly important to think at the very beginning of the Big Bang. But it's really important on Earth right now. We're in the middle of Earth, of the age of Earth as Michael said. Sorry, Matthew said, it started about four and a half billion years ago on our solar system. The sun, all the planets on Earth perform. We've got five or so billion years to go before the sun turns into a red giant. So we're right in the middle. And we're in the middle of the best period of time. And large life arms started to develop about half a billion years ago. And it's going to grow steadily hotter as all stars of this type do. And in about half a billion years, the Earth will become really uncomfortably hot. Having nothing to do with global climate change, we could make it uncomfortably hot much sooner than that. Even on any carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the Earth will become really a life of our type in about half a billion years. So we're living right in the middle of the best. But the thing that's really is at the end of exponential growth. What's happened is that since the industrial revolution started in the 1800s, it was helpful to all industrial products, including our output of carbon dioxide, about 30 years. So we'll ask the point, if you like, happened from about 1980 to 2010, that's 30 years. The next one will go until about 2040. There's four, three more doublings this century. That's a fact, eight. Two times two times two. But now it's so much carbon dioxide, we're actually increasing the amount of dioxide in the entire atmosphere by a principal amount. From a little under, to just over 400, so that's 133. But the key thing to understand is that that's not compared to what we're poised to do, and we keep exponentially increasing the amount of oxygen.