 Hello, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for joining us at this conversation with Neil Stevenson to talk about his new book, Termination Shock. My name is Ed Finn. I'm the academic director of Future Tense, which is a collaboration between Slate, New America and Arizona State that examines the intersection of emerging technology with people and policy. So Neil Stevenson is a bestselling author, a string of bestsellers, the kind of writer whose books are passed around in boardrooms and maker spaces and startup offices, who coined the term metaverse in his novel Snow Crash, in the Diamond Age in a string of amazing books exploring all sorts of topics from space exploration and the future of the human to, in his most recent book, Termination Shock, the existential challenges of climate change and what that means for us as a species, biologically, culturally, socially, politically, technologically. So, I want to start by telling a little story about Neil and how we came to know him about 10 years ago, and one of the very first Future Tense events which I actually wasn't present for but I've told this story so many times that I really hope Neil doesn't tell me that I got it wrong. So, Neil was, had recently written an article called innovation starvation, which was a reflection on how things worked out growing up, watching the Apollo program, the national interstate program, all of these huge ambitious global scale, long term, positive visions of the future that were then built into reality, a set of, a set of exercises and thinking big and then doing big stuff. And the, this essay was making the argument, we seem to have lost that thread. We don't seem to be thinking big in the same way anymore. And we seem to have a much more dystopian and antagonistic relationship with the future and this is a real problem. And so, Neil was there with ASU's President Michael Crow at this event, and Michael Crow being the kind of guy he is that, well, Neil, you know, maybe this is your fault, maybe it's not that we have this structural problem or that the engineers and the scientists and entrepreneurs are have lost their capacity to think big maybe what we need are better stories about the future we need to rediscover our sense of optimism, and our sense of hope about the future. And so that conversation struck a spark, and I'm so glad that it happened because one of the things that came out of it, what two of the things that came out of it were project hieroglyphs, which is this wonderful collaboration and book project where we took that task to heart and try to imagine technically grounded optimistic stories about the near future. And it was the birth of the Center for Science and the imagination which became the institutional home for that project. And over the years, we have continued to work with Neil and a bunch of other amazing writers and researchers and all sort of artists all sorts of people to create to try to work towards this sense of inspiring optimism and agency around the future. How do we and responsibility towards the future so how do we change that collective relationship to work towards the world that we want to live in, rather than just freak out about the worlds that we don't want to live in, or throw up our hands and say there's nothing we can do. So, speaking of worlds. I want to bring bring you in Neil, enough for me. I want to talk about world building that you are a celebrated master of fictional worlds, and every story is a microcosm but your books are often straight up cosmos is Cosmo I don't know, richly are the world's world worlds that are their own immersive form of imagination so I'm going to ask how you approach that craft do you have a philosophy or an aesthetic approach to the way that you build story worlds. Is this something that you think about. How do you how do you think about that that that part of your that aspect of your writing. I think you can kind of divide my books into ones that take place in in some version of our world. So don't really involve world building per se, versus ones that actually do involve creating some kind of fictional world so. This is an example in 70s, those are both books where where a fictional world had to be created as part of the project and you know, it is a it is a different process for me to be sure you've got to have some idea of what's the. I would say what's the history of the world that you're trying to build. You know, I mean, to name a pretty, pretty off sided example. Tolkien probably had to have the Silmarillion worked out in his head in order to create the world that's that's depicted in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. And what the backstory was and to create the sense of historical depth behind the characters and places and situations that that he was featuring in those those books. So, you know, it's all a matter of trying to. At the end of the day what a writers really trying to do is to foster and maintain the suspension of disbelief on the part of the of the reader. And so it comes down to, you know, what do you need to do in order to achieve that that goal and in the case of a world building kind of book, what you have to do is give it some depth, give it a history give it some background. Well, one one way of phrasing it that that has kind of stuck in my mind is that I was talking to Richard Taylor Sir Richard Taylor who founded a workshop that did the props and the costumes and the weapons and so on for the Lord of the Rings movies and he said his. His basic principle that he tried to follow was to create the impression that if the camera were to pan around and look to either side of the frame that the world that you were seeing in the frame would just keep on going forever. And so that that's as good a way as I can think up to encapsulate what it is that you're trying to do when you write a world building kind of book. I really love that. And it reminds me of a bit from the the comic comics author and sort of comics philosopher Scott McLeod, he has a book called understanding comics where he uses that the reverse of that the the the fiction that the world only exists where you see it. And then when you turn your head it sort of disappears behind you. So it's a neat inverse of that. Yeah, and it also strikes me in the division that you made that that's of course easier when you're setting your story in our world. But of course, every time you fictionalize your your changing things. And you got me thinking when about the suspension of disbelief because without getting into any spoilers, your new book opens with a really improbable moment. You sort of draw us into the storytelling through getting into explaining in great detail how this moment happened and you know that we know by the end of the opening section of the book we know everything about why this moment came to be. But how do you how do you think about world building when you do have the world as it is how did you approach the things you wanted to change for termination shock and extend out or build out from the present. Well one of the basic decisions to be made from the very beginning was how far in the future to set the book, because clearly, the farther you reach into the future the more leeway is available in terms of basically how much the climate has changed. And, and so you're used to are given leeway to imagine all kinds of lure it disasters and and and relatively improbable outlandish kinds of events that might happen. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking that approach. But, but if you could think of that as a knob that you can set to whatever setting you want. The decision I made was that I wanted to have the book seem more approachable to people who aren't necessarily habitual readers of science fiction. It's a nice middle ground where it can be just a few years in the future it can have enough kind of speculative material in it that science fiction fan will will find it a fun book to read. But it's not so far out that that that readers of you know genre, you know, techno thrillers or whatever you want to call them would find it off putting or or weird. And I also thought that it was important to do it that way simply because, you know, part of what's going on in this book is, is me trying to sort of get people thinking about the problems of climate change. And if, if the book is set too far in the future, it's easy to read it as just a kind of escapist entertainment and not kind of take it as seriously but if it's said in a world that's essentially the same as the world we're living in now with just a few kind of exaggerations then hopefully it feels more immediate and gets people thinking about the problem in a more direct and immediate way. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because I'm very interested in this whole question of climate futures, and how we, everything that I said about the future seems only to be more accentuated when we're talking about climate change because it's the set of global incredibly complex problems that seem to happen too slowly and too quickly at the same time, and that are vastly distributed and there's no one person you can point to and say this is your fault or you can fix this. So this must present some interesting challenges as a writer. How did you approach the, that challenge you set yourself of getting people to think through these problems, and imagine potential responses. A couple of things, one is that I kind of made a decision not to emphasize kind of outlandishly weird climate events particularly the you know mostly what we see is, is kind of a hurricane Harvey situation that takes place in Houston, which is something that happens every few years already, it's just it's a little worse because sea levels a little higher, you know climate has advanced a little more. But I wanted to, again, I wanted it to feel sort of immediate and and not something that was projecting way out into an outlandish future. And, you know, the other basic move I'm making in this book is, is positing a situation where there's one individual who does actually have a lot of leverage and a lot of agency in that he's made a decision that he's going to implement solar engineering, just on his own. He's a wealthy Texan, who comes from a background in the oil and mining industry. He's got the know how he's got the will to do it, he's he's got the land to do it on, and he just makes a unilateral decision that he's going to that he's going to take some action. I think that is a way of making the whole idea hopefully feel more immediate and not just something that kind of dissolves into this welter of you know conferences and you know international organizations and and debate. Well, back to the formula we came up with for hieroglyph no hyperspace, no hackers, no holocausts. Yeah, and I forgot that. Yeah. Yeah, what do you think I mean is, is that something your your your main character is he and I think by hackers we were also talking about plucky bands of outsiders right that not every story can be about the improbable external rag tag under force, and I don't know he I hear I don't think the TR the main character is, is that but I'm curious to hear what you think and yeah why was, why was this a good mechanism for getting into into the climate discussion. Yeah, well the, I mean, so let's take those in order so, you know, no, no hyperspace basically means, let's, let's have these stories be about real technology that either exists already, or could exist, you know within a few years. So that's, I've kind of checked that box in this book by having the, the, the geoengineering scheme be be all based on science that we know and on. I love the detailed, you know, fly leaf illustration in the book of how, how the tech works very satisfying to the, you know, yeah, thanks. That's all that's from Weta workshop design studio, who just did an amazing job with it. The. So, and then the no hackers just means, can we, can we please get away from the, the trope of the kind of rag tag band of counterculture. People who are sort of tweaking the essence of hacking is finding clever ways to tweak or manipulate a great big system, great big powerful system that you didn't create. You do and everything but, but at the end of the day, if that's, if that's what hacking is you're sort of, you're always kind of an epa phenomenon, as opposed to being the phenomenon. And so, in this case, again, the, the, the guy who's implementing this, this device is building something new and he's, he's kind of the opposite ended the spectrum from a rag tag counterculture figure he's very much a stock. Well and gas billionaire, who's using kind of very straight laced engineering approaches to and technology that comes out of the mining industry. And then finally the third one was no holocausts plural, which, which just means, you know, can we get away from books that derive the sort of an almost pornographic fascination from incredibly terrible things happening to the world. The And in this case, you know, there are certainly bad things going on in the world and I think, you know, if anything, I've been a little optimistic on that front but rather than just having everything just turned to shit and be desperate and gloomy, you know, it's a, it's a case where one person tries to do something which is controversial and perhaps ill advised and other people react against it. Some people like what he's doing some people don't but basically geopolitics happens in what I hope is is kind of a realistic way it's neither a complete disastrous holocaust nor utopian future. Yeah I found the geopolitical part of your story really interesting because I think part of what it makes the narrative appealing is this idea that oh there is somebody who can do something and can have a meaningful impact, and who can take action and then that that action causes precipitates all of these other things it changes the geopolitical order effectively. I wondered how if that's something you, you thought about you know do you see this. I'm curious to where your thoughts are on the whole question of geoengineering and you know other other responses to climate change you know I'm not sort of invested in that particular term but just what is what is large scale collective action look Well, I mean just to review what whenever we talk about climate change. We're really essentially talking about one number, which is the parts per million of co2 in the world's atmosphere. And prior to the industrial revolution that was in the mid 200s. When I was born. It was 320. And today it's 414 a year ago is 411. So that gives you some idea of how fast it's going up right now it's higher than it has been at any point in the last few million years. And you know the last time it was this high earth had a very different climate. And there you know the only thing really worth talking about is how do we get that number down again. And, and there's kind of two parts of that one is to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere, which is a great thing to do. And it's going to happen slowly it's it's probably you know even under the most optimistic projections it's not going to be until something like 2050 2060 something like that before we reach net zero carbon emissions. So it's easy to perhaps imagine that if we could reach that point. Then the problem would kind of resolve because that's the story that we have in our heads from past examples of, of air pollution problems right so in the 1950s in London there was a terrible air pollution problem because of coal burning and they enacted a clean air law, and the problem sort of went away, because the smoke basically blew off, you know the next time the wind changed and, and, and, and so the recovery was sort of free and automatic. Similar things happened with smog in Los Angeles, or the, the, the problem of the ozone hole disappearing. As soon as we stopped putting the bad stuff into the atmosphere, the problem is of nature corrected the problem. Those are bad analogies or, or narratives for thinking about the CO2 problem because if we can stop putting new CO2 into the atmosphere, the amount of time that it would take for natural processes to bring the number back down to where it should be is on the order of a million years. So, so it's not just enough to go to net zero carbon emissions although we do have to do that but we're also going to have to impact CO2 from the atmosphere so called carbon capture we're going to have to do it on an unbelievably massive scale. So anything that we talked about in the hieroglyph project is is trivial and completely dwarfed by the scale on which we have to do carbon capture. And, and in the meantime, there's going to be this period, probably most of the 21st century during which the CO2 level is just too high. And, and so it seems likely that we're going to begin seeing the mass fatality events, such as Kim Stanley Robinson very aptly describes in the first chapter of his book. The History for the Future. And so, so what, what's going on in termination shock is that this guy might my fictional character so he gets all this, and decides that he's going to take action to, to bring the global temperature down through geo engineering. So, for, for carbon capture programs to be implemented on a meaningful scale. So, and that does thus end the, the, the dissertation. I'm disappointed that you don't travel with a stand projector and stick to show us some of the charts and grass. I do. I have a PowerPoint so I've been showing it my book tour events. Yeah, well I was about to follow up and say actually I'm, that's great I'm glad that you do because this is it isn't a huge challenge that we need to contend with. You know, when we first started talking about climate future stuff at the Center for Science and the imagination a few years ago, it really felt like the urgent challenge was just to get people to, to pay attention and to care about it to recognize it as a real and present challenge that not some something abstract or something that would get taken care of later. Now it doesn't feel like we need to make that argument anymore. I agree. I think have come to come to accept that this is happening, and it's serious. And so now the problem feels like what are we going to do about it. And there are very few compelling stories out there that offer people a sense of agency and responsibility that connect us in the present to some kind of future that we might actually want to work towards. So, I don't you know just, I'm just going to throw that out there. Is that something that you think about maybe maybe the way to, to get into this is to think about, do you see a role for fiction and addressing this crisis to the stories we tell about climate, make a difference. Well, I mean clearly, I've got some opinions about that, given the current book. So, I, I haven't made an effort to follow clarify, you know, climate fiction. Largely because I've been working on a clarify book and I didn't want to get tangled up with stories that other people were telling. So I'm not well versed in that I don't know what kinds of stories people have been been telling. I think it's certainly easy to tell a gloomy story. But hopefully, you know, kind of in the spirit of the hieroglyph project. People can can take other approaches as well and and and and try to come up with visions that are a little more encouraging. And I might, might help spur people into some kind of constructive action. It's, it's hard because it's so slow and kind of diffuse. And, and you know, I mean, a lot of the proposals to begin doing something about it are in the realm of policy, you know, it's like, how can we create financial incentives that will, you know, create a market or some other, you know, set of financial structures that will cause people to spend money on this. And, you know, that's just, it's not as fun to write about as aliens and rocket ships and blasters. Yeah, it's it's really hard and this is, you know, mentioning Kim Stanley Robinson's novel also becomes a centerpiece of his story as a new financial cryptocurrency that's basically a carbon coin that people can be motivated to to stop producing carbon you can get paid not to do things that are going to contribute to the to the crisis. So, I agree it's it's really hard to, to get into the policy questions. But I think, you know, you end up doing it in this story too right because all of the, the technological solutions end up being policy, their policy debates. There are some weird, maybe surprising analogies between this and the question of human activity in space. You know, we have all of the technical solutions that we need to address this challenge right now. We will get better ones, you know, we'll get better, we'll get more efficient solar and all kinds of things will maybe one day we'll have fusion power, but we know how technically we could solve these problems now, but it becomes a policy and a social question, just like we've known how to go to space for a long time and the question becomes well why are we going to do it and who's going to pay for it and what's the, what's the meaning of it what's the purpose of it. So, I guess, do you see that that sense of is, I, well, I'm thinking about your, the, your writing and, you know, one of my favorite things you ever wrote was that great long article and wired about transatlantic or ocean, oceanic cables. And this interplay between the stuff of the real world, the material fabric and industrial fabric or reality and how that overlays with our social fabric and information, but also economies and ideas. And I see a lot of that in this book to the way that you talk about resource extraction and mining and the, the, the, the role that those industries played historically and causing a lot of this, this pollution, but also how inescapable they are for anything we're going to do technologically to, to build a different future. So I just is, did you think about that notion of how do we change the things that we value, what do we, what do we identify as valuable or how do we, how do we, how do we change our, our value structures in order to invest in or buy into either economically or just sort of in a, in a more social way, how do we buy into a different way of doing things to deal with the climate crisis. Yeah, I would say that I did not think about it deeply, that it's not that kind of book. And so it's, and so in that sense, you know, I'm kind of dodging the central question a little bit. Is your privilege as the interviewee. The one of the one of the interesting features of where we are right now globally as a society is the reliance on billionaires to solve problems. So, problems that 50 years ago we would have solved through some, you know, governmental body, some other kind of large traditional institution. A lot of those don't seem to be getting solved anymore by those traditional institutions and, but at the same time we've seen the rise of, of billionaires who are proportionally speaking, you know, incredibly wealthy right so it's not just that they're rich people. It's that they're unbelievably rich and control a pretty significant fraction of the total wealth of the human race. And so it's become conventional now to kind of expect that the Elon Musk's and the Bill Gates of the world are going to tackle things like the space program, or eradicating malaria, or other things like that that used to be the province of large governments. So, in this case, that kind of enabled me to bypass a lot of the detailed policy and money questions that are in the real world. Very important by just saying by fiat that I've got this character who's got a lot of money who just decides to single handedly do this. And I think it is realistic that individual or a country might might do some geoengineering because I think it's, it's achievable at a, at the right price point. Yeah, it's not that hard. But I don't think that the same is true of carbon capture on on a scale, commensurate with with what we need to see. So, so for that we are going to have to find ways to make it lucrative for lack of a better term. And I bet geoengineering is interesting too because I think there's a fairly narrow and maybe more provocative definition which is about something like over you know launch a bunch of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. But if you think about how much human activity changed in 2020 because of COVID and how it had a noticeable noticeable impact on how much carbon we put into the air. During those months when we all decided that suddenly it wasn't so important to drive into work every day and now we weren't going to get on an airplane to travel to that conference. And that we're human activity is already at a scale that we're we're effectively engineering and manipulating every system on the planet. So, I guess, and have been doing for thousands of years. Yeah, that's right. Every, every invasive species that we introduce every large social decision we make every new technology that takes off and becomes a ubiquitous tool in the human toolkit. These all have huge impacts. It's only now that we're beginning to recognize how I think we spent a long time separating ourselves from pretending to separate ourselves from natural systems and now I realized oh no, we're still part of them and they're part of us. I think there's a segue here. So we're talking about how we solve these problems now to that to to innovation starvation and the whole idea of thinking big. So it's been a decade since you had that conversation with Michael Crow. How the stakes of that discussion change, do you think, are we still facing the same fundamental challenges about how we imagine and build the future. I think one thing that's definitely changed is, is the various exploits of Elon Musk which in not just SpaceX but other things he's done as well which are kind of in that spirit. So that's kind of a new wrinkle that didn't exist back then. And it, you know, in some of the remarks that he's made about what he's doing. I'm honestly thinking of this. I'm not what I wrote but just what I wrote about, you know, the idea that, you know, why shouldn't we, why shouldn't we dig big tunnels under our cities, you know why shouldn't we build a rocket that's bigger than the Saturn five. So, so that's a new wrinkle. And, I don't know, beyond that, I think I get you know changing changing the mindsets and the behaviors of large institutions is very difficult they basically don't change. I think for the most part just have to be kind of superseded and absorbed, you know, instead of being reformed and reprogrammed from the ground up. So, to what extent that's actually happening though. Yeah, it feels like an interesting juncture in terms of the institutions that are actually governing and the reason, I mean I'm not an expert in this but I think that the reason billionaires are people are empowered to make these decisions now is as you were saying because they are so much more wealthy and powerful that this this level of wealth disparity is is is really remarkable and coupled with this time where we have an incredible amount of technological agency to do stuff. If you have the money the means the wherewithal to pull it off. So, it's very also they also tend to be unitary decision makers, as opposed to, you know, deliberative bodies. So, there's all kinds of mechanisms that have been put into place, basically as to react against past abuses or past, you know, failures that that were were put in for kind of well meaning reasons but have the effect of, of making things incredibly slow and sometimes preventing from happening altogether. And so, you know the trying to do anything ambitious and big in the world is really hard. And you've got to have not just the capital on hand, but you've got to have the talent with who can who can execute your plan you've got to have the opportunity. And all of those things are kind of ephemeral and kind of touchy so you know your your investors may get skittish and decide not to invest or decide to fire you and put in new management and your talent may may wander off. And the opportunity that that you're trying to strike at may be ephemeral you know if you have to spend six months or a year. Satisfying due diligence or regulatory requirements that the opportunity may no longer exist by the time you've done all of that. So, I think that the ability of wealthy individuals to just pull the trigger on projects like this and begin doing things kind of gives them even more of an advantage than they have already. I mean they already have the advantage of being billionaires, which is a pretty big advantage, but but then so multiplying even that is their kind of ability to to move in a decisive way. The only thing I would add to your list is even billionaires need to have the right story to tell about what they're trying to do. And I'm reminded of another thing that you said in the early hieroglyph days which is that a good science fiction story can save you countless hours of meetings and PowerPoints because it gets everybody on the same page. So that that that makes me think of that this question of the feedback loop between science and science fiction. And I'm going to bring up something that you may already be sick of talking about which is they can imagine what this might be. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you have no idea. No idea. You can get out your katana and try to cut through the wall at any time. In snow crash you coined the term metaverse and you must be having interesting feelings about how another billionaire and one of the world's largest companies has taken up your moniker. So, feel free to to to talk about that example or not but what are your thoughts on this feedback loop between science and science fiction, and has this most recent episode, you know change your thinking about that at all. Well yeah the interesting thing in the case of the metaverse is the time lag, which is about 30 years. So, that's pretty good and academic publishing. Yeah, so I may I must have coined the term and something like 1989 or 1990 when I was writing the book. So it's been that long, almost a well, you know, 30 plus years. So, and in that time a lot of people have, have looked at that idea and sort of they're without my influence have have implemented various aspects of it. So, in a lot of ways, it already exists and has existed for a long time there's, there's massively multiplayer games that have been around for a while World of Warcraft as has been around in its current form for for a long time and Fortnite is another very popular game where you're, you're, you know, existing in a virtual world with 100 or 99 other players represented by avatars. So a lot of this stuff already exists and is being pushed forward, maybe not under the name of the metaverse but you know it's got the, the same underlying technological requirements. So, the, the, the, the version that we're seeing being shown to us by, by Facebook is is far as I can tell nothing particularly new. It's, you know, we're seeing a few people having a virtual meeting around a virtual conference table and sharing a virtual whiteboard. You know, two people who are far apart playing chess with each other and that kind of thing and all of those have existed for for many years in other under other names. So, the, I guess I would just suggest that we focus not on what they're claiming they're going to do in a few years but what they're actually doing now which doesn't bear much of a resemblance to the metaverse. So, and ask ourselves if they maintain the same business model in which, you know, very large numbers of people use the application for free and then their data is sold to unknown, you know, players. You know, what, how's that, how's that going to make our society look given given the way it looks now. But, do you have any thoughts on the feedback loop? Yeah, the feedback loop. I kind of strayed from your question. The, I mean, I think it's real. It's clearly it's a thing that happens sometimes I wouldn't want to overplay the idea too much. But, you know, I guess I can't really improve on the thing I said years ago that you've already quoted which is that the story provides a vision or a narrative that a company can kind of organize itself around. And so it saves a lot of unnecessary communication. So you can see this with, with what SpaceX wants to do which is colonize Mars. Okay, there is a very simple, clear vision. You know, in the 60s, the vision was put a man on the moon. Again, very simple and clear. In between we had the space shuttle which is, you know, develop a modular reusable launch system that can be employed to put payloads into low earth orbit of various types to perform a range of scientific experiments and commercial applications right so that's a pretty long winded and vague story that a lot of people don't find very motivating. Yeah, and that became reflected in the very complex technical requirements that the space shuttle had to fulfill to meet many different expectations. So I want to I want to transition over to take some questions from the audience encourage you to put your questions in if you haven't already. There's some good ones in here. So this is one from arena as months and you write a lot about how people react to crumbling or flawed institutions what's your favorite sci fi or fantasy novel that shows healthy institutions. That's a that's a great question. And it's very difficult to answer I so like nothing's coming to my head right away. Part of it is I'm not that dedicated a reader of science fiction I'm not as well versed in it in the in the whole body of work as you might, as you might expect. So I would probably pull up some kind of embarrassingly ancient reference. You know the, the Federation and Starfleet and in Star Trek. For the most part is portrayed as a pretty effective organization I mean occasionally. You might see a flawed, you know, commander or some kind of conflict in the upper brass but you know it. It's generally the good guy and as portrayed as being pretty good at his job. So I think that's a fairly classic example of a of a big institution in science fiction that this appears to work. I like that example sorry go ahead Neil. I just, I'm remembering a remark I heard about I can't remember who told me this story a friend of mine was saying that he had tried to get his, his uncle or something to watch Star Trek. The original series and this this guy was like a navy World War two veteran or something and, and he was just he just thought it was ridiculous and. So my friend asked him you know why you know why why are you so like dismissive, you know this because I think it's pretty cool and he goes, speaking of Captain Kirk he said, they would never let a hippie like that be in charge of a starship. That's amazing. I am continually amazed by how much starfully and Star Trek is still a big part of our collective imagination of a positive future, just like Disney's Tomorrowland it's sort of just still there, you know it's it's still a territory that we keep coming back to. Okay, well, we'll go to a different wedge of the trivial pursuit pie here Neil as a student of history. Does this period remind you of any other periods if so what lessons can we learn from that or those periods this is a question from Sean McAllister. I think it's, we're, we're unfortunately kind of forced to look at previous examples of empires that that went into decline. I didn't want to say it like for a long time I was holding out hope that the United States was would pull out of the nose dive in. You know not not be in decline anymore but it's it's really hard to say that right now with a straight face sadly. And one book I've been flogging on the book tour is called the fate of Rome. It's a of course I'm blanking on the name of the author but it's a fairly recent book, maybe somebody can can pull it up it's it's about the role that played by climate change and and Kyle Harper Kyle Harper. Yeah, yeah that's it. In the fall of the Roman Empire and he's telling a pretty oft told well worn story how the Roman Empire declined and fell apart but with new information about how changes in climate and and disease, which were sometimes interrelated phenomena contributed to that. And, and so the bit that I've been quoting from is in 535 536 of the of the common era AD, whatever you want to call it. There were some volcanic eruptions elsewhere in the world that led to cold conditions for a couple of years and crop failures. And, and at the same time, through a sort of complicated chain of events allowed bubonic plague to escape from its reservoirs in Central Asian marmot colonies to the Mediterranean, where it just had unbelievably devastating effects like you know even by the standards of bubonic plague epidemics. This one was a doozy. And so it's kind of a meditation on how if, if there, if there's existing kind of structural weaknesses in a in an empire that the shock of a pandemic and the way that it it saps the energy of of a country can can hasten the process that was already kind of underway for other reasons that that's a pretty good one to look at I think Yeah, it looks like a great, a really interesting book and I hadn't heard that I think there's been Emily new it says a great book on looking at I think it's called for cities that also does that exploring how these kinds of external stresses can just be a tipping point for all empire political society civilization. So another question that I'll share from from the group is about geoengineering sort of real world geoengineering proposals to spray reflective aerosols into the stratosphere like Nathan Mirvold, which I think is, which I don't understand if that's different from what you proposed in the book so maybe you can elucidate that but or you mentioned briefly the idea of putting giant mirrors and orbit somewhere, or fertilizing the oceans. So this is a question for Mike Nelson, I do you have thoughts on other geoengineering proposals or maybe what what led you to choose this one for the for the book. Yeah, so I'll go in reverse order what led me to choose this one is that it's the simplest and most straightforward technique and nature has done the experiment for us over and over again with volcanic eruptions so there's variations on the theme. The ones that are I associate in my mind with with Nathan Mirvold's work are different ways of delivering the sulfur to the stratosphere using balloons or what have you and ideas are sort of a fundamentally different idea called cloud brightening where you just have ships fleets of ships that shoot seawater into the air and create mist create clouds artificial clouds that just because they have high albedo they're they bounce back a lot of the suns. The sun's light. Another another way to reduce the amount of sunlight entering the the atmosphere is is space based solar geoengineering. There's a you know space geeks will know that there's these points called Liberation points or Lagrange points in space. There's five of them in any two body system so if you're looking at the earth sun system. There's four in L five which are off to the sides and then there's one two and three and L one is simply in between the earth and the sun it's where the gravity of those two bodies balances out. So, by definition, it's directly between the earth and the sun and so if you put any kind of mirror or absorbing object there, it's going to stop some of the light that would have otherwise continued and hit the earth. And it's kind of stable it's it's a meta stable. unstable equilibrium so basically if the thing drifts too close to the sun, the sun's gravity gets stronger, and it falls into the sun if it goes the other way toward the earth it falls into the earth so you've got to expend some energy to do station keeping but still it's a pretty stable location to put stuff and so one idea that's been discussed is is you know trying to launch. Some kind of objects that would that would kind of unfurl. They'd have to be lightweight but then they would have to expand it you know it's like a fan or an umbrella or something to block as much light as possible. So that's my time for one last question, which I wish I'd asked you in the inner conversation as well, something that I really liked in the book was your discussion of performative war, which I won't contextualize again so that we're not doing any spoilers. I was just asked about that it felt was really interesting and imaginative. Others have written about this but didn't have ranking systems and betting lines. So, maybe you could dilate a little on performative war and is that something that you see becoming more common place in the near future. Yeah I mean it's a, it means something like. It's a way of reducing the body count and the amount of damage done in a conflict by moving things out of the realm of World War two style, World War one style, you know, advancing or retreating and into the realm of kind of bait well we might call Psi ops. So, how do you affect the psychology of the enemy to make them capitulate. And on one level it's kind of derided as being sort of something that savages do or their primitive people do, which is a fair, a fair point but on the other hand, you know it can have the net effect of keeping the body count lower. So if you look at World War one, for example. You know a lot of people died in that war and it would have been preferable if we could have found, you know, like, what if we had two champions what if Hector and Achilles had gone out and fought each other instead only one of them would die. So performative war is just a term for that kind of thing. And I'm, you know, again, avoiding spoilers I make some use of it in the, in the novel in a kind of modern context and it's it does exist now we see it when when when we had the shock and awe attacks and Baghdad that's an example of it. When and terrorist attacks, you know, are attempting to do some of the same thing you know they're the body count, the damage done might not be nearly as high as what you would see, you know in a typical country on the Eastern front of World War two, but, but somehow it's calibrated in a way to affect people psychologically much more strongly than than old school trench warfare did. I just, I thought it was an interesting way to put some action and some fighting and some combat into a book without having it just turned into a bloodbath. And it seems like it's going to have interesting intersections with disinformation and already has. When the performative war is not just about the battle of the champions but convincing people that actually some much larger piece of the fabric of reality is different, you know and you have the footage to prove it. Interesting threads there remind me of one of the plot lines in your novel fall as well, and the events around Moab. Unfortunately, we have to stop there on that really positive and heartwarming note, but as always, Neil it's a great pleasure to be with you congratulations on this book. I encourage everybody to go and check it out. Thank you for your time, everybody for joining us today, and if you're not racing out to capture some carbon yourselves, you should dial into next week's event on December 8 at 6pm Eastern is China cancelling the internet. Speak getting back to our question about empires rising and falling. Thanks again. Thank you, Neil.