Best-selling author and futurist David Brin doesn’t mince words when it comes to his disdain for Yoda, the diminutive sage of the Star Wars saga.

“I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature,” says Brin in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Brin is just as unsparing when it comes to Star Wars creator George Lucas, whom he accuses of peddling “romantic claptrap about how demigods and mystic warriors are better than democracy.”

For Brin, narratives that glorify the prerogative of an elite caste are no trivial matter. His 1998 book The Transparent Society argues that current notions of privacy allow the rich to operate in secret as they dismantle democracy. “Unless we have radical transparency in human civilization,” says Brin, “this attempted putsch by a new aristocracy is going to succeed.”

Read our complete interview with David Brin below, in which he explains why SETI is doing it wrong, muses about whether self-righteous indignation is a form of addiction, and talks about his epic new first-contact novel, Existence. Or listen to the interview in Episode 66 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), which also features a discussion between hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley and guest geek Rob Bland about Batman in film, comics and television.

Wired: Tell us about your new novel, Existence. What’s it about?

David Brin: Existence is about the world of roughly 2050, and terrible things have happened, but guess what? People have reacted to the terrible things by coping, as they always have. They’re dealing with it. They’re dealing with living in a world of augmented reality, where you’d step outside and you can scroll through all the overlays of augmented reality that are laid upon the surface world. Google Glass is just heading us down in that direction, but I take it 40 years into the future.

The book is set against what I consider to be the fundamental quandary of our age, and that’s the Fermi paradox — the notion that the universe ought to be filled with all sorts of lifeforms, species that came out onto the galactic stage before us, and we see no signs of them, not even in the rocks of the Earth. The Earth was prime real estate for 2 billion years, with an oxygen atmosphere and nothing living on land higher than slime molds, so why didn’t the Independence Day aliens show up then, instead of when we happened to be able to defend ourselves?

And this astronaut in my novel, in the first chapter he’s out there using a space lariat — a tethered device that NASA’s actually developing — to remove space debris so that that form of pollution doesn’t destroy our access to low-Earth orbit. He snags something very unusual, and it appears to be a crystal, about a meter long, and it appears to be a message in a bottle. It appears to have been sent by other civilizations. And so the question — is it a hoax? What might the motives be of the aliens that appear to be inside?

Wired: Neal Stephenson has said that some mainstream critics have accused him of being grandiose for titling his novel The System of the World. Have you heard from any of those same critics about titling your novel Existence?

Brin: Not really, except in a joking way. I mean, there are people who say, “Well, Brin, you better live up to this.” And I’m pleased to say most of them have written back to me saying grudgingly, “Oh, all right, you did.” But there’s always going to be snarkers out there, and my answer to them — if they have useful criticism that I can learn from — my response is, “Great! Would you like to join my collection of pre-readers who catch mistakes? Next time you might be able to catch it in manuscript.”

Wired: This book predicts that bags of urine might be worth something in the future. Given the current economic situation, would you advise that we all dump our stocks and invest in urine instead?

Brin: The great phosphorous mines of Florida are being tapped out, and soon it’ll be just Morocco and a couple other places that have large phosphate beds left, and so in my novel it’s posited that in 40 years or so, men are expected to either pee outside, or into phos-urinals that collect the phosphorous.

Wired: In Existence, an autism plague features prominently. Why does autism interest you and what approach should we be taking to dealing with it?

Brin: The rate of discovery of autistic syndrome — or autistic spectrum syndrome — is rapidly rising. Some of it may be due to better diagnosis, and some may be due to environmental factors. I posit in the book that some of it may be simply due to the fact that they’re not dying anymore, but instead starting to flourish in a world where the online opportunities to express themselves are computer-mediated and possibly enable them to lead productive lives. In which case the question is, are they sick at all? Well, I think parts of the spectrum are obviously crippled and unhappy, but how many parts of that spectrum? Well, that’s an interesting question. Ask some of the internet billionaires, who are clearly from Planet Asperger.

Wired: The book also explores the idea that self-righteous indignation might be a form of addiction. Could you talk a bit about that?

Brin: I actually gave a talk at the National Institute for Drug and Addiction on this very topic. Believe it or not, I still do science. I was trained as an astrophysicist, but I do guerrilla raids into little areas of science that are outside my expertise, and I’m pleased to be a member of a civilization that puts up with that. The boundaries that were so rigidly defended — guild boundaries of scientific specialty — are no longer as fiercely defended as they were, and one piece of evidence of that is that we just won the right to establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD. It’s going to be very exciting. And all the deans from all the divisions and departments at UCSD signed on to participate in this bold new endeavor that will study imagination and how it works in human beings, from neuroscience to the arts to education — especially education — and how to engender and encourage it. So keep your eyes and ears open for more information about the Arthur Clarke center.

But the notion of self-righteous indignation being a drug high seems to develop naturally out of recent scientific results that show that addiction is actually the most natural of human processes. You’ve heard the phrase “addicted to love.” Well, you can deliberately enter less salubrious mental states. You can deliberately go to Las Vegas, and the slot machines are now tuned to track the pattern of your behavior at the slot machine and change their rewards pattern so you start getting more rewards when it calculates that you’re about to stand up and give up and leave. So there’s gambling, thrill addiction. Well, it turns out that there’s substantial evidence that self-righteous indignation is one of these drug highs, and any honest person knows this. We’ve all been in indignant snits, self-righteous furies. You go into the bathroom during one of these snits, and you look in the mirror and you have to admit, this feels great! “I am so much smarter and better than my enemies! And they are so wrong, and I am so right!”

And if we were to recognize that self-righteous indignation is a bona fide drug high, and that yes, just like alcohol, some of us can engage in it on occasion — as a matter of fact, when I engage in it, I get into a real bender — but then say, “Enough.” If we were to acknowledge this as a drug addiction, then it might weaken all the horrible addicts out there who have taken over politics in America, and allow especially conservatism to return to the genteel, calm, intellectual ways of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley.

Wired: I’ve heard that you have a list of over a hundred possible solutions to the Fermi paradox. Could you talk about that?

Brin: I have the honor to really have done the only review article on the whole question of SETI. And the reason is that my 1983 paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society — and you can get it through my website davidbrin.com — that article was the only attempt to summarize the vast array of explanations for The Great Silence. Since then, it’s appeared to be a human flaw or a human tendency … all the smart guys I know who have weighed in on this issue, from Paul Davies and Michio Kaku to Stephen Hawking, they all tend to pick one explanation and say, “This obviously is it.” I don’t see the purpose served by that. I mean, this is the only scientific topic without any subject matter.

It’s far, far better and more useful to catalog these things, and so in my 1983 paper I cataloged about 70 explanations. There have been about 30 or 40 since then. And they all suffer from various flaws. My favorite, which goes into category A — meaning that it’s conceivable that it might actually reduce the numbers a whole lot, and yet is not horribly pessimistic — is the water worlds hypothesis. It turns out that our Earth skates the very inner edge of our sun’s continuously habitable — or “Goldilocks” — zone. And the Earth may be anomalous. It may be that because we are so close to our sun, we have an anomalously oxygen-rich atmosphere, and we have anomalously little ocean for a water world. In other words, 32 percent continental mass may be high among water worlds.

“The evolution of creatures like us, with hands and fire and all that sort of thing, may be rare in the galaxy.”

In which case, the evolution of creatures like us, with hands and fire and all that sort of thing, may be rare in the galaxy. In which case, when we do build starships and head out there, perhaps we’ll find lots and lots of life worlds, but they’re all like Polynesia. We’ll find lots and lots of intelligent lifeforms out there, but they’re all dolphins, whales, squid, who could never build their own starships. What a perfect universe for us to be in, because nobody would be able to boss us around, and we’d get to be the voyagers, the Star Trek people, the starship builders, the policemen, and so on.

Wired: What do you think about the current approach to SETI, and is there anything you’d do differently?

Brin: I’ve sort of offended some of my friends in the SETI community by pointing out that recent papers have shown that their design for a search strategy for looking for extraterrestrial intelligent life with radio — the Paul Allen telescope that they built — is brilliant, it’s clever, and it’s designed entirely wrong. It could not possibly be designed worse for finding the kinds of messages that we’re likely being sent, if aliens are sending us messages. Because they’re likely to not waste the time making gigantic beacons, but likely they will know the thousand — or 10,000, or 50,000 — lifeworlds around them that have oxygen atmospheres. And likely all they’ll do is send a ping to each of them once every hundred years — or maybe once a year — saying, “Is there anybody there yet?” Because that’s cheap to do.

Another cheap thing to do is what I talk about in Existence, and that is sending probes. Now, any one space probe is going to be vastly more expensive than sending a ping via radio waves. You have to make the thing, and you have to accelerate it to 10 percent of the speed of light with a solar laser, and that’s expensive. But once it arrives in the destination system, it can then wait there for millions of years until life shows up. Whereas if you’re sending radio signals, while each one is cheap to make, you have to send them over and over across those millions of years.

Wired: You wrote an article called “World Cyberwar and the Inevitability of Radical Transparency,” which is a follow-up to your 1998 book The Transparent Society. What motivated you to write that article?

Brin: Well, what’s happened is a ferocious attempt to return to the old pattern of human government. Ninety-nine percent of human civilizations that had agriculture were pyramidal in shape, and were ruled by an obligate oligarchy, a ruling caste, that made sure that its powers were inherited — because that’s Darwinism at work — and that kept the opportunities of those below them crushed, so that the child of a peasant would likely remain a peasant and not rise up to compete against the children of the oligarchs and the lords and the aristocrats. The fact of the matter is that unless we have radical transparency in human civilization, this attempted putsch by a new aristocracy is going to succeed.

More and more of our wealth is being hidden. The latest estimate is $20 trillion has been squirreled away, and nobody knows where it is. Half of the wealth of Third World or developing nations has been robbed of them by their own kleptocracies. Can you imagine how rapidly those countries could develop if that money was simply returned to them? Maybe be left in the Swiss bank accounts, but have the Swiss instead reassign those bank accounts from the kleptocrats to the people of those countries, so the interest could aid development. Now, do I sound like a socialist? That’s not socialist at all. It’s just saying that everything should be above board, and capitalism should work with transparency.

One of the gods of the right, Friedrich Hayek, founder of the Austrian School of Economics, who the conservatives claim to consider to be the greatest economist of all time, said that the absolute necessity of capitalism is for all the players to know all of what’s going on all the time, so they can make good capitalist decisions. Even a laborer in a factory, even a peasant, if that peasant knows everything that’s going on, then that peasant can make the best deal for the fish he just caught or the yam he just grew. The greatest hypocrisy on the planet right now is for those who defend capitalism to not be in favor of radical transparency, for all of us to know who owns everything. And that is my militant, radical, moderate, pro-capitalist, pro-Enlightenment, ferocious stand.

Wired: Your Uplift series explores the possibility of boosting the intelligence of animals such as dolphins and chimps. How close are we to achieving that?

Brin: The concept of “uplift” is one of the most popular that I’ve put in my novels, and people love to read where I portray the endgame, and that is dolphins and chimps are almost ready — they can talk to us, they can add their wisdom to our culture.

These novels set 200 years in the future are about this endgame, about where the dolphins and the chimps are proving themselves. And it’s a wonderful, glorious thing. We’ve expanded the range of what it means to be human. We’ve expanded the range of wisdom that can participate, compete and partake in this wonderful enlightenment of ours.

In Existence, I talk about how we’re going to add artificial intelligences. We’re going to add autistic people, who will suddenly be technologically empowered to communicate. We’re going to probably resurrect Neanderthals within the lifetimes of our children. And it will be a more diverse world.

So isn’t it a great thing to uplift dolphins, chimpanzees and other animals that could be uplifted, to be our companions? And people write to me about that, and then I respond and I say, “Yes, but are you prepared to get this started, knowing that to get the outcome on the other end — 200 years in the future, that I describe in my Uplift novels — these creatures are going to experience a lot of pain? There’s going to be 200 years of pain.” Now, I’m not the first to describe uplifting animals. Cordwainer Smith did it in his wonderful novels. Pierre Boulle did it in Planet of the Apes. H.G. Wells did in The Island of Doctor Moreau. And in every case they took the simplistic morality tale, the Michael Crichton version of this tale, which is that some isolated scientist does this as a mad experiment and it winds up being horrible, and in the end he gets his comeuppance — like Victor Frankenstein — and everything gets put back.

And these were inspirations for Michael Crichton, because that was the pattern for all of his novels. I don’t look at things that way. I say, “Let’s do a thought experiment. What if we do it wisely? What if we do it as us? What if we do it in the open? Abandoning secrecy and with all the criticism and with the best of intent. Not trying to make them slaves, as Boulle, Smith and Wells portrayed, but trying to get additional voices for our culture. What if we did all the things right?” There would still be more than 100 years of pain. And if anybody tried to get started on an uplift project, immediately most of the people who said this is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, in 200 years, they would say, “No, let’s not do this,” because of that pain. And that’s a quandary that I explore in Existence, which turns out to be a prequel to my Uplift universe. Because it shows how the uplift project might get started.

Wired: You mentioned Planet of the Apes, and the idea of boosting primate intelligence was recently dealt with in the prequel movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Did you see that movie, and what did you think of how they handled the idea of boosting primate intelligence?

Brin: Well, I started out somewhat hostile to that movie. I wasn’t very happy at first with what I’d heard. But I was won over. They went away from the standard Frankenstein/”we’re going to treat them like garbage” notion. Instead garbage happens to this ape, but it happens in the course of individual human beings making mistakes, and some individual human beings being shitty. But civilization itself is not automatically repulsive and evil in that movie. Instead, science creates something beautiful, and makes a bunch of mistakes, and then it’s science — not our oppression of our ape slaves, but a scientific error — that winds up killing us.

Wired: Speaking of movies, you’ve been highly critical of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. What sort of reactions do you get when you criticize such popular stories?

Brin: I’ll tell you, I didn’t get anywhere near as much hate mail for my dissing of Star Wars and Yoda as I got for pointing out that our personal computers don’t have BASIC on them anymore. The geeks came out in droves to attack me for that. But people can look it up. It’s called “Why Johnny Can’t Code,” and it points out that the computers and tablets that kids have these days don’t have an entry-level, good way for a kid to learn programming.

But The Lord of the Rings? Well, I respect Tolkien. People should look up my essay. I really respect and admire Tolkien. I think he was the most honest of the Romantics. It happens I think that Romanticism is an enemy meme. I think it is deeply contrary to the Enlightenment, and deeply harmful. But Tolkien himself was the most incredibly honest Romantic. He himself pointed out the flaws of the elves and the drawbacks of Romanticism. I respect Tolkien. If I had gone to World War I like he did, and watched the flower of my generation mowed down by machine guns, I might have turned against modernity too.

I make a very big distinction between him and George Lucas, who has been given everything by modernity, who has been treated fantastically by modernity, and who has spent the last 20 years relentlessly pissing in modernity’s face, preaching Romantic claptrap about how demigods and mystic warriors are better than democracy. He never once shows the Republic ever functioning at all, at any level, in any way. And for those who think that this wasn’t deliberate, he told The New York Times in an interview that he despised democracy and he considers the best form of government to be a benign dictatorship … and strongly hinted that someone like him would probably make the cut.

“I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature.”

I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature. I have gotten people into tongue-tied snits unable to name for me one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, or says anything that’s genuinely wise. “Do or do not, there is no try.” Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! “Try” is how human beings get better. That’s how people learn, they try some of their muscles, or their Force mechanism heads in the right direction, that part gets reinforced and rewarded with positive feedback, which you never give. And parts of it get repressed by saying, “No, that you will not do!” It is abhorrent, junior high school Zen. It’s cartoon crap.

Saying that got me a book, because I was invited to Star Wars on Trial, in which I was the prosecuting attorney and Matthew Woodring Stover, who was one of Lucas’ novelizers, got to be the defense attorney, and it was such huge fun — a lot of snapping of suspenders and calling each other out and calling witnesses. We would call witnesses back and forth on a dozen different themes.

Wired: Are there any other new or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?

Brin: Well, people ask why it has been nine to 10 years between major Brin novels, and one of them was that Existence was so complicated, but I’ve also been doing other projects along the way. And one is my first science fiction comedy, and I think folks will get a lot of groans out of it. Either they’ll get a lot of yuks or they’ll say “yuck.” Comedy is very hard, I don’t know. The other thing I’ve been working on is a [young adult] series in which aliens kidnap a California high school … and eventually regret it.