01. The End



EVA KELLEY: So, hi John.

JOHN HOLTEN: Hey, Eva. What’s up?

EK: John just mispronounced my name, which is fine, because we’ve only known each other for five years.

Laughter

EK: Hi John

JH: Hey Eva

EK: So, what are we doing here?

JH: Well we’re going to go on a journey, kind of.

EK: Yeah, we’re supposed to find out about the future, I guess.

JH: Fuck yeah!

Jingle

EK: Hi, and welcome. As the name suggests, we’re looking at the lifecycle of humans from birth to death to rebirth and renewal. And we’re doing so with an eye on the future. So if we’re talking about Barbara Streisand cloning her pet dogs, we’re doing so from the perspective of what this means for a space colony in the far future. Because they’ll have pets too. Get it?

JH: We’re holed up here in an office at Klang Games, a computer game company in Berlin, Germany. We’re surrounded by programmers and game designers who are busy making a computer game called SEED, an MMO.

EK: And MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Game?

JH: Yeah, and SEED is one such game, set on an exoplanet that hundreds of thousands of players help settle. It’s a realistic projection set in a time many years from now. We’re trying to get our heads around what that might actually look like.

EK: Basically, we traveled to LA, Atlanta, Oxford, and Boston, among other places, to meet some of the world’s leading experts so that they can explain to us in simple, understandable terms just what the hell is going on and what we can expect.

JH: We’re going to look at topics like transhumanism, brain implants, simulation theories…

EK: … interfacing, cryogenics, alien zoos, cloning…

JH: … the apocalypse, mind uploading, body prostheses; but also our obsession with self-improvement. Like our sleep cycles, for example. Could technology help us with our sleep?

EK: You know, I’ve had so many issues with sleep.

JH: Like bad dreams?

EVA More like not being able to fall asleep. But lately, it’s been so much better just because I feel more balanced and peaceful, but before that I tried just about everything legal.

JH: Oh gosh.

EK: Yeah, it was fun. Speaking of dreams …

JH: Great segway.

EK: Thank you. I want to tell you about this meeting I had a couple of weeks ago that was supposed to be about math, but turned into this crazy dreamscape experience. It all happened in a Harvard classroom with Joshua Tan, a Ph.D. candidate of math.

JH: This sounds like it could be a dream.

EK: It was! And it gets better. So I was there talking to Josh about simulations, and he was explaining what a simulation means in terms of math and algorithms, and then we went into Immanuel Kant and the meaning of the Sublime, because that’s what his master’s thesis was about.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We falsely state here that Josh Tan’s MA thesis was on the topic of Kant’s Sublime, when in fact, it was the topic of Tan’s BA thesis.]

JOSHUA TAN: You read the Critique of Pure Reason, you think, oh my god, I never want to read this again, it is the most awful writing. And you have to go through another book – oh my god, I don’t wanna do this! And then there is a third book, still terrible. Then, you get to the end of the Critique of Judgement. At the end, in the epilogue, finally, Kant turns into a good writer. He defines what the sublime is there.

EK: And then he just went with it. Just spun off into this beautiful description.

JT: He is going up the Alps, the Matterhorn. He is hiking up there, it is late evening. He gets to a little ledge and decides to set up camp. He builds a little fire. The sky darkens, it’s night, and he looks up at the night sky. He sees this infinitude of stars. And suddenly, he realizes how small he is, and how large the universe is. How little – how meaningless in some sense, how insignificant this little speck of dust is in the grand scheme of things. In that realization, he encounters a kind of freedom: yes, I am insignificant, but I have the freedom to appreciate that. It is within my power to understand and appreciate my relationship with the universe at large. That is somehow a primal endowment that is part of what it means to be human, this freedom to acknowledge this, and the freedom to decide. All those emotions wrapped up together: being in nature, looking at the sky, seeing the stars, realizing how insignificant you are, but also this paradoxical freedom; that is the sublime.

JH: That was incredible! I want to hear more from Josh.

EK: We will ... in the next episode. This episode, we are starting where it’ll all end: with the apocalypse.

JH: Bang! The end IS near.

EK: That’s what everyone’s saying, and what everyone has been saying for what feels like a really long time.

JH: What about you, how do you think the world is going to end?

EK: I keep coming back to Zombies for some reason. I don’t know why. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d like to survive the apocalypse.

JH: Oh really? You want to wuss out?

EK: It just seems like it would be a terrible life. At least for the first five decades –

JH: – which would be the rest of your life. Well, let’s see. We’re going to go there. We’re going to see about life extension in this podcast. You could live forever.

EK: All the looting, and the zombies of course … What about you, John? How do you think you’re going to die?

JH: In short, I think more about what it will do to the structures we have around community, family, and society. These things will be stripped away. Quite quickly, we will potentially be one against one, desperately alone and fending for ourselves.

EK: But see, that sounds terrible. Do you see my point?

JH: Yeah. Something to look forward to.

EK: It’s intrinsically human to think about death, but it’s interesting how the idea of a collective ending of it all – the apocalypse – is such a theme on a lot of people’s minds.

JH: Right, and it always has been with religion, and what have you.

EK: Before we talk more about the future and its possible apocalyptic results –

JH: – or indeed, its possible, if any, redeeming qualities –

EK: – if any; we asked some friends and family members how they think the world is going to end, why it would end, and if they would want to survive it.

JH: This is Episode One. The End.

EK: The End.

SAM: No matter what really happens, I’ve got an agreement with a select group of friends of mine to move to an offshore location – not giving away a precise place here, but it’s off the coast of France. It’s a fort.

DAD: A combination of greed and stupidity.

VENUS: All those chemicals, it’s insane!

MARIA: One way is like earthquakes and tsunamis, and stuff like that, because of the ice caps melting.

V: And then, ten years later, you realize that everybody has cancer.

M: Probably, I feel like the plague was like a thing that could totally come back.

V: First of all, I have a compass thing, and a radio, because that’s going to be the only way to communicate.

D: I think it’s a lot closer than everybody realizes.

V: On the one hand, I think, it could literally happen tomorrow.

M: The obvious one is zombies. But realistically, it would probably be a disease or a pollution thing.

D: If one imagines that everyone poops every day, 4.5 billion people: that’s a mountain of poop. And where does it go?

S: Sea seems to be the best place, set up an ecosystem in which everyone has to bring a seed. Beans, tomatoes, vegetables, so we can eat, so we can be a self-sufficient farm.

V: It’s just the, oh, I’m gonna buy 800 gallons of water…

S: I was going to bring green beans.

ZOE: Just like somebody who knows how to make money off of the anxiety that this is happening.

S: Beans grow pretty quickly.

M: Maybe everything would be flooded.

D: Basically a river of shit.

S: Zombies can’t swim, at least not as far as this place is.

V: It’s horror, and horrible, and everything falls apart that you’re used to.

S: Soy, rice, and I think, is the currency dirt?

M: My social skills would almost be a life-saver, because I’m like a fun person to be around.

S: Either way, I feel like we’d be given a warning. I think you probably have half an hour to get your affairs in order.

D: Billions of batteries every year.

M: If it was about survival and not some airborne thing happening, I think I would have a better chance, because I could totally be a badass.

D: We think: Well, it’s gone, we flushed the toilet, or we just leave it in the ground, or, whatever we do with it. And we do the same thing with plastic bottles, straws, batteries, and nuclear waste. We’re just: out of sight is out of mind.

S: Yeah, I want to stick around. I want to try and stick around, I guess.

D: How much crap can the world handle? If you took 4.5 billion bowel movements and put them in one place, would anyone live there?

M: Also, I’m a fast runner. I don’t run a lot, but I could.

D: I know survivalists who are morbidly obese diabetics.

M: Would want to be in the rich-people-bunker until it’s safe to come out, but if it was never safe to come out, I would rather not be in the rich-people-bunker and just be dead.

D: Instead of preparing for the end, you should try to make things better for everybody.

S: There’s a forum, but I feel like I’ve said too much.

D: With all our garbage, islands of plastic floating around the ocean, all the fish dying, the climate’s changing – and nobody cares. They’re more interested in whether they have soft toilet paper.

S: Either we destroy the Earth, which therefore destroys humanity – unless we move on somewhere else; or we say, okay, well the Earth is going to survive, and humanity as we know it might not exist in that way, and it might go into something else.

D: Don’t shit where you eat, right? But that’s what we do.

S: It’s inevitable, and I don’t think we’re gonna be really able to stop it.

D: Do I have my wife and my daughters with me? Do I have access to basic antibiotics? Things like that? Am I armed? Do I have a lot of ammunition? Because there’s gonna be a lot of crazy people running around.

EK: You just heard in no particular order my mom, my dad, my little sister, and my friends Venus, Zoe, and Sam, whom I’d like to congratulate on their very vivid imaginations. The question of »Do you think the end is near?« is the new icebreaker, honestly.

JH: It’s so funny and a tad unsettling to hear so many different takes on something so serious. I found myself nodding my head in agreement to all of them.

JH: One thing to think about when starting a podcast about the future of humanity is the idea of prophesy and the idea of predicting the future of humanity. But I guess starting with the end and the end of the world that makes me think of the idea of weather prediction - prophesy, we used to always look to the weather in ancient times and make predictions about the future based on natural occurring weather phenomena. But nowadays we can't predict the weather because the weather has gone AWOL, a bit loco, in the sense that the 'right' weather is happening in the wrong places at the wrong time so to speak. We're always joking that it's cold when it should be warm and so on and that kind of permeates into the larger sense that we are going through the sixth mass extinction event on the earth's timeframe which is no small matter and it's kind of terrifying.

One book I read this year was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, kind of outlines in terrifying clarity the effects climate change and global heating is having. And one thing you can see this summer with the Amazon fires that have been in the news is how non-linear the weather is coming: so Wallace-Wells talks about 'cascades', basically feedback loops that one aspect of global warming will impact a totally other part of the world or a totally other part of the meteorological cycle. So basically we can imagine new biological cycles that are taking place: we've got rainstorms that are huge, with huge amounts of rainfall coming out of nowhere; we've got mudslides as a result of these floods. Then we have some crazy numbers: 600,000 people die from wildfire smoke every year. I mean, obviously the Amazon fires you can then think are releasing all this carbon from the very things that used to capture the carbon - the trees - and that's one of the most scary feedback loops we can imagine.

Just to jump out from this year, in 2017 we had 100,000 fires in the Amazon, a quarter of all the carbon absorbed per year comes from the Amazon. But basically then last year we got Bolsonaro, who got elected to be president of Brazil and now you really got to ask: how much damage can one man do? And it seems he can do quite a lot of damage actually! One prediction is that between 2021 and 2030 Bolsanaro's deforestation would release 13.12 gigatons of carbon. And to put that in context the USA put out 5 gigatons in 2018 (also not good). So you're talking here about all the other countries and what they would do to reduce their carbon output would pale in insignificance by just the sheer stupidity of this man's political agenda. And of course you can follow the money in relation to why he is doing this, you can also see how the West's need for more and more cattle to eat more and more beef, and other animals, we need to have soya to feed that livestock so therefore farmers and other interested parties will cut down the Amazon to plant this mono-culture which itself is terrible for biodiversity which leads into again this sixth mass extinction just so that farmers can send profit margins up and up to send us the beef that we're eating kind of mindlessly.

And all of this does become terrifying. What are you going to do? I mean all sorts of things seem to heading toward some sort of crunch in an accelerationist kind of way and yet signing a Greenpeace petition or what have you can help, but also you've got since last year in 2018 the rise of the school strikes, Friday's For Futures, led by Greta Turnberg. And I think this is so indicative that it's the kids who are taking the lead in this while so many of us are feeling kind of paralyzed. When we look at the future of humanity the kids are being the most vociferous. The cliche is that we inherit the earth from our children, and their grandchildren, but there is something to that cliche in the sense that we're merely passing it on, it doesn't belong to any of us. The world, you could argue, doesn't belong to humans at all. And in this podcast we'll be looking at some object-oriented thinking and so on, if we've got time for it. So that's why we're starting with this brief episode the end of the world and the apocalypse. It's been in popular culture from as long as any of us can think of. Recently we've had book and film by Cormac McCarthy The Road, which I heard David Wallace-Wells argue is maybe an enjoyable post-apocalyptic scenario because we're never told what the actual kick-off event is. McCarthy doesn't give us that one reason why the world kind of falls apart, but I think with global heating and other technological related adverse affects of society that you can imagine they all lead toward a gradual slow heating up of the world. So we have to think about that in the long run and not just one apocalyptic movie-friendly event.

Bring on the future, with positivity and happiness I guess.

JH: But really Eva - what I want to talk about now is the second law of thermodynamics. (laughs)

EK: Really? That's what you want to talk about? Because I would talk about the first one, but I just don't know anything about the second one. That's a joke.

JH: It states In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all isolated systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. In other words that the way of the universe is to move from order to states of disorder - in a word: entropy. Which being the crazy Irish guy that I am, makes me think of an Irish poet, WB Yeats and his poem The Second Coming.

EK: Can you read it?

JH:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

EK: Nice.

JH: Entropy. Things breaking apart. And yet, and yet - we have life… highly ordered states of matter. Another weird Irish connection is that Erwin Schrödinger, the great 20th-century physicist famous for his cat, has in fact another paradox - posed in a series of lectures in Dublin between 1942-1943 - how is that out of the chaos of the universe, matter comes together into life? This series of lectures were highly influential by the way, they allowed for the subsequent discovery of DNA and the field of genetics.

EK: There is something to be found in death - and perhaps even the apocalypse. Our first reaction to the apocalypse is usually one of fear, or just generally, it’s depressing. But actually, an ending also by default implies a beginning.

JH: Yeah. There’s the famous quote from the German physicist Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. What he actually said was: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

EK: We will find out more in episode 2 of The Life Cycle when we question the theories behind the »zoo hypothesis«.

EK: Meanwhile, remember to like and subscribe. The song you’re hearing right now is »The End of the World« by Vegas. The Life Cycle podcast is produced by Klang, and written, hosted, and produced by John Holten and me, Eva Kelley. Additional research done by no one.

JH: Executive producer is Mundi Vondi, mix and sound engineering is done by our main man David Magnusson.

EK: And special thanks to my mom Eyla, my dad Andrew, my sister Maria, and my amazing friends Venus, Zoe, and Sam, for all sharing their apocalypse dreams.

JH: This episode was recorded at Harvard University, MIT, and the Klang headquarters in Berlin Kreuzberg. See you next time!