by my contention is for iraq to get to a because everybody's sick of me saying it i think at a level of capability fuller did it better than anybody else we have at a level of capability not exist its capability is not the reality that we've inherited outdated ready institution we've transcended material scarcity as an ontological reality there is enough for all that never has been that's the thing that i see but that's a thing that  little hard for anybody to give any sense to because everybody starving but we're going to talk about you and your career and i really like i really can graduate you on all the work where does it again call the th so yeah welcome welcome very very much to conversation it's a great pleasure to welcome to the program and you know a younger well yes he's younger than me but he's still coming into his major period of  intellectual activity and so forth and that sets the bomb and he's a i'm happy to report he's got his ph d from pennsylvania state university a ph d in geography so fellow geographer there are many of us around as what i did my doctoral work in at wayne state university in detroit but welcome very much to the program and we're going to be talking about your major is but welcome to the program thank you so much for having me and it's certainly in some countries but much less in the united states why wouldn't it be because i have a suggestion because it's your is so comprehensive you can be interested in climate patterns economic patterns political geography you can topic and there's been a push away from synthesis putting it all together and that's something the geographers have always been excellent at is looking at the big picture across across you know what's going on in the natural environment  reduction in reductionism and specialisation is just down to very very finely tuned beaches specialisation and nobody's going to be and there should be a place where people are thinking the larger issues like they do in a comprehensive way go jumping basically ignore the existence of disciplines and study topics and study them however we feel can most effectively make progress on these topics very good i have a friend mark stallman if you're watching mark i low but his dad and a lot of it has to do with the extensions of consciousness that technology is and now we're coming into an information age and we're transcending literacy it a certain level and linear thinking we're getting information overload with all the sensory capability we're able to have available to us now compared out is real information overload permits pattern recognition you don't have to know all the details it's like seeing the whole painting rather than looking at their individual dots you can stand do you think that makes any sense oh it makes perfect sense because we have so much information available to us things that people and previous generations would have and we could only have trained for this increasingly right at our fingertips and that makes it so much easier for us to look at the big picture and to tease out the insights because that's the important part it's not that the little details of what happened when and all that it's the insights for what it means for us in our lives it is those little details that are being rewarded within the academic process but you getting down into quantum mechanics or getting down into the individual you know it's specialization well what's being here is this is one reason the we started the institute that i'm part of when we started it outside of the university world we work with a lot of people in universities but we have a space where we can study freely the topics as we see fit without getting caught up in is it part of this department or that department i think i was in this thing i'm still i remain in that i'm interested in i'm going to just say it sounds crazy here in the present i think there should be a department the university of everything you know it's a little bit of room but that's sort of what we're going toward you know this is this is something geography departments they're not departments of everything they do have their focus areas they do but what they do and they do this really well and i had a fantastic time studying the you know the processes that generate the patterns and so you can observe the patterns and then you can try and understand what processes produce them and you can go back and forth between the two look at the process see what patterns emerge from it and then you can look at  the patterns and try and learn more about the process is really a great way of learning about the world yeah there should be more of that encourage and i think also the youth are particularly adapted to your younger and you've got kids coming up behind you you know teenagers and think i think that's the trend o human consciousness and we're caught up in a thing where that's been discouraged intern and we don't we've got institutions that were formulated within a condition instead nation states these kind of things that very likely in terms of the future if it's a positive future are going to be subsumed within a larger collective pattern that represents the collective and the collector situation it was a process in this part of the universe if you can follow sure yeah i'm ok i'm just old enough where now i remember i was quite young not just remember our family getting its st computer yeah people who grow and this was before the internet was really a significant thing people who are born today or even born you know ten years ago or so they don't have those memories for them computers and the internet are just part of their reality part of their entire he writes and when you can when learning about a different topic is as simple as just clicking over to a different website or a different page yeah or something like that to look across all the different disciplines is much easier now when he might have to go to a different part of the library or a different building on campus or the number of members that were used to have to go complex not all completely on line look i want to get into your thing catastrophic and all that because that's really important but let's talk a little bit also if i don't because i went over your bio pretty are pretty good it's impressive you were involved in ethics and morality and such things that help texas the study of right and wrong and what we should or shouldn't do ron and so the reason i take i think so seriously is because if we want to live our lives in the right way or the best way or so then that it's important for us to think carefully about how the basic catholic principles that we should be living our lives according to and that was that's always meant a lot for me to try and live a good life not not just a fun life for myself but a good life deal yes so for me it all starts with a yeah ok yeah yeah yeah yeah and that got you concerned with these important great i congratulate you on that grounding and then you also did grounding work as an engineer eating kind of thing with the new emerging technology g s for undergraduate studies yeah yeah that's where they met and then we get down to the major tell us well i come from an engineering family right my father was an engineer my mother's father also an engineer and growing up engineering was always kind of the natural direction for me and i like that a lot i had a fantastic time in engineering it's a great education to have a very it's a great perspective on the world because what it is is practical yeah right and so i learned a lot about how to think practically about solving problems but also do it with you know advance science and technology well and practical science and technology is one of the a lot of the most practical things are using science and technology  master's work and that this was an electrical engineering at northeastern university and as i was looking at what i was going to do for my ph d yeah that's when i really started thinking about you know maybe geography maybe involved in like community service things like that how to how to help out and that got me thinking about this is where the ethics comes in and in engineering we work on design problems and try to try to make this certain certain type of tool or so work better really important work but i was meanwhile thinking about ok so which engineering design problems should we be softened and can we really figure that out very well how about i anticipate tori design how does that thought where have we're going to we we're going to have if we get a department of everything there's a we have a department of energy and you know and all media and everything like that and i got a ph d in everything ok i don't suppose that's a really available but anyway that's just off the side so and i want to get down to the major thing you're now associated with this is a very serious work about assessing risk yes catastrophic risk global global catastrophic the organizations called the global catastrophic risk institute ok and you gave a wonderful present ation for helen caldicott thank you and as i understand you just did a thing with  yet so you're getting into a lot of very responsible people for sort of the major questions that evolve around the risk to the homo sapiens species but share how that got started and how that's a major focus of your concern now these various levels  are trying to make the world a better place than we need to work our not just make the water better better place but make it as much of a better place as we can ok ok that's i was talking about risk you're going to be considering things that are on the other side of making it a better life making things better but making for the better this includes preventing things from getting worse or that there's a there's a philosophy in there somewhere that would really sound good over a beer i if you understand what i'm saying you're dealing with risk and much of the human experience is dealing with the whole bond market in the whole the whole economic paradigm in the dow jones and all of this is invest everything there is risk there's risk that is a very sick and they've got all gridlock ways of dealing with risk in terms of investment you know it's a big prison will but you're dealing with the things that exist that are catastrophic kind of aspect for the extensions of human risks of catastrophes so big yeah they could permanently and human civilization and i don't think there's any doubt oh yeah and the reason these are so important is because if we really do care about not just ourselves not just our immediate friends and family we should care about our friends and family if we really care about everyone and this is a basic moral point that we should care about everyone in the world and the ecology  and maybe the ecology as well yeah and put if we do care about everyone not just now but also into the future yes right than a catastrophe that could permanently and the whole of human civilization and that could mean you know the loss of life for millions of people all around the world and countless numbers of countless future generations into the whole future yeah they do so if you look at it for the next if you're looking for a way to make the world a better place a much better place romans sure but there were people in the americas going to know anything about it i mean they were separated and everything so it would be a localized risk there has always been but what you're talking about is risks that are in heron to our time n are you well i mean some of these for it risk is a big some of these risk have always existed ok like a small large well small pox but for example a large asteroid impact right this was the best of yeah and as far as how catastrophic that was to matadi that's a much more difficult question because you know i have to do the archaeology of digging up the populations and then see how it affected them and there's just they did it and it came back spencer wells national geographic is scientifically solid ok came back and they had markers five markers that came back from my white chromosome which is i understand it relates me as an individual to an individual that existed in the past and that individual could be identified where that individual was an individual ok and it went back to ike forgotten it i think all come out of africa and they want to know their migration patterns that would be a risk that would be a pattern that would be relevant understanding that fascinating story but you know what we really what we look at is you know what scale of catastrophe is the human species capable of surviving and the fact that we did survive that massive eruption seventy five thousand years ago because we're here now obviously our ancestors survive very i got hurt how could i have not heard of that site that people can go to to get the reading of the real world think dangers in a large scale perhaps there you must have been tracking others that are close to honor taken get kind of data and making it a general is well sure and that is a major research tool for understanding one possible projection of the human scenario into the future that is to be taken to account and the story i can graduate as you know one of your colleagues thank you is very rich you have the story of the hope of likewise today the threats that exist to our survival as a global species today you know everything that could go into you know come from from us as would you to him and of thousands millions of years into the future think about all those future people looking back on us right we need to survive all the threats that we're facing today and order for all of those future generations to to have the chance to live just like our existence depends on our ancestors and thermal nuclear and all of that then there's people are talking about global warming they're talking about biological and pandemics that can come and that how do you assess them do you say which is the most the one that is the most likely to be relevant and what are the the percentages are the odds of one thing happening and how do we study it what do we do about how do you read it how many do you recognize and how do you relate them one these these catastrophic risks you know which ones should we be most worried about or but something that something i tell them is that in a certain way that's not actually the right question to ask for so one reason and you'll like this because in some of the what i'm most interested in is not what should we be most worried about although that is a very important question analyzing understanding the risks whether it's each risk separately  looking at how they relate to each other and that's really the starting point for understanding them and then ultimately the bottom line is what are the best most effective ways of reducing the risk in practical now you asked about which risk should be we be most worried about i say was that ok i appreciate your pattern you for yeah yeah yeah so i can i can say a little bit about that it depends on the time scale we're looking at you know so if we're talking about stand out as the most likely scenarios as you get further into the future upcoming decades or of or revisiting further yeah and then ok so global warming is a very interesting one because it's different from something like a war or a pandemic because it happens relatively slowly global warming is already happening and we're already feeling the effects of it something that here in new york city we know quite well from hurricane sandy that rolled to over that was from the wind not from the water but the water cause you know the subways were flooded yeah right right right and replace is and that's only going to get worse but it's gradual and it's not like a nuclear war where the bombs go off and things change much more would you say but you're trying to rate these and i know you're not you're seeing it all is a pattern i respect that and that's something that we should be thinking that way but it would seem to me the most immediate thing that we could see happening next weekend or something would be the weapons being yeah is their capability is the other thing about her just to clear weapons is right now and this is maybe a little under the radar it's a great one for people to be learning about right now there are actually excellent opportunities to reduce the risk from from nuclear weapons and that there are and i'll say a little bit about this there's a number of different things going on around the world to help out reducing the risk of nuclear weapons one thing that i'm really interested in and i'm i'm hon have had the chance to contribute to this a little bit yeah there's a new initiative about five years old on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons use and so spell it out for humanitarian impacts and what they do is attention to the humanitarian crises that would occur even if a single nuclear weapon would go off and certainly if there was a large scale nuclear war then the humanitarian impacts are just that much more c they try to model on the and so we're now how do we get some idea of projecting what it might mean with a model years studying risk yeah yeah the modeling that i'm most familiar with is on it's called nuclear winter and this is the global environmental consequences you know nuclear right and snow and all of that as much and we've got less sunlight is terrible for plants right it's really difficult to grow plants and so there's talk about there could be global famine yeah yeah with even not model it is one of the scenario they look at is a hypothetical nuclear war between india and pakistan very dangerous territory yes really with very high with one hundred nuclear weapons that are the size of those weapons is about fifteen kill it sounds which is about the same size as what we had and hiroshima and nagasaki so these are not enormous maggots ha nuclear weapons these are relatively small nuclear weapons in this hypothetical scenario and so with just that with just fifty weapons on each side they simulate a nuclear war between india and pakistan and then they model this is this is the model in part they model the smoke up into the into the stratosphere and then the model what happens to the global environment for the next say twenty years after that and this is this is they're using global climate models that simulate what happens with temperature and precipitation all around the world given these environmental conditions and it's tough it's really difficult that the conditions that the world would be faced with even in a relatively small nuclear war because india and pakistan they have a much smaller number of nuclear weapons compared to particular in the united states and you just marveling at the  is not happy stuff no no this is not happy stuff at all but the larger the weapon the more it can burn it will put more smoke up and same process same process just it's just it's just a firestorm then whatever little things the other nuclear powers could add to that and everything what the overall cumulative effect of an all out spasm of hatred unleashing of the total if anybody ever tried to measure a model that yes  more that's the reason they call it nuclear winter is because you could have so much cooling you get went through temperatures you get below freezing temperatures all year round ok and you can as you can burning that you could even have freezing at least for years so afterwards freezing temperatures all year round i just have to hope we have enough food lying around to keep people alive how about immediate death and so forth or is there i've used the term maybe i shouldn't use it is irresponsible i see it seems to me the weapons have become at some point in the relatively recent history species lethal for the homo sapiens species this war would in fact kill everyone on the planet because the initial explosions is highly lethal would only hit certain cities maybe a large number of cities yeah but some people in other places in different parts of the world would not be that comes to mind and then it seems to me in terms of the wrist thing could act here another question say that whatever it is that i mean let's let's just for the heck of it we're just talking intellectually over coffee or something and  whether it would be whether it's in correct or it's absolutely absurd to use the term species lethal for the ready entire homo sapiens you i see people using it i don't know if it's a based on kind of thing and we had some difficulty things did some chemical weapons that were pretty destructive but we weren't anywhere near even giving that any contemplate is it ridiculous to think of it is a ridiculous proposition to think black winter or ially be reading human history within an ethical within an evolutionary pattern that would be stopping like the dinosaurs or stopping a trend evolution that was been going on for what three certainly not at all irresponsible to bring up in a certain way we can't know the answer to this right kill everyone it's it's tough to say whether it would but as far as i'm able to tell from my own studies of this it seems like it potentially could potentially potentially could and it gets right down on to percentages that potential one percenters at ninety nine percent you know what i'm trying to get with all grid and they get down to where we think is much more carefully calibrated everything out carefully are we able we don't we don't judge these things of really don't we don't good good numbers for that yet this is something for us to reduce the risk ok to have and as for just as far as what we can do to reduce the risk yeah the specific things we can do so much of that doesn't really depend that much on whether the probability is one percent or ten really against the risk yeah yeah well so the doc for example per perfect example was saying earlier about there's this new initiative across the international community on the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons you know right and it comes out of civil society for nonprofit non governmental organization and i think well and also a lot of the countries that selves do not have nuclear weapons countries like norway and mexico and austria have been leading this process alongside non governmental organizations the one it's called i can the international coalition or campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons helen caldicott has been a great leader catastrophe that would be even if a single nuclear weapon is used right and by doing that they hope countries the countries that have nuclear weapons help them realize that ok these are weapons that we need to make sure we never use and hopefully this is this is the hope with this whole initiative and it i think it has a very good chance of succeeding of convincing countries that they need to reduce the number of nuclear weapons that they have to disarm that weapon hasn't that been and so the question was about this is it matter whether it's one percent or ten percent or one hundred percent this this process the humanitarian initiative on nuclear weapons they are saying  pushing the world in a lot of the same directions whether it's a single nuclear weapon that nation like from from a terrorist attack you know or an accident or something like that to a full scale nuclear war that's all part of the same conversations over a lot of this difference between one nuclear weapon being used and five thousand nuclear weapons being used is in some ways not that important of a distinction a good the one be triggering the other because what's an old friend trying to get a thing to go with iran and so you're aware and it's a thing of great concern you know and also did you do much geopolitics linking politics and geography or was your  yeah it's hard not to when you're talking about something like nuclear weapons yeah or global warming for that matter right where and nuclear weapons you have the big difference between the countries who have nuclear weapons including the united states and the countries that don't have to clear weapons and then within the countries the doing united states you know you look at who who are our adversaries what are the countries that these weapons potentially could be aimed towards countries like and ten thousand years ago what actually was going on but i was trying to say that this isn't abnormally pregnant or time in evolutionary theory they say that you have a steady state hom down to a time of qualitative transformation of the human scenario and the earth and that kind of spe that's sort of that sort of it's not your normal time when you can get down to work we could not have modeled that with any sense of anything in one thousand nine hundred we were imported it terms of destroying it's actually even bigger than that bigger than that  so this what we what we have right here on earth yeah whether the human civilization right now this year or next year or the next couple of decades however long it takes us to get through this could be a critical critical issue critical moments for the entire universe yes not they not you're not just right here on earth because so st of all for what about the rest of the universe for all we know we are mean there may be it's entirely possible that there are other civilizations out there and we just haven't found them yet it's entirely possible ok there's an awful lot of there's no if a lot out there yeah maybe maybe there are so far away that we can't ever find seti you know they were going you know we're still a work in progress and so far we haven't found any other intelligent civilizations so for all we know we could be this could be the universe is only chance to do something truly special right that heloc to say it is it is indeed a small world after all they got that one right thank you but it does need thank you mr disney but it is a very large galaxy and the keep our civilization intact while i wondered the dinosaurs that time thing they tried and they failed well that i'm trying to say they tried and they failed we need to succeed where the dinosaurs failed right we need to keep our civilization succeed to survive a major unleashing of the weapons now you say that will better yet make sure the weapons don't get at least in the st place but ok do if they do we need it we need to survive it it's not just the weapons it's the diseases that get you right it's the  civilization stabilize we're not in such a perilous position and then we need to eventually and we've got plenty of time for this it's no rush but we do need to spread out beyond earth and to into the rest the solar system the rest of the galaxy and beyond human beings if you were our descendants whatever those and descendants of ours would be part of is it just to put this in context you know right we're talking much longer time scales for that you know the threats to the surviv of our civilization those are media those could happen right now or next year or next decade or so those are very immediate this is the st order of business to make it off of planet earth we actually have about five very well understood and about five billion years it becomes too hot for life as we know it to exist on earth yeah that's coming no matter what nothing we can do about that as far as we can tell maybe there is but we have five billion years to worry about but so this is why we're period of history right here right now is of you know literally lactic literally astronomical cosmic significance evolutionarily we are ok if we manage to survive the threats to our civilization that exist right now if we manage to survive these threats than our our descendants maybe not even that far into the future we'll have the chance to  spread out beyond our home planet in achieve things on a much larger scale than what we have here on earth today ok i got his mistress yeah i think so you know it's a small world after all but we could achieve much more you were asking about opportunity there's much more opportunity off this planet than there is on it ok generally ok there's a fantastic planet but it's small it's only one planet there's a lot more out there but it's pretty unique life raft off the titanic they can be picked up by something that we don't know out in the into the great ocean of the universe or something that could continue but if they have a thing equally alteration in terms of mankind's ability to transform the environment that the destructor scenario that can be modeled that we finally come to a world where geopolitically the means by which political identity and the institutions that give identity to people it is very important have been established in a geo political sense the thing that made it possible for one person or one group or one nation or something to assume legitimacy to the rest of the home homo sapiens was whoever had the biggest club whoever had the military power to enforce their conquest st log international laws the right of conquest if you're advanced you go conquest the other and then you set up yourself as the king and that's the history of mankind you have a few people were doing very very well and the masses are service or serving as servants in the court of the kings who rule in everything what kind of an alteration ontologically in terms of being able to see the number the life support capability able to be provided to everybody in a way instead of out of a context of scarcity there's not nearly enough so for one to win the others have to lose could there be any alteration on that side of reading b and just toward design science capability of arriving at a liberating capability of humanity that would create a residency or a synergistic residence universe that would bring us into a universe and level a transcendent what we've been two hundred thousand years is there any point thinking about maybe we transcended scarcity or something along that line that would make possible a world of justice for all and as soon as just a residency of an integrated humanity everybody involved everybody important everybody having a sense of identity and security well this is where the only got two minutes we're going to min and a half left a minute and a half ok as those of this is where bring him back to where we started this where the author so important right because if we truly do care about everyone around the world not just ourselves  we don't need to compete in the same way that we do now and said we can solve problems we can and we can figure out what the best ways are to you know distribute what resources we have an act what a bowl and in a productive fashion don't need to worry about so much about conflicts between different people because of the different countries and so on because the countries care about each other as much as they care about themselves and i'm going to fight so if we can meld on the ethics and why says c r institute dot org and your work is really important thank you thank you thank you and give my best to all your colleagues let us by all means be in touch in the time ahead very good thank you thank you for coming in seth set  coming back again tomorrow so please tune in and once again said thanks for all the good would keep on doing it thanks for having me ok my pleasure ok i think we're we're out ok that's it