YouSaid · the spoken record

Neal Stephenson

lines on the record: 144
first: 2021-11-11
most recent: 2021-11-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, well, he's clearly willing to tackle big, ambitious projects without a lot of kind of soul searching or trying to make up his mind.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was trying to express the talking a lot about the moment where suddenly you kind of. Rise above the thin blue blanket of the atmosphere and you're up into the blackness. And that had a huge impact on him. So he was kind of, I wouldn't say groping for words because he was pretty eloquent, but he was trying to express his feelings about that in a way that is pretty gripping to watch.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you saw it with Shatner Reaction to the flight yesterday. For him, that trip was more than worth it just for these intangible reasons.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's plenty of people who are sufficiently excited by the colonized Mars vision that they're willing to just go all in on it, even if there's not a business plan behind it. So I think it's well chosen. It's just. I think it's probably the only approach to take. A lot of when white people came to this continent and started colonizing it, there was not a lot of coherent planning. Like what plans they did have turned out to be terrible plans, you know, trying to come up with plans that extend decades into the future is a waste of time.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to think of a resource that's on Mars that could be brought back here cheaply enough to compete with stuff we could just dig out of the ground here or grow here. So I don't know if there is a business plan for that or if it's just strictly we're going to go there and see what happens.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that colonizing Mars is the kind of It's easily stated, it's catchy, it's the kind of thing that can inspire people to get involved in a way that some other programs might not. So I think it's well chosen in that way. I have technical questions. There's a problem of perchlorates on the surface of Mars that's going to be big trouble. And there's radiation. So this is known.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, SpaceX in particular has done things that are just unbelievable. And I don't think anyone was anticipating 20 years ago, let's say, when this all started. Just the speed with which they'd be able to rack up these incredible achievements. If you've kind of even seen a little bit of how the sausage is made and so the difficulty of doing any kind of space travel, what they've achieved is just unbelievable.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. But that doesn't seem, you know, it doesn't seem plausible. We know that humans had sex with Neanderthals, with Denisevans. So you could think of them as aliens that came from our planet. So that's a kind of data point, I guess. But if you broaden your definition of sex to mean any kind of gratifying physical interaction, then sure.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Star Trek, in classic Star Trek, you had to really suspend your disbelief to think that Spock was half Vulcan and half human, right? Because that's just not going to work. DNA-wise. So if by sex you mean reproductive sex, then I would say no unless you go to a panspermia kind of theory, which is that humans were seated onto the planet as part of a galactic program of some sort.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are different takes on that depending on how biologically similar they are to us. There's a school of thought that says basically. Advanced life has to be carbon based for just reasons of chemistry. So, right away, if you impose that limitation, then you're kind of assuming something that's starting to be biologically similar to us. So if they're about as big as we are and they kind of move around in space, you know, in a physical body the way we do, then there's probably a way to solve that communication problem. If they're, you know, like beings of pure energy from Star Trek or... Something like that, then it's a different story.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I love thinking about ideas like that. That's great science fiction novel father that the aliens are so different that we simply don't see them.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would think. So I actually think your idea of a science fair project gone bad, you know, it makes more sense in that it would explain why if these things are alien technologies, they're just kind of hanging around our aircraft carriers for no particular reason, like not trying to communicate.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I would expect that the arrival of these things would be something we'd notice. It's got to decelerate into our solar system by, unless it got here really, really, really slowly. So I guess that's. That's a possibility, and just kind of snuck in.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'd like to see some better pictures for the reason I mentioned earlier having to do with the difficulty of traveling between star systems. It's really hard for me to believe it's aliens. I just can't understand why you would go to all that trouble to transport something across light years and then do what these UFOs are allegedly doing. Like how is that interesting? How does that justify the trip?”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, part of my motivation in studying that was to ask that question. It was more almost a symbolic way of saying, look, There's all kinds of physics we haven't explored yet. It's no more crazy than the idea of chemical rockets. It's just that more money's gone into chemical rockets”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think about it, a whip is an incredibly simple primitive object that can break the speed of sound So it's unbelievable in a way that for thousands of years, people wouldn't know technology have been able to accelerate objects through the speed of sound just through an architectural trick, just the physics of a moving bend of material in a medium can do this. So that's the thing I still think about from time to time. You can use the same physics to make freestanding loops of chain or other flexible materials that just kind of stand up under their own physics.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jordan Kerr and others worked on another laser system, the late Dr. Jordan Kerr that just would heat up a heat exchanger by converging many converging solid state lasers from the ground. And Kevin Parkin works on a similar scheme that just uses microwaves to do that. We looked at tall towers. I spent a while looking at kind of semi-seriously at giant bullets.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you fire it at a vehicle that has a block of ice on the back and the pulse hits the ice and flashes off a layer of steam that becomes plasma. And plasma is opaque because it conducts. And so being opaque, it then absorbs all of the energy from the laser pulse and gets really hot and just pushes on the back of the block of ice. And then you wait a moment for that to dissipate and then you do it again. So it would just kind of vibrate its way. It sounds really violent, but Freeman said that if you were wearing rubber soled tennis shoes standing in this vehicle, you would just feel a mild vibration. So there your source of energy is on the ground and you're getting higher specific impulse than you could get by burning chemicals.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's, I mean, you've probably heard a project Orion, which was Freeman Dyson and some of his collaborators. A scheme to power a large space vehicle by detonating atomic bombs behind it. And so one of the other people who was working at Blue Operations during this time was George Dyson, the son of Freeman. And so we knew all about Project Orion. And he found an old film that they'd shot on a beach in La Jolla of a prototype of this that was powered by lumps of C4. So that was an idea, but for private company obtaining a large number of atomic bombs was probably out of scope. So it was more of a theoretical thing. Conceptually similar Approach using lasers that Freeman worked on with Arthur Cantrowitz and some others where you take a pulse blazer.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so at a certain point, you give up on trying to invent completely new ideas and just go poking around trying to find those guys. So, there's a number of ideas that we looked at. Some are crazier, some are less crazy. But the direction that that company eventually took was chemical rockets.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put all of my brain power to work and be creative as I could and invent some idea that I thought was new for making things go fast. And I would always find out that some guy in Russia or somewhere had thought the same idea up 50 years ago and figured out all the math”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. This is basically the story of how All of this competition, and because of these historical accidents, you know, trillions of RD dollars and rubles were put into development of chemical rocket technology, which is now advanced to an incredibly high degree. But there's other ways to make things go really fast. Is all that rockets do that's all orbiting really fast. And because so many nerds are obsessed with space, people have been thinking about alternate schemes for as long as they've been thinking about rockets. And so one of the first things that I learned, kind of trying to explore new possibilities was that I could”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which is true of a lot of technologies, by the way. By the time these rockets are kind of working, we've got hydrogen bombs that are so big and so devastating that nobody really wants to use them. But it turns out you can fit a capsule with a couple of people in it into the socket on the end of a missile that was made to hold a hydrogen bomb. So we start doing that instead as a proxy for having a war.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creates a demand for rockets that didn't exist before. Because if you've got atomic bombs, you need a way to deliver them. You can do with bombers, but it's a lot better to just hurl them to the other side of the world on the top of a rocket. So suddenly rockets, which had gotten a boost because of Hitler's V2 program, got a much bigger boost during the 50s and 60s.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hitler desperately wants to bomb London, but he can't quite reach it. And the Luftwaffe has been kind of neutralized. So he decides he's going to lob warheads into it with rockets, which is a terrible misallocation of resources. It's a terrible idea. So it only could have happened in a dictatorship controlled by a lunatic. But that's the situation that existed. So they built these rockets. That's the V-2. And then it's just a complete coincidence that that war ends with atomic bombs being developed in a completely separate super weapon program. And so suddenly the...”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what I was Blue Operations LLC, which was the precursor to Blue Origin. And so it was a small staff of people that did that for a few years. And I think it was about 2003, 2004 that it swung decisively towards the direction it's been following ever since, which is using basically existing aerospace technologies and models to make chemical fueled rockets for space tourism. I believe and I continue to believe that the fact that we use chemical rockets is just an accident of history that comes out of World War II. So until World War II, rockets are being built on a small scale by people like Robert Goddard. But then...”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, to go back to the first thing you said, Jeff Bezos is not a guy who required a lot of convincing. He'd been thinking about it since he was five years old. And it was an inevitability. But the idea that kind of got hatched in 1999 was to just do some advanced scouting work, explore the corners of the space of possibilities.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have nothing against it. It's just, like I said, it's got the motivation to do it has to come from some kind of spiritual or kind of non-tangible calculus.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew a veteran of the Apollo program who once said that the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest achievement.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasons. I think that's the only reason that you would do it. Because economically, it just makes more sense to build rotating cylindrical space habitats and make them perfect.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of parameters that we need to stay between in order to survive in terms of the gravitational field that we can deal with. So that sets a bound on the size of the planet. And what we need in the way of temperature and atmosphere and so on. So when you look at all those complications, then basically building sort of exactly the environment we want out of available materials in this solar system starts to look a hell of a lot better. It's hard to make an economic argument, let's say, for making that journey. One of the things I like about the expanse is the fact that the people who are trying to build the starship to go to the other solar system are doing it for religion.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, the generation ship, yeah. I think that's the only way it would have to keep going for a long time. And they might get to where they're going and find a shitty solar system. We can try to. Try to do some advanced survey, but I mean, if you get there and all the planets in that solar system are just garbage planets, then it's kind of a big letdown for this like thousand year voyage that you've just been on. So, I mean, we have a pretty narrow range of.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he better take some good pictures on your way by. And that's great if it happens. I'm not knocking it. But the amount of energy that's needed is just staggering. And there's other issues like just how do you maintain an ecosystem for that long in isolation? How do you prevent people from going crazy? What happens if you hit something while traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light?”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just an energy I mean, you can do it slowly whenever you want. But the idea of getting there in one lifetime or multiple, a few lifetimes requires huge amounts of energy to accelerate. And then as soon as you get halfway there, you need... You'll just go shooting by. And so that means carrying a lot of energy. And there's ideas like Yuri Milner, I think, is still funding the idea to use laser propulsion to send something to another star system, a small object. But it'll have no way to slow down, as far as I know.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what happens is that these things come along and then people find ways to game them. And so I saw an interesting thread the other day pointing out that, you know, 20 years ago, if you had Googled Pythagorean theorem. Chances are you would have been taken directly to a page explaining the Pythagorean theorem. If you do it now, you're probably going to, the top hits are going to be from somebody who's got an angle, who's got a scheme. They're like trying to sell you math tutoring or they're working some kind of marketing plan on you. The traditional engines become actually less useful over time for their original educational purpose. That doesn't mean that they can't and shouldn't be replaced by newer and better ones.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah, yeah. That was still in the era of Alta Vista and Ask Jeeves and multiple different search engines. And yeah, I'm pretty sure I had not heard of Google at that point. That would have been 95, 96. I think the book came out in 94”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is the theme of a book I wrote called The Diamond Age, which talks about a book that essentially does that. And I've been sort of watching people try to come at the problem of building that thing from different directions. Ever since the book came out, basically. And so I kind of have a, although I haven't worked on it myself, I do get a sense of the level of difficulty in realizing that goal.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a good chunk of the Gulag Archipelago when I was a teenager because my grandfather had it in his house because he was one of these Americans who was obsessed with the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat and wanted people to be aware of some of what had happened. And so he had those books lying around. And I would read them. And it's a similar kind of parallel story to what happened in Germany during the war, you know, this creation of this system of camps and oppression and lots of troubling behavior.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, so one of the things that emerges from the war and from the extermination camps is that we were never allowed to have illusions anymore about human nature. So you have to learn that lesson to be an educated person and you have to know that Even in a supposedly enlightened civilized society, people can become monsters quite easily. So that is for sure the big takeaway.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being who I am, I tend to focus on the Curious technological things that happened in conjunction with that war, which may not be where you want to go.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, hyperinflation and unemployment and the decline in standard of living. And that sounds like a plausible explanation. But there are economic troubles now for sure. We had the bank collapse in 2008. And there's stagnation in some people's standards of living. But it's hard to explain what we've seen in this country in the last few years just strictly on the basis of people are poor and angry and sad. Think they want to be angry.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know until the last 10 or so years, I would have taken that view, I think. But people will find ways to be divisive and angry if it scratches a kind of psychological itch that they have got. And we used to look at the Weimar Republic, what happened in the economic collapse of Germany prior to The rise of Hitler, World War II, and kind of explain Hitler, at least partially, by just the misery that people were living in at that time.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The standards of living life expectancy, all that have gotten incredibly better within the last, particularly the last hundred years, I mean, just antibiotics, modern vaccines, electrification, the internet. These are all improvements in most people's standard of living and health and longevity that exceed anything that was seen before in human history. So people are living longer. They're generally healthier and so on. But again, we still see a lot of the same behavior patterns, some of which are not very attractive.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Afraid it repeats itself a lot. So I think human nature kind of is what it is. Tend to see similar behavior patterns emerging again and again. And so it's kind of the exception rather than the rule when something new happens.”
2021-11-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #240 – Neal Stephenson: Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI, VR & the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source