Building A Better Future: The Role Of Optimistic Sci-Fi

This interview has been transcribed using AI technology. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the transcription may contain errors.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Futurist Society, where, as always, we are talking in the present and talking about the future. Thank you so much to everybody joining us. I have a really special guest today.

Andrei Bourmanis is a writer and producer of some of my favorite intellectual properties that have really inspired me to bring you this podcast, as well as think about the future in an optimistic light. Andrei, thank you so much for joining us. I mean, you've had experience with Star Trek.

You had experience with the Orville. Tell us how your career started and what got you into this.

Well, thanks. And it's a pleasure to be here, Imran. I've always been interested in space and astronomy from a very young age.

I was born in Chicago, but I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1960s and 70s. And I remember vividly a couple of experiences, one being a camping trip with the Boy Scouts when I was 11 years old and going out to a place called Oak Creek Canyon, which at the time was near the town of Sedona, which has become a very popular tourist destination in recent years. Not so recent years.

It's been that way for a while. But certainly back when I was a little kid, there weren't a lot of people there. And so the skies were very dark and you were up in the mountains.

And I remember seeing the Milky Way for the first time. It was like a solid band of white light stretching across the sky from horizon to horizon. That's how dark the skies were back then.

And I was flabbergasted. And then some months later, got to see Saturn through a telescope for the first time. And it literally took my breath away.

I couldn't believe this tiny little disc with a tiny little ring around it, that you could see that with a telescope, by the way, a telescope with about the aperture of that little one over there. And I was hooked. This was around the time of the Apollo moon landings, which was a very exciting period, of course, in history.

And, of course, I was a huge fan of Star Trek. I saw it when it was originally on the air a few times, but I was very young and I didn't really understand it. My older brother was a fan of the show.

And then I really started to get to know the show, the original Star Trek series when I was in high school, because they were starting to show it in reruns after it had been canceled. And I'd come home from high school and Star Trek was on TV pretty much every afternoon at four or five o'clock or whatever. And I watched it religiously, read a book about the making of Star Trek, which I found fascinating.

I had no idea at that time how TV shows were made, but I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be writing for Star Trek, for new incarnations of Star Trek and then other science fiction shows. But yeah, I studied, I was a physics major in college, studied physics and astronomy and did a year of graduate school in physics and decided, you know, I didn't really want to go that route. My primary interest was astronomy, which is, you know, applied physics.

But all of my friends who were going on to get their PhDs in astronomy spent all these years in graduate school and they couldn't get jobs in the field. They ended up becoming computer programmers because back then there was only about 1500 professional astronomers in the United States. I don't know how many more there are today, probably not a lot more.

And I kind of, you know, I didn't really care for computer programming. And that was something that seemed like, you know, if I'm going to do that, why am I not just, you know, getting a computer science degree? And so I wandered a little bit.

I'd always had an interest in writing, creative writing. I had a literature minor when I was in college, just because I like to read books that didn't have a lot of equations in them. So, you know, I took a lit class every semester and I was a pretty good technical writer.

And I had a physics professor who recognized that and encouraged me to pursue technical writing. Because there aren't a lot of people who know science who can write reasonably well. And one thing led to another, I started to take some screenwriting classes for fun.

Star Trek, the next generation had come on television. They had an open submission policy where you could send in scripts and they would read them. And a few people actually sold scripts that way and became writers.

I took a shot at that in the late 1980s. I got a nice thanks, but no thanks, but you know, I wasn't discouraged per se. And another long story short, I was offered a NASA fellowship to spend two years at a place called the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University.

And they looked at the policy and political dimensions of the space program, which was foundering at the time. And that's something that I found very interesting because a lot of the work that I did when I was an undergraduate in grad school was funded by NASA grants. And, you know, I was just sort of shocked that so little had happened since the Apollo Moon landings.

The shuttle finally got off the ground and that was impressive. But then when the Challenger exploded, I started to read all of these articles about how, you know, political factors were such a huge part of what essentially compromised the design of the shuttle system. And it tried to be all things to all people and it failed.

And it's one primary goal, which is to make access to low Earth orbit inexpensive for both humans and payloads. Well, I thought, hey, I want to know more about that. And the program at George Washington gave me that opportunity.

But I still, you know, was writing and I was coming up with stories for Star Trek through a lot of knocking on doors and getting passed along from one person to another. I managed to find an agent in Hollywood who said she would try to help me get a meeting to pitch stories at Star Trek. And I'm like, great.

Months went by, nothing was happening. And I gave her, I decided I'm going to call this person one more time. And if the answer is still nothing, nothing happening, I'll, you know, I'll just kind of let it go.

And she said, oh, no, you know, they're not taking any pitches right now, but they're looking for a new science consultant. And I was like, well, what's that? And she said, well, they have somebody who looks at the scripts for the, you know, for the right science and technical language and to make sure that the stories aren't too far out into fantasy.

And the guy who's been doing it got promoted onto the writing staff. And so they're looking for somebody new. And once somebody knows the show, knows how to read a script and knows science, I'm like, well, okay.

So I had a conversation with one of the producers. She and I kind of hit it off over the phone. She invited me to come out and, you know, meet the writing staff.

Again, I'm still living in Washington, DC at this time. And had to go to a conference in Tucson. And so while I was there, I drove out to LA.

I met, I met Michael Piller and Ron Moore and Brandon Braga and Jerry Taylor and all of these fantastic people whose names I'd seen in the credits. And I'm like, I can't believe I'm here. And Michael Piller, who was the executive producer of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, which was on just starting at that time, gave me an audition script.

He said, here's a script. It's got a lot of technical issues. I need your help.

And the guy who'd been doing that job, Narain Shankar, who'd gotten a PhD in physics from Cornell and decided he didn't want to do that anymore and had come out to LA, he had had an internship at Star Trek. And that's how he became involved in the show and became their science consultant. He convinced them that they needed somebody, you know, not full-time, but on a regular basis to handle this sort of thing.

So he showed me the format that he used to write up his notes. I read the script. I went to the library.

I did some research. I wrote up seven or eight pages of notes, faxed them to Michael Piller the next day, and then flew back to DC. And a couple of weeks later, Jerry Taylor called me and said, Michael loved your notes.

The job's yours if you want it. 

That's great.

And they literally needed me to start to the week that I finished my master's degree in science technology and public policy at GW, and my NASA fellowship ended. So May of 1993, I drove from DC out to LA.

Wow.

Figured I'll give this a shot for a couple of years. I was still young at the time. And I figured if I can't make it go as a writer, I can always go back to DC and continue the stuff that I was doing, you know, with NASA and with some other think tanks and so forth.

But it worked out. I eventually sold a couple of stories. They had me write a script.

They liked that, had me do another one. And then I became a full-time writer and producer on Star Trek Enterprise for all four seasons. And I've just been doing TV ever since.

So I love the trajectory that you had. And honestly, I really like where it's kind of worth that right now with the Orville, which is something that I feel like is a great continuation of that. For so long, there was really like when you look at science fiction and imagining the future, very dystopian, right?

Very negative, very pessimistic. And the Orville was kind of like this fun experience to get people back and like, oh, hey, the future could be cool. I can't wait to live in that kind of environment.

And I guess my question to you is like, what do you think that the difference was? Where did this change in pop culture that all of a sudden now we're looking at it negatively? And when, you know, in the 60s, everybody was just so excited about everything that the future could hold.

You know, I feel like that's when the original Star Trek, even when the next generation came out, you know, there was tons of great science fiction from that time. But what do you think? I mean, you kind of lived it, right?

You were on the ground floor.

No, absolutely. And yeah, there has been a, you know, there has certainly been dystopian science fiction for many, many decades. And if you look back at Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, who I got to work on a couple of projects with, who was my hero growing up, I always loved his writing.

He used to say, I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm trying to prevent it. And so, you know, a lot of that work is, you know, in the sort of the context of cautionary tales.

But what made the original Star Trek so different is it was deliberately an optimistic view of the future. And there were a lot of things that were going on, you know, in the 1960s that gave many people pause about the viability of the future of human civilization, not least of which were the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggles, you know, the vast inequality and poverty in a nation as rich as ours. How does any kid go hungry at night, let alone a larger world?

And Gene Roddenberry, who created the original Star Trek and was himself quite the visionary, said, you know what, this is wrong. There needs to be a message out there that says that these problems are solvable, that it's not inevitable that we're going to face some kind of Roman Empire-esque decline. And so, his conception of Star Trek was that let's look at the present from the point of view of a future where these problems are all basically behind us.

And we have developed the technologies to literally explore the entire galaxy and learn whatever we can learn. And he also, at the time, this was, you know, long before cable television, long before HBO and The Sopranos and all of these things that could never have been done on network TV, there were subjects that were still taboo on television, interracial relationships, stories about God and, you know, that explicitly questioned, you know, religious assumptions and so forth. And Roddenberry was fascinated by those questions, and he wanted to address them.

He tried to do that in some of his other shows, and it was a challenge. He was always fighting with the network censors. Well, if you do that in the context of science fiction, well, everybody thinks, well, this is just kind of weird and fantasy and it's not the real world.

And so, they don't look at it as carefully. And you can get away with things, you know, in a science fiction context that in a straight drama might raise a lot of eyebrows. And Star Trek did raise some eyebrows from time to time.

Certainly, one of the first, if not the first, interracial kiss on television was between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Aurora in a third season episode. That episode did not play in much of the American South. They did not put it on the air because they didn't want to see a white man kissing a black woman because they thought, well, you know, we're going to lose viewers.

We're going to get all these angry phone calls. That was the world of 1968. And so, Roddenberry very, very cleverly, you know, managed to do things and hold up a mirror to society and question why things are the way they are.

And from the perspective of, if we just keep moving forward, things are going to be so much better. It was a pretty simple kind of, I think, message ultimately. And I think that he really drew attention to the value of these kinds of utopian, for lack of a better word, visions of the future in contrast to the more dystopian fantasies.

And I think that the dystopia, you know, it's a reflection of the anxiety of the times, right? I mean, the 1950s were called the age of anxiety by a lot of people. And that anxiety was understandable because, you know, we'd been through, you know, a couple of traumatic world wars.

We'd been successful, and certainly America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was extraordinarily prosperous by global standards and was coming into its own as, you know, as a world power and so forth. But the specter of the atomic bomb and then the hydrogen bomb hung over a lot of this and cast a very long shadow. Still does.

Maybe not quite to the extent that it did back then. But, you know, there was a lot of fear and anxiety. And, you know, I remember some of that.

Again, I was very young at that time. But, you know, I think we did at least one duck and cover drill when I was in grade school. You know, something that...

There's a lot of fear and anxiety today.

Absolutely.

And I feel like that's something that, you know, we have to actively combat against. How do you feel about, you know, the way that the world is trending these days? I had an opportunity to speak with Rod Roddenberry, so Gene Simmons, right?

And he was super pessimistic, you know, and it was such an interesting contrast. Like in one generation, you know, his dad was so hopeful. And he's like, you know, I see a lot of negative stuff, but I do think that, you know, humanity has it in us.

But overall, the message was a little pessimistic. How do you feel about everything these days?

You know, it's definitely challenging to maintain that sort of, you know, Star Trek optimism these days. And one of the reasons that, I mean, probably the main reason that Seth MacFarlane created the Orville is he was discouraged and sort of tired of seeing all the dystopian science fiction, especially in the new Star Treks. And the new Star Trek shows, I've watched some of them.

I can't say that I've watched a lot of them. I worked on Star Trek for 12 years altogether. And I didn't think that there would be other Star Treks going forward or that I would be involved in anything remotely like Star Trek again after that period ended in the mid 2000s.

And then when it came back, it's like, oh, wow, great. You know, they're bringing back Star Trek. Hey, that's exciting.

You know, it's been years. I enjoyed the first movie with, you know, with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in that cast. So I didn't necessarily think it was great.

Yeah.

But, you know, it was fun. It had the spirit.

I don't know that it had the depth per se of the original or next gen, but Seth really missed that, you know, that episodic, optimistic, future-oriented science fiction that says, yes, we have it within us to build the kind of future that is depicted on Star Trek, the original series and the next gen. And to some extent, the other shows. I mean, they're not completely dire by any means.

But I think that, you know, what changed in the culture, again, with the advent of cable television and the opportunities to tell more and more gritty, dramatic stories without interference from sensors... censors. Not sensors. I have a sensor on my phone.

At any rate, yeah, I think that that, you know, that opened the door to a lot of great creative writing that was because drama tends to go dark, right? It's conflict and it's Sturm und Drang and it's, you know, murder and all of the other things. Well, with The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad and all of these great shows that started to crop up in the late 90s and early 2000s, well, that was an opportunity for writers who really like to dig into that, you know, the darker forces of human life.

And, you know, and that's that's most literature, too, because that's what kind of triggers the emotional reaction.

Yeah, I hear you. I just I look at comic books, right? And comic books from that time were so much more optimistic and like, hey, we're going to go get them, you know?

And now it's just so dark, right? It's like, yeah, I guess my question to you as somebody that has created a lot of this pop culture, do you think it's a reflection of the anxieties that you were talking about that are in the populace and this is what the artists are producing? Or do you think that on some level the pop culture is producing this and then it reflects in the populace?

Because the writers and everybody are looking at world events and they're the people that are spreading right. What do you what do you?

Oh, it is both. And there is definitely a feedback loop at play. And, you know, feedback loops can be.

You know, positive and negative, you know, when Jimi Hendrix played his guitar and moved up to that, to this peak, creative feedback, it created some amazing sounds to create a lot of horrible noise, too, right? So I think that, yes, there is a there is definitely a feedback mechanism. There are people who sense who feel they're for whatever reasons.

And I think maybe creative people are a little more prone to anxiety than people who have more limited imaginations. I don't mean that in a negative sense, but, you know, people who think too much tend to be warriors. Right.

So you find that among a lot of writers. And I do think that it does feed back into the culture. If you're fed a diet of nonstop, you know, Sturm und Drang, as I mentioned earlier, you know, it's going to it's going to it's going to ultimately affect your outlook.

And that's why I think it's important to have shows like the Orville out there saying, hey, no, no, no, it doesn't really need to be that way. Why don't you include some positive imagery and storytelling in your media diet and counterbalance some of those negative reflections? I think today, of course, we're seeing and you know, I'm not any kind of political commentator pundit.

We've seen a lot of turmoil, uh, using that word, not necessarily in the most emotional way, but, um, you know, politically, uh, not just in the United States, but around the world, we've seen the ascension of a different model of government. That is not the sort of idealized democracies that I grew up thinking were the best model for how to govern a society. Autocracies, not only in Russia and China, but in Hungary and other places and, and potentially here, because, you know, whatever you think of Trump, uh, uh, he is, he is somebody who has autocratic impulses.

He wants to be king. You may not say that explicitly, but you know, he does. And that's, that's kind of, um, uh, astonishing to me that that could happen.

And I think that, you know, set aside how much change that will really, uh, you know, foment here in the United States. Yeah. But the fact that, that he was elected at all is, is a huge change and has caused a lot of people, anxiety causes a lot of people, some kind of comfort, I guess.

But, um, and then the fact of climate change, the fact of AI, I think that, you know, you asked me earlier about, you know, sort of projecting out into the, not too distant future. Well, this is a time of extraordinary change. And I don't think that AI is going to live up to some of the hype that you hear from people like Sam Alton or Elon Musk or others who, who believe that this is going to be civilization changing, but maybe it will be, I mean, it will certainly have an impact.

It will certainly be a change. And I'm hoping it's going to be a change for the good, because I think there is a lot of incredibly valuable stuff that AI can do and is already proving that it can do. It has nothing to do with whether or not it's intelligent or conscious, which neither thing, neither of those things are true at the moment.

And I doubt that they ever will be, but in your old, in your own field in medicine, look at what, look at what AI can already do in terms of looking at protein structures and how protein fold proteins fold, which is an important part of how they react, how they behave in biological systems. You know, the discovery of proteins that can act as antibodies. Well, that's a research project that's been going on for a very long time, and it's not easy to do.

And yet AI is now accelerating the pace at which we can make those discoveries. In material science, that's already happening. Should AI, you know, develop in the way that I hope, maybe in a few years, we'll have room temperature superconductors that are, that are easy to manufacture.

That would have a huge impact on addressing the problem of global warming, among other things.

Let's, let's double click on that. Yeah, obviously technological progress that's happening exponentially right now, much different from when we were in the 60s or, you know, any other era of humanity. And there's a number of different technological breakthroughs that I think need to happen for us to get to that utopian society, right? Like this idea of a post-scarcity society of Star Trek is something that, you know, we have to do a lot to get there.

What do you think that we need to do to get there? Like, if that's the goal, where every human being has food, where every human being is able to live up to their full potential, you know, you have a physics background, what kind of technologies do we need, do you think to get there?

Certainly, you know, there's a book, I've met the author, and he contributed a piece to the Orville book that I wrote that came out in October. Emmanuel Saadia, he's an economics professor and historian. A few years ago, he wrote a book called Trekonomics.

And he directly addressed the question of what is it, you know, we have this utopian ideal, and he was focused primarily on Star Trek, the next generation as his model of, okay, they have this economy in the far future, where there is no scarcity. There is no need to work to sustain your life. You don't have to work for food or shelter or medical care.

That's irrelevant. You get that. It's automatic.

How does that kind of a future work? And what is the currency of such a future? Well, the short answer to how we get there in Manu's mind is, we have essentially unlimited energy that's clean energy.

And we have replicator technology, which is a sort of a hyper advanced version of what we are doing now in 3d printing. So on Star Trek, the next generation, you know, Picard would go into his ready room, walk up to the replicator and say, tea, Earl Grey, hot, you know, the cup of tea, which would appear and it's like, well, that was as if by magic. Now that obviously, in their in their conception of it, involve transporters, which are a form of technology that I think are probably going to be in the indefinite future for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come.

But 3d printing, and being able to create any kind of food you want with protein feedstocks or whatever else you might want to use, that kind of technology, I think, is, is, is within reach. And nuclear fusion probably will happen eventually. Clearly, it's taken much longer than the optimists would have guessed back in the 70s or 80s.

But we're getting closer, right?

Like, that's, we're getting closer, we're getting closer. It's, you know, it's incremental progress, which is always frustrating, because you just want to see the big breakthrough, right? Yeah.

But it'll happen. And I think, you know, obviously, we already have solar, which is cheaper than coal in the United States, I believe at the moment, in terms of kilowatt price per kilowatt hour. We have geothermal, we have wind, we have other clever ways of harnessing energy that don't involve spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

So I think, technologically, one of the first things we have to do is make those, those kinds of technologies more widespread, decarbonize the economy, make sure that we are growing food in a changing climate that is nutritious and, and widely available. I do think that beyond the technological dimensions of the problem, you know, they're really social dimensions. It's really about, you know, finding fairer forms of government.

I don't know if you've read Kim Stanley Robinson. He's a science fiction writer. And I've met him a few times at conferences and things over the years, really nice guy, really good writer.

He's a science fiction writer, he has a PhD in English literature. So he's very literate. He wrote a book, his most recent book, called The Ministry for the Future.

And the premise of the book is that an international body, something like the UN, puts together a group whose sole purpose is to ensure the survival of human civilization for decades and centuries to come. And so they're addressing problems like climate change, like scarcity, through whatever means can best, in their view, address those issues. And it's a great book.

It's really good. It's, it's really interesting, the various things that, you know, that Stan has to say about, about these issues. But a lot of it, I think will come down to, you know, an active citizenry, and people recognizing that these problems will only get worse if we don't actively try to make them better.

And obviously, a show like The Orville plays a role in establishing a vision, and making it clear that that vision does not come without some level of work. It's not just something that's automatically going to happen, right? We all have to be active participants in building that better future.

And we can disagree about some of the means. There are a lot of different ways, potentially, to approach that. But, you know, fundamental fairness, the golden rule, a society that is not based on a few winners and a lot of losers, which, you know, unfortunately seems to be a trend these days, that hopefully will end sooner rather than later.

And it isn't necessarily anything like, you know, pure socialism or communism, whatever those words mean to different people. But it does mean establishing some fundamental level of fairness for everybody. And I think that, you know, if AI does become the revolutionary technology that its strongest advocates say it's going to be, then, yeah, we will probably need to look at something like universal basic income to make sure that people have shelter and food and proper medical care.

You know, there are a lot of things.

What do you think about getting into space? Because I know that that's something that you have a background in. There's obviously the public option, which is NASA, and then you have this private option, which is SpaceX.

And, you know, there's lots of incremental steps that we need to get to become a space-faring civilization. What do you think that we need to do? Is it, you know, going to be the SpaceX Starship?

Is it going to be NASA taking on more of a role? Is it going to be, you know, lunar colonies, Mars colonies? What do you think that we're headed with that direction?

Well, the fundamental bottleneck is the cost of getting a pound of payload to low Earth orbit. This has always been the problem. It was not a problem in the 1960s per se, because of the imperative of getting a human being on the moon ahead of the Russians.

That was the, you know, John F. Kennedy's famous speech in 1961, when the Soviets kept achieving these firsts. First Earth-orbiting satellite, first human in space, first multi-person crew, first woman in space, by the way, 1963, and first spacewalk.

So they kept beating us, and that scared people. And, of course, Kennedy said, look, we need to establish a goal and figure out a race, you know, that we can win against the Soviets. And his study group came back 10 days later and said, look, landing a human being on the moon, bringing them home safely, the Russians would basically be starting from the same place as we are if we establish that as the goal.

And so we won't have to catch up. It's kind of an even race. And so that's what we did. And money was not an object. Well, ever since then, obviously, we won the race. And then people went on with their lives.

It was no longer that interesting. And so the space shuttle was supposed to be the solution to the problem of cost, right? The space shuttle was supposed to bring down the cost of getting a pound of payload into low Earth orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude.

In the late 1960s, early 1970s, a Saturn V launch cost something like $250 million. Now in today's dollars, that's probably closer to like four or five billion. It's a lot of money to put three people on, you know, in low Earth orbit and send two of them to the moon, which we can't do anymore, by the way.

So the shuttle was supposed to bring down those costs. It failed in that mission, unfortunately, for many, many reasons. But you know, one of the most salient and interesting statistics that I ever read about the space shuttle, space shuttle had a payload capacity of about 60,000 pounds.

If you could transmute lead into gold, simply by virtue of putting it in the payload bay of the space shuttle, sending it into low Earth orbit and bringing it back down, it would not be economically sensible to do that. So that's how much it cost in the shuttle era to get stuff up to low Earth orbit. Every shuttle flight costs about a billion and a half dollars.

That ain't cheap, right? So Elon, say what you will about Elon. I think he's kind of gone off in some interesting directions.

I would rather see him focus on cars and rockets than what he's doing right now. But his company, SpaceX, is very well run by a woman named Gwen Shotwell, and they have amazing engineers. And the Falcon 9 is a great vehicle, highly reliable.

It has brought down the costs of getting a pound of payload into low Earth orbit significantly by a factor of two or three over earlier launch vehicles that were still in use, like the Delta II and the Atlas V and so forth. And he hopefully can repeat that feat with Starship. Now, Starship, who knows?

I mean, I'm still waiting to see whether that is going to pan out the way that he hopes. And frankly, I don't see how Starship is going to land a human crew on the in the next two or three years. I don't think that's likely.

I'm not an expert on the architecture of these kinds of missions and the technology involved in taking something like Starship and landing it on the surface of the moon. It seems like overkill somehow to me that that's not really the way to do it. But I do think that, yes, landing into space is going to be very important.

I don't know that that necessarily means establishing settlements on the moon or Mars. I know Elon is a vocal advocate of putting a human settlement on Mars and bringing the population by the middle of this century up to around a million people. I don't know that that's a good idea.

I don't know it's a bad idea. But I can't say that that's really my particular vision for what what our future in space might look like. I think it's going to be more, more oriented toward robotic technologies, potentially toward large space stations, you know, like the famous sort of spinning donut ring in 2001, a space odyssey.

Those are probably better environments for humans than the surfaces of the moon and Mars. And I think that, you know, what we can do in terms of manufacturing in space, well, again, that's people have talked about that for decades. We've not yet found an application that would, you know, be cost effective.

But of course, that goes back to the bottleneck of how expensive it is to get anything up into into low Earth orbit. Right out of the bat, you know, right out of the box, you're spending, you know, I think, again, SpaceX has brought that down. And it's maybe on a on the order of a couple of $1,000.

I'm not sure right now. But yeah, eventually, maybe that'll happen. But of course, bringing anything from orbit back down to the Earth is, you know, that's, that's the easier thing, obviously, than getting it up there.

But I can't imagine a future where thousands of payloads are coming back through the atmosphere every day from low Earth orbit or anywhere else. That not having an environmental impact, that also has to be factored into the value of doing something like that. So I think off Earth economies, they may take off on their own at some point when when we have the technology to do that in a way that, you know, doesn't doesn't cost trillions upon trillions of dollars.

Yeah, so that's, that's a little, yeah, it's a little fuzzier to me. But I think once that bottleneck is broken, when it when it costs 100 bucks a pound to get something into low Earth orbit, and do it safely and routinely and so forth, then I think we'll start to be able to get a vision of what what can be accomplished and how that can help us here on Earth going forward.

Yeah, I totally agree that that's the big bottleneck. I wonder when it's going to happen. You know, I hope that it happens in my lifetime.

I'd love to be able to see the classic, you know, overview effect of the Earth.

Yeah, right. Me too.

And, you know, I just, I see progress happening, but it hasn't happened at a rate where it's successful to people like us. So hopefully, that would be something that would be changing. Listen, honestly, I feel like I could talk to you for another hour.

But we have to get into our last three questions, which are general questions, but I do want to change it up a little bit. Because these are questions that I wanted to ask you, but I didn't have enough time to because we kind of went to these in these different directions. The first of which is, Alien, you have a physics background.

There's all these new disclosures happening. What are your thoughts? Are we alone in the universe?

Or is this something that is all smoke and mirrors?

I doubt we're alone in the universe. You know, I've followed some of the, you know, some of the latest quote unquote revelations from people who have worked in the higher levels of government about these things. And, you know, their stories are compelling.

But again, as somebody who was trained, you know, as a scientist, I need to see the evidence. And as Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You know, the videos that we've seen from some of these Navy fighter jets, of these of these tick tock shaped objects that seem to defy the laws of physics, we understand them.

Fascinating. I need more than a video, you know, I need more than an eyewitness account to conclude that something like that is not only real, but alien technology from a civilization that is far more advanced than ours, right? So I would love it if that were true.

I find that very exciting. Just more generally, based on what we know, well, when I was in college, we had not yet discovered a single exoplanet, single planet orbiting another star. We all assumed that they were out there, but there was no observational evidence.

And I was willing to concede that, well, maybe our solar system is a freak occurrence. And maybe solar systems like ours are extraordinarily rare. Well, we've discovered that's not the case.

That's encouraging in terms of, you know, prospect for finding life. I don't know that it's entirely possible in my mind that there are all sorts of intelligent life forms in the universe, but that they're not technological. You know, we have other intelligent life forms here on the earth, dolphins and whales and, you know, and different kinds of intelligence.

I think that intelligence like ours is probably relatively rare. If it were common, I think we'd probably know about it by now. It's kind of a, you know, shaky argument.

But, and the other problem, of course, is just time scales. You know, we've been able to send radio waves out into space for barely more than a century. How long have we, are we going to keep doing that?

Well, probably not much longer because we're already changing the technologies of how we communicate so that we're not leaking a lot of radio energy out into space because that's not efficient. This so-called window of contact, which people have talked about, if there were another civilization like ours, a thousand light years away, just like us, maybe more advanced, maybe not quite as advanced, what are the odds that we would actually be able to find them and communicate at the same, at the time that we're at a roughly, you know, in a certain kind of parity in terms of how we use the electromagnetic spectrum, right? I mean, there are billions of stars within a thousand light years of the earth, literally billions. The odds of finding the one that has some form of intelligent life that is also familiar with radio waves and has radio telescopes and the kinds of technologies that we use, or even more exotic things that we could potentially detect, you know, what if that civilization existed and thrived a million years ago?

That's a blink of an eye in the history of the universe, right? What are the odds that we would be at the same, that sort of same parity with somebody relatively close by and a thousand light years is our backyard, right?

Do you think that's the most compelling answer for you, for the Fermi paradox, for why we haven't had it?

Yeah, pretty much.

The times don't match up because I get it. I mean, like in the grand scheme of things, the amount of time that has existed in the history of the universe, we are such a small and significant speck on it. And for us to match up with those two, I get that.

So I guess if that's your most compelling argument, I hear that. And I think that's certainly something that is very grounded in science. Last question about this.

You highlighted the Tic Tac, which is something that supposedly defies the laws of physics, right? Or at least has technology that we don't understand yet, right? That's, to me, one of the exercises that you must have been doing for a long time in your career, is like you have this technical background, you have this endpoint of something that you want to make believable, right?

You want to make something that has some sort of scientific background, or this endpoint that does not exist yet. If you were to make that same kind of thought process, right? How would you describe these things that are happening based on your scientific understanding of physics and everything like that?

How is it that these things are moving like that?

Yeah, well, I would say that, yeah, my understanding is pretty limited. I want to admit that right up front. And the only thing that I've, you know, learned about to some degree, anyway, not any kind of expertise that would potentially fit that bill, would be some kind of space warp effect.

And of course, warp drive, you know, is something that we invented, quote, on Star Trek. Other people prior to Star Trek had considered that as a possible way of, you know, traveling ever since that, you know, Einstein developed the general theory of relativity, and showed us that we could conceptualize space as a kind of a fabric connected to time, and that the presence of matter and energy warps space, and warped space tells matter and energy how to move. So, right there, if you had some technology that would allow you to warp space instantaneously, in whatever fashion you would like to do that, that I think would probably be sufficient to explain the movements that we see in these videos.

But it could be something else, because again, we only know what we know. And I think that there is far more out there to be learned than we understand at our present state of technological and scientific development. It could be something so far removed from the way that we traditionally have thought about science for the last 400 and some years, that it would take a huge conceptual shift in human understanding about the nature of the universe to really get a handle on how these things work, if they are in fact real.

Very interesting. Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people say, but I like to learn by asking a lot of different people, and if a lot of smart people say the same thing, then that leads me to believe that maybe there's something to that, right? And so, that's something that has been talked around these circles, which is very interesting to hear.

You know, I mean, if that's something that is possible, that would be a huge breakthrough for us as a space-faring species, you know?

Yeah. And if for some reason these things have no mass, if there is a way to make them act like massless particles, then again, that would be, you know, if they have no inertia, mass is a measure of inertia, you can somehow create an object, a physical object that has no inertia. Yeah, then I could imagine it maneuvering all sorts of crazy ways, right?

Yeah.

But again, I have no idea how one would do that.

Yeah, I can't wait to see what comes out of, you know, the next few years of hearing.

Me too.

That lends into my next question. Yes. If you could have a goalpost for humanity over the next 10 years, 20 years, what do you hope comes out of the future?

What is something that you really look forward to? You know, for me, like, it's something very basic. Like, I cannot wait until we have humanoid robots that can clean my dishwasher, that can fold my laundry.

When I feel like we have that, that's like the future for me, right?

Yeah.

But what does it look like for Andre Bormanis? What do you hope that comes out of the next 10, 20 years from technological breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs, what have you?

Yeah, you know, I would love to see an orders of magnitude reduction in the cost of getting payloads and people into space. Would love to have that experience myself. I would love to see supersonic travel come back.

I'm with you. I'm with you on the robots.

Everybody.

Personally. Yeah. But you know, my main thing, I am interested in and highly sympathetic to the people who are trying to expand human health span.

I'm not a believer in immortality in any practical sense. I think even if we could stop the aging process and retain our, you know, the physiological processes we have in our mid twenties or wherever the sort of the optimum, you know, state of the body might be and do that indefinitely, well, something is going to get you eventually, right? You're going to, you know, walk in front of a bus or who knows what's going to happen.

I'm not a fan of the idea of uploading our consciousness into computers. I don't think that that's plausible. I find that to be fantasy more than science fiction.

But you know, if I could have both of my parents lived into their early nineties I hope I have that longevity kind of on my, you know, on my side, but of course you never know what might happen. But if I could you know, if I could have a, you know, a long, healthy life living into my say early one hundreds or to 110 or 120 without being decrepit mentally or physically, that would be wonderful because I would love to see what the world looks like toward the end of this century. And I would be, I will be, I will be a hundred years old and in 2059 if I live that long.

Halley's Comet will be back.

Yeah. Yeah. Here's hoping you see Halley's Comet again.

Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Oh, it's a pleasure. It's so nice to meet you. Yeah.

Yeah. Nice to meet you too. And thank you to all of our listeners and our subscribers.

If you don't mind, if you could please, please, please hit the like and subscribe button that really helps us out. And if you want to follow Andre, he's got a new book coming out about the Orville, which is a really funny and, and hilarious take on utopian science fiction. So check that out.

And for those of you guys who are listening on a regular basis, we will see you again in the future. Have a great day, everybody.