The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Future of Humanity

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

The Future of Humanity Brian Cox and Robin Ince take on the entire future of our civilisation, as they are joined by Astronomer Royal and former head of the Royal Society Lord Rees, Baroness Cathy Ashton and comedian, actor and director Chris Addison. They'll be talking about the biggest challenges facing humanity at the moment, and whether science offers the solution to some of these great problems, from Climate Change to the rise of AI.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello. Hello. Hello. Today on the Monkey Cage, we are asking human progress. Was it a bad idea right from the start? Did it all go wrong when a bacterium managed to find its way into an archaeon and formed the first eukaryote, laying the necessary, if not

sufficient, foundations for the evolution of all complex multicellular life on Earth? You've been reading Richard Dawkins again. Yes, I have, R2. As Jacob Bronowski said, we are nature's unique experiment to make rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Now that experiment seems to have failed, what next for the human race? Now, as many people realise, there is greater evidence to suggest the Earth only exists to

actually be a public information film for all other sentient beings in the universe. They turn on, watch us at midnight and go we better not do that. Now, what's on this side? Remember, do not kiss a dog with rabies never eat a lit firework and of course the classic when reheating a bath don't do that by throwing in a two-bar fire and avoid democracy as much as you can i have to i very much now i've moved into that kind of now democracy i'm not sure i think benevolent dictatorship may well be the way that I'm going to go.

And possibly, maybe led by an enigmatic scientist, perhaps? Someone like Jim Al-Khalili? I was with him until the last bit. Anyway, today we will be discussing the future of humanity with a distinguished cosmologist, astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, an expert on global politics, chief EU negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal and former leader of the House of Lords, and an actor and director who's worked on some of the greatest satirical political comedies in recent years, including The Thick of It and Veep.

So if you're bored of experts, turn off now. And our experts are... I'm Martin Rees, I'm Professor at Cambridge and Astronomer Royal and if you ask me what my hope is for the future of this world is that we avoid the downsides of new technology. My name is Cathy Ashton, I was the European Union Foreign Minister and I'm now amongst other things Chancellor of Warwick University and when I think about my optimism for the future of planet Earth I think that people are capable of making the right decisions eventually. I'm Chris Addison. I'm doing a PhD in procrastination at the University of,

I haven't got around to applying there yet. And my most optimistic thought about the end of humanity is that at least we won't have to hear about Brexit anymore. And this is our panel. Chris, I'll start with you. Do you feel, when we talk about the possibility of civilisation, is it time for the human race just to throw its hands up and say, look, we gave it a good go, but it hasn't't really worked out let's hand it over to another species well not necessarily there are a number of good temping agencies we could call to see if people could come in and take over from us uh i don't know but other species are there other species yeah it could maybe said we could we get

some dolphins in for a while they're sort of famously quite clever and rather benign apart from the some one or two little awkward things that they get up to but other than that you know they're sort of famously bright and perhaps might have some some possible solutions for us of course we would have to flood the entire place so they can get around maybe they could take their capital as Venice and then we could we could move from there but yeah I don't know that it's necessarily time for us to throw the towel in yet I just think that maybe we've it's like it's like when you're driving a car, sometimes you realise you're just going in the wrong direction. And there are two options. You can either keep going out of pure cussedness and the desire not to feel that you are wrong, or you can go, do you know what? We took a wrong turning back there. Maybe we need to go back. I

think we're probably at that stage. And just as soon as we can get the glove box open and read the map, we'll be fine. I'm a bit worried that he's still got the glove compartment on the map. It's called GPS now, isn't it? You should see some of the cassettes he's got in there as well. I passed a junction. You know, at the junction on Slip Roads, sometimes you just see an unspooled cassette. In the old days, you'd just see somebody obviously going,

oh, for God's sake, and throwing it out of the the car i saw one about two weeks ago who was that what car could they possibly have been driving at that point you might as well just throw the car on the side martin um your book is about the great challenges that we face and you said I think in your book that we are facing our greatest challenges now we are and of course we can't forecast very well you mentioned I was astronomer royal I'm sometimes asked do you do the queen's horoscopes for her and I say well if she wanted one I'm the person she'd asked but I haven't been asked and I have to say that I'm an astronomer and therefore I don't have a crystal ball and I can't foresee things very far ahead all I would to say that I'm an astronomer and therefore I don't have a crystal ball and I can't foresee things very far ahead.

All I would say is that scientists are better predictors than economists but I wouldn't say more than that. But if we ask what we can predict there are some things we can predict 50 years ahead. One is that the world's getting more crowded and also it's getting warmer. Those are the two big problems which we have to tackle and cope with. But also the other point is that new technology is advancing fast,

and smartphones would have seemed pretty wild 20 or 25 years ago, so we can't at all predict the dominant technology in the middle of the century. And what worries me very much is that, first of all, we won't cope with the big issues like climate change. But secondly, technology is getting so powerful that even a few people can misuse it. And we know already we have cyber attacks and we're going to have other ways in which people can,

by error or by design, cause problems that cascade globally because our world is very interconnected and anything that goes bad in one continent is going to spread around the world in a way it wouldn't in the past. If we take those examples and discuss them for a while, Cathy, so climate change, for example. We know what the problem is.

It's a well-defined problem. And actually the solutions, in a scientific sense, are well-defined. It is clear that we need to reduce emissions and find a way of producing cleaner energy and so on. But the problem, I suppose, there is one of politics and one of people. And I suppose it's convincing people that there is a problem which is a pr problem in a way or a political problem and then finding a political solution because it's a global challenge yeah you've got to take the scientific information and translate it so that

people i think feel able to do something about it whether it's plastic bags that you have to pay for or getting plastics out of the ocean turning down the temperature in a washing machine all of those individual practical steps that people can do and feeling control of something which on the face of it is a massive challenge and beyond many people's anticipation of what they can do. You've also got to link it in some way to all of the other factors that make people and politicians and policymakers decide to move in one direction or another. So you have to link it to trade, you have to link it to what we can do to ensure people's jobs continue or new ones are created. You have to find a way to make the science and the policy fit together effectively.

It's not impossible. It requires us to collaborate better than I think we do with science from the public policy and politics point of view, and it requires us to keep getting the message across and to do so in a way that makes it clear that this is a genuine problem and there is no alternative but to tackle it. And that means as well thinking about what I call the false equivalence of having people who deny somehow being seen to be equal with those who say this is a real problem when they're not equivalent. And all of those things need to happen by that collaborative effort being made real. Chris, you're a storyteller.

That's part of whether you were a stand-up comedian with the work you do in film and TV now. That thing of... And the offences I give in court. I remember Brian about two and a half years ago saying to me, he said, I think if you show people the evidence, eventually they come to the right decision. And he's a little bit more sceptical on that now.

And I think that problem that we have, which is to show a graph, however much that may show imminent problems, will not stick in the same way as a story. You hear of people in Trump's administration say that when he's found out to have totally misled people in terms of information, then people who work for him say, it doesn't matter, we've won the narrative.

Yeah, yeah. So how do we make these ideas sticky enough to kind of stay on people, to go, hang on a minute, this story is a story now which propels us into action? Well, the problem is not so much finding those stories because those stories are available in terms of you can find communities that are in under threat of flooding and indeed have been flooded so you can you can point now to you and

we've all seen documentaries where there's a polar bear on a tiny fox's glacier mint in the Arctic and that image is heartbreaking, and it stays with us until we go to bed that Sunday night an hour later. Is climate change now, is it really a scientific challenge, or is it now more of a political challenge, a public relations challenge? Well, I think it's the latter, because it's a hard sell to tell people to make a sacrifice now for people in distant parts of the world 50 years

from now and i think even if you will agree on the science that's going to be a hard sell and i think two things that can help one is that we should enhance research and development to all kinds of clean energy because if the cost comes down and it's more advanced than the Indians, for instance, who now need to build coal-fired power stations in order to not depend on stoves burning wood and dung in their homes. They will be able to leapfrog directly to clean energy if it's cheap. So to bring down the cost of clean energy so that India and other countries choose it, that's the one win-win situation.

It helps the countries that build these new techniques, helps those that use them. So that's one thing. But also, I think, to keep public interest, we've got to ensure that politicians' inboxes and the press are always concerned with climate change and these issues. And that's where opinion leaders are important. And if you look over the last few years,

the two most important people have been the Pope and david attenborough two very different people but uh the pope um before the uh paris conference in 2015 he got a standing ovation at the un for his encyclical and had a big effect on his billion followers in latin america africa and east asia and david attenborough more recently at the uh poland conference had a similar effect so it's really these charismatic people who can affect a large public and they can have more effect than experts have directly can I ask you you you wrote a book I think 13 14 years ago which I think I hope I may be wrong is this our final century which in America they said people won't be interested in that kind of long term so they called it our final hour that's right to make it more immediate but did you find from from writing

that book I'm interested in now in your new book finding the certain stories that you heard back from readers the ones again that really stuck with them those ones where you thought ah this is the place where I can take the narrative which will mean this really does alert people and stays with them yes well I'm not a great preacher but I try to sort of present the the arguments but I do think that in the climate issue it is a matter of how far you look ahead. If you're planning to put an office building or something you apply a five percent discount rate and if you don't get your money back by say 2050 you won't do it but that's not the right way to think about climate change we've got to think about the life chances of someone who's born today

would be 11 22nd century and apply a small discount rate and unless you're prepared to do that then you won't prioritize it enough so that's a big change we've got to get people to think long term and it's ironic that now we are in a situation where we are familiar with the billions of years ahead which the earth has is less than half way through its life we think and plan shorter term than

our medieval forebears did when they built cathedrals which took 100 years to be built they thought there'd be an apocalypse in a thousand years but they nonetheless added bricks to a cathedral thinking 100 years ahead whereas now we don't really plan even 30 years ahead in general and that's partly because of course things are changing more rapidly the medieval people thought their kids and their grandchildren would live the same lives as them.

That's why they thought ahead. But we don't plan ahead more than 30 years. There's one exception, actually, which is to dispose of radioactive waste, where people talk with a straight face about whether the waste depository is safe for 10,000 years,

even a million years. So that's a context where they apply zero discount rates but when it comes to actually planning energy we don't think 30 years ahead but this isn't that partly to do with the fact that we oddly enough although we have a much wider view of the world we know far more of the world yeah our concerns are so much smaller than than they were in the sense that uh if you're built you're building a cathedral because you think it might get you into it's the thing you're supposed to do as a central act of faith in your religion it doesn't matter that it's not going to be finished because you're

doing it for the greater glory and if you want to look at it from a kind of uh what's in it for me perspective it's uh this is gonna this is gonna play well with a big filler when i go upstairs so so we don't have that anymore. And we also are led by people as... I mean, I know it's always coming back to this at the moment, but we're led by people who are just trying to get to the end of the day. Our government just want to get to the end of the day. And the next thing they want to do

is to make sure that they are in that seat the next morning and that they will win the next election. So they will do whatever that takes. And that's a kind of, that's not telling the truth to the people. Well, that's true because as Mr Juncker said in a different context, the politicians know what to do. They don't know how to get re-elected when they've done it. That's a serious concern.

But I think the point is that the excuse they have to some extent is that it is harder to predict 10 or 20 years ahead now than it was in medieval times. And so they genuinely don't quite know what the progress will be then. And that is an excuse. Although, as I say, in some cases,

we can predict 50 years ahead. We can predict the population will be higher. We can predict the world will be warmer. But you can get the scientific predictions if you take the one about population and we know there will be a larger population what we also know is it'll be on the move and that's where politicians and politics has to come in because how you deal with that how do you deal with the challenge of people who for one reason or another we may have had 70 years of peace, but actually most of the planet has not.

And there are wars raging on our borders, as it were, that are creating the circumstances where people flee for their lives. One of the things that I believe, back to my original point about, you know, what I'm optimistic is, that the interconnectivity and the way that generations that will follow are linked together and are talking and tackling and looking at issues is something that we should be extremely optimistic about. We know that in 20 years' time, the technology that we think of today as groundbreaking will seem passé, and we don't know what that will mean. And we also know that we've got to find clever

and intellectually very cutting-edge ways to tackle problems that exist, not just in our own societies, but beyond. And so if you look at that, I think what we don't do is give enough credence to the capacity of people to make change. You know, I was thinking about this on the way in. Last year, this time last year, there were five vegans in the UK. Now, McDonald's, I think, has a vegan menu.

There's like 600,000 of them out of nowhere, like they were in a cupboard going, boom. And suddenly, something in that idea, something in the idea of health and in the idea that this climate is attached to that notion, it's slightly more problematic than people make out, but nonetheless, that is an impetus to take up that diet. It's gone crazy.

So it's clearly possible. What is it about that specific thing that has caught people's imagination? I'm a vegetarian. They've taken the heat off us. In the old days, if you were a vegetarian and you turned up, it was like, what can you eat then? Anything anything except meat we don't have anything except meat now they just oh you're not a vegan thank heavens for that we've run out of seeds you know it's just the in the next hour of the program martin i wanted to move to your second point yes which actually relates to what kathy said about the the march of technology essentially

which in some sense uh leads us to imagine a brighter future but as you alluded to there are significant problems that come with those technologies right well i talked in my book about um a bio cyber ai and space technologies and actually space is the most benign one so we should lead us to the end and talk about the gloomy ones first. Of course, cyber, we know already, allows a few individuals to cause massive damage through cyber attacks, and it's very, very hard to check these up.

And I think bio, although it offers huge opportunities for better health, is going to have the same problem because bio-error and bio-terror is something which can be generated by just a small group. It's not like making a nuclear weapon that you can't do in a clandestine way in your back garden, but you can generate a cyber attack or a bio-weapon quite easily.

And I think there'll be a growing tension between privacy, security and liberty if we're going to guard against these kinds of problems happening in our country and elsewhere. So that's the real downside, I think. So we've got to try and make sure that we can harness the benefits of these, which of course are potentially huge, but avoid the misuse. Because our society is very vulnerable. We know that a few people can cause massive disruption on the scale of a city or even a country. I suppose, Cathy, that's a challenge, isn't it? Because you look back to the big threats that we faced in the past, perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis,

or as you negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, you're dealing with state actors, big programs. And you can't verify. And you hope rational actors but if you have individuals that can cause mass destruction that's almost a seems like an unsolvable problem i think it's a it's a really difficult problem and you can see that by everything from how police forces and nations are trying to grapple with it individually and collaboratively to try and work out how you make sure that you can check whether somebody's got hold of fissile material if they're trying to build some kind of dirty bomb

or simply the household products that can create a bomb that you can set off. This is really, really difficult and challenging stuff and I don't think we've really got beyond the foothills when it comes to cyber of actually looking at what we can do to really take it on. really difficult and challenging stuff and i don't think we've really got beyond the foothills when it comes to cyber welfare of actually looking at what we can do to really take it on we know it's a problem we actually have seen it as a problem every day there are challenges in this country and elsewhere and so it's going to take science especially and technology to be able to grapple

with it as well as all the human stuff that goes alongside it, because people's desire to create mayhem needs to be addressed. Yes, there's an arms race between the attackers and the defenders in the cyber context. And this natural assumption and instinct we have for our own individual liberty, which, as you'd mentioned, seems to be a tension here. Yes, because privacy is not a

concern because everyone puts all their stuff on facebook etc so it's a generational difference i mean um old people do care about this whereas younger generation don't and that's at least something which is a reassurance because they're spying on each other and that makes it harder for someone to get away with something clandestine without it being noticed sorry just one is part of the problem that we have which is what we are now some human minds are able to generate in terms of technology in terms of the inventiveness and innovation the number of possible permutations of its use if you have a flint or fire or a wheel etc there are some but now what we're able to create there are to actually be able to predict where this information can go and how it can be used is such a kind of unruly and difficult to

take path no i think that's a big problem and uh that's a problem with with uh everything to do with computers and ai but i think uh the other concern we need to have is about health and bio, which we know already the ethical and prudential concerns about what's done with gene editing and all that sort of thing. And that's going to become more acute. We're going to have to ask to what extent do we allow

gene editing to be used, not just to get rid of some really bad gene that gives you a particular disease. Are we going to use it to enhance people if we can? We just don't know. But that's going to be a new set of concerns we're going to have to deal with so the i suppose that the question is whether our knowledge about nature and the workings of nature um it is well it certainly has the potential to make our lives better or worse but is not

knowing any better than knowing? Well, I think on the whole, knowing is better. Clearly, knowledge is on the whole a good thing, but we've got to accept that we can't predict how it will be applied. To take a simple example, when the laser was invented, those who invented it had no idea it could be used both as a weapon and also for... And to destroy Princess Leia's home planet. Right, yes. Yeah, right. But also for eye surgery and for DVD recordings and all that.

Was that a laser knife? That was a form of a laser, yeah. Look, don't get into the scientific and be right. What I'm worried about now is that the show has reached a point where we are going, no more knowledge and maybe we should destroy nature because it's trying to destroy us. And we've never got that bleak before. I we'd come to the more some of the more fun ways that we might be annihilated um in your book you deal with some of the more uh fanciful scenarios

but you know the universe can just take us out without us having a hand in it. Well, I'd like to cheer you up and not talk about that. I think space has a cheerful aspect. Ah, so we can get optimistic. Yes, and also life extension. Really? Does that sound like a good idea? Well, some people think so. And, of course, there's this guy, Ray Kurzweil, who works for Google. He wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines.

And he thinks that he could be downloaded to a machine. But he's in his 60s, so it won't happen in his lifetime. And that's why he wants to be frozen in liquid nitrogen when he dies and then resurrected into this new world. He sounds like somebody you'd avoid at a party, certainly. Well, let me tell you something else. I discovered that there are three academics in this country who've paid to be frozen in the same way well two have paid the full whack one paid the cut price just have his head frozen and i'm glad to say they're at

ox oxford not from my university all three of them are from us yes Yes, yes. And I told them I wanted to end my days in an English churchyard, not an American refrigerator. What about in a refrigerator in an English churchyard? Well, maybe that's the best of both worlds. Thomas Gray's Elegy in an Electrolux. Right. So in terms of our future beyond Earth into space, what are our possibilities, our opportunities?

Well, I mean, I think it's a post-human enterprise rather than a human one in the following sense. Clearly, we could have people going to Mars. I'm old enough to remember the Apollo program 50 years ago, and I thought then that it would only be 10 years before there were footprints on Mars, as there would have been had the Americans continued to spend 4% of their federal budget on space,

but they didn't, there was no motive. And of course now robots are so much better that there's no practical case for sending people into space. And if I was an American, I wouldn't support the NASA man program. I'd leave it to the private sector, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with their companies, because they can accept higher risks

than NASA can impose on civilians who are funded by a taxpayer. And to be crazy people prepared to go, even with one-way tickets. And Musk himself, he says, he wants to die on Mars, but not on impact. And he's only He's only 47 now, so he might. So I think

the few people will go, but I think it's a dangerous delusion to believe in mass emigration as Musk does and as late Stephen Hawking did, because nowhere on Mars is as clement as the top of Everest or the South Pole.

And dealing with climate change though a problem is a real doddle compared to terraforming Mars. So we've got to deal with the Earth's problems here. There's no planet B for ordinary risk averse people. But, and this is getting back to answering your question. Yeah, I thought you were going to be optimistic. You said that we're trapped here.

Yes, yes. These guys on Mars by the end of a century they will be ill adapted to where they are. They'll be away from all the regulators, so they will use all the techniques of cyborg and genetic modification to adapt to that alien environment. And that may

mean they are flesh and blood but looking rather different. It could be that they become electronic. And in the latter case, if they become electronic entities, then they become electronic entities, then they won't want gravity, they won't want an atmosphere, so they just go off into the blue yonder. You're describing the Daleks.

Yeah, that's right. Yes. Yeah. And if they're not out there, then we'll be sending them because they'd be near immortal and so they can make these interstellar voyages. So I think it'll be these... I'm not me, but I'm having a lot of fun.

They will be the precursors of this post-human evolution beyond the Earth. The idea of people on Mars by the end of the century is not crazy, but it'll be for adventurers, not for mass immigration. But I agree with Martin. In your book, you talk about the fact that the people who did the adventures of the past, who went off in leaky boats, heading for somewhere they had no idea quite where it was, with very little equipment to help them, were taking much greater risks than actually most of...

Far greater, and going into the unknown to a far greater extent. Exactly. Anyone who goes to Mars, they know already more or less what it's like. Exactly. They know what it's made of. They know what it's going to be like and so on. Whereas they had no idea what they were going to reach out to. And so there will always be, thank goodness,

adventurers prepared to do things that really will expand our knowledge and do things in ways that I think are quite crazy, but actually get the results that you want. And we should cheer them on. We should cheer them on. But we also have to recognise that most people are not going to do that. And we have to solve the problems that we have here too and don't send something equivalent of a mayflower shortly afterwards then go who's on mars now religious zealots

do you think that will um help you've essentially suggested it will but it will help us develop technologies which will be relevant solve our problems here on earth because you often hear this in science in general actually i mean i you see the criticism of the large hadron collider or the space missions and say well shouldn't we do solve the problems here first before we acquire new knowledge about the universe yes um well i think that argument's oversold you know the non-stick frying pan coming out of the moon landings as it were um the easier ways to make a non-stick frying pan um but but um but clearly um you you can't predict the uses of these new technologies and clearly um having people work at the front of the technology is is going to help us, but we have to control the downsides. But I do think that we should leave these things

to the private sector. People talk about us going to explore the solar system. It needn't be us, because whereas climate change does require a concerted effort by all people and all nations, space travel can be just left to a few individuals. It may be the sort of Wild West scenario, but that, I think, is more realistic

than us spending a lot of public money on something which doesn't provide any practical help. And you end up with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mars! Everybody! It's fantastic. Essentially, the people who can afford to go are the people who go, Bye then! Bye! But the people who can afford to go are the people who go, bye then, bye.

But the only thing you have to be, I think, just be conscious of is that the motivation for them, not them as individuals, but the adventurers we think of in the future, is also interesting in itself. People went to foreign lands to explore and to bring back products that they could sell and to be involved dynamically if you like in trade and and other things well so too the explorers of the future will be looking

for things that they can sell back on earth or they can use back on earth and that has implications again if you have monopolies who are bringing back products that they can charge whatever they wish for that become increasingly important so you still end up with having to balance all of these different things against, I'm afraid, these people that we call politicians and governments. I love the idea that they're going there to bring new stuff back. And the Chinese have just announced that they're going to do an experiment on the moon to try and grow a potato.

Walter Raleigh got that. We brought that one back already. Find something else. We don't need moon potatoes. But also it's Jeff Bezos, isn't it it is doing that as well i just wanted something that might mention which which is sometimes when people talk about the optimism and and that we are we are moving forward and as you mentioned earlier chris you know perhaps sometimes we're so tapped into connected to the bleakness but the real thing that we should be thinking about is the fact that it's it's not the gap gap between the way things are,

but the way things could be. And that is the real battle now, which is to say, yes, we are moving on, but we need to more and more work out, hang on, we have this information, we have these possibilities, we have in terms of managing to minimise the divide between people. Do you think that's what we... It's there, it does it does exist these possibilities but they're still not being acted on yeah and it's

back to the narrative the story that we we know what kind of country what kind of world we could live in we know the solutions to a lot of problems scientific or or otherwise. The question is, are we prepared to put the effort, the energy and the priority into trying to resolve them? And sometimes we make decisions that take us in a different direction. You can think back on ways in which perhaps we would have moved faster and further on climate change. Perhaps if we'd had President Al Gore, the White House would have done more quickly, because for him, that was a massive priority at a time when it wasn't a priority for many people, particularly politicians involved across the world. Or you can look back and think, if things had been different, we could have made a dramatic change. And it comes back again to the role of people,

that people actually determine much more than I think sometimes we all realise how far and how fast we move on an issue. And so it really is important to make sure that people feel empowered to make change. Right, but it's very hard to get people to think about the long term when there are immediate humane issues. I mean, it's hard to believe that people are really going to do something about climate change

50 years from now when there's now a situation when the thousand richest people on the planet could improve the lives of the bottom billion on the planet and they're not doing so.

So that's really the big gap between the way things are and the way they could be. And although people are getting, on average, better off, the gap between the way they are and the way they could be is getting wider. And that's why there's no ethical progress, and that's what depresses me. Chris, at the end of this, do you have a greater optimism, a more strenuous pessimism where are we i don't know i i think um i think i am

broadly optimistic about the future of humanity but that is because i just don't understand enough well that's the uh end of the moral maze and i feel that this might be a show that needs a sequel it turns out talking about the destiny of humanity and the ethics of all of them can't be covered in 29 minutes. Why don't you do one in 2047 called Told You So? And he'll still look the same age.

Me too, Robin. They reboot him every year. We also asked the audience a question and the question was, when you were a child what did you think humanity would be up to by 2019? And here are the answers. We would be able to use teleportation to get anywhere, but I would

still have been late for school. Extinct. I thought we'd have discovered the secret to everlasting youth by now, but it seems Brian Cox has kept it all to himself. I was told that we should not worry because things can only get better.

Happy to have misled a generation, Brian. And just simply, not this. That's the universal human condition right there in two words. I didn't think it was going to be that. Thank you very much to our panel, Chris Addison, Cathy Ashton and Martin Rees. Next week's episode, we are asking, can fish count? I'm not asking that.

All right, then, next week's episode, I'll be asking, can fish count? And you'll be sitting there going, why aren't we doing physics? Anyway, good night. Good night. APPLAUSE In the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage Till now nice again

Before you go Let me just squeeze in here And tell you about the Flip Podcast From BBC Radio 4 Each month there's a new book set to listen to From people like Rhys James May Martin And Joe Lysett.

Subscribe to the Flip podcast on BBC Sounds. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet. We are travelling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you