Alright Matt, I've got a topic I want to talk to you about and I've read a bunch of things and I'm going to present some information to you from a scientific like philosophy perspective. But you're really good at all that. You're really good at the philosophy part and you're really good at the history part and extrapolating things that happen in the past to the future. And so I think this topic is going to be uniquely interesting.
It's in that Venn diagram between things I like, like space and things you like, like exploration and I don't know the future of humanity and the history of thought. Thoughts? Great. This is what, I mean hopefully people have figured this out by now but there's like three or four basic formats for the episodes that we do and this is one of them.
It is. This is also actually the Aliens episode that I've been promising. What? It is.
Aliens. Yeah. You've been begging me to talk about aliens for months. That's about bringing it up in socially uncomfortable situations.
Destin, you know, my aunt is terribly terribly sick. Oh man, that sucks. So I've been thinking about aliens a lot, bro. Okay, but anyways, we might have to put down my dog.
Ah dude. Do you think there's stuff watching us though? So we just need to do this. We need to make this happen so we can clear this off the plate and we can get back to to be in friends.
Yeah, but I'm gonna be, I'm gonna level with you here. I am not ready to go all in on the aliens conversation. Like what I would like to do today is just kind of present some ideas to you. And then I think there's going to be a follow up later after we get some feedback from people that support on Patreon and stuff like that because this is a bigger conversation but we have to like build the foundation for this.
So to be clear, we are just entering the aliens phase of our friendship. This isn't going to mark the end of it. Yeah, exactly. Okay, I accept you for who you are.
I want to tell you something that I've read about that I think is interesting. And I want to tell you about how I think it has to do with interstellar travel. I've never seen these two connections be made. This is what I think is an original thought but as we've discussed in the past, a lot of times our original thoughts aren't actually original but like when I write songs by Coldplay.
Yeah, exactly. So what do you know about the Spanish explorers and the conquistadors and the people that were leaving the European continent and they're heading over towards the Americas and the islands in the Pacific? Do you know anything about the things they would do when they did that? Like when they would come to an island they didn't know about?
Sure. I think of the big three as being Pizarro and Fountain of Youth guy. That's Balboa, right? And then Cortez is the other one.
He's Mexico, right? Yeah, I think so. I think De Soto is in there somewhere. We're in your part of Indigram right now.
Yeah, except barely. I don't know this stuff. I mean, I remember it from like college history surveys and I taught it a couple of times at a perfunctory level. I don't think about this much.
So you just taught it at the college level? Is that what you just said? Well, yeah, but it's survey stuff, dude. Like literally one week ahead of the students just reading the same book and being like, oh, yeah, it's right.
I remember this from when I learned it sort of. He's trying to get through it and not look like an idiot. So you can get to the stuff you know better. Okay.
These guys were from the era of Spanish dominance. They had a fleet that gave them a period of control during colonialism that outstripped the French and outstripped the English. That changed in 1588 when the English beat the Spanish Armada. Sir Walter Raleigh was engaged in this stuff.
This is a Queen Elizabeth victory. It's just a really fun era English history and the Spanish are the bad guys for this part of the story. But right up until 1588 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Spanish went hardcore on the colonial thing and on the go find gold thing and on magical mystical quests. And it was kind of rad.
And it's kind of all tied up a little bit with pressures from the Reformation and the stuff that would eventually get sorted out in Vienna with Islam becoming more powerful and Turkey. And so hey, maybe it's a little bit easier to go west. Let's see what's out there. It's just a super fun era.
But the conquistadors, they went on cool quests like for the Fountain of Youth in Florida. Well, that's pretty rad. My understanding is they didn't find it, but I've been to a couple of the beautiful clear watersprings that maybe inspired the legend. Of course, they encountered Native Americans in Florida.
And of course, that didn't go great. I mean, you've got a millennium of development in terms of technology between Native Americans in Florida and what you're getting from the most technologically advanced society on earth at the time. That's Spanish. Yeah, obviously, advantage Spanish.
Well, I don't know, you could maybe make a case for China at that time. But I mean, China's just out of sight, out of mind, is a completely different orbit of what's going on on the planet. Yeah, so I mean, it didn't go great and understandably the conquistadors have its conquerors right there in the name. So it's not the most flattering look at things.
And then Cortez famously invades Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, the conquistadors encounter the Mayans, who are the Native Americans who built up this elaborate society that had cool architecture and had a great sense of how the stars and astronomy worked and how that all fits together in the seasons. I mean, it's a pretty advanced civilization, but they couldn't be the Spaniards. Then those conquistadors made their way all the way to Techno-Titlan and you think of the confrontation with Montezuma and the Aztec Empire there in central Mexico. So both the Mayans and the Aztecs ultimately are defeated, however you qualify defeat by the Spaniards in that regard.
And then Pizarro is the third, I think, of the big three. And he's the guy who ends up in modern day Peru and has the showdown with the Incas. He got assassinated. His ended badly.
But the damage was done. Advantage for the defenders is you know the terrain. You have a huge numerical advantage. Advantage for the attackers is maybe your 2000 years ahead in technology, armor, projectiles, gunpowder.
Yeah, didn't take a lot of conquistadors troops to equal a whole lot of guys who could only engage in hand-to-hand combat. So I don't know. Is that what you're thinking? So we're looking for?
Yeah, that kind of stuff. We take a class here in Alabama when you're in high school called Alabama History. It's awesome. It's a great class.
Like we learned about the Atlattl, which is a thing that extends the length of your arm. And of course I was just so blown away by this. Like I went out of my yard and made an Atlattl out of an old fish and pole. Like I love the same.
You did the same? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we learned about this chief, Chief Tuscaloosa.
He was a chief of the, I forget it was Chachtar Creek people. I forget. But he led this group of Native Americans against DeSoto. He took him on.
And there's this place called Mabila. It's a lost city here in Alabama. And there was this big battle that happened between the Native Americans in Alabama and DeSoto. Like they just went for it.
DeSoto had a Mississippi campaign, right? Is this part of that? DeSoto was all over the place. I don't know about the Mississippi campaign.
I know he was in Alabama. He spent a lot of time in Florida. I've seen stuff where he went up into Tennessee. Like, I'm sitting here looking at a map of some stuff that DeSoto did.
It looks like he was in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama. It looks like he maybe went over to, I don't know, the map stops just before Mississippi. But DeSoto did a lot of things. And one of the things in particular that I think is interesting that they did is what I want to bring up today.
If you were a member of this Spanish exploration party, like, let's say we're in Spain in around 1530, right? We know that there's a lot of new world over there. And we want to go to it. You're on your way.
You're like, hey, we're going to stop at this island here. I don't know what you do when you stop an island when you're at Spanish explorer. We're going to stop at this island. We're going to wait a few days and then we're going to go on to the next island.
What kinds of things would you do with that island? Because I have this thing I've read that they did where they kicked out pigs. Have you heard of this? Huh?
They kicked out pigs. What do you mean? Yeah. So like the Spanish, it's my understanding when they would come to an island and they're like, Oh, interesting island.
But we don't know where this is on the map. But let's put it on the map. Okay, we're literally going to put it on the map. Let's leave some pigs here.
That way, when we come back through to our new island that we have on the map, there will be pigs. Lots of pigs. Lots of pigs. And we can hunt the clever and we can eat the pigs.
So this was a thing that they did. And they did a lot. My understanding is even Columbus did this as well. So Columbus was Portuguese, right?
Remember me? Correct. Or what was Italian? What was Columbus?
I don't know. He was Genoese. What's that? Where's that?
Italy. Genoa is Italy. But he sailed for Ferdinand and Isabelle of Spain. Okay.
But the reason you're connecting with Portugal is how there was a grunge music scene in Seattle in the 1990s. Yeah. You picture Seattle in the 90s. You picture indie rock in the early 2000s.
You picture Omaha, Nebraska. There was an explorer scene in Lisbon, in Portugal. And so even if somebody didn't sail for Portugal, like that's just where the college of navigation, you know, maybe not literally, but that's where it was. Really?
Everybody was connected there. That was the scene. So Columbus was from Genoa, sailed for Spain, and of course had connections with Portugal because everybody did. And what's the unifying factor over all of that?
The Roman Catholic Church. So these are separate kingdoms, but also, you know, this is pre-prodistant reformation. So yeah, your memory is good. Is the point.
I want to hone in on this kicking out of the pigs into this area. Like if you're at a new island and you take, let's say like six pigs, and you leave them on this island, what did the pigs do when they're on the island? Hump. Yes.
Yes, they did. Another way to say that is what they replicate. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah.
No doubt. So these pigs make other pigs. What is the value of that when you come back? Obviously.
Those pigs have done all the hard work of converting garbage plants into protein that makes the human body work and sustains sailors who are deprived of protein and minerals in an environment where it's very hard to get it over long seaboys. It makes those sailors continue to function. Yes. Okay.
So this, this right here is the heart of what I want to talk about today. Okay. I'm going to ask, I know it's weird, but I want to ask you just a couple more questions about pigs and just go with them. I'm going to talk about conquistadors.
All right. No, no, no. The connection to the conquistadors and explorers is that these are people who are trying to populate new lands in the world. Okay.
Yes. And they have very few stopping over points for these pigs along the way. Throughout, you're talking about these islands, you've got the Azores and then Bermuda. There's nothing in the middle of the Atlantic.
Yeah. It happened in, it's not the middle of the Atlantic, but you know, my understanding is that Columbus, he got some pigs from the Canary Islands and he kicked some out of the Dominican Republic and Desoto, he came back. Oh, that's how he went. Yeah.
The cenaries are barely even on the way. I don't know if that's how he did it in that specific voyage, but some things I read said he did that. Desoto came over and he kicked out some pigs at Tampa. And so even now there are these feral hogs all over the south and a lot of them can trace their roots back to those initial pigs that these guys kicked out.
They have like little websites and stuff that can go on like hoglinnage.com and they figure out like just what they just mash the keys with their hooves or is scientists doing this? Scientists doing this. Have you ever heard of Tiber Island in Georgia near Savannah, Georgia? Yes.
Yeah, I've been there. Yes. I know where we're talking about. Far east side of Georgia, there's an island, a couple of islands south of Tiber Island and it's called Osaball Island, O-S-S-A-B-A-W Osaball Island.
I don't know what that is. I don't either. They kicked some pigs out on this island and these pigs replicated like crazy. And it wasn't just like a pink pig.
When you're thinking about pigs, sometimes we think of the old McDonald reading book type pig that's like happy and it's usually smiling, you know, it's not about to be slaughtered for food. You know that pig? We're talking like boars that kings would hunt. Yeah.
Or like, pickery. What do you call those? How do you say it? I don't know.
What's it called? I don't know. The point is there's Old McDonald's farm pink pig is just one of many expressions of pig from the old world. I read this article on this this website from this, I guess they make ham in Virginia.
You've heard of Virginia Cured Ham. Yeah, sure. But it's this really fun little website called Tienda, like La Tienda, like like in sure. Yeah.
A market kind of thing. Like a store. Yeah. And they're talking about the Cured Ham that came from Spain back in the day and these boars and they talked about all these pigs.
They just kicked off the boats. And this particular, I don't know what they're doing. They're selling ham's or something, but they trace the lineage of the pigs back to the. Yeah, it's pretty fun.
Oh, that's great. So it's Old World Ham. Yeah. In the new world.
Exactly. Yeah. We're suckers for that in America. Oh, yeah, we are.
Absolutely. Anything older than our shores captures the imagination. The Osaball Island pigs. Okay.
They were taking over the island and in 1978, the state of Georgia took control of the island. And I think of animals as having different PR efforts and the pigs were eating all the seaweed and stuff there, but they would also eat the sea turtle eggs on the beaches. And so if you think about the PR of a sea turtle and the PR of a pig, who's going to win that one? Yeah.
It's not close. I know. So the state of Georgia came in and they started kind of like taking over and destroying a lot of the pigs that they saw as an everyday. They just released much larger six-pack containers, like the plastic rings from six-pack containers, but just bigger.
So the pigs would get their heads stuck in those and then they would die. That's how they did it. And even it out. That's how they did it.
It's so funny that you have like this old school 19th century style doily that you keep putting to your face as we talk. Like you have consumption. I'm blowing my neck. It's a little discreet coffin and you check it for blood.
It's bad. It's sniffle. Thank you for enduring the pig conversation. I wasted more time than I wanted to on that.
It was kind of fun. That's not a waste of this interesting. I'm with you. Okay.
All right. So in 1978, they're going to level the playing field on whatever it's called, island. Yeah. So basically, the government comes in and kills all the pigs.
And now the Osaball Island pigs are borderline extinct and people are upset about it. So it's government ever reached your favorite topic. So getting back to the pig thing. So let's imagine we have an island and we kick out six pigs on this island.
What are the attributes of the pig that enables it to harvest, as you said, the natural resources of the island and convert that into usable resources for the conquistadors or the explorers? What are the attributes of the pig itself? Well, they're just they're like a dad who takes his kids out to eat. I mean, they're just a garbage disposal.
They're like goats. They can convert almost anything into usable protein, which is incredibly valuable. There's lots of animals that you can eat, but they're picky and finicky. Also, they can go subterranean pigs can root up things and grab minerals from that.
So just from a pure energy conservation and transformation perspective, there's a reason that aside from two very notable religious group exceptions, there's a reason that everybody everywhere eats pigs. They do great in lots of different environments. They're highly adaptable. We think of pigs as being fleshy and hairless, but you've seen boars.
I've seen boars in the wild. I mean, one, they're terrifying, but two, they can winter coat up pretty damn well. Yeah, looks like you could get through a long winter there, Tuske. I think you'll be all right.
They have fat. It's a really adaptable animal that can work anywhere. A decent lifespan, they aren't rabbits, but they reproduce really effectively. Yeah, and they're not picky and they're findable.
As an animal to hunt, they are dangerous, but they're findable and getable, whereas their other animals might be a good source of protein, but you're going to waste a lot of protein and calories getting the animal. So I want to thank you because you're clearly playing ball with me. You don't know where I'm going to take it here, but I don't, but it's fun. Everything you just said, man, is going to line up with what we're going to talk about.
But there's one other thing that a pig can do that we haven't covered. And that is the fact that the pig has a processor on board. The pig has a brain. The pig can make decisions on what to eat, what natural resources to eat.
And that allows it to convert these other things in energy. Okay, so now's the moment for the big reveal. I would like to introduce a concept to you that is fascinating. And I think it is connected to the pigs.
Have you ever heard of a guy named von Neumann, only from you saying you want to talk about aliens for the last three months? Okay, John von Neumann is perhaps one of the most intelligent people ever to not win a Nobel Prize. See, Dutch, Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist. Really?
von Neumann is one of the most, I mean, it's unbelievable how smart this guy. He was absolutely some type of what he called it when a person is they excel in all the different categories. Polymath? Yes, he was a polymath.
That was von Neumann. And he came up with a concept that is brilliant. They're called von Neumann machines. Okay, a von Neumann machine is a machine that once you understand what it can do, it has tremendous implications for philosophy, for the future for everything.
And a von Neumann machine is a machine that has the ability to replicate itself. Okay, think about that. I'm thinking about that. And I have heard that expression now that you mentioned it.
Okay, a von Neumann machine has the ability to replicate itself. And what's that? So pig. Yeah, a pig is a von Neumann machine.
Absolutely. So I'm a von Neumann machine? You are a von Neumann machine. Well, that's one of the nicest things anybody's ever said.
Okay, there was an idea that von Neumann had. And there was this big problem amongst a lot of the physicists and smart people back in the day around the Manhattan Project. They're sitting around, they're having these conversations. And yeah, sure, they're building nuclear weapons and they're solving some of the most incredible issues in physics.
But like in the lunch room, they would have these really big discussions. And one of the discussions they had is, where are the aliens? Like, where is everybody? Is one way you'll hear it talk to like, where are all the aliens?
One of the things that von Neumann proposed is he said, hey, if there's the ability to make self replicating machines, and there is intelligent life, have you ever heard of the Drake equation from you? Yes. The Drake equation talks about, so there's so much here. And we're just going to skim over the surface of all of this and we're going to have to come back to it.
There's two things that are often talked about together. The first one is the Fermi Paradox. And the second one is the trick. Also from you?
Yeah. Okay, sure. Just lay them all out like I have never heard of these things. So we're dealing with the same stuff here.
Okay, so the Fermi Paradox has to do with, let's just read a definition together. I'm just going to read straight off with Wikipedia. Fermi Paradox is a conflict between the argument that scale and probability seem to favor intelligent life being common in the universe and the total lack of evidence of intelligent life having ever arisen anywhere other than Earth. So basically the Fermi Paradox is, and this is the way Enrico Fermi initially said it, is he said, where is everyone?
He's like, why is it so quiet out there in the universe? If the universe is so big and intelligent life should exist, why don't we hear from them? But isn't there an embedded second paradox right there in that paradox? Which is what?
The very thing infirmy statement that makes intelligent life being likely is the very thing that would make us unlikely to find it. He's saying things are so big, it must be out there. Well, if things are so big, it's going to take a long time to find it. There's a lot of room for it not to be in.
Enter the Drake equation. Okay. The Drake equation. Did I just walk into your trap again?
No, you didn't. No, you're doing great. So the Drake equation is an attempt to quantify or determine, I guess it's not quantified, to put probabilistic terms to the likelihood that intelligent life would be discovered. Okay.
So do you see on my screen right now? Do you see the equation on my screen? Do you see that? Yes, now I do.
So it's literally an equation. So it's n equal r star F sub p, n sub e, F sub one, F sub i, F sub c, okay. I'm going to have to ask you to unpack that a little bit. Long story short, n is the number of civilizations, like intelligent life that we think could communicate throughout the galaxy or in the Milky Way galaxy.
Okay. And all these other terms are things that go into the likelihood that there would be an intelligent civilization that could communicate with us. Okay. Communication is the operating boundary marker for intelligence.
In this particular case, yes. Yeah. Okay. So r sub star is the average rate of star formation in the galaxy, F sub e, the fraction of those stars that have planets, because you can't have life if they're not living on a planet, right?
Well, at least as we understand it. Yeah, that's a point in our understanding of reality, right? In sub e, the average number of planets that could support life, because you got to have a star that has a planet that has life. And then that life would have to be able to support that.
You would have to develop life, and then that life would have to be intelligent. And then you would have to be able to say, okay, well, intelligent life existed, and then they decided they wanted to communicate. So all these different terms add up. And then the last one is interesting, the length of time for which the civilizations release these detectable signals in the space.
Okay. All this was in a paper. And then one obvious thing that's left off the end and I understand why it is. But one other factor you have to add to that is you can't just assume that if all of those other criteria are met, that such a civilization, such a life form, that their timeline would match up with ours, they may die, but they might kill themselves and just blow it.
And so maybe they were there, but now they're not there. That's the ill term. It's actually an equation. It's the last term in the equation.
Oh, my bad. No, you got it. You just you just invented one of the terms of the trick equation. You're doing great.
Why is that your bad? You're doing it. Awesome. Okay.
So this is the concept of, okay, so you got it. The Fermi Paradox. Do I got it? No, I don't got it.
I have the gist. The Fermi Paradox. I'll repeat it back to you as I understand it. Fermi Paradox, where is everybody?
If the universe is the closest thing to infinite in physical reality that we can conceive of some people say it's infinite, but I mean, it's closest thing we got. You would think that's a big enough sample size that this would have happened more than once. This being intelligent, communicating sentient life like you and me. Yes.
Drake equation attempts to put some math to that to get to the actual likelihood or some sort of projection of how often that would happen so that maybe we could say, well, you should have sentient communicating life every this many parsecs, every this many light years, every this many galaxies. These are obviously all terrible units of measuring. I sound dumb, but I think you know what I'm getting at. You don't sound dumb at all, man.
You're killing it. My impression is that the Fermi Paradox takes my brain in one direction. It says, good job Fermi. Yeah.
Hey, what the heck? Where is everybody? The universe is almost infinite. We should have a Star Wars like society at this point with all kinds of different things.
How come that isn't happening? The Drake equation, however, listening to you explain that immediately took my brain totally in the other direction. And you got done explaining that and I'm thinking, dang, that's a lot of really specific criteria. You're getting into some crazy orders of magnitude and exponentials there for all of that to be met.
Maybe this isn't as likely as conventional wisdom makes it sound when you just rattle off the Fermi Paradox. So I don't know what to think. I know there's attention there, right? Yeah.
Okay. So enter the von Neumann machine. So there's a concept that says, if a society developed a sufficient level of technology to want to expand, Allah, Spain in the 1500s, right? Sure.
What is the best way to do that? von Neumann proposed a self replicating spacecraft. Forgive me. I'm not 100% sure von Neumann proposed it.
I know it's often attributed to him. We're doing the survey thing. Was it you said earlier? I don't know this content really, really well.
We're just flying over the top. Is that called a survey? All I need to do is say about two weeks ahead of the students and they're 18 and 19 year old freshman. I can do this.
Okay. Well, I'm trying to do a survey of this stuff for you. I will be the 18 or 19 year old freshman. I am not an expert in any of this, but I'm fascinated by it.
And what I want to do is I want to like just present these concepts and I want to dive down deeper into it. I'm sure there's different things I should read, all these types of things. But I think it's fascinating. So a self replicating spacecraft, a space pig, yeah, kind of, except the pig can has its own boat, right?
So basically a von Neumann probe von Neumann says, okay, if there's an intelligence species and they want to explore the universe, what they're going to do is they're going to make a spacecraft. It's a probe and it can fly out to the nearest star and it can look around and it looks around and it finds a planet. It's like, oh, there's a planet. And then it'll scan it somehow.
Like, oh, yeah, there's the elements that I need are on that planet and it'll go down to the planet and then it will take the resources that are in situ that are there and it will create another probe and it will send the information back. Hey, planet Earth with humans on it. I'm at this star. I found these materials and then it would make another probe and then it would self replicate and it would send that probe forward.
Okay, with me? Yeah. Okay. So this is an idea for a way to explore the universe.
Now, what's interesting about this is that probe has to have intelligence on it. It has to have some form of artificial intelligence, which means if the probe is to self replicate, there's all kinds of things like we could start to write a spec document on how we need this probe to look. We would have to have the ability to make chips on board that probe. You would have to be able to make some type.
It might not be a silicon wafer that we etch somehow with lithography and we make a integrated circuit. It might be some other type of computational capability, but we would have to make the ability for it to make some form of artificial intelligence. We would need the ability to have power on this probe. We would need it to be able to create propulsion, maybe even to do calculations to keep you if needed.
Horse to do that complex telemetry. It's going to have to make micro adjustments over a sample size of your time journey that long. You're also going to have to be able to adjust the things that you couldn't have scanned for and didn't see coming deep space travel works for a real long time. But eventually there's crap out there and it moves and you can't know it's coming.
It's going to have to make some kind of adjustment at some point in real time. Or if it doesn't, the whole thing ends the first time it encounters any meaningful unanticipated resistance. It's going to have to think on its feet for a very, very long time. Right.
Do you agree? I don't want to put you on it. I get one of two choices. No, no, no.
I was just realizing I didn't come off of that. But I was going to say, let me say this way. Do you agree that it is logical that once an intelligent species becomes sufficiently intelligent, if they have the desire to explore and expand, it's probably logical that they might make von Neumann probes. Do you think that might make sense?
Yes, because of history. Tell me more about that. So let me hit you with an example real quick. We're talking about a conquest that happened 500 years ago.
That's what you brought up. That's what you introduced. I fumbled through it because I don't know all this stuff off the top of my head. But I remember the big broad strokes of particularly that Spanish era of conquest from 1500ish to the late 1500s.
Right. So we bumbled through that one of the things that happened there that was also duplicated by explorers traveling to other parts of the world is this idea of we have to build our own supply lines behind us because there is no logistical support here. We cannot manage a baggage train, a supply train like you do in an overland expedition. It's impossible.
So they had to change the time horizon for this conquest and for this plan from the time horizon in the ancient world, in the medieval world, when you would think in terms of maximum a one year campaign during campaign season when the weather was favorable. Now, what you would do to make such a campaign of conquest viable is you would just secure your supply lines behind you. So let's say you had a million troops at your disposal. Well, you're going to have to deploy 2000 of those or 200,000 of those in your rear guard to make it so that you can have this constant line of little worker amps carrying food and all the resources from your home base all the way out to whatever you're trying to conquer.
So picture Persia. They were one of the last groups to try this approach. Persia was dominant from 540, 539 BC until 330 ish when the last emperor of Persia, the only one to be a non-Persian ethnically Alexander the Great, unseeded Darius the third. So you got a 200-year windowish we're talking about here.
They did very well, better than anybody had ever done. And they did it with dominance on their supply chain. They kept it together, but they also operated in one year campaigns. So if you just take a circle and you put it on the capitals of Persia, which are all within a few hundred miles of each other, Babylon, Sousa, Persepolis and Pissargati, modern day Iran, mostly a little bit modern day Iran.
You're saying those four capitals were the capitals all at the same time or different times? Yeah, there were different administrative purposes for all of those capitals. And there was actually a fifth. The historic capital of the Medes was Equatanna.
Equatanna was a good place to keep records because the weather didn't destroy parchment as quickly. It was a good place to keep anything that was perishable. I should say parchment's not the right word. So in the Bible, when they lost the records of King Cyrus' decree that you can go back and rebuild the temple, unsurprisingly, they found them in the document center, which was in Equatanna.
In Sousa, Pissargati was a good operating base for all of Persia's operations to the east and to India and Bactria and all of that stuff. Babylon had great infrastructure, irrigation built up by multiple generations of the Babylonians and all these other people who had come and gone out of the fertile crescent. It made sense to keep all the capitals. But if you just put a red pin in the middle of those five capitals and then you took a red string on a flat Mercator projection map and tied a pencil to that, you could draw a sphere of influence around Persia.
If you made that string, the length of what you could supply for a one year campaign and protect your supply lines, that's how big you could make the empire. They couldn't beat anything past that. Really? So we can celebrate all the glory of the Greeks and their heroism and their bravery and all of that.
And yeah, I think that's true and fun and cool. Also, Greece was just right at the end of what you could do in a one year campaign. And when they tried to stretch their campaign beyond one year, they got their butts kicked by a much smaller people group that they should have dominated. They couldn't keep the supply lines intact.
And their time horizon for a campaign, there as Persia and the 500s of 400s BC, was only a year. Maybe we could try to if we only went through places where the weather was good. Well, that was just untenable by the time you got to the age of colonialism and European conquest of the New World. It had to be a longer time horizon because of how long it took to get there.
And it, you know, necessities and other inventions forced them to think of ways to build a self replicating supply line because nobody's coming to save you. I mean, burn the ships. That's the famous line from Cortez, right? Yeah, we're here.
We're going to build our base of operations here and to use your term. We have to have self replicating stuff. We're cut off from all the grand, glorious resources of historic Western civilization. We're basically on a new planet here with food.
We don't understand animals. We don't understand perils. We don't understand people. We don't understand religion.
We don't understand whether we don't understand. We have to build a new to use your term again, self replicating base of operations because we cannot sustain the supply lines. There is a huge strategic leap forward in human thought and accomplishment, setting aside all the moral implications of conquest and everything else. That's a conversation for another day.
There is a huge leap forward in what the mighty Persians could accomplish in thinking the way they thought about supplying themselves and their expeditions and what these relatively modest expeditions in terms of manpower and size were able to accomplish in the age of colonial conquest that you're bringing up. So it's a historical lesson we have learned. I've just never thought about it in space. So are you saying that colonialism happened?
Obviously it happened because of the exploitation, because of the local material? People and other people stuff, sure. Yeah. But are you saying the great leap forward was the thought, oh, I don't have to return home every year.
I'm here to stay. I've never thought about Cortez saying burn the ships. Have you heard the Stephen Curtis Chapman song, by the way? It's so good.
That is the deepest cut of deepest cuts. Oh my goodness. Yes. I mean, not until now.
I haven't thought about that in 20 years. But yes, I know the song you're talking about. It's a great song. Cortez told you, Phyllis.
What's the point of the song as you understand it? Burn the ships were here to stay. I'm not going back. Yeah.
That's the point. Oh, what a weird choice, though, dude. Yeah. Think about that song with our right now brains.
The last one that's all come out, like the mid 1990s or something. The sensibilities back then were such like, hey, this would be a great thing to celebrate Christianity and commitment to God, a metaphor using Cortez and the Conchista doors, crushing the natives of Central America. I'm going to burn the ships of my heart and follow the Lord. I don't think that song would happen now.
That's my point. I think we might use a different analogy. Yeah, whatever. I don't care.
I think it's interesting to think that the concept of I'm here, you kept using the term time horizon, which I think is very interesting because we tend to think of time horizons in our own life spans. Ten. We think of like, hey, I live Lord willing 80 years or something like that. I can accomplish X amount of things.
I'm going to start in a location and I'm going to end in a location and hopefully this is what happens with my children or whatever. But to think about it in a completely different way, hey, I'm going to a new world. I'm going to light my ships on fire. This is where I'm at now.
This is my thing. If we're going to go back the other way, it's because we built more ships or they send people to us. That's a fail forward mentality. That's just wild and bizarre.
And also, it does big things for you. It does really big things for you. Yeah. So I made my requisite knee jerk sensitivities qualification statement there a minute ago.
Now I'm going to make the exact opposite kind of statement. It is also a huge morale boost to people who had sailed to basically another planet where they recognize nothing and are pretty sure they're going to die. Cortez is like, oh, let me just eliminate the question for you. Yes, you will die here.
Yeah. Remember the only thing we have that could possibly get us back across that ocean? It's on fire now. Good morning.
Yeah. That's pretty wild, man. It's interesting that had to be pretty liberating in terms of thought. Yeah, it's a good point.
All right. Where are we at now? So I guess there is a reason why most of South America speaks Spanish or Portuguese, right? There's a beautiful language.
Yeah. Yeah. So let's get back to von Neumann. von Neumann probes are a self-replicating machine that flies out into interstellar space.
So from this start of the next door. So the idea goes like this. I'm going to just tell you a statement that some people make and you tell me what you think about it. We know that there are no aliens because there are no von Neumann probes that we can see.
So the absence of, huh, we will just just, I'm just going to tell you the whole thing. If there were intelligent civilizations that had the ability to traverse between stars, we know that they don't exist because there are no von Neumann probes and von Neumann probes are the logical thing that would happen from a civilization that wants to explore the stars. So what are your thoughts on that? Like it's not a dumb thought.
If you just think about logically, it's not a dumb thing. No, I'm not turned off by the thought at all. Not at all. Not at all.
The knee jerk reaction to things like, and sounds on to logical argument. What is that? Where you're just like, that's dumb. I don't like it.
It's one of the most heady philosophical arguments for the existence of God. It's dependent on a millennia of Western philosophy and natural science. And it's basically the idea that the greatest thing that can be conceived of must exist. I don't want to get into all of it.
But it's one of those things like what you just said that initially hits you as no. And then you think about it over the course of a lifetime. And increasingly you're going, okay, I don't know if I'm convinced by that, but I at least understand how you got there. That's fascinating.
Maybe that thing reveals a problem with how I can see for logic. Maybe that thing is just so dangerously true that I just need more than a lifetime to chew on it. So knee jerk, my response to what you just said is the same thing I said about the Drake equation. Well, function of time.
When are we talking about here? We miss each other. I mean, that already could have come and gone setting aside all religious implications or whatever. You're saying you don't see one now.
Well, we're here. Also, there are things here that I don't think we know how they got here, like gold. Why is gold here? Do we know that scientifically?
The gold's a space rock, isn't it? Yeah, the thought is it it happened when really hot rocks hit each other really, really fast and that kind of stuff. Great. Well, gold also has remarkable physical properties unlike anything else.
You can smash that thing down and still use it down to just a fraction of it less than paper, the gold leaf and foil. It's unbelievably malleable. It has fascinating properties in conduction. It's not just pretty.
It's an amazing element. So if gold is a space rock that got here, did it get here because two things smashed into each other? Did somebody else figure out that those properties are incredibly productive again? Just spitball in here.
Did somebody else see the same values in that element that we see in it? That's left over from some self replicating thing or some other thing that got here on purpose, not on accident. Are you laughing at me right now? No, I'm loving this for two reasons.
We're kind of really deep in the thinking hole, but I'm also thinking about if this were to be a thread on Reddit, all the people that would push up their glass and be like, well, actually, they would actually make fun of how stupid we are. Those are incredibly tiny glasses for a prop. Have you had those there the whole time? Yeah, it's part of a video I was working on.
Those are microscopic glasses like that that lady who says wasowski all the time in Monster Zinkwares. I know it looks like something that would be on Mr. Potato Head. It's pretty good.
But they are a third of normal glasses. They're pretty good. It's something like a cat. I think all this stuff is fascinating.
So you do think that okay. Yeah, I don't want to round it out too. I think all this stuff is fascinating yet, because that's the thing where we do together conversationally, where we get distracted. We're like, it's time to come out of the thinking hole.
I'm not ready to come out of the thinking hole. You can signal that there's another level to the thinking hole. Of course, there's another level to this. Yes, there's more than another level.
If at any point you're like, I have to go do something, just use the predetermined safe word that you and I have agreed on that we slip past the third chair and have used in several episodes to signal we need to be done. You know the one. Yeah, platypus. Yeah.
No, you're not going to give it away that easy. And now you're just teasing people. So the other thing that comes to mind is something you said earlier. Well, kind of in a way we're a von Neumann machine.
Well, all right. I think I've made it pretty clear that I am a person of faith and I think there is a God. I do not understand the mechanics of the foundational origin story of Judaism and Christianity at all. I understand the ethical implications.
I understand the arc of history that that initiates. I see how that plays out. The story of the Garden of Eden continues to play out in humanity among people who do and do not believe in God. The reason it has staying power, even from a purely atheistic analytical perspective, is that's a pretty good founding myth.
You look around, you look at planet Earth and you're like, huh, yeah, there's some nobility to us. We were made by something good and smart and we are better than other matter. And if you smash a rock with a hammer, you should not probably generally be found guilty of murder, even though you disrupted a thing that was. But if you smash a person with a hammer, you should go away maybe forever.
We just know everybody knows everybody's always known this. So then you look at that particular foundational story and you go, huh, there's something broken about the heart of man, but there's something noble about the heart of man. There's something to redeem here. There's something beautiful here and somehow these characteristics are manifest in creation and physical existence as well.
And history doesn't just feel cyclical. It does feel like it's going somewhere. It feels like there's a story to this. Maybe it's paradigm.
Maybe we're just reading things into it. It could be. I understand if somebody could look at the world and come to that, but I don't understand if somebody could look at the world and arrive at complete nihilism. There's no point to anyone.
There's no value to anyone. We don't matter at all. You can say that stuff, but I think it's posturing. I think everyone is at least a sneaking suspicion that there's something important about people, more important about people, that there's something to the unfolding of time.
And so I would say even for people who aren't Christian or Jewish at all, there's a reason that story has stuck with us for a long time. All of that said, I have no idea. I'm not carpet bagging here. I have no idea.
I love that you've been talking carpet bagging over the past few episodes. Go ahead. You're going to go ahead with your back. No idea how that all actually works.
The Bible holds it out as there was non matter and then the initiating first cause made matter. Over what time period? I don't know. The Bible gives you one.
Is it a metaphor? Is it literal? I don't know. And that puts me at odds with certain Christians who would say they do know.
It puts me at odds with other people who would say, I know, and it's a very, very long time. And you should have said it's a very long time. I'm going with complete intellectual humility on this. I don't know how that would happen because it violates all the laws of nature that I understand.