If you could virtually build an exact model of a human brain down to the sub-molecular level and then run it as a simulation and it gave outputs that were indistinguishable from the outputs of a real brain, would that be sentient or would it still be a simulation? It's a very fine line. Is it an actual… conscious simulation of a brain or are you just faking an organism? Gareth, thank you so much for coming on our little show. We really appreciate it. Maybe you can just start off with just your n
ame and what you do. My name's Gareth L. Powell and I'm a science fiction novelist. Super, super. Now, how did you get into science fiction? I started at a very early age. Some of my earliest memories of being about four years old and watching the original Star Trek series on an old black and white TV back in the early 70s. I think that was probably the first time they were shown in the UK. So, I kind of grew up with that and then Star Wars hit in 1977 or 76, 77 wasn't it? And then, you know, th
at was a lost cause from then on really. So, I've been asking everybody this question, scientists, sci-fi authors, about what they think the world could look like in a hundred years. In terms of people I've asked, none of them have actually written a book that is set 75 years from today. So, I don't know if that is how you think the world could look, but if you could maybe just tell us a bit about the book, and then also, obviously ... What about how you think the world could look like in a hund
red years? Well in the book I sort of extrapolated current trends for, well in fact I didn't mean to be quite as topical as I was in the book because in one of the opening chapters there's a nuclear conflict between the nations of the world and I thought is that a bit far-fetched when I started writing it in 2019 and then obviously as soon as the book came out Putin rolled into Ukraine and I thought, oh blimey, I've suddenly become very topical. But yeah, in the book I sort of extrapolate sort o
f climate gradually worsening and the economy worsening and there's all kinds of, you know, the world is in pretty bad shape. And then international tensions are rising. And then I don't know where I got the idea for this, but England has a bumbling prime minister who makes a very bad joke without realizing his mic's live and accidentally triggers World War Three. So in the book I used my kind of my Cold War childhood fears and I had a superior alien intelligence come in and just take all the nu
clear weapons away and sort of relegate us to the cosmic version of the Naughty Stap as a species. So I don't honestly think that's going to happen in our case. But, you know, it's a fun, fun story premise is, you know, what happens when the adults show up and make us all behave. But definitely, definitely the way I think the world is going to look unless we have some kind of massive international... cooperation and cleanup is it's going to be a bit shittier than it is now in a lot of ways and t
he rich will be rich and the poor will still be poor and there won't be enough food and clean water to go around and you know the climate will be causing crops to fail and things will generally be not particularly good. And in that sense, do you think that humanity has a future beyond Earth? This is where I kind of diverge with the part of the community who thinks we should all hop on spaceships with Elon Musk and relocate to Mars. Mars is, from a sort of habitual point of view, an absolute nigh
tmare. It's the surface radiation, extremes of temperature, we can't breathe there, the air pressure on surface is so low we'd have to wear pressure suits to stop our skin sort of expanding. It's horrible, it's sort of almost the worst kind of place you can imagine. So the only place we know within reachable distance that is habitable is the earth. So if we were going to go to the effort and expense of trying to colonize Mars we'd be much better off pouring that money into terraforming the earth
and making the earth habitable again because that would be a lot easier and the commute would be a lot shorter. I like that, I mean I've never heard terraforming earth as a as a solution and I think it's a it's a really good way to to think about it. Yeah I mean I in some of your books you talk about obviously about sort of human arcs traveling through the universe. Are these sort of like O'Neill syllabus or something similar to that? Well, in the book they are intelligent and they have the abi
lity to reshape themselves according to their own whims and the preferences of the population of humans aboard them, so they come in all different shapes, sizes, environments. Some look like hedgehogs because they've got lots of skyscrapers sticking out of them so they can be spun, have gravity at the ends of the skyscrapers. Others are just kind of full of water, or what have you, and people have engineered themselves with gills to live in the water. So there's sort of a thousand arcs and there
are a thousand different solutions to ways to live in space, and they're all kind of muddling along together. In terms of sentience, I think it's Embers of War where you talk about sort of a sentient spaceship. Do you think this is a progression in our lifetime that we'll get to a place where AI will be sentient? That's a very interesting philosophical point. I think it's possible we'll get to a place where we can't tell whether it's sentient or not. so that it can give the appearance of being
sentient, but I don't think we will get to a place where we know for certain that it has an interior life and it isn't just mimicking sentience or doing such a good simulation of sentience that we can't tell the difference. Whether that would be sentient and alive, as I say, it's a philosophical point. I mean, it depends, you know. Yeah, I think if you could virtually build an exact model of a human brain down to the sub-molecular level and then run it as a simulation and it gave outputs that we
re indistinguishable from the outputs of a real brain, would that be sentient or would it still be a simulation? It's a very fine line. Is it an actual? conscious simulation of a brain, or are you just faking an organism? Do you think we're alone in the universe? We're using that definition. We're not, because great apes have been shown to understand mortality. Elephants have been shown to understand mortality. They grieve. So from that point of view, you know, we do have... Yeah, I'm just point
ing out there are several, just on this earth, there are potentially quite a few other intelligent species that we have made no progress in recognizing. So, when we get out into space, we might not even recognize an alien intelligence. because it might not appear the same as we are. And if we have trouble talking to crows and dolphins, trying to find a common ground to establish whether something's sentient, if it's, for instance, a large array of refracting crystals, would be very, very difficu
lt. And we might just see it as an outcrop of gemstones and not realize that it's sentient or it has thoughts. But also things can be. alive and act apparently with purpose without being sentient. For instance, an ant's nest or a beehive can achieve collective goals apparently intelligently, but with no directing intelligence. So we might meet something along those lines, which apparently it has purpose and an agenda but no sort of interior life or So from that point of view, yeah, I mean all be
ts are off once you get off Earth because if you rerun the story of Earth from the beginning again, the chances of coming up with something like us are billions to one. We're just a result of so many different accidents. So to expect to go out into space and find something like us seems to be highly, highly unlikely. In terms of first contact, so then you would think that first contact would definitely be sort of at a, you know, we'd find Mark Grubbs somewhere. Do you think there is a possibilit
y of an intelligent species contact? I think there's definitely a possibility of an intelligent species existence, whether given the size of the universe and the distances involved. we can manage that within the lifetime of our species is another matter. I would very much hope so. It's one of the things I would love to know before I die is whether there is intelligent life out there. I think we're much more likely to... see it at a great distance. For instance, when there was this star recently,
Tabby's Star, which was dimming and everybody got very excited because they thought there might be an alien civilization around the star blocking its light. I think we're much more likely to see something like that across the gulf of space and wonder about it. maybe fire a laser off at them to kind of try and initiate communication, but I think we may never get an answer, and we may always wonder, but the chance of them building something they can get here in any appreciable fraction of time, d
iscounting the idea of hyperspace, it's a big unknown. So unless there are ways to get around the speed of light, I think a ship full of aliens rocking up on the White House lawn is very, very unlikely. As I'm saying this, I'm thinking, knowing my predictive skills, then that will probably happen tomorrow now, just to prove me wrong. It's what happens tomorrow. We know who to blame. They've come for our cars, apparently. That's what aliens like to come down to, down to Earth. You mentioned shoot
ing out lasers. So there's two sides of the METI, which is the Messaging for Extraterrestrials discussion. Do you fall on the side of you think it's a good thing and we should be sort of voicing ourselves out to the universe? Yeah, I'm in two minds about this. There's the dark forest theory, which is that everybody's keeping quiet because you can never know for sure whether another species is going to kill you, so your only way to survive as a species is to stay very quiet and to immediately kil
l anyone you come into contact with because they might prove to be a threat later. It's kind of like some sort of game theory, I think. In reality, if we had thought like that as a human species, sort of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 years ago, we were broken up into small communities, small tribes, but we started trading. We started... building bigger societies, we invented agriculture and started supporting, and so we built up into what we are now a global civilization. So historically we haven't beh
aved like that, and it hasn't always worked out. Obviously there have been some native, that's not the right word, some indigenous populations that have suffered upon meeting other… parts of the human family, but in general we now have a global civilization so we're not all still cowering in those small tribal units, staying very quiet and trying not to be seen. So perhaps making ourselves known in the universe could have that effect as well. You've kind of delved into hive minds and again into
consciousness from an AI perspective. You know, do you think this is something that is in humanity's future, uploading consciousness? That's another very philosophical point, which ties into what I was saying earlier about whether we would have sentient AI because an uploaded human personality would in effect be a sentient AI. so we can't, I don't think we can have the one without the other. If we can't build a sentient AI, I don't see how we can support a human consciousness within a computer,
so we would have to have the one before the other. In that case then, possibly, as I say, but whether that uploaded consciousness would be you or not, I have some very strong doubts. I think if your body dies, you're dead, but if your personality and memories and a recording of them live on, then that recording may feel a continuity, but I think the you that inhabits your skull would have died. So, it's a philosophical point. There would still be a you in the world that remembered being you and
considered itself you and could maybe even legally be you. but I think the actual you that had been born and grown up and everything would be gone. So, yeah. Do you think that first contact could be with an AI or with a non-biological species? I think, given the rigors of space travel and the distances involved and so forth, machines are much better suited to life in the galaxy than we are. They have better radiation tolerances, they can handle acceleration, you know, they don't need... When we,
as humans, get into a spaceship, we need to bring along a whole load of plumbing. food, all sorts of things, and it takes up an awful lot of mass. Whereas if you can get the intelligence of a similar intelligence into something the size of a basketball, you can, you know, you can fire it off much faster and... much less energy and you don't need to worry about recycling the water and recycling the air, having a hydroponics garden to grow carrots and all of that. So I think it's more likely we w
ould have machines roaming around out there and if they were sort of Von Neumann machines that every time they got to Somewhere, with Metal, they built another copy of themselves, or another two copies of themselves, and then all went their separate ways, and they all built copies, and they all built… And you'd have an exponential kind of diffusion out into the universe. I think that we would be more likely to meet the kind of wavefront of that kind of expansion than just a sort of random single
ship wandering through the galaxy and bumping into us, just from a statistical point of view. And that's one of the arguments against the existence of alien life, is that hasn't already happened, because even at kind of sub-light speeds, you could probably spread out to, using that method, throughout the entire galaxy in around a million years, and the galaxy's been around for... a lot longer than that. The universe has been around for 14 billion years so it you know or it's possible that has a
lready happened and we just missed it because we're quite a young species. Don't forget we've only been kind of technologically savvy for a handful of centuries. So yeah we're talking about very small windows of time and very large units of distance. So why do you think we haven't found aliens yet or what do you think the answer to the firing paradox is? Well, I mean, even if, I mean, our radio emissions are going out into the galaxy, but they only go a certain distance before they degrade to th
e point where they're undetectable from the background anyway. So that's quite a small shell in a huge galaxy. The only way to really announce our presence on a larger stage is through light. And I don't think we're emitting enough light to be detectable at any appreciable range of the planet. At best, a telescope may... know, the telescopes for us, if there was a civilization like us around Alpha Centauri now, and that's only four light years away, I think at best we would see a planet and wond
er why it had a high albedo. And that would, you know, that would be the city lights, but we would think that could be reflective ice, that could be, you know, a cloud layer. It would be very, very hard to distinguish that without telescopes that are just... so incredibly clear, they're almost in the realms of science fiction themselves. So, if there was an intelligent species 500 light-years away, they would have no way of knowing we were here. They wouldn't have time to receive any signal we s
ent, they wouldn't have time to... The light leaving here would be from Elizabethan times. so they wouldn't be able to see anything apart from they might detect a lot of carbon in the atmosphere from all the fires. But, you know, it's a big-ass galaxy and we simply aren't making enough noise, despite the dark forest theory people. Unless something is literally in our neighborhood, I don't think it will spot us. In terms of the golden record, how has the golden record played a part in your life?
How long have you known about it? Do you know about it? Yeah, I remember learning about it at school when I was younger, being played the Beethoven and Chuck Berry and the snips of music and stuff, I think, as there was all the different people saying things in different languages, which to be honest, if you're an alien, that's going to be confusing as hell if you're trying to piece together a language. and you don't realize they're all different languages but you know to make it easier but and
then there's the famous picture of the man and the woman and the aliens are going to get that and say stop sending nudes it's just yeah I mean the idea that some hipster alien is going to have a working turntable to play that on is just you know the fact that it I think they didn't they, did they include instructions for how to build a, a record player? Sounds... So basically they had a top-down on the on the cover They had a top-down and a side on a view and they used hydrogen as the time betwe
en hydrogen atoms absolute on North I suppose and then they had sort of a they had an image which would show what the The the first image that an 18 would be able to see and essentially if they saw that image They'd be like Jimmy we've cracked the code, you know, let's look at the whole record It's just, I mean, I think, you know, Voyager isn't even going to get outside our Oort cloud for like 20,000 years or something, is it? So, I mean, if an alien actually found the thing, you know, they'd pr
actically be within shouting distance of us anyway. So, but, you know, the fact they found it, I love the idea that they might all come down and get to talk, because they've had it on, like. 45, well, 78 when it should have been all 33 or something, but it's... Yeah, I mean on the hellos, essentially they first got, they tried to get the UN to basically do the hellos and then eventually they just pulled in people from Ithaca, and there's a hello in there that is, have you eaten yet? Please come
say hello sometime. I forget which language that's in, because they're all unscripted hellos. So yeah, and I think it's 70,000 years until it reaches, I think the first star. And we'll be going for, they did a study about 10 years ago, we'll be going for about 4.5 billion years, which is, for our audience, about the time that Andromeda will hit the Milky Way in about four billion years, and the Earth will no longer be here, we'll say in about four billion years. 5. In terms of making a new world
record. What do you think could be a way to represent what it means to be human? I ask that because I have read somewhere that your books very much ask what it means to be human. That's a very good question. I would say I would try for more clarity than I think a snapshot of the entire world on one small recorded device can probably manage. So I would aim to include sort of mathematical puzzles and theorems and things we've discovered the kind of culture and the science. until we have a common
language that we can discuss those in, or at least into, you know, unless we're going to send a follow-up probe or what have you. But for the first one, I would concentrate on making contact, and making contact as clearly and as unambiguously as possible, because... I mean, we have a hard enough time speaking to each other via text message without misinterpreting and taking offense. So trying to do that with minds that probably work in extremely different ways than ours, I think we'd have to be
very, very careful and very, very clear and very simple. It makes me think about one of the ideas we've got for a message is essentially a welcoming AI. And the idea is that if we found some sort of a probe, the first thing we'd do is switch it on. And once we switch it on is to have some sort of a self-starting multimedia message. Not necessarily artificial intelligence, but something sort of like that. Any ideas on that? I think even that's an interesting idea, because people do posit dangers
of runaway artificial intelligence and of creating what's known as a singularity, where a machine smarter than a human designs another machine smarter than itself, which designs a machine smarter than itself, and you get this runaway effect until basically we're dealing with completely ineffable god-like creatures who may see us as a little more than ants. So, to send one to an alien race, who may also have considered these dangers, they may have put a ban on self-aware machinery. They may consi
der that very dangerous, and to them, that might be like us sending them a scorpion in the post. They might be like, what the hell? So, we would have to think very carefully before including anything like that. I mean, the whole thing is a minefield, it's not as simple as sending a greeting card, because if they open that and there's a self-aware entity on board, they may take that as some kind of infiltration, or some kind of direct insult, or we've violated a taboo, they may have a taboo again
st creating artificial life, full stop, so... That would have to be very carefully thought out, I think. Would you say maths is a good form of basic communication? To start off, we've got to figure out what is the base, and then obviously from there sort of build that to more advanced communication. Maths is a very simple way of, because there are some, well there appear to be some constants in the universe, if we can present those in a way that can be understood by an intelligence that maybe op
erates in base 8 or base 10 or base 12, then that may be a starting point. I always loved the fact in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they used music, which was a lot of fun, but there's also chemistry because you can symbolize a hydrogen atom and then a carbon atom and then you can gradually build up and then you can say, you know, this is what we're made of, this is kind of what we eat, and so on, represent that chemically, so that's a possibility as well. And from that you would... I don'
t know, not being a linguist or anything, how you would go from swapping simple mathematical formulas to meaningful dialogue, but that would certainly be, I think, a place where if they were at all technologically advanced, they would, at least technologically advanced to understand the contents of the probe we've sent them, they would have to know some basic maths and some basic chemistry. So, and also star maps as well, we could send them, you know, as on the first Voyagers, a variety of star
maps as well. So they could, we could, you know, we'd have a common context there if they could identify the same stars as we did. But somehow, I don't know how we would go from those first concepts through to more complex interactions. We make first contacts. They're similar to us, similar enough to us that it's an evolutionary sort of pathway that has been traveled before, but they are 200,000 years in the future. What would you ask? What would you like to know from them? Just how to clear up
our mess, how to get through the next population bottleneck, whether that's through either resource depletion, pollution, runaway greenhouse effect, or our own warlike natures, we're heading for a whole mess of trouble and I'd like to know how to get through that as painlessly as possible. How do you think it would change our perception of ourselves finding life out there? I think it might force us to grow up a bit. At the moment we're pretty self-centered, we have a very short-term view. We're
very curious, but we don't think about the future too much. And we don't think through the consequences of our actions enough. And I think if we found another advanced species out there, we might do a bit of tidying up. We might, you know, we'd want to put on a good face for them. So we might, you know, start tidying the oceans. We might start, you know, stop killing each other a bit. and, you know, try and get our house in order. I think that would do us a lot of good. Any advice for people asp
iring writers or wanting to get into science fiction writing? Yeah, simply just read as much as you can in the genre, especially the books that are being written at the moment. People will tell you to go back and read Dune and all those, and that's an important part of it, but also finding out what the genre is doing today, what subjects are being engaged with and talked about today is a very good thing to do. And read books. Critically, read books you like and try and work out what it is you li
ke about them, and read books you hate and try and work out what it is you hate about them, and that will give you a fairly good idea of how to achieve the effects you want to achieve when you actually sit down and start writing your books yourself. Over the last couple of months, anything that you have been fascinated by and are excited by? I've been writing a lot of columns for the Engineer magazine, I write a monthly column there about taking a sci-fi view of today's engineering, which is fun
. But a lot of that has been based around automation and the coupling of automation with ever-advanced artificial intelligence and the various ways that could work on the battlefield, in healthcare, in supply chains. We're only just scratching the surface of that, I think, and the coming decades are going to be very interesting. There's already fully automated ships. sail up, are loaded by fully automated cargo handling robots, sail off, deliver there, and then are unloaded at the other end, and
then come back, and they're completely automated sort of drones, and I've got this kind of... idea that all the humans have died off and these parts of our supply chain are still beavering away like clockwork toys, just moving stuff around the globe for us, and yeah, that's very interesting. Gareth, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming on the show, and also hope to have you back when we've got a couple more viewers as well.
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