Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 19: Modern Myths – Flat Earth, Space Colonization, and the Stories We Tell to Escape Reality

Worst case scenario is that we turn Earth into Mars. I mean, that would be utter devastation, right? Like wiping out all life on the planet basically. So why even think about Mars colonization as a reasonable option? I've often thought about living on Mount Everest, you know, condominiums on Mount Everest or the ocean floor.

As far more practical and easier and cheaper and safer than anything beyond Earth yet you don't see that. And why? I mean, there are stunts we can get to those places, but nobody thinks just 'cause we can go to those places that we're gonna. Live there. And so why do we use that flawed logic when it comes to space?

And I think it relates to what I would call the sort of mother of all disconnects or fallacies here, is that we imagine ourselves to be separate from the earth. Just the fact that we've been to the moon makes people think, well then we'll live there someday. But we didn't do that for Mount Everest. We didn't do that for Ocean Floor.

It's easy in our minds to just say, oh, we can just do X without understanding Almost the first thing about how complicated our lives on earth are, how completely tied we are to the entire community of life. We're an integral piece of it. We're not somehow separate manufactured parts that can just be shipped wherever we want.

Are we open to changing our beliefs? What assumptions are we willing to let go of if the evidence suggests otherwise that openness is at the heart of the scientific process? To be human is to dream and to question. But when do our dreams turn into delusions and our questions harden into conspiracies.

This episode explores two powerful beliefs and the increasingly popular movements behind them. One is the belief that humans could and should live in space that we're destined to leave our planet behind and colonize the stars. The other is the belief that we're not. On a planet at all, that the earth is actually flat while the ladder is held by fringe figures.

And the former by some of the most powerful men on earth, both rest on premises that might have more in common than you might realize. To explore these modern myths, we're joined by two guests, astrophysicist Tom Murphy and documentary filmmaker Daniel J. Clark, whose film behind the Curve. Follows prominent people in the fringe, but growing flat earth movement Together we'll examine the stories we tell ourselves about the world we inhabit, how we determine what's real or possible and what kind of world these stories create.

Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring how our understanding of our place in the cosmos shapes our relationship to planet earth. I'm Alex Leff.

Have you ever watched the 2018 documentary behind the curve? Excuse me? Anyone ever told you the earth is flat? The number who think the world is flat is growing Thousands, if not millions of people. Wow.

I can't believe I'm talking about this. There are millions of flat earth. There's, if you look on Google Trends, it's like Spike, there's flat earth dating sites. We've got songs, flat earth bottle on my bezel. The sky is the limit, probably literally. Ah, I see what you did there. I think Behind the Curve is a great film and fascinating look.

Into the Flat Earth movement and friend of the show astrophysicist, Tom Murphy thinks so too. You may remember Tom from our episode, astrophysics for a New Stone Age, or his blog Do the Math. When Tom told me he had been emailing with Daniel J. Clark, who directed behind the curve about comparing flat earth to space colonization, I invited them both onto the podcast so I could hear this conversation too.

And so you could join us as well.

Thank you both so much for making the time to talk today, and I was really excited. I watched behind the Curve years ago, and on one hand just loved the subject matter. Found it a fascinating. Microcosm for conspiracy theories, people's mistrust in each other, and authority, but also just thought it was made so well as a film and how gentle the approach was.

Your relationship with Mark. And yeah, so excited to get to talk with you and have you both in conversation with each other. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, and likewise, I'm a big fan. I, I don't know if I've seen the film. Two or three times. But it's always great and I've recommended it to many people, so it's, it's a great piece of work.

That's so nice. Thank you so much. Yeah. Daniel, I'm curious, what was the first seed? How did you first hear about the flat earth movement? It was kind of two things at once. I was working as a camera operator on some project, and one of the other people there was a conspiracy theorist, and he had really strong opinions about who really killed Nicole Simpson and like all this stuff.

And then he brought up. Oh, you think that sounds crazy. Like I have a friend who thinks the earth is flat and I just couldn't wrap my head around it at the time and I forgot about it pretty quickly after I left. But you know, it just deep in my brain. And then our producer and editor of the film, Nick Ander, he was on Reddit, I guess, and someone was talking about flat Earthers and he was like, should we explore this?

Should this is this interesting? Like, are these people for real? 'cause it seemed like a joke. It seemed like a troll. I think to some people it was, but to some people it was absolutely very serious. And shortly after that, we just decided, all right, let's figure out what this could be. And then we saw that there was a flat Earth international conference happening.

The very first of its kind, we're like, all right, that's our target. Like who's gonna be there? Let's start reaching out to those people so that we're talking to prominent people in the community, not just anybody. People who have clout and who people respect in the community, and then follow their stories and then their.

Convergence at this conference and what year was this? Is 2017. Yeah, and it's interesting because it's funny how much has changed in just the less than 10 years when you started working on the film. I imagine that for someone who is maybe a kid. 10 years ago takes for granted the fact that, well, yeah, people do believe that the earth is flat.

I'm curious about what your understanding is about when the modern movement gained traction and what was leading to that. From everything that we've gathered, it was, it was very much a murmur in the background, like something that was just very fringe people. Didn't really pay much attention to it. It really gained a lot of attention on YouTube because these flat Earth videos are usually very long and they love the retention of people letting them play.

They're conspiracy based, so they're kind of exciting and funny. So even if you're not interested, you're willing to listen and just kind of either ridicule it, but they're ridiculed, but they might make a point that you go, oh, I, I just, that's interesting. I, I didn't think about that. And it really got a lot of people's attention.

And then it became just a spiral of they believe this and they're looking for more proof, and then they, a community starts forming and people start commenting, and then all of a sudden you have friends who are doing the same thing. And you have this big community of creators and commenters. And then they start meeting in person.

And we went to a few flat earth meetups and it's people having a good time. They're just, you know, either drinking a beer and talking or drinking their own water that they brought from home. 'cause they don't trust the water at the restaurant, of course. So all these things kind of combine into one big piece of identity for a lot of these folks, and that was so fascinating to us and it's something we hadn't really expected necessarily.

When we started looking into it, we thought it was just people. Kind of standalone in their beliefs all over, but it turns out like they were just feeding each other and the videos would ping pong, so someone would make a video about this thing and someone would make a video about that video and they would elaborate on it, and then they would kind of go back and forth and it was this crazy feedback loop.

The slow creep. Sometimes some people initially shrug it off and then there's just something that sticks in their mind. They can't get rid of that one thought or that one clue. This doesn't make sense to them. If the earth was flat, this does make sense. And then, yeah, before you know it, they'll find their people and go to these meetups and it'll be part of their personality.

At that point, you think you are in a globe spinning it a thousand miles an hour. In reality, you are actually in a giant planetarium slash terra. Slash Soundstage slash Hollywood back lot. That is so big that you and everyone you know, and everyone you've ever known, never figured it out.

I'm curious how you first got connected to the protagonist of the film Mark Sergeant. How did he enter your awareness and how did you approach him and start building a relationship with him? It was way easier than you can even imagine. Uh, I think he was the keynote speaker at the Flat Earth Conference that was announced, and we went to his videos and watched a few, and he's credited with being kind of the, the guy who brought a lot of people in, 'cause he made these videos called Flat Earth Clues.

And there were more digestible versions of these longer hour, two hour videos. They were maybe 10 minutes a piece and there was a string of them turned it into a book, all that stuff. But on his videos, he said, here's my address, here's my phone number. Wow. So we just reached out and he said, if you're willing to come up here and film, I'll spend the afternoon with you.

And he was very nice. Like we got along super well. We had pizza and root beer at this little shop on this island and just kind of talked. And then soon as we were done lunch, I just, I'm gonna grab my camera, let's walk around, let's see what's up. And aside from like the flat earth stuff, which, you know, can get a little dark, we mostly just connected on like movies and, and just quoting stuff.

And we got along in a lot of other ways. But yeah, what he's known for. Believing and evangelizing, I guess you could say, uh, is just something outside of our agreement. Were you upfront about that? How did you mm-hmm. Pitch him the project you were working on and like what your perspective on it was gonna be?

Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of ways you could go about it where you could infiltrate and say you're a flat earth or, and try to get these people, and some people did that to flat Earthers and so they were very skeptical and I thought it was a really. Unethical way to make something. So from the get go, it's like I'm not a flat earth.

We're just trying to understand what's going on here. There's a quote early in the film from Mark that he's explaining that the South Pole, it's like a 200 foot wall of ice, straight up game of throne style, and the sun and the moon are just lights in the sky. It's really fun to get to hear the descriptions of what they're piecing together.

I'm curious, as you were finding out about it, was there something that you were like, that's kind of, that's kind of compelling? Here's the thing, A lot of what Flat Earthers do is they'll say all these things and be like, and what's your explanation? And you don't have one ready because you haven't talked about it ever, but they'll have 10 reasons to argue with you.

Mm-hmm. That you're not prepared to argue and therefore you can't argue back. You're kind of like at a loss for words maybe. But when I first started looking into it. I thought, well, this could go one of two ways. Like either we make a documentary about flat earthers and about their psychology and kind of use that as a lens to say why people believe incorrect things.

Or we discover the earth is flat. And that's interesting. That's a good film too. Uh, but the, the most preposterous thing was the conspiracy element. Of millions of people in every country in the world agreeing to keep it a secret from their people for power reasons. When it's like if the earth is flat, you can control the flat earth.

Like there's no difference there. Tom, I wanna bring you in. So we have Tom Murphy here who is an astrophysicist, and I guess first Tom, if you could just tell us a little bit about the work you've done maybe like 10, 20 years ago, what would you have been up to? Oh, 10 or 20 years ago, um, I was shooting lasers at the moon.

I was building the apparatus to, to measure earth moon distance to millimeter accuracy, which by the way, would not have worked in a flat earth. Um, so it all hangs together the way it's supposed to in terms of orbits and earth rotation and all of that. I'd looked at colliding galaxies before and served on many NASA panels to evaluate proposals, uh, for various space missions.

And at one point was a lead on a mission concept study to put an optical transponder on Bobos on the moon of Mars as a way to do solar system tests of general relativity. By me, you know, measuring. Interplanetary distances to high precision. I'm understanding like a one every three words, but um, it sounds very impressive.

Sorry. Yeah. Well, so the reason I bring that up is, you know, I've been in quote the room at the Jet Propulsion Lab where they piece together missions. Look for any deal breaker flaws and you know, you have all the chairs and all the monitors with the, you know, navigation and thermal and optical and communications.

And one thing about the flat earth community, they don't believe that NASA is a real. Thing. They think it's all a big hoax and satellites aren't real. And here I am, my life history participating in that enterprise. And I guess I'm really gullible 'cause it all seemed very real to me. Uh, and everybody else, uh, participating.

Tom, when did you first hear about Flat Earth? When did the like modern flat Earth movement get on your radar? And what was your response? You know, I think I'd maybe heard some just. Smatterings of conversation about it, but never really paid much attention. And then really, it's the behind the curve documentary that I saw and I had no idea that.

It was a real movement that people were, were really into this and promoting it, and I thought it was a really fascinating look at kind of a tribal nature to humans that you have this club offering unconditional support in some sense, and we see this in politics too, sometimes the most, the more outrageous your claim, the more.

Solidly branded, you are in that club. So it's a token of your commitment really, to that cause. And so I, and I wonder, just like I've wondered how. Extremely intellectual religious leaders. What do they really think behind, you know, in their private thoughts? I wonder about some of the flat earth people.

'cause these are, a lot of them are very smart people and to what extent do they have do inner doubts, but to doubt would be to leave the club and leave the companionship that they've built. So I think that's a really important piece that glues it all together. One of the things that's powerful about this film is that it's not at all mocking the movement.

It's debunking in a way, but it's also a character study. Yeah. And a rather empathetic one that looks at the psychology of the people that have become fascinated with this and dedicating their lives to this. You talk to scientists who were talking about how part of the problem is that these people were being mocked and being pushed away.

Someone says later in the film that, so the issue is not. Necessarily a lack of intelligence. It's not about being educated or uneducated or smarter dumb. It really isn't. Uh, I think it's sometimes miseducation when we leave people behind, we leave bright minds to mutate and stagnate. These folks are potential scientists gone completely wrong.

Their natural, inquisitive and rejection of norms could be beneficial to science if they were more scientifically literate. Mocking is felt easy and it felt predictable. I'm sure people would've liked it, and I think there's a, there's a little bit of playfulness, like kind of immediately debunking claims that they're making by cutting to the next scene.

But it was just very obvious to us that mocking these people or pointing out that they're wrong or, or making fun of them in some sort of way, didn't make them realize that what they were doing was incorrect. It just made us the enemy and them the hero even more. And then we wanted to explore belief.

Through flat Earthers and once we kind of unlocked that, it was really easy to pull it together and just treat people with respect. Alex, you were bringing up the point that the movie made, somebody who was interviewed said that these are natural scientists and the flat earth theorists, the flat earth people.

I agree with that. They're very skeptical people and skepticism is a huge part of science and it's what drives agree. A lot of science is, I'm not sure that's right. Let me go poke at it. That's a very healthy part. Of science, it tries to tear itself apart all the time to make it stronger. Mm-hmm. That was something very interesting in the movie that there were a couple of experiments.

So the flat earthers were attempting to conduct experiments themselves. Yeah. Some of were to, to, to prove that their earth was flat. That's right. And they were doing incredible jobs of it. I mean, reasonably designed experiments. Recently we've carried out an experiment to test rotation to the earth. If the earth is spinning at one rotation every 24 hours, that means that every hour it has to turn 15 degrees.

In today's 21st century on navigation systems, they're using what's called a ring laser gyroscope. It is extremely precise. If we could simply get one of these ring laser gyroscopes, we would be able to prove once and for all that there is no rotation to the earth. Now what's fascinating is what happens when the experiment shows or points to strongly around earth?

How do they react to that information and that data? And that's what's fascinating. How strongly attracted are you to a particular outcome? How important is the outcome versus what the experiment tells you? And so these folks were very powerfully attracted to a particular outcome and just wouldn't stop until they kind of accounted.

For things in their own way. Yeah. They just refuse to, to accept the guidelines that they put out ahead of time. And that's like why it was like so hard to just pin down. So if you get this result, what does it mean? It was very frustrating to, to just make them decide ahead of time if they were gonna accept the answers 'cause.

They just, and never did at the end, which isn't the way actual science works. You follow the, the process and learn what you can and, and you are listening, not telling. Mm-hmm. And so I think that's where these natural scientists in the flat earth community kind of get it wrong, which is we have the answer and now we're gonna build the latter rungs to try to reach that particular point.

I wonder if it'll help to differentiate between the scientific experiments where you're asking a question and you're seeing what the answers are, and then there's missions, there's a goal you're setting. We will do this no matter what, and that's something that our. Culture celebrates often it's that we're going to achieve something that previous generations would've thought is impossible.

And even though we don't know exactly how to do it, we're gonna figure out a way. And it almost seems like the flat earthers are not necessarily trying to. Prove themselves wrong, but are insisting that we will figure out a way. We're not gonna take no for an answer. We're gonna be bold, and we're going to figure out how we can prove something we already believe to be true.

There's a faith still in among scientists, but the faith is not in a particular answer. It's in the process. So what you try to do is design a process that's open-minded that if this is true or not true, this test will reveal the truth or not truth. And so you're deliberately trying to build something that has the ample opportunity.

To find the faults if there are faults, and so that's the key, is not designing a system intended to achieve a particular result. It's actually intended to do the opposite in the sense that it's, it's designed with the capability of exposing the, the faults to the idea. There's this great line that I believe it's Tim Urban, who's a science writer, says in behind the curve, he's sharing that, you know what Flat Earthers can offer us is to turn it around on ourselves and ask how we're flat earthers.

What are the assumptions that we're holding onto? And Daniel, I love that you created a film that almost, in a way, it feels like. I imagine that someone could watch this film who believes in flat earth theory and might not feel attacked, might be open-minded enough to see the way they could question that themselves, and as well as for someone else watching it to be kind of self-critical.

I thought that was a really interesting thing that, that you chose to. Not just let the audience kind of sit on their tower looking down sneering at people, but really having to look inward. How did you come to that and what was your thought on that approach? Yeah, we wanted to make the film about flat earthers applicable to anything that you believe.

And it's like what Tom says, like it's not about proving what you want to be true. It's about. Taking a look and creating tests that could point you in the right direction. Either way, everybody has something that you're kind of just going with. If you really strongly believe in something and you want to just make sure that you're not believing the wrong thing, take a step back and create some sort of test where you can open-mindedly, look at the evidence in front of you and see.

Where it falls. Okay. This is where I think things get interesting. So when Tom first emailed you Daniel and then told me about it, I was like, oh, great. This is a great excuse for me to rewatch behind the curve. It was on Netflix back in the day when I saw it. So I went on Netflix. I typed it in. I couldn't find that there.

But another film came up, returned to space. And I started watching it, and it's a film about Elon Musk and SpaceX. So behind the curve starts where you're with Mark Sargent and he's telling you emphatically. His understandings of the flat Earth. And at the beginning of the return to space film, we have Elon Musk who is telling you, and this is a quote from him, that earth is the cradle of humanity.

You cannot stay in the cradle forever. It is time to go forth, be out there among the stars, expand the scope and scale of human consciousness. That's how return to space begins. Both of these films have their protagonist making a claim. And it's interesting because. The idea that the earth is flat is such a laughable fringe theory in many people's minds.

The idea that we're going to colonize space, it's almost an expectation that we have. And Tom, I wanted to ask you to kind of take us on a little intellectual journey, your understanding of space exploration, space colonization. When you were working with nasa, what were your expectations around that? And then how did you start to.

Questions, some of the assumptions you found other people had. Yeah, I mean I started out, I was born in 1970 and so I remember the, the Voyager flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. Really exciting. And then the space shuttle program was super exciting. I was really thrilled and loved Star Trek, you know, I mean, I became an astrophysicist, was really fond of everything to do with space and just assumed.

Basically everybody else in our culture that this was our future because there are narratives that really make sense. I mean, we walked and then we had horses, and then cars, and then airplanes and rockets and the moon and. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate. Right. And you just see that that keeps going.

At least that's makes sense. Or this cradle metaphor. It propagates the idea that we don't need to really take care of earth because we're gonna leave it. It's just the cradle. You know? You can, in the cradle, somebody else will clean it up. Mm. If you accept that metaphor, that earth is a cradle. Obviously we leave it, but.

Who says it's a cradle, you know, like that's, that's the fundamental flaw. So I think I. Came into this with a full expectation and excitement, enthusiasm about space exploration and about human habitation. You know, as I got into my science career, I was often reviewing proposals that were large budget, you know, space, mission, ambitious projects.

That might have hundreds of millions of dollars to put something on Mars. And once you get humans involved, it's outrageously expensive. And that's a way to say hard, by the way. Hmm. That's a measure, not a perfect measure, but it's a measure of difficulty. And so I started to realize that, gosh, a mission to Mars at $500 billion.

How does that happen? You know, it might be two or three times that expensive once you actually get engaged in the project and committed to the project, because that happens a lot. I, I started to doubt the practicality, just kind of based on that more financial assessment and did start to question, well, what, what is so hard about it?

What's so difficult about colonizing space? Having human settlement, right? Realizing that, gosh, it's so hard just to get to the moon, and the moon is nothing. I mean, the Mars is 600 times farther on average than the moon, and we haven't been back to the moon. Since 1972, and this is something that I kind of learned, it was somewhat fascinating.

I would poll my students, how far have humans been from the surface of the earth in your lifetime? I gave them choices of 600 kilometers the moon or beyond the moon. So those were the choices, and probably typically 70% would say the moon or beyond in their lifetimes. And the right answer was the first one just skimming the earth and they were often angry.

When the right answer was revealed because they just assumed the cultural mythology that we always march forward and forward. And if we've done it, if we've locked it in, we're we're still doing that. Or even better, they imagine that the space station was beyond the moon because that's where they are in science fiction.

The International Space Station, isn't that an example of us already making a first step into space colonization? Isn't that a positive sign that we still are up there? Yeah, in a sense, it, it can be seen as a one of the latter rungs on the way to some goal, but it's, it's a very low ladder rung because the air, water, food.

Fuel to keep it from decaying in its orbit, all come from the earth on very expensive resupply emissions eight times a year or so. Think of it like air hoses and water hoses and fuel hoses and a food conveyor connected to this thing. It's really not apart from the earth. It's just like a fancy version of scuba with all these umbilicals.

Very expensive umbilicals. And the cost for the space station, not even including the building, the fabrication of the thing, which is enormously expensive, but just the maintenance of a crew on the space station comes out to about a million dollars per person per day. It's a pretty expensive hotel. Yeah.

Think about the most expensive place you've ever stayed. Mm-hmm. All inclusive, you know, and this is a thousand times bigger. A thousand times bigger. Mm-hmm. And I did the same calculation for the lunar landings, the Apollo missions. And there were 103 days spent in space for crews of three. At a price tag of 300 billion, and that works out to about a billion dollars a day per person.

Hmm. So it's a thousand times more expensive still than the space station, and that is a tiny distance compared to solar system scales. And we haven't repeated it since the, the stunt in the 1970s, Tom. So you grew up totally convinced that there would be space colonization in the future, and as you were really looking into it.

Started to find it really unfeasible, it sounds like. That scientific process of asking questions and really seeing what the answers are, even if the answers aren't, what we want to hear was what was guiding you. I had a naive level of understanding about what the full context is, and as I've added layers of context, that extrapolation just breaks and it doesn't make any more sense.

And so kind of like the flat earth deal, where if you believe in a certain outcome. You want to build the ladder rungs to that outcome, your job becomes to build those ladder rungs, and you don't really question whether the outcome is reasonable. You just sort of put your blinders on and start working with the assumption, the unfounded assumption of some endpoint that isn't real hasn't been realized.

Uh, I have like a million thoughts right now. Uh, first I just wanna, I just wanna jump out and say like, a lot of what we're experiencing is life imitating art, and so people. See like sci-fi and they're like, well, we gotta get there one day. Mm-hmm. We gotta, we gotta get to Star Trek and colonize and just be out in space.

Just living the Expanse is one of my favorite shows that exists or that existed, I guess. So people kind of want that. People think that's exciting and a future to go towards. And we also have this. History in the US of the Frontier and Columbus. And what people forget is like they went to a very resource heavy location with great weather and they had tools already in society and a ton of people and they could keep replenishing.

Whereas we can't really go to Antarctica. It's a possible to live there without tons and tons of resources and money being given to you constantly. And even then you can breathe the air around you. Antarctica and you can scoop up ice. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You can scoop up ice and drink it. And so it's an enormous advantage over space in Antarctica.

And even that's just hard. But I think the disconnect is 'cause people, they're not giving the reverence to space and how challenging is, or how far the moon is. In fact, like the moon is so far, people just can't fathom the distance. And that's not their fault. It's just like. People can't fathom how big the earth is.

It's so huge. Right? I mean, you see the moon up through the trees and you're like, well, the tree isn't far, and the moon is beyond that. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really far away. Yeah. There's a lot of like. Disconnect. But to Tom's point about you could send unmanned missions or like robots or whatever you wanna call it, it would cost, what did you say?

A hundredth of the price. Yeah. Human uh, involvement makes it enormously more expensive. Uh, I mean, for a hundred million dollars you can put something on the moon surface or something to that scale and stew a hundred of those right? Instead, instead of just like doing one, 100th of the cost. Right. Anyway, that's my opinion.

But 'cause it's a resource thing, right? We could be spending that money in a lot of different places doing a lot of different things. But space is exciting for people still. People have this. Collective memory of landing on the moon. Even if you weren't around then you just kind of like, we did that.

Mm-hmm. It's something we achieved and I think Mars has become because of Musk and a bunch of other people, like really pointing to it as the next step in our humanitarian evolution. People are like, yeah, if we don't do that, then what are we even doing? But that is the exact right question. Yeah. That is, sure we can end hunger and homelessness.

Well, and this is exactly why I think this relates to the flat Earthers is because there is kind of this similarity between the camps and this kind of faith-based. Assumption of what the future is or what, you know, it's a belief in something that's not at all real, but the extrapolation in the flat Earth case is, well, it looks like the earth is flat from here to the horizon, so it's flat.

Mm-hmm. That's an extrapolation that. Really fails in the long term, but so does the space colonization, extrapolation, and I would love to see that. Wait, what are we actually doing? Why does this make any sense? I'd love to see that come about. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things where you wonder if we do get to Mars.

Will it be like, all right, we got there. We're not going again. That's just not gonna happen. You bet it would. Of course. Yeah. And then we're just like, well, why did we do that? They're like, all right, well that costs half a trillion dollars. And now that we've done it, like there are other contexts here as well, that, you know, we've been on this joy ride from fossil fuels that mm-hmm.

Has made our lifetimes. Look like anything is possible, but that is a temporary context that will go away, and we can't honestly say what comes after. You know, people talk about solar or wind recycling and practice. It's hard to pull off what we're. Doing now without fossil fuels is it's unproven. But I would go even farther and say that even if that were somehow, you know, wave your magic wand and that's possible to kind of keep our current trajectory without fossil fuels underwriting it.

Congratulations, you've just kept the six mass extinction fully powered because that's what's happening. And ecological nightmare is unfolding where extinction rates are up a thousand times. The background. It's not from greenhouse gases. So solar panels and wind don't change that story. It's just the sheer scale of impact on our planet from deforestation, habitat loss, and over hunting overfishing, 8 billion people in the planet, et cetera.

So all that stuff is happening in the background. I guess the point is we're basing a lot of these assumptions on a very anomalous period in human and earth history. That for many reasons can't hold up. And that's where I don't think these people really go there. There's a quote from Jeff Bezos. He's giving a presentation on Blue Origins, his space colonization company, and he says, I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system.

If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time, 1000 Mozarts and 1000 Einsteins. How many Hitlers. Yeah, right. But then someone like Bal Aldrin who says, by refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969, we won the moon race.

Now it's time for us to live and work on Mars. First on its moons, and then on its surface, there is this sense of like. One, I think that we feel very vulnerable. Elon Musk has talked about like, we need to be a multi-plan species, because if we're just on this one planet, then all of a sudden it's like, oh no.

Well, what happens if this planet doesn't go well? Well, yeah, but if this planet doesn't go well, it's gonna turn into Mars. Mm-hmm. Why would we just move there first? Mm-hmm. I mean, I can see like, you know, exoplanet, like inhabitable zones or whatever. That's. So far off. It's not even fathomable, but like, I guess the point to some people is like, we need to start at Mars and then we can go to these other really distant things and be across the universe kind of species.

But to the point of the other people like Buzz Aldrin, it's like, yeah, he's, he's not wrong. Like, people get excited. It's a popular thing because it, it brings together like this sense of purpose to society. Like we have resources available that Yeah. Could be distributed in a very different way. And everybody would be happy.

Well, not, you know, nobody's ever gonna be happy, but these are more mission-driven things. It's like sports almost, right? Mm-hmm. If we win as a team, like Aldrin referenced, we won the space race, it's like, sure. But you made the space race. Like you, you created this game that you decided to win. Mm-hmm. At any cost necessary.

You know, I really like the point that. Worst case scenario is that we turn Earth into Mars. I mean, that would be utter devastation, right? Like wiping out all life on the planet, basically. Mm-hmm. So why even think about that as a reasonable option? So I've often thought about living on Mount Everest. Yeah.

You know, condominiums on Mount Everest or the ocean floor. As far more practical and easier and cheaper and safer than anything beyond Earth, yet you don't see that. And why? I mean, there are stunts we can get to those places, but nobody thinks just 'cause we can go to those places that we're gonna live there.

And so why do we use that flawed logic when it comes to space? And I think it relates to what I would call the sort of mother of all. Disconnects or fallacies here is that we imagine ourselves to be separate from the earth. Hmm. Humans have kind of made a mental category for themselves that we can be put anywhere.

We're kind of exchangeable parts, you know, sold separately. We are no longer dependent on. Earth and no longer a part of it. So yeah, we could go anywhere. We could be in space. This is despite even the people who have gone to the moon, they weren't separated. They were breathing air from earth, drinking water from Earth eating, food from Earth.

It was a stunt. And maybe this is a good time to bring up how humans deal physiologically in space in a high radiation environment. So cancer is like. On the table. If you spent your life on Moon or Mars, you are going to die of cancer. So there are all these things, all these contexts that just get completely ignored or lost because it's easy in our minds to just say, oh, we can just do X without understanding Almost the first thing about how complicated our lives on earth are, how completely tied we are to the entire.

Community of life, and we're an integral piece of it. We're not somehow separate manufactured parts that can just be shipped wherever we want. So if we solve cancer, uh, figure out cold fusion or something like that, that doesn't require any fuel, and then a way to create water and oxygen super easily without any heavy resources, no, no, you just, you're going down the wrong track.

Just make it so we don't have to breathe. Go. That's the problem. Wow. Outside the box thinking we don't need water. I knew that my lungs were the problem. Upload our consciousness to AI and then send it into space. Exactly. Yeah. There you go. Perfect. And this is where I think Daniel's expertise is gonna be really interesting because flat Earthers are on the fringe of society.

It's so easy for most people to just dismiss. What do you do when you have flat Earth community like that, that's so fringe versus. The people who just believe we can live in space, despite all of the technical limitations that Tom is breaking up, these are people that are some of the wealthiest people in the world.

These are the people who have control of governments. What would your approach be to trying to create a story that maybe helps them or others in their community question some of those space colonization assumptions? Yeah, I actually. I'll say it like, for a while I was, I was on the train of like, oh man, if there was a mission to Mars, I, and they asked me to be on it, I would go, oh, I would still go.

Um, nobody's asking me, I get car sick, so, but yeah. So I think. The thing you would need to provide, especially to like leaders, is an alternative that is popular. Because if you're gonna be the first to come out, it's like kind of like, just like a flat earth going against their community. Like if you come out and say like, Hey, this is not worth our time.

Like, we have other issues, people are gonna be like, that's complicated. It's uh, you're getting political. It's not sports anymore. Now you're talking about solving problems and that's boring. Um, even though it would make a lot of things better for a lot of people, whatever. So there needs to be some sort of alternative or really, really good reason instead of just saying, well, we can't do it.

'cause people are gonna hear that and say, well, we, like you said, like humans can do anything. And it's like, well sure if we have air and water, we can do a lot. So I think it's gonna take some sort of already accepted ground based movement. So like people kind of collectively are rising together and saying like, let's stop worrying about going to Mars.

And a lot of people say this already, but it's not a very popular opinion. Like, let's stop focusing on going to space and colonizing space and let's. Figure out how to live where there's less water like California and Colorado. So I get, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is there needs to be some sort of really good spin on the reason they're not doing it anymore and it has to be a popular other thing.

I don't think you can just say you're not doing it 'cause it's not cost effective or it's unfeasible to even achieve. You're gonna have to just really find a hype man that can sell an idea that gets us all back. Too rational because like thinking about it for not very long, I was like, yeah, wait, why? Why do we think we could do that?

Why did we think we could colonize space? Like it didn't take a lot to make me realize that this space colonization, it was 'cause I like the expanse and I thought, I thought it was cool. And you know, in, in space movies you just take a spaceship and it hovers and you shoot out into space and you're fine.

You don't have to do anything once you get out there. There's no entry stuff that you gotta worry about. And everybody's always got plenty of oxygen and water and it just, culturally, we just expect that someone's gonna figure it out. Mm-hmm. And that's maybe true, but at what cost? On one hand, something like the Flat Earth theory is kind of innocuous in the almost decades since you first started working on the film.

Conspiracy theories. Mm-hmm. Especially during COVID. And since then have really accelerated and it seems to be like there's this ever widening distrust of institutions and experts and of. Each other. There's this moment in behind the curve that really stuck out to me where they're talking about how a teacher is sharing that, telling a, a room of school children that the earth is a globe is round.

And I believe they were saying that like a third of the kids, these little kids immediate like, no, it's not. And there's this. Kind of hypothetical question of like, well, yeah, what would happen if you told me that 50 to a hundred years from now, we live in a world where actually the majority of people believe the Earth is flat.

It starts to raise a lot of kind of like Twilight Zone. Questions about like, what would it be like to live in a society where the wealthiest people and the people in power are believing such a ridiculous idea and that we're spending trillions and trillions of dollars based on the idea that the earth is flat?

And then, you know, based off of what Tom talks about, it makes me think like, oh, wait a second. We kind of live in a world where it's exactly what we're doing. And behind the curve is really good at how to approach. A fringe idea and I'm, so, I'm curious, like, as a filmmaker, like how would you make a behind the curve too?

That's a hundred years in the future where a fringe narrative is now the dominant narrative? Wow, that's a very interesting question. Um, ever since making the movie, yeah. Conspiracy theories have been. More, we thought the movie would get less relevant over time, and it's sadly become more relevant over time.

Yeah. But to your question, it's like the question is the conspiracies of one. How do you break through that? And that's, uh, I'm just a documentary filmmaker, but you know, I, I. I think you just need, it's, it's all about optics and personalities and you have to get people believing in someone who's like trustworthy.

And for some reason we've put our faith in current society behind billionaires who are doing these sort of things because what they say sounds cool. And they have the money to do it. And it's like, all right, if Bezos and Musk want to go to space, that's must be cool. And they are in charge of doing it and And it plays right into our cultural mythology too.

Exactly. This is where we're going and so nobody really questions how crazy it is. Right? It's the next step. Anyway. There's something that Mark Sergeant says towards the end of the film that I think is very telling for both the flat earth. Theory and the space colonization belief, whatever we wanna call it.

And this is kind of like why Mark is pitching, why believing in flat Earth is so powerful. He's saying, you're not alone. You're not this little speck of dust flying through space at incredible velocities. You are the center of the universe. As a matter of fact, you are the star of the show. Didn't he have a T-shirt that said I'm the star of the show?

Yeah. It said, yeah, mark Sergeant. Yeah. And I think that there is a emotional toll to finding out you are a speck of dust flying through space. That incredible velocities. It's upsetting to find out that you're not the center of the universe. And I think like what's been so incredible about the scientific revolution is that like we did not want to find out that, oh.

Shit, the earth is not the center of the universe. It's actually rotating on the sun. I think that similarly like Mark is holding onto flat earth because finally it makes him the start of the show. And I think that people that believe that we have to colonize space, empathetically, like understanding Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and any serious politician and astronaut or scientist who really is holding onto that, a grieving that will come from realizing like.

Oh my God. Like even though I grew up watching all these shows, like we're actually not going to ever leave this planet, and I want to take that emotionally seriously, that like people are gonna have a really hard time coming to terms emotionally with the reality that if we're not here to colonize Mars, then why are we here?

What you could do is either say like, uh, we can't do that. Or you can say, we could do that, but it's gonna cost us everything. So maybe what we do instead is these million other things. But I would say we couldn't even do that Well, but Daniel's coming from a storytelling convincing people perspective. I, yeah.

I guess if you're saying like, we can't do something. They'll be like, yes we can. Like we are so strong. Whatever. Right? Um, but if you present it as like, we can do that, like a child almost, you know, like, sure you can do this, or we could do all of this other stuff. And I think maybe that's the better the.

Presentation of this concept. I know. And Tom, you're like, no, we can't do that. But it's like, well, sure we could if we did nothing else but that forever, but that, that would kill us. Yeah. And then we'd all die in space. This is why I was really excited. I thought it would be cool to have you guys a conversation.

'cause we need the scientist and we need this storyteller. You know, we need Tom who's like, doesn't matter what the narrative is, here's the reality. Sure. Dr. Per Espin stoke. I don't know how to pronounce the name. Yes, that's pretty quote. This psychologist and writer has this quote. Let's take the metaphor of, uh, argument is war one side wins than the other loses.

If my opponent feels he's better than me, that's intolerable to me. So I'll, I'll not listen to what he says already when he's talking. I'll be planning my counter attack. Another way of thinking about it is let's go and explore together and this exploring together. It takes us to another place than argument.

I really loved that this film is about. Bridging rather than bonding is a concept that I've found useful. Like bonding is when a group of people insult someone else and they, they bond over that shared insult. But bridging is about really trying to talk to the person that you actually disagree with and try to see like, is there a way we can be on the same page?

Mm-hmm. And one of the main messages of behind the curve. Scientists looking inward and realizing like it's so tempting to be like you idiots. How could you believe the earth is flat and scientists are right? The earth isn't flat, but just yelling that at them didn't. Help. So I do think it's really interesting how you do kind of bridge with people, and I like what you're saying about like, you could do that or we could do this, like providing an alternative.

And I'm also wondering though, if our responsibility to not mocking and. Bridging with people changes if now we're talking about the wealthiest people on earth and governments or, or what you think about that. I think there's a world where that works. But then you have like this cult of personality sort of situation where people love Musk and people love, they're like country's identity and things like that.

And you're gonna have probably just like a childlike reaction. You have to meet them where they are. And provide them with something they want to hear 'cause people don't listen to what they don't want to hear. You could also try to convince the people in power. That, you know, $500 billion goes a long way to building your legacy as the greatest humanitarian in the world.

Or you can go to space and people will die up there and it'll be your fault. I don't know. You could, you could pitch it a couple ways and you know, the footprint of every human hour spent in space racks up about 2000 hours of the average global. Citizens' footprint. And so it's a way to accelerate an ecological decline.

So yeah, that's why I say not only will the people who you shove in space ultimately die from that exposure, you're also killing everybody else who's left here by the effort. Gosh. But you know, I think, Alex, you hit on something really important, which is that this sense of specialness is sort of part of the North star, if you will, for the flat earthers.

You know, we want to not just be a speck on a speck hurdling through space. We only give up that reluctantly because of overwhelming evidence. We only gave up the idea that we're not divinely created, but evolved because of overwhelming evidence. You know, that was also an insult. I think humans in space is another expression of this supremacy of humans.

I wonder if our idea of humans in space actually kind of arose as our, uh, Copernicus understanding of the universe changed. We realized like, oh, we're not at the center of the universe and there's a bunch of other stars everywhere. Okay, well, at least we could probably go there at least. And I think maybe on an emotional level, that's kind of how we like comforted ourselves as we.

Had to shift our expectations. So like, right. Yes. The evidence made us change our perspective and accept that the earth is one among many, but it didn't actually change the worldview that put us at the center of the universe. We just shifted it a little bit and you know, just as. Overwhelming evidence made us give up some of those beliefs.

I'm trying to think about the analog, what will make us give up belief in humans and space, because that's another frontier for human exceptionalism and only overwhelming evidence will. So it takes a lot of effort to build up that. Contextual evidence, which is the journey that I've gone on myself. But it's a heavy lift.

It's not something so, you know, in asking the question, how do you get people to shed that idea and they're not going to be eager to give it up 'cause it's such a beautiful idea. In a sense. The only way to do it is through, I think the way I did it. I didn't give it up because I didn't want it anymore.

Mm-hmm. I gave it up because that's where all the contextual layers lead to once you allow them in. And that's a process. And so I think that's a really difficult prospect when the evidence is not just abundantly clear around us. Hmm. It's not a lived situation. Daniel, you know, there's such a good ness too, behind the curve.

I think that kind of gentleness and compassion with people that you would otherwise just wanna dismiss is really key and yeah. How else would you coach Tom on like, how to have these conversations? Well, it's identify where people's strengths are. Like they're not all wrong. People who are really into like colonizing space or whatever, like what are the underlying reasons for that?

For the most part, it's not just like, it's cool the end. It's like, 'cause there's a sense of getting out there, exploring and then kind of identifying how that can be. Constructive in other ways. Mm. Rather than like just saying, all of your ideas are wrong. It's almost about trying to find shared values in a way.

It's like mm-hmm. Exactly. So it's like, oh, okay. You guys really value exploration. Yeah. How can we as humans still. Meet that need to explore. Yeah. Or like, you know, people who are trying to colonize space. A lot of it is coming from this place, I think of like real fear that like we're very vulnerable to extinction.

Mm-hmm. If we are just on one planet. So it's like, oh great, okay. You guys are really concerned about us going extinct. That's something we can really share. How can we build off of that beautiful desire to not. Have everyone die. Sure. If your fear is, you know, we're going extinct. Yeah. It's like you said, like sending people to space is worse, but then there's also people are interested in exploration or learning more about, like, we can send, we already have Mars rovers, like we already have these things that are, are existing on these places that are.

Incredible feats of engineering and and exploration. So yeah, like there's all these things that we're already doing or we could do in different ways that I think would satisfy a lot of the desires that people have or the excitement that people have about space, like. Voyager is awesome. Taking these amazing space telescopes that we have are incredible.

We're learning so much. We're exploring in different ways. Those things are maybe not as exciting as sending a person to Mars, but whoever you send there is in a lot of trouble. Let's just send Musk and call it done. That's what I've been saying. Send him in a car in his little roadster. Exactly.

Thanks for listening. Until next time, I hope you'll consider our place among the stars. If the earth isn't a cradle, then what is it? What if the earth is. Us. What if this planet is an extension of our bodies and our bodies are an extension of this planet? Maybe we're not supposed to leave the earth anymore than our fingers are supposed to be severed from our hand.

And if that's the case, then what are we supposed to be doing here? What's another vision for humanity as part of the earth that excites you and might inspire others? Well, I know it's not as epic as our cosmic destiny, but the human Nature Odyssey, Patreon is pretty cool too. There, you'll find the full two hour version of this conversation with Tom and Daniel.

There's also a bunch of other bonus episodes and writings. Thank you so much to the Kindred spirit supporting the Human Nature Odyssey, Patreon. Contributing your thoughts and helping keep the podcast alive for years to come. And thank you to everyone sharing the podcast with a friend and leaving a friendly review and a very special thank you to Tom Murphy and Daniel J. Clark. Clips of the Behind the Curve documentary were used with a filmmaker's permission. You can find the link to both Tom and Daniel's work in the show notes. This series was made in association with the Post Carbon Institute. You can learn more at resilience.org. And as always, our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.

You can find a link in our show notes. Talk with you soon.