funding is being cut to sciences at the national level, so we need to keep pushing for as much science education as possible. so, i have just finished writing an optimistic book about the apocalypse. and it did not start out that way at all. average did not realize that the book was going to have a happy ending. it actually started because i have been a really fast in my whole life with how stories about destruction, especially massive global destruction and apocalypses and everything from kind of the underground cannibal apocalypse to sunday stories and cancellous court -- stories. guzzle is kind of one of my spirit animals.

[laughter] and i wanted to a -- a couple of years ago when i was thinking about this i thought, well, how can i write the kind of nonfiction version of a council movie. what would that look like if we delved into the scientific literature and what history has to teach us, you know, what would be the equivalent of some kind of massive destruction caused by a force that we don't understand? and i came upon the idea of mass extinction which is, indeed, the worst kind of disaster that could never happen to the planet and the more that i researched them, the more that i read scientific papers and talk to scientists, i realize that actually one of the main characteristics of a mass extinction is that there are always survivors. that was when i really began to change how i understood what this book was going to be about. so let me start by selling you a

little bit about the destruction . a mass extinction is actually a scientific term of art which refers to any event where more than 75 percent of all species on the planet die out. and usually these take about a million years. and so when you look at them, it taking place in geological times, not a quick thing that we can see in a human to my human lifetime. one of the things that links pretty much all of the mass extinctions, and there have been pretty -- five of them so far in herds history of the past half billion years is so, is that most of them are caused by climate change so usually there is some horrific event that sets off the climate change, maybe in * is the planet, which is what happened in the most recent and perhaps most famous mass

extinction which is the one that extinguish the dinosaurs 605 million years ago when an asterisk land into a planet. of course when that happened actually it wasn't like of michael bay movie. it wasn't like a big rocket the planet and there was like fire and dinosaurs were being, like, barbecued. although that sounds really cool -- and there were no lasers or anything like that. what actually happened was, of course, were the asteroid hit there were horrific fire sent creatures were killed by the thousands, but over time the pastor worked his way into the atmosphere and change the climate over the long term. so actually what happened with most dinosaurs died out from the subsequent climate changes. and this is the case with, like asset, nearly all the mass extinction. so let me tell you a little bit about my favorite mass extinction to give you an idea of how these work. everyone kind of has a favorite

mess extinction. he talked to a geologist's about this : they always kind of -- they have a gallon of humor about it because these are terrific mass slayings of creatures. and so my personal favorite is the one that comes at the end of the permian time. and if you look at this chart here have geological time, you can see it down near the bottom. even a little thing that says, a gigantic extinction right next to the permian. this is about 250 million years ago. and at that time the planet, due to a plate tectonics -- tectonics, the continents were completely different than they are now. there were arranged into one giant super continent, pangaea, so you have to imagine a super continent stretching all the way from the north pole down to the south pole. and that was when in the north -- so, basically in the north

the area that eventually became siberia began to turn into a super volcano. and what happens in the super volcano is not a scientific term, but it basically referred to a massive, massive volcano. and this was a volcano caused by and a man's province which is a very large area where water is being released in multiple places, so you have to a imagine great big prevents opening above the earth. is not like a mountain where it's blowing upon the top. it's kind of like the iceland the volcano's the starts extruding lawbook among big waves of law about. so, again, it's not explosive. is just of law but losing out of these huge cracks and vans, and there are multiple bands. so in this northern area, pangaea, this event went on for of about -- let's say a thousand

years. it was a thousand year irruption, and what happened was overtime the gases and ash that were r vc eruption were kind of like a super industrial revolution. they were releasing so much carbon into the environment that the climate first started to cool down, and then it heated up into a super greenhouse, and the oceans became acidic and creatures died out in the incredible numbers. it was the worst mass it -- worst mass extinction that the plan has ever seen. by the end of that million years 95 percent of all species on the planet had died out, even in sex, which is very unusual. you don't usually see insect deaths. it was sea creatures, and creatures, plants, everybody was grew by the volcano. but there was one survivor on land who kind of is the creature that actually turned me around

on mass extinction and made me think about them in a new way. and it was a creature who is related to a group of animals that later evolved into mammals. it was can't -- kind of a mammal like creature. think of it is the uncle of humanity, not our direct ancestor. and his name, yet a couple of trades that made it an excellent survivor in this incredibly difficult time in its history. it was somewhat small, about dog size. it was about 3 feet long, two to 3 feet long. it looks like a little bit like a pig in a little bit like a lizard. and they were borrowers. so you have to imagine them eating away the pigs do, probably eating to birds andrew cut. there would have big, powerful legs. there were digging out.

it. it was kind of awesome the whole world was kind of transformed into heaven. there were used to being in the ground, breathing dirty air anyway. they had a great lung capacity for the who. possibly there were able to get more oxygen from dirty air and other creatures similar in size. the other thing, of its natural predators died during the early triassic, which is the time that followed the permian. it had no predators. it had dirty air. all of its food sources were mostly underground. so if the sunlight is locked in temperatures are changing, that food sources probably going to be mostly unarmed but that transition. but one of the other things that heated was, it scattered across the southern continent.

remember, this is a huge supercontinent. he moved from one northern region all the way down into the south. this is over millions of years. scattered across the continent species evolved into a different species, possibly four, possibly more. adapting to new ecological niches, it did two of the things that talk about in the title of the book. scattered and adapted. it fled from a source of danger which was the super volcano and learned how to live in new places. and this humble little weird faced guy sort of became my mascot when i was working on this book. angus had traded in ancilla -- godzilla. this creature was very humble and yet nevertheless managed to make it through the toughest time in its history of these

other creatures around were suffering because their food web was unraveling. this is a major cause of mass extinction. a food web is just a way of talking about the network of who beat him in an ecosystem. and what happens if you have a food web where a lot of creatures are going extinct is that it causes knock on extinctions' among other creatures to, perhaps, eat them. if resource die, you die. whenever you have -- as a kind of one of the ways that mass extinctions is started. if you have a few die off and then you get all of these knock on mass extinction situations, extinctions that caused 75 percent. so there is one thing that we can do as humans that they can't really or probably couldn't. we have the ability in a crisis to basically to what

lystrosaurus did, adapt to new environments. we managed to, at different points in history, a plea from danger when we have been lucky, but we also have a form of memory that goes way beyond just remembering what happened yesterday. it goes way beyond remembering, hey, if i want to go to sleep tonight and need to dig a hole in the ground the way lystrosaurus did. humans can remember not just their own lifetimes that we can use history to remember the whole of our civilization's history. we can use scientific fields like anthropology and geology to actually look back and consider the whole history of our evolution as a species as well as the evolution of the planet and look at all of the disasters that have happened and learn from them. that's a very profound survival skill. like i said, is something that as far as we know is fairly

unique to human beings as a species. we have not found any other species that seem to be able to do that. and so part of my help in the center of writing this book when i realized it was not going to be all destruction and there was going to be some hope of survival is that we actually have the traits of a survivor species like lystrosaurus, plus we have this added ability to plan for the future. that is really important, and i spend a lot of time in the book talking about ways that we can start planning for the future basing will we disasters that happen to humans in the red that's important in planning some learned from mr. in a great experiment. so let me put this in perspective for you. human beings are mammals, which is why we are so cute and very

and we have live babies and all those good things, just like these appear. and the typical species life span for a mammal, and other words, the typical amount of time before the species evolve into another species or dies out is a million years. that's a typical species life span. and humans, sapiens, involved about 100,000 years ago, possibly 200,000 depending on kind of where you sit in the anthropological debate over this question. but the fact is either way we are pretty early in our species timeline. we have only got, you know, say 900,000 years left to go. so are thinking about planning for the future as a species, planning for our survival as some of recipient, we need to be thinking not just of what we will do next month or next week,

but how are we going to set things up so that we have a a good experience living for another 900,000 years. what can we do now, what can we think about doing as a species, what kind of projects can we take on to make those 900,000 years really awesome instead of living like campbell's underground and turning into zombies. >> so in my book i talk about two kinds of very long-term plans that we can start working on now and that we can share with coming generations. the first area i am most interested in is cities and city building and city planning. the reason why is right now the vast majority of humans -- well, not the vast majority, the majority of humans live in

cities. and the u.n. has done some predictions on how that trend will continue. and if things go pretty much as they have been, we are looking at possibly as many as 67 or 70 percent of people living in cities in 50 years. people becoming more and more urban. the majority of humanity will be located in cities. so as your thinking about the future, a good place to focus on ways to make our lives more survivable is the city. and their different ways that we can tackle making cities more survivable -- more survival. first of all, we need to be thinking about how you make a city robust against disaster. there are a lot of different things you can do from a better earthquake engineering, and that's one thing and talk about a lot in the book. i'm from san francisco where we do with them all the time. of course your you live in a selections on.

seattle shapiro to be thinking about earth. >> a lot. we also need to be thinking about things that are little bit more ephemeral and social. how you organize a city the evacuation plan in a flood? how you organize how to respond to a pandemic that it's a city? that may not have to do with how you engineered the city but it has to do with how you engineer the social infrastructure of the city. and it turns out, there are a lot of myths about hand-to-hand appendix in a city that is not really true. that was very interesting. one of the really interesting areas, and this will allow futuristic, i really think it could help cities become not just more disaster proof but also more sustainable is a movement that has just started now that is called living architecture. goes by some other name, like pyro architecture. it's basically a combination of

architectural designs that imitate nature, but also material science that creates new kinds of building materials that behave like living substances or actually are partly made of living substances. one of the best examples of this is something that is called self feeling concrete. again, not a scientific term, just a phrase that is used. what you can see here on this slide is one experiment that was done a few years ago by some students who invented a substance that was partly made from bacteria. these are genetically modified bacteria that when were put into our crack in concrete command you can see here, sort of on the left side there is the crack. this is magnified, by the way. they put this substance that they referred to as the sell a fella, i know what that means.

anyway, they made some. basically this bacteria would go into the crack. because it had been modified it would extrude this epoxy as well as some other kind of calcium like to absences. eventually fill in the crack, holding on to the concrete and leaving behind this kind of star that actually looks like a kind of living skin that has sealed up. of course important part of this experiment and all experiments with synthetic biology, architecture, the bacteria aren't set up and engineered to die when they're done with filling in that crack. so the fln, give their lives to heal the concrete. and this is just one example of the self filling material that could be used in cities. i talked to architects and designers for the book about

much more futuristic ideas for how these kinds of materials might be used to myself feeling materials, of course, make housing more sustainable because instead of tearing down old structures, the structures might heal themselves. it can also make things like bridges more safe because if they develop cracks they may be able to heal themselves but for a real disaster happened. so we might be able to have so feeling structures that are maintaining themselves dislike living organisms. the city itself can become a kind of living organism. also helped by things like a smart kid every works. coming year creating an organism with billings are talking to

each other on the grid in the green. it's my idea, the idea of a lot of architects and designers working in the space, cities are going to slowly become more like organisms. and this will allow us to have hopefully carbon neutral or even carbon-cities where there ultimately using fuel. everyone will have its own house you that. you could use that for fuel. you might use it also for lighting. you could have genetically modified elegy that would grow in the dark. and i talked to one designer is interested in living architecture. one hundred to wonder years we might be cultivating mold and our houses, not killing it.

exchanging recipes with the neighbors. the best small to purify the water and let the night. so cities might not be as much in contradiction with nature and in contradiction with the environments where there. one day we might look at on the city and see something that looks kind of like a ruined or as a tree house and come across these crumbling structures and realize a structure covered in fines might really be a living place. my look like it was crumbling because it had been in so feeling. these buildings would be covered in stars and bumpy. there would not look all smooth and sexy. there might be a lot more sustainable and a lot better for the people in the mini environment. and ultimately -- again, looking further into the future, even

further than biological cities, we might start extending our ability to of farmers cities and build their cities using organic materials bandit start actually forming the atmosphere. when i say farming the atmosphere, i choose those words because we have used farming to pretty much transform the surface of the earth. we now are kind of shepherds of almost everything that grows on the planet except for some areas, and even those are kind of falling under human control. ultimately if we want to maintain the climate at a level that we prefer regard to study of how we control the climate. it's not going to be enough to cut carbon emissions the planet goes through carbon cycle is naturally. as i was talking about with the

permian, there is absolutely time with the plan is going to create the results of the industrial revolution without any help for us. but many volcanoes, humans will have to take off the burden. speaking in a state that we refer this set up a new call for that, but that's kind of written history. things have been a lot warmer in the hemisphere. at times much more carbon rich, sometimes much more oxygen ridge.

and so it's quite an unnatural for a step be hoping to keep the planet in a state where it's nice and cool, the way we like it. so mutually overtime if we want our species to enjoy life onward to cover it we're going to have to think about what kinds of technologies as we can invent to draw carbon down of the atmosphere when it naturally starts getting in there through either stuff that we have done which one could argue is not natural, or through the natural carbon cycles of the planet. so that would be -- those technologies are gl engineering technologies, ways of engineering the entire geology of the year for. i do talk about that in the book. i will give you too many spoilers. it's a long way off. there have been some zeal engineering experiments that have happened quite recently. there was of rodeo engineer off the coast of canada who did an experiment trying to draw down carbon from the hemisphere by

doing iron seating in the ocean. so far it doesn't seem as if it worked out. the idea is you put six iron in the ocean. it attracts macros that like to eat and and they also drawdown carbon. when they die hopefully this into the bottom of the ocean and take the carbon with them. the problem is, they don't tend to sink all the way to the bottom of the ocean. you end up with more carbon. that's just a start. and jill engineering is really in its infancy. and finally, if we really want to look long term beyond biological cities, beyond steel engineering, there are still going to be problems with the earth. for one thing, we have this habit of running into giant rocks and space because we are a giant rock hanging in space. there are other rocks out here with us. gravity brings us into contact

some times. and we also, of course, have a planet which is full of magma. and volcanoes happen, sometimes really a long time and sometimes really catastrophically. if we want again to have our half a million years and hopefully beyond we need to be thinking about how to get off the planet. any to be thinking about how humans can have backup cities and new civilizations on other planets and maybe other structures in space because if something catastrophic happens to the planet will need to have a place where we can go be refugees. maybe really going to be at some point. hopefully the government will mind. maybe will have to go to mars and mercury. a lot of jobs on mercury right now. it's like saskatchewan. come on. we will take any refugees. the thing is, when we think

about space travel and colonizing space, it may turn out to take a little bit longer than we think. let me just give you a quick example of how that, my work. looking back into him minister, humans, 50,000 years ago used much like you're sitting over year to get from asia to australia. 50,000 years ago they crossed an entire ocean. it was not really until about 500 years ago that you have international travel using boats creating a global culture. it was not until really the advent of tremendous amounts of capital being poured into shipping as part of the colonization of the planet that you really got turned of, like

harris said, global culture. so that's a lot of lag time between the first use of boats to go from one continent to the other to creating a culture where humans are traveling all the time between the continents. so if you think of this first year as the rockets that we have used to get to the moon and the rockets refused to take our robot friends to mars, we may be pretty far away from a time when we are jetting between mars and derek bell a time. i hope it's not going to be 50,000 years. i don't mean to suggest that we are going to have to wait that long, but it may be a lot longer than we hoped. it may not be the next decade with the next century that we have a city on mars. it may take us hundreds of years before we really have a space calling civilization, and it may look nothing like what we expect we may not be using rockets to get off the planet.

maybe using something like the space elevator. that's actually -- it's great that i'm in seattle because every year there's a space elevator conference for people who want to build it, and discuss their ideas. since the 1990's when nasa actually worked on a model for the space elevator. some of the things that we might need to create one, nasa has actually had an annual price offered to anyone who can build part of this elevator that does not exist yet, and up to you about that in the second. as you can see, this image is actually from nasa. what you can see here is the elevator car bed. there is are far in the background. the idea of a space elevator, first of all, is answering a basic question which is coming out you have sustainable space travel because right now we're using rockets which require

rocket fuel which is expensive, heavy, and polluting and there's a limited supply of it. so it's not a good long-term solution. we can't keep using rockets to get out of the gravity well. will what we use? how would we have a kind of trained to space that would be completely able to be used over and over again, something that would not pollute the environment. so the space elevator. this is hell of works. you have a platform on earth, your elevator platform. somewhere along the equator, and then you have of very, very long tether attaching that elevator platform about 60,000 miles, so you're partly to the men at the point command at the other end of that to other you have a counterweight, and that counterweight is in geostationary orbit, so orbiting the earth but also attached by this to other. target to that in a minute because it's kind of the problem

. and right now we actually have the technology to do a lot of this. the counterweight not so much. the counterweight might be a captured asteroid, it might be a happy version of the death star. basically what it will be a support, a destination for people to get to in space where they can then get on to a spaceship that will take them somewhere else. the space elevator is is to get you out of the gravity well into space and an honor merry way. it will take you about three days to get up to that counterweight or port. so the car isn't really like an elevator as you think of it today. it's more like a train sleeper car. you probably have a bunk bed that will cost a lot of money. hopefully it will be much, much cheaper than the amount of money it costs now. and of course you can use the elevator car over and over again and have people going constantly

up and down and, of course, supply is going up and down as well. the idea is that the elevator car would climb up that to other using robotic arms of the kind that exist now in industrial factories to build large machines. you have your robotic arm pulling this elevator car out of the gravity low birth and in the space. the big question is what would you make the tender of? it would have to be flexible and then. it would have to withstand weather. it has to withstand micrometer rights that reasoning around in space. it would have to withstand the space junk that we put into the atmosphere. we could have robots of their collecting space junk. it has been suggested that it might be made of carbon and the tubes, but it's unclear whether that could really be used for something like this. leica said, every year nasa as a

contest where they offer up to million dollars to anyone who can come up with the substance that would be strong enough and light enough to be evident. so far no one has actually won the full amount, although people are working on the carbon and a juvenile. if you have an idea for it in you should go to the space elevator conference and see if you can help create the future of space travel. the point is the things in the future might not look exactly the way we expect. we have 900,000 years to a change and develop new technologies that will hopefully make the future a place where we can survive, survive disasters from everyday stuff like earthquakes and synonymous to really mass extinction causing disasters like super volcanoes or encounters with * from space.

the thing is that, as i said, no matter what happens, humans are probably going to survive. if we look even dispassionately and geological history and human history, we see that humans to have all the traits that are required to survive even are really horrific disaster, even a mass extinction. the question is just how we will survive, what kinds of projects we start taking on as a species to make our survival something that is enjoyable or sustainable and not turn into a horrific scenario where we have to live underground eating worms of the time, which i don't mean to poop on eating worms. i want to do it every day. humans have a survival instinct, like every other creature on the planet. the fact is no matter if for good or bad, we're going to make

it through and survive. is just a question of how we're it's going to get command difference calling to get. at some point that think we may evolve into an entirely different species after that million years is up. and say we won the as part squid, part cyborg it moving on the moon of saturn. that's a win. we don't have to be human at the end of that journey. we may change a lot of that time we hopefully our progeny will look back at us and say, good job. the was a great path you took. you help them survive and now we have an awesome, and tighten. so again, like i said, that's a win. think it's going to give weird, but we're in to make it through. thank you very much. [applause]

>> we can do a few minutes if people want to the lineup at the corner of the room. >> you said there would be robot arms pulling that. what power them? >> that's a big question. the mall that nasa work done and i think that you would see -- i don't think you can see it in the picture. it would actually be laser power. there would be lasers on the surface that would be powering it basically a version of solar power but with lasers beaming at receivers on the elevator car. the question is, again, how you do that with weather patterns interfering? patti make sure that your lazar continues to power in space. once it gets into space it can probably use solar, but as its leaving the gravity well averred

that still a big question. the answer now is lasers, which is always an exciting answer, but it's an open question. a lot of ex factors in building the elevator. the tether is another. >> so adapt, scatter, remember. what happens when the power goes out? weapons to the books, libraries? >> the libraries are made of paper. so i think -- there are a lot of answers to that question. humans luckily do have a lot of redundant storage mechanisms. we don't just use terabytes reiterates second use of my house for perfectly legal stores of media. we also have books. also a lot of groups who organize online who are working on creating storehouses of knowledge that can be printed

out and used in the event of civilization collapsed. there's also the possibility the week it maintain some of those archives with generators. it really depends on what the collapse is because a lot of these disasters -- we imagine that giant fireball. it's going to be like bull will invent nanotechnology that destroys the electrical grid. to watch the show. the point is that most of these disasters i'm looking and a things that don't happen instantaneously. they are kind of a slow-moving disaster that picks up speeds. even when you have something like an earthquake or tsunami or even a bombing, are radiation disaster, those tend to be localized. you're always try to have pockets where people live information. what humans are great at is sharing information over

distances. even if the time frame were some people in seattle and san francisco don't have the internet and stab our eyes out because we can't imagine what that would be like, there are other people out there who will maintain as information stores. he will have backups. >> so what is the best thing that we can do to insure survival? >> well, i've been talking about some of that today. i think that the main question is, how do we conceivable we're doing is being part of a long-term pathway to survival? all of these threats take place over many, many generations which is hard for us to think about because were used to thinking about what i can do more to fix up the next week. these are things we can do in a human lifetime to fix things for people living 300 years from now . the real question is out of we

conceive of a project like rebuilding our cities to be more like biological organisms in a way that is and frustrating because obviously in my lifetime and never going to see that. in my life, never knowing the see a space elevator. how do we have steps along the way, and then a technology in our lifetime that can add to a future where we have biological cities? that's why i'm excited about things like self filling materials which are something that we can and been in a lifetime that we can even be perfect in a lifetime and that could be part of a pathway toward having a more sustainable city. and so i think that is really a difficult task, realizing that you won't get to see the end of the story in your lifetime. you want it to have a happy moment of light, and then we survived because euro in about the end of a million years.

the same way that we look back at homo erectus and real like my good job with the whole fire thing. played tools, good job. you know, so i think that that has to be the hope. weekend of kid bike size projects and we can do in a lifetime. a . >> she started to answer my question. i was wondering, humans are uniquely able to learn from history but also have not shown much inclination to learn from history. or you going to motivate people to start down this path of things that would be useful to us a million years from now or even a thousand years from now? which even 100. i always find it funny that people say humans are so bad and

binding for mystery or we are so lazy. nobody is motivated to do anything then the fact is if you look into -- humans on that bigger timeline, look at us as a species, not your brother or your professors are whenever if -- also just take something like climate change when did eumenides figure out the stuff really done with our industrial production is causing climate change? about, yeah, 25 if you wanted to be generous you could say 30 you're 40 years. so in our lifetime we figure that out. during that time it has become one of the most hotly debated political issues on the planet. that is pretty damn good. no, we haven't fixed it. in fact, many would argue that we are screwing things up even worse, but the fact is that just

in the short amount of time since we figured out that we were screwing up, we turned it into something where it's a huge question of our going to do with it. so it's frustrating. probably all those will be dead before we find out who prevailed and what the alternative energy will be that we finally used instead of fossil fuels and will it be torn -- please note. solar is line open for because solar is a really great technology that is just in its infancy . so i think our track record is pretty good. i feel like we have learned a lot from disasters that have happened historically and that we are really pretty agile and responding. is just that it is not within my lifetime. if you look back at the last 500 years, you know, there have been awesome things that humans have done and learned from. now we have science, an incredibly widely accepted theory of dealing with the

world, not everywhere, but in most places. that was also quite recent. i guess i just feel like humans are doing. i think we are muddling through. we are not the greatest, sometimes very jerks, but i think on the whole we actually -- that urge to adapt and survive does percolate out into our politics and social structures. again, it takes time. >> thanks. >> yeah. thank you. >> hi. you mentioned that there were communities online where there are storehouses of knowledge. do we put it off in emergency circumstances to iraq. >> i talk about this in my book. there is one group that is -- you're going to have to do the illness. basically three cds, something like that. basically all the knowledge is on three cds.

stuff like howdy you do basic medicine, how you do basic farming techniques. also altos section on how men need the family. so sometimes there's a little bit of an ideological problem but there's also projects, a group that has -- their trying to come up with a fairly small number of machines that you would need to restart civilizations. everything from like a threshing machine to a 3d printer. so it will survive the apocalypse which is great news. and there are other groups doing it as well. and it's kind of putting all the information together, but you always have to think about the threat model. there also seems to be this scenario for humans. everything will collapse. because we will have the internet on sale -- internet

anymore. one have any power. maybe it will all be out of existence. and so we will have to start with man leading the charge into the agricultural economy again. and i don't mean to pick on these poor guys. they're trying the best. the fact is, if there is not a lot of disasters we to see a complete loss of every kind. as i said when i began, the apocalypse is a lot more complicated than we think it will be, and there will be pockets of people who have access to high-technology and even on the planet they're people who have access to high technology that many, many people in the world tell. so the apocalypse may look a lot like the world does not come into slightly worse. so we have to be prepared for that. is just a little bit worse.

very slow. that's part of why we really do need to be trying to take action to china is slowly gently steer us away from the slightly worse if you find other stuff in el me and let me know. >> i have two kinds of thoughts. one is that if the focus more on food supply navy as part of the organizing affect of losing control, i was surprised you have not spent more time talking about that. the second thing is, our other plants that are really cute examples of these living architecture? >> plant communities like type of plants you would use? >> mushrooms as an example, not

to use, but to look at how they survive in all kinds of odd and strange circumstances or creatures underneath the seat. >> yes. these are both super grip questions. in response to your question about the food supply, that's actually a big concern. i talked about it a little bit, but it go into all of the concerns. i do have a section or a talk about famine. and that's actually a very likely result. that's actually all of these examples i talked about or a few examples of how math -- mass extinctions unfold slowly, part of what is happening there is species are experiencing famine because the more than species died out the more that the food supply dwindles. so that is really what you're talking about when you're talking about death by climate change. some of it is also death by habitat -- habitat change, but

that is not just about, its way to lot. it's also it's way too high for the grass that i eat to live. these are intimately bound with a mass extinctions work. food webs are an interesting way to think about it. that's really where the death happens. as for the plant question, i have a favorite plan. it's actually not a plan. it's bacteria. it's kind of like a plan to, blue-green algae. if anyone was here for the lecture before me, san a bacteria probably played a big role in a lecture. it is the greatest survivor on earth. it survived every single mass extinction. it looks just like sludge. the ancestors lived on earth billions of years ago and made

it through incredibly harsh conditions. your sow. they did it might evolving photosynthesis. in other words, solar power. what made them so adaptable and so able to live anywhere, including on spell dollars, including on that early triassic earth. they have been all cuban wrigley was because it had this ability to get energy in the food supply anywhere in went because it relied on the son. and so i actually have a pretty extensive section of the book or talk about not just the austin this of san a bacteria as a survivor species, but also how we can learn from it to think about solar power as being a real cornerstone to survival because it worked for cyano bacteria. it would triple a are actually the source of chloroplasts .

the ancestors. san bacteria to create plan cells. it's a really, really good survival mechanism. it's great that we finally invented it. at think if we are just in the infancy of imitating sanitary of people said humans prod bacteria upon the earth. yeah, that's great. we should be. the. >> some of the things he talked about. most of the people in the room probably share this memory. i do to the. we're worried about nuclear winter. to you preclude an event like that? faugh -- that potential is there

and can he will -- it may be getting worse. given the politics of the world. my question as to do with, do you preclude some sort of set the political to the political disasters that would, you know, create that nuclear winter? >> yes. >> with that event be sufficient to a pretty well kill off most people or with the few that survive actually be able to build something beyond that or would we be going back? >> i think my answer in order is no and yes. [laughter] i do talk a lot about radiation disasters. the interesting thing about nuclear winter is that it has happened before. in fact among when that has traded 65 million years ago that eventually led to the slow, dying off of the dinosaurs for a

they're coming of with the idea of nuclear winter in the 80's. his previous kind of horrific said of explosions. so we know for sure that in the event of nuclear winter many, many species did survive. we know it's a survival event. there is also some evidence to suggest that the first mass extinction of the planet went through bought for under 50 million years ago. it may have been caused by massive radiation bombardment. again, it's controversial because it so long ago and it's hard to say, but it seems as if some of the evidence points to the idea that there may have been a nearby supernova. the plan was bombarded with camera radiation and slide off part of the atmosphere. it caused a very rapid ice age. so we know that life survived that. that is a huge radiation disaster. we also know that one good way to survive radiation disasters is to have about 2 feet of rock

between you and the incredibly energetic particles that are bouncing around. so i do have a chapter in the book on underground cities because we may end up living in an underground city. i think, you know, nuclear war is one kind of threat and then there are other kinds of radiation disasters that can happen as well. so radiation disaster is a very eminent threat. maybe not imminent, but it is one of the threats. it is definitely a scenario. may have even cause mass extinctions in the past. >> thank you. >> hello. >> earlier in a documented you think there will be talk with greater access to technology, and i totally agree and say the apocalypse is already here. is just not evenly distributed. i spent time volunteering in a clinic in rural africa, and once you get past town dirty everything is, it's fascinating to see how people can do so much with so few resources. in your research, did you too

much looking into how people are already dealing with an apocalypse in their own way? >> yes. i don't talk about it to recollect that, but that is -- i mean, what you're saying is true, and that is part of why it is important to remember that the apocalypse is complicated and the people are capable of living in many different kinds of conditions and in being incredibly resourceful in those conditions. i think that as we look to the future it is important to look to the developing world as a model because there are a lot of ways in which the kinds of development taking place there leapfrogging over some of the mistakes that we made with industrialization could really be a kind of a pathway toward a future where we don't have to use fossil fuels of we don't have that have a kind of massive cable infrastructure to have internet communication.

maybe we can start fresh in some way. so i think the answer to try the simple answer is yes. i think that is a really good model. the other thing is that, you know, some of the disasters that have happened in the developing world like famine is a really, really big one which i do talk about in the buck. one of the things we learned about famine is that it is a human created disaster. that's something that we learned from looking at now famines develop in different parts of the world. sure, there are natural causes, especially in africa where irrigation is usually from rainfall, but the fact is that all of those can be prevented but international cooperation and people actually have access to resources and those resources are not overpriced. and so that becomes a really good model for us. what works and what doesn't

work. so far mostly things haven't worked. that's and experiences go. >> one more. >> okay. this is the last question. in taking the information you gave about the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other is certainly terrible death. >> be explosion. >> yeah. >> but that took some time in the hemisphere. and with the super volcano at yellowstone, which is eye and a stand from my reading in terms of geographic or geological time that should be happening present . ..

>> pouring ash into the atmosphere so the volcano at yellowstone the caldera. so what would happen is it would spew lot of but it will probably only last about a week the made devastation would again be asked entering the environment to get into the stratosphere. there would not be all lots of burning lava death beyond the boundaries of the park i just read about this at the observatory i also have the same question. would never destroy everything? note it's not. [laughter] but the main devastation would be negative getting into the environment.

wind of vulcanologist a ideologist steady this they consider the disaster zone if you get 10 centimeters or more of ash in your area. that would have it in a pretty wide area around the neighboring four or five states. if you get a lot of cash it is very polluting. rivers. difficulty with crops they would be wrecked for that year. in there would be a very expensive cleanup. it would just be infrastructure destruction and crop destruction. and it is possible global temperatures might go down a tiny bit. the ri