who, one of the greatest writers in american history. i would argue that without the carson city of experience, the nevada territorial experience come he never could've become a mark twain. >> booktv in american history tv look at the history and literary life of carson city, nevada, next weekend on c-span2 and three. >> next, science writer annalee newitz recounts the mass extinctions that have taken place on earth during its 4.5 billion year existence and presents her thoughts on how humans can survive a future catastrophic disaster. this program is a little over one hour. >> thanks so much for coming out to hear about the end of the world.

and thanks to the town hall for putting on this amazing secret it's so terrific that this public science education going on like this, especially in a time when funding is being cut by science at the national level. so we need to keep pushing for as much science education as possible. so i just finished writing an optimistic book about the apocalypse. and it didn't start out that way at all. it really did not realize this book is going to have a happy ending. and it acts was started because i have been really fascinated my whole life with stories about destruction, especially massive global destruction and apocalypse is and everything from kind of the underground cannibal apocalypse zombie stories and godzilla stories. godzilla is kind of one of my spirit animals. and i wanted to come a couple years ago when i was thinking about this, i thought how could

i write a kind of nonfiction version of a godzilla movie? what with that look like if we delve into the scientific literature and what history has to teach us? what would be the equivalent of some kind of mass, massive destruction caused by force that we don't understand. and i came upon the idea of mass extension, which are indeed the worst kind of disaster that could ever happen to the planet. and the more that i research them, the more the red scientific papers and talked to sign this, i realized that actually one of the main characteristics of a mass extinction is that there are always survivors but and that was when i really began to change how i understood what this book was going to be about. so let me start by telling 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% of all species on the planet die out. and usually these take about 1 million years. and so when you look at them, they are taking place in geological time. they are not a quick thing that we can see in a human lifetime. and one of the things that linked very much all of the mass extinctions, and there have been five of them so far in earth's history over the past half billion years or so, is that most of them are caused by climate change. so usually there some horrific event that sets off the climate change. may be an asteroid hits the planet, which is what happened in the most recent and perhaps most massive extinction which is one that extinguished the dinosaurs 659 years ago when an asteroid slammed into the planet. but, of course, when that

happened actually it wasn't like a movie, it wasn't like a big rock at the planet but it was like fire and like dinosaurs were being barbecued. although that sounds really cool, and there were no lasers or anything like that. what actually happened was of course where it hit the were horrific fires and creatures were killed by the thousands, but over time it worked its way into the atmosphere and changed the climate over the long term. so actually what happened was most dinosaurs died out from the subsequent climate change. this is the case with like what i said almost all the mass extinctions but let me take a little bit about my favorite mass extinction, give you an idea of how it works. everyone kind of has a favorite mass extinction. if you talk to geologists about this and they always kind of, they have a gallows humor about

it. these are horrific mass slayings of creatures, and so my personal favorite is when it comes at the end of the permian period. if you look at this chart here of geological period you can see it kind of down near the bottom. diabolo thing this is gigantic extinction right next to the permian. so this is about 250 million years ago. and at the time the planet due to plate tectonics, the continents were completely different than they are now. they were arranged into one giant supercontinent, ngo. said to imagine a supercontinent for stretching all the way from the north pole down to the south pole. 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 bowl can is not a scientific term. at its basic refer to a massive, massive volcanic and this was a volcano caused by a province which is a very large area where love is being released in multiple places to get to imagine great big things opening up in the earth but it's not like a mountain where split up on the top. the defense opened up like iceland volcano that we saw recently. they just start spewing lava. so again it's not explosive. it is law by using out of huge cracks and there's multiple events. answer in this northern area of 10 jia, this event went on for about i would say a thousand years. so it was 1000 your eruption. and what happened was over time the gases and ash that were released from the volcanic

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 in the heat it into a super green's. the oceans became very aesthetic and creatures died out in incredible numbers but it was the worst mass extension of the planet has ever seen. by the end of that million year period, 95% of all species on the planet have died out. even insects i doubt which is very unusual. you usually don't see in sick to death in a mass extension but it was sea creatures, land creatures, plants. everybody was screwed 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

related to a group of animals that later evolved into mammals but it was kind of a mammal like creature. thing of the kind of like the uncle of humanity. not our direct ancestor, and its name is lester source. list resource has a couple of traits that made it an excellent survivor in this incredibly difficult time in earth's history of somewhat small, about dogs i've. it was about three feet long, two to three feet long the looks like a little bit like a pig and a little bit like a lizard. and you have to imagine eating kind of the way pigs do, like probably eating roots. they probably burrowed in the evenings so they would dig a borough. bed very powerful front legs. they were digging out holes in living underground a lot. so for lystrosaurus, it was kind of awesome when the volcano started going off because the whole world was kind of

transformed into lystrosaurus heaven. because they were used to being underground and breathing kind of dirty air anyway. they had a great lung capacity which means that possibly they were able to get more oxygen from dirty air than other creatures that were similar in size. and the other thing about lystrosaurus was that a lot of its natural predators died during the early period, but the following the permian. so that no predators. it had dirty air. all of this food source of mostly underground. so if someone is blocking temperatures are changing, that food source is probably going to be mostly unharmed by that transition. but what are the other things that lystrosaurus dead was it scattered across the southern continent. so remember, the huge supercontinent, lystrosaurus move from a more northern region all the way down into the south.

this is over a period of millions of years. and gathered across that continent, evolved into many different species may be possibly four, maybe possibly more. and adapted to new ecological niches. it did two of the things i talk to in the title of my book. it scattered and adapted. it fled from the source of danger which was a 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. i guess i traded in godzilla as my mascot and picked up lystrosaurus. because this creature was as i said, he was very humble and yet nevertheless it managed to make a few the toughest time in earth's history while all of these other creatures around it were suffering because their food webs were unraveling. and this is a major cause of

mass extinction to a food web is just a way of talking about that the network of basically who eats whom an ecosystem. and what happens is you have a food web were a lot of creatures start going extinct, in that it causes knock on extensions among other creatures who have to eat them. so if your food source of guys, you die, too. whenever you have, that's kind of one of the ways mass extinction get started to get a few die off and get all these knock on mass extinction situation. they cause this 75% number. so there's one thing that we can do as humans that lystrosaurus can't really do, or probably couldn't do. so we have the ability in a crisis to basically do what lystrosaurus did, which is adapting new environments. humans have been terrific at doing that. we've managed to at different points in history leave from

danger when we've 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 i needed to go and grab the ground the way and 70. humans can remember not just their own lifetime, but we can use history to remember the whole of our civilization's history. we can look back and consider the whole history of our evolution as a species as was the evolution of the planet. and look at all the disasters that happen and learn from them. that's a very profound survival skill but like i said it's something as far as we know it is fairly unique in human beings as a species. we haven't done an o species that seem to be able to

do that yet. so part of my hope in sort of the center of writing this bo when i realized it wasn't going to be all destruction and it was going to be some hope of survival is that we actually have the trait of a survivor species like lystrosaurus, plus we have this added ability to plan for the future. that is really important, and i spent a lot of time in the book talking about ways that we can start planning for the future, basing those plans on what we know of disasters that have already happened to humans but also disasters that happen to the earth. because that's important in planning is learning from history and learn from the great experiment that is human evolution and human civilization. so let me put this in perspective for you. human beings are mammals, which is why we are so cute and furry and we have live babies and all those good things. just like these cute cats up

here. the typical species like them for a mammal, in other words, typical amount of time before the species evolves into another species or dies out is a million years. that's a typical species like that. and humans, homo sapiens, evolve about 100,000 years ago, possibly 200,000, the pending upon where you sit in the debate over the question. but the fact is either way, we are pretty early in our species timely. we've only got, you know, say 900,000 years left to go. so when we're thinking about planning for the future at the speed, planning for our survival as homo sapiens, we need to be thinking not just of what i going to do next month or next week, but how are we going to set things up so that we have 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 but they going to make those 900,000 years really awesome? instead of living like cannibals underground and turning in to 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 for the next several millennia, and more. and the first area that i am most interested in is cities and city buildings and city planning to the reason why is right now the bassman jury of humans, well, not the vast majority. the majority of humans, more than 50% live in cities. and the u.n. has done some

predictions on how the trend will continue. and if things go pretty much as they have been, we are looking at possibly as many as 67 or 70% of people living in cities in 50 years. people are becoming more and more urban. the majority will be located in cities. as we are thinking about the future, a good place to focus on ways to make our lives more survivable is the city. there's different ways we can tackle making cities more survivable. first of all we need to be thinking about how to make a city robust against disaster. there's a lot of different things we can do from better earthquake engineering, and that's one thing i talked about a lot in the book, since i'm from san francisco where we deal with earthquakes all the time. you guys also live in a zone. seattle should probably think about earthquakes a lot also. we also need to be thinking about things that are a little bit more social, like how do you

organize a cities evacuation plan in a flood? or have you organize how to respond to a pandemic that hits your city? that may not have -- it has to do with how you engineered the social infrastructure of the city. turns out that a lot of myths about how to handle pandemics in the city that are not really to care and i was very interesting to me to find out about. one of the really interesting areas, and this is going to get futuristic, that i really think 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. it goes by other names like bio architecture, and it's basically a combination of architectural designs that imitate nature, but also material science that creates new kind of building

materials that behave like living substances, or actually are partly native living substances. one of the best examples of this is something that is called self-healing concrete but again not a scientific term. it's just a phrase used a lot different kind of substances. what you can see here on the slide is one experiment done a few years ago by some students who invented a substance that was partly made from bacteria, genetically modified bacteria, that when you put into a crack in concrete, and you can see here there was sort of on the left side there's a crack, and this is magnified by the way. and they put this substance that the referred to as bacilla filla -- [laughter] >> basically this bacteria would go into the crack and then becauseyified it

would exclude the a proxy as well as some of the kind of like substances. and eventually fill in the cracks holding onto the concrete and leaving behind this kind of scar that it actually looks like a kind of living skin that has healed a. and, of course, the important part of this experiment and all experiments with synthetic biology, architecture is that the bacteria are trained, not trained to your setup, engineered to die when they're done with their filling in the crack. so there's a fail-safe mechanism. so they fill it in, give their life to heal the concrete. and this is just one example of a self-healing material that could be used in cities. i talk to architects and designers for this book about much more futuristic ideas for how these kind materials might be used. self-healing materials of course

make housing more sustainable because instead of tearing down old structures, the structures might heal themselves. it also can make things like bridges more say because if they give up cracks they may be able to heal themselves before a real disaster happened. and so we might be able to self-healing structures that are maintaining themselves just like living organisms. and the city itself can be kind of a living or position held by this kind of biological innovation. but also of course helped by things like a smart grid that really works. if you have a smart grid that really worked, where disabling said just enough power from the grid to supply what it needs of the buildings that don't need power don't fit any power from the grid, you are creating a kind of organism where the buildings are kind of talking to each other on the grid and a green who is going to get power when, and you start having almost like a body where

different organs are getting blood are getting nutrients we need them. and so it's my idea, and the idea of a lot of architects and designers working in the states that cities are going to slowly become more like organisms. this will allow us to have hopefully carbon neutral or even carbon megacities where we are alternate using alternative fuels, maybe growing fuels. maybe cities would be full of algae that's over every home would have its own algae that fd you could use that algae for fuel. he might use the algae also for letting the judge amounted -- algae that wit would glow in the dark. i talked to one designer was really interested in the architecture and she said, you know, and 100 or 200 years we might be cultivating mold in our houses, not killing it. you'd be exchanging recipes with your neighbors like how do you get the best mold to purify their water and light up at night?

so our cities might not be as much in contradiction with nature and in contradiction with the environment where they are. and one day you might look out on your city and see something that looks kind of like a ruin or like a treehouse. edge would come across this kind of common structure and realize actually a crumbling structure to make structure covered in vines might really be a living place but it might look like it was coming because it'd been self-healing. group who they wouldn't look all smooth and sexy like downtown seattle does now. but they might be a lot more sustainable and a lot better for the people in them and the environment. and ultimately, and again looking further into the future, even further than biological cities, we might start extending our ability to form our cities

and build our cities using organic materials, and start actually farming the atmosphere. and 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 know we are kind of shepherds almost everything that grows on the planet, except for some areas. and even those areas are kind of falling under human control. and ultimately if we want to maintain the climate at a level that we prefer, we are going to have to start thinking about how are we going to control the climate. because it's not going to be enough just to cut carbon emissions. obviously, we need to do that. that's a great start, but the planet goes to carbon cycles naturally but as i was talking about with the permian period, there's also the times when the plan is going to create the results of an industrial

revolution without any help from us but it's going to of mega- volcanoes, carbon will be introduced into the atmosphere and heat things up all by itself. we don't need to be there to do it. so humans are going to have to take on the burden, or take on the project of actually keeping the environment in a state that we prefer. having the ice caps on the north and south poles, that's great for us. we love it. we like it to be kind of cold. all the animals and plants in our environment are kind of set up in a vault for that. but that's actually kind of weird in the history of the planet. most of history of the planet there have been no ice caps at the polls. things have been a lot warmer. the atmosphere at times has been much more carbon rich. sometimes it's been much more oxygen rich. and so it's quite unnatural for us to be hoping to keep the plan in a state where it's nice and cool the way we like to

eventually over time if we want our species to enjoy life on earth, we're going to have to think about what kinds of technology we can invent to draw carbon debt out of the atmosphere when it naturally starts getting in there through either can either stuff that we've done, which one could argue is not very natural, or the natural carbon cycles of the planet. and so those technologies are geoengineering technologies, ways of engineering the entire geology of the earth together to talk about that in the book as well and it won't be too many spoilers, but trust me, it's a long way off. there had been some geoengineering experiments that have happened actually quite recently. there was a road geoengineering off the coast of canada but did an experiment trying to draw down carbon from the atmosphere by doing i am seeking in the ocean, and so far it doesn't seem as if it worked out the

guide is he put carbon, unser, you put iron in the ocean and it attracts microbes that like, i like to eat iron and then those microbes also draw down carbon. and when they die hopefully they sink to the bottom of the ocean, take the carbon with them. the problem is they don't tend to sink all the way to the bottom of the ocean actually end up with more carbon. that's just the start of the. geoengineering is really in its infancy. and finally if we really want to look long-term beyond biological cities, beyond geoengineering, they're still going to be problems with earth. for one thing, we have this habit of running into giant rocks in space because we are a giant rock hanging in space. and there's other rocks out there with his, and gravity brings us into contact sometimes. and we also of course have a planet which is full of magma.

d volcanoes happen. sometimes a really long time and sometimes really catastrophically. so if we want, i can, to have our awesome million years, and hopefully beyond, we need to be think about how to get off the planet but when you to be thinking about how humans can have active cities and new civilizations on other planets and maybe other structures in space. because if something catastrophic happens to the planet we need to have a place we can go be refugees. maybe we'll are all going to be venusian refugees at some point. hopefully diminishing government won't mind. or maybe will have to go to mars or mercury. i heard there's a lot of jobs and murky right now. it's like saskatchewan to they are like come on, we will take any refugee. the thing is that when we think about space travel and think about colonizing space, it may turn out to take a little longer than we think the we are

kind of taking our first baby steps towards space travel. but let me just give you a quick example of how that timeline might work. looking back into human history, humans, 50,000 years ago used we did loads of much like this when you're seeing over here to get from asia to austria. 50,000 years ago. across an entire ocean. but it wasn't really until about 500 years ago that get international will using vote using 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, like i said, a global culture. so that's a lot of lag time between the first to use of

boats to go from one continent to the other to creating a culture where human to traveling all the time between the continents. so if you think of this first vote here as the rockets that we've used to get to the moon and the rockets refused to take a robot friends to mars, we may be able far away from the town when we're jetting between mars and earth all the time. i hope it's not going to be 50,000 i don't mean to suggest that we're going to have to wait that long. but it may be a lot than we hoped. it may not be next decade or next century that we have a city on mars. it may take us hundreds of years before we will have a safe going civilization. and may not nothing like respect. we may not use rockets to get off the plane. we may be using something like this space elevator. a space elevator, actually it's great th in seattle

because every year there is a space elevator conference in seattle where people who want to build it, and discuss their ideas. .. >> it's answering a basic question which is how do 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 ou.

so what would we use? how would we have a kind of train into space that would be completely able to be used over and over again, something that wouldn't pollute the environment? so the space elevator. and this is how it works. so you have a platform on earth, you have your elevator platform somewhere along the equator. and then you have a very, very long tether attaching that elevator platform up about 60,000 miles, so you're you're partway to the moon at that point. and at the other end of that tether, you have a counterweight. and that counterweight is in geostationary orbit, it's attached by the tether. and i'll get to the depther in a -- tether in a minute because the tether is kind of the problem. right now we actually have the technology to do a lot of this. the counterweight not so much, it might be a captured asteroid,

it might be a happy version of the death star. basically, what it's going to be is a port. it's going to be a destination for people to get to in space where they can then get onto a spaceship that will take them somewhere else. so the space elevator is just to get you out of the gravity well. it'll take you about three days to get up to that counterweight or port, so the car isn't really like an elevator as you would think of it today. it's more like a train sleeper car. you're going to probably have a crappy bunk bed that'll cost a lot of money. but hopefully, it'll be much, much cheaper than the amount of money that it costs now to get into space. and, of course, you can use the elevator car over and over again. and you can have people going constantly up and down and, of course, supplies going up and down as well. and the idea is that the elevator car would climb up that tether using robotic arms of the

kind that exist now in industrial factories to build large machines. so you have your robotic arms pulling this elevator car out of gravity well of earth and into space. the big question is what would you make the tester out of? it has to be flexible and thin, it has to withstand weather, it has to withstand micrometeorites that are zooming around in space. it has to understand the space junk that we've put into the atmosphere. maybe we'll have robots or that are up there collecting space junk. it's been suggested that it might be made out of carbon nanotubes, but it's unclear whether they could be used for something like this. every year nasa has a contest where they offer up to a million dollars to anyone who can come up with a substance that would be strong enough and light

enough to be that ribbon. so far no one has actually won the full amount, although people are working on the carbon nanotube angle. and if you have an idea for it, you should go to the space elevator conference and see if you can help create the future of space travel. the point is that things in the future might not look exactly the way we expect. we've got, like i said, 900,000 years to change and develop new technologies that will, hopefully, make the future a place where we can survive, where we can survive disasters from everyday stuff like earthquakes and tsunamis to really mass extinction-causing obstacles like asteroids from space. and the thing is that, as i said, no matter what happens humans are probably going to survive. if we look even dispassionately

at geological history and at human history, we see that humans do have all the traits that are required to survive even a really horrific disaster, even a mass extinction. the question is just how we're going to survive, what kind of projects will we start taking on as a species to make our survival something that is enjoyable or sustainable and not turn into, you know, a or risk scenario where we have to live underground eating worms all the time. which i don't mean to poop on eating worms, i think that's great, but i don't want to do it every day. [laughter] humans have a survival instinct. so the fact is no matter if we're good or bad, bad to the planet or good to it, we are going to make it through. we're going to survive. it's just a question of how weird it's going to get, how different it's going to get. and at some point, i think, we

may evolve into an entirely different species after that million years is up. say we wind up as part squid, part cyborg creatures living on a moon of sat turn. that's a win for us. [laughter] we don't have to be human at the end of that journal think. we may change a lot over that time. and we hopefully our progeny, our squid/cyborg progeny will look back at us and say, good job, you guys. that was a great path you took. now we have an awesome home on titan. [laughter] again, like i said, that's a win for us. and i think it's going to get weird, but we are going to make it through. thanks very much. [applause] so we can do q&a. if be people want to line up at the mic at the corner of the room.

>> space elevator, you said there would be robot arms pulling up. what would power the robots? >> so that's a big question. the model that nasa worked on, and i think that you would see -- i don't think you can see it in this picture -- is that it would actually be laser powered, there would be lasers on the surface that would be powering it, basically, you know, sort of a version of solar power but with lasers beaming at receivers on the elevator car. the question is, again, how do you do that with weather patterns interfering, how do you make sure that your laser continues to power it in space? i think once it gets into space it can probably use solar, but as it's leaving the gravity well of earth or, that's still a big question. so the answer now is lasers which is always an exciting answer to any question, but it's a lot of x factor in'

building the elevator, so the tether is another, obviously, big question. >> hi. so one of the things we adapt can, scatter and remember but i'm sure everybody's reading books on these things, what happens when the power goes out? how do you read? what happens to the books, the libraries? >> well, the libraries are made of paper. so i think, i mean, there's a lot of answers to that questions. humans, luckily, do have a lot of redundant storage mechanisms. we don't just use terabyte rays like i use at my house for perfectly legal stores of media. [laughter] we also do have books. there's also a lot of groups who organize online author working on creating storehouses of knowledge that can be printed out and used in the event of civilizational collapse. there's a possibility we could

maintain archives with generators. it really depends on what the collapse is. because a lot of these disasters, like, again, we imagine the giant fireball or if any of you are watching the show "revolution," it's going to be google that invents nanotechnology that destroys the electric call grid. don't watch that show. [laughter] most of these disasters that i'm looking at are things that don't happen instantaneously. so they're kind of a slow moving disaster that kind of picks up speed over hundreds of thousands of years. and even when you have something like, say, an earthquake or tsunami or even a bombing, even a radiation disaster, those tend to be localized. so you're always going to have pockets where people have information, and what humans are great at is sharing information over distances. so even if there's a time period where, you know, some people like in seattle and san francisco we don't have the internet, and we all stab our

eyes out because we can't imagine what that would be like, there's probably people out there that will maintain those information stores, and we will have libraries. we will have backups. >> thanks. >> so what's the best thing that we can do to insure the survival of the human race? >> well, i've been talking about some of that today. i think that the main question is how do we conceive of what we're doing as being part of a long-term pathway to survival. because all of these threats take place over many, many generations. and that's very hard for us to think about because we're used to thinking about what can i do tomorrow to fix something next week. and these are things we can do in a human lifetime to fix things for people living 300 years from now. the real question is how do we conceive of a project like rebuilding our cities to be more like organisms in a way that n't frustrating because

obviously, well, in my lifetime i'm never going to see that. i'm never going to see a space elevator except if i'm playing a video game. so how do we have steps along the way? how do we invent a technology in our lifetime that can add to a future where we have biological cities? and that's why i'm really excited about things like self-healing materials which are something that we can invent in a lifetime, that we can maybe even perfect in a lifetime and that could be part of a pathway toward having a more sustainable city. and so i think that's really the difficult task, is realizing you won't get to see the end of the story in your lifetime, you know? you won't get to have the happy moment of like, and then we survived. because you're only going to know that at the end of a million years. so you have to just hope that, like i said, our cyborg-squid offspring say, oh, thanks you guys. the same way we look back at homo e reck discuss and the

whole fire thing? good job! [laughter] so i think that has to be the hope that we kind of get bite-sized projects that we can do in a lifetime. and go to space. [laughter] >> well, you've actually already started answering my question. i was wondering, you know, humans, as you said, are uniquely able to learn from history but also haven't shown much inclination to learn from history. so how are you going to motivate people to start down this path of things that will be useful to us a million years from now or even a thousand years from now. >> yeah. or even a hundred years from now, right? so i always find it funny that people say, you know, humans are so bad at learning from history or we're so lazy, like nobody's motivated to do anything. and the fact is that that if you look at humans on that bigger

timeline, like look at us as a species. don't look at us like your brother or your professors, just an individual person who's like a total idiot for their whole life. [laughter] you have to look at it as a really long-term narrative. so, again, we're very early in that narrative. and also just take something like climate change. okay, when did humanity figure out that the stuff that we're doing with our industrial production is causing climate change? >> [inaudible] >> about 20, if you wanted to be generous, you could say 30 years or 40 years. so in our lifetimes we've figured that out. and during that time it's become one of the most hotly-debated political issues on the planet. and that's pretty damn good. no, we haven't fixed it and, in fact, many would argue that we're screwing things up even worse. but the fact is that just in this short period since we figured out that we were screwing up, we've turned it into something where it's a huge question of how we're going to

deal with it. and so, again, it's frustrating because probably all of us will be dead before we find out, you know, who prevails and what the alternative energy will be that we finally use instead of fossil fuels. you know, will it be corn? please, no. will it be solar? that's what i'm hoping for because solar is a really great technology that's just in its infancy. so really 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 weirdly pretty agile at responding. it's just that it isn't within a lifetime. you know, it's like if you look back at the last 500 years, you know, there have been really awesome things that humans have done and learned from. now we have science as an incredibly widely accepted theory of dealing with the world. not everywhere, but in most places. and that was also quite recent. so i just, i just -- i feel like humans are doing okay.

i think we're muddling through. you know, we're not the greatest, sometimes we're jerks, but i think on the whole we actually -- that urge to adapt and the urge to survive does percolate out into our politics and into our social structures. but, again, it takes a little time. >> thanks. >> yeah, thank you. >> hi. so you mentioned that there were communities online where they're accumulating, basically, storehouses of knowledge to be printed off in emergency circumstances? >> yes. >> do you happen to know the names of those organizes? >> i do name them in hi book. it's basically three cds, and it's stuff like how do you do basic medicine u40 how do you do basic farming techniques. there's also a helpful section

on how men lead the family. [laughter] there's sometimes a little bit of an ideological problem with each of these projects, but there's other projects. there's a group that has, they're trying to come up with a fairly small number of machines that you would need to restart civilization. so everything from like a thrashing machine to a 3-d printer, actually. so makerbot will survive the apocalypse which is great news. and there's other groups doing it as well. and i think, you know, if you kind of can put all the information together from all those groups it can be interest, but, again, you always have to think about what is the threat model here? there always seems to be this go-to scenario for humans where we say everything is going to collapse, you know? we're not going to have the internet anymore, we're not going to have any power, the cities will be -- maybe they'll all be nuked out of existence. so we'll have to start with, like, men leading the charge into the agricultural economy

again. [laughter] and i don't mean to pick on these poor guys, they're just, they're trying their best. and they did amass like an incredible amount of really helpful information. but the fact is that there's not a lot of disasters that are like that where you just see a complete, you know, loss of every kind of new technology. so i think 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 today on the planet there's people whoever access to high technology that many, many people in the world don't have access to. and so the apocalypse may look a lot like the world does now, just slightly worse. and so we have to be prepared for that. [laughter] just a little bit worse. and very slow. and that's part of why we really do need to be trying to take action now to kind of slowly, gently steer us away from the

slightly worse but comely dated world. -- complicated world. if you find other stuff, e-mail me and let me know, other resources. >> i've had two kinds of thoughts. one is that if you focus a little bit more on food supply maybe as, you know, part of the organizing effect of, you know, losing control of the whole situation -- >> yeah. >> so i was surprised that you hadn't spent a little more time talking about that. second thing is, are there plants or plant communities that are really good examples that these living architecture are looking at? >> plant communities like types of plants you would use? >> yeah. or let's say mushrooms as an example not to use, but to look at how they survive -- >> yes. >> -- in all kinds offed and strange circumstances, or ath the sea.

>> yeah, yeah. these are both super, great questions. in response to your question about the food supply, that is actually a big concern in my book, and i didn't -- i talked about food webs a little bit today, but i didn't go into all the concerns about food webs. but i do have a section where i talk about famine. and famine is actually a very, very likely result of climate change. and that's actually, all of these examples i've talked about or a few examples i've talked about of how mass extinctions unfold slowly and take about a million years, part of what's happening there is species are experiencing famines. because the more that species die out, the more that the food supply dwindles. and so that's really what you're talking about when you're talking about, you know, death by climate change. i mean, some of it is also death by habitat change. but habitat change isn't just about like, wow, it's way too hot for me to live, it's also way to hot for the grass that i eat.

and that's why i think that food webs are a really interesting way to think about mass extinction, think about food webs unraffling. -- unraveling. because that's where the death happens is in the food web instruction. and as for the plant question, i have a favorite plant. all of you, it's actually not a plant, it's a bacteria. but it's kind of like a plant. blue-green algae. if anyone was here for the lecture before me, this bacteria the greatest survivor on earth. it's survived every single mass extinction. and it is blue-green algae, it looks just like sludge. and the ancestors of blue-green algae lived billions of years ago and made it through incredibly harsh conditions, and here's how they did it: they did it by evolving photosynthesis. in other words, power.

so what made them so adaptable and so able to live anywhere, including on snowball earth, including on that early triassic earth was because it had this ability to get energy and a food supply anywhere it went because it relied on the sun. and so i actually have a pretty extensive section of the book where i talk about not just the awesomeness of this 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, hey, it worked for cyano bacteria. it works for plants. it may actually be the source of color to blasts in plants, to create plant cells, so it's a really, really good survival mechanism. so it's great that we finally invented it. and i think, you know, we're

just in the intan si of imitating the bacteria. so basically one day, you too, might be like bacteria. [laughter] you know when people say, you know, humans are like bacteria upon the earth. and it's like, yeah, that's great. we should be like bacteria on the earth. sorry. >> so i'm going to ask a question that maybe diverges a little bit from some of the things you've talked about. i think most of the people in the room probably have a, share this memory that i do of growing -- of living in the '70s and the '80s, and we worried about nuclear winter. do you preclude an event like that? i mean, the weapons that exist, that existed then still exist now, and, you know, that potential still is there for some sort of a devastating nuclear exchange among nations. and it seems to actually be getting worse, proliferating,

well, with concern and given the politics of the world. so my question has to do with do you preclude some sort of a set of political disasters that would, you know, create that nuclear winter and -- >> yeah. >> and would that event be sufficient to pretty well kill off most people? or would the few that survive actually be able to build something beyond that, do you think, or would we be going back to the -- >> tw i think my answer in order is no and yes. i do talk a lot about radiation disasters. and the interesting thing about nuclear winter is that it's happened before on the planet. in fact, when that asteroid hit 65 million years ago that eventually led to the slow dying off of the dinosaurs, it caused a nuclear winter. >> right. >> and, in fact, that's one of the models that people used when they were coming up with the idea of nuclear winter in the '80s with this previous kind of horrific set ofloons

that had happened. so we know for sure that in the event of nuclear winter many, many species did survive. we know it's a survivable event. there's also some evidence to suggest that the first be mass extinction that the planet went through about 450 million years ago may have been caused by massive radiation bombardment. of course, it's so long ago and very hard to say, but it seems as if some of the evidence points to the idea that there may have been a nearby supernova, fried off part of the atmosphere, it caused a very rapid ice age. so we know that life survived that as well. so that's a huge radiation disaster. we also know that one good way to survive radiation disasters is have about two feet of rock between you and the incredibly energetic parking lot cls that are bouncing around -- particles that are bouncing around. i do have a chapter on

underground cities, because we may end up living in underground cities. nuclear war is one kind of threat, and there's other kinds of radiation disasters that can happen as well. so radiation disaster is a very imminent threat. maybe not imminent, but it's one of. >> it's a scenario. >> it's definitely a scenario, it may have caused mass extinctions in the past, so, yeah. >> thank you. >> hello. >> hi. >> earlier in your talk you mentioned there will be pockets of people with access to technology as there are now and i'd say the apocalypse is already here just not recently distributed. once you get past how dirty everything is in africa and there's no electricity, it's really fascinating to see how people can do so much with so few resources. in your research, did you look into how people in the developing world are already dealing with an apocalypse in their own way? >>s. i don't talk about it directly

like that, but that is -- i mean, what you're saying is absolutely true, and that's part of why it's important to remember that the apocalypse is complicated and that people are capable of living in different kinds of conditions and be be incredibly resourceful in those conditions. and i think that as we look to the future it's really 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 kind of leapfrogging over some of the mistakes we made with industrialization could really be a kind of a pathway toward a future where we don't have to use fossil fuels, for example, or we don't have to have a kind of massive cable infrastructure to have internet communications. maybe we can start fresh in some way. so i think the answer, the simple answer is yes. i think that that is a really

good model. and 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 and which i do talk a lot about it in the book, and one of the things we've learned about famine is that it is a human-created disaster. and that's something that we've learned from looking at how famines develop in different parts of the world. and, sure, there's natural causes for famine, especially in africa wher irrigation is usually from rainfall. but the fact is all those famines can be prevented with international cooperation and if people actually have access to resources and those resources aren't overpriced. and so that becomes a really good model for us in thinking about the future and how we are going to handle things like food shortages, you know, what works and what doesn't work. so far mostly things haven't worked, but that's how experiments go. our first efforts may not work, but we need to be thinking about

those regions of the world as places where we're going to have to deal with famine first, and how are we going to do it effectively. one more? okay, this is the last question. >> i'm trusting i won't embarrass myself too much because i haven't fully formed this question. but i'm taking the information you gave about the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and how there was, you know, certainly terrible death -- >> big explosion. >> yeah. but that that took some time in the atmosphere x -- and with the super volcano know at yellowstone which i understand from my reading in terms of geological time that should be happening pretty soon, would that be a thing where, you know, maybe north would be wiped out, but the population of the rest of the world would have some time to adapt? the that? or should we have built those

underground cities that we can go to? [laughter] do you have any thoughts or comments about that? >> yes. i do, actually. >> we don't have any control whether or not -- >> we don't. and, of course, you should always be working on building underground cities. [laughter] so, you know, please start soon. but -- and, actually, an underground city would be great if there were a supervolcano like at the end of the perm on. so the volcano in yellowstone is not the same kind. they are both called supervolcanos because you would eject a lot of material, but the one that ended the permeon lasted for at least a thousand years, and it opened these big vents that were just pouring lava and all this goo into the atmosphere. so that's another scientific term, goo. pouring a lot of ash into the atmosphere. to the volcano at yellowstone would be enormous. so what would happen is it would

collapse, there would be vents that would open up and spew lava. but it would probably only last for about a week. and the main devastation from it would be, again, ash entering the environment, getting up into the stratosphere. and, you know, there wouldn't really be a lot of, like, burning lava death bond the boundaries of the park, it turns out. ..

a round the sort of neighboring four or five states around the volcano, so you would get a lot of-which is very polluting. some rivers would be polluted. there would be difficulty to crops. there is a main outcome that would be crops would just be rack for the year. it would be the midwest. a lot of crops that are very valuable for food and for export would be ruined. of course there would be a very expensive cleanup. the problem we're not be a lot of death. it would really be in for structure destruction. and, again, crop destruction. so -- and, it is possible that global temperatures might go down a tiny bit. there was a similar kind of corruption in 1812 in indonesia where you had a super volcano that went off and it did lower global temperatures just a tiny bit so that it would not be like climate change situation. as a lowering of the temperature might last for two or three or four years.

so it is kind of a baby super volcano. and that don't mean to downplay it. it would not wreck of america. you would not have a lawyer in seattle which is kind of house i imagined it would be. no. sorry. it would not happen the way. that volcano could erupt any time. not likely that it will, but it could. for sure. i would like to end with that have been taught. [laughter] thank you again for coming out. [applause] >> for more of the nation, visit the authors website. >> well, charlie parker was one of the finest american musicians, and he was what is often called a genius or the

word genius is used. that is just advertising. but charlie parker actually was a genius. he not only was a remote to five remarkable technician of his estimate, but he embodied what the power jess billy is which is the ability to be a will to play and to year. much of his real-life was learning how. so he had to hear the entire context in which your she is temporizing and react to this sound that is going on around them. charlie parker became one of the most masterful of that ability.

is not magic, but people don't usually know that is when a person has to do. the majority of it. now, there are some people who compose pieces which every note that you hear is been previously written. the players are actually performing far written composition. now, that does not mean. every great actually does that. they don't make anything. they just color it with different nuances. the artistry is like that of an actor. if you play hamlet you are going to say to be or not to be. way s

an artistic. so if you say it -- what a jazz musician does is a jazz musician is like an actor who is acting to other actors and makes up his own part. his own part has to go with what the other people saying. so he has to immediately make sense. so louis armstrong, human beings can actually respond that quickly to each other and create order. creating chaos is not a problem. we can get a bill billeted. the when you get a baseline the suns did the mob him apart that

sounds good, warm part that sounds good, that's pretty remarkable beebread people actually learn had to do that. charlie parker, he had to learn how to do it, like anybody else. >> were received from and when did he live. >> 1920 to 1955. >> thirty-five years. >> no, he didn't live for 35 years. thirty-four. he died six months or so before his birthday. so he was -- he grew up in kansas city. it was actually tortillas century extension of the wild west because he grew up in a totally corrupt town in which the mayor was no good unless corruption is considered an

achievements. if that is what people think the mayor of kansas city, he was a very successful mayor. and the mafia was there. one of the gases that ordered the book -- people have locks on their doors of their places because they can't open all the time. then never closed. whatever you want to do to get. if you wanna sex you could it is. if you wanted to gamble, you could get it. if you wanted liquor you could get it. every wanted, and legal or illegal, it was always available so charlie parker grew up in the world. he -- part of what he learned when he was a kid was that whatever happens in life, there

is always the opposite version of it. so when he was a kid he was -- he had so many things come to him so fast that he learned that he could live one way during the day and another after dark. and so one of his jobs when he was 15 years old was to put on such shows on saturday night. so he's sitting around the bandstand letting his woman dance around, said on tables. it would set and never be money and would stand up and the money will be gone. women would have sex with other women, the man. he was sitting there with the saxophone playing well this was going on. so he didn't grow up in a world

that was innocent. he may have been innocent when he entered it, but he definitely was not one left. and so it is turned the startling to realize in our era that there were people who lived even more extreme than modern american people do. there is no place the surly for uni to immediately go and csx show. that is very doubtful. if you live in kansas city in 1935 you could have done it. so that is part of what the story is. and all that kamal of these guys created this very beautiful music. and that is part of the victory. there is still something in human beings the respond that

has nothing to do with a context it may be completely corrupt. that is one of the big influences. working outside and kansas city. they would tell each other, i like him. i like that silky saxophone that the place. to me we are talking about people who live disreputable live, but there was something beautiful that they could your, you know, they might have lived on the garbage most of the time. some kind of way there was something that allow them to us

to respond to something beautiful. >> segregated kansas city at the time. charlie parker grew up. >> well, the segregated -- >> was that an issue? >> it was not really an issue after dark. because the musicians would play . you could actually live in an emigre world when it was early in the morning hours. that was true in louisiana and new orleans. that was true and a lot of places. in fact, the local governments to often was very resistant

because jazz actually encouraged people to be with each other as individuals. it did not say your jewish. that was of secondary stuff in the jazz world. if you could play, you could play. he could not play, you could not play. if you could not play, if you could then it was not a liability. it was of secondary. >> stanley crouch. his new book is "kansas city lightning: the rise and times of charlie parker". also the author of the all-american skin game and a columnist at the new york daily news. what the right about the daily news? >> well, american life. as i understand it. this country is in a counselee remarkable human occasion

because no matter how bad things get in america there is always something good that happens. there is a good response. it may not be the one immediately. you know. segregation, racism, anti-semitism, all of these things come at a certain time but continue to grow. basically there go roms. now, the problem is never completely overwhelmed, but even a segregationist today. that is how much ground they lost over the years. and so that is one of the

things. how americans continue early bind out a way to judge each other on a human basis. that does not mean you're going to like anybody. does not mean you're not going to like anybody. it seems that you're better off to do with the human being as a human being than to try to pretend that the person is a variation, you know. because i was arguing with my daughter wants. she said, well, dad, you're not giving me an a opportunity. you don't understand me. i said, well, look. i have not mistaken you for a mammal. i know you are. i don't think you really know.

well, if you go, maybe you are different. people have always felt the same way, you know, because they have always known what the u.n. is. will we learn all is. everything you and i are excited by or like, there is some version of it before we were born. and when we encounter it then we -- we -- we feel like it has been spoken for previously. i think that is the major hope. and the country remains the symbol for everybody in the world of the best. >> luggage charliear