AS215: The End, with Phil Torres

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. This is episode 215. All right, before we get to it, I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who filled out the survey that I referenced about a week ago, I think. Got plenty of response. I promised I would never bring it up again. Once we got to the requisite number and we're there, thank you. If you want to continue doing it, that's fine, because it is a place where you can leave feedback. Feedback, so if you ever want to go to the website atheisticallyspeaking.com and click on it, you can. You can leave feedback about the show, and I will read it. So if you want to, you can, but we've hit the number, so I promise I will not bug you about it again. However, I was thinking, with how well this worked, I wonder if we could do the same thing with, I just noticed the other day that the iTunes reviews for this show are not that, there's not that many of them.

0:01:24 Thomas: For how many listeners I have, there're actually not a lot. So I was thinking, you know, hear me out on this. I hate to bug you about this stuff, and I promise I won't spend too much time on it. But let me just lay it out real quick. Here's what I have in mind. If I can get to 500 iTunes reviews. Now, I think I'm using just the US iTunes charts, I guess. I don't know if I can access. Maybe there's other reviews on other countries. But I think for the US one, I'm at something like 130 or 180, something like that. I forget. If we can getto 500, which we totally can if people just do it, we could get there like tomorrow easily. But if we can do that, I was thinking in exchange for that, I could record like an extra bonus episode for everybody with like whatever guest you want or whatever topic, whatever it is.

0:02:10 Thomas: Like you guys could even write in your review for iTunes, which hopefully you're giving me, you know, five stars if you feel it. Give whatever you feel the show deserves. But hopefully I've earned a good rating from you. But be honest, I don't mind. But you could also write in like, hey, you know, whatever your review is. And then I'd want for the bonus show, I'd want, I don't know, Cogdiss. I'd want whoever, whatever it is, whatever or guest topic you'd want. And if we get to 500, I'll release like a bonus, like long show, could even be a double show, free of charge, no Patreon dollars, no whatever. It'll be totally extra, extra thing. And we could get to that like right away. So please go to iTunes. Apologies to anyone who doesn't use it, but enough people do. I think most people listen to my show on some form of iTunes.

0:02:58 Thomas: Leave a review, leave a star rating, five stars preferred, of course, but hey, you're going to be you. You're going to be honest. I know how it works. I would have it no other way. So I just thought I'd try this and sorry to bug you. And I'll keep a tally. So in the future episodes, I'll just reference like, hey, we're at this many reviews. Good job. Thanks. Whatever. But I won't spend too much time on it because I don't want to take too much time away from the show. So that's my idea. I'd love to reward you guys with some totally bonus content for everyone on whatever topic they want. So that should be pretty cool. So please go to iTunes, leave a review for the show, Atheistically Speaking, and there you go. Okay, now to get to this week, this today's guest, this interview was awesome. Okay, so I had someone I didn't know, Phil Torres is his name, didn't know him at all really, and I was gonna have him on the show to talk about his new book, and it was it was amazing.

0:03:51 Thomas: It was a really fun interview. I am very excited and it turned into a double interview. I wasn't even sure how long I was going to do. I kind of like to leave it open so that if things remain interesting, I can go as long as we want. If things aren't very interesting. And I feel like, okay, maybe this is not worth two episodes for my listeners. You know, I'm not going to try to squeeze stuff out longer. I would cut it off. So that's why I usually leave my interviews open-ended. This one, we had no problem going two episodes worth. We went plenty. It was really interesting. Phil Torres was a really cool guy, is rather, but in this interview, you'll find he had a ton to say, fascinating topics. Episode one, so today's episode, Monday's episode is more about the book and the end of the world and all that.

0:04:39 Thomas: Now Thursday's episode which again, patrons will get early. So if you're on patreon.com/atheist and you've pledged as little as a dollar an episode, you will get part two immediately whenever you want it. I'm going to publish them at the same time. Everyone else has to wait till Thursday but that's fair enough. If you can't afford it, no big deal. I get it. Part two, we talk about foreign policy, and I've been reading a lot about the Middle East. I had a lot of questions for him on that. He studied it a lot in his process of writing this book, which is called The End, because it's possible maybe the end of the world is going to come from the Middle Eastern. But it was really fun. And episode two, Thursday's episode, really branched out to some other stuff, not just strictly the book, but lots of foreign policy talk and just current events.

0:05:26 Thomas: It was fun. I enjoyed this a lot. This interview went by like nothing for me. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and present you with part one with Phil Torres.

0:05:48 Thomas: We're joined right now by Phil Torres. How you doing, Phil?

0:05:51 Phil: Good. Thanks for having me on.

0:05:53 Thomas: Now, if you Google Phil, you will see a beautiful, beautiful man staring back at you, and I'm told this is not you, unfortunately. Now, Phil may be a very beautiful man as well, but the main Phil Torres, if Google, because I know people are going to Google you, they'll find someone who's very easy on the eyes, who I guess is not you. Is that right?

0:06:09 Phil: Yes. That is correct. Yes, there's my doppelganger, at least nominally speaking. I think he's two or three years younger than me and has a thriving career with National Geographic, I think it is, or maybe it's Al Jazeera.

0:06:33 Thomas: Al Jazeera, yeah. Because I started doing research on you and I just, you know, Googled Phil Torres and was like, yeah, this seems about right. And then I wasn't seeing anything about the book. I was like is this the right guy? So yeah, Al Jazera. Isn't that always how it is? You know, he's got to be a little younger, got to just barely... I'm sure there's a bunch of Thomas Smith out there I could use to model that after.

0:06:34 Phil: Yeah. Yes.

0:06:56 Phil: It's quite possible. Sure.

0:06:58 Thomas: But, so, your background, however, is not one of an Al Jazeera journalist. What's your background? Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

0:07:07 Phil: So I studied philosophy as an undergrad, and I have a master's in neuroscience from Brandeis. I spent a year as a philosophy grad student at Harvard. And so that brings us up to probably 2009, at which point I sort of became an independent scholar. I always had sort of autodidactic tendencies, but at that point, I became an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and did a lot of independent research. Mostly, it was sort of academic, and I published in a number of academic journals. But recently, the last couple of years, I've turned more towards freelance writing for Salon. I have some articles coming out in Skeptic and The Humanist and so on.

0:07:55 Phil: And then, of course, the book which comes out this Tuesday, that is February the 16th. So that's my background.

0:08:07 Thomas: Right, well, of course, we're going to get to the book. So, the book is called The End, and it also has a subtitle of What Science and Religion Can Tell Us About. Do I have that right? What Science and Religion Tell Us about the Apocalypse. So I get the science part. Now, what in the world, sorry to be the stereotypical atheist, but what exactly is religion going to tell us about the end of the world?

0:08:09 Phil: Okay. Exactly. Yes. Well, There's a lot to say about that. So if you look back historically, at least some scholars have argued that perhaps the first real developed sophisticated eschatological system, where eschatology just has to do with the study of the end of the world or claims made made about the end of the world, eschaton means the end. So all the way back to uh Zoroaster, who was probably two millennia before Christ, um he was an ancient Persian, the ancient Persians sort of developed the this these first sort of uh again sort of detailed frameworks of how uh time is linear and at some future point there's going to be a catastrophic event which which ushers in a paradise, ultimately.

0:09:23 Phil: In fact, the details of the Zoroastrian eschatology are incredibly, strikingly similar in many, many respects to the eschatology of Christianity and the eschatology of Islam. So what's sort of interesting is if you actually study the history of what I would call millenarian thought, millenarism meaning just this idea that at some point in the future There will be a catastrophic rupture in the fabric of history, which will have some kind of supernatural aspect to it. And it again will introduce, you know, heaven on earth. So humans, I mean, the history of this is incredibly rich. It spans, you Know, not only time, but space.

0:10:08 Phil: I mean people all around the world have anticipated an end to, you know, this weary world full of sin and suffering. What's sort of fascinating is you get up to 1945 and for the first time you have atheists talking about the end of the world in a vivid and really evidence-based manner. 1945, of course, is the end the World War II and the beginning of the atomic age. It's when we dropped two bombs on the Japanese archipelago.

0:10:43 Phil: So since then, there's also been this proliferation not only of additional big picture sort of secular apocalyptic scenarios, which a lot of scientists call existential risks. So not only was there the possibility of nuclear war and a nuclear winter resulting from that, but also climate change, biodiversity loss, we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event. And then there is a swarm of additional risks which sort of loom hauntingly on the threat horizon before us, which have to do with biotechnology, like genetic engineering, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, even the possibility of a physics disaster.

0:11:25 Thomas: A black hole in one of the super colliders or something?

0:11:28 Phil: It's, yes, it's exactly, it is very, I should emphasize that those are without a doubt improbable. You know, there's a whole, there's like a strange lit scenario, there's black hole, there's vacuum decay scenario, but all of those are highly unlikely. But nonetheless, it could, you know, we're doing these experiments precisely because we don't really know what's going to happen. So it could very well be that, you know, if science was just 10 years more advanced, we would have a theory that indicates these experiments are dangerous or something of that sort. So it's just something to, I don't think it's unreasonable to include it on the list.

0:12:11 Thomas: Right, right.

0:12:12 Phil: So anyway, so ultimately, the reason that religion matters here is that you have some of these fields of emerging science like synthetic biology and nanotechnology are not only becoming exponentially more powerful, but they're also becoming significantly more accessible to small groups, even at the extreme individuals. So whereas to build a nuclear bomb, you still need a big team with some kind of division of cognitive labor to design it. And then you need the tools to manufacture it. You're dealing with uranium and plutonium, which are rare and highly dangerous materials. You can basically set up a lab in your garage for a couple hundred dollars and perform experiments that only the most experienced biologists 15 years ago could do.

0:13:08 Phil: And once you have a microbe, they're self-replicating, so the supply is abundant rather than rare, like uranium and plutonium. So ultimately, you have this situation where smaller groups and even individuals are being empowered like never before. And at the same time, you Have this throughout the world, including the contemporary world, you have individuals who genuinely believe that the world must be destroyed in order to be saved. It's the apocalyptic mindset. And so my sort of argument is borrowing from existential risk studies and saying, look, we really are in a kind of qualitatively unique epoch in human history where self-annihilation is becoming more and more of a possibility.

0:13:58 Phil: And on the other hand, if you look at religion, you have this long history that extends all the way up to the present of essentially delusional individuals who have been motivated by apocalyptic, activist apocalyptic beliefs. And these two trends, when they come together, could genuinely be apocalyptic in a secular sense. They could bring about an existential catastrophe of some sort.

0:14:26 Thomas: Right, so it's not as though you're going to these scriptures to tell you anything about the End of the World. It's more the fact that people believe certain things could greatly accelerate our demise.

0:14:39 Phil: Precisely, yes. And I think in order to effectively mitigate the risks opposed by apocalyptic groups, you really have to understand what they believe. And that's why I go into, you know, I discuss the narrative of dispensationalism, which is a version of a pre-millennial Christian eschatology, and then also what the set of beliefs that are motivating the Islamic State, which are quite conspicuous, modern day example of an active apocalyptic group that really does want to bring about the end of the world. Sure.

0:14:39 Thomas: Yeah, well, let's go back a bit because there's a lot there for sure, and I want to get back to some of it. But when you started talking about religion, it struck me that it almost seems mandatory, and it sounds like you've done a fair bit of study into this, so maybe you can tell me. It almost seems like it's a necessary component of any religion to have a end of the world scenario. You know, it's, I can't think of, maybe, I'm sure there are examples, but I can't think of a whole lot that don't, you know?

0:15:44 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, so there are cyclical eschatologies. You find like Hinduism and Buddhism, but interestingly enough, I mean, those still have, there's still a, if you will, a sort of millenarian or apocalyptic component, because the cycle is one of growth and flourishing and then decay, deterioration until things get catastrophically bad.

0:15:54 Thomas: Oh, right, right. Right. Hmm. But yeah, it's interesting to think of that from, you know, like, why that would be. I don't know if you have any theory on it, but it seems off the top of my head, like I don't know, they all need something to sell or They all, you know, they need to manufacture some sort of conflict to motivate people and to, you know, I don't know if you've done any study into that, but what do you think?

0:16:15 Phil: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that's wrong at all. Some theologians have talked about eschatology as providing the ultimate theodicy. It's the ultimate answer to, if you have a God who's omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why is it that you have have a world that is so saturated in evil, natural and human cause. Eschatology provides, I would say, an unsatisfying, but ultimately it provides an answer to this conundrum, which is that in the end, the cosmic justice will be exacted on the world and Hitler will go to hell and finally, aborted babies will go into heaven and everything will be all right in the the end. So I take it that eschatology is absolutely central to most religions, especially those that conceptualize history linearly. Without this view that in the future, everything's going to be okay, everything is going to be set right, and we'll join God for eternity in everlasting bliss. What does religion ultimately offer if not that? So I completely agree

0:17:00 Thomas: Right, right.

0:17:19 Thomas: Finally.

0:17:54 Thomas: Right,

0:17:55 Phil: With you. It's It's really an integral component of the entire world view.

0:18:02 Thomas: And I suppose if your religion, as sort of a survival of the fittest of these ideas, I mean, if your religion doesn't have a picture of the end of the world and another one does, it would sort of seem to dwarf yours in some sense, you know, like, oh, this one, yeah.

0:18:16 Phil: I would agree with that, yeah. There's

0:18:18 Thomas: So, yeah,

0:18:19 Phil: Something very, very appealing about it's going to be okay in the end.

0:18:23 Thomas: Yeah, you know, it's also interesting, I was thinking when you talked about 1945 and secular versions of the end of the world starting to come as a result of that, it also, I don't know if it's any connection or correlation or just a coincidence, but it does seem like at the same time, Christians in this country, and let me know if you have any numbers on this, if this is something you studied in writing your book, but it seems like their picture of the end of the world has sort of gotten further away.

You know, like for most moderate Christians, I think it used to be a bigger part of their belief system to say, oh, Jesus is coming back, Jesus is coming back. I mean, in the Bible, in The New Testament, Jesus is coming back now. You in a few minutes. Like, look at your watches, everybody, because this is, he'll be back. And then it's interesting that I think maybe it's just a product of how good your country is doing or how, you know, how good conditions are for people. But for one reason or another, I don't think most Christians, like the Christians in my family, you know, they're not holding their breath for the end of the world. What do you think about that?

0:18:47 Phil: Sure. Yeah. So there was a Pew poll from 2010 that found that 42% of Americans, Not Christians, but Americans believe that Jesus would either definitely or probably return by 2050. So it's quite a size. I mean, you mentioned your family, and I have some familial connections to individuals who really do actively anticipate an imminent end to the world. I also write a little bit in the book. And so point being is that I don't think my family actually is in aberration.

0:19:46 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah. Oh, okay.

0:20:19 Thomas: Atypical? Yeah, yeah.

0:20:20 Phil: Yeah. And so I write in the book also about the connections that various, I mean, really a significant number of politicians, almost all on the political right, these connections that they have with with Pastor John Hagee, amongst many others that I mentioned. But John Haguee in particular, he runs a big church in Texas, and he's also the founder of Christians United for Israel, or CAFI.

0:20:51 Phil: And he has written quite a bit. I mean, he's written several books on this, like Jerusalem Countdown, about how the end, the rapture is imminent, followed by the seven-year period, the tribulation period, which involves the European Union making a peace agreement with Israel, and this eschatological connection between future events involving Israel is a major part of of why he is a pro-Israel supporter. In fact, his Christians United for Israel, I think, is arguably the biggest religious lobby in the country, yes, without a doubt. So part of that is that there's a verse in Genesis that says those who bless Israel will be blessed by God. So that's part of the motivation, but there's also, without doubt, this eschatological component, component, which is that if there is not a Jewish state in Palestine, the tribulation can't commence. And if the tribulation can't commence, then eternal peace will forever elude us.

So we really need, this is part of the reason, frankly, in my judgment at least, part of the reason there has been so much talk about a preemptive invasion against Iran, why there's... there's been so much disapproval of the recent Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration forged in which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which runs the Doomsday Clock, recently praised as one of the most notable reasons for optimism today.

0:21:35 Thomas: Yeah, there is a weird connection between Republicans and Israel, huh? It's kind of a, it makes sense. Yeah it's sort of part of their eschatological picture as it were, it seems like.

0:22:39 Phil: And yet you have all these Republicans on the other side opposing it. So ultimately, I think you have a pretty sizable number of people in the U.S. who really do believe this sort of thing, and a lot of politicians who have fostered a quite close connection with people like John Hagee. And listeners can go online to YouTube and search presidential forum 2015 and find Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee. Ted Cruz has a very close relationship. And I strongly suspect that Ted Cruz probably genuinely believes in the dispensaries.

0:23:30 Thomas: Wow. See, okay, I was just gonna ask you, and it sounds like I wasn't sure if this would be something you'd want to answer, but now I think maybe it would be. Because I see two different pictures when we talk about these Republican candidates. There's a whole lot of pandering to religion. And one side of me, maybe a cynical side, because I'm incredibly cynical with all politicians, is, well, who knows what they really believe.

0:23:37 Phil: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-mm.

0:23:58 Thomas: What's his name? Rubio is going going to say, oh, well, there's only one savior. It's Jesus Christ. I'm not the savior. Go out of his way to say all that. And Cruz is going to... Trump's efforts to try to look like he knows anything about Christianity have been hilarious. But I don't see it so much with Trump because I think he's really... Or rather, you're right. I do see more pandering with Trump. So I'm not worried about him. But how much should we worry? Well, for different reasons. But But how much should we worry about the just in terms of the religious beliefs? I mean, I don't think Trump is any sort of religious, you know, like zealot in disguise or anything like that. Whereas I don't know with some of these other Republicans, like, like you said, I don't know, you know, you suspect Ted Cruz believes some of this stuff. I would have no idea. Now, what do you think? Do you think they really believe this? Or do you THINK they're pandering or, you Know, different levels of each? What do you Think?

0:24:06 Phil: Trump has said a similar thing, right? Yes, sure, sure.

0:24:56 Phil: It's a great question. Without a doubt, it's hard to tell. For example, the Islamic State, in their official propaganda, they have a magazine called Dabiq. They repeatedly talk about this Armageddon-like battle that's going to take place in the northern Syrian town of Dabiqu. Do they really believe it? It's an open question, And yet, if you read the scholarship on it, there is genuinely good reason for thinking that some of the higher-ups like al-Baghdadi and his people who led before, like al Masri and al-Zarqawi, all of them seem to really genuinely believe that this is the case. So in the US case situation, there's the similar sort of problematic of deciphering what these individuals publicly aver. Is it sincere?

0:25:11 Thomas: Mm hmm.

0:25:57 Phil: And I think if you dig deep, you'll find that Ted Cruz, he's visited John Hagee's church on a number of occasions. If you listen to his rhetoric, you know, when he's not sort of in the political context, I feel like there's sufficient hints to reasonably infer that he probably does hold some of these beliefs quite sincerely. But you're right. It's hard to know exactly.

0:26:32 Phil: I mean, I should perhaps add that George Bush was told by a Palestinian delegation in, I think, 2003 that God told him to invade Iraq. Jacques Chirac, the former president of France, also recounted a similar conversation he had where Bush mentioned Gog and Magog, two end times figures that appear in the dispensationalist narrative.

0:27:03 Thomas: Well, now that's scary. I mean, that is really scary to think about.

0:27:05 Phil: Yeah. I mean, I also would emphasize it's just not an implausible statement to say that when you have certain beliefs, they do influence your behavior. The question is, one, do these individuals actually hold these beliefs? And then two, what is the extent to which the beliefs actively influence behavior? Behavior. Ronald Reagan came into office a really fervent dispensationalist, and there are quotes of him saying, these are the end times, and nuclear weapons make possible these prophetic claims that you find in, I'm forgetting the Old Testament book off the top of my head, but they've tried to make a connection between the Old Testament prophecies and what's possible with the weapons.

0:27:15 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:27:51 Thomas: Revelation? Oh, the Old Testament. And,

0:28:03 Phil: Did it influence his behavior? He seemed, later on, in his second term, to lose those beliefs a little bit and become more pragmatic and more grounded in reality. But I think a lot of people would also say that it definitely colored his worldview, and it probably did influence his behaviors.

0:28:22 Thomas: That's just the thing, is that we can't get inside these politicians' heads, and we can always tell two stories that have the same outward signs but that are vastly different, have vastly different implications. And we can'T really know the answer. I mean if I think that Ted Cruz is 100% pandering and you think he really believes it, we can't, there's not really a whole lot we can do to resolve that. I mean, maybe we look at quotes. Yeah, there is a certain amount of evidence, of course, but yeah, it's difficult. And now, let me ask you this, because I hear a lot of atheists say constantly, look, why, there are a lot of, are they called apotheists? I don't know. I think that's the term, where it's, there's no, it doesn't matter. I don't believe in God, you believe in god, whatever.

0:28:35 Phil: Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah,

0:29:13 Thomas: And this has always been the precise reason why I think that doesn't really work as a methodology. You know, it's like, it sounds like from your book and just, I mean, a lot of this info is already accessible to everybody, really. I mean some of it, not I'm saying not to read your book, definitely read the book, everyone.

0:29:37 Thomas: But a lot of these things are pretty logical. I mean, we know nukes have been around, you know, a lot are just the more minor themes. So it strikes me that it's more important now than ever that we try to get everybody on the same page in terms of, look, is this world all there is? Or should we all try to die and go to another world after this? Maybe we should all get on the same page on that, you you know,

0:29:36 Phil: I completely agree. I think in a world that is cluttered with what you might call doomsday machines,

0:30:09 Thomas: Some

0:30:09 Phil: Referring to the mechanisms, the artifacts and products, and so on, that will result from biotechnology and synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and so on. In a world that's cluttered with these doomsday machines, it is more important than ever before, to have beliefs about reality that are properly hinged to facts and to the best available evidence. I think moving forward, this is, it can hardly be under-emphasized. The stakes are increasing, I mean virtually everybody who studies this, this isn't hyperbole, this isn't exaggeration, just about everybody who studies this genuinely believes that the stakes are higher today than in the past, and that they will probably, at least for the foreseeable future, meaning the next century or two, they will continue to get even higher.

0:31:06 Phil: In the past you could have an apocalyptic group that had ambitions to destroy the world world in order to catalyze various events leading up to the final judgment. And the means available to them was heavy rocks, even guns, exactly.

0:31:27 Thomas: Heavy, heavy rocks. They're going to shoot a few arrows. Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay.

0:31:34 Phil: The means were insufficient for achieving their Fanatical goal. So today, we already live in the atomic age in a world with enough nuclear weapons to start firestorms in multiple urban centers and induce a decade-long nuclear winter, which could result in crop failure and starvation, and genuinely, it could result in the extinction of humanity. So we already live in an age with nuclear weapons. In the future, there will be far more powerful ways to manipulate and rearrange the physical world than what we have presently. And so there's a certain soberness, a certain seriousness of our present era, a unique era. As I put it in the book, it's essentially that what I would argue is that the instrumental rationality of our means, the ability to achieve a goal, using technology that is, is far more advanced than the moral rationality.

0:31:35 Thomas: Yeah, to say the least.

0:32:36 Phil: Of our ends. We still have humans all around, you know, huge number around the world who believe in virgin births, who believe that, you Know, Muhammad was the last great prophet in a long lineage beginning with Adam. And almost 50% of those around the world, including in the Muslim world, believe that the end is right around the corner.

0:33:00 Thomas: It's incredible. It, it's incredible, it scary. Now, when I read your book, am I going to start digging a bunker in my backyard, or is, what's your, what's overall picture of, what am I gonna come away with?

0:33:01 Phil: Um, yeah, so, so let me be clear, this is not a prepper's book.

0:33:19 Thomas: Okay, I was hoping for like a how-to, you know, maybe some blueprints on where to, how to position my bunker, that sort of thing. No.

0:33:28 Phil: You won't find any of that. There are some suggestions, some strategies for potentially mitigating the risk of some kind of annihilation. Even just a global catastrophe is bad enough. Frankly, if you look at the experts, Sir Martin Rees at Cambridge, Nick Bostrom at Oxford, I mean, these guys estimate a genuinely worst case scenario being 25% to 50% before the end of this century.

0:34:02 Thomas: So we're fine. It's just our kids, basically, or our grandkids.

0:34:07 Phil: Yeah, so we may be fine, but if the probability of total annihilation is that high, the probability of a global catastrophe that we survive, but is nonetheless horrific and unprecedented precedented in history, is going to be even higher than that.

0:34:09 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, sure. Yeah, you know we haven't talked about, oh sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. We haven't talked too much about what kinds of natural disasters might happen. Yeah you did a bit of research into that, right? What kinds of ways that aren't motivated by insane religious people. It's a nice little change of pace here. What kind of just more soothing natural deaths could we look forward to?

0:34:24 Phil: So no, no, go ahead, that's fine, yes, absolutely, sure, sure. So since you mentioned that also, part of the danger of religion, it's not just in inflating the probability of an anthropogenic catastrophe involving advanced technologies. It's also in, you know, climate change, biodiversity loss, these are not phenomena that figure in the end times narratives of a lot of religions. They actually do to some extent, because a lot religions talk about, you know, sort of natural disasters, pestilence, and so on. But that'll only increase their faith-based beliefs about the future. So a great example of, in the meantime, they end up ignoring, they end up neglecting, you know, very serious slow motion catastrophes that are unfolding right before us. So there's a famous example of John Shimkus, who's a Republican congressman. He was at a hearing in D.C., and he, people also can find this on YouTube, and he talks about how he's not worried about global warming because global warming will entail sea level rise, and God promised Noah after the great damage.

0:34:51 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, true.

0:36:02 Phil: In Genesis, he promised that there will never be another flood to wipe out the earth. There are many more examples of this, people's religious beliefs influencing, pushing them to ignore our reality, our precariousness in the global ecosystem with respect to climate and so on. So those are two that are both, they're sort of environmental catastrophes that are anthropogenic in nature. There's also, there's super volcanoes, there are asteroids and comet impacts.

0:36:19 Thomas: Tell me about a super volcano. Is that just, I think I remember, is it just one that's so big that the ash clouds enough of the atmosphere that it causes huge problems, or what's involved with that? I mean, it's not like the whole earth will be covered in lava or anything.

0:36:54 Phil: So that's exactly correct. Yeah, the lava would be more of a local disaster. Disaster.

0:36:58 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, interesting.

0:36:59 Phil: The real issue is that very much like, I mentioned a nuclear winter before, which would result from firestorms, which are gale force winds, you know, conflagrations that would release huge amounts of soot into the atmosphere, go up into the stratosphere. And those, the soot would basically act as a, you you know, molecular mirror or, you know, just like an umbrella. So consequently, there would be this artificial cooling period. And a super volcano, it's the exact, essentially it's an exact same thing. So you'd have all of this sulfuric acid that would end up in the stratosphere and it would block out the sun, that would result in agricultural failures, you know, food supply disruptions, famine, starvation, malnutrition, so on.

0:37:49 Phil: As it happens, a supervolcano is roughly twice as likely as a species-destroying asteroid or comet.

0:38:00 Phil: It is quite interesting. It's really not on a lot of people's radar, but if you read, again, geologists who study this sort of thing, they take it fairly seriously. It's not nearly as probable as something like an engineered pandemic or a nuclear conflict of some sort, but it's definitely part of the cosmic risk background that we deal with. In fact, a lot of people are completely unaware that between 70,000 and 77,000 years ago, there was a super volcanic eruption that happened in Indonesia, and it resulted in, you know, several years of of uh unusually frigid conditions around the world, and the human population dwindled

0:38:51 Thomas: Oh, is that that event that I was going to say? I do know the story of the human population dwindling to a very low, what is it, like a couple thousand or something I think I heard one time.

0:39:00 Phil: It might it might even be lower than that. Maybe like 500 breeding pairs, um, it it's it's really quite extreme, not that the population was was that big back then anyways, um, but But nonetheless, I mean, it really pushed us right to the precipice of extinction.

0:39:03 Thomas: Wow, that's incredible.

0:39:17 Thomas: Wow. I didn't know. Unless I'm thinking of another occurrence of that, I don't think I am. I I didn't know that was due to a super volcano. That's really interesting.

0:39:25 Phil: Yeah, so there was a huge genetic bottleneck due to the... I think there is still some controversy about the exact etiology of this situation. But I think a lot of people would agree that it probably had to do with the Toba catastrophe. In fact, the geologists invented the word supervolcano to apply to this particular case.

0:39:37 Thomas: Oh, okay. Wow, that's really incredible. Well, they just wanted a cool name. Yeah, could have been mega volcano or yeah, ultra volcano.

0:40:00 Phil: And so we still have supervolcanos around in Yellowstone National Park. There's a supervolcano under that. And if I remember correctly, research just from the last year or so found that the magma chamber underneath is quite a bit larger than we had previously thought. So it hasn't gone off in a while, and that doesn't mean it's due, but it could happen.

0:40:02 Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah, that is the thing about geological time. It is like could be today, could be 100,000 years from now. Either way, you know, hard to say. But yeah, that was really interesting and now it seems not that it would be good, of of course. But do you think in your research, I'm just curious, humanity could probably survive a super volcano, right? It would just be mass devastation and stuff like that. We could probably find a way at this point with our technology and stuff. Don't you think we could at least carry on the species?

0:40:33 Phil: Yeah, yeah, well, so that is a really, really interesting question.

0:41:02 Phil: So when it comes to, just to contrast this with comets and asteroids, if we were to detect, If NASA were to detect a large, you know, kilometer diameter asteroid heading towards Earth, there are things that we could do. You know, we could potentially, I mean, you Know, movies have been made out of this, potentially send up a, you know, a rocket that would push it to the side or some kind of, you know, nuclear device that would obliterate it.

0:41:31 Phil: You know and there are various other suggestions as well. But like a lot of geologists have pointed out, even science fiction hasn't really come up with a good solution, a good way of defending against a supervolcano. Yeah, so there really aren't.

0:41:45 Thomas: Oh, really? Wow. I mean, is it really that it covers the whole earth? There's not a single spot. Let's say the one in Yellowstone. Is that what you said, said Yellowstone. Let's say that one goes off. Now, United States, not going to do too well, I'm sure. But is there some place in Fiji that I could go? You know, is there's got to be some place that'll be okay or not? Does it really just gets up into the atmosphere and then ruins the entire planet?

0:42:13 Phil: Yes, so it would disperse into the higher atmosphere globally. So without a doubt, it would have, I mean, the scope of a catastrophe of this sort is genuinely planetary. So yeah, there's really nowhere, you can't just fly somewhere else. And yes,

0:42:19 Thomas: Wow. Wow. But I mean, we did survive. Allegedly, we survived 77,000 years ago with no technology. So I mean there's gotta be, there's gonna be a decent chance that we can and figure something out.

0:42:47 Phil: Yeah, so I think there are two issues. One is, would the size perhaps be bigger? Maybe we got lucky and it was a huge super-eruption, but perhaps it was just small enough to enable us a couple hundred to survive.

0:42:50 Thomas: The size or something. Oh,

0:43:08 Phil: But also, the world population today is absolutely massive. Fifty percent crop failure would be the result of just billions.

0:43:17 Thomas: Yeah. No, it's not going to be fun. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's going to бытьerrible.

0:43:19 Phil: Yeah. So I think it depends on a multiplicity of different factors. But you're entirely right. I mean, there's, you know, who knows? I mean there are ways to potentially power through. Some people talk about bunkers. I mean, some serious, legitimate scientists. There's also the possibility of space colonization. You know, NASA has already talked about by the 2030s, we're going to have a colony on Mars. Elon Musk has, I believe the number he mentioned was 2025, he hopes to have, you know, to be sending some humans off to Mars.

0:43:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:44:01 Thomas: Well, Matt Damon's already there, so we should be. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

0:44:04 Phil: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So at least we have some people who are good. It. It's pretending they're other people to carry on. So

0:44:12 Thomas: This must have given you a whole lot of time of just sitting and imagining things, because I'm just sitting here thinking how interesting it would be. Super volcano goes off tomorrow. Let's say a lot of us survive. I mean, at least initially, it sounds like most of us will be alive for, I don't know how long it takes for the ash to cause serious problems. But how fascinating is it that just everything would stop? It's like, well, everything we're doing, our economy, all our news cycle, the Kardashians, we're not going to be keeping up with them anymore. Everything we're doing just will stop and we'll say, well, most of us are going to die pretty soon. Like how unreal

0:44:13 Phil: I think

0:44:57 Thomas: Is that? It's just, it's incredible to think about.

0:45:01 Phil: There's also an interesting point to add to that. One is that the absolute worst case scenarios, like existential risks, they are by definition events that can only happen once in a species lifetime. So unlike every other kind of risk out there, there's no possibility of learning from them. One could happen happen tomorrow, but we couldn't sit here and talk about one having happened yesterday.

0:45:26 Phil: An event of that sort is incompatible with observers like us. So ultimately, the point is that the way a risk is often defined is the probability of it occurring multiplied by its consequences. So some people might listen to this conversation and think, well, a super volcano, it's like It's like you have a chance once every 100,000 years or something that's going to happen if I remember the probability correct. I might be slightly off on that. So what does it matter? Even if the probability is low, if the consequences are immense and catastrophic and global and so on, then you can still have a really significant risk. Risk. So even if one of the factors is low, if the other one is compensatorily high, then you can still have a significant risk that's worth worrying about. Existential risks are, you know, it's the worst sort of most extreme consequences possible. So even it's unlikely that it's going to happen, it's still very much worth thinking about.

0:46:07 Thomas: Right, right.

0:46:36 Phil: So I mean, the exact same thing would apply to catastrophic risks, which are low probability. Looking back over recorded history, we've never had a supervolcanic eruption, we never had an asteroid impact, nor have we ever had a global engineered pandemic.

0:46:54 Phil: We might think, well, we're perhaps safe, we can not just extrapolate to the future. It's fine, but or rather, why not, why be so concerned with these risks of this sort? It's because the consequences would be so massive, and I also would absolutely emphasize once again that the natural risks are the least probable, virtually every scholar who studies this sort of thing concurs about that. It's much more likely that we're entering this new age of emerging technologies, which are dual use, highly powerful, and uh, and quite accessible. So there's ample reason for uh, for, you know, caution moving forward and uh, in careful thought about, you know, proper policies moving forward.

0:47:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

0:48:14 Thomas: All right. That's it for part one, with Phil Torres. As a reminder, part two is available instantaneously, right now, as we speak, at patreon.com/atheist, as a thank you to all my very, very kind patrons who supported the show. Everyone else, no hard feelings, but you get it on Thursday. So with that said, I another quick reminder to please write an itunes review. Let's see how many we can get to. The quest for 500. I know we can do it. It'll help the show a lot. I'm excited and hopefully I can get that bonus show for you guys once we get there. All right. Well, whichever day I see you, be it right now for patrons or on Thursday for everybody else, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you then.