#1003 - Sean Carroll

Joe Rogan (0:01)

And five, four, three, two... Yes, how are you, sir?

Sean Carroll (0:07)

Good. Thanks for having me.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Thanks for being here, man.

I wanted to ask you this, because I was reading this today, and I'm starting to freak out. NASA is planning on drilling into Yellowstone.

Sean Carroll (0:18)

Okay.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

To save the world.

Sean Carroll (0:20)

I didn't know about this.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

You didn't know about this?

Sean Carroll (0:21)

They're relieving pressure? What are they doing?

Joe Rogan (0:23)

Yes. Yeah.

Sean Carroll (0:24)

There's been thousands...

Joe Rogan (0:27)

We were talking about chiropractors for the start of folks.

I think they plan on like, you know how like if you have like a giant cyst, and you sort of make a slice in it, you can kind of squeeze everything out of there. You ever see a doctor do that?

Sean Carroll (0:40)

I've seen doctors do that. I've never seen NASA do this.

Joe Rogan (0:43)

I have no idea what this is talking about. NASA wants to spend $3 billion drilling into a volcano to save the United States. And presumably a large chunk of the world too, right? Because there would be some sort of a nuclear winter-type scenario.

Or the skies would be covered with... This is not your area of expertise.

Sean Carroll (1:01)

I'm sorry to throw this on you. I wonder about the providence of this. But, you know, these are things that it's some people's areas of expertise, but no one has figured everything out, right? Like, we don't know all the forces that are pushing around the Earth to make volcanoes and earthquakes and stuff like that.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

Go back to that picture. Look at this picture.

That picture freaks me out.

Sean Carroll (1:24)

That looks realistic, yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:26)

Every six to eight hundred thousand years, that thing blows sky high.

Sean Carroll (1:30)

Microsoft Paint version of geophysics.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

Yeah, it's from like a GeoCity site from 1994

Sean Carroll (1:36)

Yeah, yeah. Well, here's the thing to think about, right?

Joe Rogan (1:39)

Can you keep this up close to you?

Sean Carroll (1:40)

Sure. Yeah, pull it.

There's all sorts of disasters that could happen to us that we don't really plan for because human lifetime is a hundred years, technology is a few hundred years, but maybe there are disasters that happen every thousand or ten thousand years, and they could be very bad. I think solar flares are the ones to really worry about, to be honest.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

Is that what you're concerned with?

Sean Carroll (2:02)

It's not my professional concern, but I was once sitting next to a hotshot lawyer who had just been finished visiting Washington, DC to campaign for, we got to start hardening up the electrical grid because one kind of solar flare that he says happens every thousand years could wipe out electricity in the United States or the world for weeks or months.

Millions of people would die, right? So a few billion dollars and we can harden it and fix things, but who's going to spend a few billion dollars for something that happens once every thousand years?

Joe Rogan (2:33)

Isn't that the issue? Even with preventing asteroids or doing something to avoid collisions, right now we don't have an issue. So we go, ah, we have other things to worry about. We have a terrible president. We have global warming. We have this, we have that. There's always something that keeps us from being rational about the future.

Sean Carroll (2:53)

Yeah, that's right. And the good news with asteroids is that there's other good reasons to look at the sky and map things, right? So what astronomers are doing are piggybacking asteroid mapping strategies off of things they can actually get money for, right? Because, yeah, no one is going to pony up that much money to look at the asteroids.

Joe Rogan (3:12)

Yeah, well, I would think that that would be like a really good use of money. Like let's keep an eye on the rocks that might kill everything.

Sean Carroll (3:19)

You would think that everyone would save for their retirement and so forth, right? But this ability to plan for the future, not what we evolved for.

Joe Rogan (3:26)

Well, that's a big ability. I mean, that's a big plan for the future, though. I mean, literally, you're talking about like, wasn't there one that just whizzed by that was three miles wide?

Sean Carroll (3:35)

Yeah, but whizzed by means it was something like eight times as far away as the moon.