Eleven Seconds Before Midnight: Can Humanity Become Wise Enough to Survive?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Michelle Martin (0:22)

You know, I love books that invite us to look more broadly at ourselves. And today, the book that I have in my hand is an invitation to look at ourselves the way the universe might look at us. The man sitting before me is an ecologist, trained mathematically. He is a pioneer in aquaculture. He is the chairman, founder of and group, executive chairman of Blue Aqua International. They are based here in Singapore. They operate across six countries. He's originally from Iran, but he's now Singaporean. Time to say welcome to the author of a new book that I present to you. I think you're really going to enjoy the discussion. It's called Eleven Seconds Before Midnight, Dr. Farshad Shishehchian. Welcome to the show.

Farshad Shishehchian (1:02)

Thank you. Thank you, Michelle, for inviting me.

Michelle Martin (1:04)

What a fascinating book. You draw together cosmology, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, even modern UAP, unidentified.

Farshad Shishehchian (1:15)

Yes.

It's not easy to bring them all together. On the record, yeah.

Michelle Martin (1:21)

Tell me about your philosophy at the heart of this book that asks, who are we, where have we come from, what have our institutions avoided talking about?

Farshad Shishehchian (1:30)

I think it's very important that we understand that for so many years, but I think in a cosmic time and scale, we are very young. We always assume that we are the center of the universe. And a lot of people believe that the whole thing has been because of us. And we are very insignificant. We are just in the corner of one galaxy, you know, in a small star, you know, like we have one star and we have our solar system. And we are like in a very quiet corner of the universe.

And still, we think that we are the center of the universe. So that's a big assumption.

Michelle Martin (2:08)

Interesting. Your title, Eleven Seconds Before Midnight. What exactly is the clock of measuring? How close to midnight do you believe humanity is?

Farshad Shishehchian (2:17)

Actually, this means that, you know, scientifically, we believe that since Big Bang until now is around 14 billion. So for a lot of people, assuming this giant number is a bit difficult. So I try to, you know, make it smaller from a, like in a scale of one year. So if we take the whole universe formation one year, we are just on the last day of the year and the last 11 second of the year, the human return history is nothing more than 11 second. It's 5,000 years.

So there are, there is at least 11 months and I don't know, 30 days and I don't know, 24, 23 hours and something, you know, before us. And we are very young.

Michelle Martin (3:03)

You saved this book in your hope for it, the first page, for my children and for theirs. May they inherit a species that has at last learned to look up. What do you hope that the reader will experience with this book?

Farshad Shishehchian (3:17)

I think looking up means looking at the reality.

Because most of the time, we just look at ourselves. We have created a lot of standards within ourselves. So we live with what we have created. We don't know what is beyond all these things. Looking up means look up and see how small you are. And you should be humble then. Then you should value your life, same species that living with you, the same planet that you have. So we will put our differences aside, because the world is not what we have created and we are living in. The world is way, way bigger than that.

Michelle Martin (3:58)

I wonder if you can give listeners maybe a taste of your book, maybe read us an excerpt from chapter 4

Farshad Shishehchian (4:03)

Yeah. So this chapter is very, very interesting and I really love it, because it's a question that when I ask everybody that, you know, sometimes we discuss with my friend from many different nationalities, believe anything, they cannot answer it. So I call it gold power and structure of the civilization.

So we say the Azdecs call the sweat of the sun, the Egyptian call it divine flesh of the gods. The Sumerian, in some of the oldest return text in human history describing who descended from the sky, in stories that some readers have interpreted as being connected with the mining of the precious metal. Every major ancestor and civilization independently attached extraordinary significance to one yellow metal.