New Realities recorded on June 16, 2009
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews author Howard Bloom about the continuous evolution and reinvention of nature. Bloom argues that nature creates unpredictable, radical leaps through creativity and imagination, turning poisons into new opportunities. They discuss the origins of the universe, the role of consciousness, and how human consumerism and technological advancements are part of nature’s process. Bloom emphasizes that art and fantasy act as the infrastructure for future realities, urging humanity to use its imagination to colonize space and create new ecological niches.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld, and each week on this program I explore what I feel is really at the leading edge of consciousness of our evolutionary moment in history that we’re at. And tonight’s guest is really someone I feel who has his finger on the pulse of that change, that transformation. He is Howard Bloom. He is the author of many amazing books like the Lucifer Principle, The Global Brain, and he’s writing a new book called The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism. Howard, thank you for being here.
Howard Bloom
Alan, it’s a pleasure to meet you again.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. We did meet. And one of the great things that you said in that talk that you gave was how nature continuously reinvents itself. I think you used the example when there was no more nitrogen in the early one-celled life forms that were reproducing, they reached their limits of oxygen producing or carbon producing…
Howard Bloom
No, you’ve got it. It was about 2 billion years ago, and to describe what’s going on here and how nature reinvents herself, she reinvents herself through us. Whoever us happens to be at the moment. And that means mother nature loves those who most oppose her. She loves those who give her the hardest time of all, who break the most of her rules. And 2 billion years ago, it happened something like this. Cyanobacteria had been around for two and a half billion years. They were a brilliant adventure, invention. They lived off of sucking up sunlight and using the sunlight to lace together the molecules they see around them. But when they laced those molecules together, let’s put this in blunt English. They took in all of the material that their metabolic system allowed them to turn into energy and into more cell stuff. But they had to toss out the garbage, and they did it in the same way that humans sometimes do it and elephants do it even more, and cows, they farted it out. That meant that they were farting out a toxic poison. They were farting out stuff that they were farting into the atmosphere. Now, these things are so small that you and I couldn’t see them. They’re so small that when they’re in a community the size of our palm, that community is so thin that we cannot see it. It’s invisible to us. And in that community, the size of the palm of your hand or mine, there are seven trillion bacteria all working together, all sharing knowledge together, and all sometimes inventing their way out of a tough spot together. That’s more bacteria in one colony the size of the palm of your hand than all the humans who have ever lived, doing research and development together, exploration and development.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So when they were at that key point where there was nothing left of their resources, nature or they reinvented themselves?
Howard Bloom
Well, they had a lot left of their resources. The problem was that they had poisoned the atmosphere. What looks like just one tiny bit of gas let out into the atmosphere of a very big planet, at first, the resources of your garbage heap, the atmosphere, look infinite. And they ran out of garbage heap. They eventually passed wind with so much of this toxic poison that over the course of two and a half billion years, they utterly poisoned the atmosphere. And at that point, there was, according to Lynn Margulis, who is one of the leading biologists of the last hundred years, and the person who came up with this observation, there was a huge die-off. There have been 142 mass extinctions in the history of this planet so far, before tailpipes, before smokestacks, and this was one of them. And the bacteria, you are absolutely right, first of all, there was a mass die-off, which means that from your point of view and mine, we, as moral animals, have to look at that and say, that’s unacceptable. Mother Nature put up with the deaths of trillions of her creatures. That is not acceptable to us humans. Meanwhile, these bacteria did reinvent themselves. There were tiny bacteria that had been capable of using oxygen but were not capable of transporting themselves. And large, the large bacteria made a deal with the small bacteria. Come into me, I will transport you, I will take you to the food that you need the most, I will protect you against predators, all you have to do is suck up that toxic atmosphere and turn it into energy for me. That was the deal. And that led to the kind of cells that eventually are in you and me. And the toxic poison was called oxygen.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And then oxygen breathing creatures were created. Let’s talk about what is that mechanism behind this reinvention of nature. Because we’re at another turning point. We have a lot of toxins in the atmosphere, and we need to somehow see the world differently, incorporate another strategy into our dynamism of living creatures. But I’m interested… that will happen at some point, but what is this mechanism that is the intelligence behind that reinvention? That’s what I’m trying to understand in my studies.
Howard Bloom
There’s a big question here, and I call it the God problem. And the God problem goes like this. I’m an atheist. And so are many of my colleagues in science. We do not believe that there is a God, and most of us do not believe… a small number believe that there is an intelligence that preceded the universe, but that’s a very small number. And I’m among those who don’t believe that there was an intelligence that preceded the universe. So the question is, the universe has done some really astonishing things. In the beginning, if you and I had been sitting around at a table before the birth of the universe, and you had said to me that some random spot in the nothing where we were sitting was going to erupt as a size of a micro pinprick, and from that pinprick, there was going to be enough implicit in that pinprick to make an entire universe, and it was going to erupt as a giant sheet… this tiny little thing would erupt as a giant sheet of time and space, rushing at a speed that was utterly beyond belief. Alan, I would have said you were crazy. We’ve been sitting around here in what one of my colleagues calls potentia, the potentia, as in potential, for as long as there’s been a potentia, and nothing like this has ever happened, and nothing like this ever will. Plus, there is the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of matter and energy. You can’t defy it. Well, the universe exists because of one of those acts of mother nature loves those who abhor her the most or rebel against her the most. The universe broke her rules. It broke the first rule of thermodynamics, and it erupted in time and space. And then you, Alan, you’re sitting there, you’re the visionary, I’m the old frumpy crumpet, and you tell me that this sheet of space and time is going to precipitate like a cloud precipitates in a rainstorm with particles, with things. And I have to say to you, Alan, look, you got it right on the first guess, that was lucky, but all there is is space, time, and speed right now. Space, time, and speed cannot remake themselves as particles, as things. There have never been things in this universe. Mark my words. There are no things. Period. There never have been, there never will be. And whammo! Gazillions of these particles come precipitating, and the astonishing thing is they precipitate in only 16 different forms. You’d expect gazillions in a universe of six monkeys and six typewriters, in a universe of randomness, but no, it’s not random. Only 16 different forms and a gazillion identical copies of each. And if you predicted to me that these things would then have social rules and get together, they would know who to avoid and who to get together with as if they had little Emily Post etiquette books built in, I’d have to tell you, Alan, you’re crazy.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So there is some ongoing invention and novelty that is shocking to our limited ego personality minds. And, you know Nassim Haramein? Do you know Nassim?
Howard Bloom
No, what’s that?
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, he’s a genius. He says the universe… he doesn’t call it the God question, he says the universe has a self-organizing principle to it. It’s able to self-organize itself. And he’s actually speaking, you should come on Friday, he’s speaking in New York about his theories of anti-gravity. Anyway, Nassim says because there’s this feedback between what’s going out and what’s coming in to all organisms, we can self-correct and go into new directions that are novel.
Howard Bloom
See, he’s dealing with old metaphors. I hate to say this about a colleague, but… And I believe that Barbara Marx Hubbard has tried to introduce us at one time or another. But he’s dealing with old metaphors. And the old metaphors get you stuck. Because the old metaphors are talking about feedback loops and things of that sort. Those are from the cybernetic movement of the 1950s. And these concepts do not take and even self-organization. Self-organization does not take into account the giant, unbelievable, astonishing leaps. There is something more than mere self-assembly going on here. There is more than the repetition of old rules over and over making new rules. My friend Eshel Ben-Jacob is the head of the physics department at the University of Tel Aviv and the head of the Israeli Society of Physicists. And when I say to Eshel, this is a very fractal universe, and I explain to him how the Mandelbrot set, which is one of the basic fractal patterns, reflects an awful lot of what this universe does, and fractals are about just taking the same rule and repeating it over and over and over again, and some of the most astonishing patterns you’ve ever seen in your life, and you have seen them on calendars and things, emerge from just the repetition of very simple rules. And Eshel calls me out, because Eshel says there is something in these great creative leaps, like the creative leap from the potentia to that first pinprick of space and time called this universe, and from the first manifold of space and time unfolding at a at astonishing speed to the precipitation of particles, these are leaps that go beyond the simple repetition of rules, making gargantuan things. Yes, the repetition of rules, which is implicit in self-assembly, does take place, and it does make amazements. It makes things like stars and galaxies, but it doesn’t make things like whole new atomic structures. It doesn’t make things like macromolecules that have three billion atoms participating in just one molecule.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, in Eastern philosophy, and some of science as well, I feel the Eastern understanding of nature, they say all somethings come from nothing, and they don’t explain that, they just state it as a fact that…
Howard Bloom
And I think they’re right. They are right. But there’s another thing. I have five heresies, and one of those five heresies says that one plus one does not equal two. And what I mean by that… Well, okay, back at our cocktail table at the edge of the universe, right? It’s 300,000 years after the Big Bang. These particles did precipitate exactly as you said, Alan, and once again, I was wrong. But these particles have been moving at incredible speed and they’ve been colliding like bullets colliding head-on and bouncing off of each other and hitting another particle head-on, and that’s all that’s been happening for the first 300,000 years of the universe. It’s called a plasma. And you make one of your nutty predictions to me. You say that these particles are going to slow down, and when they slow down, these little things the size of my fist are going to discover that they are longing for something. That they have an emptiness they cannot seem to fulfill. And there are these giant things, relatively speaking, the size of the Empire State Building, and those are going to discover that they have an inanimate longing too. A desire for something they can’t quite fulfill. And the little things the size of your fist and those things the size of the Empire State Building are going to discover that their needs fit each other with a precision that not even a German engineer could replicate. What’s more, take one of the little things from anywhere in the universe and put it next to one of the big things from anywhere in the universe, and they will automatically get together in a marriage of a kind.
Alan Steinfeld
You talking about electrons and protons? Is that what you were talking about?
Howard Bloom
You got it. Protons and electrons. Protons are 1,850 times the mass of an electron. Now, Alan, you would say amazing things are going to come from this. I’m going to call one of those amazing properties an atom. I’m going to call another one of those amazing properties hydrogen. I’m going to call another one of those amazing properties helium. And Alan, I could say point blank, see those things? I’m watching them. You were right. They are getting together. But that’s a proton plus an electron, Alan. A proton plus an electron only equals a proton plus an electron. Which one of us would be right? Astonishing, amazing, unbelievable, unpredictable new properties. would come piling from this and it’s something beyond mere self-assembly. Remember, we’re talking to an atheist. That’s what I am. And a materialist. A materialist who thinks…
Alan Steinfeld
But you’re a skeptic in a good way. I wouldn’t say necessarily you’re an atheist who says there is no such thing… you seem to be creatively open to new possibilities.
Howard Bloom
I am looking for the gods inside the universe… I’m looking for the gods inside this universe, and because I’m very narrow in the way I look at things, I’m looking at it from a scientistic point of view.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But what is consciousness? I mean, I understand what you’re saying, that when new things come together and combine, they absolutely produce properties that have been totally unpredictable. And that seems like the continuous history of nature itself. But so it’s produced this other thing called consciousness, the way we’re conversing is because we’re cognizant of something that came out of nowhere, obviously.
Howard Bloom
Well, back to one plus one does not equal two. One plus one does not equal two because when you put an electron together with a proton, you get all kinds of properties you never conceived. One of those properties is a shell, a shell within which the electron moves. Another property is a precise distance between that shell and the nucleus of the atom. Another emergent property is the shell the second shell out, which is also just exactly the same distance away as the first shell is from the nucleus. All these things from popping from nowhere? Nowhere. Then nowhere must be infinitely more creative than we give it credit for.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, let’s start there. Now, if it is, for instance, what is that nowhere? And where…
Howard Bloom
Let’s start with the human level. Now remember, humans with consciousness, we can’t exactly pinpoint the date of consciousness, but let’s put it to the date that we developed the first stone tool, and it’s 2.5 million years ago. 2.5 million years in a universe that’s 13.73 billion years old is not that much time. It’s a tiny little sliver of time. But Hegel, Hegel, the German philosopher, Georg Hegel, said… he’s got this incredibly dense, hard to get through book called the Philosophy of History. And when I went to to get a copy from my local library, which was one of the five biggest libraries in the world, they had a copy, it was from 1905, and that the pages had never been slit out, which means it had been sitting there in the library for 100 years with no one ever opening it. And it has, if you manage to get all the way through it, it has a simple message. History is spirit attempting to become flesh.
Alan Steinfeld
Now, we have to go into that, you being an atheist using a word like spirit. I don’t know what you mean.
Howard Bloom
Well, I’m after the God problem here. I am after the problem of cosmic creativity. I am after the problem of how these immense, immense surprises take place. And I can’t say that I’ve got an answer, but I can tell you that when it comes to human beings, 30,000 years ago, you may have been sitting around a campfire and come up with something, a new way of making noises. A structured way of making noises. You call it a song. And I would listen and I would go, I would be floored. I’d be absolutely floored by this creative thing that you come up with simply by putting together a string of sounds. Admittedly, birds do it, and a number of other animals do it, but I’d be floored. And then you would say, well, I bet you if you took that mammoth tooth, and you hollowed it out, and you put a couple of holes in it, you could make tunes like this too. But they’d sound entirely different. I would know you were crazy. A mammoth tooth is a mammoth tooth. Period. But I’d follow your instructions and I would try it out and soon we would have a flute. And then people around us who couldn’t make flutes and couldn’t and couldn’t manage the fingering of flutes and who couldn’t sing the way that you can, would begin to dream of music, and they would dream of music that no one had ever heard, and they would want to get it out to other human beings, and they wouldn’t be able to. They wouldn’t be able to. For 30,000 years, they wouldn’t be able to. Until synthesizers, and simple MIDI-based instruments, computer-based instruments came along, and made it easy, not for everybody, but for those who could master these particular instruments, made it easy for them to get the tunes that have been haunting their souls for 30,000 years to get to the point of the synthesizer.
Alan Steinfeld
Repeat that Hegel quote again, because I want to absorb it.
Howard Bloom
History is spirit attempting to become flesh. History is soul attempting to become material reality.
Alan Steinfeld
Now, what does he mean by spirit and soul?
Howard Bloom
Well, in his case, he, remember, he lived in a a nation that had ceased to be a nation. It would have been an empire until about 850 AD, and then it had broken up into about 180 principalities. And in that territory, that part of the world, Germany, with 180 principalities, people dreamed of being a state. Now, there’s a big question here. Why do people dream of being a state? Why did it catch their passions? And where did the concept of a state come from that caught their passion so basically? For Hegel, spirit was the spirit of a nation. It was the spirit of a nation-state struggling to come into being. But, and it’s true, you know, we don’t know how states evolve, and I haven’t been able to find any good scholarships on how they’ve evolved, so I’ve been putting together the pieces for myself.
Alan Steinfeld
What do you know about through a common language, a common custom? I mean…
Howard Bloom
Yes, all of that, it’s like saying, isn’t consciousness the result of 100 billion brain cells? Yes, all these things, and this is self-assembly, all of these things come together, a set of common habits which we call a culture, a set of common beliefs which we call a culture, a common language all exist exactly as you said it. And eventually, there emerges, we do not know why, there emerges a dream of a nation state. It emerged in China, it’s emerged in Africa. It’s emerged in among the Aztecs and the Incas, who were thoroughly isolated, they didn’t have any contact whatsoever with the Chinese and the Japanese and the Europeans who were evolving the concept of a nation-state. So in a sense, you’re right, it evolved the same way that those shells around the proton in which atoms, in which electrons move, came from nowhere. In which putting an electron and a proton together produced hydrogen, a property that came from nowhere. We don’t know the the the simple story of the evolution of the state, but we do know that what Hegel saw was a people dreaming and yearning for something, and believing that that something could come to pass a material reality. And guess what? He was right in the same way that the the guys who watched in wonder when I made the flute and you did the singing, wished that they too could make music even though they didn’t have your voice and they didn’t have my ability with my fingers.
Alan Steinfeld
So the whole conversation that I want to lead to then is, I mean using all these examples is, where are we going? Let’s say, okay, so things unpredicted have appeared. The internet couldn’t have been predicted, I mean, 50 years ago. No one would have imagined it, or maybe a few people. Maybe H.G. Wells could have imagined it.
Howard Bloom
100 years ago the idea would have been incomprehensible, you’re absolutely right.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, so there’s so many more elements that are appearing on the scene. So I want to know if we could somehow predict the unpredictable, where do you see the culture now going, being aware that nature is always full of surprises, and we’re also in a situation where their back against the wall, we’re running out of resources, we’ve polluted our planet. All the things that you’ve studied and researched, and with your great sense of history, can you take a stab at the future?
Howard Bloom
Well, step one is that every poison is a fuel in disguise. Every poison is a source of riches waiting to be made into riches. How do we know that? Bacteria taught us that. They taught us that two billion years ago when they took the oxygen crisis and turned it into an astonishing opportunity. Because without oxygen you and I wouldn’t be here. We regard that not as a poison, but as one of the greatest gifts that God, or creation, or evolution, has ever given us. Without oxygen we’d be gone. And right now we’re putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Hell, carbon dioxide, carbon is this incredible atom that can be used for all kinds of astonishing things. We’ve used it to make plastics, we’ve used it to make fuels, we are using it to make graphite compound fibers, all kinds of things. And we don’t have the ability to come up with a way to use the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that’s crazy. Now I have friends, one of them is the chief research scientist at NASA Langley’s research division, who dreams of algae and halophytes. And why does he dream of algae and halophytes? Because algae are very good at taking carbon dioxide and turning it into biomass, and any form of biomass can be used as fuel. Halophytes…
Alan Steinfeld
So is that happening? Is he developing things that will generate itself through our poison? Is that…
Howard Bloom
Well, alas, right now it’s still at the dream phase. It’s still where the nation-state in Germany was in the days of Hegel. Hegel died without there still being a German state, but there would be one. He was not wrong. So people are dreaming of these things right now, but what does it take to take these things and take them from dreams and turn them into realities? Activism, persistence, dedicating your life to a cause. Those things help, and right now, instead of looking at our woes and saying oh woe is me, we should be looking at the opportunities these things open. Every poison is an opportunity waiting to be opened.
Alan Steinfeld
But is humanity an unconscious agent of nature itself? Or have we kind of now in combat with nature fighting against it? But you know what I’m saying? I’m saying we, being a natural evolution of the offspring of creation from those one molecule, are just in concert with those same drives that have always existed as nature evolved itself. Or something else?
Howard Bloom
Yes. I think you’re right on everything that you’ve just said. We are nature incarnate. We are nature with a body, a brain, and a consciousness. We are nature with a soul and a spirit. And we are nature with our you know, there are selves that come out of us when we make love to another person that we never saw before. So there are all kinds of natures in us. And we are nature incarnate. We are piles of those protons. We talked about the protons banging against each other in a mad ricochet at the beginning of the universe in a plasma. Those protons are still alive today. They’re alive in you and me, Alan. There are more than we have numbers for living in you and me. You and I are a new social experiment of very, very, very old protons. And remember Nature’s basic rule: Mother Nature loves those who oppose her most. If we’ve got a poison in the atmosphere, we’ve got to turn it into a product. We have to turn it into a treasure.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what are the poisons do we have that you see at this moment?
Howard Bloom
Well, we have a poison of a lack of imagination. I think that’s an incredible poison. For example, there’s 10.06 sextillion cubic meters of rock beneath our feet. And what is our obligation toward that rock? Well, in a sense, if we follow the lessons of bacteria, it’s to turn it into biomass. To make it part of the grand experiment of life. The life on this planet is still just a tiny little scum on the surface. And life’s imperative from the very beginning has been, take as many inanimate molecules as you can and kidnap, recruit, or seduce them into this grand scheme of life. Now life began as something much smaller than a teaspoonful of biomass. And today it is, I have the figures in the computer, it’s somewhere around 220 trillion cubic meters of biomass. But that’s nothing. We have an entire universe into which to spread. We have 10 sextillion cubic meters of rock. That’s resources! That is resources for life itself. How do we know? Bacteria are two miles beneath our feet. They’re called chemolithoautotrophs, which means they eat stone all on their own using chemical processes. And they are turning stone into biomass, even as we speak, and even as we wail our griefs over the fact that there are no more resources left. Resources depend on the ability to see things that were formerly barren as resources. And that is our obligation to nature. If we don’t do it, bacteria will, because they are just as clever at research and development as we are. But they don’t have spirit. They don’t have soul. Yes, they have the magic of cosmic creativity, whatever that is, but they do not have the blessing of consciousness, and there’s another thing, Alan, and this is going to sound really crazy. We are the only species on the face of this planet capable of going beyond our atmosphere. We are the only creatures on the face of this planet capable of going to other planets, other moons, other places in the heavens, and taking life there, taking ecosystems there. And that, I believe, is our obligation on behalf of Mother Nature.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s actually Nassim, this guy who’s speaking on Friday, he’s actually developing anti-gravity machines, creating mini black holes that will power us beyond the planet, and he has one of those genius minds that have created the new possibility. And I’ll probably be interviewing him at some point, but…
Howard Bloom
Oh, that’s terrific. I would love to see, I mean, my schedule…
Alan Steinfeld
If you, if you are around on Friday, I’ll call you.
Howard Bloom
I don’t know, I’ll look at the calendar when we’re off the air.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But… yeah, no, I’ll call you. But getting back to the point, yes, don’t you think other civilizations on other planets have actually done what you’re proposing? We do get off planet and start to colonize…
Howard Bloom
Remember, when we were sitting at our coffee table at the edge of the universe, you were the one with the creative ideas, and I was the grumpy cantankerous thing who said it can’t be done, right? So in my role as the grumpy cantankerous scientist, we have no evidence whatsoever that there’s life any place else in this universe. However, here’s the big however. I wrote an article for a physics magazine called Physica Plus, called the Xerox effect. And the Xerox effect points out that this universe has something that we don’t tend to recognize very often, supersynchrony and supersimultaneity. When, remember back in the days when you and I were sitting at the coffee table at the edge of the universe, and you said that the sheet of space and time was going to precipitate like a rainstorm, a hailstorm of particles, and I said you were crazy? And remember, gazillions of identical copies of 16, only 16 different forms of elementary particles came raining from that sheet of time and space and speed. Alan, they all came at once. And they were, and all in a given breed or a given species were precisely, absolutely identical to each other. So the only problem, we in evolutionary biology, which is one of my fields, tend to look at the question of reproduction. How you make a child that in turn looks very much like you. But that isn’t just the only problem that relates to reproduction, there’s cosmic production. There’s mega mass production, manic mass production, in which things of the very same kind are produced almost identically and sometimes precisely identically pretty much at the same time. For example, if we roll the clock forward to a billion years after the Big Bang, we will see, well those atoms, those atoms you told me that would come to be when electrons and protons found each other, and I thought you were crazy, you made another prediction back then, I don’t remember it, but your prediction was these little tiny things, these new things called atoms, would discover a force that had never manifested itself in the cosmos before. It would be a force of attraction, and it would whisper so softly that it seemed not to be there at all, but would make, it would make the biggest things that this universe had ever seen. And of course, Alan, I know you, you have these crazy dreams. And I still don’t believe in them. I know that’s impossible. Well, the fact is that the whispering force that we’re talking about is gravity. And gravity swept together those early atoms in huge spiral forms, and then clotted them together in giant balls, and the gravity of those giant balls deformed the atoms at their heart and tore them to pieces. And when they tore them to pieces, they erupted in one of the products, one of the waste products, of that tearing apart, those waste products, essentially, atomic screams, were light. They were photons. And these balls blazed with light, and they were stars. But guess what? Supersimultaneity ruled. And these stars that were all operating on the same sort of metabolic process all around, in the same way, only differing in size and a little tiny bit of, well not even chemical composition in the beginning, all they were were hydrogen, helium, and lithium. That’s all there was. Differing in only the smallest ways, stars of almost an identical kind came to life at almost the same time everywhere across the face of this universe. Now what does that have to do with life?
Alan Steinfeld
Everything I say. Because, you know, if you’re saying that because the earth, this solar system, this galaxy does not seem special in any particular way than anything else out there, what you’re implying, right?
Howard Bloom
Yep, you’re absolutely right.
Alan Steinfeld
And in that case, who we think we are as life forms are not just some freak of nature, because nature…
Howard Bloom
Right. There is a question here. There is a field called nucleocosmochronology. And it deals with placing the dates of the evolution of the first elementary particles. I am calling for a science, not that anybody’s listening, but I’m calling for a science called moleculo-chronology. Which is mapping out the chronology of the birth of the first molecules. Why is that important? Carbon, which was I believe element number six, I’m very poor at this. But carbon is the great seducer, the great introducer, it is the cocktail party hostess of the atomic family, and it can take all kinds of atoms and introduce them to each other in astonishing new ways. And the result is that we see carbon-based molecules, we call them biomolecules, everywhere we look in this universe. Alan, they are in cold interstellar gases. They are in hot stellar gases. They are all over the place. Now, it takes quite an act of God knows what, the kind of cosmic creation that we’re talking about, cosmic self-creation, for those molecules to assemble into the very, very huge atomic communities, the huge molecules, that make up you and me, and then it is a huge leap for those molecules to discover their capacity to self-replicate, to self-assemble. But if that happened here, there is a very good chance that it was happening pretty much at the same time with the carbon molecules that are all over the place in this cosmos. So as a scientist I say very strictly, there is no evidence for life any place else at all, and if we feel any obligation to life, we have to look at the fact that there have been 142 mass extinctions. They were not caused by human beings. And it is our task to take life into as many new niches as possible, which means moons, which means planets, which means our own creation, O’Neill colonies, great big cans of glass and concrete in space. Glass and concrete made from the stuff of the moon, made from the stuff of asteroids. The amount of material resources up there to make human colonies in which whole entire ecosystems could thrive, is almost infinite. It utterly defies belief. It’s far beyond just finding a new continent like North America or South America.
Alan Steinfeld
So you’re also saying though, if there are civilizations out there, they’re probably at the same level of development that we’re at.
Howard Bloom
Yeah, give or take. Because as you get further from the beginning of things, the exactitude, the precision begins to go away. Things get more and more wobbly. But they still stay pretty much the same everywhere.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But if we were to take like a total leap of the imagination and something predict something unknown and unknowable at this point, if you could use that creative imagination to tap into where this next leap of conscious evolution will take us, yes, it’s feeding off the poison, it’s turning that around, but let’s take some creative act here and see what is seemingly impossible now, like you’ve been saying all along when you talked about the impossible, what would you let’s say like to see happen that is impossible to conceive of at this point.
Howard Bloom
Well, in September of last year, I was on a panel with Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of research and development for Yahoo, and with Peter Norvig, the head of research and development for Google, and with Nova Spivack, who is the world’s leading expert on semantic webs. And we were projecting the future of the web. And I said the web will be your genie in a bottle. The web will try to figure out your needs before you recognize them and figure out how to fill them. If you are aching for a woman, which men often are, your web will be out there in the cyber world seeing what woman needs exactly what you have to offer, and what woman has to offer exactly what you have. Because if you’re wandering around aching for the fact that nobody seems to want you and understand you, there is probably somebody who corresponds to that want and ache out there. It’s just a matter of getting introduced, and the web will be able to do that. The web will be able to figure out what material goods you need when you need it, so that you won’t have to be bombarded with ads from Dell Computer and Nike sneakers when you don’t need computers or sneakers, but you can get all the information on exactly the computer that would fit your needs, and it might be supplied by Dell when you need it. So that when you’ve just had a fight with your girlfriend in the morning and you’re driving into work and you need somebody desperately to talk to, but you think that it would destroy some of your working relationships for you to come in kvetching about your problems with your girlfriend, you could talk to your intelligent agent, you could talk to your genie in a bottle, you could talk to your computer. And your computer would talk back to you and show the same kind of unconditional love that a dog would show. The basic purpose behind this mental exercise is that by tapping into our fantasies, we come up with things that utterly defy belief. And when you’ve got huge numbers of things operating simultaneously, sometimes the new emergent properties arise. And those new emergent properties that come from knitting together new things over and over again, those emergent properties are the ones that defy description, defy belief. Like the concept of a nation back in the 19th century in Hegel’s Germany.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, part of what you’re saying, what I’m also fascinated with, is the way that people shift their view of reality. So if that computer technology was a reality, we would suddenly be reorientated sociologically in different ways. And that’s where I’m also intro- So when in one of your writings you talk about Marco Polo and then Columbus coming on the scene, and then the printing press…
Howard Bloom
The infrastructure, the infrastructure of fantasy.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right, right. And all that process of this mass production, and Columbus wasn’t that he just discovered a new continent, is that he was able to tell everyone about it. And that changed the way we thought of ourselves in relationship to the world, but it also changed reality in a very fundamental sense.
Howard Bloom
Yes. And there’s this intimate relationship between reality and fantasy. And fantasy manages to rear its head based on existing realities and take them a step further, and then fantasy remakes reality. And the next generation of kids has a new reality as its platform. It’s like a staircase. You and I are at step number 117, and we build step staircase number 118 and our kids are born into it. Kids are born, you and I were born, with twice as many brain cells as we need. So when we provide a kid with a 14-button controller and a game like Halo, the neurons that that kid needs to play Halo are going to stick around. The 50% of his neurons that are not needed are going to go. And that kid is going to have a very different brain from you and me. And different brains dream differently.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So what are these new brains dreaming that… because we have the same brain, we just, we just have used it differently.
Howard Bloom
Well, I don’t know. I’m wondering what my second wife’s 10-year-old, who I’ve raised since he was 10, now he’s 18, I’m wondering what he’s dreaming, having grown up with a 14-button controller. And he’s grown up, I used to think that he was isolated in his bedroom, Alan, I was crazy. He was in his bedroom with his Halo, and with his Halo, he was playing with kids, 16 different kids, and he didn’t even ask what continents they were from. They were from all over the world. Meantime, he had his earbud in his ear connected to his cell phone, and he was on with his best friend from the time he got home from school until the time he went to bed at night. He was not isolated. He had a much richer social environment than you and I had when we were kids. I don’t know what the forms of the dreams that come from him are, but I do know this. I know that iconic figures will come along. And they will come along in rock and roll, and they will come along in film, and they will come along in the popular arts, and some of them will catch his imagination. Because some of them have grown up the way that he has, and some of them will be expressing a new reality, and the ones who dream the hardest are going to remake reality the most. And what I mean by that is this: there’s a story in the book you were talking about, that book is The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism, and it’s coming out November 25th. And the story is one that I use to try to explain the infrastructure of fantasy. And it goes like this. Once upon a time there was a stockbroker in France, a part-time stockbroker, who decided to spend some of his time writing, which you know, if he had a wife, his wife would have gone crazy, and his parents would have said you can’t make a living at that. It was the end of the Civil War and the Americans had just come up with a new form of cannon called the Columbiad, which would launch a thing the size of a Volkswagen van, it would just shoot it at your enemy. And this stockbroker had an idea. What if you took one of these cannons, you packed it with lots of explosives, you put in a vehicle rather than putting in a cannonball, and you launched people toward the moon? And he wrote a really silly book. I mean, what kind of fantasy is this? What kind of nonsense? About launching a bunch of men into an orbit around the moon and then bringing them back to earth? This is ridiculous! But the book did very well, it was called From the Earth to the Moon, it was by Jules Verne. Now kids grow up on what people like you and I make. The wild leaps of fantasy that that we try to nail down in our work are the things they grow up with as classics. And two kids, one in Germany and one in Russia, grew up imprinting, that is their minds literally reshaping its morphology, around Jules Verne’s vision. And they came up with a different approach. They said don’t put the explosives in the mouth of the cannon, put them in the back of the vehicle. How would you like to be riding on a vehicle that’s got enough explosive to shoot something to the moon in its rear? It was an old idea. The Chinese had used it, it was called the rocket, and we actually had rockets in the war of 1812, many years before this, they were called Congreve rockets, and they made it into our national anthem. The bombs bursting in air, the rockets’ red glare. So but it was a crazy idea using these rockets to put humans into space. However, they wrote their books, their crazy ideas, you can imagine how their wives gave them a hard time about this not making a way to make a living and their parents telling them that you can’t make a living doing this. And another kid grew up in Germany reading the books that these guys, Tsiolkovsky in Germany, and Oberth in Germany, I mean, Oberth in Germany and Tsiolkovsky in Russia, had written based on Jules Verne. And he also grew up imprinting on Jules Verne. He grew up with a brain morphologically wrapped around visions of space. And his name was Wernher von Braun. And he developed something called the V2 rocket, and then he was brought to the United States at the end of World War II, and with another fantasy expert called Walt Disney, he laid the basis of the infrastructure of fantasy for what we call our space program, for my friend Buzz Aldrin putting his footprints on the moon. And for us, now we’re not quite sure where we’re going in space next, and we’re not quite sure it’s important, because we’re so preoccupied with what’s on this planet, but we better be preoccupied with both, because it’s our obligation to life. All of this was built on parent things your parents would have told you were crazy. All of them were based on things that your wife would have told you were a waste of your time. They were based on building fantasies. And fantasies someday materialize, they materialize first in the morphology of the brains of the young, and then in the new things those young generations make.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, this reminds me of this quote I just read of Albert Einstein that said logic will only take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere else.
Howard Bloom
Yes. And he said the vision is the vision is everything, and the technique is the servant. The vision is the master, and the technologists are simply the servants.
Alan Steinfeld
So the best thing we could do then is fuel our imagination with possibility.
Howard Bloom
Right. And we do it through things like science fiction, we do it through things like ideology, we do it through the things that we say to each other to inspire each other, we do it through art, art…
Alan Steinfeld
Right, art is the basis…
Howard Bloom
Yeah, art is the heart of it. If you go back to Hegel, history is about spirit attempting to take on flesh. History is about spirit attempting to rearrange and create new realities. Art is the pipeline into spirit. Art is the pipeline into the human soul.
Alan Steinfeld
Well then, let me let’s just go forward a little bit into this whole new concept. Where where does consumerism fit into this whole discussion? Because that’s sort of a key to this next book you’re writing, right?
Howard Bloom
Right. Okay. So you’ve got you’ve got a flower, pick the flower of your choice. A tulip. The tulip is a consumerist to the nth degree. The tulip is a master of waste. First of all, it erects these great big yellow panels, we call them petals. Now these are a waste of its time and energy, and obviously, nature has a reason for consumerism, so what we’re doing is looking into the reason and seeing if it’s really valid.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, define just consumerism, just go start there.
Howard Bloom
Consumerism is the… remember manic mass production? The stuff that went on at the beginning of the cosmos when there were gazillions of things of identical forms? That is a common thing in nature. And consumerism, I think it’s a false concept, consumerism. Consumerism means the wasteful expenditure of material goods and the wasteful expenditure of the energy that goes into those material goods. And the production of material goods that could in reality poison their atmosphere, the way that the cyanobacteria poisoned their atmosphere. Right. But every creature indulges… I can’t say every creature, I’d have to really go down a list of creatures, but so many creatures indulge in it, it’s ridiculous. Let me go back to the tulip, Alan. Bear with me on the tulip. Okay. The tulip erects these giant billboards, that’s all they are. And they’re there to attract bees. And the tulip, like you and me, we produce enough sperm cells in our life to impregnate all the women on the planet many times over. That’s a literal truth, it’s a waste. Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the first guy to invent the microscope, took a look at sperm, and said it’s filled with little animals. It’s filled with little independent animalcules, he called them. Why waste gazillions of animalcules? Are they worth any less than you and me simply because they’re small? That is nature using consumerism to the nth degree, and she uses it in the tulip. She produces so many grains of pollen that they could populate the planet with tulips. Just the grains of pollen from one tulip. How many of those are actually going to find a receptive home? How many of them are actually going to turn into plants? One in a billion?
Alan Steinfeld
But is it waste, or is that used for some other byproduct, for some other creature or organism or something?
Howard Bloom
Well, what happens is creatures come along who invent a way to use it. Right. Bacteria are the masters of this. I mean, when those tulip petals fall to the ground and all of those tiny little grains of pollen fall on space that is not going to allow them to turn into a plant, bacteria take care of the problem because they regard these things as food. But remember, bacteria regard granite as food and have recently invented a way to use radioactive substances. They found a way, they’ve invented a metabolic way to make radioactive substances their food. They’re called radiodurans bacteria, and they’re alive in the cooling pools of nuclear plants, and they’re alive, again, two miles beneath the earth in mines in South Africa where you find uranium.
Alan Steinfeld
So what’s the benefit then, if we look at this nature in terms of consumerism, how can we use that concept to evolve where we’re going?
Howard Bloom
First of all, remember what consumerism is to us in terms of material products. Every form of trash, and this was said back in the days of Napoleon Hill, every form of trash is treasure waiting to be discovered. Every form of garbage is gold waiting to be mined. You know, once upon a time, we looked at stones that were filled with gold, and we didn’t know how to melt the gold out of them, and we didn’t know how to fashion gold into objects. And they were just stones. That was only three thousand or four thousand, possibly seven thousand years ago. So nature takes care of her garbage and turns it into gold by inventing or by having creatures who invent, new turn those objects into new metabolic niches. And what we are looking at is everything that we look at as garbage is a metabolic niche waiting to be invented by us.
Alan Steinfeld
We, because we are the forefronts of… we are the thinking extension of nature. Is that what you mean?
Howard Bloom
Well, we are one of the only two heavily heavy duty research and development species in nature. The other are bacteria. And believe me, bacteria can outrace us to just about everything except they can’t get off the planet. Yes, they’ve made deals with birds and they’ve been traveling thousands of miles every year in the guts of migratory birds. Very clever of them. Very, very clever. And yes, there are so many bacteria in you and me that if we put just one of us humans into space, we have launched an ecosystem. There are a hundred trillion cells in you and depending on whose counting, fifty trillion of those cells don’t even claim to be you. They’re bacterial colonies, you know, these vast, complicated colonies that digest your food for you. And then excrete what they excrete, what they… how do we say this in polite English? What they put out in forms that we’re not allowed to talk about on radio, happens to be wonderful food for you. It’s glucose. Right. It’s sugar, it’s candy. And the fili of your gut love it. So put one of us into space, and you put up an ecosystem with literally tens of millions of communities.
Alan Steinfeld
So this is our destiny. This is what you’re saying, again, is the where nature, where evolution seems to be going towards.
Howard Bloom
Well, evolution tells us in every way she can, look up, look up. She makes us celestophilic. We are obsessed with the sky. All of our philosophies, all of our creation myths are obsessed with the sky. We feel our ancestors lived in the sky, and we’re not alone. Because when two lizards go up against each other in a showdown to see which one’s gonna get the girls, it’s the one who can lift his head the highest who gets the prize. And the one who can’t is out of the game. And the same thing when lobsters go up against each other in showdowns, it’s all about height. There’s another thing, one more amazing fact here, and that is, if you count all the species of animals living in the air, that is living by flying, and all the species that live on the land, guess which has the greatest number of species? The air or the land?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I’m sure you’ll say the air, because of where you’re going.
Howard Bloom
The air has about six times as… it has about six times as many species. Why? Because once we got airborne, we were capable of creating, and it’s not you and me, we’re not airborne unless we take a plane. But there are creatures that are airborne without the use of a plane. And those creatures have found six times as many niches for life as the creatures that have stuck stubbornly to the ground.
Alan Steinfeld
Interesting. But let’s say we do create another ecosystem on another planet somewhere, where what’s it all been for? What’s nature and this element of soul and spirit that you talked about? What’s the purpose of it all? Is it just to move nature from place to place?
Howard Bloom
Well, we can… look, nature is obsessed with creation. Nature is obsessive compulsive. She has always been creating things in mass numbers and creating new things, and she’s been remarkably persistent at it. She does it every, you know, we can’t tell exactly when, but she does it over and over and over and over again and bless her because creativity is fun. Creativity is joy. Creativity is ecstasy. Creativity is surprise and awe and wonder. And if we only think of it as nature is doing everything, nature is doing everything in her power to awe us. Nature is doing everything in her power to surprise us. And we, as a consequence, because we are nature incarnate in the form of consciousness, have the obligation to make bigger surprises than anything else nature has ever conceived. If we simply take that challenge, that’s life enough. And we can figure out the higher purposes later on because we know we have two options. Either we will be a part of the next big surprise, the next big thing, when an electron and a proton get together and make all kinds of new properties… or we’ll be left out. Which would you rather be? I know you, Alan. I know which you would rather be.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, we’re either in it, out of the game, or in the game.
Howard Bloom
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
And I think you’re right. I think nature has given us this huge, vast potential of creative imagination, as many people have called it, to create the next leap that will come out of some little kid playing some computer game and say, guess what? I’ve invented the anti-gravity machine or…
Howard Bloom
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
And it’s the joy of creating, then, you’re saying is is nature fulfilling its destiny, it’s that Hegel quote, it’s the spirit coming into flesh.
Howard Bloom
That’s it. And we have drivers built into us to make sure that we participate in that, to the, at least to the best of nature’s ability. We have boredom. Boredom. And boredom hurts. And boredom drives us, even if it only drives us to consume creative goods. The fact that there are people listening to you and me right now, out of boredom? That is what makes it possible for you and me to fly with our fantasies.
Alan Steinfeld
To fly with our creative imagination. And so the creativity versus the… but everyone has that creative potential in them. Everyone has that spark of nature.
Howard Bloom
Yes. And if they’re not part of the dance, they’re part of the audience. And the audience counts. The audience counts for everything, because without the audience, the dancers have no reason to dance. And I could tell you the story of how this works in bees, which do their communication through dance, but they’re out…
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, tell me.
Howard Bloom
Well, okay. If we’ve got the energy for this. The bees… look, there are two kinds of bees. There are, or there are lots of kinds of bees, but we’re going to break it down to two for simplicity. There are explorer bees, and there are conformist bees. And the conformist bees are 95% of the hive. A hive consists of about 20,000 individuals, and those 95% of the hive go out to the same place, they follow each other, when they get some place that’s filled with what they need, pollen or nectar, they give off a little whiff of a pheromone that says, hey, this is a hot place, visit it. And then they go back to the hive, carrying either pollen or nectar in pollen baskets or in a honey stomach. And when they get back to the lip of the hive, they only go a little tiny bit into the hive, because there are unloader bees waiting for them there. And if the hive needs the stuff that they are bringing in, let’s say you are bringing in nectar, and the hive needs nectar right now. I’m an unloader bee. I and a whole bunch of other unloader bees will rush over to you as if you are a superstar. And we will feel you with our antennae, and we will feel you with our forepaws or whatever they’re called in bees, and we will unpack your cargo as quickly as we can, and we will show excitement, we’ll even have a higher temperature than normal because we’re excited. And you will pick up that excitement, and you’ll go, oh wow, I’m great! And you’ll fly back to the flower patch again, and you’ll get another batch of pollen or nectar and bring it back, expecting the same treatment. But guess what? Imagine that it’s a hundred-degree day. Now, in a hundred-degree day, the entire hive can melt. It’s made of wax. And the pupae can die. But the bees have invented a way to take trash and turn it into treasure. They’ve invented a way to work around this. It’s called air conditioning. And it means that the unloader bees have to forget about pollen, forget about nectar, and concentrate on water, because the interior bees will then take that water and splash it on the wax walls of the hive. And with that cooling mechanism, we’ll keep the colony cool and we’ll keep the pupae from dying and we’ll keep the hive from melting. So you’ve just come in with pollen. And we have an emergency here. We need water. And just a few minutes ago, when you came back, we rushed over to you, and we treated you like a star. We were all your groupies. And now we ignore you totally. We literally turn our backs on you. We stick our tongues down to feel what’s in your honey stomach, and if it’s not what we need, if it’s not water, we turn our backs on you in a way that, if you did it to a human, would be savage. Tom Seeley, the major researcher on this, calls it rejection. And so, now if you are rejected, eventually you’ll go back over and over again, picking up more of the stuff that got you all that good treatment once upon a time. You won’t be able to believe that your job is obsolete. That you’ve been laid off. But finally, you’ll go more and more slowly, when you go to your destination, and you’ll bumble through the flower with less enthusiasm, and your temperature will go down because you’re not as excited. And eventually you’ll give up. And when you give up, you will wander around with a group of what Tom Seeley calls, unemployed bees. You will be bored, and you will need something to lift your spirits. Now here’s where the explorer bees come in. The explorer bees are like artists. They look as if they’re totally wasting their time. Their mothers and fathers would know instantly these kids are doing something that’s utterly useless. And will never make them a living. They are wandering off and following their instincts like hippies, like beatniks. And just bumbling, fumbling, flying around. However, eventually they find something. And those who have found water come back to the hive, and they dance. They dance their message. They dance the exact direction of where the water is, the amount of the water, how hard or easy it is to get to that water, and the precise distance. Now, you and I are now unemployed. We don’t have anything to do. We need something to excite us. We’re wandering around depressed. So we go over to the dance floor, and four or five different bees are dancing. They’re dancing their advertisements for the sight they’ve just found that they think is great stuff. And eventually, we all, you know, we check out each one of the bees. If she’s persuasive enough, we go out and check for ourselves. If we like what we see, we come back and we join her in the dance. And eventually all the unemployed bees settle on the message of just one bee, and they go off to the next water pool, and they all come back with water. And once again, the unloaders at the hive treat them with enormous enthusiasm, and once again we feel good because we’re given tremendous attention, we’re stars again.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, so the punchline then, I mean for all of it where… okay, go ahead.
Howard Bloom
Punchline is what you were saying before, art is the guide. Art is the form of pop culture is the form of communication that keeps the hive alive. Except in human terms, hive making is not a matter of repeating old patterns that bees have been doing for 200 million years. We make new niches for ourselves, we create new forms of hives by taking old poisons and turning them into new possibilities. We do that by inventing the equivalent of entirely new metabolisms.
Alan Steinfeld
And this… so if we can pull it all together as we wrap up…
Howard Bloom
Did we lose the sound here? Hello? Are you there?
Alan Steinfeld
Hello… Let’s end with this last statement on what the global brain really is. Can you sum that up… wait. Well Howard, we got disconnected. I’ll just, this is a great place to stop. And I think he made all his points. So I think the… Let me see if I can try, you have his number, maybe I can just do a wrap up in a second. This is New Realities. My name is Alan Steinfeld, Howard Bloom. Can we try getting him one more time?
Howard Bloom
Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, we lost each other.
Howard Bloom
Yes.
Alan Steinfeld
What did… okay.
Howard Bloom
So wrapping it up. The laptop without… this is a laptop that doesn’t have computers that reads our minds directly that has no material substance, that doesn’t have to be implanted in our brains, that reads our imaginations, our thoughts, brings us together with people who will help us bring those thoughts and turn them into realities.
Alan Steinfeld
So be it. That’s great. There’s more… there’s nowhere that came from too. I look forward to talking to you again. Thank you Howard. Just give people…
Howard Bloom
Alan, it’s been terrific.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks. No, I really enjoyed this, but give people your website so we…
Howard Bloom
It’s www.howardbloom.net or just plain howardbloom.net and the upcoming book in November is The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism.
Alan Steinfeld
And Howard is also the author of the Lucifer Principle and The Global Brain. So, yeah, I will I look forward to seeing you in the press, maybe we’ll do a television show as well.
Howard Bloom
That would be terrific. I would enjoy that tremendously.
Alan Steinfeld
Thank you. I’ve been talking to Howard Bloom. My name is Alan Steinfeld. This is New Realities. If you want to reach me, email me at alan@newrealities.com or my website just newrealities.com. So thank you for listening. Check that website for this interview to be archived and other interviews and also listen to BBS Radio. Thank you very much, and I’ll be talking to you next week.
