Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #14: Science, Faith, And The Fight For Truth
When headlines turn science into a battlefield, who decides what counts as truth—and at what cost? We sit down with veteran science reporter and editor, Dan Vergano, now back on the DC science beat to unpack how politics, platforms, and power steer public understanding of vaccines, climate, and gender care.
He explains why culture war flashpoints rarely start at the kitchen table, but are manufactured by media ecosystems and political fundraising that thrive on outrage, leaving newsrooms to fight for clarity without owning the channels of distribution.
We also confront a deeper divide: materialist science versus spiritual worldviews. Can faith and empiricism coexist without forcing certainty where none exists? Our guest argues for intellectual humility, noting that even at the frontier—where quantum mechanics and relativity don’t meet—honest science acknowledges the unknowns.
From there we pivot to space policy reality checks: billion‑dollar line items, SLS sticker shock, Starship’s unfinished milestones, and the hard questions around lunar bases, planetary protection, and whether the Moon truly helps us reach Mars. If humans go, what’s the justification—unique science or a costly rerun?
Imagination still matters. Sci‑fi and cli‑fi seed the metaphors that energize students, budgets, and national will, often more than any single article can. Yet the economics of journalism are collapsing, rewarding speed over verification and paving the way for AI‑generated sludge that drowns out reporting.
We weigh AI’s bubble risk, its cultural fallout for education, and a possible future where machines write for machines while readers are left behind. Through it all, we come back to the basics: transparency, skepticism of power, careful sourcing, and a public that deserves facts presented with clarity and respect.
If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review—your support helps more curious listeners find conversations like this.
The diamond podcast. I'm here in my little office in the jungle in Hawaii. You are in your office in DC. So can you tell us a bit about Scientific American, your work for them, your transition to working back in DC, and we'll go from there?
SPEAKER_01:Let's see. I was a uh an opinion editor for Scientific American. I've been working in DC for 30 years. So it's not a physical move for me. It's what we've lately done is we're shifting me from the opinion page back to reporting, which is what I did for 28 years before I became an opinion editor, just because there's so much going on in science policy in DC with the new administration. So it just made sense. We need more bodies to cover everything that's going on. And we have a new editor-in-chief, David E. Walt, who's looking at moving the magazine's focus more to news coverage in some sense. And so I'm one of the benefits of that. I have to stop torturing you, Tam, as your editor. Instead, I get tortured, I get tortured by other editors now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Don't know what to do. Let me ask you a bit about the controversy, which I think probably was not big news for most people, but for people in science and who read Scientific American and have, in my case, for decades. I'm curious what you can say. And obviously, don't go further than you feel comfortable saying. But my understanding was that the prior chief editor got in hot water because of her public comments that seemed to be overly political. Is that at all true, or is that just not what happened?
SPEAKER_01:I have to be very careful and say I can't, I'm not speaking for Scientific American when I talk about that. I'm certainly not speaking for our owners for Springer Nature. But what you're describing has is what has been reported. And she did she did resign after that. It's a it's a shift for the for the magazine. She's a an incredible journalist. And maybe the only thing I could add to all that is that she's a person who was stalked online by pretty vociferous and awful trolls for a decade, if you're wondering at all, like how anything like that can happen. I think that's probably part of the equation. Okay. So I can I think that's all I can tell you. It's a tough business. Reporters and editors are real people, and people lose their temper, and that you've seen it happen everywhere you've worked, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I'll just say what I did read about it. It did seem unfortunate that she would either resign or be asked to resign, whatever happened based on some comments that were not remotely beyond the pale, given the spectrum of opinion and discussion in social media and the public discourse today. And it seems strange that someone who has her role would expect to be would be expected to be extremely limited in what they can say in their personal time. And I'll leave it at that. Yeah, that's all I can, it's their thing. Yeah. And I should I knew Laura just virtually through her role at a slate probably a decade ago. She ran a piece of mine there a long time ago. So somewhat perfectly followed her career. So I'm great. Publishing lands well. Yeah. Let's get back to Sound of Americans. So you guys have been around for 180 years. That's impressive. And you've been with them for you said 30 years now?
SPEAKER_01:No, I've only been with Scientific Americans for two years. I'm okay, but you've been in journalism for a long time. Yeah, I was essentially the science reporter for USA Today for 13 years. And then I went to National Geographic, and then I went to BuzzFeed News, and then I was at something called Grid News, and then I moved from which was going under, so I was moved over to Scientific American from there. I'm just uh old science journalist at this point. And I've you know how it is like one minute you're the young kid, and then the next minute you're uh the older guy. Well, I didn't get any middle time. What's going on? Dude, I was suddenly old. What the hell? So I've but I've had a if you want to talk about science journalism, I've run the gamut. I've and I was originally, maybe it's interesting to people, I was an engineer at the Pentagon. I worked for an Air Force contractor, and part of my job was suppressing FOIA requests. And at one point I figured out it would be more fun to write the FOIA than to suppress them. And so I ran off to journalism degree school and never actually graduated from that, but I got a job and made my way in journalism. So much for yeah. I I went from being a nobody at the Pentagon to being a nobody at USA Today in five years. So it people who thought that there was some kind of big gatekeeping thing keeping people out of media, then that means if you had if you're willing to hit deadlines, you could get a job back then. It was the 1990s.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I want to kind of dive a bit into the uh the culture war, so to speak. And I I use that term hesitatingly because I think a large part of the problem is our framing of these cultural issues and discussions as either wars or battles or and obviously there is conflict, but I'm a big fan of Charles Eisenstein, who is a social philosopher. Part of his work has been over many years just really highlighting the problem itself being this kind of othering tendency. So you want to look at this lens of the culture wars, quote unquote, through this kind of broader lens of how can we actually understand the nature of these conflicts, why they're happening, and maybe even discuss today in a work session some tentative steps to transcending those culture wars on the science front. So let me ask you first do you see a, do you agree there are culture wars or whatever term you want to use over science and science journalism going on right now?
SPEAKER_01:So what I'm seeing is that a lot of these sort of cultural divides in our politics are manufactured ones where you have political actors who have chosen to elevate questions of personal autonomy, lifestyle, whatever you call it, want to call it, into political causes that they can fundraise off and try and get people to vote for their party for. Thinking about things like climate change, thinking about things like gender-affirming care, thinking about things like vaccines. These are all things that one of our political parties, activists and fundraisers have decided would be fruitful ones for them to turn into polarizing subject of discussion. And that's clearly reflected in the surveys where you see things like the Pew data, where all the shift in opinion on things like trust in science, which they never define very well, what the hell does that mean? Is all the movement is upon, is you see it in the Republican Party responses. So those are the people who are essentially being polarized through their media, which is a Fox News, Joe Rogan, talk radio, to receive these kind of messages. And that's what you're seeing reflected in this distrust for science that's been very fruitful for that party and probably was a good political decision for them. So, how do we talk to that as science journalists? It's tough. We uh we're not commisars and we're not political activists, ideally, most of us. If you're doing straight news, certainly you're not. And also we don't own the means of communication. Google decides who gets the news and who doesn't right now. Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News decides who gets the news and who doesn't now, in that regard of these cultural wars. They're not Sui Jenry, they're not genuine cultural things. There's not somebody in my hometown in Dubai, Pennsylvania, saying, you know what, I'm really pissed off about vaccines, and I'm gonna do something about it. Somebody on from their pulpit or somebody on the radio put that idea in their head, and that's why we're having fights about it right now, and why some people got into political office who are making changes in that regard. So, anyways, what do we do about that? We try and do the best job we can, is what I've concluded. Like that's this in a functioning democracy, it's that should work very well. It worked pretty well when I went into journalism back in the 1990s. That means of transmission is broken now, but what can I do? I have to work with the ones that I have. And so, is there some way that I can write differently or communicate differently to reach the people who've been polarized that way? Certainly. There's certainly better ways to do that. There's some science suggesting how you do that. The question is, how do we do that and make a living? And how do we do that and still have good journalistic ethics, which is clearly to be honest and accurate with people and how we report the news?
SPEAKER_00:Is all that clear? I've said a lot.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's basically my nutshell talk about it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no, uh, I think that's a great you know opening for a drawder discussion. I don't want to spend all our time on this issue, but I think it is probably the most relevant issue for a lot of people today who are not scientists themselves or not interested in science policy, et cetera. Let me go a little bit deeper. And so my understanding, and I'm not trying to push your or maybe, but my understanding is that there is certainly a cultural divide based on the fact that maybe half the country gets speaking very roughly, consider themselves to be Christians, religious in some manner, and that forms a basis for their worldview. And I've done quite a bit of work and writing and thinking in the intersection of science and spirituality, and my personal view is that both sides need to shift toward a more rational spirituality, be a more spiritual rationality, if that makes sense. It doesn't mean abandoning rationality at all, it means actually recognizing that we can create a worldview that honors spirituality, the need for meaning, for purpose in life, for some kind of higher power, even though I don't personally accept it as any kind of conscious being out there. I'm more on the kind of the eastern philosoph philosophical side of things. But certainly a lot of people in the US and around the world, the Western world in general, still see religion and church, God as very key to their sense of self-worth, their meaning-making in their lives. And it's been this like obviously multi-century push by rationality and Western science to in many ways take over a large part of that function in people's lives and their psyche, and it's still manifesting very in very real ways today. So I'm curious how much of the current culture wars you would agree, and again, don't feel like you'd agree with me at all, is based on this kind of genuine feeling of science pushing back on God and spirituality and that being a bad thing. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing.
SPEAKER_01:Agree with you that there is a genuine divide here, that the idea of materialism that is intrinsic to science is antithetical to the spiritual view that most religions have, right? About the nature of the world, right? You to be a to accept the Ur philosophy, throwing a lot of words around, of science, you you are materialist in your outlook, and you don't accept any kind of supernatural or spiritual uh actor as a serious thing to discuss. And that if you are a person with a more spiritual outlook, definitely would get your backup and would cause uh a schism you're talking about then. I have a hard time as a Catholic uh reconciling that with things like the Vatican Observatory and papal encyclicals about this, saying that there's actually a concordance between the scientific outlook on the world and a spiritual one. It's possible to have both. So again, here I see a lot of the antagonism as being politically ginned up, as abortion was not a political issue for people in the church until Roe v. Wade, until the 70s, when this is the schism in American life, that was pushed by conservative elements of the of my own church and other denominations in the United States who had been on their heels since the 1920s, the Inherit in the Wind era of the Scopes Monkey trial and this fight to boost their membership and their enthusiasm. In my own hometown, like I said, in central Pennsylvania, what I see is the church has taken over some of the roles of social services that have been left to go to hell since the Reagan Revolution, when the state was started to withdraw from taking care of things. If you want childcare, you got to have a church. And that's bottom line. And if you're going to the church and people are telling you that science is borderline satanic, you're not going to have a good look outlook on science. So again, I see a lot of this polarization in this regard as manufactured and not genuine, but that might just be because I'm of a more soft spiritual side myself. So there's a genuine element to the division, and then again, there's this manufactured element, which I I see as a factor in in that divide. Does that answer your question? I don't know if I've been this one.
SPEAKER_00:No, that's good. And let me ask you, and if you don't mind, again, feel free to say I don't want to talk about this. With your personal upbringing and beliefs, you mentioned you grew up Catholic, it sounds like you still consider yourself a Catholic. I know people like Francis Collins have written a spoke of the case. He's a great example. Yeah, he's a community.
SPEAKER_01:He's a better example than me, man.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I'm curious again, how do you personally reconcile that that worldview with your work in science and the materialist views of modern science? And we'll add this too. Like I think there is a fair view that would be rightly called scientific, but wouldn't be necessarily materialistic. And that's maybe our next topic is that I am a card-carrying panpsychist, which is obviously not materialism. And yet I consider my worldview very scientific. So we can delve into that next. But yeah, for now, if you wouldn't mind fleshing out your how you reconcile Catholicism with your scientific views.
SPEAKER_01:What I've learned both from growing up Catholic and from interviewing scientists for 30 years is that both theology and science don't know Jack. They're like essentially they're paper airplanes against the panzer tank of reality, both of them. And so they're they are they're firing like spitballs at a battleship when they talk about they either one claims they have a group on reality. The scientists, if you the higher and higher they get, the scientists are more and more honest about how little they don't know about anything. We can't explain there's like a what is it, 50 degrees of magnitude difference between quantum mechanics and uh general relativity's explanation of the cosmos. We don't know anything, and there's room for all kinds of explanations in that if you want to be a science fiction fan. And likewise, the Catholic sacraments still confuse me, and it's been quite a while.
SPEAKER_00:At least they're not in Latin anymore. It used to be in Latin, of course, for a long time.
SPEAKER_01:Some play, some people like that. So basically, what I would do is approach it with a great deal of either side of this thing with a great deal of humility. I'm sympathetic to Einstein's agnosticism, where he basically said, and I'm my is my I'm not a spiritual person, I wouldn't say that about myself, but I would say that I do try and have a great deal of humility about these sort of questions, uh, that your ardent atheist Richard Dawkins, who probably types who you know, who probably piss off more people than they ever convert or whatever, have pretend to have the answers either side. And I think that's actually to be Mr. Smarty Pants about it. I think that's the a better way to approach it.
SPEAKER_00:Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, yeah. And let me let me roll back now and talk about how you got into this line of work. What inspired you to become a science journalist?
SPEAKER_01:I it happened by accident. So I was working at the Pentagon for an Air Force contractor as an engineer, and I was handling FOIA's from reporters. And there was also a book that we relied on heavily at the Air Force that had mentioned in its names all these classified Air Force satellites and other agency satellites that I wasn't allowed to mention unless I had an unclassified source for it. And so it was called Deep Black by Bill Burroughs. And it was a great book because we had it pages thumbed so we could refer to things that were otherwise classified by this unclassified reference. So it was a well-thumbed thing. Bill's service to the classified agencies is great. And but in the back of it was a thing he ran on a science journalism program at NYU. And I'm reading these FOIA requests, and they were idiotic. And I was like, Oh, these scientists are dummies. Like, engineers are smart, man. Like it was really to be a really top-notch engineer, like that was hard. But look at these idiots, they're writing these idiotic letters. It must be easy to be a journalist. So I was stupid. But I thought I wrote Bill. It turns out it's harder than that it looks. I wrote Bill and asked him if I could maybe go to his. I didn't have a girlfriend, right? And why don't I go to New York and go to already had a master's degree, but what the hell? I'll go to his program and nothing else. I'll hang out with the cousins and live in New York for a year. And so I got into his program and it was an interesting program. I interned at CBS News. I ended up interning at science news in DC. I thought I would end up a military reporter because of my background as an aerospace engineer, but it turns out they catered medical news events, and I was broke and I needed to eat. So I started gravitating towards, and there's a lot of medical news in New York. So I started gravitating towards those things for lunch, essentially, and reporting that. And it turns out it's really interesting and hard. And I just learned a lot everywhere I went, and it felt much more real than doing budgets as an engineer. I knew I learned I learned tensor algebra so that I could go do budgets and view graphs for the Pentagon. My big responsibility there was making sure I had the right order of donuts for the meeting. I'm completely serious when I tell you. That was my big responsibility.
SPEAKER_00:So donuts and pizza got you into it.
SPEAKER_01:They had to have the peanut crusted ones for General Dickman. Seriously, that was like an order I had. And I'm a really impressive person. I'm sorry, Pam. I got a piece of the Pentagon tour rewritten. That was like my big achievement in five years of doing that. Anyways, and so I was doing this all of a sudden doing this really interesting stuff. And there were jobs then. Like I went from science news to something called Health Week. I started freelancing for USA Today. I there was a I jumped to medical tribune, which was around then uh news service where I learned daily news writing about medicine. That, of course, blew up in the first dot-com boom, and suddenly I was working at USA Today. I lucked out. And so I was suddenly one of two science writers for the country's largest circulation newspapers, which was pretty damn good. And it was really interesting stuff. And a lot of people read it at two million readers a day, and it felt like a good deal. But, anyways, sorry, that was a longer answer to your question than you wanted, but there you go.
SPEAKER_00:So, where does Scientific American fit in this kind of spectrum of science journalism? Obviously, lower circulation than USA today, but more focused on actual science by far. Right. I know it's had 180 years of history, so a lot has happened. Where do you see your role within that ecosystem today?
SPEAKER_01:So, science, I'm again, I'm not speaking, I can't speak from the owner. And and David might have given you a different answer, but my sense is that Scientific American kind of fits that sweet spot between your science and nature and your New York Times science news section, like in between those spaces, in the Atlantic over here doing its hot take version of science. It's trying to hit, it's like the New Yorker has the reader who's the New Yorker, New Yorker. We're trying to reach the Scientific American. That is somebody who is interested in the world, interested in news, astute about science, maybe not a PhD, of course, but like understands that there are physical laws in the universe that play a big role in its functioning and want to know more about it, want to know more about news in that area. So it's an avid newsreader, an elite newsreader thing, not to be elitist, of course, that's bad, but it's not the broad audience that USA Today had, which was basically business people who were traveling on airplanes and wanted a newspaper as they stepped over the threshold of their door, of their hotel room. You have to know who your audience is in journalism, right? And so it's a little bit funny. The magazine reader, I would say, for Scientific America is in their 50s or 60s typically, an older reader, whereas the online reader is somebody in their 30s. But they're both your scientifically educated. They've had a year of at least rocks for jocks in college. They've had that two years of college for the most part. Anybody, if you're in high school reading it, great, or for your less education. But I think that the place where it's most often carries is with that reader, which is a smaller audience than USA Today's.
SPEAKER_00:Understood, yeah. So what's your new beat in DC and what's the vibe so far?
SPEAKER_01:I've been doing it for a week and a half. But so essentially, yeah, I'm gonna be a science policy reporter here. And yeah, the vibes are the scientists are pretty angry and pretty upset about the way things are going. They see the administration is hostile to science. They see a Supreme Court that's indifferent to science or hostile to it. They see a Congress, the majority is backing them up in some ways, but not speaking out in ways they hope. These things like the statements of dissent from federal employees are basically cries to science to Congress. So get on the stick here. You funded these agencies, you need to stick up for what we're paying for. So it's a lot like the first six months of the Trump administration when I was at BuzzFeed News reporting on this sort of thing, but on steroids. So, like back then, we would complain there was every day there was one new thing that was shocking to scientists, and now it's three things a day or four things or five. But my Slack, when I get off this call, will probably have two new things in it. Reuters is reporting just now that HHS is reviving a shuttered task force on vaccines related to the vaccine injury program, and it'll be headed by the NIH chief, who is not been great on vaccine policy. And what does that mean? Yeah, bodhicary, yeah. And what does that mean? And so there's all these sort of incremental sort of things that we're trying to the question for us now on this beat, and that we're thinking is which incremental things do we just note, which ones do we report, and which ones do we fold into larger coverage down the road for a feature like trying to make sense of what it all means? So, does that make sense? A reporting program is a plan of how you're gonna be reporting, which is what I'm at now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, what are gonna be the key things we I'm curious of your history and your current take on space policy in DC? I know you've got a long history in that area. I'm very curious on it. I've followed it peripherally myself for decades. Yeah, I'm quite excited about the potential for Martian and Moon colonization. Can you kind of give us a bit of an update on where we are with space policy today and where the new administration is on those issues?
SPEAKER_01:On on moon and Mars colonization, they are very pro getting people back to the moon and eventually Mars. The administration is pros proposed massive cuts to NASA and science programs, otherwise, but in terms of Mars, they want a billion dollars extra move to that at the space agency. Is that a lot? A billion a year adds up. It's not enough to get you to Mars. No. But it's better than cuts if you're a Mars person. It's serious money. Uh the space agency's budget is I'm just uh spitballing here, 25 billion a year, maybe. So a billion added, and they want to cut it down to 18. So a billion added is something. It's not clear Congress will go for that at all. And it's not clear it's uh so that's one thing. On the other hand, uh, it's a mess in reality because we've spent 15 years putting money into this thing, the space launch system, which is this hugely expensive sort of white elephant rocket that NASA has built. Basically, senators pushed it on the Obama administration. It throws away reusable rocket engines from the space shuttle program to power it, and it costs two to four billion dollars a launch. It's not economic. Especially when you have SpaceX launching much cheaper reusable rockets, and you have other players coming in that space as well as well, Amazon and so forth. And the current plan, the Artemis program plan, is to land astronauts on the moon in 2027. These are the official things, using a SpaceX, using SLS and a SpaceX, a reusable rocket, which unfortunately keeps on blowing up. So that ain't gonna happen. Um it ain't gonna happen in 2027, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, there's just all these things that these interstitial steps that have to happen. You have to perfect refueling of those rockets, those the starships. You have to get the starships off the ground and into orbit safely so that they don't blow up and kill all the astronauts or whatever. You have to prepare a landing site for them. The notion of this uh horizontal landing on the moon being hokey dokie without a landing site prepared is untested, let's put it that way. And likewise on Mars, especially if you have people in the thing. There's one thing to land an empty tin can on the moon and it tips over on its side. But if there's people who need it to be standing straight up to get back to Earth, then can't do that. And we haven't done any of that. And that's multi-billion dollar, multi-decade research um to get that point, to land people on the moon and Mars that way.
SPEAKER_00:The temptation, yeah. Yeah, you see, you wrote a piece earlier this year, I think a satire piece, try to say it was quite a satire, yes. Make the moon great again. I was just about to go there, yeah. So you don't take this particularly seriously, at least in its current form.
SPEAKER_01:The National Academy of Sciences has done a couple of reports about why go to the moon, why go to Mars with people. And they've concluded that there ain't no good reason. It really has to be a political decision to do it. And so we we have a political decision to do it, the public kind of supports it, which is the the piece we saw in the past where they kind of liked it until you until it started costing a lot of money. And it's it will cost a lot of money to do it, hundreds of billions of dollars over granted, over 20 years. Yeah, I I don't take what they're doing now seriously. They're gonna do it in Elon Rock in Musk's rocket that keeps blowing up in two years, even if they get the thing into orbit, you still have to man rate it. Like I was an aerospace engineer, it's not that simple. It's it is uh it's unbelievable how many things can go wrong and kill people in space. It's just very hard to get your hands on it around it. Uh and so then you have to ask what is the reason for this and what kind of program are we gonna have? And what I was saying in that satire piece, which was basically that if what we want are boots on the moon, we should just land a pair of boots on the moon, which was not my joke, actually. It was a a NASA person's joke to me, the bootlander. We used to have a joke in airspace engineering about the Sunlander, like we we were gonna land people on the sun. Uh, what we're gonna do is build the spaceship completely out of cash, and then what we're gonna do to get it in the we're gonna launch it at night, and that's how we get it on the sun. And it there's this same air of unreality about this notion of, yeah, we're gonna get people on the moon and beat people to the moon. Like we did that already. There's no justification because what happens in these programs is when the people at OMB, when Russell Vaught gets a look at how much it's really gonna cost to build a moon colony, they're gonna say, ah no. And you then what you end up with is a program like the space shuttle that is a uh workaround, is a shortcut, is boots on the moon, and then you've spent a lot of money, anyways, to do nothing. There's we've if all we end up doing is just putting a couple of astronauts on the moon, they bounce around, they take some pictures, they play golf, and then they get back on the thing, they come back and they go away for 30 years, then what have we done?
SPEAKER_00:And what about that? What about the notion of the moon as a stepping stone to colonizing Mars? And this again has been a long-standing debate. Elon Musk is a Mars guy. Other people are like they're moon guys, but it seems like there's some rationale to have a some kind of base on the moon to get as a landing station, a stepping stone to get to Mars, under the rationale that we need to be a multiplanetary species. That notion has resonated with me personally. A lot of people in my world are like, why don't we work on our own planet before we go multiplanetary and mess that one up too? I like humanity a lot. I want to see it continue. It seems to me, as an insurance policy alone, it does make sense to have some kind of presence on Mars before too long. So that there's a lot of questions right there. Maybe you can address those.
SPEAKER_01:So, yeah, there's a lot packed into that premise that a colony on Mars is even workable. And there's just fundamental questions about the biology of Mars itself that we haven't answered. But you're talking about parking a colony on Mars, like we actually don't know if there's life on Mars. There might be microbes under the surface there, and we haven't even looked hard enough. So, what you're talking about is sending a bunch of biology from Earth to Mars and possibly contaminating that, and we don't know. And we so we have to do a lot of fundamental research just to answer that question, I would say, before we could seriously talk about having a colony on Mars. Mars is a sh terrible place to live. It's an airless, there's wind, but it's 0.07% of the, I'm sorry, it's 7% of the pressure on Earth. It's a tough thing. There's no magnetic field to screen the sun's rays. It's you're gonna have to dig holes for people to live in. And I don't know, I don't want to live in subway tunnels with Elon Musk as my boss, which is what we're thinking about right now. And so the notion of the moon as a stepping stone is a problem from an engineering standpoint because the moon is a gravity well. So you're basically gonna have to pay extra to get from the moon off the moon to it. Doesn't get you a lot of added delta V to go launch from the moon to Mars. Like a stepping stone would be better to be like something in the Lagrange point, a space station there where you could, I don't know, refuel or you know, have a medical facility or something like that if things go wrong and it wouldn't cost as much to maintain, like a I don't think there's any sort of stability point between Earth and Mars. There's not because of their differential orbital characteristics. But so the moon, although you could say the moon is a lab to learn to live on Mars, you could make that argument, like the way the space station is a basically an exercise in keeping people alive in space. But do we need to do that on the moon? Would the something like the space station serve that function just as well? I'd like to see some analysis of that. So the better argument, I think, for having people on the moon or having a lab there is a temporarily staffed one that could look at these questions of like water in the Martian craters, resources there that aren't other otherwise there, or research that could be done there that can't be done on Earth, rather than as a stepping stone to Mars. And I think that's what a lot of people are talking about. There's all this sort of weird manifest destiny lingo about having a seizing the high ground on the moon. That's not how it works. Like there, there's it's not Marvin the Martian sitting there, I'm gonna blast the Earth because it gets in the way of Venus from the moon that you're gonna get a benefit on. It just seems like sort of 19th-century colonialist thought that's still live with us today and resonating with the leadership of NASA when they say things like that now to talk that way. It's the kind of stuff that people have gotten jazzed by ever since Werner von Braun sold the notion of a Mars mission to Collier's magazine and the Disney Company in the 50s. I'm sorry, I'm uh I I'm not very thumbshiny about this, but that's how I that's how I see it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I read Red Mars when I was probably 20 years old. I'm guessing you probably read that series too, Kim Stanley Robinson, an amazing trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. You've not read it?
SPEAKER_01:I've never read it. I gave up science fiction when I became an aeroplot. So I was what was it, 1980, the mid-let's say the mid-1980s. I became an aerospace engineer, and I had read all the science fiction I get my hands on until then. I was a huge science fiction nut. And uh and then I started to learn the math, and I was like, oh my god, this is all a lot of it is but yes, yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, a lot of the things. Red Mars, though, Red Mars and Robinson, he's certainly he's to me in the top of the pantheon of hard sci-fi.
SPEAKER_02:I've heard it's a good, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's a it's an amazing story, really beautifully written, but also I think fairly true to the science. And I've heard no one critique it as being untrue to the science. And he's not really advocating anything, he's basically just kind of describing this future of Martian colonization, different factions, a lot of politics and philosophy and spirituality also is discussed. Amazing books, but certainly inspired me in realizing there is obviously there's a very deep discussion and debate about the merits of any of this, and we haven't done it yet. We've been there with robots, but not humans yet. Looks like we probably are before too long. But I guess the broader question for you, and maybe you've already answered it partially, is what do you see the role of sci-fi and also this newer genre that Robinson himself has pioneered of CliFi, climate science, as in capturing the imagination to spur regular people to be interested in science, to support science funding, to support science journalism. Do you see it as being a big role still? Definitely.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I see what you're talking about as probably being the thing that will keep support for science like alive in our culture. Hell, it got me into aerospace engineering. And I and because what we're seeing, I think, in our politics is that the narratives that control our lives or that are running underneath us, the they're the software that actually power political action and real movement in history. So they're probably more important than the news stories I write, which are more maintenance. I'm a janitor in terms of keeping people who are science literate like up to date on things. Whereas that's the thing that's the onboarding for those people and that gets more people broadly and creates the tropes and the narratives, the Disney and Collier stuff I just crapped on into the culture that actually makes real things happen. And so I think that's key. I actually have been on National Academy of Sciences committees for science writing, where we did have science writers. I think Robinson was on one of them, and they're important people. I'm I bitch and moan about how tough it is to be a journalist, but to be a successful science fiction writer is a tough gig. That's the life of an artist for sure. And so I think they're doing God's work, is what I would say. In my view, I did have, and I I think it's in it's worth looking back at how prescient like some of the new wave science for fiction writing was from the late 60s, early 70s about our situation now. They were warning about the things we're facing now. They were warning about climate change, they were warning about future shock. And so I think just pointing to that, I could write an op-ed arguing for my case here. I won't make you write it.
SPEAKER_00:I'm happy to help. Turning to this notion of sci-fi as prescient and warning of possible dystopian futures. I want to delve a bit into the AI policy side of things. And as we worked on a few pieces together, right? I've been writing a lot in the last couple of years about AI and AI policy. I'm firmly in the AI doomer camp. I don't mind using that label because I truly do believe we're on a very dangerous path.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_00:And I thought we were already in a very dangerous path under Biden and their very laissez-faire, hands-off approach, and Congress doing nothing. And then, of course, Trump comes in and says, No, that was too heavy-handed. Rip. No regulation whatsoever. None. Full steam ahead, pulled out of all the international processes, the Bleicher declaration process. Vance went to Paris in February, said, nope, we're not doing any of that. We're backing out, full steam ahead. This is all about beating China. So to me, it seems like the AI dystopian fiction of the past, the movies, books, it's like it's being played out in real time right now. Is that part of your beat? Are you following this stuff pretty closely? I'm gonna disappoint you. No.
SPEAKER_01:We have a couple of staffers who cover that already. Denny Bouchard here, and another and other writers take it on as it comes along. I probably would be more focusing on the science agencies. So if they step in to this, although, as you say, like the administration is very laissez-faire about it. What I mean, my fear is more immediate than yours, which is that there's gonna be a bust. I think it's clearly a bubble in the stock market. And when that goes piff, I'm worried that it's gonna take down the economy the way that the 2008 recession hit us. So that's my more immediate concern about NVIDIA economics right now with AI. Long term, though. Uh and I you don't even have to be as big a doomer as you to be concerned about the effects on education that we're seeing. I'm talking to students who like say their colleagues can't program anymore. They're not learning and they can't write an essay. How hard is it to write a college essay for God's sakes? And so very hard, yeah. And and so we're yeah, I'm very worried. On the other hand, I do talk to people on the non-LLM side of machine learning who see promise in in areas of medicine for things like molecular discovery and so forth. But that's a little different than the AGI debate and that sort of thing that you've been concerned about. I you hope I'm I maybe I'm more optimistic than you, but only in terms of degree, I'm still on the pessimistic side that people will grow up and say, okay, this is a tool in some cases, but in a lot of cases it's useless or worse. One of the concerns in journalism, maybe to bring it back to that, is that essentially we're concerned we're gonna have AI talking to AI. Like the headlines are written by AI for stories that are gonna be written by AI, for readers who are AI. And like the whole human element of journalism might be removed. If Google, which just is the thing that controls the ad spigot for journalism and much else besides, decides that AI copy is what's gonna be rewarded, and by copy, I mean writing, right? And other text, then that's what we're gonna get. So we might end up living in this phantasmosgoria of crap, AI slop that's completely indecipherable, which is how it is now. If you just type compare this car to that car, what you get is an AI thing that's half the time is completely unreadable, and well, you realize halfway through it's actually about sinks, and like that essentially is the Alice in Wonderland world of media that we could be upon us, I think, very shortly, the way things are going and the way investments are being made.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I call that social weirding. And yeah, I agree with all that. I think we're gonna have more and more of this kind of massive digital global overlay of self-talk with machines. It's it's already ruined search checking in. Yeah, there's so many things happening before our eyes. Kids are already depressed and disconnected from social media, AI round one, and that is AI round two to really worry about our next generation. There's so many things that we just can't touch on today, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Let's move on from that. And I want to ask um, yeah, maybe we'll see. Even happier.
SPEAKER_01:I can just sense that's coming from Etienne.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I will try to end on the optimistic note, but let's first delve into another area which I think is relevant to science policy and science journalism. And this is a tendency toward groupthink and human nature of all types. And one thing I I was raised by a dad who read Science News in South America, and he was not himself a scientist, but he really loved science and he followed it. We talked about it. I studied biology undergrad, so I still am a scientist in terms of my training, even though I'm a lawyer now. I work in neuroscience somewhat today. So anyway, I'm very science literate. I'm in that world, and I've noticed in my 30-some years of being in that world that even though scientists and science are a lot of this day more rational than your average bear, there is still very much a tendency toward groupthink, particularly in times of crisis, right when you want to avoid groupthink. So I'm curious how much you and your colleagues talk about this internally in terms of how to write about tough topics in times of crisis. Is there some self-reflection on how to really address those issues and not simply fall in with the perceived group in times of crisis?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I would say so. If you want Jesuitical like discussions of ethics and morals, then you should become a journalist. If you like self-doubt, journalism is the right thing for you. Like basically, every good journalist I know is filled with self-doubt. They're the kind of you're the kind of person who wakes up at 3 a.m. in the morning wondering, oh God, did I type the wrong number in that story? And if you're not that kind of person, you shouldn't be doing it. If you're the person who never worries about anything, you're not right for journalism. So yeah, a lot of what we talk about is very down-to-earth. Is this a good story? Is this a bad story? Is this a story that's being pushed on us? Is this a field, is this field good? There are fields of science that we don't trust that we really go to extra efforts to check out when they tell us things because there's a track record there of excessive promises. Evolutionary psychology is a classic example. Part of the problem, though, in what you're talking about, is that science journalism has mostly been extirpated in the United States. In 1990, there were something like a hundred science news sections in this country, and now there's one. And there were dozens of science magazines in this country in that same time period. And now there's still a few, but they are much less than they used to be. I worked at National Geographic for a few years, and God love the place, but it's not the magazine that it was, even when I was there in 2015, which is amazing, right? It's an American icon. And so that, and that's and people don't realize that they think the news comes from free from somewhere. It's really it's a bunch of people making phone calls, like here I am. Like, what do you think of this doc? And that's all journalism is. So when you have only 10% of the people that you had 20 years ago making those phone calls and things like that, then what you get is much less critical journalism. And so you might see that as groupthink, but really what it is, you're looking at a landscape that has been denuded of all of its critical analysts. And so the reason why it might seem like groupthink is because it's the same great story, just republished three different times in three different places. Oh, wait, if you look at it, this is an AP story. And if you noticed, like how stories now don't have sourcing on them. I I see this in the New York Times. Uh other places it shouldn't be, like they only have one source on the story. EPA Today announced that such and such. And there's nobody who's like a former EPA person saying, like, what? And there's nobody who's an expert on the thing on such and such saying, yeah, no. Because there's it. Why is that? I we've journalism can't afford that anymore. Google pays you the same nickel for that crap story, the single source story, as it did for the carefully researched one that took more time. And in fact, it rewarded the crap story more because it came out faster. And that's just the economics of it, and that has driven people out of the field. So the other thing you might be seeing is that people do circle the wagons when things get tough. Like I was reporting on the pandemic, and I was getting death threats. And so what? I got death threats when I was at USA Today, too, but more of them, and like a lot of luminacy from people who like you know did their own research on things. And my appetite for out of out-of-the-box or off-the-grid answers for things goes way down when I pick up the phone and it's somebody screaming about fake news who is brainwashed by some crap that some fake on YouTube forced down their throat. When you get that a lot, and you could see people saying, Yeah, no. Some of the complaints about groupthinker are bogus. There's this trope that the lab leak is the great one. That there was this trope that a paper came out, I think, in Lancet or Nature that called the idea of a lab leak a conspiracy theory, and we all fell in the line about it. But that's crap. Like I reported, who knows? Like, we don't know, because what I report is what my colleagues reported. But that's not convenient to that narrative, which people who are making a living off of drifting on that idea, don't want to say. And so when you point that out, it gets ignored. And so I'm a little bit