Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

A couple years ago, a little more than a couple years ago,

episode 86 of Mindscape, we had Lord Martin Reese on the show.

Martin is a very well-known and respected theoretical astrophysicist,

but he's also someone who worries about the future of humanity.

So we were talking about existential risks, the prospects of post-humanity,

stuff like that.

And naturally we talked about one example that was in the news not long before,

which was a large Hadron collider, the giant particle accelerator in Geneva,

which we don't remember now because it didn't happen,

but people were worried at the time about the chance that you would make a tiny black hole

or a new kind of particle that would utterly destroy the earth.

And physicists, of course, worried about this too.

They don't want to die because they did some particle physics experiment gone terribly wrong.

So they thought about it. They thought about it really hard.

And they said, as far as we can tell, the chances of this happening are just incredibly, incredibly tiny,

we should just go ahead.

There were people out there who said, what do you mean incredibly tiny?

How tiny does it have to be if we're really talking about the end of all life on earth?

And Martin Reese had an interesting rejoinder to that.

He said, well, there's also a probability that you will find a free energy source

that will completely remove our dependence on far and oil forever.

...