Hello everyone, welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. We've all heard that the earth is getting warmer,

that we're in the middle of global climate change, and that climate change is being caused by human beings,

and there are effects on the globe, whether it's farming, or fossil fuel burning, transportation, etc.

So it's a depressing prospect because it is very real, and it's going to hurt us in very important ways.

But nevertheless, there's still room for bits of optimism. Maybe we can do something about it. Maybe there is reason for hope that the human race will actually figure itself out,

and get this right before we completely destroy the planet.

Today's guest is Ramesh Nam, who is a professional technologist, investor, also a science fiction writer.

He's the author of the Nexus Trilogy, which is a wonderful set of books I encourage you to read,

and it's about a future where we have brain implants that let us communicate with the internet wirelessly,

something I'm very, very interested in myself. But in his professional capacity, he's thinking mostly these days about our energy future,

and especially the future of renewable energy. So in today's podcast, we sort of take the optimistic view on climate change and energy generally.

We say, is it conceivable that we will be able to free ourselves from a dependence on fossil fuels and get to a point where we can still enjoy the high energy consumption that drives our society right now without destroying the atmosphere or leading to global climate change?

So Ramesh is optimistic by nature, and he's pretty convincing. He knows this stuff, he lays out a case that at least it's possible to be optimistic.

We might do terrible things to the planet, but it's not absolutely necessary. And of course, at the end of the podcast, I do take a little bit of time to ask about brain implants and other crazy science fictiony things.

So it's a very fun conversation, a little bit of reason for hope in the midst of this doom and gloom.

Remember that there is a website for mindscape, preposterousunivers.com slash podcast, and on the website, you can find information about going to the Patreon page,

supporting on Patreon if you want ad free versions of the show, and if you want to monthly ask me anything episode. And with that, let's go.

Ramesh, welcome to the mindscape podcast.

So I asked you on because I'm fascinated by what things you've said and done about clean energy and the future. But in looking over the various things you've written and spoken about, this overwhelming sense of optimism comes through about technological progress and the future and so forth.

And you're not, I've met more optimistic people even than you, but I would definitely say that you're 90th percentile optimist about the future.

That's right.

So why don't we help the audience a little bit, place you in some kind of context because you have this fun trajectory where you came up as a computer scientist, then you wrote fiction and now you're proselytizing for clean energy.

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