Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and with me is today's guest, Owen Cotton-Barritt.

Owen is a mathematician at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford,

where his work focuses on, I would describe it as theoretical questions involved in

trying to improve the far future. Owen, welcome to the show. And does that seem like an

accurate way to describe your research? That's a bit grandiose sounding, but that is what the

eventual aim is. It seems like we...

The future could be a very big thing ahead of us,

and if we're able to do things to make it go a bit better

rather than worse, then that could be quite important.

And it's hard to work that out,

but it's maybe important enough that it's worth further study.

What a delightfully affable British way to describe this very important project. I love it.

Just so we can get clear on our terms, when we talk about the far future, what kind of time scale are we talking about?

Is this, you know, 10 years, 100 years, a thousand years? What kind of order of magnitude?

I mean, let's go with 100 years up, but I really do mean up. Not just like capping out at millions of years.

And kind of millions of years is roughly how long humanity has been around for.

Or even necessarily billions of years. At the moment, we are a apparently unique force in the universe because we're not just moving it around

according to kind of following existing patterns but we're building things deliberately as we

want them to be and at the moment we can do that over most of the

...