Sandra Faber on the Future of the Earth

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2021

⏱️ 89 minutes

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Summary

Of all the scenarios that keep astrophysicist Sandra Faber up at night, it's not the Earth's increasing volcanism, the loss of photosynthesis, or even the impact of a massive asteroid. Rather, it's the collapse she's certain will result from the unbridled growth of the world's economies. Join Faber and EconTalk host Russ Roberts as they explore what the most inexorable law of physics has to do with economics and whether the world's growing economies pose a problem or provide the solution for the finiteness of planet Earth.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.6	Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and
0:17.8	find links down there information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives
0:23.2	with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd
0:30.3	love to hear from you.
0:37.2	Today is October 17th 2021 and my guest is astronomer Sandra Faber of the University of California,
0:43.8	Santa Cruz. We're going to have a conversation about humanity. We're going to go back about 14
0:48.9	billion years and we're going to go forward about a million years. So hold on to your hats.
0:54.7	Sandra's field is a formation of galaxies. She's published hundreds of scientific papers.
1:00.0	She's won a lot of awards, medals, prizes, delivered many named lectures, a bunch of honorary
1:04.8	degrees. She's extraordinarily successful academic astronomer. And we connected the two of us
1:12.0	because Sandra's interested in the question of what would the economy a million years from now be
1:18.0	like. And she and I had the beginning of a conversation about that. We're going to continue that here.
1:24.0	And we're going to talk about what an economist thinks about that question, which I think will be
1:28.6	maybe amusing and fun. And we're going to start with a little bit of astronomy. So Sandy, let's get
1:34.1	started. Now you have suggested to me and I suspect elsewhere that astronomy is kind of expensive.
1:41.5	How expensive is it?
1:42.4	A few years ago, by the way, Russ should say how glad I am to be here and really looking forward to
1:51.6	this wonderful conversation. Asked your question a few years ago, I estimated that the typical PhD
2:01.6	from our department, if we were completely honest about it and tried to incorporate and include
2:09.3	all the things that went into supporting that student, including the expensive telescopes that
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