Ep. 000: David Krakauer

…begin transmission…

Caitlin McShea: All right. Hi, David, how are you today? 

David Krakauer:  Hello. I'm here at the alien crash site, so I have to be a bit careful…

CM: …and that's why you're glowing.

DK: …It's why I'm glowing, because I'm glowing in the reflection of the combustion of these hyper warp drives.

CM: Of course, haha. So, I should take a moment to introduce you introduce the project. This is a new InterPlanetary interview series called “Alien Crash Site.” It is hosted by me. I am Caitlin McShea, and it was invented by you, you are David Krakauer. David Krakauer is the William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the president of the Santa Fe Institute, and the inaugurator/Captain of the Interplanetary Project. And this Alien Crash Site interview series will explore a variety of artifacts, apparently many of which David has in his possession. 

**David keeps displaying various toys and trinkets to the camera during Caitlin’s introduction.

CM: Oooh, that's a good one.

DK: I’m just going through a few to sort of give people a sense of what we might be talking about.

CM: Right, that’s a promising one.

DK: And this one was brought back by Caitlin from another Planet!

**long pause** 

CM: So…Alien crash site.

DK: Yes. Sorry about that.

CM: That's okay, at least I can see them. Ok, let me also say that Alien Crash Site existed kind of in the realm of the invention of InterPlanetary. We started talking about Alien Crash Site back in 2017, before InterPlanetary was ever launched. We just have the opportunity to get into it, now that 2020 has made us all isolated, in our own zones. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

DK: We all live in an alien crash site, now. Yeah, so the idea of Alien Crash Site is sort of the following, which is: Imagine that you stumbled onto an Alien Crash Site, and you discover an artifact of extraterrestrial provenance. And the key is that this discovery could change everything…

**shows another toy

…like this, by analyzing this, by studying this, whatever that object was, you might come to an understanding that you wouldn't have had, otherwise. And so that's the idea, and what are these artifacts? I guess the series is an effort to attempt to ask what the ultimate Alien Crash Site artifact would be, how it would work, how it would change everything and to discuss it. You know, what does this thing mean in the broader context of our stage of technological evolution?

CM: Right.

DL: And it could be anything, it could be a pencil case, a chalk, could something inanimate. 
Like that's an example.

**holds up another toy***

DK: And, and that's the basic idea.

CM: Yes, but that idea, I think, stems from this 70’s, Soviet, sci-fi novel, Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. And I think that's important to mention, because there's a great fear, there’s great risk. It's not like you just stumble upon this lovely meadow and you find things that change the planet. Like, you could die, you could dissolve! 

DK: Yes, exactly. No, that's right. So yes, so Stalker…

**David pauses to show the camera that he’s wearing a “Stalker” T-shirt

DK: …which of course is the film by Tarkovsky based on the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic. We should talk about that a little bit, and then we'll put it in a larger context, because I think it's kind of fun to do that. So, the idea of Roadside Picnic is that there has been some event, some visitation an alien crash perhaps, or a visit, and a series of Zones on the planet, six of them, have been infected by some presence or some technology. The governments of the world have decreed that these should be a non-visitable, that they should be avoided. And they're right, because it's full of dangers and traps, but it's also full of objects which seem to be miraculous or portend to be miraculous. And there are figures who enter into these areas, these Zones, illegally in search of those artifacts, which they can then sell. And they have all sorts of horrible names and they can turn you into slime, nd God knows what.

The most sought after of all artifacts is this golden sphere. The golden sphere is an artifact that is believed to give you some access to some universal knowledge. And what slowly dawns on you over the course of time is that it's not clear precisely what this is, right? In other words, why does this place exist? What happened? What is this technology? How do you understand it?

And there's a kind of a twist – without giving anything away – the Strugatsky brothers suggest that actually what we consider to be these super advanced technologies were actually just litter or the detritus of a picnic, right? Roadside Picnic. That aliens sort of stopped off on on earth, not necessarily for Earth. I think they did it by mistake, like if you had to go to the toilet or something…

CM: precisely…

DK: that a bit of a picnic. And they left this junk behind, which to us of course seems miraculous. So, it's a bit of a twist that one civilization might consider earth-shatteringly, planet-shatteringly advanced, is to another civilization just it's garbage. Rubbish. And that was always a very interesting idea.

Ok, but Stalker was a Russian filmmaker, Tarkovsky’s take on the Strugatsky brothers’ novel. It’s that same sort of idea that the Polish science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem wrote this wonderful book, Solaris. Tarkovsky makes a movie about it, and humanizes it. So Tarkovsky humanized Roadside Picnic, and turned it into something much more mystical, with a completely different cast of characters. So now you have the Stalker, you have the Writer and you have the Professor. It's not quite clear to me why, but we can discuss that. And now the Zone is in some sense, almost like a grail-legend, where they're going in search of the meaning of life and some form of salvation for themselves, or their family, right?. And there the room is the golden sphere. 

CM:  Yeah. I would say it's a loose adaptation of two minutes of the book, but it's an amplification of the mood or the mystery of the Zone…and the time. Like, the idea is that when Stalkers exist in the Zone, they have no idea how long they're in it, the duration of their stays. I think that Tarkovsky does a good job of eliciting that feeling, but it's not a true adaptation of Roadside Picnic, and I think the audience should know that. But it's great. 

DK:  Absolutely. It's very Tarkovsky-style. He wasn't really interested in science at all, he was interested in the spirit. And so, he took it, very interestingly, he took that idea of this area of the Zone, of mystery, and pursued it as a kind of a quest narrative.

CM: And it's good to bring that up because now it kind of draws into focus the very diverse quality of what an object or artifact could be. So, in Stalker it's a room, it's a location. But in the book, it's a golden sphere, or a sparkler, or whatever. And now, you know, you can go on to envision, what is this artifact? And how do we interpret what we discover? 

DK:  Yeah. We've talked about this, about the series here and how we might think about these artifacts. And I think you can think of everything in terms of threes, and three by three tables,  and three categories. One, you want to think about the artifact from the perspective of the producer of the artifact, the constructor, the “why do they do it? Do they do it for us?” Like in 2001, when they leave us a monolith to sort of accelerate our cultural evolution. But when the Strugatsky brothers did it, it was just their litter. They had no intention of leaving us anything.

CM: They didn't even notice us.

DK: They didn't notice us and didn’t care. So, there's that kind of thing. There's a more sinister kind of object, too, like in War of the Worlds, where we were left underground forever before we even evolved, just to destroy us once we did. This is a bit like the Andromeda strain, by the way.
It’s also in Stanislav Lem’s other great book, His Master's Voice, where there's a neutrino signal, which we intercept. We never decipher it. But in the process of trying to understand it we manufacture things.

CM:  Right, like there's this halfway understanding which we can still gain utility from, even though we're completely ignorant to it’s true function. 

DK: Exactly, that we never will know, right. And then, so that's them and then there's us. And well, they are sort of entangled, but it seems to me be kind of fun to discuss real objects in our history that we've discovered that have a little bit of this quality of being a crash site artifact, and what they stand for in our culture and in the near future, before we get onto my artifact, which is totally transformative.

CM: Yeah. So, there seems to be this historical rallying towards mystery as miraculous. When you think of things like the Easter Island heads, or you think of Stonehenge, or these physical spaces much like the room in Stalker ­– because they can't be explained, or because we haven't yet or at the time of their discovery been able to replicate their placement, we assume that it's from something other. Usually we assume extraterrestrials or religious or universal leaders. And we attempt forever in archeological practices and anthropological practices to try to get closer to understanding its function or meaning, but it's like the law of infinite divisibility. 

And maybe we have in a kind of mythical sense, but probably not…even if they are human created or alien left, we probably don't fully understand them. And that happens across time. 

DK: True. Yeah. That’s right. I think that Petroglyphs, Petra forms, Megaliths all have that quality. Partly because of their scale and what seems to be an extraordinary understanding of cosmology and orbits, that they encode astronomical events, that leads certain deranged people to suggest to they are of alien origin. They make for wonderful science fiction. But you're right, I mean, there's this idea that unlike standard science where you get to do experiments, you don't get to do experiments with history, so the evidence is always circuitous, and you can never be sure that you've understood. They do have that quality. I think we're actually right, this mysterious quality that they seem to be there for a purpose, they were built by human, so we should be able to divine the purpose, but nevertheless, we never do it. Yeah. That's absolutely true. 

CM:  But so there is, I think, the encoded part of that is kind of fundamental to what you’re saying. So, let's assume they were built by humans. I might be a little more like extra-romantic, but fine, let's assume they were built by humans, since they most likely where. They do seem to encode some meaningful knowledge leap. Like now we know when to harvest our crops. Now we know when visibility is safest for travel, things like that. And so, it seems like these artifacts that we're going to be discussing, the things that were pulling out of these Zones have to do the same thing. And that's why they're so misunderstood. They're encoded, but with the function that we assume is for our benefit. We don't know necessarily…

DK: You know, I've talked about the Rosetta stone, right? The Rosetta stone had a function and that function was to provide a means of interpreting three different languages. In the second century BC, I guess there was this, and it has ancient encryption for Egyptian, Demotic, and Greek. It was buried under ground until Napoleon decided to go and conquer Egypt, and in the process takes his savants with him, and they excavate this extraordinary artifact and they know one of the languages or maybe one and a half.

So, it took a while until one person came along and got it solved, and was able to use it then as a reference for interpreting Egyptian script elsewhere because they had this. So that's a nice example of something. I think when it was forged in Memphis, when King Ptolemy had it made, it wasn't made for posterity, I don't think. I think it was made for their own purposes, although I'm not sure, and that information was lost for nearly 2000 years until it was then finally decoded. 

So that's an interesting example of an artifact that's turned out to be extraordinary and important. But its function, I’m not sure…it’s interesting. I don't know who it was for, but there are plenty of others. I mean, one of my favorites that has this quality is the Antikythera

mechanism, and this is kind of beautiful. So this was about 1901, some fishermen off the coast of Greece fished up this what looked like this totally rusted orrery, clock or Astrolabe-like structure. And it was dated to the second century. Actually, it’s a calculator for calculating the orbits of the planets. It's based on Hellenistic astronomy, but we couldn't build anything like that in the West or understand that kind of science until about the 14th century. So, if we'd found it any earlier, we wouldn’t know what it was anyway, just put a bit of metal, right. 

We found it in the early 20th century where we had the science by then, we'd recovered the science that had been lost. But it's a very interesting case. I mean, here unbelievably advanced ideas, unbelievably advanced systems of construction would have been lost certainly to Western civilization for 2000 years. So that's a beautiful artifact and has many of these qualities I think, as Alien Crash Site might. And maybe it will.

CM: Do you think that's coincidental? In terms of the mysticism of “object,” is it possible that we only found it when we were able to decipher it? Perhaps it's been found and tossed for 2000 years, you know? I think there is something to be said about the moment of discovery, that's kind of influential. 

DK: That's an interesting point. I don't know. I mean, it could have been dredged up earlier and they just sort of thought it was just bit rock or something. I think that's a very good point. It had to be restored. It wasn't pristine and they wouldn't have known where a gear was. And so yes, it may have just been trash. I can't think of many other cases, certainly hidden languages or lost languages have so many of these arguments, even today there are certain languages that we can translate. I don't know if there's a kind of propitious moment. I doubt it. 

CM: Haha, ok, that's fine. I know you also wanted to discuss Borges in the framework of an artifact.

DK: Yes! So in this kind of topology of objects that we don't understand and maybe never could, there is a wonderful short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1945 called The Aleph. And the aleph is a very remarkable thing. I think it looks a little bit like this… 

**Holds up a magnifying demi-sphere

DK: …it isn’t a motor, it's some kind of lens, and this lens is in the basement of a very mediocre poet, who has set himself the task of writing one of those kind of compendious cosmogonic poem that covers the history of every place on earth and every culture and every civilization, it’s just ridiculous. And, it's turns out that this poet who has been writing this poem about all these places possesses in his basement an aleph, which turns out to be a very magical object that is a single point in space that has access to all points in space.

“Aleph,” of course, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, it symbolizes one, it symbolizes oneness. And there's a joke in it, actually, because Borges later revealed that he was probably making fun of Neruda and mocking gently his extraordinary poem collection, The Heights of Machu Picchu, which has this quality of being a cosmogony. I think Borges was a bit peeved by that, but anyway. I think the anecdotes are interesting in being one of these artifacts that has magical powers that has a kind of Faust quality to it that allows you to be greater than you are. And that this poet who is actually very mediocre, by virtue of owning this thing that no one else had, could do what they could not do. It’s a beautiful example.

CM: Why does everything have to be embodied in an object, do you think? Why isn't there this kind of immaterial transference? Why do things have to be discovered? 

DK: Hmm, that's interesting. 

CM: I don't expect an answer, but I'm just wondering.

DK:  No, that’s good. Why our obsession with artifact? I mean, I do think that if you think about films like Contact or novels like His Master's Voice, those are cases where it's not an artifact, it’s a signal from space. I think there's something romantic about the archeological discovery, right? In other words, to just discover a signal, you have to have antennae or a telescope. You have to do science to begin with. Whereas if you're in your garden, you just see a giant monolith, anyone can find it. I think that's what makes the Alien Crash Site alluring because, you know, kids could be out playing and stumble across something extraordinary, as opposed to some huge facility that's required. 

CM: No, I think that's good. It sort of “Everyman-izes” the possibility of this discovery. 

DK:  But there's also something about physical embodiment, actually. In fact, we've talked about this scientifically for quite a while, which is, what would you accept as unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life, right? And there's a big difference. It seems to be between going to Mars and finding a Lovecraftian subterranean city, right, and you would be like, “Okay, game over, no dispute,” as opposed to, “beep beep beep beep beep,”. That could be anything! That could be the wheel on my Rover. I think there's something definitive about a physical object, which is always kind of a little open.

CM: And of course the signal option demands that we have an object that's capable of receiving and transmitting, so we have to kind of pre-assume a physical embodiment or equipment in order to capture those transmissions.

DK: That's true, too, but there's another maybe scientific angle on this which goes back to early work in Complexity actually. You know, what is life like and how do we know? And famously, in the 1940s, John Von Neumann, one of these kind of super-genius polymaths, got very interested in life as a replication. What is life? More than the replication of information? He said that wasn't sufficient…and that's a longer conversation. I think he's right, and he suggested that life should be a universal constructor. It's a bit like a factory. It's not just information that's copied, its that an object is made that can copy the information. So, and he came up with the theory of universal constructor, which was very physical and, and there was a lot of discussion up until the sixties about what it would take to build such a thing.

And so it was interesting in that history that he moved towards a much more physical model of what it meant for life to exist in a way from the slightly more informatic, insubstantial, replication-based theory. So that's kind of interesting too. 

CM: So, it demands physical replication? It demands an engineering of sorts towards the future, which is a lot more complex, I think, that maybe other early notions of what life could do or the limits, of life. The engineering aspect seems a little more complicated, and that would reduce quite a bit if we take that as true, what could exist in this realm of life, which maybe makes it harder for us to find it.

DK: Yeah. It's interesting. This question, I mean, we've talked about this: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and the golden record.

CM: Yes! That’s such a good object to touch upon, too. 

DK: It's an interesting object, right? Because it's kind of ridiculous. So, it’s 1977 and Carl Sagan was involved in that project. It just seems so forward-looking that we could put on this vinyl shape, but I mean, most kids now, if you showed them a record, they’d say, “Why wasn't it a golden MP3 file?”

And so the whole idea of a golden record actually, even within our lifetimes has looked like an anachronism. It's hilarious. So I think that, but then there's the question of what was on it, which is even more silly. And I think that the idea that people could translate human signals is perhaps a bit naive. Again, what I think Lem is doing in His Master's Voice, is he's saying you're never going to understand it, and it's not possible without having all of the physical embodiment and reference, which gives you this kind of prior information upon which you base and interpretations. Without any of that, it's meaningless. It's just ones and zeros. It could be constructed in any way you like. 

And you know, it's a little bit like…it's very interesting, in antiquity pre-Darwinian world when the Greeks and the Romans dug up fossils, you know, what did they do? I mean, it's like, there are these giants, so what, okay, so what did they do? So it's interesting, right? In China, they made dragons out of them, which is great!  But in the Christian West, they assembled dinosaur bones into giant humans, like, “There's Adam and Eve, here they are.” So that's what you do, right? You interpret things according to your preexisting beliefs and knowledge, however silly that is.

CM: I think that's great. I stumbled upon a meme about the hubris of the human being in our sending the golden record. And the joke is that our first contact with the universe was to send unsolicited nudes, a mixtape and directions back to our place. It's hilarious, imagining our society. And it's also interesting to think that even for most humans who have access to the images that are inscribed on the record, or the music that's included, there were deliberate choices to create a star map that's supposedly more universally understood than the actual maps that we use when we navigate stellar systems. So it's just funny to me that there was this additional level of encryption between the ordinary human being, human language, and then what we expect an alien to be able to interpret. 

DK:  Yeah, no, I mean, that was that. And there's another horrible irony. And I can't remember where, but in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, he points out that the voice on the golden record, and I can't remember his name, but I think he was a former head of the UN once, or something,  also former Nazi! What a great voice of humanity to put in the universe!

CM: Yes. A resounding morality expressed universally…

DK:  It’s the voice of one of these most awful human beings. So there's that too. 

CM: That's wonderful, and not at all surprising.

DK: Wait, we didn't mention Ted Chiang!

CM: Okay, wait: “THREE, TWO ONE: So you wanted to discuss Ted Chang…”

DK: Yes. now Ted Chang gives a very interesting twist because, as you said earlier, it's not an artifact, it's knowledge, and it's a knowledge of a timeless representation of events. Actually, it's an essay on modern approaches to classical mechanics. So they actually don't encode cause and effect relations as Newton did, but what are called action principles, which can be expressed in a timeless way. And in the film, the insight of understanding this alternative framing of mechanics, say like a Hamiltonian framing was that we could now think back and forwards in time. And so that was very interesting…unbelievably implausible, but the idea that the gift, the artifact, appeared to be a weapon was in fact knowledge, which would vastly increase our capabilities, that was a great example, I think, for a non-artifactual gift. 

CM: Yes, exactly. 

DK: And it took us a bit, right? I mean it wasn't anyone who could assemble a trust there. The protagonist she was the one… 

CM: Well, it's funny because she had the skillset, she has the specific skillset to decipher things as a linguist, but she also had the character, that’s something that we talked about earlier, she had the character to not be confronted by fear of the unfamiliar, and to also stifle the fear in others. Like China almost destroyed it, Russia almost destroyed it. So, there was something also about the particular character. Maybe where they were…those Zones, maybe they weren’t just headquarters across the planet, but in these areas there is a linguist who was kind, who might best be able to help us secure this understanding. 

DK: There was a linguist with character. Yes.

CM: We would hope.

DK: Yes. So that was, that's a good, that is an interesting one. Even though in his most recent stories.

CM: I haven't read the new collection.

**spoilers edited out

CM: Wow. Oh no!

DK: So he's sort of…if The Story of your Life was nice and optimistic, these are not so optimistic. 

CM: *sighs. Well, do we want to get into it? Do we want to ask the dangerous question? At the risk of great personal harm, death, imprisonment, what have you, what is the object, the artifact that David Krakauer hopes to discover the Zone? 

DK:  Well, I've thought about it, it's very tricky. Let me take you through the thought process, because on the one hand, I like this idea of discovering something extraordinarily modest, but which is incontrovertibly revolutionary. And there's a wonderful physicist who worked at IBM, Charlie Bennett, who makes this point: that if you traveled to the far ends of the universe and you arrive at a planet and you discovered a safety pin, that's all you would need. 

It’s a very simple object, but what kind of civilization is required to make a safety pin? It has to have natural energy, and manufacturing, and nappies or whatever. And so, or in my case, you go into the Zone, and you discover a Rubik's cube. You’re like, “No way!” So, I think the object doesn't have to be particularly impressive, but it has to imply the existence of a certain kind of culture, in order to be made. 

Actually, there's a name for this called Guttman Scaling, or implicational scaling: that there are certain objects that pre-suppose the existence of prior objects. For example, it doesn't exist in any society that doesn't also have fire, right? So, they go in that order. If you've got a Rubik's cube, you've got a plastic manufacturing plant, you know you've got Led Zeppelin. So, I went down that path, and I thought, “No, no. Nope.” 

So, then I finally came to this, I have to have my own artifact. I can invent one and it has to have properties of the aleph and the Antikythera mechanism and things that I really admire. For example, this history of calculating devices is something I’m interested in, if some of the most beautiful artifacts on the planet now are brass and bronze calculators made in the 17th, 18th century. 

CM: Totally.

DK: You know, there’s something called the Pascaline that Pascal, when he was 20, invented, Most people know Pascal from his math and geometry. But Pascal, when he was about 18, wrote a treatise on conic sections that blew everyone away. It was like, “Who is this kid?!” And then his dad, who was a tax collector, was making mistakes. And so he said, I'm going to invent this thing, and he did. It’s the most amazing thing, you can see it in museums. It looks like a little beautiful metal box.

So, I kind of was into those, I thought, well, I like that. But then, at the other end of the scale, you get things like the Difference Engine and the analytical with Babbage, that was never made. It's a kind of a generalization of the Pascaline, it's a universal Turing machine. But, the analytical engine is huge, so that doesn't work. I don't want something huge… 

CM: Right. You have to be able to take it out of the Zone. 

DK: You have to pick it out, put in your pocket. Keep the police from seeing you walking off with an analytical engine. So, what I did is I came up with is my thing, and I call it the A.A.D.Q. And the AADQ is actually extremely unreasonable, and unoriginal, because it's the Aleph, Antikythera, Dynamic Quasi-crystal. 

CM: Sorry, wait, I laughed and I interrupted you. Will you say it again?

DK: I'll say it again, if I can. It's the “Aleph, Antikythera, Dynamic Quasi-crystal.” It's the Aleph, because the Aleph in the story brings all points in space to a single point, its this global awareness device, and I like that. On the other hand, I don't like it mystifications because I'm a scientist. And the thing about the Antikythera device is that it could be worked out in time. I like to think that we could eventually work it out. So that's the second part. Then I kind of like crystalline forms, and kind of got into things that don't look living that have living-like properties, like what we see in the Andromeda Strain and so on.

It just looks so nondescript and so sinful and yet it encodes in its hidden symmetries an almost infinite amount of information, hence the quasi-crystal, the aperiodic crystal.

CM: Can you describe what it would look like? Because I don’t know.

DK: what it might look like…

**DK circles his office in search for something that might work.  

CM: I like the idea, moving forward in this interview series, of assigning all of our interviewees the homework of crafting a model of their object.

**DK returns with a hot pink monkey

DK: It could look a bit like that. Maybe not. I think if you found that, you'd think that's not an AADQ. Okay. So that would be one possibility, that's mine. Let me work through the ethics, if you like, or that behind this position for me is that once it gives you this power, it can be understood. And, and it rewards people who are rigorous in their thought. In other words, if you picked up the Antikythera mechanism, as you said, if you didn't think, you'd just throw it back in the air, it's like, what is that rubbish? And so, I like this idea that it rewards the prepared mind. But then, as I also said, I liked the idea that it's not made up of recognizable materials, or any mechanical materials that we currently use their hands, it’s crystalline.

You know Superman, his home is the Fortress of Solitude, which is this huge crystal palace in the Arctic. And the way that he builds it is by throwing a little crystal into the snow, and then it just replicates into this huge palace. I love that idea. I sort of love that idea of a tiny little thing that seems so lacking in internal complication on first inspection, nevertheless expands into something, and takes over the wilderness. 

CM: That sounds like a viral particle. That's a little scary, right?

DK: Maybe, yes, but a nice one. 

CM: And when you say that you hope that it rewards rigor, it seems to me that a Rubik's cube or lthese puzzley things you've shown us, even if it's made from this unrecognizable crystal structure, that here's gotta be something kind of pliable about it. I'm trying…I'm really trying to imagine what it might look like. 

DK: Yeah, no, I, yeah. I don't know either. I mean, that's part of the problem because I haven't yet found it and when I will, I will show it to you. 

CM: Thanks.  

DK: What else do I have here that might…Oh yeah. I mean, interestingly in my office, you know, that's kind of Rosetta stone.

**DK shows a wooden block covered in carved symbols.

DK: like this is sort of interesting isn't it? this could kind of look a bit like that, but crystalline. Perhaps the other side to this, though, and I think it is more of an SFI side, is the idea that an entire community would devote their lives to comprehending it. It's a little bit like the Glass Bead Game, right? So this, this idea that this tiny little thing, like the aleph, has infinite universal complexity, that communities would dedicate their lives to mastering it or trying to. That Glass Bead Game like element interests me too. It's not just an artifact that gives one person some special power, but actually creates around it an entire culture of investigation. 

CM: Well, that kind of brings us back to the tradeoffs mentioned in Roadside Picnic. Who's to say that a Aatalker doesn't come across you’re A.A.D.Q. and sell it to a bartender for $300 because they need to feed their kid. In which case the A.A.D.Q  exists outside of the realm of the Institute that's dedicating itself to the study of it. And then at the same time, you can put your Institute-issued spec suit on, and get in your flying car, and through the rigors of protocol, approach the Zone, but maybe you'll never discover it. But if you do, then you have the community of minds around it. 

So, there's also this kind of the community, I think, that exists, I think that's relevant. And I think that SFI is a perfect example of that, but you still need the kind of fearless criminals come and get it. I don't know if that's you, it might be. You just also happen to be the president of the Institute. 

DK: Yeah. I stole it. I stole it. I think that's actually, that's a good point. I hadn't thought of the two sides to what you just said. So, one is that the character required to make the discoveries could be quite different from those who understand it, right?

CM: Right.

DK: And that's absolutely true. I mean, even true now, right? I mean with space exploration and, you know, test pilots and astronauts and geeks on the ground, it geeks space too…

CM: I’d say primarily so…

DK: So there's that side, but then there's who possesses it, and certainly that’s true, too, right? That if you look at beautiful medieval Renaissance, early history of science-like artifacts, many of them are in private collections, because they have the money to own them, not necessarily the wherewithal to you understand them? I think that's a very good point, perhaps that is the history of artifacts, like moving between these communities, those who can afford them and those who can study them and sell them. It's a good point 

CM: …and those who never ever access them. 

DK:  I'm just thinking now that you say that, that's sort of true. If you think of complex reality as a kind of large version of this artifact, then it's sort of true. I mean, funding agencies, and then those who received the grants to study, they're not the same people, necessarily.

CM: Right! You would hope that it's a world full of Medicis. They want the beautiful things, but they also want the people who are going to understand there to assess the beautiful things. And those are the ones who are employed. But it's not often that way, you know. Quite often the artifact is kept within my palace, just for me and my amusement. So yeah, it’s the question that kind of crosses across various types of these discoveries throughout humanity’s history. 

DK:  But to your point, I mean the reverse is true, too. I mentioned the Glass Bead Game, but remember, in that novel, the Magister Ludi that kind of great adept of the game, which is kind of like a super game of life. It's like a Mandela that you manipulate, or a Go board, or something. The protagonist decides at a certain point that that's not enough, that you can't isolate yourself from society, you have to give back. And that's what he does. He leaves, you know, Castalia in order to go back into society and inform people of what he's learned. He dies, unfortunately, before he can do that. But nevertheless, that's also interesting with making your insights accessible. 

CM: So, then, what would the A.A.D.Q solve for humanity when collected, removed and understood? Is there a problem that it addresses, or is it a wonderful solution to problems we haven't even thought up or imagined? 

DK: Well that's a good question, I hadn't got to that point yet, but I like that. 

CM: I ask because, when I think about asking other people, or when I think about answering this question myself, I almost kind of work backwards and it's like, “Okay, I want this Y to be resolved. I think this X would do it. And so, I want to find a device that does X to Y to make solution Z,” but that's not what you’re saying. It's interesting to me that you went object first, as it's so opposed to my thought process. 

DK: Yeah, well, I think that’s because yours is much more noble, in a way. I think it's a very good point. It’s trying to solve the problem versus wanting to solve a puzzle. And I have to say to my shame, I'm sort of interested in solving the puzzle. And you're absolutely right, I think that is the Glass Bead Game dilemma. He was just working on this very esoteric problem, but to whose benefit? I think you make it a very interesting question about pure and applied science. I like the question, because I guess the cases that we've discussed of mixed, right? 

So in other words, certainly the Rosetta stone was functional. The Pascaline was functional. The Monoliths were kind of functional, and you know, in a certain way The Andromeda Strain…I can't give away… it is functional…

CM: Yeah, but not for us… 

DK: Well, given its nefarious object, right?

CM: Precisely.

DK: So, they often do have this character that they were built with utility in mind. But I think it's true to say that a lot of scientists are much more engaged with the puzzle than the use. I would be quite happy to give the A.A.D.Q., after I'd gained mastery of the universe ,to anyone else. 

CM: Yes, once you've made all the sides be the same color, then you can bestow it upon us.

DK: Enjoy!

CM: Great.

DK: I think there are three sides to why I'm interested in his artifacts.

CM: It’s always three with you…

DK: Well, you know, it has to be three 

CM: I'm for it. I'm fine…

DK: Well, I like artworks, right? In other words, artifacts and their intrinsic aesthetic qualities, and all that. So think of it just as decorative art, or sculpture. It doesn't have to have any value. The other deeper issues have to do with the nature of intelligence, both ours and theirs. So that's what's so interesting about evolution, because on the one hand it's a human theory about reality, but it's also a property of reality. Reality evolves. And I think that's my deep interest. I'm interested in intelligence, evidence of it, or the absence of it, and how we should measure it, and how it manifests. 

It touches my work, I think, because I'm interested in intelligence, and the origin of it in the universe. You know, a meteor hitting the Earth is a wonderful and interesting event as long as he doesn't hit somebody, but it's completely consistent with physical law as we understand it. But a giant iron Rubik's camp landing in the desert, in New Mexico…now that's something else entirely, right? And it's still behaves gravity. I mean, it's still a cosmological event, but it's more than that, because encoded within it are clues about the sort of time-wasting tendencies of life anywhere in the universe. That's the sort of thing I want to know! That's good! 

DK: That was good!

**pause

DK: …So…

CM: Haha, so thank you guys for tuning in. This was alien crash site. This was episode zero, featuring David Krakauer. I'm Caitlin McShea! Tune in next time for an interview with Ashton Eaton, a gold medal Olympic decathlon winner, twice, world record breaker, twice, mechanical-engineer-to-be, future astronaut and friend. 

DK: So we know that Ashton goes everywhere carrying a piece of pine tree.

CM: Yeah.

DK: So, if you had to ask me now, I think he's going to say it's going to be a pine cone or something like that, which he can crush and smell, so as not to feel nervous in competition. Or it could be an Omega Speedmaster watch because he wants to be an astronaut, and that’s an artifact or record from that…. 

CM: Yeah, the legacy… 

DK: Right. See you next time… 

CM: Okay…BOOP. Alright. That was good. 

…end transmission…