#E36 Musk Is Right: We Need More Population, Not Less, Says Futurist and Theologian Ziba Norman
About Ziba Norman
Ziba Norman is a senior research fellow at University College London, and a prominent theologian and futurist. Ziba is recognized for her significant work at the crossroads of theology and technology. Her intellectual journey and academic achievements had led her to explore the profound implications of emerging tech, such as bio enhancement, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and space policy on human identity, ethics, and spirituality.
Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.
(01:02) Briar: Welcome to the show, Ziba.
(02:11) Ziba: Well, thank you for inviting me.
(02:14) Briar: So, when thinking about your body of work and research and all the things that you've put out into this world, what is your vision? What is your mission? What is it that you want people to really know?
(02:27) Ziba: Well, it isn't so much what I want to know. It's what I want them to start to think about and explore. I don't have a particular message beyond that it is about exploring and exploring deeper into the nature of the human person, which I feel the combination of transhumanist ideas mixed with religious and theological ideas is best suited to do. So you need that convergence and understanding. I would say that religion actually has kind of led us away almost from the human person at least more recently. Ideas of ecotheology, which have become very prominent in particular, are something that I have reservations about because we have downgraded the human person, and sort of upgraded everything else, which is around us. So I think, yes, more understanding of what the nature of the human person is, not to limit that, but to expand it, not just in physical ways, but in metaphysical ways as well.
(03:43) Briar: Wow. Let’s dive on deep into this. I love how we've started this, and there's a lot I want to explore further with you. So, when we're thinking about upgrading humans and perhaps taking on this post-human like form, can you tell us, walk us through these upgrades that we potentially could have and why we would have them?
(04:05) Ziba: Well, I mean, there's different ways of looking at what is an upgrade. There's an upgrade of an individual, and then of course there's the upgrade of the species in general. And they are, in some way related, but not directly related. Okay. So if you really want to talk about what is going to enable us to be able to, let's say, colonize in space, and to have the world of Star Trek, which for me was very formative when I was young. The original series I don't want you to know how old I am, but the Star Trek one original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy. I was actually raised on that. And it was very influential in terms of the way I started to view myself, the world, the universe, what was possible and so on.
Before we can get to that stage, we would be looking really at alterations in the human genome, which would be somatic alterations, i.e. they'd be passed on from generation to generation. Now that's different from a short term upgrade, which might be very nice because it isn't necessarily all that different in some respects from having I don't know, Botox or something like that. Because those are things which relate to one individual. But when we're looking at projecting out towards a whole species, then that's something different. And that is something which I've written about, in about the IGM project and how that's been, projections have been looked at what we need to know about the genome now, what we hope to know, what different bits of research we might hope to have done by 2040, looking upwards to, within 10 phases of a project.
That's not the very, very deep future as Anders would talk about, but the more immediate, deep future of 500 years, let's say. And then looking at that in terms of what kind of alterations might be necessary and where we are with that now, that's the first time in human history that we have to some extent been able to direct our evolution because we know an awful lot about the codes. We know an awful lot about the genome. We've got this CRISPR cast technology, which enables us to start, limited splice things in and splice things out. Now that's great. It's fantastic. It has so much promise. It means we can bring life to lifeless worlds potentially. But unfortunately our emotional understandings as humans is far behind our scientific progress. And that must catch up without daring to go into any geopolitical issues.
The idea is that we could potentially, if we get everything else right, be living in the Star Trek world. Chris Mason suggested it was possible or that's the way he projected it. That we could be going at that point into a whole new solar system and creating a series of habitable in what was previously inhabitable regions and actually seeding life there. And that's a twofold process. It's not just terraforming, it's also Mars-ifying if you want to look at it that way. Something has to change in us, and we might also have to tweak the surface on which we're going to be living or even be living between planets and maybe a mixture of both. In terms of upgrades, yeah.
(08:18) Briar: Let's dive, dive back a bit. Yeah, no, that's absolutely great. So talking about CRISPR and editing the genome, this is a fascinating topic. And I was reading recently online that I think it was one third of parents said that if they were given the opportunity, they would upgrade their child's genome so that they would be smarter. So they'd have more likes to make it into Harvard or Yale or some of these sorts of universities. And I thought, wow, one third is a big number. Of course there's a whole bunch of ethical issues that come into this, such as should we be, I don't know, upgrading our vision so that we can see like a cat, or should we be becoming smarter? Obviously you've got the other side of things where if we are looking at genomes and pulling out genes such as the Alzheimer's gene and stuff like this, then, ultimately we're helping improve the quality of life of the child. But what's your thoughts on this argument where people talk about the ethics of editing genomes?
(09:30) Ziba: Well, I do think it's an important discussion to have because we don't want to wind up living in a dystopian eugenicist world or universe where still I am not in favour of these sorts of editing mechanisms being used for designer purposes. And that isn't really what we'd be looking at in terms of alterations for going into space. Alterations for going into space would be things which would enhance your resistance, for example, to radiation. Now that's just good, it's good probably in any context. Increased bone density because you're going to have a problem with that in long-term space travel and different gravity levels. If you do enough exercise, you strengthen your bones. Well, it's hard to get that resistance if you don't have the gravity that enables you to do that. So these are the sorts of things that would have to be tweaked.
Now when you start talking about enhancing for intelligence to get into Harvard or to get into Yale whatever that means. I think you're going into something which turns it into a vanity project, potentially for the rich. And I think that's going to cause a lot of divisions within human society on earth in the first instance. And possibly those kind of divisions would almost make it impossible for this project in the next 500 years to happen. Anyway, so I think anything which would prevent illnesses, absolutely, but when you also start talking about things like, I'd like my child to have this colour eye or that colour eye. We're making decisions. What is more attractive intelligence? Well, there's so many different forms of intelligence. So we have to be very, very careful about how we define what is desirable and how we allow these things to be bought and purchased and so on.
(11:53) Briar: I think that's one of the reasons why the world functions really isn't it, is because we are all so different. Can you imagine if we were all the same, same intelligence, same person, same temperament, same everything, just walking around, what a boring place that would be, honestly.
(12:10) Ziba: Well I think that's right. Yes. And also we're limiting capacity as well in doing that. We might in some ways fix one thing and cause another, there are a lot of unknowns in this. You have to use this kind of technology quite sparingly. So I think we have to be very, very careful of that. And that was one of the things which I was trying to bring out in the paper I wrote two planets, one species. We should be considering the potentiality for speciation, that eventually there could be a breaking almost between the human person that we create in a thousand years and the human person today. And we don't really want that actually. We don't want division. We want to create unity and higher purpose for humanity. And that includes bringing life to, as many outer reaches of the universe as we can find. We need to be one species in this. I guess that's what you say. What I would say. If not, again, you start with all the divisions that we have. We have racism on this planet now. Why? Because we see ourselves in separate camps, separate tribes. We really need to keep that unity there. And I don't think we'll succeed in any of it if we don't actually.
(13:43) Briar: I think this is a huge talking point, really, isn't it? And it's often something that I get asked is when we are adopting these technologies, are we going to end up with these two species of humans, if we will, the haves and the have nots? How do we bring this technology so that it is accessible to people so that people even want to be using it? You and I might be signing up, we might be first in line for this sort of stuff, but, but how do we bring other people along for the ride, especially I guess in today's society where no one really talks so much about the future in a government level. Like they're so busy fighting over the next four years and what's going to happen.
(14:27) Ziba: I think this right now, we actually live on a planet that's more divided than it's ever been. I am not very optimistic from that point of view. It seems that we have a hyper elite, and that is an increasingly rarefied number of people. And I don't know how we're going to really be able to sort of deal with that in terms of bringing people along. I wouldn't see myself as sort of advocating for this sort of thing until we're really ready for it. And when you're ready, you'll know if you see what I mean. Right now, the situation that we face is pretty grim on this planet, really. And there are so many people that are suffering in so many ways, starvation, war the things which our governments are currently paying for. Namely destruction in so many parts of the world. And I'm not going to suggest anything about where they are. As long as that money is being channeled into those sorts of activities, we are not going to be able to put in the kind of capital and focus required to be able to see this beautiful future.
So something's going to happen between now and then, which requires a transformation of the human spirit. And again, this is where I feel the religious questions emerge because transhumanism puts the human person back at the centre.
(16:24) Briar: What is transhumanism just for someone who's listening to this and they just want to understand a bit more about transhumanism?
(16:31) Ziba: Well, I think there are different sorts of transhumanism. I mean there are different ways of defining it. There are different subgroups of transhumanists if you want to put it that way. In a sense, I would consider myself as a religious person or if, if someone who is of mystical disposition, they are transhuman already. I mean what they are doing is they are seeing past they're human limitations and they're experiencing things which are higher than those human limitations. It might not be something which you can measure in a physical way, but it is still there. So there are transhumanists which are focusing strictly on the body. And I think that's where my research comes in saying, don't focus strictly on the body, do these two together.
Because it seems to me that, for example, the holy trinity as understood in Christianity was in some way previewing the fact that all creative capacities coming out of the human person in relationship to other human persons. And in relationship to what we refer to as God or a higher creator as an entity. This is the way we anthropomorphize the discussion, which is hardly possible for us to have. So I would say that we have to be careful of the kind of transhumanism, which over focuses on specifically limitations. Because that is what a lot of transhumanism is about and over focuses, particularly on life extension as such, and actually moves into something which is more expansive, both because that helps the longest term project, and also because I actually believe that in a sense as consciousness, we are already immortal. But what can you say? That's how I see it.
(18:37) Briar: Can you talk to us a little bit more about this? So through our consciousness, what is already immortal? What does that mean? Why have you come to this conclusion?
(18:47) Ziba: Well, I mean, I come to this conclusion for so many reasons. I mean, you probably don't know much about my background. Maybe I should move backwards into that. I was raised in a Bahai family. It's the youngest of the world's religions, and it is currently based on Mount Carmel and Haifa Israel. And we're going back to the 18 hundreds in my own family there. When it first formed, when it first started, they were millenarians really and mystics. And they were looking for the return of the promised one as mystics did. Anyway it came out of Islam. It was an offshoot of Islam with I would say not closer to Sufism the mystical side of Islam. But the religion also incorporated aspects of she Islam, which again, all religions are looking towards the coming of the great age, the utopian ideal of the return to the garden and so on.
So I was raised with that. Also as part of the religion that I was raised in, was this idea that the earth was going to be one country, and that was just accepted. And the idea that there were other life forms in space was also just accepted. I didn't think that was odd. I didn't think that the idea that there might be aliens was strange. I thought it would be strange that there wouldn't be, because with such a vast infinite expanse, as we understood the capacity of God to be all powerful, all knowing all these things which we would pray to and for, and through meant that it was impossible, that we could see ourselves as the only entities in this universe. And also that there was a huge capacity within the human person, which had, had the two been only, we hadn't scratched the surface of it.
What I discovered, of course, laterally was that actually I was moving towards something which I didn't know about and didn't understand, which wasn't fully expressed in that religion. I moved into Christianity and then I saw that the serious metaphysical writings and the works of the mystics St. John of the cross, all of these things and deeper understanding of the trinity, which I'll say I've got my, I read it in Greek, I only read the Bible in Greek you've gotta go to the source, right. Anyway it is explained by Jesus beautifully. And none of this limits the capacity of the human person in any way. I don't see that, but it takes away the idea that it's all about me. It's all about ego. And again, that's the thing which we have to be careful of as we evolve, that we can surpass our bodily limitations as we see them now, yes.
But we have to do so whilst always adhering to that one commandment of love thy neighbour as thyself, not to become over-focused on the ego, on the me and so on. Because the most beautiful experiences that we ever have as human people are in our capacity to love and exist in that beautiful, it's called Perichoretic Trinitarian Dance. And as futurists, we're engaged in that dance with loving those who do not yet exist, loving them into existence, even as it were, so that they can become part of that. And I don't see transhumanism if it's done carefully, skilfully, beautifully with that kind of foundational understanding of how it's a love within the widest possible community, even extending into what we call the future, but you could even consider it infinite. I would consider it absolutely essential, an essential part of the religious expression for the coming centuries. So, yeah. That's how I see it.
(23:37) Briar: Well, thank you for sharing your background and your story with us. It's certainly very fascinating. And so we were thinking about our consciousness and human consciousness and oh my God, it's such a fascinating topic to think about, and it's, it's one that's got me so curious, because I don't think there's a hell of a lot of information out there around our consciousness. It's almost a bit like space, really. There's so much more to learn and explore with it. And then we've got AI consciousness or potentially something that could mimic human consciousness. You've obviously been doing a lot of work with artificial intelligence. Do you think that in the future we could have-- do you think that AI could be conscious? Or do you think that perhaps we could have almost like this Ai God, so to speak?
(24:28) Ziba: Well, I think we have to be very careful when we start looking at things in those terms. Imagining that it's strictly about calculation. I mean, if you look at, let's say, artificial intelligence and you say, will it be so much fuller than we are understanding so much more, being able to calculate almost what would seem infinite to us into what could happen next. Knowing what you yourself might think before you think it and that sort of thing. We have to be a little bit careful about that because remember, there are things that we don't know, we don't understand. We're still dealing with systems which are physically bound. There are physical boundaries and limitations on them, no matter how wonderful and complete they might appear. So I think we have to be careful. We don't want to go down this route where we are looking to something which we have created, which is essentially calculating and we have programmed, and to look at that as something which is our vision of infinite capacity in the way in which a religious person might understand the nature of God.
So I think we have to be a little careful about that in terms of things like uploading your consciousness again. It's a beautiful dance between the physical and what is not physical. That is that creative edge for the human person. And I think we've got to be sceptical about that. Are people going to use it for that purpose? Yeah. Some people are and will and do think that eventually there will be a kind of oracle that you can ask a question and it will calculate what is the best answer and will maybe even mirror some kind of wisdom. But I think we should be sceptical of that because we're actually in the long term, limiting ourselves, not expanding ourselves.
(26:51) Briar: In what ways would you say that we would be limiting ourselves?
(26:56) Ziba: Well, again, because there are physical limitations, you are creating a system. You are creating something which, which is basically, it's running on codes, it's running on things which are separated still from us as physical beings. Now I know you could talk about what if we all connected to it and so on. Again, I think that's probably the wrong route to go down, at least in my opinion. I don't think that it's something which will get us to the goal really. And I also think that we've got to appreciate and understand what is deeply unique and special about the human person. The capacity to love is special about the human person, and that is also procreative capacity. The kind of love one experiences for one's children that one will die for. Do you know what I mean?
That you'll give of your own self for that isn't going to be, and you have to have the physical, the tangible as well in there. And so to anticipate that we could evolve without maintaining that tangible connection. And I mean, these are difficult questions, really.
(28:29) Briar: Oh, yes.
(28:30) Ziba: To have a kind of AI god I think we would wind up being more like serfs under the AI god. And we would be limiting ourselves ultimately. It might look very clever in the short term. I think AI is fantastic for things like scientific advancements for finding cures to diseases. It can do things so much faster. It can look at things in ways in which we could, but it would just take the brute force too long. But in terms of the wisdom to keep the human species, I think that is the goal moving forward and developing into a truly beautiful and loving species that has the capacity to do things that we can't even yet imagine. I don't think that any kind of AI god is ever going to be able to bring us there.
(29:23) Briar: Its huge questions that you are answering here. And it's very interesting to see everybody's different perspectives when it comes to AI. And I sometimes spend time on Reddit and oh my gosh, you've got the two extremes there. You've got the doomsday people, which I like to call them. And then you've got the massive like hype-y utopian people who think that AI is just going to cure everything and will never have to work, and we'll all just get paid lots of money and the world will just be this happy, glorious place where we could just do whatever. And yeah, it's interesting. It's such a fascinating topic because I don't think anybody quite knows how it's going to be. Do you imagine a future that is more utopian? Like what do we have to worry about when it comes to AI? Like where are you sort of seeing it unfold?
(30:18) Ziba: Well, actually again how quickly can you go? I mean, are people really-- when you say, for example, you want to live forever, what exactly will be your goal in that forever? I mean, if you don't have anything that keeps you on edge, that keeps you wanting to do things, then what exactly do we become? Because as human beings, we become and build character and develop through certain hardships, through certain struggles, through work, through love of our children, through even an appreciation of our own fragility actually, that--
(31:02) Briar: Through purpose really isn't it.
(31:06) Ziba: Through purpose. And so I think, again, we have to be quite careful about imagining that we can do away with all aspects of human struggle. I think there's certainly a good deal of it that we can do away with. I think we can certainly do away with hunger and we could do away with war. And if we do those two things, that will be a tremendous advancement. But of course that requires a transformation. And a moment of awareness, which unfortunately may come in the worst possible way if we're not careful looking at the world situation at the moment, we're really still playing down to our violent side as humans and not looking to the highest potentiality that we have, which mystifies me all the time. But there you go. It's what we witness.
(32:05) Briar: Yeah. I think it is quite interesting thinking about the future and thinking of all of the stuff that we could do if we all just got our stuff together, basically, if we all just sat down, aligned, came up with a vision, we were all working collectively on the strategy to get to that vision, it would just be so incredible really what we could achieve. When we are thinking about humans doing that and becoming this super species, if you will, these post humans or going to space and, and doing some of these things like How would you envision it?
(32:49) Ziba: Well, I mean, do you, do you want me to take you through the steps from where we are now to what we need to do?
(32:56) Briar: That would be great.
(33:03) Ziba: Well I mean, ideally the situation in the Middle East would result in an awakening that the danger of a third world war before it happens, I stress would, because if not, I think we're going to go backwards with all forms of technology, because we're going to have problems with our economy and technology moves when the economy is in a strong position. If people are scrambling around in the dirt to find some sort of potato to eat, then I'm afraid all bets are off on the development of IGM projects and anything else. But assuming the best case scenario, this results in a shock. People realize how close we may come to winding up with serious cons, integrations in a number of different parts of the world, and potentially even nuclear exchange, which since the end of the second World War, we have managed to avoid. Out of that, we create a situation where not, it's not about breaking up countries or creating one world government, but creating a situation where because we've learned the lesson that we're not going to get involved in this kind of confrontation, that we start putting our resources into other things. That the military industrial complex, all that money goes into the development of the human being, of the human person,
(34:33) Briar: Which is so much money, by the way.
(34:39) Ziba: But so much money that could be used for education. Because another thing we have to realize is that to do all of this stuff, we need human capacity and potential first. Everything that's been developed with AI so far has been done by humans. We have created that. Okay? So we need that capacity. We can't leave anyone behind, and we don't know where these very bright people are. We think we can create this in a lab and do something such that you're going to have a gene for intelligence or whatever. But that isn't really that simple. What we need to do is utilize the potential and educate everyone so that we have the maximum chance of finding people who are able to push our species forwards and create a bright human future so that all those people are found not left behind sitting around somewhere in Africa trying to get a bit of rice to eat today. Because that’s a huge loss of human potential.
So I think, again, put the human back into the center first, and I hope that we wake up, that this is a wakeup call, what's happening in the Middle East and in Ukraine, and that it just stops. It needs to stop. Somebody needs to say, the grownups have entered the room. It is stopping now. And, I mean, if we could do that, then I think the IGM idea that in 2050 we could actually be in a situation where we are bringing life to lifeless worlds. That would be wonderful. Unfortunately, we're working against ourselves in a number of ways because we see that the human, as a human person, we have a kind of negative streak. We're very good at making war and fighting with each other and so on.
You have a lot of people who say human beings are the scourge of the planet. Fewer of them would be better. I disagree with that. I do not think that we have a problem with population. I think we need more population, not less population. That's just my own view. I agree with Elon Musk on that a hundred percent, but we need to stop also looking at this in terms of worshiping Mother Gaia. We are not here simply as observers. We are curators, we are creators as well. And so if transhumanism could add something to the discussion, I would hope it could take it into a realm where we are not just focusing on “stewardship” of the planet. Now, I'm not saying we should be irresponsible. No, that's not what I'm saying at all.
I do think that we have to put the human person back at the centre. And interestingly, that is what the ancients did. That's what ancient scripture does. That's what we get in the gospel of John in, Trinitarian understanding is given by Jesus. The human person is central. This isn't just about, you know, if only we have this utopian structured idea, get rid of a lot of people, go forward with this little dream, and then everything will be fine. It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid, in my view. So I don't think we're going to be able to keep everything in perfect balance. And I don't think we should be frightened of terraforming other planets either. Again, that's something where our AI could be useful to us, really useful to be able to calculate changes and alterations, very quickly, which might occur if we, let's say if we did Terraform or Planet, how would that really look in 2000 years? Those are the things which we need this technology for. Anyway, so yeah.
(38:53) Briar: I was thinking recently, so one of my life's goals is to travel into space. And I was thinking about going to Mars and what life might be like on Mars and all of these things. And I was like, man, I really thought about it, and I said it to my boyfriend, and he was like, you hate dust, was what he said to me. He's like, why would you want to go to Mars? He's like, you absolutely hate dust. Anytime you're on the beach, you're moaning about the sand. But I love the idea of, of traveling to space and I think it comes from my curiosity. It's exploring the unknown. How would we start something like this? Could you imagine going to space? Would you want to sign up for something like this?
(39:39) Ziba: I think I'm a bit of a homebody, and I do love Planet Earth there might be some part of me that that wants to go. But I do recognize that the hardships will be absolutely extreme in the beginning. Now, let's put it this way. I don't think that our first move to Mars, except for very short periods, is going to be a human colony at the start. We're not going to go there and build our own cities. Our AIs are going to have to go there, and they're going to have to build those cities for us. Not AI, I mean, our robots and we are going to have to have a five star hotel ready for us.
(40:22) Briar: Oh yeah. A Raffles on Mars. Give us Raffles on Mars!
(40:27) Ziba: And once the five-star hotel is there, I'll go anytime. Because I'll go anywhere where there's a five-star hotel
(40:34) Briar: And the nail salon.
(40:35) Ziba: Including Mars. I think they're going to have to make it a little easier. There will be the first who go in the way in which Neil Armstrong went onto the moon and Buzz Aldrin, there will be the first to go. And they will probably be spending exceedingly short periods of time. If not, it would be a suicide mission. And I wouldn't advocate that. So I think we're probably going to have to have a lot of things already set up there and ready before we're doing real colonization.
(41:03) Briar: What's the timeline, would you say? And I know this is a tricky question.
(41:08) Ziba: I mean, it depends on so much, I mean, in optimal circumstances, I would've thought that it could be, 60, 80 years before we could do this reasonably well, actually not just one or two people, but I mean, to the point where you or I could just say buy the ticket, but that's optimal situation. Everything can change in the next five minutes. I mean the whole of humanity is a dynamic structure. We could wind up in a situation tomorrow where we go a hundred years backwards, literally in two weeks. I mean it really does depend on what happens next, but in an optimal situation, I think that there isn't any reason why we aren't on the edge of having the capacity to be able to do these things. So all things being equal could be not that far off, maybe even within your extended lifespan.
(42:22) Briar: I saw our mutual friend Anders in London recently. And he showed me these fascinating he had mathematical equations all over this whiteboard, and he'd recently been writing a paper about how we would communicate with extraterrestrials, aliens and beings from other planets and things as well. It was so fascinating to listen to him talk. He's such a fascinating gentleman, isn't he? But I just, I'm quite excited, I guess for the day that we have some proof or we see an alien in front of us. Like there's all so much talk and there's sometimes big headlines and I'm like, oh, are the media just trying to distract us? Or is this person like what he's saying is true? I just don't know. But I hope that in our lifetime we get to hear this sort of news, because I think it will be game-changing really. It'll be so interesting to see how society reacts as well. Will we go into a massive panic?
(43:33) Ziba: Well, actually that's one of the next papers I'm going to be writing. We're putting a volume together on just this question. And I do actually work with people who work on protocols for that. And one of whom happens to be a Jesuit priest who is also a very well-known astronomer, Chris Cordley, and he works on questions of protocols. So people are thinking about it. Yeah. Now in terms of how do we communicate with them? Well that's a really good question. And I'm sure Anders will say, obviously the language of mathematics is universal. So there is something to that. I missed out on a lot of it when I was at school, but both my children studied physics and my son and my daughter, it's a shame. Because I'm in the house, not in my flat. But in a flat you see, we've got these boards all over and they would write their formulas on the boards and converse in them almost. So is that how we are going to be able to communicate? Well, there's the other thing we have to realize that we are still anthropomorphizing our understanding of what an intelligent alien will look like, be like, whatever. We have these 1950s images, some of us
(44:58) Briar: Oh yeah, those little greys we call them, don't we? They've got those grey round heads. Yeah, little greys.
(45:08) Ziba: Well, the little greys are rather crazy image of it in fact, actually it may be that we are already in communication with quote unquote alien beings. That even mystical experience could almost be considered a type of communication with something with higher intelligence. How do you define an alien being? Does an alien being have to be something that looks a bit human and speaks in another way, or speaks telepathically? Or are we limiting our understanding of what life is actually, is it just silicon-based? Is it more than that? So many things ultimately happen in our limited state, which I think is only limited in the short term. And I would say that it's only limited in as much as we are within a physical body. The way I see it, eventually all people on death attain a higher level of consciousness, reality, and understanding.
But maybe even if you don't see it that way, you can still say that there are limitations in terms of our embodiment and our brains and what we can absorb in the way in which knowledge has big, big limitations, I would say, on how much we can expect to understand. But we can dream as far as we want, and we can hope that we do make some kind of contact in some kind of way, either through mathematical codes or whatever, or evidence of, I don't know if you saw the business about Avi Loeb, who's the astrophysicist at Harvard. And the Oumuamua. Do you remember that? It was an object that was traveling through space, which didn't conform to any other sort of object that we'd ever see. And he, as a man of, serious, scientific learning and understanding, concluded and believed that this was created by an alien civilization and that actually our first contact might not be direct contact, but it might be through artifacts.
Now that makes a lot of sense, I suppose, and it's something which people hadn't considered before. What exactly are we looking for? Are we looking for signals? We're looking for that. Are we looking for objects of things that might have been created by an alien civilization? Are we actually looking within ourselves to find that we are actually part of other realities and that there are mystical experiences which bring other entities to us. What exactly are we looking for?
(48:08) Briar: So fascinating. I was reading something on Reddit recently, which someone's argument, and actually there's a large Reddit community that all believe this, that the reason the government isn't so forthcoming about the conversation of aliens is because they believe that aliens are actually from different dimensions. So not only then would the government have to be like, oh yeah, aliens do exist, but then they would have to be like, and different dimensions exist that you can access through your consciousness. So like, this is what people are discussing. And I don't know, what's your thoughts about this?
(48:49) Ziba: Well, my old thoughts are, the old tricks are the best. And actually, I mean if you talk to people who've had mystical experiences you could almost define these in terms of other dimensional experiences, perhaps depending on how you want to define it. Now, in terms of what governments may or may not be hiding, that's an impossible one to go into, really I think as a question. I think we all rightly have reservations about how we trust those in power who could utilize information in all sorts of different ways to control people. We've seen that in so many different contexts. There was a time when you could have said, oh, it would be great to just invent an alien species cause that would unify mankind, well, I don't think it's quite that simple, but there were suggestions that, that sort of thing could be done too.
So yeah, I mean, how would it affect humanity? I would like to believe that if the information were true and it would disseminate in a positive way that we could, we could hopefully learn lessons from whatever alien species we connect to. And believe me, we've got a lot of lessons to learn. I don't believe that any alien species, and I say this would be hostile, would have any hostile intent. If it had the capacity to make contact, communicate with us inter-dimensionally or over the vast expanses of space, their civilization would not have developed to such a point that they would be able to do those sorts of things if they were hostile. And that I feel very sure of. So this fear of the alien is something which we certainly don't need to have in my view, awesome. I think that our good creator has, has adequately dealt with. It won't happen. They won't get here if they're not good kind Peace loving creative curating entities.
(51:41) Briar: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Ziba this has been so fascinating and yeah I'm sure everyone just thought it was wonderful to listen to you, so thank you.
(51:52) Ziba: Well, thank you very much for inviting me and I really, really love that dress.
(51:58) Briar: I was telling Ziba before we came on air that I wore my space dress for her today, so it's got lots of moons and stars. Cause yeah, it reminded me of you actually.
(52:08) Ziba: Ah, well, I mean, I think it's fantastic. I really do. I love that sort of shimmery color of it. So you are getting different light waves of stars. Because of course, stars are many different colors. We imagine them just twinkling in a sort of silvery look, but actually if you look at them, they're not, they're blue and they're red and they're, so many different colors there. So it's beautiful
(52:31) Briar: Absolutely. Thank you so much.
(52:34) Ziba: It was lovely to talk to you and yeah, I wish you well with all your projects.
(52:40)Briar: Thank you.
