And thanks to the town hall for putting on this amazing series. Its so terrific that there is Science Education going on especially in a time when funding is being cut to sciences at the National Level so we need to keep pushing for as much Science Education as possible. So i just finished writing an optimistic look about the apocalypse and it didnt start out that way at all. I really did not realize that this book was going to have a happy ending and it actually started because i have been really fascinated my whole life with stories about destruction especially massive Global Destruction and a apocalypse is and everything from kind of the underground cannibal apocalypse to zombie stories and godzilla stories. Godzilla is one of my spirit animals. I wanted to a couple of years ago when i was thinking about this i thought while, how could i write a kind of nonfiction version of a godzilla movie and what would that look like . We delved into the scientific literature and what history has to teach us. What would need the equivalent of some kind of mass destruction caused by a force that we dont understand, and i came upon the idea of mass extinctions which are indeed the worst kind of disaster that could ever happen to the environment. The more that i researched them the more that i read scientific papers and talk to scientists, i realize that actually one of the main characteristics of the mass extinction is the there are always survivors and that was when i really began to change how i understood what this book was going to be about. So let me start by telling you a little bit about the destruction. A mass extinction is actually a scientific term of art which refers to any events where more than 75 of all species on the planet right out and usually these take about a million years. And so when you look at them, that they are taking place in geological time. They are not a quick thing that we can see in a human lifetime. One of the things that links massive extinctions in their and five in the past half a billion years or so is that most of them are caused by Climate Change. Usually there are some horrific events that sets off the Climate Change, and maybe an asteroid hits the planet which is what happened in the most recent and perhaps the most famous mass extinction which the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when an asteroid slammed into the planet but of course when that happened actually it wasnt like a michael bay movie. It wasnt like a big rock hit the planet and there was fire and dinosaurs were being barbecued. Although that sounds really cool there were no lasers or anything like that. What actually happened was where the asteroid hit there were horrific fires and dinosaurs were killed by the thousands but over time the asteroid worked its way into the atmosphere and change the climate over the long term. Actually what happened was most dinosaurs died out from the subsequent Climate Changes. This is the case with like i said nearly all the mass expansions. So let me tell you a little bit about my favorite mass extinction to give you an idea of how these work. Everyone kind of has a favorite mass extinction if you talk to geologists about this. They have a gallows humor about it because you know these are horrific mass slayings of creatures. So my personal favorite is the one that comes at the end of the permian. And if you look at this chart here of geological periods you can see it kind of down at the bottom. There is a little thing that says gigantic extinction right next to the permian. This is about 250 million years ago and at that time the planet due to plate tectonics of the continents were completely different than they are now. They were arranged into one giant supercontinent pangea so you have to imagine a supercontinent stretching all the way from the north pole down to this sort south pole. That was when in the north basically in the areas that eventually became siberia began to turn into a super volcano. What happens in a super bowl can know is not a scientific term but it basically refers to a massive massive volcano. This was a volcano caused by a very large area where love is being released in multiple places. So you have to imagine great extends opening up an earth. Its not like a mountain where it is blowing out of the top. Its big fence opening up like the iceland volcano was so recently. They just start extruding lava, big waves of love is so its not explosive. Its just lava oozing out of these huge fence and there are multiple events. In this Northern Area of pangea, this event went on for about would say a thousand years. So it was a thousand year in corruption. What happened was over time the gases and that were released from that ill can make every option were kind of like a super Industrial Revolution. They were releasing so much carbon into the environment that the climate for started to cool down and then it heated up to a super greenhouse and the oceans became very acidic and creatures died out in incredible numbers. It was the mars worst mass extension that the planet has ever seen. By the end of that billion year period 95 of all species on the planet had died out. Even in sex died out which is unusual to see in a mass extinction that it was Sea Creatures land creatures plants, everybody was screwed by that volcano. But there was one survivor on land who kind of is the creature that actually turned me around on mass extinction and take me think about it in a new way. And it was a creature who is related to a group of animals that later evolved into mammals so it was kind of a memo like creature. Think of it as the uncle of humanity. Not a direct ancestor. It had a couple of traits that made it an excellent survivor in this incredibly difficult time in earths history. Its somewhat small about dog sized. It was about 3 feet long by 3 feet long and looks a little bit like a and a little bit like a blizzard. You have to imagine them getting back to burgers birds and roots and they probably burrowed in the evenings. They would take a burrowed and they had very powerful front legs so they were digging out holes and living underground a lot. So for the lystrosaurus it was kind of awesome when the volcanoes started going off because the whole world was kind of transformed into lystrosaurus heaven because they were used to being underground and breathing kind of that 30 air anyway. They had a great lung capacity which possibly they were able to get my oxygen from dirty error than from other creatures that were similar in size and the other thing about the lystrosaurus was a lot of its natural predators died during the early period that followed the permian. So it had no predators. It had dirty error. All of its food sources were mostly underground so the sunlight is blocked and temperatures are changing that food sources probably going to be mostly unharmed by that transition but one of the other things the lystrosaurus did was scattered across the southern continent treated so remember this is a huge supercontinent. Lystrosaurus moved from them more Northern Region all the way down to the south area this is over a period of millions of years and scattered across that continents be seated in other words evolved into many different species possibly four possibly more and adapted to new ecological dimensions. It did two of the things that i talked about in the title of my book. Scattered and adapted. It fled from the source of danger which is the super volcano and learned how to live in new places and this humble little weird faced guy sort of became my mascot when i was working on this book. I guess i traded in godzilla is my mascot and pick up lystrosaurus because this creature as they said was very humble and yet nevertheless it managed to make it through the toughest time in earths history while all of these other creatures around it were suffering because their food webs were unraveling. This is a major cause of mass extinction. The food web is just a way of talking about the networks of basically who eats whom in an ecosystem. What happens is you have a food web where a lot of creatures start going extinct and it causes extinctions among other creatures who fte met them so if your food source guys youve dyed to match. That is one of the way that mass extinctions get started raid you have new dieoffs and then you get these knock on mass extinction events that caused the 75 numbers. So there is one thing that we can do as humans that lystrosaurus cant really do are probably couldnt do. So we have the ability in a crisis to basically do what lystrosaurus did which is adapt to new environments. Humans have been terrific at doing that. We have managed to a different points in history leave from danger. We have been lucky but we also have a form of memory that goes way beyond just remembering what happened yesterday. It goes way beyond remembering hey if i want to go to sleep tonight they need to dig a hole in the ground the way the lystrosaurus did. Humans can remember not just their own lifetimes but we can use history to remember the whole of our civilizations history. We can use scientific fields like anthropology and geology to actually look back and consider the whole history of our evolution as a species as well as the evolution of the planet and look at all of the disasters that have happened and learn from them. That is a very profound survival skill. Like i said its something that as far as we know is fairly unique to human needs is a species. We havent found any other species that seem to be able to do that yet and so part of my hope in sort of the Center Friday and this book when i realized it wasnt going to be all destruction and there was going to be some hope of survival is that we actually have the traits of a survivor species like lystrosaurus plus we have this added ability to plan for the future. That is really important and i spent a lot of time in the book talking about ways that we can start planning for the future basing those plans on what we know of disasters that have already happened to humans but also disasters that have happened to the earth. That is important in planning, learning from history and learning from the great experiment that is the evolution of human civilization. So let me put this in perspective for you. Human beings are mammals which is why we are so cute and furry and we have live babies and all those good things just like these cute cats up here. The typical species lifespan for a mammal, in other words the typical amount of time before the species evolves into another species or dies out if a million years. That is a typical species lifespan and humans, homo sapiens evolved about 100,000 years ago possibly 200,000 depending on where you sit in the anthropological debate over this question. The fact is either way we are early in our species timeline. We have only got 900,000 years left to go. So when we are thinking about planning for the future as a species planning for our survival as homo sapiens we need to be thinking not just of what we are going to do next month or next week at how were we going to set things up so that we have good experience living for another 900,000 years. What can we do now and what can we think about doing us a species and what kinds of projects can we take on to make those 900,000 years really awesome instead of living like cannibals underground and turning into zombies . So in my book i talk about two kinds of very longterm plans that we can start working on now and that we can share with coming generations for the next several millennia and more. The first area that i am most interested in is cities and City Building and city planning. The reason why is right now the vast majority of humans, the well not the vast majority, the majority of humans come to more than 50 live in the cities and the u. N. Has done some predictions on how that trend will continue and if things go pretty much as they have been we are looking at possibly as many as 67 or 70 of People Living in cities in 50 years. People are becoming more and more urban. The majority of humanity is going to be located in the city so as we are thinking about the future a good place to focus on ways to make our lives more survivable is the city. There are different ways that we can tackle making cities more survivable. First of all, we need to be thinking about how do you make a city robust against a disaster and there are a lot of Different Things we can do from better earthquake engineering and that is one thing i talk a lot about in the book where in San Francisco we deal with earthquakes all the time. Seattle probably should be thinking about earthquakes a lot too trade we also need to be thinking about things theyre a little bit more ephemeral and social. Like how do you organize the citys evacuation plan in a flood or how do you organize how to respond to a pandemic in your city. That may not have to do with how you engineer the city but it has to do with how you engineer the social infrastructure of the city and it turns out there are a lot of myths about how to handle in a city and that was interesting to me to find out about. One of the really interesting areas and this is going to get a little bit futuristic, i really think they could help cities become not just more disaster proof but also more sustainable is a movement that has just started now that is called living architecture. It goes by some other names to match like bioarchitecture and its basically a combination of Architectural Design of nature but also material science that creates new kinds of Building Materials that behave like living substances or actually partly made of living substances. One of the best examples of this is something thats called self sowing concrete. Again not a scientific term but a lot of phrase that is used for a lot of different substances. What you can see here on the flight is one experiment done a few years ago by some students who invented a substance that was partly made from bacteria. These were genetically modified bacteria that when they were put into a crack in the concrete there was sort of on the left side there is the crack and this is magnified by the way. They put this substance that they referred to as the scylla filling. Im glad you are laughing because you are a science crowd. Basically this but. A that the pacelle would go into the crack and it would extrude this a proxy as well as some other calcium like substances and eventually it would fill in the crack holding onto the concrete and leaving behind this scar that actually looks like a living skin that is healed up. Of course all experiments with Synthetic Biology architecture is that bacteria are set up and engineer to die when they are done after filling in the crack so there is a failsafe mechanism. They fill it in give their lives to heal the concrete treat this as one example of the selfhealing material that could be used in cities. I talked to architects and designers for this book about much more futuristic ideas on how these kinds of materials might be used. Selfhealing materials of course make housing more sustainable because instead of tearing tearing down old structures the structures might heal themselves and they can make things like bridges were safe to guess when they develop cracks they may be able to heal themselves to for a real disaster happens. So we might be able to have selfhealing structures that are maintaining themselves just like living organisms and the city itself can become a living organism helped by this biological innovation but also of course helped by things like a smart grid that really works. If you have a smart grid that really works where say of building takes just enough power from the grid to supply what it needs while other buildings that dont need power dont take any power from the grid you are creating an organism where the wings are kind of talking to each other on the grid and who is going to get power when and you start having almost like a body where different organs are getting blood or getting nutrients when they need them. So its my idea and the idea of a lot of architects and designers working in this space map the cities are going to slowly become more like organisms. This will allow us to have hopefully carbonneutral or carbon negative cities where we are ultimately using alternative fuels and maybe growing fuels. Maybe cities would be full of algae fats or only every home would have its own algae fats and you can use that for fuel and you might use it for lighting. You could have algae that glows in the dark. I talked to one designer and she said you know in 100 or 200 years we might be cultivating moles in our houses and not killing it. He would be exchanging recipes with your neighbors for how do you get the best mold to purify your water and light up at night lex our cities might not be as much in contradiction with nature and in contradiction with the environments where they are. One day you might look out on your city and see something that looks kind of like a ruined or like a treehouse and he would come across this kind of crumbling structure and realize actually a crumbling structure a structured covering fines might really be a living place. It might look like its crumbling because it had been selfhealselfhealing so these buildings would be covered in scars. They wouldnt look all smooth like downtown seattle does now but they might be a lot more sustainable and a lot that are for the people in them and the environment. Ultimately, and again looking further into the future even further than biological cities we might start extending our ability to farm our cities and build our cities and start actually farming the atmosphere and when i say farming the atmosphere i choose those words because farming pretty much transform the surface of the earth. We now are kind of shepherds of almost everything that grows on the planet except for some areas and even those areas are falling under human control. Alternately if we want to maintain the climate at a level we prefer we are going to have to start thinking about how are we going to control the climate . Its not going to be enough just to cut carbon emissions. Obviously we need to do that and thats a great start but the planet goes through carbon cycles naturally as i was talking about with the permian period. There is actual absolutely time with a plan thats going to create the results of the Industrial Revolution without any help from us. Its going going to have megaball cannot send carbon will be introduced into the atmosphere in heat rings up all by itself. You dont need to be there to do it so humans are going to have to take on the burden or take on the