Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be.
And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search.
The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work -- they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods.
What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough, " -- which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough."
And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better.
I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job -- you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict.
And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.
We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development.
A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other.
So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas, and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." -- He meant me, not that one.
He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "agnostic" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence.
When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God, " they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand.
Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do, " the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that -- at least not very much.
Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine.
Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years.
Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just complex patterns of information interacting with each other in a beautiful way, and that can happen more efficiently at a small scale.
Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.
Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s.
Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent.
What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose?
Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound?
Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!"
I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos.
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "Don't do that, don't do this" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use.
We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people.
But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying -- there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle.
And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology -- so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap -- then they will move all the way up here.
Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us, but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.
So our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have.
JA: Yeah. And you know, I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture, but some way -- there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crime.
And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world.
(Laughter) I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for.
It turns out that freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy.
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Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be. 