(Climate Solutions) Are Only Impossible Until They Are Not

Quinn: [00:00:00] Why is it so important that we share the science of fiction, and what do we do with it once we have it? That's today's big question, and my guest is Maddie Stone. Maddie Stone is a prolific science journalist. She is a doctor of earth and environmental sciences. She's the former science editor of the technology website Gizmodo, which I love, and the founding editor of Earther, Gizmodo's climate focused vertical, which I love.

Maddie has edited articles for The Verge, Polygon, and Grist, and her original and award winning journalism has appeared in, oh my gosh, National Geographic, back when they had writers, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Grist, Vice, MIT Technology Room Technology Review, and Drilled, and many other outlets we love and link to basically every day.

[00:01:00] An avid science fiction fan like me, Maddie runs one of my favorite blogs called The Science of Fiction. It is an email newsletter and a blog, if you're old, that explores the real world science behind fictional monsters and alien planets and stuff like that, which is, checks all of my boxes. So welcome to Important, Not Important.

My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit, like Maddie. In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive with an incredible human like Maddie, who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone this time. So our mission here is to understand and unfuck the future.

Our goal with you here is to help you answer the question, what can I do? Maddie, welcome to the show. You've already had quite a day. So, thank you for, for hopping on. I appreciate it.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, absolutely. So excited to be here and talk about what is truly one of the most fun [00:02:00] subjects for me to talk about.

Quinn: 100%. We'll skip over all, like, the mining and just talk about how do you transport whales onto a bird of prey? Maddie, truly one of my favorite movies. We'll get to it. I also recently looked up what year it was made and it's very upsetting. I like to start with one important question to set the tone for, you know, what hopefully is a fun fiasco, which is why are you vital to the survival of the species?

And I encourage you to be bold and honest about it.

Maddie Stone: Oh my gosh. I'm a very humble person by nature, so this is a really challenging question for me. But why am I vital to the survival of the species? You know, I would say tying it back to the theme of our conversation today. I feel like I have long carried inside me this unusual, [00:03:00] unusually strong interest in science, particularly earth science, the environment, how the natural world works, also preserving the natural world.

I've been an environmentalist since I was like five years old. And they started doing construction and logging behind the playground where I played out in recess. And me and my little kindergarten friends yelled at the construction workers from across the fence, which was probably not the coolest thing to do, but I've been an environmentalist as long as I can remember.

I've been, you know, pursued science academically for a long time, just a big science nerd, love communicating about science with the world, but I've also been a huge science fiction fan my whole life, and I think there is an essential intersection of science and science fiction, a way they interact with each other, shape each other, and help the public understand what's really essential about science.

And I've tried to [00:04:00] leverage that as, as a way of connecting with audiences and helping the world, my, you know, small sliver of the world that I communicate with mostly via the Internet, understand complex scientific topics, understand sort of big picture trends taking place in society, understand, you know, what needs to be done to build a better future through this intersecting lens of science and science fiction, so I guess that's, you know, how my, how I hope to see my contribution matter in a couple of hundred years.

Quinn: That was amazing. Look at that. That was amazing. Look at you.

Maddie Stone: It was a hard question.

Quinn: It's a, it's a, it's a completely ridiculous question that I, I mean, truly you, you are first in our hearts, but guest number 178 or something.

I've been asking you for a long time. And can get some ridiculous answers, but also something, sometimes they're pretty meaningful and provocative, but most people are just like, what are you talking about? So I appreciate your candor and your attempt at putting something together there. We are going to get to [00:05:00] the science of fiction and all of that, which I find so meaningful for a thousand different reasons.

I grew up on science fiction. I still live and love science fiction. It's what I put on at night, as long as it's not too dark these days. My wife is a screenwriter and producer and I did a little of that. So it's, I get the whole, the whole thing is so important to meet people where they are in the worlds they already care about to show them what we are, what we are capable of, and also the real science that can inform those things.

So before we get to that though, if we could, because a lot of folks listen to this, looking for an answer to the question, what can I do? And it turns out that's like a lot of what we really do best. We contextualize some things and we'll give you the news about some things. But we always try to pair it with like really reputable, specific things that you can do about those or a potpourri of things that are very measurable and measured in that respect that we've kind of done the homework for folks.

And the podcast is a version of that in that, you know, it's folks like yourself who, [00:06:00] as I like to say, work on the front lines of the future. And without going into your entire life story, folks do find ways into working on the front lines of the future. Either they're a student, or they make some sort of lateral move, or they run an endowment, whatever it might be.

By listening to these stories and having empathy for people who, how they found their way into this. And you didn't just go straight into the Science of Fiction. I mean, you've had a fairly hardworking, illustrious sort of here and now beat which, which obviously is, is still going as of literally this morning.

And your work has been so prolific and meaningful across obviously Earther, the Post, Grist, Drilled, we love Drilled, the Verge, all these places. You are honestly to me, at least, probably our most impactful journalist around EV metals and mining and the clean energy, metals and mining beat, [00:07:00] which I assume stems from your super cool doctorate in earth sciences. I mean, again, just a quick list. And I wrote these all down and truly like this has helped me, really truly your reporting has helped me get like a 101 to 201 in this stuff.

The Microsoft work this morning about using the company to, how can they stop enabling fossil fuels, right? Aluminum smelting. E waste from toys unionized mining for these kinds of materials wind turbine magnet recycling, you've covered right to pair repair like seven different ways, Russian nickel supplies, cement and concrete, it's all the stuff, right, that it's so easy to ignore, but that is the hard game, right, you get constantly see, right?

Climate tech company raises this money. It's like, well, they're a software company. It's like, this is the hard stuff that we've got to cure. And it's very complicated and controversial from you know, mining on indigenous lands to unionized work, to waste, to obviously [00:08:00] the, the deep sea stuff and, what that does to, potentially does to ecosystems.

But I do want to talk for a moment about your evolution or transition from your doctorate which is a lot of writing in itself to journalism, and Earther, and all the rest. Was journalism always the goal or how did you get there from yelling at construction workers at age five to starting with Earther and where you are now?

Maddie Stone: Yeah, great question. Journalism absolutely was not always the goal. I think for a long time I thought I was gonna go down a more traditional science research academic track. I did my undergrad in ecology. I love the idea of a career that allowed me to kind of spend half my time outdoors hiking through the woods, going to amazing far flung places and, you know, half my time in a climate controlled lab, looking at data on a screen, trying to understand a really nuanced problem and make my [00:09:00] contribution to our collective knowledge base. So, I did start out thinking I was going to go down this more traditional research track. I got into a PhD program, was about a year and a half into that program when I realized, you know, really not a fan of a lot of things about academic culture.

I was frustrated with the sort of slow pace at which research results get, you know, translated into societal understanding and, you know, from there into meaningful action and, you know, as someone who's always been an avid consumer of the news, particularly climate and environmental news, it felt like there was this cognitive dissonance between these, you know, these big problems that we face that are becoming sort of more real and more apparent every day and the very slow and plodding pace that of the type of research I was doing intended to ultimately help us [00:10:00] wrap our heads around those problems in a more meaningful way.

So, you know, I still have a lot of friends and colleagues who've gone down the science route. But I realized pretty early on in this PhD track program that it was not for me, that the part of this whole process that I really liked the most was the communication of the end results and explaining, you know, why this matters.

And doing that either in a talk format or writing up the abstract or conclusions in a research article was always sort of the most valuable part of the process to me. And all my advisors thought that this was very strange because most scientists do not care for writing, do not care for public speaking.

Quinn: Yeah. No, thank you.

Maddie Stone: And so I got a lot of kind of raised eyebrows, at my just general interest in science communication, but also a lot of support for it, to give my academic advisors credit where due. And so about a couple [00:11:00] years into my PhD program, I had done a lot of research. I was writing a dissertation, but I was, I also started sort of actively blogging on the side.

My dissertation, not to get too in the weeds about it because it is really quite niche and focused as these things tend to be, was about soil carbon in tropical ecosystems and what keeps it in the ground and what causes it to leave the ground. And looking at a lot of interactions between minerals and microbes and processes playing out on like a really small scale and what that might mean for the future of our planet.

Anyway, as I was working on all of that, I started a blog on the side about environmental microbiology and all the cool things that microbes are doing and we can use them for because I just find them fascinating. And a lot of that had to do with mining and recycling applications of microorganisms.

So it was just like a fun thing I wrote [00:12:00] about once a week, pulled up a research paper, wrote a blog post on it, sent it out into the ether and a couple hundred people might have read it. As the years of dissertation writing wore on, I started to take this side gig of blogging a little bit more seriously, you know, as I was committed to finishing the dissertation, to seeing my PhD program out, but also realizing I wanted to do something quite different after I finished than what a lot of my peers were doing.

Again, I had a good amount of support from my academic advisors including being allowed to do a, I guess you could call it a glorified internship, working for the university newsroom at the University of Pennsylvania. essentially shadowing and working as the underling for the two staff science writers there.

And so that was sort of my first introduction into journalism. I wrote some, you know, profiles of scientists [00:13:00] and press releases about cool things going on, on campus and new studies that were coming out, that sort of thing. And so, that kind of gave me a nuts and bolts education into, very crash course education, into what a press release is, kind of how the sausage gets made in science communication, how findings get disseminated from universities to journalists to the wider public.

Around that same time, and we're talking like 2013, 2014 here, I also started a second blog called The Science of Fiction.

Quinn: Sure, yeah. Literally anything to not write your dissertation.

Maddie Stone: Anything to not write the dissertation. I know.

Quinn: My sister in law got hers in psychology and she always, she said, I had the cleanest apartment of any of my friends.

She's like, all I did was like type, type, type. No, thank you. I'm just going to go dust again.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, totally. So, around that time, this was about a year before I was supposed to be finished with my dissertation, I started a second [00:14:00] blog called the Science of Fiction. And if you remember the old Gawker media and family of sites that have since sort of scattered to the wind under various owners or been shut down. There was a free blogging platform within Gawker that anyone could use to start a blog called Kinja. Still the back end of the Gizmodo family of sites. I was an avid reader of io9 and Gizmodo at the time and I started my own Kinja blog blogging about the science of science fiction because again, huge nerd, always been a big fan of sci fi and it was just a fun additional way to communicate about science fiction.

And that got noticed by Annalee Newitz. who was the editor in chief of io9 at the time which was fairly shocking to me. I had never pitched them a story, or considered pitching them a story, but a couple of my articles got reposted to io9. [00:15:00] Subsequently, Annalee reached out to me, asking me if I wanted to be the weekend editor at Gizmodo, because they needed someone to blog fast and furious, seven times a day, Saturdays and Sundays. This was right around the same time that I was actually finishing my dissertation and being like, what the hell am I gonna do next? And so, I had taken on a few freelance assignments for different outlets at that point. I had, like, a small collection of, like, actual journalistic clippings to my name.

So I didn't have much of a resume, but she sort of took a chance on me. And that's how I got my foot in the door at Gizmodo. And I spent a few years there and then founded a climate vertical there called Earther. And I'm now jumping years into the future, but that's sort of the compressed history of how I got my start and how I transitioned into journalism.

Quinn: I love it. Thank you for that perspective. It's helpful because, you know, it's funny, my wife, I'll mention her a few times. [00:16:00] She's the greatest person alive. We grew up on E.T., right? Goonies, like, you name it. She made a TV show for Apple TV a few years ago called Home Before Dark. And it's inspired by this young, literally real life journalist, eight year old when she first hit the news, Hilde Lysiak, whose dad was an investigative journalist in Brooklyn. And I'm gonna, there's a very good chance I get this wrong, but basically, she used to tag along with him on, you know, to interview, I mean, he did, like, dark stuff. And she was super into it when she was six and seven and eight.

And I believe he covered Newtown. And he was like, you know what, I think I'm out. Which is understandable and they left and moved back to the small town he was from and he was like, I'm just going to write a book. And she's like, that's great, but I'm a journalist. So I'm going to keep going. And she published something on blogspot, you know, whatever it might've been.

And it like scooped the local [00:17:00] paper on a murder or something. And she was nine and it got all this national attention, but the town freaked out. Who are you to come in here and say, and all this stuff. But like Hillary was like, this is incredible. She got a book deal, you know, in the newspaper, all this. Anyways, my wife and her best friend made a fictionalized TV show about her, which is basically young Hilde and her friends riding bikes and solving crimes.

It's amazing. But yeah, but I think about you screaming at construction workers about getting too close to your playground. But you never know how you're going to get into this thing where you're like, I have to do this. And there's definitely a thousand variations along the way. Like you said, doing an entire dissertation, which is like, I'm committed to it.

And we're writing about the soil, which by the way, is like incredibly important. It still questions like we were not a hundred percent sure on, and we need to answer before we keep selling fake carbon offsets to people. But that stuff, it really does matter. And it does, I have done 700 different things.

And I do look back and go like, If I removed any of those, would I [00:18:00] be here? I'm not sure. Even though they don't totally go one to one. Or it felt like a waste of time, then or now. But I try to pass that on to, I'm a thousand. So I try to pass that on to people who feel like I'm lost or I'm doing two different things or I freelance in six things and I don't know where it's going to be.

And it's like, I don't know where I'm going to be, you know, it's like, and you don't know what's going to add up to get you there.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, absolutely. Some people, people often ask me if I were to do it over, would I have like, done the whole PhD again. And I really don't know the answer to that question.

But you know, despite not having used that in furtherance of like a scientific career, I do think in some important ways it got me where I am today. I don't know if I would have found science journalism if it wasn't for the confluence of, you know, random opportunities and lots of free time in front of a computer.

Quinn: Yeah. And [00:19:00] at such a specific moment of, like you said, Kinja and Tumblr and I mean, that was, I think that was post blogspot, but the point was like, there were these tools and it was sort of federated-ish, you know, and, we all worshipped io9, but like the, the comment section was huge. You know, that whole thing, it was, yeah, boy, that feels like a long time ago now.

Maddie Stone: It was a long time ago. That feels very like early internet now, but yeah, no, there were there were bloggers on Kinja who had big followings who were not affiliated with Kotaku or Jalopnik or io9 or any of those sites. Yeah, it was, it was a whole thing. Unfortunately, all of those old Science of Fiction blogs have been scrubbed from the internet.

I was able to download like internet archive or yeah, internet Wayback Machine has some of them, I really need to set aside an afternoon to go through the process of cataloging them.

Quinn: We've got to get those back out there. Think out for the Wayback Machine.

Maddie Stone: I know, Wayback, I am such a fan of the internet archive for so many reasons, but [00:20:00] particularly because those early blog posts that played an important role in my career.

Quinn: I told someone recently about how the hard drive with all my college papers, I was a religion major, which is interesting cause I'm you know, flag waving atheist. But, I took a, I thought I wanted to do political science, took one class and the professor annoyed me freshman year.

And I said, well, I'll go do this because it's also how we understand the world. You know, so many people, it's also so much of our conflict and how people live their day to day lives and all this stuff. So same thing, it wasn't a dissertation, but I remember writing about, you know, the history of armed religious conflict between India and Pakistan and, and what that land was before and all this.

And it's like, does that apply now? Not necessarily, but I still ask questions about why people do what they do, why they have to do what they're doing. And how, why we keep making so many of the same decisions we keep making. And, and that's part of it, or it's inspired by it. Would I do the same thing?

I don't know. It definitely wasn't on like, [00:21:00] Forbes Top 10 most lucrative college majors when I graduated, you know, a thousand years ago. But you know.

Maddie Stone: I think it's fair to say most of us don't really know what we're doing in our early twenties. And, you know, we're lucky if we make it out of there with, or early thirties with some sort of semblance of a career trajectory.

Quinn: Yeah. Yeah. Trajectory is a word. It's doing a lot of work there. So before we get into present day Science of Fiction I feel like we do need to talk about all of the new Star Trek the past few years. There's been so much before it was just Chris Pine and he's great, you know, but there was a period, you know, where we post DS9 and some other things and Voyager where we had, I mean, I think that first Chris Pine was like 2009, right, which I support by the way. I liked Into Darkness, but then we got this, Paramount Plus was like, we're gonna make all of it. What is your favorite? What have you jived with? Like, what has really spoken to you? [00:22:00] Because I've got, I think some popular and some controversial opinions.

Maddie Stone: Mm, okay. I don't know whether my opinions are going to be popular or controversial, but I'll just put them out there. Of the new Trek, and I have watched I think I've watched all of it. Actually, I haven't started the new season of Discovery.

Quinn: I'm only two in, so don't worry. We don't have to get into it. I'm behind and terrified of reading the internet.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, I know. I've just been avoiding it. I love Lower Decks because I think that Lower Decks is like just, it is just such a warm and wonderful tribute to all things Star Trek. It's clearly written by like the biggest Trek nerds who ever lived. It tells actual Star Trek stories that like fit within the canon and feel consistent with the rest of the franchise, but it is also like constantly making fun of Trek tropes just in a thousand ways [00:23:00] big and small, providing the loyal Star Trek audience, the people who've been watching this since they were kids, all kinds of just like Easter eggs and just like fun, delightful things that I never really expected a Star Trek show to do. So a big fan of Lower Decks for like branching out, doing something completely different and like totally nailing it, in my opinion. Sad to hear that there's only going to be one more season of that show.

Quinn: My anger is, like untenable about that. Yeah.

Maddie Stone: Yeah. Strange New World has been kind of surprisingly great. I think it has revived a lot of the feeling of, you know, classic original series Star Trek while modernizing a lot of the things that desperately needed to be modernized about it. And yeah, kind of strikes a cool balance between tapping into that nostalgia and getting the [00:24:00] fans of original series or people who grew up with the 90s Trek in my case, you know, having that like warm, fuzzy feeling of this reminds me of my childhood in some way, but also providing something like really new and obviously something that couldn't be done in the 60s or the 90s.

So I'm a big fan of both of those shows. I love the musical episode of Strange New World. I was just like, so shocked by how fun that was. I was bracing myself for it to be like a total train wreck the entire time, but that to me really sort of brought home the fact that they've got a team that like really knows what they're doing.

The fact that they could pull something like that off and not have it be like a cringe fest.

Quinn: I don't think you go for it unless you're pretty confident. It reminded me of, did you ever get to see, not sci fi, but a truly wonderful show called Crazy Ex Girlfriend? Oh my God. It's all about mental health and it's fantastic, but it's all music.

And you're just like, Oh my God, like the confidence to pull this off is just out of this world. [00:25:00] But yeah, when they were like, Oh, there's gonna be a musical episode. I was like, Oh my God. But I tell you, one of the things that has been so emblematic about this run to me is, not just, you know, Lower Decks, not focus, but like, willingness to just throw trope after trope at you and shine a light on it and then move on so quickly but have it be a part of it, but also, like you said, do old school Trek things, but also have these characters who you love and empathize with because they're just constantly getting things wrong. But besides probably season two of Discovery, which tried to do kind of, almost like a DS9 type feeling to it, which I loved.

These shows have all really worn their heart on their sleeve. In such a way that, you know, a friend and I were just talking and he's commuting from Richmond to DC once a week. And he's always got this train ride and[00:26:00] wouldn't pay for Paramount Plus. I was like, fine.

I'm gifting you Strange New Worlds. Like you just gotta, you gotta do it. And he was like, well, that's really nice. I was like, Trek has been our safe place, like, for our entire lives, you know, sleepover's doing TNG. And this version of that has mostly felt that way. Like, it's really just, not just the show and the theme, but these characters really wearing their heart on their sleeves.

It's so warm and empathetic and goes overboard with kindness. Even in Lower Decks, where they're, you know, ripping on each other. Or frustrated with one another, which happens. They're in these high stake things, but I don't know, that is, my wife always calls it in a loving way, like me watching my spaceships blow up at night, like where that brings me back to an easy place, but yeah, there's something about it and it seems so intentional, you know, I remember one point on Discovery last season, something like that, there was a point and they showed the bridge and it was all at least not Earth males on the deck. And they were so supportive and, [00:27:00] warm to each other and ready for whatever came and I was just like, this is the thing that I think has driven me to where at least I am, where it's just going like, I don't think tech is necessarily gonna save us. It's like the people and how we decide to use it and make sure it's inclusive of everyone. But I don't know. That's the thing that I've felt has always spoken to me. And it's why I love science fiction so much.

Nailed it. There we go.

Maddie Stone: There you go. Yeah. No, I mean, I completely agree. It's so earnest. But not in a, just in a very genuine way. And in a way that provides such a nice counterbalance to so much other pop culture and science fiction that's out there where everything has to be a little edgelordy or a little apocalyptic or you know out how everything is terrible and how everything is going to continue to be terrible.

Star Trek has always, [00:28:00] you know, at its roots, it's like utopian science fiction, right? And I think the new series have broadened my understanding, at least, of what it means to be a utopian science fiction show. I think a utopian science fiction show can go to some very dark places. But as you say, there is always this underlying earnestness, this underlying warmth and spirit of kind of camaraderie.

And, you know, we can do this if we all work together. And you know, all of us together is something that I think what that means within the context of Star Trek has expanded a lot over the decades.

Quinn: 100 percent. Well together has changed a lot in, in the context of decades for Star Trek, certainly.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, absolutely. So it's been a nice evolution, but also nice to see the show sort of keeping to its roots in some essential ways.

Quinn: Yeah, and it's easy to feel like, boy, all of a sudden we've got five new things, and Lower Decks is ending, and Discovery, and then what, and then, and you've got two [00:29:00] seasons of Picard that I feel like we could talk about for hours, and then a third one that was completely different, but by the way, showrun by the same guy, and then they were just like, we're just gonna do the thing that people want, and talk about, like, they just, fan service, fan service, fan service, and I was like, great.

Give it to me. This is what, this is what I need after thinking about climate change all day. Okay. But, I want to root, again, getting to Science of Fiction, in Star Trek about the Voyage Home, and, and the way this movie kind of wrapped up the first few movies, and Leonard Nimoy directing it again, and him being like, we're not doing the battles.

Like, I'm not, I don't want to do it this time. I want to do something that's different. I mean, so grounded compared to anything else. But also, people always joke, they're like, Oh, it's the one with the whales. I'm like, fuck yeah, it's the one with the whales. Like, it's, everything about that movie means so much to me.

I think from, again, it was from 1986. So I was four. But to now, like again, the heart on their sleeve, like, well, I gues we got to go find the whale. [00:30:00] So the alien thing inexplicably needs to hear from them and then it'll go away.

Maddie Stone: Yeah.

Quinn: It seems like your love of science fiction feels, feels similar to that.

Maddie Stone: I think so. I was negative too, when that movie came out, I didn't see it until I was a teenager. But yeah it had a really big impact on me and I, again, have been an environmentalist my whole life. I loved those cheesy 90s movies the Free Willy series. So I always had kind of a thing for whales.

And then I grew up watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine, a little bit of original series, but the movies sprinkled in there. And yeah, I just I think you know, the lens, the way that Leonard Nimoy approached that film as not wanting, as you say, for it to be, you know, a film about war or us versus them, but to have it be sort of a collective problem that we need to address and a [00:31:00] very topical problem for the time I should add.

I'm not sure if it was 1986, but it was some year right around there that the first international moratorium on commercial whaling went into effect. And this was sort of, the height of the Greenpeace Save the Whales campaign and people, you know, public concern over commercial whaling and what that was doing to our oceans and biodiversity was really starting to reach like a fever pitch.

And so that was obviously an issue that Leonard Nimoy cared about and he made it kind of the central plot line of his Star Trek movie, which I just think is so badass. Kudos to him for doing that. And yeah, you know, I don't know if we're ever going to have another movie where it makes sense to transport a humpback whale into a Klingon warship.

So that will always have a treasured place in my heart.

Quinn: I just love this thing. And again, my wife is this incredibly hardworking and wonderfully talented and creative and [00:32:00] amazing human who makes these things. And I get to watch the struggle of even someone who is very successful, like for the system to constantly spit it out and tell her no, you know, partly because she's a woman and partly because the system is so broken, like top to bottom, it's not great, but any idea, if you were like, here's the deal, we're going to, at the end, we're going to beam the whales onto the cloaked bird of prey.

We just powered up. from the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier and then we're going to fly away and we're going to take the lady with us. This system right now would be like, no, like, no. But I appreciated that some, for some reason they let them go for it. And like you said, I don't know when we'll see it again, but this is what I feel like Science of Fiction does for me when it comes in my inbox.

It feels like things, at least I remember reading, to go back farther, like Wired in the 1990s, these questions of, and this is my question, I always, one of the two questions I always try to get to, which is like, why do you feel [00:33:00] like you have to do this work? I can tell why you have to do all the mining stuff.

Like, that is so important and it's so integral to so many decisions we're making right now. You know, it felt like he had to, they were like, go make your shit, Leonard Nimoy, and he was like, okay. Okay. Here we go. And it feels like your conversations with these folks who you talk to for Science of Fiction and your love for it feels a similar way, which is like, this is really important.

And it's easy to just be like, it's movies and TV, but it's not. Tell me about like how sort of this latest incarnation of it and like why you have to do this as well as all the, you know, scooping Microsoft.

Maddie Stone: I think it's, I think that, you know, pop culture, the stories we tell are so important to how we see the world.

And they're often an essential part of our identity growing up. They often shape our career paths in [00:34:00] weird and unexpected ways. I've spoken with so many scientists over the course of my career as a science journalist, who have identified some early, you know, science fiction movie or book that they read as sort of the spark that launched them down you know, a career path studying galaxies or exoplanets or microbes in Antarctica and that really, I think, tells us something about how humans are, you know, we are creatures of stories.

We like to tell stories. Stories help us understand, make sense of the world. And science fiction stories in particular, I think, are just such a powerful vehicle for understanding big, macro complex problems in new ways and sort of gaming out solutions that maybe don't make sense now or don't make sense 10 years from now, but could make sense in a hundred or a thousand years.

Should there be, you know, X, Y, Z new [00:35:00] technologies available, new, societal structures in place. Like science fiction is sort of a breeding ground of ideas for what is possible. If we remove some of the structural barriers in place today. And you know, it's not, and I truly feel that, you know, this isn't just fun sort of thought experiments about, you know, what could be.

It would be so great if we, you know, were able to, you know, fly around the galaxy in these faster than light ships and visit all these different worlds and meet all these different alien cultures. Like, that's all great, but like, it's not just about this is fantasy escapism. This is, this is really a vehicle that allows us to think about, you know, the problems and the challenges facing society today and how we could address them in a less [00:36:00] constrained future and a future where we've sort of changed the underlying conditions in some way. And, you know, there are, books that have been written, there are professors who give lectures on all of the ways that science fiction has inspired real world innovation and that's part of it.

You know, we see all these one to one examples of a visionary science fiction author, you know, Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke all these kind of golden age sci fi authors thinking of technologies that we now have in our world today but that sort of one to one. Oh, it happened first in science fiction, and now we have it in our world, that I think is just one small part of the power of science fiction to affect change in the world.

I think much more broadly speaking, it allows us to reflect on our problems in kind of an open and imaginative space and think outside the box when it comes to solutions. So, you know, climate change is obviously one [00:37:00] of the most pressing, if not the most urgent problem of our time.

Something I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing about as a climate energy journalist. And I think science fiction has a really powerful role to play, how we're going to solve it. And not just, you know, dreaming up new types of transportation and new forms of energy, but how we actually rebuild and restructure society.

And I think there's powerful examples from the writings of Octavia Butler all the way through to a lot of modern climate fiction authors today who are really actively using fiction as a vehicle for you know, imagining a different future and imagining how we could, you know, restructure our world in order to live a little bit more sustainably on this planet.

So I think to wind down this long and rambly answer of why this is important, we all love stories. We don't all love science fiction, but a lot of us love science fiction. It feels like, you know, this kind of nerd culture [00:38:00] has exploded in recent years. It's a huge opportunity to communicate with audiences that isn't necessarily in the traditional route that you get information out there as a scientist or even as a science journalist.

It's a huge opportunity to meet people where they're at and science fiction in general offers us this enormous kind of imaginative playground for thinking about how we can, you know, build a better future.

Quinn: Well, I think that sums up basically everything I care about. So that, that was wonderfully instructive and, and conceived on the spot.

But obviously after decades of thinking about it and working in and marinating on it, which is what, you know, the best science fiction and even, you know, fantasy can do for us, which is just like, keep it going up here and making you think of not just like, again, like, what is, like you said, the coolest new transportation, but what I seemingly always come back to, I guess, at this point in trying to help people answer the question, what can I do is, okay, that's cool, but what are we going to [00:39:00] do with it? Who are we going to help with that? Like, what can we rectify or readjust with that, or despite that, or, you know, in lieu of that.

And I think about that with everything from mRNA to, you know, like you said solar power desalination to all these things. It's going, okay, okay. What of these? I had a wonderful scientist on the show, an AI researcher and she said, I answer old problems with new technology. And it is, it's looking at those things and going, okay.

And by the way, like one of the great things of DS9 is questioning sort of this utopia and in a lot of ways, right. And Battlestar did that very differently too. You know, I remember when they did. torture during the Bush years and things like that. They were like, I mean, we're not doing it, but we're doing it.

And we're going to be like, should we do it? Because they're like, these people are trying to kill us and yet. Yeah, so you can do it more overtly. You can do it more fantastically, whatever, whatever it might be. But that is where it comes back to it for me, [00:40:00] and even something like E.T., which they showed on an IMAX theater like last year, and I got to take my 10 year old to it, and I was like, this is going to be the greatest thing, and I was trying not to overhype it, but I was like, just so you know, this is like top three for me. But it's still this question of, what would you do? You know, with this other that is trying to survive and wants to get home, which speaks to so much of what we have going on now with climate induced immigration and things like that, it's like, how are you going to treat people?

And what are you going to do with this thing? And, I don't know. That's why I really love this series and I'm so glad you spend time on it. Is there sort of a unifying intentionality behind like who you bring, bring in and talk to? Is it like, Oh, I really love this thing. Let me give them a call.

Or is sort of there some quota or goal or something like that behind what you're going for?

Maddie Stone: Frankly it's is a little less planned out than that. It's [00:41:00] more driven by, you know, what I am reading, what I'm watching, what I'm consuming and the questions that's raising for me. And then oftentimes I get very lucky in my day job as a climate journalist and a science journalist more broadly because I don't just write on climate, to meet really interesting people who share my passion for really nerdy things.

And, you know, we just get to talking after the interview and it turns out they also go to comic cons and give panels on like the science of Star Wars or whatever. And so it's a mix of getting to talk to a lot of really cool people as a science journalist who also happen to share a passion for science fiction and how it can be this, like, vehicle for meeting audiences in new ways.

And getting some really kind of wonky and complicated ideas across through something that they are really passionate about already. And you [00:42:00] know, I just finished Andor season one and I have this really nerdy question about what that astronomical spectacle in the sky is and how that could actually work.

Quinn: What was that?

Maddie Stone: Well, it was crazy. I did a Science of Fiction post on it and I called up an astronomer and we talked about meteor showers and like, is the eye of Aldaadi a meteor shower? Like, what the heck is it? And her best explanation was maybe it's like the slime trail from migrating burgles, which are those like galactic space whales.

Quinn: Yeah, the whales! It's always whales.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, it's the whale slime trail, like, you know, from thousands of them migrating across the upper atmosphere and lighting up in the sky. Which is both awesome and just like so absurd. I love it.

Quinn: Yeah, so, you know, I'm gonna go with that.

Maddie Stone: I try not to be too much of a scientist when I [00:43:00] go into this project.

I try not to be like, this is what is technically accurate about, you know, flying space whales in Star Wars. And this is why it doesn't make any sense at all. But there's a tightrope walk in this form of science communication where you want to be accurate, but you also want to be fun. And you want to accept the fact that in this universe, there are magic people with laser swords who can move things around with their hands and their mind. Right. That's just like, you know, we have to work that in with the laws of physics. We just have to do it. So, yeah, so it's, you know, what are the weird questions that pop into my head as I'm reading and watching and consuming science fiction?

And who are the fun people I talk to who would be willing to sound off for an hour about you know, the actual science behind dilithium or what have you. It's kind of a hodgepodge.

Quinn: Perfect. Welcome. You're among friends. [00:44:00] Two, my obvious next question is. Is there some fiction in you somewhere after all of this?

Maddie Stone: Hmm, that's a great question. Well, I have dabbled in creative writing over the years. Never been so bold as to try to publish anything, but I have a lot of unpublished drafts of stories kind of gathering dust in various hard drives. So it's something I think about getting into at some point in the future.

My mom actually is a fiction writer. She's written a lot of books. She's quite prolific and yeah, so there's a little bit of it in the DNA. It's a really challenging headspace to toggle in and out of with journalism because it's, you know, going from every sentence has to be factually vetted and buttoned up and run by various parties for accuracy to whatever the fuck I want to [00:45:00] put on this paper, and I hope it sounds good and connects with people.

So it's a lot of mental toggling to go between the two that the times in my life where I've done more creative writing, dabbling are times where I've been sort of like in between jobs or again, finishing my dissertation, there was really a lot of time wasted in that period. But yeah, I mean, you know, some of my some of the science journalists I look up to the most have pivoted to or balanced a career in science journalism with science fiction writing.

And so it is sort of an aspirational goal of mine, not something I'm going to do this year or next year, probably, but get back to me in 10 years and we'll see if I'm working on something

Quinn: Great and everything's going to be great in 10 years. So we're nailing it.

Maddie Stone: Everything's going to be wonderful.

Quinn: We're nailing it. I love that. So one of the, again, I worked for a little while in the screenwriting trade, and there's still some [00:46:00] things bouncing around there, but because of my sort of involvement in it and now proximity to it in a lot of ways. And then this job, if you want to call it that, I advise this group called Good Energy, which Anna Jane Joyner founded a couple of years ago and it's fantastic.

And basically it's a new foundation and what she and her cohort do is try to get more, first of all, understand how much climate, specifically climate, is in movies and TV today slash the past 10 years, and then proactively try to get more in. And over the course of my loose involvement that I'm so lucky to have with them.

You know, it has become essentially this question of how do we get literally any climate into anything, knowing that the way the sausage is made is very complicated and mostly out of your control. So it's anything from like literally a joke to a whole character storyline or an arc or a setting or whatever it might be.

And [00:47:00] so they just recently developed their version of the Bechdel test. Are you familiar with the Bechdel test? In movies and TV, it's basically God, if I'm getting it right, it's are, are there two women in the movie or TV? Do they talk to each other and do they talk about something other than the love interest essentially?

I'm pretty sure that's what it is. So the, and most movies fail, of course, the climate version that they've come up with. I believe they're calling it the Climate Reality Test. I'll find it. Does climate change exist in this world in any way and are the characters aware of it? And they just ran the study with Colby College that they came out with this week.

And they ran, they took IMDB's top basically 250 movies from the past 10 years which, you know, imperfect ranking, but it's something. And 11% of the movies qualified, answered both questions, which is more than we actually thought, it was more than I would have expected.

Maddie Stone: Right like thinking in my head like all right, we've got Don't Look Up. We've got Geostorm. We've got the Day After Tomorrow.

Quinn: [00:48:00] But again, we haven't lowered the bar but tried to understand again this process where, again, like you said, you go from journalism where you're like you better fact check this 40 different ways and they hand it to the 40 groups who have to do it themselves from their perspective, to fiction, which is, you know, there's the science and entertainment group that pairs scientists with screenwriters and TV writers and things like that.

And that group usually gets that, look, we're trying to put the best science into these things, but in the end, the story is the thing that is going to win, because that's what we're making here, not a documentary. And 40 executives are going to tear it piece to piece and then we're going to screen it and things will change and you just have to be cool with that if you want to be a part of this.

And I think that's why the climate bar is not necessarily low, but like every little bit does help. And this is kind of where I have such an issue with the personal versus systemic action thing, right? Which is, this might be one screenwriter or one TV writer fighting for a [00:49:00] solar joke in a TV show that's making 30 episodes.

And if it gets in there, like that is a win. And that is because it could reach so many people, because it just makes it part of everyday life in some way. Because as you have said, we get so much from our stories. They don't just tell us what the future could be in this perfect world, or about lightsabers, or I definitely tried to build a proton pack at one point with a lot of lightbulbs.

Yeah, it didn't, it didn't work, unfortunately. Not enough power. They tell us who we can be and what we can do with the things we have and shine light on the mistakes we've made, not just technology wise, but as a society and an economy and things like that. And that is so important going forward.

You know, I think about do you know, the journalist Ed Yong just recently left The Atlantic, won the Pulitzer. His early COVID piece where he said, you know, COVID was this lake that exposed, flood that exposed all the cracks that were already in our sidewalk. And a lot of cracks. We have not filled them.

It's not great. And science fiction can do the [00:50:00] same thing. It can go, Hey, look at all these choices you made to get you to this fictional place.What if you make those, but also what could go wrong with some of them? What do you need to make them, but also, you know, there's the more sort of dystopian stuff, which I, frankly, stay away from right now or the complicated things that go like, you make this choice, this is where it's going.

I used to love Black Mirror. It was great. Now I'm just like, that's Tuesday. No, no, thank you. No, thank you. It's all to say, I'm very thankful for your work and I'm thankful that you do both versions of it because these mineral questions and the people who do it, just like the people who do our health work around whatever technology we're using.

That is what matters to make sure we kind of get it right as much as we can by those people, right? And to include the most people and to make sure they're paid and to make sure it's not creating just prolific amounts of waste. And we recycle what we can, right? Because we've got to do this thing.

So let's attempt to do it and ask the right questions in a way that is most beneficial for most folks and the little ecosystems we have remaining.

Maddie Stone: Well, [00:51:00] I'm grateful for anyone who is doing any work trying to inject more climate reality into, you know, Hollywood science fiction. I think it's long overdue.

I think there are more people thinking about this all the time. But as you say, lots of competing priorities, lots of screenwriters, lots of executives. Ultimately, you know, it's a balance between entertainment and what works for the audience. And you know, whatever messages or information that the writers behind this massive enterprise, you know, want to get out there.

And I did recently do an interview with Star Trek's resident science advisor, where we talked a little bit about that. And I think she was very positive on how science has been considered and incorporated into the recent series. Obviously not everything is going to have an explanation that, you know, stands up to like a dissertation defense or peer review, but [00:52:00] everything, everything that touches on science in some way gets run by an actual scientist.

And that person has input in the writer's room. And there's something really valuable about that, I think. And I'm really happy to see more efforts directed toward incorporating climate and our collective problem that we all have to deal with over the next century and that we shouldn't be shying away from in our fiction.

So that's awesome that you're involved with that.

Quinn: Well, I'm the world's smallest piece of the puzzle, but it matters and I care about it. And again, I was the beneficiary of growing up on so many of these things, my favorite animal is the whale for clearly like a bunch of reasons. So, you know, it matters. It sticks with people, right? No matter what you see it in. So, anyways.

Maddie Stone: Well, and if you want an explicit tie in between my mining and mineral work and the science of fiction, I've done a couple of posts that have been good performers for the blog. I did a sort of exhaustive survey of where in the [00:53:00] galaxy we might mine lithium beyond Earth after that I noticed that that theme was starting to pop up in science fiction There's a season of the Expanse on a lithium mining world. For All Mankind another show that I really enjoy, features a lithium mining plot on the moon involving like a shootout between astronauts from the U S and Soviet Union.

So there's been this sort of trickle of interest in science fiction in recent years in incorporating what I see as sort of one of the biggest questions and challenges of our time, which is like the resources that we need in order to move into the into the future. So yeah, that is something I try to spotlight when I can because it's a little bit of a niche that I've, you know, really made my own over the last few years.

Quinn: It's a niche, but it underpins the whole thing because we have had these finite resources that power the past 200 years. And we didn't go about procuring those in the best way [00:54:00] and didn't ask, even ask really about the costs or externalities involved until now. So doing that now for these resources that are finite and in these difficult or controversially hard to reach places, or they're just under China, where most of them are, is we have to ask those questions because we do need them and, and it would be great to get them.

It would be great if we recycled a lot more of them. But you know, it's why I believe, I'm a liberal arts major. It's why I believe here should be like a chief should we do this officer in every tech company. Right.

Maddie Stone: It would be extremely helpful. Yeah.

Quinn: All right, Maddie, last couple of questions. And this is kind of where, I don’t know what the metaphor is today, but the point is there's so many climate metaphors. I can't use anymore. The other day my kid was like, my gas tanks filled up. I was like, that's out. You can't say rising tide lifts all boats.

That's not ideal anymore. There's a few of them that are not ideal. The point is, how can we help? So, we like to focus on things [00:55:00] people can do to donate, to volunteer, to get educated, to be heard with their representative at whatever level, locally, or larger. What are some specific things besides reading your work wherever it goes, including your Microsoft piece from this morning.

Good for those folks. But also subscribing to the Science of Fiction, which has such a cool URL. It's like a sci.fi or sciof.fi.

Maddie Stone: Yeah it's sciof.fi. You can thank Finland for that domain.

Quinn: Yeah. There's a lot. The Indian ocean was hot for a little while there. People use that one a lot.

Maddie Stone: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Quinn: So what are some other specific ways you believe in groups doing great work, people doing great work, work that should be followed? Tell me.

Maddie Stone: I guess my first answer will be because I imagine there's a lot of scientists and scientifically inclined folk who listen to your podcast.

You know, don't be afraid to get out there into a non traditional forum and talk [00:56:00] about the things that you're passionate about, whether that is going to a local video game or comic convention or giving a talk at a museum or, you know, some sort of public event. I think it is really important for people to put a face to science in order to, you know, hopefully help rebuild some of the trust that has eroded over the years.

And you know, if you're a science fiction fan, if you're a comic fan, if you play video games, if you play board games, there is a convention out there of like minded nerds who want to know, you know, why this works on a chemistry level, on a physics level, and are eager to absorb your knowledge.

So go to those people, meet them where they are and use your shared passion to connect with them. That's what I would say for the science folks in the room. For [00:57:00] everyone else gosh, there's, you know, I think again, you mentioned this this false debate between individual and systemic action which is just, yeah, really frustrating and not something I want to get into too much there. But I am always a, why not both type of person. And if we're going to, change things on a systemic level it starts with, I do believe it starts with, you know, building small grassroots communities. So do something in your community that matters. You know, get involved in a local park cleanup effort. If you're into tinkering and repair, get involved in a repair cafe. These are events that take place all over the world where people bring their old broken down devices and people who have a little more experience fixing them teach you how to open it up and fix it, you know rather than throwing that thing in the trash [00:58:00] or taking it out with your, yearly e-waste haul.

Learn what's inside it and how it can be repurposed. I mean, I just, I think local and grassroots and I think, we got to start small in a thousand different ways.

Quinn: At least a thousand but those are all opportunities. As we desperately try to paint it. Okay I'm going to ask you one last question, then I'm going to get you out of here.

What is a book you have read in the past year or so, in all of your free time. that is, I'm going to simplify this more than I previously have, because I think this is just better. What's the book that's helped you? And that could be, again, sci fi, fantasy, turning your brain off. It could be something you weren't exposed to before or something that leveled up your education.

And we've got a whole list on Bookshop and people love that stuff.

Maddie Stone: One that I read very recently that I enjoyed quite a bit was not the end of the world by Hannah Ritchie. She is [00:59:00] a journalist, with now I'm going to blank on the name of it, but Our World In Data, yeah, Our World In Data, cool data visualization site.

She wrote a book about climate, the environment, sustainability, sort of, breaking down our environmental challenges into six or seven distinct buckets of challenges. So climate change, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, ocean plastic pollution, air pollution crisis, and presents this very sort of lucid and clear eyed and not overly, I wouldn't say, she's not being Pollyannaish or overly optimistic, but a very optimist take on how we actually do have all the tools to solve that crisis starting today.

And here's what it's going to take. And there wasn't a lot in there that was necessarily new to me as a climate journalist who's [01:00:00] steeped in this stuff all the time. I appreciated her perspective, her very data driven perspective in the book.

And it, it was nice to see a not completely doom and gloom dystopian vision for our future and how we solve the problems of today that was rooted in pretty hardcore research.

Quinn: Yeah.

Maddie Stone: And the second book I wanted to plug really quickly was Aaron Perzanowski's The Right to Repair, which is a very, kind of comprehensive deep dive overview on the subject of reclaiming the stuff that we own and why, you know, repair is important from an environmental perspective, also from sort of a social justice perspective and how technology companies have eroded our ownership of our stuff over the last few decades and how we can fight that.

Quinn: I love it. Yeah. That's one I've been meaning to do for a while. The more I read your day job work on that the more I go, boy, I need to get a little more grounded in this, but that's what's fun about this job is I can just be like, well, I need to spend the week on this curriculum and it's pretty great.[01:01:00]

Thank you for all of your work for evolving into journalism and Earther and everything since and working with Drilled we're big fans of Amy's. You know, should it be all the time? Probably not. Should we have optimistism all the time? But the way Amy's like, there's bad guys and we should yell at them makes me very happy. There are. And we should yell at them more. Like the construction guys across the street from your playground.

Maddie Stone: I'm glad resurrected that story.

Quinn: Yeah, it really underpinned the whole thing. Construction Workers and Whales. That's what we're calling this one. That's it. Subscribe to Science of Fiction.

You can check out Maddie's work everywhere. We link to something probably every week because it's out there. We'll certainly put the Microsoft one out there. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. I know you're about to sign off for a while, so thank you for squeezing this one in.

Maddie Stone: Absolutely. This was 100 percent worth it. Thank you, Quinn, for all of the research and the thoughtful questions. I love talking about this stuff. Happy to do it anytime.

Quinn: Awesome. [01:02:00] All righty. We'll talk to you soon, Maddie. Thank you.

Maddie Stone: All right. Bye bye.