rec.music.phish › Interview with Jon Fishman (April '92) 1 post by 1 author Shelly Culbertson (+Spector) 7/19/92 This is a few months old, but Jon just returned to me his copy of this transcript with comments and corrections. This conversation took place 3-4 am after the show at the Hilton in Eugene. It's not really a conventional interview, but I think that the ideas Jon expressed were interesting enough to bear posting here, and I hope you think so too. :-) Shelly --------------------------------------------------- Interview with Jon Fishman, Eugene, Oregon 4/22/92 (When we started rolling the tape, we were talking about galaxies, since Jon had been looking at a book about them the day before -- _Galaxies_, by Timothy Ferris) JF: ...That's incredible. They had side views of our whole galaxy. Basically, from really far away, our entire galaxy is just a disk. It looks just like in the movies, they portray UFOs as these glowing disks that are bulging in the middle, like Saturn; that's what the galaxies look like. They're all like these little spaceships sitting there. I think the ultimate engineering project is to learn how to use light as power and then over time, through eons, learn how to engineer your galaxy into a spaceship and actually be able to move it with intention through space. Here are all these galaxies and stars in space and they're all moving along, at least that's the theory, and expanding away from each other. Things are moving and probably very few if any have any control over what direction they're moving. I have some control over which direction I move as long as I'm sitting on this planet. I can get up and walk from this end of the room to the other end of the room. I can fly to the moon...but within the context of the galaxy, the whole galaxy's going this way and I'm going that way too! <laughs> And everything else with us. No-one has any say, and those galaxies are going their direction and that's it. There's just no control there. Not that you have to have control, and maybe it's a catch- 22, maybe what you would need to do to obtain control over something like that would be detrimental to your own existence. So, maybe it's impossible. But you don't know until you try. I don't think any harm can come from learning how to use light as energy. (SC: Like solar energy, right?) Well, yeah, and really use it efficiently. All there is, is light and dark. That's the bottom line of everything's existence in three dimensions as far as we know it. So if you learn how to use light directly, that's it! You win! As far as this dimension's concerned, you can't do any better than that. And if you could learn how to travel at the speed of light, more power to you, that's it. You're not going to go any further than that; otherwise you're not even going to know when you get there. <laughs> SC: That started off relating to time, whether it's linear or circular... JF: Well if it's circular, it's spherical. At least spherical. If it's circular, it's definitely a circle in all directions. Ok, and then there's the telescope and the microscope. They're the same damn thing; one looks in, one looks out. At the end of each horizon as far as our sensory input devices are concerned the last thing we can see as far out as we look is spheres revolving around spheres. As far in as we look, the last thing you see is a sphere revolving around a sphere. So where are we? In that context, where does that leave us? Well, ok, in the middle. On a linear timeline, that would be zero, and then there's positive and negative, in or out; that's if you look at it linearly. But if you look at it linearly that means that you're placing yourself in the middle of the universe, which is totally a crock; there's no way that works. But then again, why not? You might as well be the center of the universe... SC: What other perspective do you have? JF: Sure. But it's just as silly as thinking that we were the center of the galaxy. We're not even remotely close to the center of the galaxy. Our galaxy, the stars, Orion and all those stars that we look at, those are in our galaxy. When we look at a night sky, that's what we see from here.... That's like when the dolphins, or some fish that's swimming along, goes way down deep in the ocean then comes up and gets up to the light and gets up to the surface of the water; that's it for him, that's it for the fish. That's the end of his universe. He doesn't see any further than the surface; his perception of light and everything is based on it coming from the surface. And then for us it's the blackness and the stars that are there -- and those are just within our galaxy. And then once you get outside the galaxy there's billions and billions of stars we never see. It's ridiculous, it's totally ridiculous. It just keeps going. It keeps going the other way, too. I think we see less of that, it's like we can see farther out than we can see in, it seems like on all levels. That's kind of an odd thing, isn't it? We can see really far out, but we can't even see the bottom of our own ocean. We see cells and stuff, but... I was reading this book called _Engines of Creation_, talking about nanotechnology and being able to make cellular machines, amino acid by amino acid; arrange them to do specific jobs, like go in and disassemble a cancerous tumor, just disassemble it like cranes and pickaxes and shovels and construction workers and guys just building things and taking things apart, like little machines to do that, little tiny caterpillars, little tiny bulldozers...<laughs>. A little amino acid machine that goes into a cancerous cell, takes out one chain of amino acids and puts in another chain of amino acids to make that cell go back to its original job in the body. It's crazy! If someone can actually do that....and you can't ever blame it on technology, you can't blame it on Einstein, you can't blame it on people who discovered things; they just brought knowledge, all they did was bring knowledge, no-one ever said how to use it. And everybody knows, right from the start, that you can use it for shit, or you can use it for something good. And there's just as much shit as there is good stuff. That's just all there is to it. That's like nuclear fission or fusion - one way of using what Einstein thought of produces water as a by-product. One relies on a chunk of unstableness, the other one relies on stability. It's so funny, it's so obvious. I just feel like, it's go solar or die. SC: We will, though. JF: It's true. There's only so many trees, there's only so much oil, there's only so many rocks; it's totally obvious. Those things are there so that you can use them as building blocks to get to the sun, which is the ultimate end source of energy. And god forbid if you live long enough to see the sun burn out, then you can probably figure out a way to make an artificial sun. If humans are around for another three hundred million years...once you get this galaxy moving...if they actually were able to make the galaxy move, it would definitely be moving pretty fuckin' fast. <laughs> I mean, you'd be able to go light years in human life times. But that would require the human life on this planet to be completely united. Something like that might be something that would go against our natural way of survival. Maybe it's just totally anthropomorphic to think that as human beings, we can go that far. I don't mean that as a negative thing either, I just mean that as a humble thing or a realistic thing. SC: Well, what is the destiny of our species, more or less. JF: Any species can burn out; that's easy. How far can you go? When I was growing up, my father always said -- all that mattered to them was that you do your best, the best that you can do. So I was the slowest runner in second grade, and there was this point in childhood where being a fast runner in your school was a prestigious thing. Anyway, I was just never a fast runner, but I ran the fastest I could. And at one point I actually was running pretty fast; it was amazing. In ninth grade, I was the fastest runner in my summer camp. So, if the species does the best it can do...who knows? SC: It seems to me that a basic feature of humans that distinguishes them from other species is the degree to which we manipulate object in our environment and change our environment.