Any physically possible transformation can be brought about by knowledge.

There ain't no one here but us people. If you think of the set of physical transformations that can be brought about and can't be brought about, of the ones that can be brought about, the overwhelming majority—and again, that's an understatement—can only be brought about by people. By people who create knowledge because they want to bring that thing about.

And if there weren't people in the universe, this set of things which can be brought about would be tiny. Again, tiny is an understatement; it would be almost nothing. There'd be like a few dozen things in the world, different kinds of stars, and that would be that. So that's an entry point to the idea of optimism.

If something is possible, then either it's going to happen spontaneously, like a star or black hole, or it's going to be brought about. And if it's going to be brought about, it's almost certain to have been brought about by knowledge, and knowledge will have been created either by evolution or almost certainly, in the long run, by people.

Because at the moment, we're kind of maybe still catching up or have just moved ahead of evolution in the sophistication of the knowledge that we have. I think what you're saying is that if you look at the inanimate universe, there's only a few fundamental forces acting in a few known ways. And although it's replicated at huge scales, the diversity of knowledge there is quite low.

Yeah, and then after that comes the knowledge creation through evolution, which has had a long time to work relative to humans. So there are some impressive things to show, like grass and trees and humans themselves. But the growth of that rate of knowledge is very low, and you can imagine human knowledge growing much faster.

Once it begins to spread amongst the stars, being the primary thing that needs to be explained to explain the structure of the universe. Absolutely! And so we are at the beginning of the growth of an infinity of knowledge because we have humans now creating knowledge at a rate and diversity that's much greater than before.

And because we're universal explainers, anything that can be explained, we can explain; anything that can be created, we can create. Yes, well, I'm optimistic. Any transformation that is physically possible can be brought about, and it requires knowledge.