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“I liken it to justifying music because it's good exercise for the violinist's right arm.”

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps · In-Depth Interviews · November 2026

Context

Richard Dawkins and Josh Szeps were discussing why science and space exploration are so often justified by their spin-offs. Dawkins says spin-offs are a tiny part of the real case, which is wonder and understanding.

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Transcript

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Richard Dawkins

…or justifying science because aspirin was discovered from the bark of trees, that kind of thing. The majesty of the size of the universe, well, the Milky Way galaxy to start, and of geological time and of plate tectonics and things like that. I think science teachers need to do more of that.

Josh Szeps

Yeah, and I wish we wouldn't play that game of always justifying scientific research on the basis of the way it can cash out pragmatically, you know, the Teflon argument. Well, we should, you know, we should go to Mars because it, who knows what untold consumer goods will come out of.

Richard Dawkins

It's a tiny part of the justification. I liken it to justifying music because it's good exercise for the violinist's right arm.

Josh Szeps

Right, exactly. Yes. Where are you on the space race and colonizing Mars and things like that? Well, I'm

Richard Dawkins

sympathetic to the sort of negative feeling that the enormous extra expense of sending humans is probably not worth it. And sending instruments is a better way to explore the solar system, which is all you can explore at the moment by visiting it. And because the extra expense of sending a human is…

Josh Szeps

provides an opportunity for normies to sit in front of their TV and go, wow, that's. So I'm a bit ambivalent.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

“In the UK, it is basically illegal to build new housing with fitted air conditioning units. To get approval, you have to prove that you've tried sufficient ventilation. You have to prove you've tried to open windows. You have to prove you've tried to plant some trees to create some shade. You have to fill in so many documents. It's all bureaucracy, it's all planning regulation.” — Reem Ibrahim, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

“That is what he said, that I was a pastiche… of things that I perceived from outside in the world and that I could recreate cleverly and make it look like it was a work of art. Isn't that exactly what we moan about in AI now? Because AI does the same. It just scrapes all the data and puts it together so neatly and so cleverly, but it's not original.” — Stephen Fry, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps