WEBVTT

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So today I got to do
a fantastic thing.

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I went to the Mirror Lab and
had a tour of the lens facility

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underneath the football stadium.

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And I've been wanting to
do this since 2018, when

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I went to visit the European
Southern Observatory in Chile

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and some telescopes there.

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And Susan Briante told
me about the Mirror Lab.

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And so, anyway, today
we went there together,

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and with Sara Sams, Tuscon poet.

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It was so interesting
and wonderful.

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But I'm going to read you two
poems that come from my trip

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to the observatories
in the other desert.

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In the desert near
Antofagasta, Chile,

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tailings ponds are those
green neon rectangles,

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tight adjacent pools of toxins
sloughed from Middle Earth.

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Their geometric neatness like
a pantone strip, electric lime,

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unlucky lark,
primavera, artichoke.

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[LAUGHS]

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You may have seen them
from above in photographs.

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The effusions of the Atacama
mines, lithium plus pus.

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From the searest, barrenest
stretch of all the Earth

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we light our hand-held stars.

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And yeah, in a kind of
clever counterpoint,

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the closest other industry
vaults into the sky.

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The VLT, very large
telescope, and coming soon,

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extremely large.

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These astrophysicists,
they put their tongues

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into their cheeks, a little smug
that their work is just as hard

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to do as mineralogists,
but optimistic.

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All curiosity and awe.

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Above, above, above the
cynics of the minds.

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Guzman's Nostalgia for
the Light is a movie

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that will send your brainy heart
into the basement of your chest.

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Widows, mothers sifting
that same desert

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for fragments of bones
from Pinochet's camps.

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Is this calcified
scrap a human scrap?

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They work coincidentally
alongside archeologists

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whose job is in situ,
prehistoric human artifacts.

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And the movies from the
2010's, the observatories

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are also going up right their
neighborhood of scoping out

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the past.

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A half century or 10
millennia, or all the way.

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Big Bang.

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Guzman seems to hope
that we deserve the sky.

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Definitions of addiction:
Doing something

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even when it's bad for you.

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A disease, not a moral question.

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Anyway, still a
matter of choice.

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And it takes enormous
will to reverse course,

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like choosing to divorce
or join the Paris Accords

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or not shoot up, not scroll.

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Someone figured out
how to use, then scale

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to millions, all this
lithium for batteries,

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mostly though trace
amounts for mental health.

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Batteries, metal
articles wrought

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by hammering is what
a battery first was.

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Resource used to mean to rise
again, recover, by the way.

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The astronomers must know
about the desert ponds etched

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into crusty veils below their
own search for wherever's next.

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All those metal necks craned up.

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Or maybe, like their tools,
the astronomers look only up.

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Imagination resigning
itself to the common task,

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give us something new
deep in the mantle,

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deep in the Milky Way.

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When I visited the very large, I
took its picture with my phone.

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[LAUGHS]