Ulam believed that the development of the hydrogen bomb would put an end to major global wars, and despite extraordinary global and local conflicts occurring since, we have not had a global war since World War II, so 'in that sense so far he's right.'

Ulam played a fundamental role in developing experimental mathematics and hybrid approaches to science using computers, which led to primitive ideas at the time but much more developed later of what became known as complexity, and he was involved in early conversations about founding an Institute like the Santa Fe Institute.

David Krakow is the president of the Santa Fe Institute, was born in Hawaii (like Barack Obama), grew up in Portugal (making him fluent in Portuguese), completed his education in England (making him sound like an Englishman), and is completely devoted to having broad, diverse views and diverse thinking about science.

David Krakow has been integral to the Santa Fe Institute for the two-and-a-half of its existence (from ~2002 onward), is an extraordinary widely read polymath, very cultured speaker, big broad thinker, and lovely colleague who can be inspirational, with interests always in big questions like origins of life, origins of ideas, and origins of innovation.

David Krakow disagrees with the assessment (shared by many) that Moby Dick is the greatest book ever written, arguing it is difficult to believe that a book with no women in it and where the word 'love' never appears could be thought of as the greatest book ever written.

In 2012 David Krakow was named on Wired's list of people who are going to change the world.

Stan Ulam was one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the 20th century, born in Lviv (then called Lwów), Poland, recruited to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos where he worked with Edward Teller and made major contributions to the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Ulam laid foundational work in nonlinear science and nonlinear dynamics, which led ultimately to ideas of chaos, and he developed the Monte Carlo method while at Los Alamos, which has had extraordinary impact on computation of problems across the entire spectrum of science and technology.

Ulam died in 1984, the very year the Santa Fe Institute was founded, which was 40 years ago from the time of this lecture, and the Ulam lecture series (now in its 29th iteration) was named after him as a fitting memorial.

David Krakow obtained his undergraduate degree in biology and computer science from Royal Holloway College, University of London, and his doctorate in evolutionary biology from Oxford, after which he stayed at Oxford as a research fellow for several years, then moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton before being recruited to the Santa Fe Institute around 2002.

David Krakow's work has been primarily focused in evolutionary biology and computation from where he got his original degree, with breadth extending across many fields, and he has recently given considerable thought to one of the great revolutions we are going through—machine learning, artificial intelligence—and we may hear something about that.

The biosphere is currently supporting nearly 8 billion people, far exceeding the planet's biological carrying capacity of approximately 5 million people, and is experiencing exponential expansion in urbanization and resource consumption (the 'Great Acceleration').

Urban infrastructure (roads, electrical lines, gas lines, water lines, buildings) across all cities globally scales with city size at approximately 0.85 power, creating a 15% savings in infrastructure per capita for each doubling of city size, showing extraordinary universality independent of geography, history, or culture.

Individual humans metabolize approximately 100 watts (2,000 food calories per day) at basal rate, but when accounting for the energy required to maintain civilization's infrastructure (buildings, transportation, electricity), the average person's effective metabolic rate is approximately 11,000 watts, equivalent to a 30-ton organism or a dozen elephants.

War has become an urban phenomenon where the concept of 'battlefield' is now anachronistic because combat is concentrated in cities where civilians live, as exemplified by the Battle of Britain (1940) and contemporary conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Physics traditionally seeks to understand many complex phenomena in terms of a few simple underlying principles and laws, as exemplified by Weinberg's statement that physics is about seeing things simply.

Global energy use and other socioeconomic metrics, when plotted logarithmically against the logarithm of distance from a hypothetical singularity point, show a clear straight-line relationship consistent with mathematical singularity theory, with a structural break in the mid-1970s indicating that humanity avoided a previous singularity through an undetermined major paradigm shift (possibly globalization or the energy crisis).

Complex adaptive systems like cities, organisms, and companies are multi-leveled and interconnected networks that must act coherently, and understanding their dynamics requires identifying emergent laws that are statistical, probabilistic, and stochastic rather than deterministic like classical physics.

Within species, dogs show reversed lifespan-size relationships (large dogs live shorter than small dogs) because artificial breeding has removed them from evolutionary optimization, violating the assumptions of the scaling theory that requires systems to have evolved under natural selection.

Maximum lifespan in organisms is determined by the fundamental constraint that natural selection only requires survival to reproductive age (approximately 40 years for humans, producing ~10-12 offspring), and extending life beyond this requires devoting all available energy to cellular damage repair, which is incompatible with other survival functions.