Sean Carroll: Is There Intelligent Life Out There in the Universe? | AI Podcast Clips
00:00:00.000 | (gentle music)
00:00:02.580 | - Do you think there's intelligent life,
00:00:10.680 | however you would like to define intelligent life,
00:00:12.740 | out there in the universe?
00:00:14.820 | - My guess is that there is not intelligent life
00:00:19.540 | in the observable universe other than us.
00:00:21.740 | Simply on the basis of the fact that
00:00:26.240 | the likely number of other intelligent species
00:00:29.220 | in the observable universe, there's two likely numbers,
00:00:32.800 | zero or billions. (laughs)
00:00:36.400 | And if there had been billions,
00:00:37.480 | you would have noticed already.
00:00:39.040 | For there to be literally like a small number,
00:00:42.240 | like, you know, Star Trek, there's, you know,
00:00:44.920 | a dozen intelligent civilizations in our galaxy,
00:00:48.200 | but not a billion, that's weird.
00:00:52.240 | That's sort of bizarre to me.
00:00:53.400 | It's easy for me to imagine that there are zero others
00:00:55.920 | because there's just a big bottleneck
00:00:57.540 | to making multicellular life
00:00:59.900 | or technological life or whatever.
00:01:01.960 | It's very hard for me to imagine
00:01:03.480 | that there's a whole bunch out there
00:01:05.080 | that have somehow remained hidden from us.
00:01:07.200 | - The question I'd like to ask is,
00:01:09.800 | what would intelligent life look like?
00:01:11.760 | What I mean by that question and where it's going is,
00:01:16.040 | what if intelligent life is just fundamentalist,
00:01:19.840 | is in some very big ways different
00:01:22.720 | than the one that has on Earth?
00:01:26.400 | That there's all kinds of intelligent life
00:01:28.820 | that operates in different scales
00:01:30.340 | of both size and temporal.
00:01:32.220 | - Right, that's a great possibility
00:01:34.220 | because I think we should be humble
00:01:35.700 | about what intelligence is, what life is.
00:01:37.560 | We don't even agree on what life is,
00:01:38.940 | much less what intelligent life is, right?
00:01:41.940 | So that's an argument for humility,
00:01:43.900 | saying there could be intelligent life
00:01:45.780 | of a very different character, right?
00:01:48.540 | Like you could imagine that dolphins are intelligent
00:01:52.980 | but never invent space travel
00:01:55.420 | 'cause they live in the ocean
00:01:56.400 | and they don't have thumbs, right?
00:01:58.140 | So they never invent technology,
00:02:00.300 | they never invent smelting.
00:02:01.740 | Maybe the universe is full of intelligent species
00:02:06.940 | that just don't make technology, right?
00:02:09.020 | That's compatible with the data, I think.
00:02:11.260 | And I think maybe what you're pointing at
00:02:14.760 | is even more out there versions of intelligence.
00:02:19.340 | Intelligence in intermolecular clouds
00:02:22.500 | or on the surface of a neutron star
00:02:24.340 | or in between the galaxies in giant things
00:02:26.700 | where the equivalent of a heartbeat is 100 million years.
00:02:29.540 | On the one hand, yes, we should be very open-minded
00:02:33.940 | about those things.
00:02:34.780 | On the other hand, all of us share the same laws of physics.
00:02:39.780 | There might be something about the laws of physics,
00:02:43.140 | even though we don't currently know
00:02:44.260 | exactly what that thing would be,
00:02:45.820 | that makes meters and years
00:02:50.820 | the right length and time scales for intelligent life.
00:02:54.780 | Maybe not, but we're made of atoms,
00:02:57.120 | atoms have a certain size, we orbit stars,
00:03:00.300 | stars have a certain lifetime.
00:03:02.160 | It's not impossible to me that there's a sweet spot
00:03:05.180 | for intelligent life that we find ourselves in.
00:03:07.080 | So I'm open-minded in either way.
00:03:08.660 | I'm open-minded either being humble
00:03:10.180 | and there's all sorts of different kinds of life
00:03:11.980 | or no, there's a reason we just don't know it yet
00:03:14.180 | why life like ours is the kind of life that's out there.
00:03:16.980 | - Yeah, I'm of two minds too,
00:03:18.220 | but I often wonder if our brains is just designed
00:03:22.100 | to quite obviously to operate and see the world
00:03:27.100 | in these time scales and we're almost blind
00:03:31.260 | and the tools we've created for detecting things
00:03:34.860 | are blind to the kind of observation
00:03:37.340 | needed to see intelligent life at other scales.
00:03:39.820 | - Well, I'm totally open to that,
00:03:41.940 | but so here's another argument I would make.
00:03:43.980 | You know, we have looked for intelligent life,
00:03:46.460 | but we've looked at for it in the dumbest way we can,
00:03:48.740 | right, by turning radio telescopes to the sky.
00:03:51.540 | And why in the world would a super advanced civilization
00:03:55.980 | randomly beam out radio signals wastefully
00:03:58.940 | in all directions into the universe?
00:04:00.340 | That just doesn't make any sense,
00:04:02.220 | especially because in order to think
00:04:04.020 | that you would actually contact another civilization,
00:04:06.940 | you would have to do it forever.
00:04:08.740 | You'd have to keep doing it for millions of years.
00:04:10.760 | That sounds like a waste of resources.
00:04:13.220 | If you thought that there were other solar systems
00:04:18.060 | with planets around them where maybe intelligent life
00:04:20.940 | didn't yet exist but might someday,
00:04:23.540 | you wouldn't try to talk to it with radio waves.
00:04:26.300 | You would send a spacecraft out there
00:04:28.500 | and you would park it around there
00:04:30.460 | and it would be like, from our point of view,
00:04:32.300 | it would be like 2001 where there's a monolith.
00:04:35.620 | - Monolith.
00:04:36.460 | - So there could be an artifact.
00:04:37.280 | In fact, the other way works also, right?
00:04:39.380 | There could be artifacts in our solar system
00:04:42.260 | that have been put there
00:04:45.340 | by other technologically advanced civilizations
00:04:47.180 | and that's how we will eventually contact them.
00:04:49.540 | We just haven't explored the solar system
00:04:51.100 | well enough yet to find them.
00:04:52.600 | The reason why we don't think about that
00:04:54.900 | is 'cause we're young and impatient, right?
00:04:56.460 | Like it would take more than my lifetime
00:04:58.900 | to actually send something to another star system
00:05:01.020 | and wait for it and then come back.
00:05:02.700 | So but if we start thinking on hundreds of thousands of years
00:05:06.140 | or million year timescales,
00:05:07.620 | that's clearly the right thing to do.
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