Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

00:00:00.000 | If we don't ask how long do they last,

00:00:02.020 | but instead ask what's the probability

00:00:04.280 | that there have been any civilizations at all,

00:00:06.960 | no matter how long they lasted.

00:00:08.200 | I'm not asking whether they exist now or not,

00:00:10.120 | I'm just asking in general about probabilities

00:00:14.020 | to make a technological civilization

00:00:16.880 | anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe.

00:00:19.440 | And that we were able to constrain.

00:00:21.520 | And so what we found was basically

00:00:23.560 | that there have been 10 billion trillion

00:00:30.160 | habitable zone planets in the universe.

00:00:33.200 | And what that means is those are 10 billion trillion

00:00:37.440 | experiments that have been run.

00:00:39.440 | And the only way that we're the only time

00:00:43.080 | that this whole process from a biogenesis

00:00:47.720 | to a civilization has occurred

00:00:49.280 | is if every one of those experiments failed, right?

00:00:51.400 | So therefore you could put a probability,

00:00:53.920 | we call it the pessimism line, right?

00:00:56.000 | We don't really know what nature sets

00:00:58.840 | for the probability of making

00:00:59.960 | intelligent civilizations, right?

00:01:01.560 | But we could set a limit using this.

00:01:03.280 | We could say, look, if the probability

00:01:06.040 | per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22,

00:01:10.160 | one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone.

00:01:12.720 | If it's anywhere larger than that,

00:01:14.560 | then we're not the first.

00:01:15.880 | It's happened somewhere else.

00:01:16.960 | And to me, that was mind blowing.

00:01:19.360 | Doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby,

00:01:21.000 | the galaxy could be sterile.

00:01:22.440 | It just told me that unless nature's really against,

00:01:27.800 | has some bias against civilizations,

00:01:30.200 | we're not the first time this has happened.

00:01:31.560 | This has happened elsewhere

00:01:33.080 | over the course of cosmic history.

00:01:34.800 | - The following is a conversation with Adam Frank,

00:01:39.760 | an astrophysicist interested in the evolution

00:01:43.080 | of star systems and the search

00:01:45.520 | for alien civilizations in our universe.

00:01:48.940 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:51.020 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:52.960 | in the description.

00:01:54.200 | And now, dear friends, here's Adam Frank.

00:01:57.800 | You wrote a book about aliens.

00:02:01.440 | So the big question,

00:02:02.360 | how many alien civilizations are out there?

00:02:04.600 | - Yeah, that's the question, right?

00:02:06.040 | The amazing thing is that after two and a half millennia

00:02:10.040 | of people yelling at each other

00:02:11.820 | or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer,

00:02:14.640 | we now actually have the capacity to answer that question.

00:02:18.360 | So in the next 10, 20, 30 years,

00:02:20.960 | we're gonna have data relevant

00:02:22.680 | to the answer to that question.

00:02:24.440 | We're gonna have hard data finally

00:02:26.920 | that will, one way or the other,

00:02:28.800 | even if we don't find anything immediately,

00:02:30.780 | we will have gone through a number of planets.

00:02:33.760 | We'll be able to start putting limits on how common life is.

00:02:38.440 | The one answer I can tell you,

00:02:40.080 | which was an important part of the problem,

00:02:41.860 | is how many planets are there, right?

00:02:44.440 | And just like people have been arguing

00:02:46.520 | about the existence of life elsewhere for 2,500 years,

00:02:51.280 | people have been arguing about planets

00:02:53.060 | for the exact same amount of time, right?

00:02:54.800 | You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this.

00:02:58.240 | You can see they had very wildly different opinions

00:03:00.240 | about how common planets were gonna be

00:03:02.400 | and how unique Earth was.

00:03:04.080 | And that question got answered, right?

00:03:06.560 | Which is pretty remarkable that in a lifetime

00:03:08.680 | you can have a 2,500-year-old question.

00:03:11.320 | The answer is they're everywhere.

00:03:13.160 | There are planets everywhere.

00:03:14.520 | And it was possible that planets were really rare.

00:03:17.400 | We didn't really understand how planets formed.

00:03:19.560 | And so if you go back to, say, the turn of the 20th century,

00:03:23.480 | there was a theory that said planets formed

00:03:26.200 | when two stars passed by each other closely

00:03:28.960 | and then material was gravitationally squeezed out,

00:03:32.000 | in which case those kinds of collisions are so rare

00:03:35.720 | that you would expect one in a trillion stars

00:03:37.580 | to have planets.

00:03:38.420 | Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.

00:03:42.080 | - So one of the things you've done

00:03:43.840 | is simulated the formation of stars.

00:03:47.160 | How difficult do you think it is to simulate

00:03:49.720 | the formation of planets, like simulate a solar system,

00:03:52.780 | through the entire evolution of the solar system?

00:03:55.040 | This is kind of a numerical simulation

00:03:58.240 | sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.

00:04:01.680 | - That actually we're able to do now.

00:04:03.240 | There is, you can run simulations

00:04:05.080 | of the formation of planetary system.

00:04:08.560 | So if you run the simulation,

00:04:10.040 | really where you wanna start is a cloud of gas,

00:04:12.400 | these giant interstellar clouds of gas

00:04:14.800 | that may have a million times the mass of the sun in them.

00:04:18.560 | And so you run a simulation of that, it's turbulent,

00:04:21.600 | the gas is roiling and tumbling,

00:04:23.680 | and every now and then you get a place

00:04:25.040 | where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it

00:04:29.160 | and it can pull it downward.

00:04:30.300 | So you'll start to form a protostar.

00:04:32.720 | And a protostar is basically the young star,

00:04:36.040 | this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started

00:04:39.880 | but it's also a disk.

00:04:41.600 | So as material falls inward,

00:04:44.120 | because everything's rotating,

00:04:45.920 | as it falls inward, it'll spin up

00:04:47.600 | and then it'll form a disk.

00:04:49.120 | Material will collect in what's called an accretion disk

00:04:51.840 | or a protoplanetary disk.

00:04:53.840 | And you can simulate all of that.

00:04:56.080 | Once you get into the disk itself

00:04:57.920 | and you wanna do planets,

00:04:58.800 | things get a little bit more complicated

00:05:00.560 | 'cause the physics gets more complicated.

00:05:02.120 | Now you gotta start worrying about dust

00:05:03.960 | 'cause actually dust, which is just,

00:05:05.440 | dust is the wrong word, it's smoke really.

00:05:07.520 | These are the tiniest bits of solids.

00:05:10.640 | They will coagulate in the disk to form pebbles, right?

00:05:15.240 | And then the pebbles will collide to form rocks

00:05:17.640 | and then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera.

00:05:20.880 | That process is super complicated

00:05:23.320 | but we've been able to simulate enough of it

00:05:25.560 | to begin to get a handle on how planets form,

00:05:29.200 | how you accrete enough material

00:05:31.440 | to get the first protoplanets or planetary embryos,

00:05:35.600 | as we call them.

00:05:36.440 | And then the next step is those things

00:05:38.440 | start slamming into each other

00:05:40.080 | to form planetary-sized bodies.

00:05:42.960 | And then the planetary bodies slam into each other.

00:05:44.880 | Earth, the Moon came about

00:05:46.960 | because there was a Mars-sized body

00:05:48.840 | that slammed into the Earth

00:05:50.120 | and basically blew off all the material

00:05:52.360 | that then eventually formed the Moon.

00:05:54.440 | - And all of them have different chemical compositions,

00:05:58.220 | different temperatures?

00:06:00.460 | - Yeah, so the temperature of the material in the disk

00:06:04.840 | depends on how far away you are from the star.

00:06:07.160 | So it decreases, right?

00:06:08.520 | And so there's a really interesting point.

00:06:09.840 | So like, you know, close to the star,

00:06:11.760 | temperatures are really high.

00:06:13.400 | And the only thing that can condense,

00:06:16.560 | that can kind of freeze out,

00:06:18.080 | is gonna be stuff like metals.

00:06:19.360 | So that's why you find mercury

00:06:20.360 | is this giant ball of iron, basically.

00:06:23.160 | And then as you go further out, stuff,

00:06:24.860 | you know, the gas gets cooler

00:06:26.320 | and now you can start getting things like water to freeze.

00:06:29.680 | Right, so there's something we call the snow line,

00:06:32.000 | which is somewhere in our solar system

00:06:33.680 | out around between Mars and Jupiter.

00:06:36.760 | And that's the reason why the giant planets

00:06:38.920 | in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,

00:06:42.680 | all have huge amounts of ice in them, or water and ice.

00:06:47.240 | Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don't have so much,

00:06:49.440 | but the moons do.

00:06:50.280 | The moons have so much water in them

00:06:51.920 | that there's oceans, right?

00:06:53.800 | That we've got, a number of those moons

00:06:55.420 | have got more water on them than there's water on Earth.

00:06:58.360 | - Do you think it's possible to do that kind of simulation

00:07:01.920 | to have a stronger and stronger estimate

00:07:05.360 | of how likely an Earth-like planet is?

00:07:08.800 | Can we get the physics simulation done well enough

00:07:12.580 | to where we can start estimating,

00:07:14.100 | like what are the possible Earth-like things

00:07:16.680 | that could be generated?

00:07:17.840 | - Yeah, I think we can.

00:07:18.940 | I think we're learning how to do that now.

00:07:21.800 | So, you know, one part is like trying to just figure out

00:07:23.920 | how planets form themselves and doing the simulations.

00:07:27.000 | Like that cascade from dust grains

00:07:31.280 | up to planetary embryos, that's hard to simulate

00:07:34.440 | because it's both, you got to do both the gas

00:07:36.480 | and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding

00:07:38.320 | and all that physics.

00:07:40.160 | Once you get up to a planet-sized body,

00:07:43.120 | then, you know, you kind of have to switch over

00:07:44.840 | to almost like a different kind of simulation.

00:07:46.600 | There, often what you're doing is you're doing,

00:07:48.320 | you know, sort of, you're assuming the planet

00:07:50.060 | is this sort of spherical ball,

00:07:51.800 | and then you're doing, you know, like a 1D,

00:07:53.400 | a radial calculation, and you're just asking like,

00:07:55.400 | all right, how is this thing going to,

00:07:57.520 | what is the structure of it going to be?

00:07:58.980 | Like, am I going to have a solid iron core,

00:08:01.240 | or am I going to get a solid iron core

00:08:02.920 | with that liquid iron core out around it,

00:08:05.160 | like we have on Earth?

00:08:06.480 | And then you get, you know, a silicate,

00:08:08.520 | kind of a rocky mantle, and then a crust,

00:08:10.520 | all of those details, those are kind of beyond

00:08:13.520 | being able to do full 3D simulations

00:08:16.640 | from ab initio, from scratch.

00:08:18.640 | We're not there yet.

00:08:20.480 | - How important are those details,

00:08:21.880 | like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think?

00:08:23.920 | - Hugely important.

00:08:25.000 | So I'm part of a collaboration

00:08:27.000 | at the University of Rochester,

00:08:28.120 | where we're using the giant laser.

00:08:30.960 | It's literally, this is called

00:08:31.800 | the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.

00:08:33.800 | We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser

00:08:37.360 | to like slam tiny pieces of silica

00:08:40.800 | to understand what the conditions are like

00:08:43.040 | at, you know, the center of the Earth,

00:08:44.280 | or even more importantly, the center of super-Earths.

00:08:47.120 | Like the most common, this is what's wild,

00:08:48.740 | the most common kind of planet in the universe

00:08:51.720 | we don't have in our solar system,

00:08:53.600 | which is amazing, right?

00:08:54.840 | So the, we've been able to study enough,

00:08:57.840 | or observe enough planets now to get a census.

00:09:00.760 | You know, we pretty, you know,

00:09:01.840 | we kind of have an idea of what,

00:09:03.500 | who's average, who's weird.

00:09:05.380 | And our solar system's weird,

00:09:07.000 | because the average planet has a mass between,

00:09:09.880 | somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth

00:09:12.680 | to maybe, you know, 10 times the mass of the Earth.

00:09:16.180 | And that's exactly where there are no planets

00:09:17.640 | in our solar system.

00:09:18.760 | So the smaller ones of those we call super-Earths,

00:09:23.160 | the larger ones we call sub-Neptunes.

00:09:25.840 | And they're anybody's guess.

00:09:26.860 | Like we don't really know what happens to material

00:09:29.160 | when you're squeezed to those pressures,

00:09:30.920 | which is like millions, tens of millions of times

00:09:34.160 | the pressure on the surface of the Earth.

00:09:36.600 | So those details really will matter

00:09:39.320 | of what's going on in there,

00:09:40.400 | because that will determine whether or not you have,

00:09:42.300 | say, for example, plate tectonics.

00:09:44.400 | We think plate tectonics may have been really important

00:09:46.760 | for life on Earth,

00:09:47.720 | for the evolution of complex life on Earth.

00:09:50.020 | So it turns out, and this is sort of the next generation

00:09:52.800 | where we're going with the understanding

00:09:55.000 | the evolution of planets in life.

00:09:56.940 | It turns out that you actually have to think hard

00:09:59.540 | about the planetary context for life.

00:10:02.500 | You can't just be like, oh, there's a warm pond, you know,

00:10:05.000 | and then some interesting, you know,

00:10:06.280 | chemistry happens in the warm pond.

00:10:07.680 | You actually have to think about the planet as a whole

00:10:10.560 | and what it's gone through in order to really understand

00:10:13.320 | whether a planet is a good place for life or not.

00:10:16.460 | - Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful

00:10:19.440 | for the formation of complex life?

00:10:21.000 | - There's a bunch of different things.

00:10:22.560 | One is that, you know, the Earth went through

00:10:25.480 | a couple of phases of being a snowball planet.

00:10:28.160 | Like we, you know, we went into a period of glaciation

00:10:31.120 | where the pretty much the entire planet was under ice.

00:10:33.600 | The oceans were frozen.

00:10:36.200 | You know, early on in Earth's history, there was no,

00:10:38.400 | there was barely any land.

00:10:39.860 | We were actually a water world, you know,

00:10:41.800 | with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons,

00:10:45.560 | they called them protocontinents.

00:10:47.360 | So those, we went through these snowball Earth phases.

00:10:50.920 | And if it wasn't for the fact

00:10:52.080 | that we had kind of an active plate tectonics,

00:10:54.960 | which had a lot of volcanism on it,

00:10:57.360 | we could have been locked in that forever.

00:10:59.080 | Like once you get into a snowball state,

00:11:00.840 | a planet can be trapped there forever,

00:11:02.800 | which is, you know, maybe you already had life form,

00:11:04.960 | but then because it's so cold,

00:11:06.880 | you may never get anything more than just microbes, right?

00:11:10.240 | So what plate tectonics does is it,

00:11:11.780 | because it fosters more volcanism,

00:11:15.140 | is that you're gonna get carbon dioxide

00:11:16.800 | pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up

00:11:18.920 | and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase.

00:11:23.640 | But even more, there's even more really important things.

00:11:26.480 | I just finished a paper where we were looking

00:11:28.760 | at something called the hard steps model,

00:11:30.400 | which is this model that's been out there for a long time

00:11:33.240 | that purports to say intelligent life in the universe

00:11:36.300 | will be really rare.

00:11:37.800 | And it made all these assumptions about the Earth's history,

00:11:40.280 | particularly at the history of life

00:11:41.480 | and the history of the planet

00:11:42.400 | or have nothing to do with each other.

00:11:44.180 | And it turns out, as I was doing the reading for this,

00:11:47.120 | that Earth probably early on

00:11:49.560 | had a more mild form of plate tectonics.

00:11:51.960 | And then somewhere about a billion years ago,

00:11:53.540 | it had ramped up.

00:11:54.760 | And that ramping up changed everything on the planet.

00:11:57.440 | 'Cause here's a funny thing.

00:11:58.920 | The Earth used to be flat.

00:12:00.680 | What I mean by that, right?

00:12:02.160 | So all the flat earthers out there

00:12:03.360 | can get excited for one second.

00:12:04.840 | - Clip it.

00:12:05.680 | (laughing)

00:12:06.720 | - What I mean by that is that there really

00:12:09.920 | weren't many mountain ranges, right?

00:12:12.200 | The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis,

00:12:14.960 | mountain building, the true Himalayan style giant mountains

00:12:18.400 | didn't happen until this more robust form

00:12:21.360 | of plate tectonics, where the plates

00:12:22.820 | are really being driven around the planet.

00:12:25.200 | And that is when you get the crusts hitting each other

00:12:27.480 | and they start pushing

00:12:29.200 | into these Himalayan style mountains.

00:12:30.960 | The weathering of that, the erosion of that

00:12:33.840 | puts huge amounts of nutrients,

00:12:36.240 | things that microbes wanna use into the oceans.

00:12:39.240 | And then the, what we call the net primary productivity,

00:12:41.760 | the bottom of the food chain,

00:12:45.040 | how much sugars they're producing,

00:12:47.160 | how much photosynthesis they're doing,

00:12:49.240 | shot up by a factor of almost a thousand, right?

00:12:52.040 | So that the fact that you had plate tectonics

00:12:54.720 | supercharged evolution in some sense.

00:12:57.720 | You know, like we're not exactly sure how it happened,

00:12:59.840 | but it's clear that the amount of life,

00:13:01.920 | the amount of living activity that was happening

00:13:04.960 | really got a boost from the fact

00:13:06.840 | that suddenly there was plate,

00:13:07.880 | this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.

00:13:10.620 | - So it's nice to have turmoil in terms of temperature,

00:13:14.760 | in terms of surface geometries,

00:13:18.000 | in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.

00:13:20.400 | - Yeah, that's actually really true

00:13:21.720 | because what happens is if you look at the history of life,

00:13:24.080 | that's a really, it's an excellent point you're bringing up.

00:13:26.240 | If you look at the history of life on earth,

00:13:27.460 | we get a biogenesis somewhere around

00:13:31.120 | at least 3.8 billion years ago.

00:13:33.240 | And that's the first microbes,

00:13:34.320 | they kind of take over enough that they really do,

00:13:36.640 | you get a biosphere, you get a biosphere

00:13:38.000 | that is actively changing the planet.

00:13:40.320 | But then you go through this period

00:13:41.640 | they call the boring billion,

00:13:43.320 | where like it's a billion years and it's just microbes,

00:13:45.440 | nothing's happening, it's just microbes.

00:13:46.800 | I mean, microbes are doing amazing things,

00:13:48.640 | they're inventing fermentation, thank you very much.

00:13:52.640 | We appreciate that.

00:13:53.680 | But it's not until sort of you get probably

00:13:57.560 | these continents slamming into each other,

00:13:59.280 | you really get the beginning of continents forming

00:14:01.160 | and driving changes that evolution has to respond to,

00:14:05.000 | that on a planetary scale, this turmoil,

00:14:08.080 | this chaos is creating new niches

00:14:10.760 | as well as closing other ones.

00:14:12.560 | And biology, evolution has to respond to that.

00:14:15.320 | And somewhere around there

00:14:16.480 | is when you get the Cambrian explosion,

00:14:18.120 | is when suddenly everybody plan,

00:14:20.320 | evolution goes on an orgy essentially.

00:14:23.880 | So yeah, it does look like that chaos

00:14:27.360 | or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.

00:14:31.000 | - I wonder if there's some extremely elevated levels

00:14:34.720 | of chaos, almost like catastrophes

00:14:36.800 | behind every leap of evolution.

00:14:39.160 | Like you're not gonna have leaps.

00:14:40.840 | Like in human societies, we have like an Einstein

00:14:44.920 | that comes up with a good idea,

00:14:46.960 | but it feels like on an evolutionary timescale,

00:14:49.800 | you need some real big drama going on

00:14:54.160 | for the evolutionary system to have to come up

00:14:56.720 | to a solution to that drama,

00:14:58.160 | like an extra complex solution to that drama.

00:15:01.080 | - Well, I think what's, I'm not sure if that's true.

00:15:02.640 | I don't know if it needs to be

00:15:03.480 | like an almost extinction event, right?

00:15:05.880 | 'Cause it's certainly true that we have gone through

00:15:08.320 | almost extinction events, right?

00:15:09.600 | We've had five mass extinctions,

00:15:13.160 | but you don't necessarily see

00:15:14.520 | that like there was this giant evolutionary leap happening

00:15:17.640 | after those.

00:15:18.480 | So with the comet impact, the K-T boundary,

00:15:22.520 | certainly lots of niches opened up

00:15:25.120 | and that's why we're here, right?

00:15:26.120 | 'Cause our ancestors were just little basically rodents,

00:15:29.440 | rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs.

00:15:32.880 | And it was that comet impact that opened the route for us.

00:15:37.240 | But it wasn't, I mean, that still took another

00:15:39.800 | 65 million years.

00:15:40.840 | It wasn't like this thing immediately happened.

00:15:42.880 | But what we found with this "Hard Steps" paper,

00:15:44.760 | 'cause the whole idea of the "Hard Steps" paper was,

00:15:47.040 | it was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things

00:15:49.960 | where Brandon Carter said, "Oh, look,

00:15:51.800 | "the intelligence doesn't show up on earth

00:15:54.440 | "until about, you know, almost close to when

00:15:57.680 | "the end of the sun's lifetime."

00:16:00.560 | And so he's like, "Well, there should be no reason

00:16:02.400 | "why the sun's lifetime and the time for evolution

00:16:06.720 | "to produce intelligence should be the same."

00:16:09.920 | And so therefore, and he goes through all this reasoning,

00:16:12.000 | anthropic reasoning, and he ends up with the idea

00:16:14.480 | that like, "Oh, it must be that the odds

00:16:16.560 | "of getting intelligence are super low."

00:16:20.360 | And so that's the "Hard Steps," right?

00:16:21.520 | So there was a series of steps in evolution

00:16:23.220 | that were, you know, very, very hard.

00:16:24.960 | And because of that, you can calculate

00:16:26.340 | some probability distributions.

00:16:28.400 | And everybody loves a good probability distribution,

00:16:30.780 | and they went a long way with this.

00:16:32.440 | But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed

00:16:34.880 | because on, you know, when you look at it,

00:16:37.560 | of course the timescale for the sun's evolution

00:16:40.640 | and the timescale for evolution on life are coupled

00:16:43.480 | because life and the timescale for evolution

00:16:46.480 | of the earth is coupled, is about the same timescale

00:16:49.560 | as the evolution of the sun.

00:16:50.600 | It's billions of years.

00:16:51.440 | The earth evolves over billions of years.

00:16:53.720 | And life and the earth co-evolve.

00:16:56.000 | That's what Brandon Carter didn't see,

00:16:57.360 | is that actually the fate of the earth

00:16:59.480 | and the fate of life are inextricably combined.

00:17:03.040 | And this is really important for astrobiology too.

00:17:06.280 | Life doesn't happen on a planet.

00:17:09.520 | It happens to a planet.

00:17:10.840 | So this is something that David Grinspoon

00:17:12.320 | and Sarah Walker both say, and you know, I agree with this.

00:17:15.580 | It's a really nice way of putting it.

00:17:18.080 | So, you know, plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen,

00:17:23.080 | of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life.

00:17:26.200 | These things, you know, these are things

00:17:29.760 | that are happening where life and the planet

00:17:32.380 | are sort of sloshing back and forth.

00:17:34.520 | And so rather than to your point about,

00:17:36.680 | do you need giant catastrophes?

00:17:38.400 | Maybe not giant catastrophes,

00:17:39.920 | but what happens is as the earth and life

00:17:42.160 | are evolving together, windows are opening up,

00:17:44.640 | evolutionary windows.

00:17:46.240 | Like for example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere.

00:17:49.560 | When life invented this new form of photosynthesis

00:17:52.400 | about two and a half billion years ago,

00:17:54.500 | that broke water apart to, you know,

00:17:56.780 | work to do its chemical shenanigans,

00:17:59.960 | it broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere.

00:18:03.480 | That's why there's oxygen in the atmosphere.

00:18:05.240 | It's only 'cause of life.

00:18:07.080 | That opened up huge possibilities,

00:18:09.440 | new spaces for evolution to happen.

00:18:12.120 | But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever.

00:18:14.840 | So the introduction of oxygen photosynthesis

00:18:18.980 | changed the planet forever.

00:18:20.400 | And it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution

00:18:23.520 | that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

00:18:24.680 | Like for example, you and I,

00:18:26.680 | we need that amount of oxygen.

00:18:29.200 | Big brained creatures need an oxygen rich atmosphere

00:18:32.320 | 'cause oxygen is so potent for metabolism.

00:18:35.640 | So you couldn't get intelligent creatures

00:18:38.040 | a hundred million years after the planet formed.

00:18:41.400 | - So really on a scale of a planet

00:18:43.760 | when there's billions, trillions of organisms on a planet,

00:18:48.440 | they can actually have planetary scale impact.

00:18:51.960 | - Yeah.

00:18:53.880 | - So the chemical shenanigans of an individual organism

00:18:55.720 | when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.

00:18:59.160 | - Yeah, and we know this for a fact now.

00:19:01.000 | Like this is, so there was this thing Gaia theory

00:19:03.320 | that was James Lovelock introduced in the 70s.

00:19:06.760 | And then Lynn Margulis,

00:19:08.160 | the biologist Lynn Margulis together.

00:19:09.680 | So this Gaia theory was the idea

00:19:12.080 | that planets pretty much take,

00:19:14.400 | or sorry, life takes over a planet.

00:19:16.120 | Life hijacks a planet in a way

00:19:18.560 | that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks

00:19:22.960 | between the planet and the life

00:19:24.920 | such that it keeps the planet habitable.

00:19:27.640 | It's kind of a homeostasis, right?

00:19:29.280 | I can go out like right now outside,

00:19:30.840 | it's a hundred degrees, right?

00:19:32.160 | And I go outside, but my internal temperature

00:19:33.840 | is gonna be the same.

00:19:34.720 | And I can go back to Rochester, New York in the winter,

00:19:37.480 | and it's gonna be zero degrees,

00:19:39.520 | but my internal temperature is gonna be the same.

00:19:41.360 | That's homeostasis.

00:19:42.680 | The idea of Gaia theory was that life,

00:19:45.040 | the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet

00:19:48.560 | or these feedbacks on the planet

00:19:50.160 | that even as other things are changing,

00:19:52.480 | the planet will always stay in the right kinds

00:19:54.640 | of conditions for life.

00:19:56.000 | And now when this theory came out,

00:19:57.280 | it was very controversial.

00:19:58.360 | People were like, "Oh my God, what are you smoking weed?"

00:20:01.120 | You know, and like, there were all these Gaian festivals

00:20:03.760 | with Gaian dances.

00:20:05.840 | And so, you know, it became very popular

00:20:07.440 | in the new age community.

00:20:09.200 | But Lovelock, actually, they were able to show

00:20:11.000 | that no, this has nothing to do

00:20:11.960 | with like the planet being conscious or anything.

00:20:14.520 | It was about these feedbacks that by the biology,

00:20:18.280 | the biosphere can exert these feedbacks.

00:20:20.200 | And now that's become, whether or not it's still,

00:20:22.320 | we're still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks

00:20:25.080 | in the sense that the planet

00:20:26.160 | can really exert complete control.

00:20:28.640 | But it is absolutely true that the biosphere

00:20:32.120 | is a major player in Earth's history.

00:20:35.040 | - So the biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth?

00:20:38.360 | - The biosphere, so, okay, what I would say right now

00:20:40.260 | is I don't know if I can say that scientifically.

00:20:42.180 | I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount

00:20:45.560 | of the regulation of the planetary state.

00:20:48.880 | And over billions of years has strongly modified

00:20:52.640 | the evolution of the planet.

00:20:53.740 | So whether or not a true Gaian feedback

00:20:55.840 | would be exactly what you said, right?

00:20:57.520 | The biosphere is this somehow,

00:20:59.680 | and Sarah Walker and David Grinspoon

00:21:01.200 | and I actually did a paper on this

00:21:02.360 | about the idea of planetary intelligence

00:21:04.960 | or cognition across a planetary scale.

00:21:08.280 | And I think that actually is possible.

00:21:09.680 | It's not conscious,

00:21:10.660 | but there is a kind of cognitive activity going on.

00:21:13.400 | The biosphere in some sense knows what is happening

00:21:16.960 | because of these feedbacks.

00:21:19.080 | So it's still unclear whether we have

00:21:20.640 | these full Gaian feedbacks,

00:21:22.060 | but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks.

00:21:24.680 | If there's a perturbation on the planetary scale,

00:21:27.680 | temperature, you know, insulation,

00:21:29.680 | how much sunlight's coming in,

00:21:31.160 | the biosphere will start to have feedbacks

00:21:33.500 | that will damp that perturbation.

00:21:35.640 | Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something,

00:21:37.840 | temperature comes down.

00:21:39.220 | - Now I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback

00:21:43.040 | or elements of a Gaian feedback

00:21:45.000 | such that the technosphere will also fight

00:21:47.760 | to some degree for homeostasis.

00:21:49.720 | Open question, I guess.

00:21:50.960 | - Well, that's, I'm glad you asked that question

00:21:52.880 | because that paper that David and Sarah and I wrote,

00:21:56.680 | what we were arguing was,

00:21:57.980 | is that over the history of a planet, right,

00:22:00.920 | when life first forms, you know, 3.8 billion years ago,

00:22:03.880 | it's kind of thin on the ground, right?

00:22:05.600 | You've got the first species, you know,

00:22:07.840 | these are all microbes.

00:22:09.040 | And they have not yet,

00:22:10.760 | they're not gonna, enough of them to exert

00:22:13.920 | any kind of these Gaian feedbacks.

00:22:15.920 | So we call that an immature biosphere.

00:22:18.960 | But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust

00:22:21.520 | and it begins to exert these feedbacks,

00:22:24.160 | keeping the planet in the place

00:22:25.560 | where it needs to be for life,

00:22:26.720 | we call that a mature biosphere, right?

00:22:29.360 | And the important thing, and we're gonna,

00:22:30.520 | I'm sure later on, we're gonna talk about definitions

00:22:32.280 | of life and such.

00:22:33.360 | There's this great term called autopoiesis

00:22:36.280 | that Francisco Varela, the neurobiologist,

00:22:38.800 | Francisco Varela came up with.

00:22:40.440 | And he said, you know, one of the defining things

00:22:41.880 | about life is this property of autopoiesis,

00:22:44.160 | which means self-creating and self-maintaining.

00:22:47.440 | Life does not create the conditions

00:22:50.360 | which will destroy itself, right?

00:22:52.360 | It's always trying to keep itself in a place

00:22:54.680 | where it can stay alive.

00:22:56.560 | So the biosphere, from this Gaian perspective,

00:22:59.480 | has been autopoietic for, you know, billions of years.

00:23:02.720 | Now we just invented this technosphere

00:23:04.880 | in the last, you know, couple of hundred years.

00:23:07.800 | And what we were arguing in that paper

00:23:09.240 | is that it's an immature technosphere, right?

00:23:11.760 | 'Cause right now with climate change

00:23:13.040 | and all the other things we're doing,

00:23:14.400 | we don't, we're, the technosphere right now

00:23:16.360 | is sort of destroying the conditions

00:23:18.160 | under which it needs to maintain itself.

00:23:21.400 | So the real job for us, if we're gonna last over,

00:23:25.040 | you know, geologic timescales,

00:23:26.880 | if we want a technosphere that's gonna last

00:23:29.240 | tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,

00:23:31.360 | millions of years, then we've gotta become mature,

00:23:34.080 | which means to not undermine the conditions,

00:23:37.640 | to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive.

00:23:41.160 | So as of right now, I'd say we're not autopoietic.

00:23:44.640 | - Well, I wonder if we look across thousands,

00:23:48.720 | tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years,

00:23:51.400 | that perturbations, the technosphere

00:23:54.320 | should create perturbations as a way

00:23:58.920 | for developing greater and greater defenses

00:24:01.200 | against perturbations,

00:24:03.440 | which sounds like a ridiculous statement,

00:24:05.320 | but basically go out and play in the yard

00:24:08.720 | and hurt yourself to strengthen the,

00:24:11.520 | or like drink water from the pond.

00:24:13.800 | - From the pond, yeah, right, get sick a few times.

00:24:16.640 | - To strengthen the immune system.

00:24:18.200 | - Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting

00:24:19.640 | with the technosphere, we could talk about this more,

00:24:21.560 | but like, you know, we're just emerging as a technosphere

00:24:25.000 | in terms of as a interplanetary technosphere, right?

00:24:28.080 | That's really the next step for us,

00:24:29.400 | is to, David Grinspoon talks about,

00:24:31.400 | I love this idea of anti-accretion,

00:24:33.200 | like this amazing thing that for the first time,

00:24:35.840 | you know, over the entire history of the planet,

00:24:37.600 | stuff is coming off the planet, right?

00:24:39.880 | Used to be everything just fell down,

00:24:41.320 | all the meteorites fell down,

00:24:42.920 | but now we're starting to push stuff out.

00:24:45.120 | And, you know, like the idea of planetary defense or such,

00:24:47.960 | you know, we are actually gonna start exerting perturbations

00:24:51.760 | on the solar system as a whole.

00:24:53.760 | We're gonna start engineering if we make it, right?

00:24:55.640 | I always like to say that if we can get

00:24:56.760 | through climate change,

00:24:57.640 | the prize at the end is the solar system, right?

00:25:00.920 | So we will be changed, literally engineering

00:25:05.880 | the solar system, but what you can think of right now

00:25:07.760 | with what's happening with the Anthropocene,

00:25:09.840 | the great acceleration that is the technosphere,

00:25:14.480 | you know, is the creation,

00:25:15.520 | that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere, right?

00:25:18.440 | And what you can't do is, you know,

00:25:21.240 | the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere,

00:25:23.920 | and if the technosphere undermines the biosphere

00:25:28.280 | for its own conditions of habitability,

00:25:31.040 | then you're in trouble, right?

00:25:32.160 | I mean, the biosphere is not going away.

00:25:33.280 | There's nothing we could do.

00:25:34.320 | Like the idea that we have to save the earth

00:25:36.320 | is a little ridiculous.

00:25:37.360 | Like the earth is not a furry little bunny

00:25:38.880 | that we need to protect,

00:25:40.160 | but it's the conditions for us, right?

00:25:42.000 | We, humanity emerged out of the Holocene,

00:25:45.160 | the last 10,000 years interglacial period.

00:25:47.440 | We can't tolerate very different kinds of earths.

00:25:51.080 | So that's what I mean about a perturbation.

00:25:53.720 | - Before we forget, I gotta ask you about this paper.

00:25:55.920 | - Right. - Pretty interesting.

00:25:57.320 | There's an interesting table here about hard steps.

00:26:00.000 | Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation,

00:26:02.880 | 2-peruvic acid, all kinds of steps,

00:26:05.360 | all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence,

00:26:08.320 | land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor.

00:26:11.800 | So formation of the eye. - Yeah.

00:26:13.640 | - Complex multicellularity.

00:26:17.400 | - That's definitely one of the big ones.

00:26:18.880 | - Yeah, so interesting.

00:26:20.080 | I mean, what can you say about this chart?

00:26:21.480 | There are all kinds of papers talking about

00:26:24.440 | what the difficulty of these steps.

00:26:26.360 | - Right, and so this was the idea.

00:26:27.520 | So what Carter said was, using anthropic reasoning,

00:26:31.000 | he said there must be a few very hard steps

00:26:35.000 | for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence.

00:26:39.520 | Right, so there's some steps are gonna be easy.

00:26:41.520 | So every generation, you know, you roll the dice

00:26:43.960 | and yeah, it won't take long for you to get that step.

00:26:47.160 | But there must be a few of them.

00:26:48.480 | And he said you could even calculate what,

00:26:49.920 | how many there were, five, six,

00:26:52.480 | in order to get to intelligence.

00:26:54.000 | And so this paper here, this plot,

00:26:55.960 | is all these different people

00:26:57.000 | who've written all these papers.

00:26:58.120 | And this is the point, actually,

00:26:59.040 | you can see all these papers

00:27:00.080 | that were written on the hard steps.

00:27:01.840 | Each one proposing a different set

00:27:04.360 | of what those steps should be.

00:27:06.520 | And there's this other idea from biology

00:27:08.280 | of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs,

00:27:11.360 | that those were the hard steps.

00:27:13.040 | But what we actually found was

00:27:14.960 | that none of those are actually hard.

00:27:17.160 | The whole idea of hard steps,

00:27:18.760 | that there are hard steps, is actually suspect.

00:27:21.680 | So, you know, what's amazing about this model

00:27:24.040 | is it shows how important it is

00:27:26.360 | to actually work with people who are in the field, right?

00:27:29.280 | So, you know, Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist,

00:27:31.480 | the guy who came up with this.

00:27:33.160 | And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me

00:27:36.680 | have used this, but the people who actually study evolution

00:27:40.720 | and the planet were never involved, right?

00:27:43.400 | And if you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist

00:27:46.040 | or a biogeophysicist, they'd look at you,

00:27:48.640 | when you explained this to them,

00:27:49.480 | and they'd be like, what?

00:27:50.960 | Like, what are you guys doing?

00:27:53.360 | Turns out none of the details,

00:27:57.160 | or none of the conceptual structure of this

00:28:00.520 | matches with what the people actually study

00:28:04.520 | the planet and its evolution.

00:28:06.120 | - Is it mostly about the fact that

00:28:07.960 | there's not really discrete big steps?

00:28:10.480 | Is this a gradual, continual kind of process?

00:28:12.680 | - Well, there's two things.

00:28:13.520 | The first most important one was that

00:28:15.120 | the planet and the biosphere have evolved together.

00:28:17.520 | That's something that every, you know,

00:28:19.320 | most biogeophysicists completely accept.

00:28:22.360 | And it was the first thing that Carter kind of rejected.

00:28:24.720 | He said, like, no, that's probably not possible.

00:28:26.720 | And yet, you know, like if he'd only sort of

00:28:28.360 | had more discussions with this other community,

00:28:30.760 | it would've seemed like, no, there are actually

00:28:32.720 | windows that open up.

00:28:34.000 | And then the next thing is this idea

00:28:35.320 | of whether a step is hard or not.

00:28:37.640 | 'Cause for hard, what we mean by a hard step

00:28:40.360 | is that, like I said, every time there's a generation,

00:28:42.480 | every time there's a next generation born,

00:28:44.400 | you're rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen.

00:28:47.400 | And the idea of something being a hard step,

00:28:50.600 | there's two ways in which something might even appear

00:28:52.960 | as a hard step and not be,

00:28:54.600 | or actually not be a hard step at all.

00:28:56.320 | One is that you see something that has occurred

00:28:58.320 | in evolution that's only happened once, right?

00:29:00.800 | So let's take the opposite.

00:29:02.520 | We see something that's happened multiple times,

00:29:04.360 | like wings, lots of examples of wings

00:29:06.960 | over lots of different evolutionary lineages.

00:29:09.400 | So that's clearly not a hard,

00:29:10.240 | making wings is not a hard step.

00:29:12.360 | There are certain other things that people say,

00:29:13.520 | no, that's a hard step, oxygen, you know,

00:29:15.720 | the oxygen photosynthesis.

00:29:18.800 | But they are so, they tend to be so long ago

00:29:22.240 | that we've lost all the information.

00:29:23.520 | There could be other things in the fossil record

00:29:26.280 | that, you know, went, made this innovation,

00:29:29.560 | but they're just gone now.

00:29:30.520 | So you can't tell.

00:29:31.360 | So there's information loss.

00:29:32.640 | The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder

00:29:34.920 | that somebody, you know, some species makes the innovation,

00:29:38.360 | but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again.

00:29:40.920 | So yeah, it only happened once,

00:29:42.080 | but it happened once because basically

00:29:43.560 | the creature was so successful, it took over

00:29:46.920 | and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.

00:29:49.800 | So yeah, so the interesting thing about this

00:29:51.400 | was seeing how much, once you look at the details

00:29:55.920 | of life's history on earth,

00:29:57.720 | how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model.

00:30:01.440 | And it shows you that those details,

00:30:02.800 | as we were talking about like,

00:30:03.840 | do you have to know about the planet?

00:30:04.920 | Do you have to know about plate tectonics?

00:30:06.520 | Yeah, you're going to have to.

00:30:08.960 | - I mean, to be fair to Carter on the first point,

00:30:11.760 | it makes it much more complicated

00:30:15.080 | if life and the planet are co-evolving.

00:30:18.520 | Because it would be nice to consider the planet

00:30:20.720 | as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.

00:30:24.360 | And then we can sort of, from an outside perspective,

00:30:26.640 | analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create.

00:30:30.800 | And then there's a binary yes or no, will it create life?

00:30:35.240 | But if they co-evolve, it's just like a,

00:30:37.040 | it's a really complex dynamical system

00:30:39.320 | where everything is, because it's much more difficult

00:30:43.720 | from the perspective of SETI,

00:30:45.160 | of looking out there and trying to figure out

00:30:47.560 | which ones are actually producing life.

00:30:50.820 | - But I think we're at the point now,

00:30:51.900 | so now there may be other kinds of principles

00:30:54.240 | that actually, 'cause co-evolution actually

00:30:56.280 | has its own, not deterministic,

00:30:58.320 | you're done with determinism, right?

00:31:00.020 | But complex systems have patterns,

00:31:03.280 | complex systems have constraints.

00:31:05.560 | And that's actually what we're going to be looking for,

00:31:07.520 | are constraints on them.

00:31:09.960 | And so, and again, nothing against Carter,

00:31:11.400 | it was a brilliant idea, but it just goes to show,

00:31:14.000 | there's this great, I'm a theoretical physicist, right?

00:31:16.720 | And so I love simplified, give me a simplified model

00:31:20.040 | with a dynamical equation, some initial conditions,

00:31:23.120 | I'm very happy.

00:31:24.200 | But there's this great XDC comic where like,

00:31:26.200 | somebody's working something out on the board

00:31:27.800 | and this physicist is looking over and saying,

00:31:30.080 | "Oh, oh, I just wrote down an equation for that.

00:31:32.560 | "I solved your problem.

00:31:33.640 | "Do you guys even have a journal for this?"

00:31:35.280 | And the subtitle is "Why Everybody Hates Physicists."

00:31:38.480 | So sometimes that approach totally works.

00:31:40.680 | Sometimes physicists can be very good at like zooming in

00:31:43.440 | on what is important and casting the details aside

00:31:47.140 | so you can get to the heart of an issue.

00:31:48.400 | And that's very useful sometimes.

00:31:51.680 | Other times it obfuscates, right?

00:31:53.600 | Other times it clouds over actually

00:31:56.240 | what you needed to focus on,

00:31:58.640 | especially when it comes to complexity.

00:32:00.600 | - Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation,

00:32:05.120 | let's return back to the question

00:32:07.560 | of how many alien civilizations are out there

00:32:09.920 | and talk about the Drake equation.

00:32:12.400 | Can you explain the Drake equation?

00:32:15.320 | - You know, people have various feelings

00:32:17.240 | about the Drake equation.

00:32:18.880 | You know, it can be abused, but basically it was,

00:32:21.720 | the story actually is really interesting.

00:32:23.560 | So Frank Drake in 1960

00:32:26.040 | does the first ever astrobiological experiment.

00:32:28.680 | He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars

00:32:31.600 | and listens for signals.

00:32:33.080 | That was the first time anybody done any experiment

00:32:35.720 | about any kind of life in the history of humanity.

00:32:39.360 | And he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody

00:32:40.800 | to make fun of him.

00:32:41.640 | And still he gets a phone call from the government,

00:32:43.480 | says, "Hey, we want you to do a meeting

00:32:46.640 | "on interstellar communications," right?

00:32:49.680 | So he's like, "Okay."

00:32:50.840 | So they organize a meeting with like just eight people.

00:32:53.800 | A young Carl Sagan is gonna be there as well.

00:32:56.280 | And like the night before,

00:32:58.640 | Drake has to come up with an agenda.

00:33:01.840 | How do you come up with an agenda

00:33:03.760 | for a meeting on a topic

00:33:04.800 | that no one's ever talked about before, right?

00:33:07.280 | And so he actually, he breaks what he does,

00:33:09.040 | what's so brilliant about the Drake equation

00:33:10.760 | is he breaks the problem

00:33:12.680 | of how many civilizations are out there

00:33:15.320 | into a bunch of sub-problems, right?

00:33:17.480 | And he breaks it into seven sub-problems,

00:33:20.160 | each one of them is a factor in an equation

00:33:23.520 | that when you multiply them all together,

00:33:24.840 | you get the number of civilizations out there

00:33:27.120 | that we could communicate with.

00:33:28.760 | So the first term is the rate at which stars form.

00:33:32.800 | The second term is the fraction of those stars

00:33:34.860 | that have planets, F sub P.

00:33:36.800 | The next term is the number of planets

00:33:38.760 | in the habitable zone,

00:33:39.960 | the place where we think life could form.

00:33:42.520 | The next term after that is the fraction of those planets

00:33:45.800 | where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs.

00:33:50.280 | The next one is the fraction of planets

00:33:52.720 | on which you start to get intelligence.

00:33:56.080 | After that, it's the fraction of planets

00:33:58.760 | where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization.

00:34:01.760 | And then finally, the last term,

00:34:03.360 | which is the one that we really care about,

00:34:05.100 | is the lifetime.

00:34:06.000 | How long, you have a civilization,

00:34:07.200 | now how long does it last?

00:34:08.120 | - Well, you say we humans.

00:34:09.560 | - We humans, right?

00:34:10.400 | 'Cause we're standing, we're staring at the,

00:34:12.400 | multiple guns pointing at us,

00:34:14.200 | nuclear war, climate change, AI.

00:34:17.680 | So, how long in general does civilizations last?

00:34:20.320 | Now, each one of these terms,

00:34:21.560 | what was brilliant about what he did was,

00:34:23.400 | what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance,

00:34:26.320 | right, by breaking the problem up

00:34:27.840 | into these seven sub-problems,

00:34:29.320 | he gave astronomers something to do, right?

00:34:31.320 | And so, this is always with a new research field,

00:34:33.680 | you need a research program,

00:34:35.160 | or else you just have a bunch of vague questions,

00:34:36.860 | you don't even know really what you're trying to do.

00:34:40.520 | So, the star people could figure out

00:34:42.560 | how many stars were forming per year,

00:34:44.040 | the people who were interested in planets

00:34:45.720 | could go out and find techniques to discover planets,

00:34:48.960 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:50.200 | - I mean, these are their own fields.

00:34:53.080 | Essentially, by creating this equation,

00:34:54.880 | he's launching new fields.

00:34:56.480 | - Yeah, that's exactly, he gave astrobiology,

00:34:59.160 | which wasn't even a term then, a roadmap.

00:35:01.720 | Like, okay, you guys go do this,

00:35:03.200 | you go do that, you go do that,

00:35:04.680 | and it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology,

00:35:09.160 | because it did break the problem up

00:35:10.760 | in a way that gave useful sort of marching orders

00:35:15.760 | for all these different groups.

00:35:16.920 | Like, for example, it's because of the Drake equation,

00:35:19.320 | in some sense, that people who were involved in SETI

00:35:23.520 | pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting.

00:35:27.520 | There was this amazing meeting in 1978 and '92 meetings,

00:35:30.640 | 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part

00:35:34.280 | by the people who were involved in SETI

00:35:36.400 | getting NASA together to say,

00:35:37.760 | look, okay, look, what's the roadmap for us

00:35:40.720 | to develop technologies to find planets?

00:35:44.080 | So yeah, so the Drake equation

00:35:46.520 | is absolutely foundational for astrobiology,

00:35:51.280 | but we should remember that it's not a law of nature.

00:35:54.640 | It's not something that's, it's not E equals MC squared.

00:35:57.400 | And so you can see it being abused in some sense.

00:35:59.760 | People, it's generated a trillion papers.

00:36:01.640 | Some of those papers are good, I've written some of those,

00:36:04.120 | and some of those papers are bad.

00:36:06.160 | I'm not sure where my paper fits in on those,

00:36:07.880 | but I'm just saying, one should be careful

00:36:09.920 | about what you're using it for.

00:36:11.120 | But in terms of understanding the problem

00:36:14.440 | that astrobiology faces,

00:36:16.640 | this really broke it up in a useful way.

00:36:19.440 | - We could talk about each one of these,

00:36:21.800 | but let's just look at exoplanets.

00:36:25.000 | So that's a really interesting one.

00:36:26.600 | I think when you look back hundreds of years from now,

00:36:30.520 | what is it, in the '90s, when they first detected the first?

00:36:32.400 | - '92 and '95, '95 to me was really,

00:36:35.040 | that was the discovery of the first planet

00:36:37.200 | orbiting a sun-like star.

00:36:38.480 | To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.

00:36:40.920 | - I think that's one of the greatest discoveries

00:36:43.800 | in the history of science.

00:36:45.320 | - I agree, I agree.

00:36:46.680 | - Right now, I guess nobody's celebrating it too much

00:36:49.680 | because you don't know what it really means.

00:36:53.160 | But I think once we almost certainly

00:36:55.600 | will find life out there,

00:36:57.440 | it will obviously allow us to generalize

00:37:01.200 | across the entire galaxy, the entire universe.

00:37:04.960 | So if you can find life on a planet,

00:37:07.240 | even in the solar system,

00:37:08.920 | you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.

00:37:12.560 | - You can.

00:37:13.400 | All you need is one, like right now,

00:37:14.240 | it's an, you know, our understanding of life,

00:37:16.560 | we have one example.

00:37:17.480 | We have N equals one example of life.

00:37:20.120 | So that means we could be an accident, right?

00:37:22.160 | It could be that we're the only place

00:37:23.720 | in the entire universe where this weird thing

00:37:26.980 | called life has occurred.

00:37:28.480 | Get one more example, and now you're done.

00:37:30.460 | Because if you have one more example,

00:37:31.680 | now you're, you know, you don't have to find

00:37:33.200 | all the other examples.

00:37:34.020 | You just know that it's happened more than once.

00:37:35.880 | And now you are, you know, from a Bayesian perspective,

00:37:39.440 | you can start thinking like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

00:37:40.840 | this life is not something that's hard to make.

00:37:43.200 | - Well, let me get your sense of estimates

00:37:46.000 | for the Drake equation.

00:37:46.960 | You've also written a paper expanding

00:37:48.560 | on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?

00:37:51.960 | - So the paper, there was this paper we wrote,

00:37:53.800 | Woody Sullivan and I, in 2016, where we said,

00:37:56.760 | look, we have all this exoplanet data now, right?

00:37:59.240 | So the thing that exoplanet science

00:38:01.680 | and the exoplanet census I was talking about before

00:38:04.580 | have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars

00:38:08.340 | that have planets, it's one.

00:38:10.340 | Every fricking star that you see in the sky

00:38:13.540 | hosts a family of worlds.

00:38:15.440 | I mean, it's mind boggling.

00:38:17.220 | 'Cause every one of those, those are all places, right?

00:38:20.540 | They're either, you know, gas giants, probably with moons.

00:38:23.660 | So the moons are places you can stand and look out.

00:38:26.240 | Or they're like terrestrial worlds

00:38:27.740 | where even if there's not life,

00:38:28.820 | there's still snow falling and there's oceans

00:38:31.520 | washing up on, you know, on shorelines.

00:38:33.800 | It's incredible to think how many places

00:38:36.960 | and stories there are out there.

00:38:39.020 | So right, the first term was F sub P,

00:38:40.640 | which is how many stars have planets.

00:38:42.720 | The next term is how many planets

00:38:45.140 | are in the habitable zone, right, on average.

00:38:47.800 | And it turns out to be one over five, right?

00:38:50.360 | So, you know, around 0.2.

00:38:52.040 | So that means you just count five of them,

00:38:53.160 | go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five.

00:38:55.120 | One of them has an Earth-like planet, you know,

00:38:58.280 | in the habitable zone, like, whoa.

00:39:00.620 | - So what defines a habitable zone?

00:39:02.400 | - Habitable zone is an idea that was developed

00:39:06.100 | in the 1958 by the Chinese-American astronomer Xu Shang.

00:39:11.100 | And it was a brilliant idea.

00:39:12.620 | It said, look, this is there, you know,

00:39:14.640 | I can do this simple calculation.

00:39:16.400 | If I take a planet and just stick it

00:39:18.360 | at some distance from a star

00:39:20.160 | of what's the temperature of the planet?

00:39:22.380 | What's the temperature of the surface?

00:39:23.860 | So now you're all, you're gonna ask,

00:39:24.880 | you give it a standard kind of, you know,

00:39:26.240 | Earth-like atmosphere and ask,

00:39:28.000 | could there be liquid water on the surface, right?

00:39:30.080 | We believe that liquid water is really important for life.

00:39:33.200 | There could be other things that's happening, fine.

00:39:35.000 | But, you know, if you were to start off trying to make life,

00:39:37.800 | you'd probably choose water as your solvent for it.

00:39:41.280 | So basically the habitable zone is the band of orbits

00:39:45.360 | around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface.

00:39:49.080 | You could take a glass of water,

00:39:50.360 | pour it on the surface and it would just pool up.

00:39:51.960 | It wouldn't freeze immediately,

00:39:53.520 | which would happen if your planet is too far out.

00:39:55.320 | And it wouldn't just boil away

00:39:56.880 | if your planet's too close in.

00:39:58.320 | So that's the formal definition of the habitable zone.

00:40:01.800 | So it's a nice, strict definition.

00:40:03.640 | There's probably way more going on than that,

00:40:05.520 | but this is a place to start.

00:40:07.120 | - Right, well, we should say it's a place to start.

00:40:09.680 | I do think it's too strict of a constraint.

00:40:11.920 | - I would agree.

00:40:12.760 | - We're talking about temperature

00:40:15.560 | where water can be on the surface.

00:40:18.280 | There's so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil

00:40:23.640 | where the temperature varies, whether it's volcanic.

00:40:26.760 | So interaction of volcanoes and ice

00:40:29.160 | and all of this on the moons of plants

00:40:31.320 | that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.

00:40:33.520 | - Well, for example, we know in our own solar system,

00:40:35.800 | we have say Europa, the moon of Jupiter,

00:40:38.720 | which has got a hundred mile deep ocean

00:40:42.760 | under 10 miles of ice, right?

00:40:44.480 | That's not in the habitable zone.

00:40:45.680 | That is outside the habitable zone.

00:40:47.320 | And that may be the best place.

00:40:48.640 | It's got more water than Earth does, all of its oceans.

00:40:52.320 | It's twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth.

00:40:54.800 | So, you know, that may be a really great place

00:40:57.200 | for life to form and it's outside the habitable zone.

00:40:59.200 | So, you know, the habitable zone is a good place to start

00:41:01.520 | and it helps us.

00:41:02.560 | And there's reasons why you do wanna focus

00:41:05.160 | on the habitable zone because like Europa,

00:41:06.640 | I couldn't, I won't be able to see

00:41:08.560 | from across telescopic distances, across light years.

00:41:12.160 | I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa

00:41:14.160 | because it's under 10 miles of ice, right?

00:41:16.400 | So with the important thing about planets

00:41:19.640 | in the habitable zone is that we're thinking

00:41:22.320 | they have atmospheres.

00:41:24.280 | Atmospheres are the things we can characterize

00:41:26.400 | for across 10, 50 light years.

00:41:28.640 | And we can see biosignatures as we're gonna talk about.

00:41:31.220 | So there is a reason why the habitable zone

00:41:33.000 | becomes important for the detection of extra solar life.

00:41:37.120 | - But for me, when I look up at the stars,

00:41:40.240 | it's very likely that there's a habitable planet

00:41:42.920 | or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.

00:41:47.080 | - Yeah, I think that's not unreasonable to say.

00:41:50.440 | I mean, especially since the formal definition,

00:41:53.200 | you get one in five, right?

00:41:54.520 | One in five is a lot.

00:41:55.360 | There's a lot of stars in the sky.

00:41:56.560 | So yeah, saying that in general,

00:41:58.400 | when I look at a star, there's a pretty good chance

00:42:00.440 | that there's something habitable orbiting it

00:42:02.960 | is not a unreasonable scientific claim.

00:42:06.560 | - To me, it seems like there should be

00:42:10.480 | alien civilizations everywhere.

00:42:14.120 | Why the Fermi Paradox?

00:42:16.160 | Why haven't we seen them?

00:42:17.440 | - Okay, the Fermi Paradox.

00:42:19.440 | Let's talk about, I love talking about the Fermi Paradox

00:42:21.520 | because there is no Fermi Paradox.

00:42:24.620 | Dun, dun, dun, dun.

00:42:26.280 | Yeah, so the Fermi Paradox, let's talk about

00:42:28.120 | the Fermi Paradox and the history of it.

00:42:30.600 | So Enrico Fermi, it's 1950, he's walking with his friends

00:42:34.720 | at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab to the cantina.

00:42:38.160 | And there had been this cartoon in "The New Yorker."

00:42:42.400 | And they all read "The New Yorker."

00:42:43.720 | And the cartoon was trying to explain

00:42:45.680 | why there had been this rash of garbage cans

00:42:48.560 | being disappearing in New York.

00:42:50.320 | And this cartoon said, "Oh, it's UFOs."

00:42:51.800 | 'Cause this is already, it's 1950,

00:42:53.120 | the first big UFO craze happened in '47.

00:42:55.880 | So they were laughing about this as they're walking

00:42:58.300 | and they started being physicists,

00:42:59.560 | started talking about interstellar travel,

00:43:01.100 | interstellar propulsion, blah, blah, blah.

00:43:03.400 | Conversation goes on for a while.

00:43:04.680 | Conversation turns to something else,

00:43:06.520 | they go on to other things.

00:43:08.520 | About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out,

00:43:12.040 | "Well, where is everybody?"

00:43:13.840 | Typical Fermi sort of thing.

00:43:15.120 | He'd done the calculation in his head

00:43:16.880 | and he suddenly realized that, look,

00:43:18.720 | if one, if intelligence is common,

00:43:21.960 | that even traveling at sub-light speeds,

00:43:24.840 | a civilization could cross,

00:43:27.640 | kind of hop from one star system to the other

00:43:30.180 | and spread out across the entire galaxy

00:43:32.320 | in a few hundred thousand years.

00:43:34.400 | And he realized this and so he was like,

00:43:35.520 | "Why aren't they here now?"

00:43:36.800 | And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox.

00:43:40.080 | It actually got picked up as a formal thing

00:43:42.000 | in 1975 in a paper by Hart,

00:43:44.600 | where he actually kind of went through this calculation

00:43:47.000 | and showed and said, "Well, there's nobody here now,

00:43:49.880 | "therefore there's nobody anywhere."

00:43:52.440 | Okay, so that is what we will call

00:43:53.720 | the direct Fermi paradox.

00:43:55.100 | Why aren't they here now?

00:43:56.600 | But something happened where people,

00:43:57.800 | after SETI began, where people started to,

00:44:00.000 | there was this idea of the great silence.

00:44:02.120 | People got this idea in their head that like,

00:44:03.400 | "Oh, we've been looking for decades now

00:44:06.740 | "for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence

00:44:08.800 | "and we haven't found any,

00:44:10.300 | "therefore there's nothing out there."

00:44:12.060 | But that, so we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox.

00:44:14.500 | And there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox

00:44:17.220 | for the most mundane of reasons, which is money.

00:44:20.460 | There's never been any money to look.

00:44:22.180 | There really, SETI was always done by researchers

00:44:25.820 | who were kind of like scabbing some time,

00:44:28.180 | some extra time from their other projects

00:44:30.000 | to look a little bit at the sky with a telescope.

00:44:33.460 | Telescopes are expensive.

00:44:34.860 | So Jason Wright, one of my collaborators,

00:44:37.460 | he and his students did a study

00:44:38.740 | where they looked at the entire search space for SETI.

00:44:42.220 | And imagine that's an ocean,

00:44:43.220 | all the different stars you have to look at,

00:44:45.340 | the radio frequencies you have to look at,

00:44:47.100 | how when you look, how often you look.

00:44:49.140 | And then they summed up all the SETI searches

00:44:51.660 | that had ever been done.

00:44:52.500 | They went through the literature.

00:44:53.740 | And what they found was if that search space,

00:44:56.540 | if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish,

00:44:59.620 | how much of the ocean have we looked at?

00:45:02.060 | And it turns out to be a hot tub.

00:45:04.120 | That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up.

00:45:06.260 | We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up

00:45:09.740 | and there was no fish in it.

00:45:10.940 | And so now are we gonna say,

00:45:12.140 | oh, well, there's no fish in the ocean, right?

00:45:14.220 | So there is absolutely, positively,

00:45:16.780 | no indirect Fermi paradox.

00:45:18.260 | We just haven't looked, but we're starting to look.

00:45:21.980 | So that's what's, you know, finally we're starting to look.

00:45:23.620 | That's what's exciting.

00:45:25.020 | The direct Fermi paradox,

00:45:26.580 | there are so many ways out of that, right?

00:45:28.180 | There's a book called "77 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox"

00:45:31.760 | that it just, you know, you can pick your favorite one.

00:45:33.940 | It just doesn't carry a lot of weight

00:45:35.920 | because there's so many ways around it.

00:45:37.540 | We did an actual simulation, my group,

00:45:39.700 | Johnston Carroll, one of my collaborators,

00:45:42.000 | we actually simulated the galaxy

00:45:43.620 | and we simulated probes moving at sublight speed

00:45:46.540 | from one star to the other,

00:45:49.020 | gathering resources, heading to the next one.

00:45:51.660 | And so we could actually track the expansion wave

00:45:54.300 | across the galaxy, have one IA biogenesis event,

00:45:57.340 | and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled.

00:46:00.260 | And it is absolutely true that that wave crosses,

00:46:03.100 | you know, Hart was right, Fermi was right.

00:46:04.900 | That wave crosses very quickly.

00:46:06.920 | But civilizations don't last forever, right?

00:46:09.480 | So one question is when did they visit?

00:46:11.840 | When did they come to earth, right?

00:46:14.200 | So if you give civilizations a finite lifetime,

00:46:16.960 | you know, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years,

00:46:19.420 | what you find is you now have a steady state.

00:46:21.040 | Civilizations are dying, they're, you know,

00:46:22.920 | they're coming back, they're traveling between the stars.

00:46:25.680 | What you find then is you can have big holes opened up.

00:46:27.960 | You can have regions of space where there is nobody

00:46:30.120 | for, you know, millions of years.

00:46:31.760 | And so if that, if we're living in one of those,

00:46:34.480 | bubbles right now, then maybe we were visited,

00:46:36.880 | but we were visited a hundred million years ago.

00:46:39.440 | And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did

00:46:41.280 | that showed that if there was a civilization,

00:46:42.920 | whether it was like dinosaurs or aliens

00:46:45.720 | that was here a hundred million years ago,

00:46:47.440 | there's no way to tell.

00:46:48.860 | There's just, there's no record left over.

00:46:50.680 | The fossil record is too sparse.

00:46:52.560 | The only way maybe you could tell is by looking

00:46:54.440 | at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything

00:46:58.920 | reminiscent of an industrial civilization.

00:47:00.880 | But the idea that, you know, you'd be able to find,

00:47:03.800 | you know, iPhones or toppled buildings

00:47:06.560 | after a hundred million years is, there's no way.

00:47:09.600 | - So if there was an alien camp here.

00:47:13.140 | - Yeah.

00:47:13.980 | - An alien village, a small civilization.

00:47:16.520 | - Right.

00:47:17.360 | - Maybe even a large civilization.

00:47:18.180 | - Even a large civilization.

00:47:19.020 | Even if it was a large--

00:47:19.860 | - A hundred million years ago.

00:47:20.680 | - And it lasted 10,000 years,

00:47:21.920 | fossil record's not gonna have it.

00:47:23.800 | Yeah, yeah.

00:47:25.220 | The fossil record is too sparse, right?

00:47:26.840 | Most things don't fossilize.

00:47:28.640 | - Yeah.

00:47:29.540 | - And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye

00:47:31.800 | of geological time.

00:47:33.380 | So we call, Gavin called this the Silurian hypothesis

00:47:36.280 | after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures,

00:47:38.460 | the Silurians.

00:47:39.640 | And so that paper got a lot of press.

00:47:41.880 | But it was, you know, it was an important idea.

00:47:45.680 | And this was really Gavin's.

00:47:46.800 | I was just helping with the astrobiology.

00:47:48.800 | That to recognize that, like, yeah, you know,

00:47:50.800 | we could have been visited a long time ago.

00:47:52.720 | There just would be no record.

00:47:54.220 | Yeah, it's kind of mind-blowing.

00:47:56.560 | - It's really mind-blowing.

00:47:57.400 | - Yeah.

00:47:58.220 | - And it's also a good reminder that we've been

00:48:00.180 | intelligent species have been here

00:48:03.900 | for a very short amount of time.

00:48:05.300 | - Very short amount of time, yeah.

00:48:07.220 | This is not to say that there was.

00:48:08.340 | Like, so whenever I gave, you know,

00:48:10.240 | like when I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper,

00:48:13.440 | and I had to always emphasize,

00:48:14.500 | we're not saying there was a Silurian, you know.

00:48:18.360 | But we're just saying that if there was.

00:48:19.820 | That's why I love Gavin's question.

00:48:21.480 | Gavin's question was just like, how could you tell, right?

00:48:23.840 | It was a very beautifully scientific question.

00:48:26.620 | That's what we were really showing,

00:48:27.820 | is that you really, you know,

00:48:29.060 | unless you did a very specific kind of search,

00:48:31.300 | which nobody's done so far,

00:48:32.900 | that, you know, there's not an obvious way to tell

00:48:35.380 | that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.

00:48:38.520 | - I've actually been reading a lot about

00:48:42.460 | ancient civilizations, and it just makes me sad

00:48:46.580 | how much of the wisdom of that time is lost.

00:48:49.540 | - Yeah.

00:48:50.380 | - And how much guessing is going on,

00:48:52.940 | whether it's in South America,

00:48:55.220 | like what happened in the jungle?

00:48:57.460 | - Yeah, like the Amazon.

00:48:58.620 | - Like the Amazon, that was, you know,

00:49:00.500 | the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out,

00:49:03.220 | and especially just even like the plague may have decimated.

00:49:06.720 | So yeah, how much of that civilization?

00:49:09.460 | - And there's a lot of theories,

00:49:10.860 | and you know, because of archeology only looks at cities,

00:49:15.860 | they don't really know the origins of humans,

00:49:19.220 | and there's a lot of really interesting theories,

00:49:21.480 | and they're, of course, controversial.

00:49:22.740 | There's a lot of controversial people in every discipline,

00:49:25.380 | but archeology is like, it's a fascinating one,

00:49:27.940 | 'cause we know so little, they're basically storytellers.

00:49:31.000 | You're assembling the picture

00:49:33.320 | from just very few puzzle pieces, and it's fascinating.

00:49:36.380 | It makes me, it's humbling, and it's sad

00:49:39.780 | that there could be entire civilizations,

00:49:42.920 | ancient civilizations, that are either

00:49:45.820 | almost entirely or entirely lost.

00:49:48.140 | - Yeah, well, like the indigenous peoples of North America,

00:49:51.540 | there could have been like millions and millions.

00:49:53.740 | You know, we get this idea that like,

00:49:54.780 | oh, you know, the Europeans came, and it was empty,

00:49:57.980 | you know, but it may have only been empty

00:50:00.420 | because the plague had swept up from the,

00:50:02.540 | you know, from the, what happened in Mesoamerica.

00:50:05.220 | So, and yeah, and they didn't really build cities,

00:50:07.140 | but they had, I mean, they didn't build wooden

00:50:10.340 | or stone cities, they built wooden cities, you know?

00:50:13.560 | - Everybody seems to be building pyramids,

00:50:15.740 | and they're really damn good at it.

00:50:17.060 | I don't know what that-- - What is up with a pyramid?

00:50:18.340 | Like, what is, why does that apply?

00:50:19.840 | Like, what archetype in our brain is that?

00:50:23.420 | - It is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes,

00:50:25.940 | is that independent civilizations formed,

00:50:30.620 | and they had a lot of similar kind of dynamics,

00:50:33.840 | like human nature, when it builds up hierarchies

00:50:37.900 | in a certain way, builds up myths and religions

00:50:40.340 | in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way,

00:50:43.300 | it goes to war, all this kind of stuff,

00:50:45.620 | independently emerges, fascinating.

00:50:48.320 | - Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute

00:50:50.500 | does on this, as complex systems, you know,

00:50:52.620 | the origin of hierarchies and such, very cool.

00:50:55.700 | - Yeah, Santa Fe, folks, complexity in general

00:50:58.100 | is really cool. - Really cool.

00:51:00.380 | - What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things

00:51:02.940 | get together and interact.

00:51:04.820 | Going back to this paper, "A New Empirical Constraint

00:51:07.940 | "on the Prevalence of Technological Species

00:51:10.460 | "in the Universe," this paper that expands

00:51:13.100 | on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things

00:51:15.380 | in this paper?

00:51:16.260 | - Well, so the main thing we were trying to do

00:51:17.580 | with this paper is say, look, we have all of this

00:51:19.740 | exoplanet data, right, it's gotta be good for something,

00:51:23.100 | especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down

00:51:25.900 | empirically are two terms in the Drake equation.

00:51:29.300 | So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars

00:51:32.300 | that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number

00:51:35.380 | of planets in the habitable zone.

00:51:36.860 | Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation.

00:51:39.740 | So what that means is all the astronomical terms

00:51:41.660 | have been nailed.

00:51:42.500 | And so we said like, okay, how do we use this

00:51:44.780 | to do something with the Drake equation?

00:51:46.700 | And so we realized is, well, okay, we gotta get rid

00:51:48.980 | of time, the lifetime thing, we can't say anything

00:51:51.060 | about that.

00:51:52.620 | But if we let that, if we don't ask how long they last,

00:51:56.180 | but instead ask, what's the probability

00:51:59.100 | that there have been any civilizations at all,

00:52:01.740 | no matter how long they lasted?

00:52:03.020 | I'm not asking whether they exist now or not,

00:52:04.940 | I'm just asking in general about probabilities

00:52:08.820 | to make a technological civilization anywhere

00:52:12.260 | and at any time in the history of the universe.

00:52:14.220 | And that we were able to constrain.

00:52:16.340 | And so what we found was basically that there have been

00:52:21.340 | 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe.

00:52:26.820 | And what that means is those are 10 billion trillion

00:52:32.220 | experiments that have been run.

00:52:34.220 | And the only way that we're the only time that this is,

00:52:38.620 | this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization

00:52:43.420 | has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.

00:52:46.180 | So therefore you could put a probability,

00:52:48.700 | we called it the pessimism line, right?

00:52:50.780 | We don't really know what nature sets for the probability

00:52:54.380 | of making intelligent civilizations, right?

00:52:56.300 | But we could set a limit using this.

00:52:58.060 | We could say, look, as if the probability

00:53:00.820 | per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22,

00:53:04.940 | one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone.

00:53:07.500 | If it's anywhere larger than that,

00:53:09.340 | then we're not the first, it's happened somewhere else.

00:53:11.740 | And to me, that was mind blowing.

00:53:14.140 | Doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby,

00:53:15.780 | the galaxy could be sterile.

00:53:17.220 | It just told me that like, you know,

00:53:19.520 | unless nature's really against,

00:53:22.540 | it has some bias against civilizations,

00:53:24.980 | we're not the first time this has happened.

00:53:26.340 | This has happened elsewhere over the course

00:53:28.460 | of cosmic history.

00:53:29.940 | - 10 billion trillion experiments.

00:53:33.420 | - Yeah, that's a lot of experiments.

00:53:35.380 | - That's a lot.

00:53:36.220 | - Right.

00:53:37.060 | - A thousand is a lot.

00:53:38.060 | - Yeah.

00:53:38.880 | - A hundred is a lot.

00:53:39.720 | - Yeah.

00:53:40.980 | - If we normal humans saw a hundred experiments

00:53:43.540 | and we knew that at least one time

00:53:48.540 | there was a successful human civilization built,

00:53:51.460 | I mean, we would say for sure,

00:53:53.300 | in a hundred, you'll get another one.

00:53:54.740 | - Yeah, yeah, so that's what I mean, that's why,

00:53:56.300 | so this, you know, these kinds of arguments,

00:53:57.940 | you have to be careful of what they can do,

00:53:59.220 | but what it really, I felt like what this paper showed

00:54:01.500 | was that, you know, the burden of proof

00:54:03.140 | is now on the pessimists, right?

00:54:05.100 | So that's why we called it the pessimism line.

00:54:07.100 | There's been, you know, throughout history,

00:54:08.620 | there's been, you know, alien pessimists

00:54:11.540 | and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other.

00:54:13.620 | That's all they had to go with, right?

00:54:14.820 | You know, and like with Giordano Bruno in 1600,

00:54:17.300 | they burned the guy at the stake

00:54:19.060 | for being an alien optimist.

00:54:20.580 | But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant.

00:54:23.220 | This, you know, we sort of thought

00:54:24.420 | this was like the Planck length.

00:54:25.660 | This was sort of the Planck length of astrobiology.

00:54:27.620 | Gave you an actual number that, you know,

00:54:30.020 | if you could somehow calculate what the probability,

00:54:33.180 | you know, of forming a technological civilization was,

00:54:36.020 | this thing sort of shows you where the limit is.

00:54:38.620 | As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22,

00:54:40.660 | then you actually, absolutely, it has occurred

00:54:43.380 | in the history.

00:54:44.900 | Other civilizations have occurred

00:54:46.300 | in the history of the universe.

00:54:47.140 | - So to me, at least, the big question is Fe,

00:54:49.620 | which is basically abiogenesis.

00:54:52.300 | How hard is it for life to originate on a planet?

00:54:55.020 | 'Cause all the other ones seem very likely.

00:54:58.340 | Everything seems very likely.

00:54:59.620 | The only open question to me is like,

00:55:01.540 | how hard is it for life to originate?

00:55:03.260 | - There's lots of ways to, again, you know,

00:55:05.100 | we don't know unless we look.

00:55:06.620 | And, you know, you had Sarah Walker on not too long ago.

00:55:09.580 | You know, she's very interested in origins of life.

00:55:12.140 | So, you know, lots of people are working on this,

00:55:15.380 | but I think it's hard looking at the history of the earth.

00:55:18.940 | You know, and again, this is,

00:55:19.780 | you can do Bayesian arguments on this.

00:55:22.140 | But yeah, forming life, I don't think it's hard.

00:55:25.340 | Getting like basic biology started, I don't think is hard.

00:55:28.780 | It's still wild.

00:55:29.820 | It's an amazing process that actually, I think,

00:55:31.540 | requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize

00:55:35.740 | what life is and what life isn't.

00:55:37.620 | That's one of the things I like about Sarah's work.

00:55:40.220 | We're pursuing on a different level about life

00:55:43.500 | as the only system that uses information.

00:55:48.420 | But still, regardless of all those kinds of details,

00:55:51.740 | life is probably easy to make.

00:55:53.300 | That's my gut feeling, you know.

00:55:55.060 | - Yeah, I mean, day by day this changes for me.

00:55:58.260 | But as you see, once you create bacteria,

00:56:01.700 | it's off to the races.

00:56:03.500 | You're gonna get complex life.

00:56:05.300 | As long as you have enough time,

00:56:07.220 | I mean, that boring billion,

00:56:09.260 | but I just can't imagine a habitable planet

00:56:12.980 | not having a couple billion to spare.

00:56:15.900 | - Yeah, a couple billion years to spare.

00:56:17.820 | You know, there is a mystery there

00:56:19.340 | about why did it take so long?

00:56:21.300 | Like with the Cambrian explosion?

00:56:22.700 | But that may be, again, about these windows.

00:56:24.620 | That like, it couldn't happen until the window,

00:56:27.740 | the planet and the life had evolved together enough

00:56:30.700 | that they together kind of opened the window

00:56:32.580 | for the next step.

00:56:34.740 | You know, intelligent life and how long intelligent,

00:56:38.820 | technological civilizations,

00:56:40.300 | I think there's a big question about how long those last

00:56:42.540 | and how, you know, I'm hopeful, you know.

00:56:44.740 | But in terms of just like,

00:56:48.100 | I think life is absolutely gonna be common

00:56:50.580 | in the, you know, pretty common in the universe.

00:56:52.140 | - Yeah, I think it's absolutely like,

00:56:53.700 | I think, again, if I were to bet everything,

00:56:56.260 | even in advanced civilizations are common.

00:57:01.260 | So the, to me then, the only explanation is the L.

00:57:06.220 | Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.

00:57:09.420 | - Yeah, 'cause, you know, you think about it,

00:57:10.620 | we've only been around, I mean, as a tech lot,

00:57:12.540 | truly, you know, when we think about in Drake's definition,

00:57:15.500 | you had to have radio telescopes.

00:57:16.660 | That's been 100 years, you know.

00:57:18.140 | And if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history,

00:57:21.900 | that would be, for us, that'd be pretty amazing, right?

00:57:24.980 | But that's still, that wouldn't be long enough

00:57:26.380 | to really pop up the number of civilizations

00:57:28.980 | in the galaxy.

00:57:30.500 | So you really need it to be, like,

00:57:32.140 | hundreds of millions of years.

00:57:33.900 | And that raises a question which I am very interested in,

00:57:37.380 | which is, how do you even talk about,

00:57:39.420 | I call it the billionaire civilization, right?

00:57:41.360 | How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about,

00:57:44.140 | in any kind of systematic way,

00:57:46.180 | what happens to a technological civilization

00:57:48.780 | across hundreds of millions to a billion years?

00:57:52.700 | - Yeah, like, how do you even simulate the trajectories

00:57:55.420 | that civilizations can take across that kind of timescale?

00:57:58.260 | - Yeah.

00:57:59.100 | All the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so,

00:58:02.900 | 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.

00:58:07.240 | And then just, I don't know what you put it at,

00:58:09.260 | but maybe 100 years that we've been technological.

00:58:12.140 | - Yeah, and we're ready to blow ourselves to bits

00:58:14.280 | or drive ourselves off the planet.

00:58:16.220 | Yeah, no, it's really interesting.

00:58:17.360 | But there's gotta be a way.

00:58:18.200 | I think that's really a frontier.

00:58:19.540 | So you had David Kipping on not too long ago.

00:58:22.420 | And David and I did a paper, and Caleb Scharf,

00:58:24.860 | David really drove this, where we,

00:58:27.100 | it was a Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question,

00:58:29.540 | if you were to find a detection,

00:58:31.980 | if you were to find a signal or a techno signature,

00:58:35.140 | would that come from a civilization that was younger,

00:58:38.220 | your age or older?

00:58:40.020 | And you could see, I mean, this is not hard to do,

00:58:41.780 | but it was great, the formalism, the formalism was hard.

00:58:44.420 | It's kind of intuitive, but the formalism was hard

00:58:46.940 | to show that, yeah, they're older, probably much older.

00:58:49.480 | So that means you really do need to think about like,

00:58:51.300 | okay, how do billion year civilizations

00:58:54.180 | manifest themselves?

00:58:55.460 | What signatures will they leave?

00:58:57.300 | And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it,

00:59:00.060 | it's so much fun, because you gotta,

00:59:01.940 | like you have to imagine the unimaginable.

00:59:04.900 | Would you still, I mean, obviously biological evolution

00:59:08.060 | can happen on those kinds of timescales.

00:59:10.620 | So you wouldn't even really be the same thing

00:59:12.100 | you started out as, but social forms,

00:59:14.300 | what kind of social forms can you imagine

00:59:16.620 | that would be continuous over that?

00:59:18.800 | Or maybe they wouldn't be continuous,

00:59:19.940 | you'd get, they'd drop out, they'd destroy themselves,

00:59:22.140 | and then they'd come back.

00:59:23.020 | So maybe it's a trunk, or a punctuated evolution.

00:59:27.620 | I mean, but we gotta sort of, this is the fun part,

00:59:29.660 | we have to sort of work this out.

00:59:31.580 | - Well, I mean, one way to push that question is like,

00:59:34.700 | how, what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis

00:59:38.380 | as you get greater and greater technological innovation?

00:59:41.500 | So like, if you expand out into the universe,

00:59:44.820 | and you have, up to Kardashev scale,

00:59:48.020 | what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself?

00:59:51.100 | Just achieve stability while still growing?

00:59:54.460 | - Yeah. - And,

00:59:55.300 | I mean, that's an interesting question.

00:59:58.500 | I think it's probably simulatable.

01:00:00.640 | - Could be, I mean, agent-based modeling,

01:00:02.520 | you could do it with that.

01:00:03.360 | So our group has used agent-based modeling

01:00:06.140 | to do something like the Fermi paradox,

01:00:07.860 | that was agent-based modeling.

01:00:09.620 | But you can also do this, people at Santa Fe have done this,

01:00:11.940 | other groups have done this, to use agent-based modeling

01:00:14.500 | to track the formation of hierarchies,

01:00:17.960 | the formation of stable hierarchies.

01:00:20.700 | So I think that, I think it's actually very doable,

01:00:23.460 | but understanding the kind of assumptions and principles

01:00:26.780 | that are going into it,

01:00:27.600 | and what you can extract from those,

01:00:29.020 | that is what is sort of the frontier.

01:00:31.160 | - Do you think if humans colonized Mars,

01:00:34.720 | the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars

01:00:40.540 | will be fundamentally different than the dynamic

01:00:43.700 | between individual nations on Earth right now?

01:00:46.420 | Like, that's a thing to load into the simulation,

01:00:48.420 | the agent-based simulation we're talking about.

01:00:50.340 | If we settle it,

01:00:51.440 | Mars will very quickly wanna become its own nation.

01:00:53.500 | - Well, no, there's already gonna be nations on Mars,

01:00:57.860 | that's guaranteed.

01:00:58.700 | The moment you have two million people,

01:01:01.100 | the moment you have one million people,

01:01:02.500 | there's gonna be two tribes.

01:01:04.580 | And then they're going to start fighting.

01:01:06.740 | And the question is, interplanetary fighting,

01:01:09.420 | how quickly does that happen,

01:01:10.860 | and does it have a different nature to it?

01:01:13.380 | Because of the distances, you know?

01:01:14.900 | - Are you a fan of "The Expanse"?

01:01:16.940 | Do any of you watch "The Expanse"?

01:01:18.420 | - Great show, 'cause it's all about the,

01:01:19.980 | I highly recommend to everybody,

01:01:21.500 | it's based on a series of books that are excellent.

01:01:23.260 | It's on Prime, six seasons,

01:01:24.860 | and it's basically about the settled solar system.

01:01:26.900 | It takes place about 300 years from now,

01:01:28.500 | and the entire solar system is settled.

01:01:30.140 | And it is the best show about interplanetary politics.

01:01:33.740 | The first season, actually, the journal, what was it?

01:01:36.780 | Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics

01:01:40.900 | it takes place is interplanetary.

01:01:43.820 | So yeah, I think, you know, human beings being human beings,

01:01:46.060 | yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.

01:01:49.100 | I mean, I don't think it'll be necessarily

01:01:50.940 | all that different, you know?

01:01:52.300 | Because really, I think within a few hundred years,

01:01:54.480 | we will have lots of people in the solar system.

01:01:57.580 | And it doesn't even have to be on Mars.

01:01:58.660 | We did a paper where we looked,

01:02:00.980 | based on, 'cause I wanted to know about

01:02:03.060 | whether an idea in "The Expanse" was really possible.

01:02:05.620 | In "The Expanse," the asteroid belt,

01:02:07.860 | what they've done is they have colonized

01:02:09.460 | the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids

01:02:11.460 | and spinning them up and living on the inside, right?

01:02:14.100 | 'Cause they have the Coriolis force.

01:02:15.620 | And I felt like, wow, what a cool idea.

01:02:17.300 | And when I ran the blog for NPR,

01:02:19.220 | I actually talked to the guys and said,

01:02:20.780 | "Did you guys calculate this to see whether it's possible?"

01:02:23.740 | Sadly, it's not possible.

01:02:25.100 | The rock is just not strong enough

01:02:27.360 | that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds

01:02:29.460 | you need to get 1/3 gravity,

01:02:32.100 | which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings,

01:02:34.820 | the rock would just fall apart, it would break.

01:02:36.300 | But we came up with another idea,

01:02:38.020 | which was that if you could take small asteroids,

01:02:39.940 | put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag,

01:02:42.740 | and spin those up, it would inflate the bag.

01:02:45.300 | And then even a small couple kilometer wide asteroid

01:02:48.900 | would expand out to,

01:02:50.460 | you could get like Manhattan's worth of material inside.

01:02:54.780 | So forget about even colonizing Mars,

01:02:56.780 | space stations, right, or space habitats

01:02:59.260 | with millions of people in them.

01:03:01.340 | So anyway, the point is that I think,

01:03:03.820 | within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable

01:03:06.940 | that there will be millions, if not billions of people

01:03:10.060 | living in the solar system.

01:03:11.580 | - And so you think most of them will be in space habitats

01:03:13.860 | versus on Mars on the planetary surface?

01:03:16.420 | - It's a lot easier on some level, right?

01:03:18.380 | It depends on how, like with nanofabrication and such.

01:03:21.140 | But getting down to gravity well is hard, right?

01:03:24.300 | So there's a certain way in which there's a lot of,

01:03:26.900 | it's a lot easier to build real estate out of asteroids.

01:03:30.300 | But we'll probably do both.

01:03:31.180 | I mean, I think what'll happen is, the next,

01:03:33.500 | should we make it through climate change and nuclear war

01:03:35.380 | and all the other, and AI,

01:03:37.340 | the next thousand years of human history

01:03:40.460 | is the solar system, right?

01:03:42.060 | And so I think we'll settle every nook and cranny

01:03:45.660 | we possibly can.

01:03:47.020 | And it's a beautiful, what I love about,

01:03:49.460 | what's hopeful about it, is this idea

01:03:50.900 | you're gonna have all of these pockets.

01:03:53.300 | And I'm sure there's gonna be a Mormon space habitat,

01:03:55.980 | like there's gonna be, whatever you want,

01:03:57.940 | a libertarian space habitat.

01:03:59.780 | Everybody's gonna be able to kind of create their,

01:04:01.660 | there'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing.

01:04:04.180 | And those kinds of experiments will be really useful

01:04:06.580 | for us to sort of figure out better ways

01:04:08.780 | for us to interact and have maximum flourishing,

01:04:11.580 | maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.

01:04:15.260 | - Do you think that's a good backup solution

01:04:17.580 | to go out into space, sort of to avoid the possibility

01:04:22.100 | of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?

01:04:24.540 | - Well, I think, I wanna be always careful with that

01:04:26.580 | because like I said, it's centuries

01:04:28.500 | that we're talking about, right?

01:04:30.140 | So the problem with climate change,

01:04:32.540 | and same thing with nuclear war,

01:04:33.500 | it's breathing down our necks now.

01:04:35.020 | So it's not a, trying to establish a base on Mars,

01:04:40.060 | it's gonna be so hard that it is not even gonna be close

01:04:43.100 | to being self-sufficient for a couple of,

01:04:46.500 | a century at least.

01:04:47.740 | So it's not like a backup plan now.

01:04:50.460 | We have to solve the problem of climate change.

01:04:52.540 | We have to deal with that.

01:04:53.460 | There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do

01:04:55.980 | horrific things to the planet for human beings.

01:04:59.100 | So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way,

01:05:01.220 | but I do think, like I said, it's the prize.

01:05:03.700 | If we get through this, then we get the entire solar system

01:05:07.860 | to sort of play around in and experiment with

01:05:10.140 | and do really cool things with.

01:05:11.540 | - Well, I think it could be a lot less

01:05:12.780 | than a couple of centuries if there's a urgency,

01:05:17.100 | like a real urgency, like a catastrophe,

01:05:19.820 | like maybe a small nuclear war breaks out

01:05:23.780 | where it's like, holy shit, this is for sure,

01:05:26.820 | for sure a bigger one is looming.

01:05:29.260 | Maybe if geopolitically the war between China

01:05:32.220 | and the United States escalates,

01:05:34.020 | where there's this tension that builds and builds

01:05:35.860 | and builds, and it becomes more obvious

01:05:37.700 | that we need to really, really, really accelerate.

01:05:40.260 | - I think my only dilemma with that is that

01:05:43.180 | I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away

01:05:47.180 | that like, say, you start doing that,

01:05:49.140 | and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange.

01:05:51.260 | That base is, you know, it's not gonna last

01:05:53.220 | 'cause it's just, you know, the self-sufficiency

01:05:55.300 | requires a kind of an economy,

01:05:57.540 | like literally a material economy

01:06:00.100 | that we are so far from with Mars,

01:06:02.340 | that we are centuries from.

01:06:03.780 | Like I said, you know, three centuries,

01:06:05.660 | which is not that long, two to three centuries.

01:06:07.380 | You know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster

01:06:10.340 | than 60 miles an hour,

01:06:11.580 | unless they were falling off a cliff, right?

01:06:13.580 | And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour,

01:06:15.900 | but it is sort of centuries long.

01:06:17.940 | So that's why I think we'd be better off

01:06:20.300 | trying to solve these problems than, you know,

01:06:23.860 | I just think the odds that we're gonna be able

01:06:25.860 | to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars

01:06:29.340 | before that threat comes to head is small.

01:06:33.820 | So we'd have to deal with the threat.

01:06:35.260 | - That's an interesting scientific and engineering question

01:06:37.980 | of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars

01:06:40.860 | or out in space as a space habitat.

01:06:43.060 | Like where Earth entirely could be destroyed,

01:06:46.060 | you could still survive.

01:06:46.940 | - Yeah, yeah, 'cause it's really what about,

01:06:48.420 | you know, thinking about complex systems, right?

01:06:51.340 | A space habitat, you know, would have to be as robust

01:06:55.780 | as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing, you know,

01:06:58.020 | you go out and you see a pond

01:06:59.060 | with all the different webs of interactions.

01:07:01.740 | You know, that's why I always think that, you know,

01:07:04.060 | if this process of going out into space

01:07:07.660 | is actually, will help us with climate change

01:07:10.620 | and with thinking about making a long-term,

01:07:12.300 | sustainable version of human civilization,

01:07:14.660 | 'cause you really have to think about these webs,

01:07:17.300 | the complexity of these webs,

01:07:18.900 | and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever.

01:07:21.380 | The biosphere knows how to do this, right?

01:07:23.340 | And so A, how do we support,

01:07:24.580 | how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere

01:07:27.820 | that also doesn't, you know, mess with the biosphere,

01:07:31.340 | mess with the biosphere's capacity

01:07:33.300 | to support our technosphere?

01:07:34.940 | So, you know, by doing this,

01:07:36.020 | by trying to build space habitats,

01:07:37.420 | in some sense, you're thinking about

01:07:38.820 | building a small-scale version of this.

01:07:40.860 | So I think the two problems

01:07:42.440 | are gonna kind of feed back on each other.

01:07:44.420 | - Well, there's also the other possibility of,

01:07:47.340 | like the movie, Darren Aronofsky's "Postcard from Earth,"

01:07:51.340 | where we can create this kind of life gun

01:07:53.860 | that just shoots, as opposed to engineering everything,

01:07:58.860 | basically seeding life on a bunch of places

01:08:02.100 | and letting life do its thing,

01:08:03.800 | which is really good at doing, it seems like.

01:08:06.700 | So as opposed to, like, with a space habitat,

01:08:08.900 | you basically have to build the entire

01:08:11.220 | biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing,

01:08:13.580 | by yourself. - The whole thing, yeah.

01:08:15.500 | - You know, if you just, hey,

01:08:17.540 | the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria,

01:08:20.340 | place it in Europa,

01:08:22.900 | I think you'd be surprised what happens.

01:08:24.860 | - Yeah, yeah. - Right?

01:08:25.700 | Like, honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria,

01:08:29.180 | like, a giant number of organisms from Earth

01:08:33.260 | on Mars, on some of these moons

01:08:39.140 | of the other planets in the solar system,

01:08:41.380 | do you think, like, I feel like some of them

01:08:43.140 | would actually find a way to survive.

01:08:45.300 | - I, you know, the moon is hard,

01:08:46.340 | 'cause the moon is just like, there's no, you know,

01:08:47.940 | the moon may be really hard.

01:08:49.700 | But, you know, that'd be, I mean,

01:08:50.580 | I wonder if somebody must've done these experiments, right?

01:08:52.420 | Like, how, 'cause we know they're extremophiles, right?

01:08:54.540 | We know that they're, you can go down, you know,

01:08:56.900 | 10 miles below the Earth's surface,

01:08:58.780 | and there are things where there's no sunlight,

01:09:01.100 | there's, you know, the conditions are so extreme,

01:09:03.660 | and there's lots of microbes having a great time,

01:09:06.740 | living off the radioactivity, you know, in the rocks.

01:09:09.540 | But, you know, they had lots of time

01:09:11.700 | to evolve to those conditions.

01:09:13.220 | So I'm not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria,

01:09:16.780 | you know, so somebody, like,

01:09:17.700 | somebody must've done these experiments.

01:09:19.020 | Like, you know, how fast could microbial evolution occur

01:09:24.020 | in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody

01:09:28.660 | who figures out, okay, I can deal with this.

01:09:30.940 | I think the moon's too much, 'cause it's so sterile.

01:09:32.940 | But, you know, Mars, I don't know, maybe.

01:09:35.380 | I don't know.

01:09:36.220 | We'd have to, but it's an interesting idea.

01:09:37.700 | - I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.

01:09:39.660 | - Yeah, I mean, you'd think somebody would.

01:09:40.900 | Like, let's take a bunch of microbes.

01:09:42.420 | - The harsh, take the harshest possible condition

01:09:44.860 | of all different kinds, temperature,

01:09:46.140 | all this kind of stuff. - Right, right.

01:09:46.980 | Pressure, salinity, and then just, like,

01:09:49.220 | dump a bunch of things that are not used to it,

01:09:51.780 | and then just see, does everybody just die?

01:09:53.980 | You know, that's it, there's, you know.

01:09:55.100 | The thing about life, it flourishes

01:09:58.220 | in a non-sterile environment where there's a bunch

01:09:59.940 | of options for resources, even if the condition

01:10:02.580 | is super harsh.

01:10:03.700 | In the lab, I don't know if you can reconstruct

01:10:06.640 | harsh conditions plus options for survival.

01:10:09.940 | You know what I mean? - Yeah, yeah.

01:10:11.420 | - Like, you have to have the huge variety of resources

01:10:16.300 | that are always available on a planet somehow,

01:10:19.300 | even when it's a super harsh condition.

01:10:20.820 | So that's actually not a trivial experiment.

01:10:24.100 | And I wouldn't even, if somebody did that experiment

01:10:26.220 | in a lab, I'd be a little bit skeptical.

01:10:28.540 | 'Cause I could see bacteria doesn't survive

01:10:32.100 | in this kinds of temperature.

01:10:34.220 | But then I'd be like, I don't know, I don't know.

01:10:36.220 | - Is there enough, right, are there other options?

01:10:39.540 | Like, you know, is the condition rich enough?

01:10:41.580 | - Rich enough, yeah.

01:10:42.540 | - You know, there's an alternative view, though,

01:10:44.140 | which is there's this great book

01:10:46.340 | by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora.

01:10:48.180 | You know, so there's been a million century ship stories,

01:10:51.500 | like where Earth sends out a generation ship

01:10:54.220 | or century ship, and it goes to another planet,

01:10:56.340 | and they land, and they colonize.

01:10:58.060 | And on this one, they get all the way there,

01:10:59.700 | and they think the planet's gonna be habitable.

01:11:01.700 | And it turns out that it's not habitable for Earth life.

01:11:04.360 | Like, there's bacteria, or prions, actually,

01:11:08.220 | that just kill people in the simplest way.

01:11:12.100 | And the important thing about this book

01:11:14.180 | was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet.

01:11:18.020 | It may not be so easy.

01:11:19.220 | I just thought this was a really interesting idea.

01:11:20.620 | I'm not saying I'm necessarily supporting it,

01:11:21.980 | but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions.

01:11:26.500 | Not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage,

01:11:29.220 | the whole history of the biosphere.

01:11:31.020 | And it may not be so easy to just sort of be like,

01:11:33.840 | oh, just drop it over here, and it'll, you know.

01:11:35.780 | 'Cause the bacteria, even though they're

01:11:37.380 | individual examples of life, and I kind of believe this,

01:11:40.260 | the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell,

01:11:43.820 | it's the biosphere, it's the whole community, yeah.

01:11:47.900 | - That's actually an interesting field of study,

01:11:49.980 | is how, when you arrive from one planet to another,

01:11:53.180 | so we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere,

01:11:56.420 | maybe a technosphere, what is the way

01:12:00.000 | to integrate without killing yourself or--

01:12:05.000 | - Or the other one.

01:12:06.860 | - Or the other one.

01:12:08.140 | Let's stick to biology, that's an interesting question.

01:12:11.260 | I don't know if we have a rigorous way

01:12:15.940 | of investigating that.

01:12:18.340 | Because everything on life has the same lineage.

01:12:21.300 | We all come from Luca, the last universal common ancestor.

01:12:24.420 | And what you see is often in science fiction,

01:12:25.740 | people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay,

01:12:27.740 | because that metabolism, that biochemistry

01:12:32.220 | is so different from ours that we can coexist

01:12:34.140 | because they don't even know each other, right?

01:12:37.200 | And then the other version is, you get there,

01:12:38.640 | you land, and instantly, the nose bleeds, and you're dead.

01:12:41.640 | (laughing)

01:12:43.180 | - Unfortunately, I think it's the latter.

01:12:44.860 | - Yeah, it sort of feels like an alien kind of thing.

01:12:48.300 | - So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations

01:12:52.300 | we just discussed, it seems impossible to me

01:12:54.700 | that there's not civilizations everywhere.

01:12:56.780 | So how do we look at them, this process of SETI?

01:12:59.620 | - I have to put on my scientist hat and just say,

01:13:01.980 | my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common.

01:13:05.180 | I am a little agnostic about, I can see ways

01:13:07.660 | in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse.

01:13:10.740 | But until you know, we gotta go look.

01:13:12.360 | It's all armchair astronomy.

01:13:15.900 | - That's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective.

01:13:17.980 | From my bro-science perspective, it seems, again,

01:13:20.940 | smoking the aforementioned weed, it's--

01:13:24.420 | - After the bong hit, it seems so.

01:13:25.540 | - I mean, honestly, it's really just seems impossible

01:13:29.740 | to me that there's not potentially dead,

01:13:33.660 | but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.

01:13:36.660 | - Yeah, yeah, the potentially dead part, I think, right.

01:13:38.660 | It could be that making civilizations is easy,

01:13:41.500 | they just don't last long.

01:13:42.540 | So when we went out there,

01:13:43.660 | we'd find a lot of extinct civilizations.

01:13:45.620 | - Extinct civilizations.

01:13:47.580 | - Yeah, apex predators don't survive.

01:13:49.460 | Like, they get better, better, better, better,

01:13:51.260 | and they die, kill themselves off somehow.

01:13:54.280 | Anyway, so just how do we find them?

01:13:56.780 | - Yeah, so SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Technology,

01:14:00.020 | is a term that I am not fond of using anymore.

01:14:04.060 | I mean, some people in my field are, so I'm sorry, folks.

01:14:07.300 | But I'm really, what I really like is the idea

01:14:09.660 | of technosignatures, 'cause I think, you know,

01:14:12.100 | to me, SETI is the, first of all, intelligence.

01:14:14.460 | We're not really looking for intelligence,

01:14:15.580 | we're looking for technology.

01:14:16.700 | I mean, you know.

01:14:17.540 | And SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes,

01:14:21.700 | you know, and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones.

01:14:24.540 | That whole thing is still part, it's still active,

01:14:27.060 | there's still great things going on with it,

01:14:28.420 | but suddenly this whole new window opened up.

01:14:30.740 | When we discovered exoplanets,

01:14:32.700 | we now found a new way to look

01:14:35.700 | for intelligent civilizations, or life in general,

01:14:39.180 | in a way that doesn't have any of the assumptions

01:14:41.460 | that had to go into the classic radio SETI.

01:14:43.780 | And specifically what I mean is,

01:14:45.660 | we're not looking for somebody sending us a beacon.

01:14:47.820 | You really needed that with the classic model,

01:14:51.020 | for a bunch of different reasons.

01:14:52.500 | You had to assume they wanted to be found

01:14:54.340 | and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.

01:14:56.500 | Now, because we know exactly where to look,

01:14:59.740 | and we know exactly how to look,

01:15:01.740 | we can just go about looking for passive signatures

01:15:05.420 | of the civilization,

01:15:06.740 | going about its civilization-ing business, you know,

01:15:10.260 | without asking whether they want to be contacted or not.

01:15:12.940 | So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature.

01:15:16.820 | It is an imprint in the light from the planet

01:15:20.860 | of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere.

01:15:23.380 | And that's really important.

01:15:24.220 | You know, that is why kind of the whole Gaia idea

01:15:26.900 | ends up being astrobiological,

01:15:28.780 | that biospheres and technospheres are so potent,

01:15:32.580 | they change the entire planet.

01:15:34.700 | And you can see that from 20 light years.

01:15:36.740 | So let's give an example of a biosignature to start off with,

01:15:39.580 | which would be a signature of a biosphere.

01:15:42.380 | Oxygen, right?

01:15:43.860 | On Earth, at least, we know that oxygen

01:15:46.140 | is only in the atmosphere because life put it there.

01:15:49.220 | If life went away, the oxygen,

01:15:51.460 | and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair,

01:15:53.860 | they would disappear, you know, very quickly.

01:15:56.140 | They'd react away, they'd all be gone.

01:15:58.180 | So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane,

01:16:01.660 | that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there.

01:16:05.620 | Okay, what about technospheres?

01:16:07.340 | Technospheres, this is what, you know,

01:16:09.060 | so I'm the principal investigator on the first grant

01:16:11.820 | NASA has ever given

01:16:13.340 | to do these kind of exoplanet technosignatures.

01:16:16.620 | NASA was kind of, for reasons we can talk about,

01:16:18.740 | NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy

01:16:20.620 | about funding anything about intelligent life.

01:16:23.140 | But okay, what's an example of a technosignature?

01:16:25.700 | Well, one could be atmospheric pollution.

01:16:27.980 | I'm gonna put pollution in quotes here

01:16:29.740 | 'cause it doesn't have to be pollution,

01:16:30.900 | but gases like chlorofluorocarbons.

01:16:33.140 | So we've dumped, you know,

01:16:34.500 | we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons

01:16:36.740 | into the atmosphere by mistake.

01:16:38.820 | It was affecting the ozone,

01:16:40.260 | but we put so much in there that actually,

01:16:42.300 | this is one of the things we did,

01:16:43.140 | we did a paper where we showed

01:16:44.500 | you could detect it across interstellar distances.

01:16:47.220 | You could look at the atmosphere,

01:16:49.380 | look at the light coming from a distant planet,

01:16:51.860 | pass the light through a spectrograph

01:16:53.540 | and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint,

01:16:56.300 | the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons

01:16:59.780 | in an atmosphere.

01:17:00.780 | And that would for sure tell you

01:17:02.940 | that there was a technological civilization there

01:17:05.480 | because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons

01:17:08.480 | except through some kind of industrial process.

01:17:11.580 | - So you're looking for, in the case of the biosphere,

01:17:13.500 | you're looking for anomalies in the spectrograph.

01:17:17.860 | - I wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies.

01:17:19.540 | I'm looking for things that, for biosignature,

01:17:22.460 | I'm looking for things that a geosphere, right,

01:17:24.980 | you know, that just rock and air wouldn't produce

01:17:27.680 | on its own.

01:17:28.520 | - What kind of chemicals would life produce?

01:17:29.900 | - Right, and that's part of the,

01:17:31.340 | that's the interesting thing, right?

01:17:32.820 | So that's what, you know,

01:17:33.660 | so we can use Earth as an example, right?

01:17:35.260 | We can say, look, oxygen,

01:17:36.340 | we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere

01:17:38.560 | if it wasn't for dimethyl sulfide,

01:17:40.440 | which is a compound that phyloplankton

01:17:43.400 | dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it.

01:17:44.800 | That's sometimes mentioned.

01:17:46.160 | And there was even,

01:17:47.000 | there was a paper that somebody wrote

01:17:48.320 | where it was like, well, we're not saying we see it,

01:17:50.720 | but, you know, there's a bunch of noise

01:17:52.600 | in the spectra right there.

01:17:54.760 | So, you know, there's a whole list of things

01:17:57.280 | that Earth has done that are in the atmosphere

01:17:59.580 | that might be biosignatures.

01:18:00.840 | But now we're reaching an interesting point.

01:18:02.800 | The field has matured to the point

01:18:04.220 | where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures,

01:18:07.840 | things that have nothing to do with Earth's history.

01:18:11.180 | But we think that that would still be indications

01:18:14.200 | of this weirdness we call life, right?

01:18:16.840 | What is it in general that life does

01:18:19.840 | that leaves an imprint?

01:18:20.920 | So one of these things could be the structure

01:18:23.180 | of the network of chemical reactions,

01:18:25.880 | that biology always produces very different

01:18:28.280 | chemical networks, who's reacting with who,

01:18:30.320 | than just rock and water, right?

01:18:32.740 | So there's been some proposals for networked,

01:18:36.760 | you know, biosignatures.

01:18:39.400 | Information theory, you can use,

01:18:41.000 | you can try and look at the information

01:18:42.400 | that is in the different compounds

01:18:45.900 | that you find in the atmosphere.

01:18:48.120 | And maybe that information shows you like,

01:18:50.120 | oh, there's too much information here,

01:18:51.600 | there must've been biology happening, it's not just rock.

01:18:54.120 | Same thing for techno,

01:18:55.080 | that's what we're working on right now,

01:18:56.520 | that for technosignatures as well.

01:18:58.680 | - So how do you detect technosignatures?

01:19:01.800 | - Okay, so with technosignatures,

01:19:03.100 | I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons,

01:19:04.780 | so that would be an example of,

01:19:06.100 | and again, that one is a non-agnostic one,

01:19:08.240 | because we sort of like,

01:19:09.080 | oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons,

01:19:10.980 | maybe they will, right?

01:19:12.260 | And there's solar panels, right?

01:19:13.980 | You can actually, the glint off of solar panels

01:19:17.320 | will produce the way the light is reflected

01:19:19.860 | off of solar panels,

01:19:21.260 | no matter what it's made out of, actually.

01:19:23.340 | There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam

01:19:25.620 | and Avi Loeb did in, I think it was 2017,

01:19:28.620 | we've just followed up on it.

01:19:29.900 | That actually could act as a technosignature.

01:19:32.200 | You'd be able to see in the reflected light,

01:19:34.240 | this sort of big jump that would occur

01:19:36.320 | because of city lights, artificial illumination.

01:19:40.840 | If there's really like large scale cities,

01:19:44.380 | like Coruscant in Star Wars or Trent or in the foundation,

01:19:48.520 | those city lights would be detectable,

01:19:51.280 | the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years.

01:19:55.320 | So our job in this grant is to develop

01:19:57.760 | the first ever library of technosignatures.

01:20:00.760 | Nobody's really ever thought about this before.

01:20:03.040 | So we're trying to come up with all the possible ideas

01:20:07.000 | for what a civilization might produce

01:20:09.200 | that could be visible across interstellar distances.

01:20:13.560 | And are these good ones,

01:20:15.480 | or is these ones gonna be hard to detect or such?

01:20:17.280 | - City lights.

01:20:18.360 | So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light

01:20:22.100 | across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.

01:20:25.080 | - Yeah, if you looked at earth at night

01:20:26.720 | from a distance where, looked at its spectra

01:20:29.480 | and you had sensitive enough instruments,

01:20:31.880 | you'd be able to see all the sodium lights

01:20:33.200 | and the reflected light off of,

01:20:34.680 | they bounce off the ground, right?

01:20:37.160 | That the light bounces off the ground.

01:20:38.360 | So you'd convolve the sodium lamps

01:20:41.680 | with the reflected spectra from the ground.

01:20:43.880 | And yeah, you'd be able to see that there's city lights.

01:20:45.880 | Now increase that by a factor of a thousand,

01:20:48.960 | if you had a Trantor and you'd be able to detect that

01:20:52.260 | across interstellar distances.

01:20:53.560 | Thomas Beedick did this work, who's now working with us.

01:20:56.540 | - What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth?

01:21:00.440 | - Well, we just, this is fun.

01:21:02.720 | We just have a Sophia Schiff,

01:21:04.320 | just who's part of our collaboration, just did a paper.

01:21:06.000 | We did earth from earth.

01:21:07.160 | If you were looking at earth with earth technology

01:21:10.880 | for a bunch of different technosignatures,

01:21:12.800 | how close would you have to be to be able to detect them?

01:21:15.600 | And most of them turn out to be,

01:21:17.000 | you'd have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud.

01:21:19.220 | But actually it is our radio signatures still,

01:21:21.760 | that is still most detectable.

01:21:23.400 | - By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close

01:21:25.040 | and then you said the Oort cloud,

01:21:26.320 | that's not very close.

01:21:27.180 | But you mean like from an interstellar distance?

01:21:29.100 | - Interstellar distance.

01:21:29.940 | 'Cause the real, we really wanna know is like,

01:21:31.660 | I'm sitting here on earth,

01:21:32.500 | I'm looking at these exoplanets.

01:21:34.360 | The nearest star is four light years away.

01:21:36.540 | So that's like the minimum distance.

01:21:38.840 | So what can, if I'm looking at exoplanets,

01:21:42.160 | what kind of signals could I see?

01:21:44.100 | - What is detectable about earth

01:21:46.380 | with our current technology from our nearest solar system?

01:21:49.740 | - Oh my God, there's all kinds of stuff.

01:21:51.020 | Well, like our, the chlorofluorocarbons,

01:21:54.380 | you can see, you know, you can see earth's pollution.

01:21:55.960 | And you know, I think city lights,

01:21:57.800 | you had to be within, you know, within the solar system.

01:22:01.680 | - If they do direct imaging of earth.

01:22:04.120 | - They're gonna need much more powerful.

01:22:06.040 | But let me tell you what things,

01:22:06.880 | let's talk about direct imaging for a moment,

01:22:08.720 | 'cause I just have to go on.

01:22:09.560 | This is such a cool idea, right?

01:22:10.720 | So what we really want,

01:22:11.800 | and the next generation of space telescopes and such,

01:22:14.760 | is we're trying to do direct imaging.

01:22:16.200 | We're trying to get, you know,

01:22:17.960 | an image of a planet separated from its star

01:22:20.840 | to be able to see the reflected light

01:22:22.480 | or the actual emission from the planet itself.

01:22:24.540 | - Yeah, by the way, just to clarify,

01:22:26.580 | direct imaging means literally like a picture.

01:22:29.100 | - A picture.

01:22:29.940 | But the problem is, is that with the,

01:22:31.300 | even with the thing that's gonna come after JWST,

01:22:35.300 | it's gonna be a pixel, right?

01:22:36.560 | You're not gonna get any kind of resolution.

01:22:38.060 | You'll be able to get the light from it,

01:22:39.340 | which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph,

01:22:40.860 | but you're not gonna be able to take a picture.

01:22:42.520 | But there is this idea

01:22:43.940 | called the Solar Gravity Lens Telescope.

01:22:46.740 | I think that's what it is.

01:22:47.700 | And the idea is insane, right?

01:22:49.500 | So their general relativity says,

01:22:50.820 | look, massive bodies distort space.

01:22:52.700 | They actually curve space-time.

01:22:55.020 | So the sun is a massive body.

01:22:57.940 | And so that means that the light passing through the sun

01:23:00.060 | gets focused like a lens, right?

01:23:03.300 | So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes

01:23:05.900 | out kind of into the Oort cloud

01:23:08.060 | and then look back towards the sun,

01:23:10.460 | towards an exoplanet that is behind,

01:23:12.740 | not directly behind the sun,

01:23:13.940 | but is, you know, in the direction of the sun.

01:23:16.140 | And then let the sun act like a lens

01:23:18.720 | and collect, focus the light onto the telescope.

01:23:22.540 | And you would be able to get,

01:23:23.740 | and they've done, it's amazing.

01:23:25.340 | Like they've already, this idea is insane.

01:23:27.240 | They'd be able to get, if everything works out,

01:23:29.380 | 24 kilometer resolution.

01:23:32.020 | You'd be able to see Manhattan on a exoplanet.

01:23:35.460 | And this thing, it sounds insane,

01:23:37.220 | but actually, you know, NASA, they've already got,

01:23:39.060 | the team has already gotten through

01:23:40.180 | like sort of three levels of NASA.

01:23:42.700 | You know, there's the NASA program for like,

01:23:44.700 | give us your wackiest idea, right?

01:23:46.540 | And then the ones that survive that are like, okay,

01:23:48.840 | tell us whether that wacky idea, you know, is even feasible.

01:23:51.640 | And then, and they're marching along.

01:23:53.080 | And the idea is that like, you know,

01:23:55.600 | and they even have plans for how you'd be able

01:23:56.920 | to get these probes out into the Oort cloud

01:23:59.800 | on relatively fast timescales.

01:24:01.760 | You need to be about 500 times

01:24:04.080 | as far from the sun as Earth is.

01:24:07.200 | But right now everything looks like,

01:24:08.920 | the idea seems to hold together.

01:24:10.240 | So probably when I'll be dead,

01:24:12.620 | but when you're an old man,

01:24:14.680 | it's possible that something like this

01:24:16.480 | could you imagine having like, yeah,

01:24:18.520 | that kind of resolution,

01:24:19.360 | a picture of an exoplanet down to, you know, kilometers.

01:24:23.800 | So I'm very excited about that.

01:24:25.800 | - I can only imagine having a picture like that.

01:24:28.760 | And then there's some mysterious artifacts

01:24:32.480 | that you're seeing.

01:24:33.720 | - Yeah.

01:24:34.560 | - I mean, it's both inspiring and almost heartbreaking

01:24:39.560 | that we can see, like,

01:24:41.220 | I think we'll be able to see a civilization

01:24:44.960 | where there's like a lot of scientists agree

01:24:46.760 | that this is very likely something,

01:24:48.720 | and then we can't.

01:24:49.680 | - We can't get there.

01:24:50.800 | But you know, I mean, again,

01:24:51.720 | this is the thing about being long lived.

01:24:53.320 | We've got to get to the point where we're long lived enough

01:24:56.400 | that, so let's say we found like,

01:24:57.720 | this is what I always like to,

01:24:58.560 | let's imagine that we find say 10 light years away,

01:25:01.800 | we find a planet that looks like

01:25:03.820 | it's got techno signatures, right?

01:25:05.460 | It doesn't end there.

01:25:06.300 | Like that would be the most important discovery

01:25:08.160 | in the history of humanity.

01:25:09.440 | And it wouldn't be like, well, okay, we're done.

01:25:11.240 | The first thing we do is we big,

01:25:12.840 | bigger telescope to try and do those imaging, right?

01:25:15.320 | And then the next thing after that,

01:25:16.360 | we plan a mission there, right?

01:25:17.820 | There's there, we would figure out,

01:25:20.120 | like with breakthrough star shot,

01:25:23.640 | there was this idea of trying to use, you know,

01:25:25.680 | giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails,

01:25:30.180 | almost to the speed of light.

01:25:31.500 | So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures.

01:25:33.920 | And so we'll, you know,

01:25:34.880 | if we actually made this discovery,

01:25:36.240 | there would be the impulse,

01:25:37.680 | there would be the effort to actually try

01:25:40.120 | and send something to get there.

01:25:42.360 | Now, you know, we probably couldn't land, we could,

01:25:44.680 | but you know, so maybe we take 30 years to build,

01:25:48.860 | 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back.

01:25:52.280 | Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, you know what I mean?

01:25:54.520 | So it becomes now this multi-generational project.

01:25:57.080 | How long did it take to build the pyramids?

01:25:58.560 | How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals, right?

01:26:01.360 | Those were multi-generational projects.

01:26:03.720 | And I think we're on the cusp of that kind of project.

01:26:07.240 | - I think that would probably unite humans.

01:26:09.440 | - I think it would play a big role.

01:26:11.000 | I think it would be helpful.

01:26:11.840 | I mean, human beings are a mess, let's face it.

01:26:13.560 | But I think having that record,

01:26:15.320 | that's why I always say to people,

01:26:17.080 | discovery of life of any kind of life,

01:26:18.600 | even if it was microbial life, it wouldn't matter,

01:26:20.760 | that to know that we're not an accident,

01:26:22.560 | to know that there is probably,

01:26:24.240 | if we found one example of life,

01:26:25.720 | we'd know that we're not an accident

01:26:26.920 | and there's probably lots of life

01:26:28.480 | and that we're a community.

01:26:29.560 | We're part of a cosmic kind of community of life.

01:26:32.400 | And who knows what life has done, right?

01:26:34.920 | We don't really, all bets are off with life.

01:26:36.960 | - Since we're talking about the future of telescopes,

01:26:39.800 | let's talk about our current super-sexy awesome telescope,

01:26:43.000 | the James Webb Space Telescope

01:26:44.600 | that I still can't believe actually worked.

01:26:46.240 | - I can't believe it worked.

01:26:47.080 | I was really skeptical.

01:26:48.760 | I was like, okay, guys, all right, sure.

01:26:51.800 | - We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated

01:26:55.240 | piece of hardware to unfold.

01:26:57.720 | So what kind of stuff can we see with it?

01:26:59.400 | I've been just looking through different kinds

01:27:02.560 | of announcements that have been detected.

01:27:04.040 | There's been some direct imaging.

01:27:06.000 | - Yes, like a single pixel.

01:27:07.640 | - The kinds of exoplanets we're able to direct image,

01:27:10.840 | I guess would have to be hot.

01:27:13.200 | - Hot, usually far away from the,

01:27:15.520 | reasonably far away from the star.

01:27:16.880 | I think JWST is really kind of at the hairy edge

01:27:19.040 | of being able to do much with this.

01:27:20.440 | What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra.

01:27:23.760 | And the problem with spectra is that

01:27:24.800 | there's not sexy pictures.

01:27:25.920 | It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line.

01:27:27.880 | But be able to find and characterize atmospheres

01:27:31.600 | around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step.

01:27:36.560 | That's where we are right now.

01:27:37.880 | In order to look for life, we're gonna be,

01:27:39.840 | we need to find planets with atmospheres, right?

01:27:42.760 | And then we need to be able to do this thing

01:27:44.000 | called characterization, where we look

01:27:45.920 | at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere.

01:27:48.880 | Is there carbon?

01:27:49.720 | Is there carbon dioxide?

01:27:50.560 | Is there oxygen?

01:27:51.380 | Is there methane?

01:27:52.440 | And that's the most exciting thing.

01:27:54.760 | For example, there was this planet K2-18b,

01:27:57.320 | which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra.

01:28:00.760 | And the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind

01:28:03.760 | of habitable world called a hycene world.

01:28:06.760 | Hycene meaning hydrogen ocean world.

01:28:10.160 | And that is a kind of planet that it would be a,

01:28:13.280 | you know, kind of in the super-Earth sub-Neptune domain

01:28:15.960 | we were talking about.

01:28:16.800 | You know, maybe eight times that mass of the Earth.

01:28:19.260 | But it's got a layer of hydrogen,

01:28:20.880 | of an atmosphere of hydrogen.

01:28:22.640 | Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas.

01:28:25.720 | So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it

01:28:29.240 | warm enough that you could get liquid water.

01:28:31.280 | You can get a giant ocean of liquid water.

01:28:35.440 | And that's an entirely different kind of planet

01:28:37.840 | that could be habitable planet.

01:28:38.840 | You know, it could be a 60 degree warm ocean.

01:28:41.820 | So the data that came out of JWST for that planet

01:28:46.280 | was good enough to be able to indicate like,

01:28:48.600 | oh yeah, you know what?

01:28:49.520 | The models, from what we understand about the models,

01:28:51.420 | this looks like it could be a hycene world.

01:28:54.320 | - And it's 120 light years away from Earth.

01:28:57.280 | - Yeah, and so isn't that amazing?

01:28:58.760 | You can, it's 120 light years away,

01:29:00.560 | but we can see into the atmosphere.

01:29:02.320 | We can see into the atmosphere so well

01:29:03.720 | that we can be like, oh look, methane.

01:29:06.080 | Methane was a five sigma detection.

01:29:08.480 | Like you knew that the data were so good

01:29:10.560 | that it was like the gold standard of science.

01:29:13.840 | - What about detecting, maybe through direct imaging

01:29:17.960 | or in other ways, megastructures

01:29:21.360 | that the civilizations build?

01:29:24.000 | - You know what's great about megastructures

01:29:25.280 | is first of all, it's fun to say.

01:29:26.600 | Who doesn't wanna say megastructure?

01:29:27.880 | Alien megastructure, right?

01:29:29.460 | Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that.

01:29:32.440 | So the ur-example of this is the Dyson sphere, right?

01:29:36.240 | Which is amazing 'cause it was literally 1960

01:29:38.520 | that this idea came up.

01:29:39.680 | - Can you explain the Dyson sphere?

01:29:40.640 | - Yeah, the Dyson sphere.

01:29:41.480 | So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever,

01:29:44.880 | who was very broad-minded

01:29:46.360 | and thought about a lot of different things.

01:29:47.440 | He recognized that when a civilization,

01:29:50.240 | as civilizations progress,

01:29:51.640 | what they're gonna need is ever more energy

01:29:53.480 | to do ever more amazing things.

01:29:56.680 | And what's the best energy source in a solar system?

01:29:58.920 | It's the star, right?

01:30:00.680 | So if you surrounded the star with solar-collecting machines,

01:30:05.280 | sunlight-collecting machines,

01:30:07.640 | and the limit of this would be if you actually build a sphere

01:30:10.400 | an actual sphere around your star

01:30:12.280 | that had all solar panels on the inside,

01:30:14.000 | you could capture every photon the star produced,

01:30:16.980 | which is this insane amount of light.

01:30:19.240 | You would have enough power now to do anything,

01:30:21.680 | to re-engineer your solar system.

01:30:24.080 | So that was a Dyson sphere.

01:30:25.080 | It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn't really work

01:30:27.040 | 'cause it's unstable.

01:30:28.440 | But a Dyson swarm, and that's really what he meant,

01:30:31.640 | you know, this large collection of large orbiting structures

01:30:35.980 | that were able to collect light.

01:30:37.720 | - Yeah, so he didn't actually mean a rigid sphere structure.

01:30:42.520 | He basically meant a swarm.

01:30:44.080 | So that, like you said,

01:30:45.960 | and then the limit basically starts to look--

01:30:48.080 | - People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere.

01:30:50.120 | And we actually almost thought

01:30:51.240 | we might've found one of these back with a Bajoran star.

01:30:55.960 | We saw, you know, the way we detect planets

01:30:57.800 | is through the transit method

01:30:59.000 | where the planet passes in front of the star

01:31:01.160 | and there's a dip in the starlight.

01:31:02.360 | It's a little eclipse basically.

01:31:03.960 | And we know exactly what they should look like.

01:31:05.720 | And then with this one star,

01:31:06.960 | there were these really weird transits

01:31:09.440 | where it was like this little dragon's tooth

01:31:11.760 | and then there'd be another one and another one

01:31:13.440 | and another one and then nothing and then three more.

01:31:15.720 | And in the paper that was written about this,

01:31:18.600 | they suggested, you know, they went through the list of,

01:31:20.600 | it could be comets, could be chunks of a broken up planet,

01:31:23.520 | and it could also be an alien megastructure.

01:31:25.760 | And of course the news picked up on this

01:31:27.280 | and like everybody's newsfeed the next day,

01:31:29.520 | alien megastructures discovered.

01:31:31.360 | Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures.

01:31:34.360 | They were probably gas or dust clouds.

01:31:37.080 | But it raised the possibility like,

01:31:38.520 | oh, these are observable.

01:31:39.560 | And people have worked out the details

01:31:41.800 | of what they would look like.

01:31:43.280 | You don't really need direct imaging.

01:31:44.480 | You can do transits, right?

01:31:45.480 | They're big enough that when they pass in front of the star,

01:31:47.440 | they're gonna produce a little blip of light

01:31:49.300 | 'cause that's what they're supposed to, right?

01:31:50.320 | They're absorbing starlight.

01:31:51.780 | So people have worked out like,

01:31:53.560 | well, a square one or a triangular one.

01:31:55.840 | - But that wouldn't be a Dyson sphere.

01:31:57.160 | That would be like one object.

01:31:58.480 | - One object, right.

01:31:59.320 | Which is what, if it's a swarm,

01:32:00.600 | you'd expect like the light to be like blinking in and out

01:32:02.920 | as these things pass in front of.

01:32:04.800 | You know, if you've got thousands of these,

01:32:06.960 | much of the time they'll be blotting out the star.

01:32:09.200 | Sometimes they won't be, right?

01:32:10.520 | And so you're gonna get an irregular sort of signal,

01:32:14.360 | transit signal.

01:32:15.320 | - Yeah, one you wouldn't expect from a star

01:32:17.200 | that doesn't have anything.

01:32:18.200 | - Exactly, or just a planet, right?

01:32:20.220 | Or a couple of planets.

01:32:21.120 | There'd be so many of these that it would be like,

01:32:22.520 | beep, beep, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.

01:32:24.760 | - And that usually doesn't happen in a star system

01:32:29.160 | because there's only just a handful of planets.

01:32:31.840 | - That's exactly what it is.

01:32:32.680 | Everything's coagulated.

01:32:33.520 | In a stable solar system, you got a handful of planets,

01:32:36.080 | you know, five, 10, that's it probably, and nothing else.

01:32:39.660 | So if now suddenly you see lots of these

01:32:42.000 | little micro transits,

01:32:43.640 | you're telling you there's something else

01:32:45.040 | that's big enough to create a transit,

01:32:47.180 | but you know, too many of them.

01:32:49.360 | And also within a regular shape, the transit itself,

01:32:52.240 | that these could be megastructures.

01:32:54.400 | - How many people are looking for megastructures now?

01:32:58.160 | - Well, the main groups looking for megastructures

01:33:01.880 | are again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators.

01:33:05.760 | The way they're looking for it though

01:33:06.840 | is for infrared light.

01:33:07.960 | Because, you know, the second law of thermodynamics says,

01:33:10.280 | look, if you capture all of this starlight,

01:33:13.140 | you're gonna warm up the, you know,

01:33:15.280 | your thing's gonna warm up and emit an infrared.

01:33:17.760 | It's gonna be waste heat, waste heat and waste light

01:33:21.240 | from this.

01:33:22.080 | - It feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.

01:33:25.360 | - Right, and that's actually, you know, Dyson,

01:33:26.720 | that's actually why Dyson proposed it.

01:33:28.040 | He wasn't really proposing it because like he was saying,

01:33:30.520 | this is what civilizations are gonna do.

01:33:32.320 | He proposed it 'cause he was like,

01:33:33.460 | oh, we wanna start looking for alien civilizations.

01:33:36.160 | Here's something that would have a detectable signature.

01:33:39.940 | So Jason and company have done, you know,

01:33:42.780 | pretty good searches.

01:33:43.840 | And recently they made news because, you know,

01:33:46.760 | they were able to eliminate a lot of places.

01:33:48.680 | No, these are not Dyson spheres,

01:33:49.720 | but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough

01:33:51.900 | that they're like, well,

01:33:53.320 | this is kind of what it would look like.

01:33:54.660 | It's not a detection.

01:33:55.600 | And they were saying,

01:33:56.440 | they would never say it's a detection,

01:33:57.560 | but they were like, they were not non-detections.

01:34:00.160 | - And they're potential candidates.

01:34:01.440 | - Potential candidates, yeah.

01:34:02.680 | - Love it, we have megastructure candidates.

01:34:05.040 | That's inspiring.

01:34:06.360 | What other megastructures do you think that could be?

01:34:08.760 | I mean, so that's Dyson spheres

01:34:10.520 | about capturing the energy of a star.

01:34:12.400 | - Yeah.

01:34:13.240 | - But there could be other--

01:34:14.360 | - Well, there's something called the Clark Belt, right?

01:34:17.300 | So we have a bunch of satellites

01:34:18.800 | that are in geosynchronous orbit.

01:34:20.640 | Nothing naturally is gonna end up

01:34:22.360 | in geosynchronous orbit, right?

01:34:23.700 | Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit

01:34:25.420 | that's really useful

01:34:26.260 | if you wanna beam things straight down

01:34:27.780 | or if you wanna put a space elevator up, right?

01:34:30.980 | So there's this idea that if a civilization

01:34:34.340 | becomes advanced enough

01:34:36.740 | that it's really using geosynchronous orbit,

01:34:38.940 | that you actually get a belt,

01:34:39.960 | something that would actually be detectable

01:34:42.000 | from a distance via a transit.

01:34:44.260 | There's been a couple of papers written

01:34:45.720 | about the possibility of these Clark belts,

01:34:48.620 | densely occupied Clark belts being a megastructure.

01:34:52.420 | It's not as mega as a Dyson swarm,

01:34:54.980 | but it's kind of planetary scale.

01:34:57.100 | - You think it's detectable, Clark belt?

01:34:58.700 | - It could be.

01:34:59.540 | I mean, like in our list of techno signatures,

01:35:01.500 | it would be down there,

01:35:02.700 | but it would be, again,

01:35:03.700 | if you had an advanced enough civilization

01:35:05.480 | that did enough of this,

01:35:07.620 | it would certainly, you'd have a Clark belt,

01:35:09.880 | and the question is whether or not it's detectable.

01:35:11.620 | - Yeah, probably Dyson sphere is the,

01:35:13.420 | that's the more exciting thing too.

01:35:14.260 | - That's the go-to one.

01:35:15.100 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:35:16.060 | Speaking of the Dyson sphere,

01:35:17.380 | let's talk through the Kardashev scale.

01:35:19.060 | - Right.

01:35:19.980 | - What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?

01:35:23.940 | - Right, so the Kardashev scale was the same time,

01:35:26.060 | this is this golden age of SETI,

01:35:27.500 | like kind of like '59 to '65 when it just starts.

01:35:31.660 | Like this is, you know,

01:35:33.460 | Frank Drake has done his first experiment.

01:35:35.940 | People are like, "Oh my God, this is even possible."

01:35:38.540 | And so people are just thrown out these ideas.

01:35:40.480 | And as I, you know, said in the book,

01:35:42.300 | science is conservative.

01:35:43.620 | And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas.

01:35:46.420 | So Kardashev comes up with this idea that,

01:35:48.260 | look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability.

01:35:51.540 | If we're looking for civilizations,

01:35:53.740 | we should think about what are the state,

01:35:55.100 | what are the natural stages, natural in quotes,

01:35:58.060 | that a civilization goes through?

01:35:59.820 | And he was thinking in terms of energy use,

01:36:02.520 | which I like a good physicist.

01:36:04.020 | So the, he said, look, the first hurdle

01:36:09.020 | in terms of energy or threshold

01:36:11.380 | that a civilization will go through

01:36:12.660 | is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet.

01:36:15.980 | He called that a type one civilization.

01:36:18.320 | In whatever way you're doing it,

01:36:19.620 | some large fraction of the starlight

01:36:21.460 | that falls on your planet,

01:36:22.420 | you're using for your own ends.

01:36:24.260 | The next would be to use all the starlight

01:36:26.640 | there is from that star, right?

01:36:29.340 | So that's the Dyson sphere.

01:36:30.540 | So he actually, Dyson had already proposed

01:36:33.340 | his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking up.

01:36:35.780 | So that's a type two civilization.

01:36:37.860 | Type three is galactic scale,

01:36:40.300 | a civilization that could use all the starlight

01:36:42.780 | in a galaxy, right?

01:36:44.220 | So we are now, where are we now?

01:36:45.580 | Remarkably on a log scale, we're at 0.7 of a type one.

01:36:49.020 | - So we're not even type one.

01:36:50.460 | - No, no, no, we're not even type one.

01:36:51.880 | But according to, there was a paper written by a group

01:36:56.700 | that said, you know, if we continue on our path,

01:36:58.860 | we'll be at a type one at around 2300.

01:37:02.000 | - 2300. - Yeah.

01:37:03.180 | - So this is a log scale. - Yeah.

01:37:05.220 | - So 0.7, so type one is about 10 to the 16th watts.

01:37:10.220 | Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that,

01:37:14.660 | 10 to the 26th watts.

01:37:16.140 | And I think estimate for the galaxy

01:37:18.460 | is another 10 orders of magnitude.

01:37:20.300 | - Yeah, 'cause there's 100 billion star of order,

01:37:22.460 | 100 billion stars, yeah.

01:37:24.180 | - So that's a lot. - That's a lot.

01:37:27.360 | - Do you think humans ever get to type one?

01:37:30.300 | - I think, you know, there's a problem with type one,

01:37:32.440 | which is that, you know, we already know about

01:37:34.460 | climate change, right?

01:37:35.300 | The effects of our harvesting energy

01:37:37.780 | to do the work of civilization is already changing

01:37:41.140 | the climate state, right?

01:37:42.380 | And that's something that, you know,

01:37:43.740 | Kardashev couldn't have recognized.

01:37:45.440 | When you, you know, there's the first law

01:37:49.740 | of thermodynamics, right?

01:37:51.280 | Which is just about energy, you know,

01:37:53.060 | the different forms of energy.

01:37:54.060 | Then there's the second law, which is about

01:37:55.700 | when you use that energy.

01:37:57.220 | And Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law.

01:37:59.420 | If you get all that energy and you use it,

01:38:03.140 | there's waste heat.

01:38:04.420 | You don't get to use it all, right?

01:38:05.780 | You can only, second law tells you that if,

01:38:07.740 | you know, I have a tank of gasoline,

01:38:09.620 | I can only use a certain fraction of the energy

01:38:11.860 | in that tank and the rest is going to go

01:38:13.180 | to heating up the engine block.

01:38:15.500 | So that second law tells you that, you know,

01:38:17.660 | you can only use so much energy before the climate state

01:38:21.140 | is like, oh, you know, sorry, is going to change on you.

01:38:25.300 | So there's a way in which we probably can't get

01:38:27.180 | to a type one without like devastating the earth's climate.

01:38:30.780 | So we're probably going to have to figure out,

01:38:33.540 | the most important thing actually here is probably,

01:38:35.060 | this is why space becomes so at the colonization

01:38:36.980 | or settlement of space.

01:38:38.300 | If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while

01:38:40.060 | called service worlds, right?

01:38:42.020 | That at some point you probably move a lot

01:38:44.380 | of your industry off world, right?

01:38:48.900 | We've got Mercury, for example,

01:38:50.580 | there's nothing on Mercury, there's no life on Mercury.

01:38:53.020 | Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right?

01:38:55.540 | Because you can't mess with the biosphere.

01:38:57.580 | The biosphere is more powerful than you are, right?

01:39:00.100 | And so, yeah, so there's limits to how much energy

01:39:04.740 | we can harvest to do work on the earth

01:39:07.940 | without really adversely affecting the biosphere.

01:39:10.660 | - It does seem that the best response to the climate change

01:39:13.780 | is not to use less technology,

01:39:15.340 | but to invent better technology

01:39:17.900 | and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.

01:39:22.900 | - This is the frontier we are.

01:39:26.260 | And that was the topic of my last book,

01:39:27.780 | "Light of the Stars."

01:39:28.620 | It's like you've got, you have to do the astrobiology

01:39:31.660 | of the Anthropocene.

01:39:32.700 | You have to see the transition that we're going through now

01:39:35.060 | of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary

01:39:38.060 | astrobiological framework.

01:39:40.140 | And that paper we were talking about

01:39:41.780 | with the 10 billion trillion worlds,

01:39:43.540 | that was actually in service of the work I was doing

01:39:45.820 | for this other book where I wanted to know

01:39:47.500 | how often do you go through an Anthropocene?

01:39:50.300 | Does every technological civilization

01:39:52.660 | trigger its own planetary crisis,

01:39:55.340 | its own climate Anthropocene crisis?

01:39:57.420 | And the answer we actually came up from doing models

01:39:59.420 | was like, yeah, probably.

01:40:01.060 | And then the question is, are you smart enough

01:40:03.060 | to figure out how to readjust

01:40:04.820 | what you're doing technologically

01:40:06.460 | so that you're not, that all boats rise, right?

01:40:08.780 | You wanna figure out how to do this

01:40:10.060 | so that the biosphere becomes even more productive

01:40:13.100 | and healthy and resilient.

01:40:15.700 | So yeah, right, it's the kind of technology.

01:40:18.820 | I think there's probably absolutely limits

01:40:20.500 | on how much energy you can use,

01:40:22.900 | but how do you use that energy?

01:40:24.500 | And then also, yeah, getting off planet eventually.

01:40:26.780 | If you wanna use 10 times more energy than that,

01:40:30.100 | you're not gonna do it on world.

01:40:33.140 | - So how do we detect alien type one,

01:40:37.180 | two and three civilizations?

01:40:39.020 | So we've been kind of talking about

01:40:41.100 | basically type one civilization detection.

01:40:43.780 | - Yeah, right.

01:40:44.780 | - Maybe with the Dyson Sphere,

01:40:46.140 | you start to get like a little bit more type two,

01:40:49.140 | but it feels like if you have a type two civilization,

01:40:52.260 | it won't be just the Dyson Sphere.

01:40:54.100 | - Right.

01:40:55.340 | - It feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned,

01:40:58.140 | climate change, but now at the star system level,

01:41:02.700 | they're probably expanding, right?

01:41:04.780 | So how would you detect a type two?

01:41:08.060 | - How about propulsion plumes, right?

01:41:10.380 | If you're expanding, no, no, we just,

01:41:12.860 | I literally just put in a NASA proposal now.

01:41:15.980 | Thomas Beattie, who's joined us

01:41:17.220 | from the University of Wisconsin,

01:41:19.260 | has an idea to look for plumes, right?

01:41:22.700 | If you have a solar system wide civilization, right?

01:41:27.500 | And you got space truckers going back and forth, right?

01:41:29.740 | You know, from Mars to, you know,

01:41:31.020 | they're doing the Enceladus run.

01:41:33.260 | They're accelerating and decelerating

01:41:35.540 | the whole way there, right?

01:41:36.420 | If you wanna get to Mars in a couple of weeks,

01:41:38.780 | you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there,

01:41:42.740 | you flip and burn and have it on, you know,

01:41:44.860 | so you're also always have gravity, you have thrust gravity.

01:41:47.860 | So would those plumes be detectable?

01:41:50.780 | 'Cause now you've got spaceships going all over the place

01:41:52.820 | and the odds that like, you know,

01:41:54.100 | the plume is gonna cross your field of view

01:41:56.260 | becomes, could become pretty high.

01:41:58.100 | So yeah, that's, I think that's a good way of looking for,

01:42:01.540 | that's one idea of looking for, you know,

01:42:05.540 | large scale interplanetary,

01:42:08.180 | which is kind of like when you're getting to a type two.

01:42:11.380 | Another possibility is looking for the tailings

01:42:13.500 | of asteroid mining.

01:42:14.700 | This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian

01:42:18.740 | that, you know, to be able to look for,

01:42:20.460 | if you're really chewing up asteroids

01:42:22.260 | to build space habitats, can, you know,

01:42:24.380 | there'd be dust particles left around

01:42:26.340 | and would they look different from just say the dust,

01:42:28.980 | you know, from just regular collisions?

01:42:30.940 | - So pollution of all different kinds.

01:42:32.700 | - Pollution of all different kinds.

01:42:33.700 | - And trash also?

01:42:34.900 | - Okay, so trash is an interesting idea

01:42:36.580 | when you come to the actual solar system, right?

01:42:38.540 | We are actually, there's a whole other field

01:42:41.260 | of technosignatures, which are things in the solar system.

01:42:44.540 | What if somebody came by a billion years ago,

01:42:47.820 | you know, and left some stuff, right?

01:42:50.700 | So the earth has been showing biosignatures

01:42:52.720 | for billions of years.

01:42:53.620 | And, you know, a species like us looking at our level,

01:42:57.220 | looking at earth would have been able to know

01:42:59.060 | that earth had life on it, had a biosphere

01:43:02.300 | for billions of years.

01:43:03.500 | So maybe somebody sent something by, you know,

01:43:06.140 | a half a billion years ago.

01:43:07.740 | So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts

01:43:12.740 | is that have been there for a long time

01:43:14.660 | is something that people, a number of people are doing.

01:43:17.220 | We're just working on a paper where we just calculate,

01:43:19.360 | this was super fun, we calculated how long

01:43:22.620 | would the lunar lander exist on the moon

01:43:25.900 | before micro meteorites just chewed it down, right?

01:43:28.780 | How long would you be able to land on the moon

01:43:30.260 | and go, oh, look, there's, you know,

01:43:32.380 | somebody was here and left some debris.

01:43:34.940 | So there's this process called gardening,

01:43:36.460 | which is just the micro meteorite,

01:43:37.820 | constant rain of micro meteorites, you know.

01:43:40.180 | And that's where you get the lunar regolith,

01:43:42.100 | that fine powder on the moon is because of this gardening.

01:43:45.860 | And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions

01:43:48.900 | to billions of years. - Oh, nice.

01:43:50.580 | - That the, yeah, that the lunar lander will be visible.

01:43:54.780 | - Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.

01:43:57.460 | - Yeah, if there are artifacts on,

01:43:59.300 | and people have proposed doing this

01:44:00.660 | with artificial intelligence.

01:44:02.900 | We have, you know, the moon has been mapped down

01:44:04.780 | to like a couple of meters with various probes

01:44:07.180 | and all that data is sitting there.

01:44:08.420 | So have, why not use machine learning

01:44:10.580 | to like look through all those things

01:44:12.060 | and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface.

01:44:15.580 | And they did a test program where they gave it,

01:44:17.660 | they gave the computer, you know, sort of like,

01:44:19.740 | I don't know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11

01:44:22.380 | or Apollo, maybe it was Apollo 17 site.

01:44:24.540 | And it instantly was able to pull out the lander.

01:44:27.420 | - I mean, the whole task of looking for anomalies,

01:44:29.340 | something that looks not like the lunar surface,

01:44:31.580 | you make it sound obvious, but it's not exactly obvious.

01:44:34.460 | Like anomalies is really not, I mean,

01:44:39.460 | detect something that doesn't look right about this room.

01:44:42.200 | - Yeah. - It's actually

01:44:43.620 | really difficult. - Really difficult.

01:44:45.060 | It's really difficult.

01:44:45.900 | And it's, you know, what's cool,

01:44:46.720 | it's a really information theoretic kind of proposal.

01:44:49.980 | You really have to use information theory

01:44:51.700 | to say like, what's the background?

01:44:52.940 | What's, you know, well, how do I define something

01:44:55.180 | that I can say that looks weird?

01:44:57.300 | So.

01:44:58.380 | - Yeah, maybe when you're looking at a spectrograph

01:45:00.340 | or something like, it's still like,

01:45:03.340 | it's gonna look really weird potentially.

01:45:07.500 | Like we're kind of hypothesizing all the things

01:45:10.860 | that humans would build. - Right.

01:45:12.060 | - And how do we detect that? - Right.

01:45:13.660 | - But that could be really weird stuff.

01:45:15.500 | - That's why there's this emphasis now

01:45:16.740 | on these agnostic signatures, right?

01:45:19.540 | So actually disequilibrium is a nice one.

01:45:22.100 | One way to define life is it is a system

01:45:24.980 | that is far from equilibrium, right?

01:45:26.740 | It's alive, right?

01:45:27.580 | 'Cause as soon as it dies, it turns into,

01:45:29.660 | it goes back to equilibrium.

01:45:30.900 | And so you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere,

01:45:33.620 | even if you don't know whether,

01:45:34.620 | these could be chemicals that you have no idea

01:45:36.100 | whether or not they have anything to do with life.

01:45:38.020 | But the degree of disequilibrium,

01:45:40.300 | the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not,

01:45:43.500 | you know, the chemicals have not all kind of like

01:45:45.220 | just gone down to a, you know,

01:45:46.660 | they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state.

01:45:49.640 | You can actually tell that in very general ways

01:45:51.900 | using what's called the Gibbs free energy.

01:45:54.460 | And that's kind of a signature.

01:45:55.860 | Like if you see an atmosphere

01:45:57.260 | that is wildly out of equilibrium, you know,

01:46:00.780 | that indicates that there's some,

01:46:02.260 | there's something happening on that planet,

01:46:04.140 | biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases,

01:46:08.140 | you know, into the atmosphere

01:46:10.980 | that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.

01:46:13.420 | - So is it possible we can detect anomalies in space time?

01:46:17.460 | - Well, you could detect,

01:46:18.580 | and there's been some work on this,

01:46:20.180 | like with the Akubre drive, you know,

01:46:21.660 | these proposals for warp drives.

01:46:23.860 | And we can talk about that later.

01:46:24.980 | I'm skeptical of those, but,

01:46:27.540 | 'cause it may really be possible

01:46:28.660 | you just can't go faster than the speed of light,

01:46:30.460 | but people have done work on like, you know,

01:46:32.620 | what would be the signature of an Akubre drive?

01:46:37.500 | What would be the signature?

01:46:39.180 | You're like, you know,

01:46:40.020 | could you detect if you're using a drive like that,

01:46:42.220 | then you certainly are distorting space time,

01:46:44.100 | which means any light that's passing by has gotten,

01:46:46.620 | you know, its trajectory has gotten altered

01:46:49.380 | because it had to pass through the distorted space time.

01:46:51.900 | So yeah, there are possibilities along with that.

01:46:54.580 | You know, one of the funny things,

01:46:55.460 | I don't know if they've gotten past this,

01:46:56.580 | but somebody calculated the problem

01:46:57.940 | with the Akubre drive, or this warp drive,

01:47:00.180 | was that if you dropped out of warp,

01:47:02.740 | there would be this spray of gamma rays

01:47:05.180 | that would like sterilize any planet in front of you.

01:47:08.020 | So it's like, well, yeah,

01:47:09.180 | you probably don't want to do that,

01:47:10.420 | but that would be a great bios or techno signature.

01:47:13.220 | Oh, another planet obliterated.

01:47:15.020 | - So you think it's not possible

01:47:16.220 | to travel faster than the speed of light?

01:47:17.340 | - I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say that.

01:47:18.700 | But what I think, you know,

01:47:19.540 | if you look at the physics we understand, right?

01:47:22.020 | - Yeah.

01:47:24.260 | - Every possibility for faster than light travel

01:47:27.860 | really relies on something that doesn't exist, right?

01:47:30.860 | So, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations.

01:47:34.300 | You can actually play with them.

01:47:35.860 | The equations are right there.

01:47:36.700 | You can add things to the right or left-hand side

01:47:40.380 | that allow you to get something like the Akubre drive.

01:47:43.340 | That was a metric that showed you like,

01:47:45.340 | oh, it's a warped bubble.

01:47:47.340 | It's a warping of space-time that moves through space-time

01:47:50.620 | faster than the speed of light, right?

01:47:52.620 | Because nothing can move across space-time

01:47:54.980 | faster than the speed of light,

01:47:56.540 | but space-time itself can move

01:47:58.820 | faster than the speed of light.

01:48:00.420 | But here's the problem with all of those proposals

01:48:02.860 | is they all need something.

01:48:03.860 | The thing you added, the little fictional term

01:48:05.900 | you added into the equations

01:48:08.100 | is something called exotic matter, and it doesn't exist.

01:48:11.380 | It's really just something we dreamed up

01:48:12.900 | to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.

01:48:15.780 | So, you know, it's a nice fiction,

01:48:18.780 | but really right now, you know.

01:48:21.300 | You know, we live in this weird moment in history

01:48:24.740 | of the great acceleration,

01:48:26.020 | where like the technology we use now is, you know,

01:48:30.260 | is completely different from the technology

01:48:32.180 | we used 10 years ago,

01:48:33.900 | is remarkably different from the technology

01:48:36.700 | from a hundred years ago.

01:48:38.620 | But, you know, I remember playing Assassin's Creed

01:48:42.420 | where everybody's like, you know, what is it?

01:48:43.860 | It's 1200 and everybody's like, stab, stab, stab.

01:48:46.180 | And I was like, yeah, this is a great game.

01:48:47.100 | And then I got Assassin's Creed II,

01:48:49.700 | and it was 300 years later.

01:48:52.260 | And everybody's like, stab, stab, stab.

01:48:54.380 | And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn't changed.

01:48:57.620 | And that was actually true for most of human history, right?

01:49:00.420 | You used your great grandfather's tools

01:49:03.660 | because there was no need to have any other new tools.

01:49:05.900 | And you probably did his job.

01:49:07.740 | So, you know, we can be fooled into thinking like,

01:49:10.340 | oh, you know, technology is just gonna go on forever.

01:49:12.700 | We're always gonna find new advances

01:49:14.500 | as opposed to sometimes things just flatten out

01:49:17.140 | for a long time.

01:49:17.980 | So you have to be careful about that bias that we have

01:49:20.700 | living in this time of great acceleration.

01:49:23.260 | - Yeah, but also it is a great acceleration

01:49:26.260 | and we also are not good at predicting

01:49:29.420 | what that entails if it does keep accelerating.

01:49:32.180 | So for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein

01:49:34.980 | often talks about we under invest

01:49:37.100 | in theoretical physics research.

01:49:40.940 | Basically like we're trying too hard

01:49:44.180 | for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets

01:49:48.060 | versus like trying to hack physics,

01:49:51.900 | sort of warp drives and so on.

01:49:53.900 | Because it's really hard to do space travel.

01:49:58.260 | And it seems like in the long arc of human history,

01:50:00.620 | if we survive, the way to really travel

01:50:03.460 | across long distances is going to be some new,

01:50:06.020 | totally new thing.

01:50:07.060 | - Right, right.

01:50:07.900 | - So it's not going to be an engineering problem.

01:50:11.300 | It's going to be a physics.

01:50:12.900 | - A fundamental physics problem.

01:50:14.220 | - Fundamental physics problem.

01:50:15.060 | - Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in principle,

01:50:17.140 | but I think there's been, you know,

01:50:19.180 | I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there.

01:50:20.900 | People, you know, string theory,

01:50:22.020 | people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years.

01:50:25.100 | It's not like people haven't been,

01:50:26.500 | not like there hasn't been a lot of effort.

01:50:28.260 | And, you know, and again, I'm not going to predict.

01:50:29.620 | I think it's entirely possible that we have, you know,

01:50:32.140 | there's incredible boundaries of physics

01:50:34.900 | that have yet to be poked through.

01:50:37.220 | In which case then all bets are off, right?

01:50:39.660 | Once you get sort of, you know, interstellar,

01:50:41.580 | fast interstellar travel, whoa, you know,

01:50:43.700 | who knows what can happen.

01:50:45.500 | But I tend to be drawn to like science fiction stories

01:50:49.340 | that take the speed of light seriously.

01:50:51.140 | Like what kind of civilization can you build

01:50:53.020 | where like it takes, you know,

01:50:55.140 | 50 years to get to where you're going

01:50:57.620 | and a 50 years back, like, so I don't know.

01:51:00.060 | I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say

01:51:01.420 | that we won't get warp drives.

01:51:03.140 | But as of right now, there's, it's all fictional.

01:51:06.260 | It's, you know, it's barely even a coherent concept.

01:51:08.580 | - Well, it's also a really exciting possibility

01:51:10.700 | of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan

01:51:14.480 | or extending our notion of time.

01:51:17.980 | And maybe as dark as to say,

01:51:20.620 | but the value of an individual human life

01:51:23.020 | versus the value of life

01:51:25.380 | from the perspective of generations.

01:51:27.380 | So you can have something like a generational ship

01:51:29.300 | that travels for hundreds of thousands of years.

01:51:31.820 | And you're not sad that you'll never see the destination

01:51:37.740 | because you kind of have the value

01:51:39.380 | for the prolonged survival of humanity

01:51:43.860 | versus your own individual life.

01:51:45.260 | - Yeah.

01:51:46.100 | It's a wild ethical question, isn't it?

01:51:47.620 | One of the, that book I told you about, "Aurora."

01:51:50.300 | It was, I loved the book

01:51:51.540 | because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual.

01:51:55.060 | 'Cause you know, I've read, I love science fiction.

01:51:56.580 | I've read so many generation ship stories.

01:51:58.540 | And they get to that planet.

01:51:59.700 | The planet turns out to be uninhabitable.

01:52:01.780 | It's inhabited, but it's uninhabitable for Earth.

01:52:04.080 | Because again, he has this idea of like, you know,

01:52:06.380 | life is particular to their planets.

01:52:08.060 | So they turn around and they come back.

01:52:09.780 | And then when they land, the main character goes,

01:52:12.820 | there's still people who are, you know,

01:52:13.800 | arguing for more generation ships.

01:52:15.540 | And she goes and she punches the guy out

01:52:17.700 | 'cause she spent her whole life in a tube, you know,

01:52:20.180 | with this, I thought that was a really interesting inversion.

01:52:23.300 | You know, the interesting thing about,

01:52:24.580 | we were talking about these space habitats,

01:52:26.420 | but if you really had a space habit,

01:52:27.620 | not some super cramped, you know,

01:52:29.060 | crappy usual version of a century ship.

01:52:31.580 | But if you had these like space habitats

01:52:33.020 | that were really, you know, like the O'Neill cylinders,

01:52:34.940 | they're actually pretty nice places to live.

01:52:37.420 | Put a thruster on those, you know, like why,

01:52:39.900 | why keep them in the solar system?

01:52:41.100 | Maybe that's, maybe space is full of like

01:52:43.540 | these sort of traveling space habitats

01:52:45.580 | that are in some sense a, you know,

01:52:47.200 | they're worlds in and of themselves.

01:52:49.540 | There's the show Silo, which raises the question

01:52:52.420 | of basically if you're putting on a generational ship,

01:52:55.280 | what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship?

01:52:59.640 | You might want to lie to them.

01:53:00.800 | Yeah.

01:53:01.640 | You might want to tell them a story.

01:53:03.040 | Right.

01:53:03.880 | That they believe.

01:53:04.700 | Yeah.

01:53:05.540 | Because there is a society, there's human nature,

01:53:07.060 | there's like, how do you maintain a homeostasis

01:53:10.100 | of that little society?

01:53:11.500 | I mean, that's a fascinating technical question,

01:53:15.540 | the social question, the psychology question.

01:53:17.900 | You know, the generation ship too,

01:53:19.020 | and you know, which I talked about in the book,

01:53:20.420 | the idea of the, also the, you know,

01:53:22.140 | you talked about extending human lifetimes,

01:53:24.260 | or, you know, the stasis, the cryostasis,

01:53:27.040 | which is a mainstay of science fiction.

01:53:29.340 | You know, that, you know, right, you can be put to,

01:53:31.020 | you can basically put in suspended animation and such.

01:53:33.240 | None of these things we know are possible.

01:53:34.900 | But, you know, it's so interesting,

01:53:35.740 | and this is why I love science fiction,

01:53:36.820 | the way it seeds ideas, right?

01:53:39.160 | All these ideas we're going to talk about,

01:53:40.500 | because they've been staples of science fiction for 50 years.

01:53:43.740 | I mean, the whole field of cryogenics.

01:53:45.780 | Yeah, where are we at with that?

01:53:47.020 | Yeah, I wonder what the state of the art is

01:53:48.700 | for a complex organism.

01:53:50.220 | How long?

01:53:51.260 | How long can you freeze and then unfreeze?

01:53:53.300 | Right.

01:53:54.140 | Maybe like with bacteria, you could do freeze and unfreeze.

01:53:56.140 | Oh, bacteria can last.

01:53:57.140 | This is the thing about panspermia, right?

01:53:59.140 | How long can, you know,

01:54:02.160 | how long can a bacteria survive in a rock

01:54:04.800 | that's been blasted?

01:54:05.640 | You know, if there's a comet impact

01:54:07.080 | across, you know, interstellar distances.

01:54:09.760 | That does seem to actually be possible.

01:54:11.520 | People have done those kinds of calculations.

01:54:13.200 | It's not out of the realm of possibility,

01:54:14.840 | but a complex organism, multicellular,

01:54:17.520 | multisystemic or multisystems, right,

01:54:19.980 | with organs and such.

01:54:20.920 | - Also, what makes an organism?

01:54:22.800 | I mean, it could, you know,

01:54:24.240 | which part do you want to preserve?

01:54:25.840 | Because maybe the, for humans,

01:54:27.280 | it seems like, like what makes a personality?

01:54:31.900 | It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories.

01:54:35.640 | Like if I woke up in a different body

01:54:38.820 | with the same memories, I'd pretty much,

01:54:41.400 | I would feel like I would be the same person.

01:54:43.160 | - Altered carbon?

01:54:44.240 | Have you, that's a great series.

01:54:45.840 | I think it's on Netflix.

01:54:46.920 | It's, you know, that's a really great series

01:54:49.000 | where that's exactly the idea of sleeves.

01:54:50.400 | Everybody's able to like, you know,

01:54:51.760 | you can re-sleeve in another body.

01:54:54.080 | And it raises exactly sort of this question.

01:54:56.480 | It's not the greatest cyberpunk,

01:54:57.880 | but it's pretty good.

01:54:58.720 | It's got some great action sequences too.

01:55:01.540 | - As we get better and better advancements

01:55:03.420 | in large language models

01:55:05.560 | that are able to be fine-tuned on you,

01:55:09.440 | it raises a question,

01:55:11.840 | because to me, they've already passed the Turing test,

01:55:14.300 | as we traditionally have defined it.

01:55:16.920 | So if there's going to be an LLM

01:55:18.360 | that's able to copy you

01:55:19.720 | in terms of language extremely well,

01:55:22.440 | it's gonna raise ethical and, I don't know,

01:55:24.960 | philosophical questions about what makes you, you.

01:55:28.240 | Like what, if there's a thing

01:55:30.240 | that can talk exactly like you,

01:55:32.640 | like what is the thing that makes you, you?

01:55:35.300 | Is it, it's gonna speak about your memories

01:55:39.960 | very effectively.

01:55:41.260 | - This leads us to,

01:55:42.100 | if we're gonna get to the blind spot.

01:55:43.920 | I, you know, I am of the opinion,

01:55:46.100 | heretical in some camps,

01:55:48.000 | that, you know, the brain is not the minimal,

01:55:51.560 | the minimal structure for consciousness.

01:55:53.800 | You know, it's the whole body.

01:55:55.680 | It's embodied and made, actually, in some sense,

01:55:57.240 | it's communities, actually.

01:55:59.500 | So yeah, so I don't, I mean, you know, I could be wrong,

01:56:02.040 | but this is, you know, this is what this whole work

01:56:03.760 | that I did with Marcello Gleiser and Evan Thompson,

01:56:05.840 | the philosophy of science,

01:56:08.060 | which is interesting 'cause it leads to this question

01:56:09.480 | about, you know, right,

01:56:10.800 | oh, maybe we should just download ourselves

01:56:12.040 | into computers, right?

01:56:12.880 | That's another story that one tells.

01:56:15.360 | I'm super skeptical about those,

01:56:17.440 | but it is, that's one of the narratives

01:56:18.800 | about interstellar travel is just like,

01:56:20.840 | and that anybody we meet is gonna be a machine anyway,

01:56:23.680 | whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies

01:56:25.600 | or it's just gonna be artificial intelligence.

01:56:27.280 | Like, there's the whole idea

01:56:28.120 | of how long does biological evolution last?

01:56:30.880 | Maybe it's a very short period

01:56:32.560 | before everybody, you know, goes to,

01:56:34.280 | or the machines take over and, you know, kill ya,

01:56:36.760 | or, you know, it's some hybrid.

01:56:39.440 | - What do you think aliens look like?

01:56:41.560 | So we talked about all the different kinds

01:56:43.400 | of biosignatures that might leave or technosignatures,

01:56:46.200 | but what would they look like when we show up?

01:56:49.400 | Are they gonna have arms and legs?

01:56:52.560 | Are they going to be recognizable at all?

01:56:55.720 | Are they gonna be carbon-based?

01:56:57.040 | - Yeah, so, great question.

01:56:58.960 | And this question gets to the heart

01:57:00.360 | of thinking about life, right, about what life is.

01:57:05.000 | And this is the physical part of that.

01:57:06.800 | There's also sort of the informational part of it,

01:57:10.560 | but let's just talk about the physical part of it,

01:57:13.080 | which is, you know, life,

01:57:15.000 | anything that we're gonna call life

01:57:16.360 | is probably gonna work on Darwinian evolution.

01:57:18.600 | That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution.

01:57:20.280 | Just like we know the laws of physics are general,

01:57:22.480 | the laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic,

01:57:24.920 | this basic logic, that, you know,

01:57:27.600 | anything we'd reasonably call life

01:57:29.400 | probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.

01:57:32.560 | And so, you know, evolution's about solving problems

01:57:35.660 | that, you know, to survive that the environment presents.

01:57:40.660 | And the environment's always gonna present these problems

01:57:43.560 | in physical and chemical terms,

01:57:45.700 | so that you'd expect a kind of balance

01:57:49.800 | between what we call convergence,

01:57:51.280 | evolutionary convergence, and evolutionary contingency.

01:57:55.040 | So, you know, if you've gotta move along a surface,

01:57:57.720 | you know, a surface between a hard surface and air,

01:58:01.160 | then the idea of some kind of jointed stick, right, legs,

01:58:05.240 | makes sense, that you're probably gonna trigger that.

01:58:07.280 | You know, if we look at Earth's history, multiple times,

01:58:09.240 | multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other

01:58:11.640 | are going to solve the problem

01:58:13.520 | of getting towards energy sources

01:58:15.580 | using some kind of, you know, stick-like apparatus.

01:58:18.560 | - So that's about movement?

01:58:19.980 | - Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved.

01:58:21.360 | One problem that has to be solved

01:58:22.200 | is I gotta get to food, right?

01:58:23.840 | Another problem is I gotta get away from predators, right?

01:58:26.320 | You've seen wings.

01:58:27.160 | We've seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs

01:58:30.200 | to birds involved wings.

01:58:32.200 | Insects evolved wings.

01:58:34.040 | Mammals evolved wings.

01:58:35.680 | If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface,

01:58:38.200 | if you move through the curved surface,

01:58:39.400 | it's gonna produce lift.

01:58:40.680 | Yeah, there you go, evolutional trip on that.

01:58:42.720 | So I think you can expect certain classes of solutions

01:58:47.400 | to the basic problems that life is gonna be presented with.

01:58:52.060 | Stay alive, reproduce.

01:58:54.100 | But one of the weird things about like with the UFO things

01:58:58.220 | is that you always see like, oh, they all look like humans.

01:59:00.420 | They're just like basically humans with, you know,

01:59:02.100 | triangular heads.

01:59:03.300 | And that's where we get to contingency, right?

01:59:06.220 | So what we've been talking about is convergence.

01:59:07.580 | You expect that evolution will converge on wings

01:59:10.800 | multiple times when presented with the problems

01:59:13.540 | that wings can solve.

01:59:15.780 | But contingency is accidents, right?

01:59:19.520 | That, you know, you've got something

01:59:20.720 | that's evolving a certain kind of wing,

01:59:22.360 | a leathery wing, right?

01:59:23.920 | And then, you know, the climate changes

01:59:25.800 | and they all die out, end of story.

01:59:27.640 | Or, you know, an asteroid, a total accident,

01:59:29.240 | an asteroid hits.

01:59:30.380 | And so contingency, accidents play also a huge role

01:59:34.400 | in evolution.

01:59:35.280 | And one of the things that, you know,

01:59:37.360 | lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about

01:59:39.640 | is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth's history

01:59:41.960 | over again, would you get the same creatures?

01:59:44.760 | Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way,

01:59:48.260 | that you wouldn't find anything on Earth

01:59:50.140 | that resembled any species today.

01:59:52.940 | They've done experiments actually on this with E. coli.

01:59:55.940 | You know, you take a bunch of E. coli,

01:59:57.620 | you let them evolve for a while,

01:59:58.940 | you take a bunch of them out, freeze them,

02:00:00.660 | let one, you know, let that population continue to evolve,

02:00:03.820 | the other one's frozen,

02:00:04.820 | now start it over again with the frozen.

02:00:07.580 | And it seems to me that contingency tends to win, right?

02:00:10.700 | The contingency, at least from what we can tell,

02:00:13.180 | I mean, that's not a hard result,

02:00:14.680 | but in those experiments,

02:00:16.080 | what you find is that accidents really do matter.

02:00:18.140 | So the idea, and this is important,

02:00:19.660 | so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks.

02:00:23.520 | How many joints they're gonna be?

02:00:25.220 | Anybody's guess.

02:00:26.140 | You know, do you expect humanoids, you know,

02:00:29.060 | things with a, you know, a sensing apparatus

02:00:31.420 | on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs?

02:00:34.340 | That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences

02:00:37.860 | that led to that.

02:00:39.180 | - I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system,

02:00:43.420 | like where is most of the cognition competition going on?

02:00:46.200 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:00:47.840 | - You could see that in organisms.

02:00:49.400 | Like, actually, I don't know how the brain evolved.

02:00:54.240 | Like, why does it have to be in one place?

02:00:56.120 | - Doesn't have to be.

02:00:56.960 | So my favorite word, word of the day, is liquid brains,

02:01:00.080 | right, this idea of distributed cognition,

02:01:02.400 | which, fascinating idea.

02:01:04.200 | And we've come to understand

02:01:05.160 | how much distributed cognition there is.

02:01:09.200 | Obviously, you social animals, like termites, et cetera,

02:01:12.960 | and ants, that's an example of distributed cognition.

02:01:15.400 | The organism is the whole colony.

02:01:17.720 | This is one thing that's been really interesting

02:01:19.040 | in the state of the study when we cut to, for aliens,

02:01:21.600 | is that when we've come to recognize

02:01:22.760 | that human intelligence, it's not actually,

02:01:25.120 | it's been distributed, the kinds of things

02:01:26.560 | that go into intelligence are distributed

02:01:28.520 | all across the biosphere.

02:01:30.400 | Lots of different examples of things

02:01:32.040 | show various pieces of what we have.

02:01:35.320 | Jason Wright will describe it as like a deck of cards.

02:01:38.040 | The cards are all there.

02:01:39.120 | We got the hand that actually led

02:01:40.440 | to the kind of technological progress

02:01:41.960 | that we see.

02:01:43.520 | But the kinds of, the basic idea of using tools,

02:01:46.240 | the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye,

02:01:48.560 | all the things that we define as intelligence,

02:01:50.800 | you can find many places and many other places across,

02:01:55.080 | many other lineages across the Earth.

02:01:57.640 | So it could be, they could be very, very different

02:02:00.060 | with something like, yeah, maybe it's the hive mind idea

02:02:03.040 | or bacterial colonies that actually manage

02:02:06.720 | to come to their own version of high cognition.

02:02:10.600 | - But I wonder if there's, if we stretch out time

02:02:13.360 | across 10, 20 billion years,

02:02:17.600 | whether there's a Darwinian evolution

02:02:20.440 | stops working at some point in terms of the biology

02:02:23.880 | or the chemistry of the organisms

02:02:25.400 | and it switches to ideas, for example.

02:02:28.440 | It's much more rapidly, you're operating maybe,

02:02:31.540 | I guess it's a kind of Darwinian evolution

02:02:33.500 | on the space of memes or whatever it is.

02:02:35.800 | - Technology seems to operate on,

02:02:37.600 | and certainly markets can operate

02:02:41.320 | in ways that look very Darwinian.

02:02:43.080 | - So basically a planet is working hard

02:02:46.120 | to get to the first kind of organisms

02:02:48.320 | that's able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.

02:02:53.320 | And then it kind of stops evolving there.

02:02:55.880 | And then it's ideas that take off.

02:02:57.680 | - Right, right, 'cause yeah, cultural, it's true.

02:02:59.400 | It's amazing that cultural evolution

02:03:01.640 | totally disconnects from the Darwinian process.

02:03:05.780 | But I'd be careful to say that a planet

02:03:07.400 | is working hard to do this.

02:03:08.440 | 'Cause it's really, looking at us,

02:03:10.720 | what we think of as ideas and culture,

02:03:13.400 | and it's quite possible we're gonna make it

02:03:15.880 | another 200 years and this is gone, right?

02:03:18.040 | 'Cause it actually wasn't a very good idea long-term.

02:03:20.880 | I mean, we just don't know.

02:03:22.080 | - So maybe the idea generation organism

02:03:24.800 | is actually the thing that destroys.

02:03:26.640 | - Not the biosphere, 'cause again,

02:03:27.760 | but it destroys itself.

02:03:28.800 | It may not be very long-term.

02:03:30.240 | It may be very potent for a short period of time,

02:03:33.160 | but that it's not sustainable.

02:03:34.840 | It doesn't become, like we were talking about before,

02:03:36.320 | mature, it's very hard to make it into,

02:03:38.360 | integrate it into a mature bio/technosphere.

02:03:42.720 | And of course, evolution is not working for anything.

02:03:45.280 | Well, here's the actually interesting thing, right?

02:03:46.600 | So people are very much, evolutionary biologists

02:03:49.080 | will get very, their hair will stand on end

02:03:50.800 | if you start talking about evolution

02:03:51.880 | having a purpose or anything.

02:03:53.360 | But the very interesting thing about purpose

02:03:55.680 | is that once you do get to a idea-generating species

02:03:59.000 | or collective organism, yeah, then kind of all bets are off

02:04:04.000 | and there is goals, there is teleology,

02:04:08.720 | there is a, now suddenly, absolutely,

02:04:11.800 | there's a direction implied.

02:04:13.240 | So that's kind of the cool, interesting thing

02:04:15.040 | that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless

02:04:19.160 | and directionless, and suddenly, yeah,

02:04:20.920 | we're the ones who supply, or any kind of creature like us

02:04:23.340 | has an absolute direction, that way they decide on.

02:04:25.800 | - Although you could argue that from a perspective

02:04:27.560 | of the entire of human civilization,

02:04:30.040 | we're also directionless.

02:04:31.600 | We have a sense that there's a direction

02:04:34.560 | in this cluster of humans, and then there's another cluster

02:04:39.000 | that has a different sense of direction,

02:04:40.480 | there's all kinds of religions that are competing,

02:04:42.900 | there's different ideologies that are competing.

02:04:45.480 | And when you just zoom out across, if we survive,

02:04:49.800 | across thousands of years, it will seem directionless,

02:04:52.240 | it will seem like a pinball-- - It's a mess.

02:04:54.120 | (laughing)

02:04:55.120 | It's an unholy mess.

02:04:56.760 | But at some point, the expansion into the solar system,

02:05:00.280 | say, that would be both direction,

02:05:03.120 | I mean, depending on how you look at it,

02:05:04.840 | it was directional, there was a decision

02:05:07.400 | that the collective of human beings made

02:05:09.520 | to anti-accrete, to start spreading out

02:05:12.360 | into the solar system.

02:05:13.260 | So there was definitely a goal there

02:05:15.640 | that may have been reached in some crazy,

02:05:17.800 | sort of non-linear way, but it was still, right,

02:05:21.680 | there was still, it's still a goal was set

02:05:23.600 | and it was achieved.

02:05:25.120 | - If there's advanced civilizations out there,

02:05:27.400 | what do you think is the proper protocol

02:05:31.540 | for interacting with them?

02:05:32.880 | Do you think they would be peaceful?

02:05:34.640 | Do you think they would be warlike?

02:05:36.400 | Like, what do we do next?

02:05:38.920 | We detect the civilizations,

02:05:41.040 | do all the technosignatures we've been talking about,

02:05:43.680 | maybe direct imaging, maybe there's really strong signal,

02:05:46.720 | we come up with a strategy of how to actually get there,

02:05:49.960 | but what's the, then the general says they always do,

02:05:54.080 | the military, industrial complex.

02:05:56.000 | - We've watched that movie.

02:05:57.480 | - Where, what kind of rockets, what kind of,

02:06:01.080 | and do we bring rockets?

02:06:02.440 | - Right.

02:06:03.800 | Well, I think, you know, so this also,

02:06:05.640 | this general question also leads to METI,

02:06:07.520 | Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

02:06:09.760 | And I am definitely of the opinion of like,

02:06:11.280 | you should be very careful, you know?

02:06:13.660 | Like, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea

02:06:15.520 | to have your head below the grass.

02:06:17.420 | You know, the people who advocate like, oh yeah,

02:06:20.160 | we should be sending, you know, powerful messages

02:06:22.660 | that are easily detectable into interstellar space.

02:06:25.920 | I'm like, why would you, 'cause we just don't know.

02:06:27.920 | Like, I'm not gonna say they are war-like.

02:06:29.760 | I'm not gonna say they're not war-like.

02:06:30.880 | I have no idea, you know, but we sure as hell,

02:06:34.400 | well, first of all, who gets to decide that?

02:06:36.280 | The idea that a bunch of astronomers

02:06:37.520 | who happen to have a radio telescope, I don't, you know,

02:06:39.960 | who speaks for earth, which I think was a great book

02:06:42.920 | somebody wrote.

02:06:44.360 | So, you know, I definitely, we should be cautious,

02:06:48.500 | I would say, 'cause we just have zero information.

02:06:50.880 | And the idea, you used to have this idea of,

02:06:52.440 | well, if they're advanced, they've managed to survive.

02:06:54.340 | So of course they're gonna be wearing togas, you know,

02:06:56.660 | and be singing Kumbaya.

02:06:58.580 | But I just wouldn't assume that.

02:07:00.740 | It's also possible, though,

02:07:01.660 | that like their cognitive structure is so different

02:07:04.700 | that we're not even living in the same universe

02:07:06.940 | in a certain way.

02:07:07.780 | I think we have to be prepared for that.

02:07:09.100 | We may not even be able to recognize each other

02:07:11.340 | in some way as cognizing beings.

02:07:15.420 | One of my favorite movies is "Arrival."

02:07:17.500 | I don't know if you've ever seen that one.

02:07:18.500 | I really love that one because, you know,

02:07:19.540 | they literally, they have a different language,

02:07:21.140 | they have a different cognitive structure

02:07:22.740 | in terms of their language,

02:07:23.580 | and they're literally kind of living in a different physics.

02:07:25.780 | - Different physics, different language,

02:07:27.540 | different everything.

02:07:29.980 | - Yeah.

02:07:30.820 | - But in the case of "Arrival,"

02:07:31.660 | it can at least like recognize that they're there.

02:07:34.300 | - They did, right.

02:07:35.140 | And they managed to cross the language barrier, yeah.

02:07:38.700 | - So, but that's, both sides have an interest

02:07:41.340 | in communicating, which you kind of suppose

02:07:43.940 | that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity.

02:07:48.920 | Because like, how do you become advanced

02:07:50.340 | without a kind of curiosity about the mysterious,

02:07:53.540 | about the other?

02:07:54.780 | - But also, you know, if they're long-lived,

02:07:57.020 | they may just be like, we're not even interested.

02:07:59.380 | Like, we've done this, we're like, you know,

02:08:02.380 | 10 billion years, or sorry, say 10 million years ago,

02:08:05.460 | we were really interested in that, in this,

02:08:07.180 | in communicating with you, you know, youngins,

02:08:09.540 | but now we're not at all.

02:08:10.700 | And that's just, you know, one of the beauties of this,

02:08:13.000 | again, is how to think about this systematically,

02:08:15.220 | 'cause you're so far past the hairy edge, right,

02:08:18.380 | of our experience, of what we know,

02:08:21.120 | that you want to think about it, right?

02:08:22.640 | You don't wanna be like, don't know, can't say anything,

02:08:24.600 | 'cause that's not fun.

02:08:25.680 | But you also have to sort of systematically

02:08:27.780 | go after your own biases, right?

02:08:30.440 | So one of the things I loved about Arrival too,

02:08:32.240 | was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this idea,

02:08:34.080 | like, we'll teach 'em math, we'll teach 'em our math,

02:08:36.520 | then they'll teach us their math,

02:08:38.000 | and then, you know, we'll be telling each other

02:08:39.720 | knock-knock jokes, you know, and swapping cures for cancer.

02:08:42.840 | And, you know, in the movie, like,

02:08:44.000 | they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist,

02:08:46.040 | and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, right?

02:08:48.740 | And it's the linguist who understands

02:08:50.020 | that language is actually embodied.

02:08:51.580 | Language is not just something that happens in your head,

02:08:53.540 | it's actually the whole experience.

02:08:55.620 | And she's the one who breaks through.

02:08:57.260 | And it just points to the idea that,

02:08:59.140 | how utterly different the cognitive structures,

02:09:03.100 | the, you know, of a different species should be.

02:09:05.680 | So somehow we have to figure out how to think about it,

02:09:08.400 | but be so careful of our biases,

02:09:10.320 | or figure out, like, a systematic way

02:09:11.820 | to break through our biases,

02:09:13.860 | and not just tell, make science fiction movies,

02:09:15.860 | you know what I mean?

02:09:16.880 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:09:19.080 | Speaking of biases,

02:09:20.540 | do you think aliens have visited Earth?

02:09:22.740 | You've mentioned that they could have visited

02:09:24.620 | and started civilizations,

02:09:25.940 | and we wouldn't even know about it

02:09:27.700 | if it was 100 million years ago.

02:09:30.740 | How could we even begin to answer this question?

02:09:32.380 | - Gotta look, gotta look, gotta figure out ways to look.

02:09:34.900 | So I, you know, I mean, I don't put it,

02:09:36.660 | it's not high on my list of, you know,

02:09:38.860 | things that I think are probable,

02:09:41.120 | but it certainly, it needs to be explored, you know?

02:09:43.980 | And unless you look, you never know.

02:09:45.260 | So looking on the moon, look at where would we find,

02:09:48.700 | if aliens had passed through the solar system

02:09:50.860 | any time in the last three billion years,

02:09:53.380 | where might we find artifacts?

02:09:54.700 | Where might artifacts still be around?

02:09:56.220 | Earth, probably not, 'cause of weathering and resurfacing.

02:10:00.300 | The moon's a good place.

02:10:01.700 | Certain kinds of orbits, you know?

02:10:03.460 | Maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable,

02:10:05.740 | so you gotta figure out which orbits,

02:10:06.980 | actually, you could put something there,

02:10:08.060 | and it'll last for a billion years.

02:10:10.020 | So those are the kind of questions.

02:10:11.660 | I don't, like I said, I don't,

02:10:14.240 | it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen,

02:10:16.820 | but it could happen.

02:10:17.720 | I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know.

02:10:19.780 | - What about, speaking of biases,

02:10:21.780 | what about if aliens visiting Earth

02:10:24.300 | is the elephant in the room?

02:10:26.020 | Meaning, like, the potential of aliens, say,

02:10:28.400 | seeding life on Earth.

02:10:30.420 | - You mean like in that directed panspermia?

02:10:32.820 | - Directed panspermia. - Yeah.

02:10:34.340 | - Or seeding some aspect of the evolution.

02:10:39.020 | - Like 2001.

02:10:40.540 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

02:10:42.460 | You know, it's a great story,

02:10:44.500 | but always with Occam's razor or whatever with science,

02:10:47.520 | if I can answer that question without that extra,

02:10:50.960 | very detailed hypothesis, then I should.

02:10:54.840 | And the idea that evolution is a natural process,

02:10:58.460 | that's what I would go for first, right?

02:11:00.720 | That just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way

02:11:03.460 | than adding, 'cause it's kind of a duos ex machina thing

02:11:07.640 | of like, oh, then the aliens came down

02:11:09.080 | and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve

02:11:10.960 | by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.

02:11:13.300 | - So to you, the origin of life is a pretty simple thing

02:11:18.220 | that doesn't require an alien.

02:11:19.660 | - I wouldn't say that, it's not a simple thing,

02:11:21.380 | but it doesn't, you know, putting, I think,

02:11:24.300 | 'cause you know, all you're doing

02:11:25.300 | is kicking the can down the road, right?

02:11:26.860 | The aliens formed, right?

02:11:29.100 | So you're just saying like, all right,

02:11:30.520 | I'm just kicking the can down the road to the aliens.

02:11:33.180 | How did they, what was their abiogenesis event?

02:11:35.700 | - Well, so from a different perspective, I'm just saying,

02:11:38.160 | it seems to me that there's obviously

02:11:40.060 | advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy

02:11:42.460 | and through the universe,

02:11:43.600 | from the Drake equation perspective.

02:11:45.580 | And then if I was an alien, what would I do?

02:11:48.340 | You know, I've gotten a chance to learn

02:11:52.000 | about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.

02:11:55.700 | I recently went to the Amazon,

02:11:57.100 | you get to understand how they function

02:11:59.100 | and how the humans in the Amazon,

02:12:01.500 | they're in contact with the civilized world,

02:12:05.100 | how they interact with the uncontacted tribes.

02:12:07.420 | First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent

02:12:10.180 | towards the outside world,

02:12:11.760 | but everybody else try to stay away from them.

02:12:13.940 | They try to kind of protect them, don't talk about them,

02:12:16.340 | don't talk about their location, all this kind of stuff.

02:12:19.420 | And I've begun to internalize and understand

02:12:21.600 | that perspective of why you're doing that.

02:12:23.420 | And if I was an alien civilization,

02:12:25.840 | I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing.

02:12:28.740 | And of course, there's always the teenager or the troll

02:12:30.820 | who's gonna start messing with this stuff,

02:12:32.860 | or the scientists, you know?

02:12:34.580 | - Yeah, right.

02:12:35.420 | - And so, it's not, from our perspective, yes.

02:12:40.420 | And if you're in the Truman Show, like Occam's Razor.

02:12:43.340 | But like also, the Occam's Razor,

02:12:45.840 | from the perspective of the alien civilization,

02:12:48.740 | we have to have the humility to understand

02:12:52.740 | that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect.

02:12:56.120 | That it will not be obvious.

02:12:57.100 | - Right, I understand the logic of what you're saying,

02:12:58.900 | but the problem for me with that is that,

02:13:01.300 | right there, first you have to assume

02:13:03.180 | that alien civilizations are common,

02:13:05.220 | which I'm not sure about, most of 'em may be dead,

02:13:07.460 | or they're not, while I think that life is common.

02:13:10.820 | And again, this is just my biases, right?

02:13:12.220 | So now, the problem is, how do we sort out

02:13:14.420 | sort of the biases we're bringing,

02:13:18.420 | or the assumptions we're bringing in,

02:13:20.420 | from the sort of causal chain that comes out of that?

02:13:25.420 | I would first wanna try and do this without,

02:13:29.380 | like if we're talking about the origin of life,

02:13:31.340 | or the evolution of life on Earth.

02:13:32.740 | I'd wanna do it just on its own,

02:13:34.460 | without asking for this other layer.

02:13:36.960 | Because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions,

02:13:41.460 | which also have their own sort of breaking of causal chains.

02:13:44.060 | 'Cause I don't really, like the idea that,

02:13:46.660 | when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien?

02:13:48.960 | But again, like alien minds could be

02:13:50.940 | so unbelievably different, right?

02:13:53.540 | That they wouldn't even recognize

02:13:54.740 | the question you just posed, right?

02:13:56.780 | 'Cause it's just like, you know, we're very much,

02:13:58.500 | we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure,

02:14:00.780 | or cognitive, you know, and we're very governed by,

02:14:03.780 | even if you went and talked to,

02:14:05.220 | this is an interesting thing to think about,

02:14:07.420 | you know, if I could suddenly magically appear

02:14:09.460 | a hundred thousand years ago,

02:14:10.820 | and talk to a hunter-gatherer,

02:14:12.380 | about their worldview and their motivations,

02:14:14.180 | you know, I might find something that's like,

02:14:15.460 | there were no resemblance to things that I think

02:14:18.500 | are sort of, oh, that's what naturally humans do.

02:14:20.460 | - Well, let me ask you this question.

02:14:21.740 | Let's together do the thought experiment.

02:14:23.300 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:14:24.140 | - If we either create a time machine

02:14:26.260 | that allows us to travel back and to talk to them,

02:14:28.740 | or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization

02:14:33.380 | on a nearby star system, what would we do?

02:14:37.780 | - Yeah, I think that's a great question.

02:14:39.420 | I mean, so, you know, it's interesting how that

02:14:40.620 | even brings up the ethical questions, right?

02:14:42.460 | Let's say that, you know, would we,

02:14:44.300 | we'd have to first sort of sort out

02:14:45.980 | what are the consequences for them,

02:14:47.580 | and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?

02:14:51.220 | - And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective,

02:14:54.220 | what are we to gain from this interaction?

02:14:56.820 | - Right, right, right.

02:14:57.660 | You look at the way the missionaries, you know,

02:14:59.020 | missionaries had these interactions

02:15:00.540 | because they thought converting them

02:15:03.060 | to whatever religion they were, you know,

02:15:04.740 | was the most important, that's what the gain was.

02:15:07.300 | So from our perspective, I mean,

02:15:09.380 | we'd have to sort that out.

02:15:11.420 | I think given, you know,

02:15:12.660 | if we're doing this thought experiment, we are curious.

02:15:16.820 | And I think eventually we'd want to reach out to them.

02:15:19.620 | - I think when you say we,

02:15:21.660 | let's start with the people in this room, right?

02:15:23.540 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:15:24.380 | - But there is, I wonder who the dominant forces are

02:15:27.540 | in the world, because I think there's a lot of people

02:15:30.380 | in the military, they will probably move first

02:15:34.260 | so they can steal whatever advantage they can

02:15:37.620 | from this new discovery so they can hurt China

02:15:40.580 | or China hurt America.

02:15:42.700 | That's one perspective.

02:15:44.060 | Then there's the capitalists who will see like how

02:15:47.660 | the benefits and the costs here,

02:15:49.540 | and how can I make money off of this?

02:15:51.420 | There's opportunity here, there's gold in them hills.

02:15:55.020 | And I wonder, and I think the scientists

02:15:56.740 | is just not going to, unlike the movies.

02:15:59.100 | We're not going to get much say.

02:16:00.660 | - They're going to put them,

02:16:01.500 | "Hey guys, we, wait a minute."

02:16:03.220 | They would engage probably.

02:16:04.580 | I mean, it's just as a human society as we are now,

02:16:07.460 | we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.

02:16:12.300 | - In our engagement.

02:16:13.180 | - In our engagement.

02:16:14.020 | - Yeah, yeah, probably.

02:16:15.340 | - So using that trivial biased logic,

02:16:18.740 | it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging

02:16:21.180 | in a very obvious way.

02:16:22.620 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:16:25.620 | - Which brings up that old direct for me, paradox for me.

02:16:29.980 | What do you make of all the UFO sightings?

02:16:32.980 | - I am all in favor of an open, agnostic,

02:16:37.740 | transparent scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs.

02:16:42.420 | But the idea that there's any data that we have

02:16:46.620 | that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology,

02:16:50.420 | I just think they're the standards.

02:16:52.020 | They just, none of what is claimed to be the data

02:16:55.140 | lives up to the standards of evidence.

02:16:56.660 | So let's just take a moment

02:16:57.500 | on that idea of standards of evidence,

02:16:58.900 | 'cause I've made a big deal about this,

02:17:00.020 | both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this.

02:17:03.020 | So what people have to understand about science

02:17:04.740 | is we are really, scientists,

02:17:06.980 | we are really mean to each other.

02:17:08.380 | We are brutal to each other.

02:17:10.100 | 'Cause we have this thing

02:17:10.980 | that we call standards of evidence.

02:17:12.860 | And it's the idea of like, you have a piece of evidence

02:17:15.820 | that you wanna link to a claim.

02:17:18.100 | And under what conditions can you say,

02:17:20.460 | "Oh, look, I've got evidence of this claim X, Y, and Z."

02:17:24.660 | And in science, we are so mean to each other

02:17:27.860 | about whether or not that piece of evidence

02:17:30.180 | lives up to the standards that we have.

02:17:32.100 | And we spent 400 years

02:17:33.780 | determining what those standards are.

02:17:36.660 | And that is why cell phones work, right?

02:17:39.180 | If you didn't have super rigorous standards

02:17:42.180 | about what you think that's,

02:17:43.900 | oh, this little antenna,

02:17:44.980 | I've invented a new kind of antenna

02:17:46.220 | that I can slip into the cell phone

02:17:47.940 | and I can show you that it works.

02:17:49.980 | If you didn't have these standards,

02:17:51.860 | every cell phone would be a brick, right?

02:17:53.780 | And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs,

02:17:55.660 | the evidence you have and the claim that though,

02:17:57.660 | this shows that we are being visited

02:18:00.700 | by non-human advanced civilization

02:18:04.500 | just doesn't even come close

02:18:07.220 | to the same standards I'm gonna have to obey

02:18:09.820 | or whatever, live under.

02:18:11.020 | If my team, the group I work with,

02:18:13.060 | if one of them says,

02:18:15.340 | "Look, we've discovered,"

02:18:16.260 | wants to announce that,

02:18:17.340 | "Oh, we've discovered a techno signature

02:18:19.460 | "on an alien planet."

02:18:20.500 | We're gonna get shredded as we expect to be.

02:18:23.260 | We expect to be beaten up.

02:18:24.980 | And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing,

02:18:28.980 | that you don't get a pass

02:18:31.260 | because it's a really cool topic.

02:18:32.820 | So that's where I am right now.

02:18:33.820 | I just don't think any of the evidence

02:18:35.940 | is even close to anything that could support that claim.

02:18:39.420 | - Well, I generally assign a lot of value

02:18:42.420 | to anecdotal evidence from pilots.

02:18:44.820 | Not scientific value,

02:18:45.900 | but just like it's always nice

02:18:48.180 | to get anecdotal evidence as a first step.

02:18:51.860 | So it's like, "Hmm, I wonder if there's something there."

02:18:53.980 | But unfortunately with this topic,

02:18:55.580 | there's so much excitement around it.

02:18:56.860 | There's a lot of people that are basically trying

02:19:00.020 | to make money off of it.

02:19:00.980 | There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff.

02:19:02.380 | So even if there's some signal,

02:19:04.740 | there's just so much noise,

02:19:05.820 | it's very difficult to operate with.

02:19:07.300 | So how do we get better signal?

02:19:10.420 | So you've talked about sort of,

02:19:12.540 | if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth

02:19:16.540 | and maybe detect things like weird physics,

02:19:21.700 | what kind of instruments would we be using?

02:19:23.820 | - Yeah, so in the book,

02:19:25.260 | I talked about the idea that this is really stupid,

02:19:27.380 | but you want to look up, you want to look down,

02:19:30.060 | and you want to look all around.

02:19:30.980 | - I think that's brilliant.

02:19:31.820 | I mean, it's simple, not stupid.

02:19:34.700 | It's like literally.

02:19:35.700 | - So you want to do ground-based detectors,

02:19:38.780 | upward-looking ground-based detectors

02:19:40.220 | of the kind we're already building for meteors,

02:19:42.540 | for tracking meteors.

02:19:44.300 | You want to have space-based detectors,

02:19:46.020 | put them on satellites.

02:19:46.860 | This is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about.

02:19:49.340 | And then probably on, we have lots of people in the sky,

02:19:53.300 | there should be detectors on the planes,

02:19:56.380 | or at least some kind of alert system

02:19:58.660 | that if a pilot says, "Oh, look, I'm seeing something,

02:20:00.500 | "I don't understand," boop, presses the red button,

02:20:02.660 | and that triggers the ground-based

02:20:04.780 | and space-based data collectors.

02:20:09.180 | And then the data collectors themselves,

02:20:10.420 | this is something that people really don't understand,

02:20:12.180 | and it's so important.

02:20:13.900 | In order to actually do science with anything,

02:20:16.260 | the data you have, you have to understand

02:20:18.620 | where it came from, like down to the nth degree.

02:20:22.100 | You have to know how that camera behaves

02:20:26.020 | in a bunch of different wavelengths.

02:20:27.660 | You have to have characterized that.

02:20:29.100 | You have to know what the software does,

02:20:31.700 | what the limits of the software are possibly.

02:20:33.340 | You have to know what happened to the camera.

02:20:34.860 | Was it refurbished recently?

02:20:37.220 | In every spectral wavelength,

02:20:39.460 | in all of its data collection and processing,

02:20:44.100 | you have to know all of those steps

02:20:45.260 | and have them all characterized.

02:20:46.700 | 'Cause especially if you wanna claim like,

02:20:47.860 | "Oh my God, I saw something take a right-hand turn

02:20:49.860 | "at Mach 500," right?

02:20:51.580 | You better have all of that nailed down

02:20:53.940 | before you make that kind of claim.

02:20:55.860 | So we have to have characterized detectors

02:20:57.540 | looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves.

02:21:00.860 | We need a rational search strategy.

02:21:02.460 | So let's say you wanna lay out these ground-based detectors.

02:21:05.940 | Where do you put 'em, right?

02:21:07.060 | There's only so much money in the world.

02:21:08.660 | So do you wanna put 'em near places

02:21:10.620 | where you've seen a lot of things beforehand,

02:21:12.220 | or do you wanna have 'em try and do

02:21:13.740 | a sparse coverage of the entire country?

02:21:17.220 | And then you need the data analysis, right?

02:21:20.820 | You're gonna have so much data,

02:21:22.340 | so many false positives or false triggering,

02:21:25.300 | that you need a way of sorting through

02:21:26.620 | enormous amounts of data

02:21:27.900 | and figuring out what you're gonna throw out

02:21:29.060 | and what you're gonna keep.

02:21:29.940 | And all of these things we're used to doing

02:21:31.460 | in other scientific enterprises.

02:21:33.140 | And without that, if we don't do that,

02:21:35.420 | we're gonna be having the same damn argument

02:21:37.460 | about these things for the next hundred years.

02:21:40.100 | - But if I ask you, I give you a trillion dollars

02:21:43.140 | and ask you to allocate it to one place,

02:21:47.140 | looking out, SETI, or looking at Earth,

02:21:51.660 | what should you allocate it to?

02:21:52.500 | - Oh, God, looking out, looking out.

02:21:54.100 | Because that's the bad, you know, as I always like to say,

02:21:55.740 | here's my codification of this.

02:21:58.100 | If you said, "Hey, Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraskans."

02:22:01.420 | And I said, "Oh, good, let's go to the Himalayas."

02:22:03.720 | (laughs)

02:22:04.560 | You know, you'd be like, "Why am I going there?"

02:22:06.020 | I'm like, "Well, you know, maybe there's some Himalayas,

02:22:08.260 | you know, some Nebraskas in Himalayas."

02:22:09.700 | You say, "No, no, let's go to Nebraska."

02:22:11.380 | If we're looking for aliens,

02:22:13.380 | why don't we look on alien planets where they live?

02:22:16.620 | 'Cause that's, we have that technology now,

02:22:18.620 | as opposed to the, you know, the bucket of assumptions

02:22:22.380 | that you have to come up with in order to say like,

02:22:24.260 | "Oh, they're here right now."

02:22:25.580 | You know, they just happen to be here right now.

02:22:26.900 | And also, the very important thing,

02:22:28.580 | I call this the high beam argument.

02:22:31.060 | You know, to deal with the UFO stuff,

02:22:32.580 | you have to deal with all of,

02:22:33.740 | you have to answer these weird, irrational things

02:22:36.180 | that are happening.

02:22:37.020 | Like, okay, there's an advanced civilization

02:22:39.380 | that is visiting Earth regularly.

02:22:41.820 | They don't wanna be detected.

02:22:43.540 | They've got super powerful technology,

02:22:45.740 | but they really suck at using it

02:22:47.380 | because we keep seeing them.

02:22:49.100 | We keep seeing them, but then they disappear, right?

02:22:51.340 | I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under.

02:22:55.820 | It's like, you know, so there's that whole sort of argument

02:22:58.220 | you've got to explain.

02:22:59.060 | Like, why, if they want to stay hidden,

02:23:01.180 | are they so bad at it?

02:23:03.500 | So, you know, that's why I take that level of difficulty.

02:23:07.580 | And then I put it on top of, where should I look?

02:23:10.020 | I should look at the, you know,

02:23:12.620 | I should look at where they're from.

02:23:14.860 | That makes me wanna look at, do the telescopic stuff.

02:23:17.900 | - Yeah, I think the more likely explanation

02:23:20.300 | is either the sensors are not working correctly

02:23:24.420 | or it's secret military technology being tested.

02:23:27.580 | - Absolutely.

02:23:28.420 | I mean, if you had, listen, that's why, again,

02:23:29.660 | I think UAP, you know, absolutely,

02:23:32.460 | UAP should be studied scientifically.

02:23:36.580 | But if I had to make a bet and it's just a bet,

02:23:38.420 | I would say this is, you know,

02:23:39.380 | this is peer state adversary stuff.

02:23:41.700 | When I did, I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021,

02:23:45.460 | which, you know, blew up.

02:23:46.660 | And so, you know, I had a lot of, you know,

02:23:49.140 | people talking to me.

02:23:50.100 | While I was doing that,

02:23:50.940 | I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people,

02:23:53.060 | the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities,

02:23:57.300 | and what they were saying about, you know,

02:23:58.540 | the New York Times articles and the various videos.

02:24:01.780 | And really none of them were talking about UFOs.

02:24:03.420 | They were all talking about, you know, peer state.

02:24:05.340 | That's where I learned the word peer state adversaries.

02:24:07.580 | How like even simple drone technologies, you can, you know,

02:24:10.900 | and you want to, you purposely want to do this.

02:24:12.380 | You want to fake, you know,

02:24:15.100 | signals into the electronics of their adversary

02:24:18.860 | so they crank it up.

02:24:20.020 | So then you can just soak up

02:24:21.260 | all the electromagnetic radiation

02:24:22.980 | and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.

02:24:25.860 | - That said, I'm not saying that that's what this is.

02:24:28.540 | If I was the head of an alien civilization

02:24:31.620 | and I chose to minimize the amount of contact I'm doing,

02:24:36.620 | I would try to figure out what would these humans,

02:24:40.580 | what would these aliens like to see?

02:24:43.600 | That's why like the big heads in the humanoid form.

02:24:47.620 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:24:48.460 | - Like, I mean, that's kind of like

02:24:50.140 | how I would approach communication.

02:24:52.020 | If I was much more intelligent,

02:24:53.660 | I would observe them enough.

02:24:55.520 | It's like, all right,

02:24:56.360 | if I wanted to communicate with a nail colony,

02:24:59.220 | I would observe it long enough to see

02:25:01.180 | what are the basic elements of communication.

02:25:03.240 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:25:04.300 | - And maybe I would do a trivial thing,

02:25:05.700 | like do like a fake ant.

02:25:07.580 | - Right, a robot ant.

02:25:08.420 | - Or a robot ant.

02:25:09.820 | But then it's not enough to just do a robot ant.

02:25:11.860 | You'd have to do a robot ant

02:25:12.980 | that like moves in the way they do.

02:25:15.060 | And maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants.

02:25:18.540 | But no, I do sort of,

02:25:20.300 | I just wanted to make the case for that.

02:25:21.660 | - This is the plot, actually,

02:25:22.620 | of a great science fiction book called "Eon" by Greg Baer.

02:25:26.260 | And the idea was like these sort of, you know,

02:25:28.180 | this is actually where my first,

02:25:29.900 | I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-METI.

02:25:34.420 | Because the idea is that, yes, our aliens come,

02:25:36.500 | they sort of make their arrival.

02:25:38.500 | And really their point is to get rid of us.

02:25:40.380 | It's the dark forest hypothesis.

02:25:43.180 | And what they do is they sort of,

02:25:44.380 | literally the way they present themselves

02:25:46.580 | is in this sort of classic UFO thing.

02:25:49.020 | And they do it, and they arrive at the,

02:25:50.820 | this was during the Soviet Union,

02:25:52.000 | they arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China.

02:25:53.660 | And they're kind of faking us out

02:25:55.540 | so that we never can organize ourselves against.

02:25:58.700 | So it was really, they did exactly

02:26:00.180 | kind of what you're talking about,

02:26:01.560 | but for nefarious purposes.

02:26:03.940 | - Okay, let me ask the pothead question.

02:26:06.580 | Yet another pothead- - Yet another pothead,

02:26:07.900 | the whole conversation. - I'm sorry.

02:26:09.180 | I'm sorry. - Bogs before breakfast.

02:26:11.220 | - It's science and pothead questions back and forth.

02:26:14.340 | Okay, what if aliens take a form

02:26:17.620 | that's unlike what we kind of traditionally

02:26:20.860 | envision in analyzing physical objects?

02:26:26.340 | What if they take the form of, say, ideas?

02:26:28.660 | What if, real pothead, if it's consciousness itself,

02:26:33.660 | like the subjective experience, is an alien being?

02:26:37.960 | Maybe ideas then is an easier one to visualize

02:26:40.320 | 'cause we can think of ideas as entities

02:26:42.820 | traveling from human to human.

02:26:44.300 | - When I made the claim that the most important,

02:26:46.900 | that finding life, any kind of life,

02:26:48.980 | would be the most important discovery in human history.

02:26:51.740 | And one of the reasons is, again, as I said,

02:26:53.280 | that life, if we're not an accident,

02:26:56.000 | and there's other life,

02:26:57.620 | then there's probably lots of other life.

02:26:58.940 | And because the most significant thing about life is

02:27:02.500 | it can innovate, right?

02:27:03.760 | If I give you a star and tell you the mass

02:27:08.620 | and the composition, you can basically,

02:27:09.980 | pretty much using the laws of physics,

02:27:11.180 | tell exactly what's gonna happen to that star

02:27:12.620 | over its entire lifetime.

02:27:13.600 | Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall,

02:27:15.860 | it's gonna be a white dwarf,

02:27:16.700 | it's gonna be a black hole, end of story.

02:27:18.060 | If I gave you a single cell and said

02:27:19.980 | what's gonna happen in a few billion years,

02:27:21.340 | you'd never be able to predict a giant rabbit

02:27:23.820 | that can punch you in the face, right, a kangaroo.

02:27:26.420 | So life has this possibility of innovating,

02:27:28.660 | of being creative.

02:27:29.940 | So here's, so what it means is,

02:27:32.260 | and that's a part of a kind of a fundamental definition

02:27:34.340 | of what it means to be alive.

02:27:35.500 | It goes past itself.

02:27:37.260 | So give life enough time, you know,

02:27:41.060 | and what are the, what are the end result?

02:27:44.100 | Like, you know, there's, there's, you know,

02:27:44.940 | like, that's why I love science fiction so much.

02:27:47.500 | It does, at some point, does life reach a point

02:27:50.100 | where it climbs into the laws of physics itself?

02:27:52.740 | It becomes the laws of physics.

02:27:54.340 | Or, you know, these sort of lie at the extreme limits

02:27:57.980 | of thinking about what we mean by reality,

02:28:00.540 | what we mean by, you know, experience.

02:28:03.740 | But, and I'm not sure there's much we can do

02:28:06.100 | with them scientifically, but it, you know,

02:28:07.980 | they're open-ended question about the open-ended nature

02:28:10.540 | of what it means to be alive and what life can do.

02:28:14.940 | - Since you said it's the biggest question,

02:28:17.660 | which is an interesting thought experiment.

02:28:19.540 | What is the biggest scientific question

02:28:20.900 | we can possibly answer?

02:28:22.660 | You know, some people might say about, like,

02:28:24.500 | what happened before the big bang,

02:28:26.380 | some big physics questions about the universe.

02:28:28.860 | I can see the argument for, you know,

02:28:33.020 | how many alien civilizations,

02:28:34.260 | or if there's other life out there.

02:28:36.860 | You want to speak to that a little bit?

02:28:38.140 | Like, why?

02:28:38.960 | - Why is the?

02:28:39.800 | - Why is it the biggest question in your,

02:28:41.940 | why is it number one in your top five, or?

02:28:43.900 | - I've evolved in this, right?

02:28:45.180 | You know, I started off as a theoretical physicist.

02:28:46.860 | I went into computational astrophysics

02:28:49.060 | and magnetohydrodynamics of star formation.

02:28:50.940 | But I always, you know, I was a philosophy minor.

02:28:52.340 | I always had the sort of bigger questions

02:28:54.420 | sort of floating around the back of my mind.

02:28:56.420 | And what I've come to now is the most important question

02:28:59.580 | for physics is what is life?

02:29:01.660 | What the hell is the difference

02:29:02.740 | between a rock and a cell, fundamentally?

02:29:05.820 | And what I really mean by this,

02:29:06.900 | and this is where I'm going to go non-traditional,

02:29:09.220 | is that really the fundamental question that is agency.

02:29:13.260 | What does it mean to be an autonomous agent?

02:29:15.580 | How the hell does that happen?

02:29:17.660 | You know, it's so, I'm not a reductionist.

02:29:19.980 | I'm not somebody who's just like,

02:29:20.820 | well, you just put together enough chemicals

02:29:22.180 | and bing, bang, boom, and you know, it suddenly appears.

02:29:24.180 | There's something that really is going to demand

02:29:26.580 | a reconception of what nature itself is.

02:29:30.780 | And so yeah, black holes are super cool.

02:29:32.420 | Cosmology is super cool.

02:29:33.860 | But really this question of what is life,

02:29:38.340 | especially from by viewing it from the inside,

02:29:41.620 | because it's really about the verb to be, right?

02:29:43.620 | Really, what is the most,

02:29:44.500 | what is the most impressing philosophical question

02:29:46.900 | beyond science is the verb to be.

02:29:49.100 | What is being, right?

02:29:51.740 | This is what Stephen Hawking said

02:29:53.180 | when he talked about what puts the fire in the equations?

02:29:55.980 | The fire, right?

02:29:56.980 | The fire is this presence.

02:29:59.500 | And this is where it touches things like,

02:30:00.940 | you know, whatever you want to say it,

02:30:02.060 | the sacred, spirituality, whatever you want to talk about.

02:30:04.300 | My first book was about science and human spirituality.

02:30:08.300 | So it's like, you know, so this question of life,

02:30:10.560 | what makes life as a physical system, you know,

02:30:14.100 | so different is to me much more,

02:30:17.180 | because it's, you know, that's where being appears.

02:30:18.700 | Being doesn't appear out there, right?

02:30:21.300 | The only place that ever appears to any of us is us.

02:30:24.100 | So, you know, I can do this kind of projection

02:30:26.380 | into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that,

02:30:28.460 | that God's eye view.

02:30:29.700 | That's a story we tell.

02:30:31.160 | This is where, you know,

02:30:32.740 | this between us is where the verb to be appears.

02:30:36.860 | - So this is something that you write about

02:30:39.300 | in "The Blind Spot,"

02:30:40.780 | why science cannot ignore human experience,

02:30:43.920 | sort of trying to pull the fire

02:30:47.260 | into the process of science.

02:30:52.260 | And it's a kind of critique of materialism.

02:30:54.820 | Can you explain the main thesis of this book?

02:30:56.620 | - Yeah, so the idea of "The Blind Spot"

02:30:58.980 | is that there is this thing that is central to science.

02:31:03.780 | So the blind, we're using the blind spot as a metaphor,

02:31:05.580 | right, so the eye has an optic nerve,

02:31:07.700 | and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen.

02:31:11.180 | So you can't have vision without the optic nerve,

02:31:13.240 | but actually you're blind to the optic nerve.

02:31:15.100 | There's a little hole in your vision

02:31:16.420 | where the optic nerve is.

02:31:17.900 | And what we're saying is that science

02:31:19.980 | has something like this.

02:31:21.500 | There is something that without which

02:31:24.220 | science would not be possible,

02:31:25.500 | but that science, the way it's been configured,

02:31:27.700 | and actually when we mean the blind spot,

02:31:29.500 | get into exactly what I mean, what it is,

02:31:31.740 | but it's not really science.

02:31:33.700 | It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science.

02:31:37.260 | It's a metaphysics that got glued onto science.

02:31:40.380 | And so what is that thing that is,

02:31:42.500 | what is the blind spot?

02:31:43.340 | It's experience.

02:31:44.160 | It is presence.

02:31:45.500 | And by experience, people have to be very careful

02:31:47.340 | 'cause I'm not talking about being an observer.

02:31:49.120 | It's the, you know, there's lots of words for it.

02:31:51.380 | There's direct experience.

02:31:53.000 | There is presence, being, the life world

02:31:57.860 | within the philosophy called phenomenology.

02:31:59.680 | There's the life world.

02:32:00.520 | It's this sort of raw presence

02:32:03.160 | that you can't get away from until you die.

02:32:05.020 | And then who the hell knows, you know?

02:32:06.300 | That like, you know, as long as you're around, it's there.

02:32:08.920 | And what we're saying is that that is the,

02:32:11.260 | the way to say this,

02:32:12.100 | that is the precondition for the possibility of science.

02:32:17.100 | And the whole nature of science,

02:32:19.380 | the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out.

02:32:23.620 | It pushed that out so it could make progress.

02:32:26.420 | And that's fine for a certain class of problems.

02:32:29.180 | But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper,

02:32:33.100 | there's a whole other class of problems.

02:32:34.860 | The nature of consciousness, the nature of time,

02:32:37.660 | quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us.

02:32:40.340 | And that if we don't learn how to take,

02:32:43.740 | understand that that is always the background,

02:32:45.940 | that experience is always the background,

02:32:47.940 | then we just end up with these paradoxes and prop,

02:32:50.220 | these yoga that require this intellectual yoga

02:32:52.860 | to get out of.

02:32:53.700 | - I think you give a bunch of examples of that,

02:32:55.280 | like looking at temperature as a number.

02:32:57.700 | There's a very sort of objective scientific way

02:32:59.460 | of looking at that.

02:33:00.300 | And then there's the experience of the temperature.

02:33:02.180 | - And how you build the parable of temperature

02:33:04.180 | that we call it.

02:33:05.620 | So what is the blind spot?

02:33:07.060 | We use the term, it's a constellation.

02:33:08.860 | It's not just materialism.

02:33:10.180 | It's a constellation of ideas

02:33:11.500 | that are all really sort of philosophical views.

02:33:13.740 | They're not what science says,

02:33:15.660 | but because of the evolution of the history of science

02:33:18.460 | and culture, they got like pin the tail on a donkey.

02:33:21.180 | They were sort of pinned on and to tell us

02:33:23.920 | that this is what science says.

02:33:24.980 | So what is it?

02:33:25.820 | One is reductionism, that you are nothing

02:33:28.080 | but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry,

02:33:32.120 | which is nothing but, all the way down to quarks, that's it.

02:33:35.180 | So that's reductionism.

02:33:36.380 | The objective frame that science gives us this God's eye view

02:33:39.300 | this third person view of the world

02:33:41.340 | to view the world from the outside,

02:33:43.620 | that that's what science bequeaths to us that view.

02:33:46.680 | Physicalism, that everything in the world

02:33:48.700 | is basically made of stuff.

02:33:50.800 | There's nothing else to talk about, right?

02:33:52.900 | That that's all there is

02:33:54.100 | and everything can be reduced to that.

02:33:55.820 | And then also the reification of mathematics

02:33:57.500 | that mathematics is somehow more real than this.

02:34:01.180 | And there's a bunch of other things,

02:34:02.220 | but all these together, what they all do

02:34:04.620 | is they end up pushing experience out

02:34:06.920 | and saying experience is an epiphenomena.

02:34:09.180 | Consciousness, I tend not to use the word consciousness

02:34:12.060 | 'cause I think it gets, you know,

02:34:14.020 | it leads us in the wrong direction.

02:34:15.460 | We should focus on experience 'cause it's a verb

02:34:18.180 | kind of in a way or it's verb-like.

02:34:20.720 | So yeah, and that this, by being blind to that,

02:34:24.300 | we end up with these paradoxes and problems

02:34:27.420 | that really not only block science,

02:34:29.760 | but also have been detrimental to society as a whole,

02:34:31.760 | especially where we're at right now.

02:34:33.460 | - So you actually say that that,

02:34:35.500 | from a perspective of detrimental society,

02:34:37.620 | that there's a crisis of meaning

02:34:39.660 | and that we respond to that in a way

02:34:42.620 | that's counterproductive to these bigger questions,

02:34:44.840 | scientific questions.

02:34:46.260 | So the three ways, the three responses you mentioned

02:34:48.860 | is scientific triumphalism.

02:34:52.220 | And then on the other side is rejecting science completely,

02:34:55.120 | both on the left and the right, I think.

02:34:57.180 | The postmodernists on the left

02:34:58.700 | and the anti-establishment people on the right.

02:35:01.540 | And then just pseudoscience

02:35:02.980 | that kind of does this in-between thing.

02:35:04.980 | Can you just speak to those responses

02:35:07.420 | and to the crisis of meaning?

02:35:08.800 | - Right, right.

02:35:09.640 | So the crisis of meaning is that,

02:35:11.100 | on the one hand, science wants to tell us

02:35:14.820 | that we're insignificant, we're not important,

02:35:16.540 | we're just biological machines.

02:35:18.520 | So we're basically an insignificant part of the universe.

02:35:23.220 | On the other hand, we also find ourselves

02:35:25.380 | being completely significant.

02:35:27.260 | In cosmology, we have to figure out

02:35:28.960 | how to look from the inside at cosmology.

02:35:32.340 | We're always the observers.

02:35:33.460 | We're at the center of this collapsing wave front of light.

02:35:38.100 | You know, in quantum mechanics, it really comes in.

02:35:40.160 | It comes in, you know, the measurement problem

02:35:41.780 | just puts us front and center.

02:35:43.100 | We've spent 100, some people have spent 100 years

02:35:44.940 | trying to ignore the measurement part

02:35:46.660 | of the measurement problem.

02:35:47.700 | So on the one hand, we're insignificant,

02:35:49.340 | and on the other hand, we're central.

02:35:50.820 | So which one is it, right?

02:35:52.900 | And so this all comes from not understanding

02:35:55.700 | actually the foundational role of experience,

02:35:57.760 | this inability, we can't do science

02:36:01.300 | without already being present in the world.

02:36:03.760 | We can't reduce what happens in science

02:36:06.540 | to some sort of formal, a lot of it is about,

02:36:08.780 | we love our formal systems, you know, our mathematics,

02:36:11.460 | and we're substituting.

02:36:12.700 | That's one of the things that we,

02:36:14.540 | there's two philosophers we really like who are heroes.

02:36:17.020 | One is Herschel, who is a mathematician

02:36:20.220 | who invented phenomenology, and the other is Whitehead,

02:36:23.860 | who was one of the greatest mathematicians

02:36:25.620 | of the 20th century.

02:36:27.620 | And Herschel came up with this idea

02:36:28.820 | of the surreptitious substitution.

02:36:30.620 | Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system,

02:36:34.220 | a calculus of, you know, data for actual experience,

02:36:37.580 | that that's more important than,

02:36:39.820 | and so let me just do,

02:36:40.660 | before I go to those three responses,

02:36:42.520 | let's just do the parable of temperature,

02:36:43.900 | 'cause I think it'll, people can,

02:36:45.560 | it'll help them understand what we mean.

02:36:48.280 | So think about degrees Celsius, right?

02:36:51.500 | We kind of have, in the modern scientific culture we live in,

02:36:54.060 | we think like, oh yeah, degrees Celsius, they're out there.

02:36:56.220 | The universe, it's, you know, the molecular cloud in space

02:36:59.220 | is 10 degrees, you know, Kelvin.

02:37:02.540 | The way we got there is we've forgotten

02:37:05.740 | how that idea is rooted in experience, right?

02:37:09.020 | We started off with science by,

02:37:10.900 | we had the experience,

02:37:11.740 | the subjective experience of hot and cold.

02:37:13.500 | I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold.

02:37:17.260 | Science was this process of trying to extract

02:37:20.260 | from those experiences what Michel Bitbol, a philosopher,

02:37:23.640 | calls the structural invariance,

02:37:25.200 | the things that like we could both kind of agree on.

02:37:28.120 | So, you know, we figured out like,

02:37:29.560 | oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder

02:37:31.900 | that's got mercury in it.

02:37:32.940 | And that, you know, hot things will be higher in that,

02:37:36.780 | you know, on that gradiated cylinder,

02:37:38.300 | cold things will be lower.

02:37:39.860 | And we can both kind of figure out

02:37:41.180 | what we're gonna agree on our standards for that.

02:37:43.720 | And then we have thermometry, yay.

02:37:46.220 | We have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant

02:37:48.780 | of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold.

02:37:53.220 | And then from that,

02:37:54.060 | we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera.

02:37:56.020 | And then we end up as at the bottom of,

02:37:58.580 | you know, at the end of that,

02:37:59.740 | with this idea of like every day I wake up

02:38:01.220 | and I check my phone and I'm like,

02:38:02.300 | oh, it's gonna be, you know, 60 degrees out, great.

02:38:04.700 | And we start thinking that 60 degrees

02:38:06.740 | is more real than hot and cold.

02:38:08.900 | That thermodynamics,

02:38:09.780 | the whole formal structure of thermodynamics

02:38:12.360 | is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold

02:38:16.100 | that it came from.

02:38:18.100 | You know, it required that bodily experience

02:38:22.260 | that also, not just me, you, I have to tell, you know,

02:38:24.700 | it's part of my communication with you,

02:38:25.980 | cold today, isn't it, right?

02:38:27.600 | That from that basic irreducible experience

02:38:31.080 | of being in the world, you know,

02:38:32.900 | with everything that it involves,

02:38:34.300 | I developed degrees Celsius,

02:38:36.740 | but then I forgot about it.

02:38:38.060 | I forgot the experience.

02:38:39.140 | So that's called the amnesia of experience.

02:38:41.380 | So that's what we mean by the, you know,

02:38:44.560 | how the blind spot emerges, how we end up,

02:38:47.140 | how science purposely pushes experience out of the way

02:38:49.900 | so it can make progress,

02:38:51.100 | but then it forgets that experience was important.

02:38:54.780 | So where does this show up?

02:38:55.620 | Why is this, you know,

02:38:57.060 | what are the responses to trying to get this back in

02:38:59.420 | and where this crisis of meaning emerge?

02:39:01.840 | So scientific triumphalism is the idea that only,

02:39:04.820 | the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths,

02:39:07.760 | right, unless it can be codified in a formal system

02:39:10.640 | and represented as data, you know,

02:39:12.680 | captured in some kind of scientific causal network,

02:39:16.760 | it doesn't even exist, right?

02:39:18.100 | And anything else that's not part of it,

02:39:21.280 | part that can be formalized in that way

02:39:23.080 | is an epiphenomenon, it's not real.

02:39:25.480 | So, you know, scientific triumphalism is this response

02:39:29.400 | to the mist, you know, the weirdness of,

02:39:32.160 | you know, I could call it the mystery,

02:39:33.040 | the weirdness of experience

02:39:34.240 | by kind of just ignoring it completely.

02:39:36.100 | So there's no other truth, you know, art, music,

02:39:39.980 | you know, human spirituality,

02:39:41.520 | it's all actually reducible just to neural correlates.

02:39:45.440 | So that's one way that it's been dealt with.

02:39:47.660 | The other way is this sort of, right,

02:39:48.880 | you've got on the postmodern, you know,

02:39:51.540 | the left, academic left,

02:39:52.840 | you get this thing like science is just a game,

02:39:54.840 | you know, it's just a game from the powerful come up with,

02:39:59.000 | which is also not true.

02:39:59.900 | Science is totally potent and requires an account

02:40:02.920 | for what is happening.

02:40:04.460 | So that's another way to push sort of science away

02:40:07.080 | or respond to it.

02:40:08.080 | The denial, science denial that happens,

02:40:10.120 | that's also another way of sort of, you know,

02:40:12.880 | not understanding the balance that science is trying,

02:40:16.600 | that we need to establish with experience.

02:40:18.960 | And then there's just pseudoscience,

02:40:20.260 | which wants to sort of say like, oh, you know,

02:40:22.200 | the new age movement or whatever,

02:40:23.840 | which wants to have, you know,

02:40:25.440 | wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it

02:40:27.880 | in this weird pseudo-spiritual way,

02:40:29.800 | or, you know, that doesn't have the rigor of science.

02:40:33.580 | So, you know, all of these ways, all of these responses,

02:40:36.760 | we have this difficulty about experience.

02:40:39.140 | We need to understand how experience

02:40:41.800 | fits into the web of meaning.

02:40:43.580 | And we don't really have an accurate,

02:40:46.320 | we don't have a good way of doing it yet.

02:40:47.520 | And the point of the book was to identify very clearly

02:40:50.400 | how the problem manifests, what the problem is,

02:40:52.780 | and what its effects are in the various sciences.

02:40:55.800 | - And by the way, we should mention that

02:40:57.900 | at least the first two responses,

02:41:01.280 | they kind of feed each other.

02:41:02.920 | There's a, just to observe the scientific community,

02:41:06.080 | those who sort of gravitate a little bit

02:41:08.320 | towards the scientific triumphalism,

02:41:11.860 | they, there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul.

02:41:16.860 | If you, I mean, it has to do with PhDs,

02:41:19.760 | it has to do with sitting on the academic throne,

02:41:21.720 | all of those things, and the human nature

02:41:24.320 | with the egos and so on, it builds.

02:41:26.080 | And of course that, nobody likes arrogance.

02:41:28.560 | And so those that reject science,

02:41:31.000 | the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.

02:41:33.440 | - I absolutely agree.

02:41:34.280 | - It just goes back, and it's just this divide that builds.

02:41:37.360 | - Yeah, no, and that was a problem.

02:41:38.220 | Like when you saw, so like I said, you know,

02:41:39.480 | my first book was about science and human spirituality.

02:41:42.040 | So I was trying to say that like, you know,

02:41:43.760 | science is actually, if we look at what happens

02:41:46.960 | in human spirituality, not religion,

02:41:48.400 | religion's about politics, right?

02:41:50.200 | But about, you know, for the entire history of the species,

02:41:52.360 | we've had this experience of, for lack of a better word,

02:41:55.600 | the sacredness.

02:41:56.600 | I'm not connecting this God or anything.

02:41:58.280 | I'm just saying this experience of like the more.

02:42:01.200 | And then, you know, with the new atheist movement,

02:42:03.280 | you got people saying that like,

02:42:05.120 | anybody who feels that is an idiot.

02:42:07.240 | You know, they just can't handle the hardcore science,

02:42:11.000 | when in fact their views of the world are so denuded of,

02:42:15.520 | they can't even see the role that experience plays

02:42:17.680 | in how they came up with their formal systems.

02:42:19.800 | You know, and experience fundamentally is weird.

02:42:21.920 | You know, mysterious.

02:42:22.880 | It's like, it kind of goes down forever in some sense.

02:42:26.080 | There is always more.

02:42:27.240 | So yeah, that arrogance then just,

02:42:28.680 | if you're telling everybody who's not hardcore enough

02:42:31.640 | to do the, you know, standard model of cosmology,

02:42:33.960 | that they're idiots, that's not gonna bode well

02:42:35.840 | for your, you know, the advance of your project.

02:42:37.920 | - So you're proposing at least to consider the idea

02:42:40.800 | that experience is fundamental.

02:42:43.880 | Experience is not just an illusion

02:42:46.280 | that emerges from the set of quirks.

02:42:48.760 | There could be something about the conscious experience

02:42:51.960 | of the world that is like at the core of reality.

02:42:56.040 | - Yeah, but I wouldn't do it.

02:42:57.100 | I wouldn't, 'cause you know, there's panpsychism, right?

02:42:58.840 | Which wants to say that-- - Right, so that's

02:42:59.680 | all the way there.

02:43:00.720 | - Yeah. - Panpsychism is like,

02:43:02.160 | that's literally one of the laws of physics.

02:43:04.120 | - Right, right. - It's conscious.

02:43:04.960 | - But see, what all those do is like,

02:43:07.240 | just the idea of say like physicalism versus idealism,

02:43:10.300 | which are kind of the two philosophical schools

02:43:12.040 | you can go with.

02:43:12.880 | Physicalism says all that exists is physical.

02:43:14.640 | Idealism says all that exists is mind.

02:43:16.800 | We're actually saying, look, both of these,

02:43:19.120 | to take either of those positions is already to project out

02:43:22.880 | into that third-person view, right?

02:43:25.320 | And that third-person view we wanna really emphasize

02:43:28.080 | is a fiction.

02:43:29.720 | It's a useful fiction when you're doing science, right?

02:43:31.960 | If I wanna do like, you know, the Newtonian physics

02:43:34.820 | of billiard balls on a pool table, great.

02:43:37.800 | I don't wanna have to think about experience at all, right?

02:43:40.120 | But you know, if I'm asking deeper questions,

02:43:42.640 | I can't ignore the fact that there really is

02:43:44.760 | no third-person view, and that any story I tell

02:43:47.920 | about the world is coming from,

02:43:50.800 | it's not just first-person, but it's literally,

02:43:52.720 | 'cause I'm gonna argue that experience

02:43:54.520 | always involves all of us.

02:43:56.160 | Experience always originates out of a community.

02:43:58.800 | That, you know, you're always telling those stories

02:44:02.080 | from the perspective of already existing,

02:44:05.400 | of already being in experience.

02:44:07.160 | So whatever account we wanna give of the world

02:44:11.280 | is gonna have to take that experience

02:44:13.640 | as being irreducible, and the irreducible starting point.

02:44:16.800 | So ultimately, like, we don't have an answer.

02:44:19.160 | Like, that's when people are like,

02:44:20.120 | "Well, what are you suggesting as your alternative?"

02:44:22.000 | It's like, look, that's the good work

02:44:23.160 | of the next science to come.

02:44:24.400 | Well, our job was to point out the problem with this.

02:44:27.360 | But what we would argue with is,

02:44:28.640 | and we're thinking about the next book,

02:44:30.120 | is this is really gonna require

02:44:31.520 | a new conception of nature, right?

02:44:34.080 | That doesn't sort of jump right to that third-person,

02:44:36.680 | that fictional third-person view,

02:44:38.440 | and somehow figures out how to do science,

02:44:40.960 | recognizing that it always starts from experience.

02:44:44.200 | It always starts from this field of experience,

02:44:46.320 | or in phenomenology, the word is the life world,

02:44:49.440 | that you're embedded in.

02:44:50.560 | You can't un-embed yourself from it.

02:44:52.520 | So how do you do, so one of the things

02:44:55.680 | that Whitehead said was, you know,

02:44:56.960 | we have to avoid the bifurcation of nature.

02:44:59.560 | And what he meant by that is the bifurcation

02:45:01.520 | into like sort of scientific concepts,

02:45:04.040 | wavelength, you know, think about like seeing a sunset.

02:45:06.800 | You can say like, oh, look, it's just wavelengths,

02:45:08.560 | you know, and scattering particles.

02:45:10.240 | And your experience of the redness,

02:45:12.040 | the actual experience of the redness,

02:45:13.640 | and all the other things, it's not just red,

02:45:15.480 | there's no qualia, there's no pure redness.

02:45:17.600 | Everything that's happening in the experiential part

02:45:19.720 | is just an epiphenomena.

02:45:20.880 | It's just, you know, brain states, whatever.

02:45:23.200 | He said you can't do that.

02:45:24.440 | They're just, they're both real.

02:45:26.300 | They're both accounts, they both need to be integrated.

02:45:29.920 | And so that required, I think,

02:45:31.680 | a really different conception of what we mean by nature.

02:45:34.480 | - Is it something like incorporating in the physics,

02:45:39.240 | in the study of nature, the observer,

02:45:41.120 | the experiencing observer,

02:45:42.480 | or is that still also looking from a third person?

02:45:45.000 | - I think that that's what we have to figure out, right?

02:45:46.920 | And so actually, you know, a great place

02:45:48.080 | to think about this is quantum mechanics, right?

02:45:50.000 | 'Cause one of the things we're arguing is like,

02:45:51.480 | look, in the chapter that I wrote on,

02:45:55.000 | 'cause it was, I wrote this with Evan Thompson,

02:45:56.840 | who's a wonderful philosopher,

02:45:58.240 | and Marcelo Gleiser, who's a theoretical physicist.

02:46:00.840 | When I was writing the chapter

02:46:01.880 | on the origin of the blind spot,

02:46:03.160 | like, you know, sort of what,

02:46:04.000 | how this emerged out of history,

02:46:06.320 | my, the subheader was like,

02:46:07.920 | well, it made sense at the time, 'cause it did.

02:46:10.360 | You know, it really, there was a reason why

02:46:12.360 | people adopted this third person,

02:46:14.040 | God's eye, deterministic view.

02:46:16.440 | This view of sort of like,

02:46:17.280 | yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe,

02:46:20.000 | yeah, totally made sense.

02:46:21.280 | But by the time you got to the beginning

02:46:22.440 | of the 20th century, science itself was telling you like,

02:46:25.680 | eh, eh, and no place does this appear

02:46:27.920 | more than in quantum mechanics, right?

02:46:29.760 | Quantum mechanics slams you with the idea that the,

02:46:34.520 | of the measurement problem, you know?

02:46:36.800 | The most important thing about quantum mechanics

02:46:38.480 | is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation,

02:46:41.960 | which, you know, you put in,

02:46:42.800 | like we talked about before, you have initial conditions,

02:46:44.920 | and now you've got a differential equation,

02:46:46.280 | and you crank out the differential equation,

02:46:47.960 | and it makes predictions for the future, right?

02:46:49.880 | Exactly like Newtonian physics,

02:46:51.640 | or its higher versions of Lagrange or Hamiltonians.

02:46:55.800 | But then this other thing happens where it's like,

02:46:57.640 | oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it,

02:47:00.400 | as soon as the measurement is made,

02:47:02.320 | I have a whole nother set of rules for you.

02:47:04.400 | You know, that's the Born, what we call the Born rule.

02:47:07.240 | And it was telling you right from the beginning

02:47:09.000 | that measurement matters, right?

02:47:11.720 | So when you're asking like, how will we do this?

02:47:14.560 | Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.

02:47:17.120 | So, you know, there's been all these different

02:47:18.480 | interpretations of the quantum mechanics.

02:47:19.880 | Many of them try to pretend

02:47:21.760 | the measurement problem isn't there,

02:47:23.240 | go to enormous lengths,

02:47:24.600 | like the many worlds interpretation,

02:47:27.040 | literally inventing an infinite number

02:47:29.080 | of unobservable parallel universes

02:47:31.680 | to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them,

02:47:34.280 | which is that measurements matter.

02:47:36.080 | And then you get something like cubism,

02:47:37.600 | which is I'm gonna advocate for,

02:47:39.240 | is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics,

02:47:41.280 | which puts the Born rule at the center, right?

02:47:43.960 | Instead of like focusing on the Schrodinger equation

02:47:46.280 | and the weird things that come out of it,

02:47:47.440 | like Schrodinger's cat and all that other stuff,

02:47:49.360 | it says, no, no, actually the real mystery

02:47:51.600 | is the Born rule, let's think about the Born rule.

02:47:54.520 | And like you said, that puts the agent,

02:47:57.280 | the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.

02:48:01.240 | - So that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of,

02:48:03.360 | that's the thing you're trying to integrate

02:48:05.120 | at the center of the thing.

02:48:06.120 | And in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious,

02:48:08.480 | but maybe this same kind of thing

02:48:12.640 | should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature.

02:48:17.640 | - Absolutely, that's exactly it.

02:48:20.840 | So one of the things that's really interesting to me,

02:48:22.280 | so I have a project, I'm part of a big project

02:48:25.760 | that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pannier on cubism,

02:48:28.960 | so I've been part of that.

02:48:29.800 | And what I've been amazed by is the language they use.

02:48:33.040 | So what's cool about cubism

02:48:34.320 | is it comes from quantum information theory.

02:48:36.040 | It's a pretty modern version

02:48:37.680 | of thinking about quantum mechanics.

02:48:39.360 | And it's always about, you have an agent

02:48:43.440 | who makes an action on the world,

02:48:47.120 | and then the information they get from that action

02:48:49.600 | through the experiment, that's the action in the world,

02:48:51.920 | updates their priors, updates their Bayesian,

02:48:55.440 | that's why it's called cubism, quantum Bayesianism,

02:48:58.400 | updates how the information they've gotten from the world.

02:49:01.480 | Now, this turns out to be kind of the same language

02:49:04.160 | that we're using in a project

02:49:05.840 | that's about the physics of life,

02:49:08.460 | where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation

02:49:11.200 | to look at semantic information

02:49:12.880 | and the role of semantic information

02:49:15.240 | in living systems like cells.

02:49:16.760 | So we have Shannon information,

02:49:18.540 | which is a probability distribution

02:49:20.280 | that tells you basically how much surprise there is

02:49:23.360 | in a message.

02:49:24.760 | Semantic information focuses on meaning, right?

02:49:28.060 | Focuses on, and in a very simple way,

02:49:30.080 | just like what is, how much of the information

02:49:32.640 | that the agent, the critter, is getting from the world

02:49:37.280 | actually helps it survive, right?

02:49:40.980 | That's the most basic idea of meaning, right?

02:49:42.800 | We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it.

02:49:44.800 | Does it help me stay alive or not?

02:49:46.720 | And the whole question of agency and autonomy

02:49:50.880 | that occurs in this setting of just asking about

02:49:53.520 | how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food

02:49:57.440 | kind of has the same feel, the same sort of architecture

02:50:01.280 | as what's going on in quantum mechanics.

02:50:02.800 | So I think what you said is exactly it.

02:50:04.440 | How do we bring this sort of recognition

02:50:07.000 | that there's always us, the agent,

02:50:10.480 | or life, the agent, interacting with the world

02:50:14.400 | and drawing it, both giving information

02:50:16.160 | and passing information back as a way of doing science,

02:50:19.960 | doing hardcore science with experiments,

02:50:21.860 | but never forgetting that agency,

02:50:23.880 | which also means experience in some sense,

02:50:25.880 | is at the center of the whole thing.

02:50:27.300 | - So you think there could be something like cubism,

02:50:30.160 | quantum Bayesianism, that creates a theory

02:50:35.160 | like a Nobel Prize winning theory,

02:50:37.000 | sort of like hardcore real theories

02:50:40.960 | that put the agent at the center.

02:50:42.960 | - Yes, that's what we're looking for.

02:50:44.400 | I think that is really, that's the exciting part.

02:50:46.680 | And it's a move, you know,

02:50:47.520 | the scientific triumphalist thing says,

02:50:49.440 | you know, we understand why people love this.

02:50:52.360 | Like I have these equations and these equations represent,

02:50:55.360 | you know, there's this platonic ideal that they are,

02:50:57.800 | you know, they exist eternally on their own.

02:51:00.880 | It's kind of quasi-religious, right?

02:51:02.480 | It's sort of like somehow look,

02:51:03.880 | these equations are the, you're reading the mind of God.

02:51:07.020 | But this other approach to me is just as exciting

02:51:09.720 | because what you're saying is there's us and the world,

02:51:12.520 | they're inseparable, right?

02:51:14.080 | It's always us and the world.

02:51:15.800 | And what we're now finding about

02:51:17.080 | is this kind of co-creation, this interaction,

02:51:20.720 | you know, between the agent and the world,

02:51:23.400 | such that these powerful laws of physics

02:51:26.600 | that need an account, like in no way am I saying

02:51:28.280 | these laws aren't important, these laws are amazing,

02:51:30.520 | but they need an account, but not an account that strips,

02:51:34.680 | you know, that turns the experience,

02:51:36.760 | turns the agent into just a, you know, an epiphenomenon,

02:51:40.640 | that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem

02:51:42.800 | as if the agent's not the most important part of the story.

02:51:45.480 | - So if you pull on this thread

02:51:47.080 | and say there's a whole discipline born of this,

02:51:50.840 | putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory,

02:51:54.160 | in a physics theory, like how, is it possible

02:51:57.760 | it just like breaks the whole thing open?

02:52:00.280 | So there's this whole effort of, you know,

02:52:03.380 | unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics

02:52:05.840 | of like coming up with a theory of everything.

02:52:08.080 | What if these are like the tip of the iceberg?

02:52:13.080 | What if the agent thing is like really important?

02:52:18.760 | - So, you know, listen, that would be like kind of my dream.

02:52:22.480 | I'm not gonna be the one to do it

02:52:23.680 | because I'm not smart enough to do it.

02:52:25.560 | But, you know, Marcello and I have for a while

02:52:27.440 | have been sort of critical of where foundational physics

02:52:30.760 | has been for a while with string theory.

02:52:32.680 | I've spent my whole life listening to talks

02:52:34.920 | about string theory real soon, you know,

02:52:37.460 | and it's gotten ever more disconnected

02:52:42.080 | from, you know, data observations.

02:52:45.360 | There were people talking for a while

02:52:46.480 | that it's post-empirical, and I always wanted to write

02:52:50.400 | a paper or an article that was like,

02:52:52.720 | physicists have been smoking their own stash, right?

02:52:55.320 | There's this way we've gotten used to like, you know,

02:52:56.760 | you have to outweird the other person.

02:52:58.960 | We're like, my theory is 38 dimensions.

02:53:01.160 | My theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, you know,

02:53:03.760 | psychedelic squirrels in it.

02:53:07.360 | And so there's been a problem, there's a problem.

02:53:08.880 | Now, I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics

02:53:11.840 | or there's a crisis in cosmology.

02:53:13.240 | Other people have used that.

02:53:14.440 | That's been the headline on scientific American stories.

02:53:18.080 | So there clearly another direction has to be found,

02:53:20.760 | and maybe it has nothing to do with this,

02:53:22.600 | but I suspect that because so many times the agent

02:53:27.600 | or the having to deal with the view from the inside

02:53:33.400 | or the role of agency, like when it comes to time,

02:53:36.920 | thinking that you can replace the block universe

02:53:40.260 | with the actual experience of time, you know,

02:53:43.480 | clocks don't tell time, we use clocks to tell time.

02:53:46.840 | So it may be that even like the fundamental nature of time

02:53:48.960 | can't be viewed from the outside,

02:53:50.720 | that there's a new physics theory that is gonna come from,

02:53:54.120 | that comes from this agential,

02:53:56.160 | informational, computational view.

02:53:59.380 | I don't know, but that's kind of what I think

02:54:01.880 | it would be fertile ground to explore.

02:54:05.760 | - Yeah, time is a really interesting one.

02:54:08.320 | This time is really important to us humans.

02:54:10.980 | What is time?

02:54:12.160 | - Yeah, that's right, what is time?

02:54:14.080 | So the way we have tended to view it is we've taken,

02:54:16.740 | this is what when Herschel talks about

02:54:18.120 | the surreptitious substitution,

02:54:20.400 | we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful,

02:54:23.800 | formal system for viewing time,

02:54:27.360 | and we substituted that

02:54:30.120 | for the actual experience of time, right?

02:54:33.080 | So the block universe,

02:54:34.040 | where like next Tuesday is already written down,

02:54:36.280 | you know, in the block universe,

02:54:37.640 | the four dimensional universe,

02:54:38.600 | all events are already there,

02:54:40.400 | which is very potent for making

02:54:42.120 | certain kinds of predictions within the sort of,

02:54:44.300 | you know, the scientific framework.

02:54:46.240 | But, you know, it is not lived time.

02:54:49.920 | And, you know, this was pointed out to Einstein,

02:54:52.240 | and he eventually recognized it.

02:54:54.180 | Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson,

02:54:56.920 | who was the most famous philosopher of like the,

02:54:59.160 | you know, early 20th century, and Einstein,

02:55:02.280 | where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity,

02:55:04.440 | and Bergson, whose whole thing was about time

02:55:06.560 | and was about duration.

02:55:07.720 | He wanted to separate the scientific image of time,

02:55:12.120 | the map of time, from the actual terrain,

02:55:15.940 | which he used the word duration.

02:55:17.600 | Like we humans, where duration for us is full,

02:55:21.320 | it's sort of, it's stretched out.

02:55:23.320 | It's got a little bit of the past,

02:55:24.440 | a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present.

02:55:25.860 | Music is the best example, right?

02:55:27.560 | You're hearing music,

02:55:28.640 | you're both already anticipating what's gonna happen,

02:55:31.140 | and you're, you know, remembering what's going on.

02:55:34.800 | There's a kind of phenomenal structure there,

02:55:38.320 | which is different from the representation of time

02:55:41.860 | that you have with the formal mathematics.

02:55:43.940 | And what, you know, the way we would look at this

02:55:46.880 | is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution,

02:55:49.360 | the problem with the blind spot,

02:55:50.920 | is it says, oh, no, no, the formal system is time.

02:55:54.200 | But really the only place time appears is with us, right?

02:55:57.200 | Where we're time, you know.

02:55:58.440 | So having a theory that actually could start with us,

02:56:01.920 | you know, and then stretch out into the universe,

02:56:03.880 | rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view

02:56:07.560 | back on us, you know, could,

02:56:10.040 | that's a route towards a different way

02:56:12.640 | of approaching the whole problem.

02:56:13.600 | - I just wonder, who is the observer?

02:56:15.040 | I mean, defying what the agent is.

02:56:16.860 | - Right.

02:56:17.700 | - In any kind of frame is difficult.

02:56:20.600 | - Is difficult, right?

02:56:21.520 | And so that, but that's the good work

02:56:22.840 | of the science ahead of us, right?

02:56:24.640 | So what happened with this idea

02:56:25.640 | of the structural invariance I was talking about?

02:56:27.480 | So, you know, we start with experience,

02:56:28.840 | which is irreducible.

02:56:29.760 | There's no atoms of experience, right?

02:56:31.560 | It's a whole.

02:56:33.120 | And we go through the whole process,

02:56:34.360 | which is a communal process, by the way.

02:56:35.880 | There's a philosopher, Robert Crease,

02:56:37.200 | who talks about the workshop.

02:56:38.840 | That starting in like the 1700s, 1600s,

02:56:41.260 | we developed this communal space to work in.

02:56:45.540 | Sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory,

02:56:48.200 | where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined,

02:56:50.800 | argued over, and then validated,

02:56:53.000 | and we went to the next step.

02:56:54.780 | So this idea of pulling out from experience,

02:56:57.360 | these thinner, abstract, structural invariance,

02:57:01.500 | the things that we could actually do science with.

02:57:03.640 | And it's kind of like,

02:57:04.480 | we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction, right?

02:57:07.580 | So the problem with the way we do things now

02:57:10.180 | is we take that, those abstractions,

02:57:14.060 | which came from experience,

02:57:15.380 | and then with something like, you know,

02:57:16.660 | a computational model of consciousness or experience,

02:57:21.420 | we think we can put it back in.

02:57:22.860 | Like you literally pulled out these super thin things,

02:57:25.740 | these abstractions, you know, neglecting experience,

02:57:29.180 | because that's the only way to do science.

02:57:30.780 | And then you think somehow,

02:57:31.620 | oh, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna jam experience back in,

02:57:33.940 | and, you know, have an explanation for experience.

02:57:36.780 | - So do you think it's possible to show

02:57:38.180 | that something like free will is quote-unquote real,

02:57:41.900 | if you integrate experience back into this physics,

02:57:44.500 | into the physics model of the world?

02:57:46.140 | - What I would say is that free will is a given,

02:57:49.580 | and that's the thing about experience, right?

02:57:50.840 | So one of the things that Whitehead said,

02:57:52.760 | I really love this quote,

02:57:53.600 | he says, "It's not the job of either science or philosophy

02:57:57.020 | to account for the concrete.

02:57:59.180 | It's the job to account for the abstract."

02:58:01.660 | The concrete, what's happening between us right now,

02:58:05.420 | is just given, you know, it's just, it's presented to us.

02:58:08.820 | Every day, it's presented to me.

02:58:10.660 | If you want an explanation, fine,

02:58:11.940 | but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it.

02:58:14.480 | Right?

02:58:15.320 | So that free will, in some sense,

02:58:16.660 | is the nature of being an agent, right?

02:58:18.200 | To be an agent, agency and autonomy

02:58:20.700 | are sort of the two things that are, you know,

02:58:23.140 | they're equivalent.

02:58:24.220 | And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous.

02:58:27.260 | And so then the question really to ask is,

02:58:29.220 | can you have an account for agency and autonomy

02:58:32.980 | that captures aspects of its arising in the world,

02:58:37.980 | or the way it and the world sort of co-arise?

02:58:41.640 | But the idea, you know,

02:58:42.480 | the reason why we argue about free will often

02:58:44.100 | is because we already have this blind spot view

02:58:46.320 | that the world is deterministic because of our equations,

02:58:49.300 | which themselves, we treat the equations

02:58:51.240 | as if they're more real than experience.

02:58:53.820 | You know, and the equations are a paler, you know,

02:58:56.820 | they don't corral experience.

02:58:58.380 | They are a thinner, you know, representation.

02:59:00.800 | As we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain.

02:59:04.620 | What's happening between us right now in this, you know,

02:59:06.780 | all the weirdness of it, that's the terrain.

02:59:09.100 | The map is what I can write down on equations

02:59:11.020 | and then in the workshop do experiments on.

02:59:13.420 | Super powerful, needs an account,

02:59:15.480 | but experience overflows that.

02:59:17.880 | - What if the experience is an illusion?

02:59:19.980 | Like, how do we know?

02:59:21.940 | What if the agency that we experience is an illusion?

02:59:26.100 | - An illusion, looking from where?

02:59:28.580 | Like, right, 'cause that already requires,

02:59:30.020 | to take that stance, is you've already pushed yourself

02:59:32.460 | into that third-person view, right?

02:59:34.460 | And so what we're saying is that third-person view,

02:59:37.340 | which now you're gonna say like,

02:59:38.180 | oh, I've got a whole other set of entities,

02:59:40.900 | of ontological entities, meaning, you know,

02:59:42.860 | things that I think exist in God's living room

02:59:46.340 | in spite, you know, that are independent of me

02:59:49.260 | and the community of living things I'm part of.

02:59:51.860 | - So you're pushing it elsewhere.

02:59:53.900 | Just like there's a stack of turtles,

02:59:55.340 | it's probably, if this experience,

02:59:59.060 | the human experience is an illusion,

03:00:00.780 | maybe there's an observer for whom it's not an illusion,

03:00:04.140 | so you always have to find an observer somewhere.

03:00:06.180 | - Yeah, right, and that's why, you know,

03:00:07.700 | fundamentally the blind spot,

03:00:09.620 | especially the scientific triumphalist part,

03:00:11.740 | is following a religious impulse, you know?

03:00:14.460 | It's wanting the God's eye view.

03:00:16.620 | And you know what's really interesting?

03:00:17.620 | And when we think about this

03:00:18.540 | and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly,

03:00:21.020 | you know, there's a line of philosophical inquiry

03:00:24.300 | that this language gets couched in,

03:00:26.700 | and it is actually a pretty,

03:00:29.020 | it's only one version of philosophy, right?

03:00:32.620 | So it is pretty much

03:00:33.500 | what we call the analytic tradition, right?

03:00:35.980 | But there's, even in Europe, or in the Western tradition,

03:00:38.900 | and you know, for Western,

03:00:40.140 | what we'll call Western philosophy,

03:00:41.460 | there's phenomenology.

03:00:42.580 | There's Herzog and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty,

03:00:45.020 | which took an entirely different track.

03:00:46.700 | They were really interested in the structure of experience.

03:00:49.300 | They spent all their time trying to understand,

03:00:51.740 | trying to develop a language

03:00:53.300 | that could kind of climb into the circle

03:00:55.580 | that is experience, right?

03:00:57.260 | Experience, you're not gonna be able to start with axioms

03:00:59.180 | and work your way to it.

03:01:00.100 | It's given, so you have to kind of jump in

03:01:02.540 | and then try and find a language

03:01:03.780 | to account for its structure.

03:01:05.900 | But then, so that has not been part of this discussion

03:01:09.020 | about you'll never, good luck finding a YouTube video

03:01:12.860 | where someone, you know, a famous scientist

03:01:14.900 | is talking about science

03:01:16.820 | from a phenomenological point of view,

03:01:18.300 | even though it's a huge branch of philosophy.

03:01:20.780 | And then you get the philosophies

03:01:22.580 | that occurred from other cores of civilization, right?

03:01:25.220 | So there's the Western core,

03:01:27.580 | out of which comes the Greeks and the, you know,

03:01:29.380 | the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition.

03:01:31.700 | But then you get India and you get Asia

03:01:34.180 | and they developed their own.

03:01:35.140 | They were highly complex societies

03:01:36.860 | that developed their own responses to these questions.

03:01:39.940 | And they, for reasons,

03:01:41.580 | 'cause they had contemplative practice,

03:01:43.420 | they were very focused on like direct,

03:01:45.340 | trying to like directly probe attention and experience.

03:01:49.220 | They asked questions in ways that the West never really did.

03:01:52.820 | Phenomenology kind of started it,

03:01:54.340 | but you know, there's philosophers like Nagarjuna

03:01:57.740 | and Vasubandhu, and they were like the Plato

03:01:59.900 | and the, you know, Aristotle of, you know,

03:02:02.220 | sort of those philosophies.

03:02:04.100 | And they were really focused on experience.

03:02:06.060 | In the West, I think maybe because we had

03:02:08.140 | the Judeo-Christian tradition,

03:02:11.240 | where we already had this kind of God

03:02:12.720 | who was gonna be the frame

03:02:13.940 | on which you could always point to that frame.

03:02:16.100 | In the traditions that came from

03:02:18.740 | the classical philosophies of India and Asia,

03:02:22.060 | they started always with,

03:02:23.220 | they wanted to know about experience.

03:02:24.700 | Their whole philosophies and their logic

03:02:26.740 | and their argumentation was based on,

03:02:29.740 | I've got this experience.

03:02:31.060 | I can't get out of this experience.

03:02:32.920 | How do I reason from it?

03:02:34.780 | So I think there's like a lot of other

03:02:35.980 | philosophical traditions that we could draw from.

03:02:38.380 | You know, not like slavishly,

03:02:39.580 | we don't all have to become Buddhists to do it,

03:02:41.380 | but there are traditions that really tried to work this out

03:02:44.300 | in a way that the Western traditions just didn't.

03:02:47.060 | - But there's also the practical fact

03:02:49.100 | that it's difficult to build a logical system

03:02:52.460 | on top of experience.

03:02:53.820 | It's difficult to have the rigor of science

03:02:56.020 | on top of experience.

03:02:57.340 | And so it's, as science advances,

03:03:00.380 | we might get better and better.

03:03:01.340 | Like the same as it's very difficult

03:03:02.940 | to have any kind of mathematical

03:03:05.100 | or kind of scientific rigor to,

03:03:07.340 | why complexity emerges from simple rules

03:03:12.820 | and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions.

03:03:15.660 | - Yeah, but I think we can do it.

03:03:17.020 | I think there's aspects of it.

03:03:18.460 | I mean, as long as you're never trying to like,

03:03:20.220 | this is what experience is.

03:03:21.660 | Like, I think that's kind of the where we're,

03:03:22.740 | you know, you're never gonna have a causal account

03:03:26.740 | of experience 'cause it's just given,

03:03:28.380 | but you can do lots about,

03:03:30.180 | and that's what the good work is,

03:03:31.740 | is to how do I approach this?

03:03:33.300 | How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous

03:03:34.660 | that I can do experiments with also?

03:03:37.100 | But so for example,

03:03:37.940 | I was just reading this beautiful paper

03:03:39.180 | that was talking about in the, you know,

03:03:41.900 | this is what we're accounting

03:03:42.740 | with our semantic information too, causal closure.

03:03:46.220 | Love this idea, right?

03:03:47.820 | The idea that, so we've talked about autopoiesis

03:03:49.740 | a while back, right?

03:03:50.580 | The idea that living systems are,

03:03:54.100 | they are self-creating and self-maintaining.

03:03:57.300 | So the membrane, cell membrane

03:03:58.740 | is a great example of this, right?

03:03:59.820 | The cell membrane, you can't have a cell

03:04:01.820 | without a cell membrane.

03:04:02.900 | The cell membrane lets stuff through,

03:04:05.540 | keeps other stuff out, right?

03:04:07.420 | But the cell membrane is part of the processes

03:04:10.220 | and it's a product of the processes

03:04:13.700 | that the cell membrane needs, right?

03:04:16.580 | In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself.

03:04:20.180 | So there's this strange, it's always with life.

03:04:22.100 | There's always this strange loop.

03:04:24.100 | And so somehow figuring out how to jump

03:04:25.660 | into that strange loop is, you know,

03:04:28.180 | the science that's ahead of us.

03:04:29.220 | And so this idea of causal closure,

03:04:31.220 | accounting for how the, you know,

03:04:33.940 | we talk about like downward causation, right?

03:04:37.940 | So reductionism says everything only depends

03:04:40.060 | on the microstate.

03:04:40.820 | Everything just depends on the atoms, right?

03:04:42.460 | That's it.

03:04:43.300 | If you know the Lagrangian for the standard model,

03:04:46.060 | you're done, you know.

03:04:47.340 | Of course, in principle, you need God's computer,

03:04:49.420 | but fine, you know, in principle, it can be done.

03:04:53.100 | Causal closure, and there's,

03:04:54.260 | I was just reading this great paper

03:04:55.740 | that sort of argues for this.

03:04:57.780 | There's ways in which using Epsilon machines

03:05:00.060 | and all this machinery from information theory

03:05:02.540 | that you can see ways in which the system

03:05:06.100 | can organize itself so that it decouples

03:05:08.740 | from the microstates.

03:05:10.060 | Now the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs

03:05:13.460 | the microstate for its own description,

03:05:15.340 | its own account of the laws.

03:05:17.020 | Whether that paper is true or not,

03:05:18.540 | it's an example of heading down that road.

03:05:20.860 | There's also Robert Rosen's work.

03:05:22.460 | He was a theoretical biologist who he was, you know,

03:05:25.220 | he talked about closure to efficient cause

03:05:27.500 | that living systems, you know, are organizationally closed,

03:05:31.460 | are causally closed so that they don't depend anymore

03:05:34.980 | in the microstate.

03:05:35.820 | And he made the, he had a proof,

03:05:37.100 | which is very contentious.

03:05:38.100 | Nobody knows if it's, you know,

03:05:39.140 | some argue it's true, some argue it's not.

03:05:41.100 | But he said that because of this,

03:05:43.420 | living systems are not Church-Turing complete.

03:05:46.980 | They cannot be represented as formal systems.

03:05:50.100 | So, you know, in that way, they're not axioms.

03:05:52.060 | They're not, living systems will not be axioms.

03:05:55.140 | They can only be partially captured by algorithms.

03:05:58.100 | Now, again, people fight back and forth

03:05:59.940 | about whether or not his proof is valid or not.

03:06:02.540 | But I'm saying, I'm giving you examples of like,

03:06:04.820 | you know, when you see the blind spot,

03:06:08.060 | when you acknowledge the blind spot,

03:06:09.420 | it opens up a whole other class

03:06:10.860 | of kinds of scientific investigations.

03:06:13.380 | You know, the book we thought

03:06:14.460 | was going to be really heretical, right?

03:06:16.100 | You know, obviously, you know,

03:06:17.700 | most public facing scientists are very sort of in that,

03:06:21.380 | especially scientific triumphalism.

03:06:22.580 | So we were just like waiting, you know,

03:06:23.980 | waiting for the fight.

03:06:25.100 | And then the review from science came out

03:06:27.180 | and it was like totally pro, you know,

03:06:30.540 | they was very positive.

03:06:31.780 | We're like, oh my God, you know?

03:06:33.820 | And then a review came out in nature physics

03:06:35.980 | and it was totally positive.

03:06:37.780 | And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal,

03:06:39.980 | 'cause we kind of criticized, not capitalism,

03:06:42.660 | but we criticized sort of all industrial economies

03:06:45.260 | for that they were sort of had been touched

03:06:47.180 | by the blind spot, socialism, communism, doesn't matter.

03:06:49.780 | These extractive, you know,

03:06:51.500 | had sort of had that sort of view

03:06:52.700 | that the world is just reducible to, you know, resources.

03:06:56.620 | The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review.

03:06:59.420 | So it feels like there's actually out there,

03:07:01.860 | there is some, among working scientists in particular,

03:07:04.740 | there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view

03:07:07.860 | and a recognition that we need to shift something

03:07:10.900 | in order to like jump past these hurdles

03:07:13.500 | that we've been arguing about forever.

03:07:15.860 | And we're not, you know, we're sort of stuck in a vortex.

03:07:18.140 | - Well, it is.

03:07:18.980 | I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge

03:07:20.780 | that there's an elephant in the room,

03:07:22.020 | like that we're just removing the agent.

03:07:25.020 | Like it's, everyone is doing it and it's like, yeah, yeah.

03:07:28.180 | There's the experience

03:07:30.980 | and then there's the third person perspective on the world.

03:07:35.140 | And so to, man, science from a,

03:07:38.000 | applying scientific rigor from a first person perspective

03:07:41.580 | is very difficult.

03:07:42.580 | I mean, it's fascinating.

03:07:44.220 | - I think we can do it 'cause it's also the thing,

03:07:46.100 | you know, what's really interesting is this,

03:07:47.340 | I think it's not just first person,

03:07:49.460 | it's first and second, right?

03:07:51.220 | Because science, 'cause when, so like one idea is that,

03:07:54.540 | we, you know, the idea that,

03:07:55.940 | oh, science gives us this objective third person view.

03:07:58.540 | That's one way of talking about objectivity.

03:08:00.420 | There's a whole other way is that I do the experiment,

03:08:02.500 | you do the experiment, we talk to each other,

03:08:04.500 | we agree on methods and we both get the same result.

03:08:07.460 | That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity.

03:08:10.300 | And it acknowledges that, you know,

03:08:13.580 | when we talk about agents,

03:08:15.140 | agency and individuality are flexible, right?

03:08:18.220 | So there's a great paper for speaking of Santa Fe

03:08:20.180 | by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of

03:08:21.820 | information theoretic measures of individuality.

03:08:24.500 | And what you find is it's actually pretty fluid.

03:08:26.380 | Like my liver cell is an individual,

03:08:29.060 | but really it's part of the liver.

03:08:30.380 | And my liver is, you know, a separate system,

03:08:32.740 | but really it's part of me, but I'm,

03:08:34.780 | so I'm an individual, yay,

03:08:36.340 | but actually I'm part of a society.

03:08:38.060 | Like, and I couldn't be me without the entire community

03:08:42.420 | of say language users, right?

03:08:43.780 | I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions.

03:08:46.220 | And my community of language users is part of ecosystems,

03:08:50.020 | right, that are alive, that I am a part of a lineage of,

03:08:52.700 | this is like Sarah Walker's stuff.

03:08:54.300 | And then that,

03:08:55.820 | those ecosystems are part of the biosphere, right?

03:08:58.100 | We're never separable as opposed to this very atomizing,

03:09:01.140 | the triumphal of this science view

03:09:02.860 | is once like Boltzmann brains.

03:09:04.260 | You're just a brain floating in the space, you know?

03:09:07.140 | - Yeah, there's a fascinating degree

03:09:10.300 | to which agency is fluid.

03:09:13.020 | Like you are an individual,

03:09:14.220 | but you and I talking is a kind of individual.

03:09:17.420 | - Yeah.

03:09:18.260 | - And then the person listening to this right now

03:09:22.460 | is also an individual.

03:09:23.540 | - Right.

03:09:24.380 | - I mean, that's a weird thing too.

03:09:25.220 | - That's a weird thing, right?

03:09:26.060 | - Because there's like, there's a broadcast nature too.

03:09:29.220 | - This is why information theoretic.

03:09:30.700 | So the idea that we're pursuing now,

03:09:32.700 | which I get really excited about

03:09:33.780 | is this idea of information architecture, right?

03:09:36.740 | Or organization, informational organization.

03:09:39.020 | Because you know, right?

03:09:39.860 | Physicalism is like, everything's atoms.

03:09:41.820 | But you know, Kant recognized,

03:09:43.220 | Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism

03:09:45.980 | 'cause he recognized that life has a weird organization

03:09:49.460 | that was specifically different from machines.

03:09:52.220 | And so this idea that, how do we engage with the idea

03:09:56.860 | that organization, which is often,

03:09:59.860 | I can be cast in information theoretic terms

03:10:02.820 | or computational terms even,

03:10:05.020 | is sort of, it's not really quite physical, right?

03:10:08.140 | It's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical,

03:10:10.660 | it has to instantiate in the physical,

03:10:12.060 | but it also has this other realm of design, you know,

03:10:16.180 | and some not design like intelligent design,

03:10:17.940 | but there's a, you know,

03:10:19.100 | organization itself is a relationship of constraints

03:10:21.900 | and information flow.

03:10:22.980 | And I think, again, that's an entirely new,

03:10:25.300 | interesting way that we might get

03:10:26.580 | a very different kind of science

03:10:27.820 | that would flow out of that.

03:10:29.700 | - So going back to Kant and organism versus machine.

03:10:34.700 | So I showed you a couple of legged robots.

03:10:40.380 | - Very cool.

03:10:41.220 | - Is it possible for machines to have agency?

03:10:44.900 | - I would not discount that possibility.

03:10:48.140 | I think, you know, there's no reason I would say

03:10:52.220 | that it's impossible that machines could,

03:10:54.980 | whatever it manifests, that strange loop

03:10:57.060 | that we're talking about, that autopoiesis,

03:11:00.140 | I don't think there's a reason to say

03:11:01.340 | it can't happen in silicon.

03:11:06.100 | I think whatever it would,

03:11:06.940 | it would be very different from us.

03:11:08.420 | Like the idea that it would be like,

03:11:09.620 | oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated.

03:11:11.780 | I think it might have very different

03:11:13.580 | kind of experiential nature.

03:11:16.660 | I don't think what we have now,

03:11:18.980 | like the LLMs are really there,

03:11:21.680 | but yeah, I'm not gonna say that it's not possible.

03:11:26.140 | - I wonder how far you can get with imitation,

03:11:29.060 | which is essentially what LLMs are doing.

03:11:30.900 | So imitating humans, and I wouldn't discount

03:11:34.500 | either the possibility that through imitation

03:11:36.660 | you can achieve what you would call consciousness

03:11:40.420 | or agency or the ability to have experience.

03:11:44.140 | I think for most of us humans to think,

03:11:45.780 | oh, that's just fake, that's copying.

03:11:48.140 | But there's some degree to which we humans

03:11:51.020 | are just copying each other.

03:11:53.180 | We just are really good imitation machines.

03:11:55.780 | Coming from babies, we were born in this world

03:11:57.660 | and we're just learning to imitate each other.

03:11:59.460 | And through the imitation and the tension

03:12:01.540 | in the disagreements in the imitations,

03:12:03.980 | we gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.

03:12:08.100 | - Yeah.

03:12:08.940 | I think, so it's possible, right?

03:12:11.420 | It's possible.

03:12:12.260 | But I think probably the view I'm advocating

03:12:14.020 | would say that one of the most important parts

03:12:18.260 | of agency is there's something called EFOR,

03:12:22.140 | the EFOR theory of cognition.

03:12:24.260 | Embodiment, inaction, embedding,

03:12:27.340 | and there's another one, extension.

03:12:29.380 | But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body,

03:12:33.580 | which is itself part of an environment

03:12:35.820 | that is the physical nature of it

03:12:39.260 | and of the extension with other living systems as well

03:12:44.220 | is essential.

03:12:46.180 | So that's why I think the LLMs are not gonna,

03:12:48.420 | it's not just imitation, it's gonna require,

03:12:50.420 | this goes to the brain in the vat thing.

03:12:51.820 | I did an article about the brain in the vat,

03:12:53.580 | which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans,

03:12:55.820 | where they did the brain in the vat argument,

03:12:57.900 | but they said, look, in the end, actually,

03:12:59.340 | the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat

03:13:00.900 | is actually to have a brain in a body.

03:13:02.380 | And it could be a robot body, you know,

03:13:04.500 | but you still need a brain in the body.

03:13:05.940 | So I don't think LLMs will get there

03:13:07.940 | because they can't, you know,

03:13:09.260 | you really need to be embedded in a world.

03:13:11.140 | At least that's the E4 idea.

03:13:13.300 | - The E4, the 4E approach to cognition

03:13:15.500 | argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head,

03:13:18.240 | but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended

03:13:22.980 | by way of extracranial processes and structures.

03:13:27.300 | They're very much in vogue.

03:13:28.700 | (laughing)

03:13:29.700 | 4E cognition has received relatively few

03:13:31.820 | critical evaluations, this is a paper,

03:13:34.100 | but reflecting on two recent collections,

03:13:36.420 | this article reviews the 4E paradigm

03:13:38.540 | with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses.

03:13:41.840 | It's fascinating.

03:13:42.680 | I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition

03:13:46.420 | extends far, and it could go real far.

03:13:49.300 | - Right, there's a great story about an interaction

03:13:52.580 | between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist,

03:13:55.060 | you know, the great biologist,

03:13:56.620 | and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist.

03:13:59.460 | And Bateson always loved to poke people.

03:14:01.420 | And he said to Salk, he said, you know,

03:14:03.140 | where's your mind?

03:14:04.320 | And, you know, Salk went, up here, and Bateson said,

03:14:06.860 | no, no, no, out here.

03:14:08.820 | And what he really meant was this extended idea.

03:14:10.780 | It's not just within your cranium, to be, to be,

03:14:14.460 | to have experience, you know, experience in some sense

03:14:16.980 | is not a thing you have, it is a thing you do, right?

03:14:20.980 | It's a, you almost perform it in a way,

03:14:23.300 | which is why both actually having a body,

03:14:26.300 | but having the body itself be in a world

03:14:28.460 | with other bodies is, from this perspective,

03:14:31.780 | is really important.

03:14:32.620 | It's very attractive to me, and, you know, seeing, again,

03:14:34.460 | if we're really gonna do science with them,

03:14:35.700 | we're gonna have to, like, have these ideas

03:14:37.300 | crash up against data, you know, crash up against,

03:14:40.080 | we can't just armchair it, you know, or, you know,

03:14:42.460 | or a quarter, you know, couch quarterbacking it.

03:14:45.820 | But I think there's a lot of possibility here.

03:14:47.540 | It's a very radically different way of looking at,

03:14:50.860 | at what we mean by nature.

03:14:53.100 | - What do you make of the fact that this

03:14:55.340 | individual observer, you as an individual observer,

03:14:58.380 | only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world?

03:15:03.380 | Does it make you sad?

03:15:04.540 | - No, actually, it doesn't make me sad.

03:15:06.620 | So, okay, so, you know, full reveal,

03:15:09.980 | I have been doing contemplative practice

03:15:11.980 | in the Zen tradition for 30 years.

03:15:14.180 | I've been staring at a wall for 30 years.

03:15:16.860 | And it's taught me a lot, right?

03:15:18.300 | You know, I really value what that practice

03:15:21.700 | has given me about the nature of experience.

03:15:25.140 | And one of the things it's taught me is, like, you know,

03:15:26.820 | I don't really matter that very much.

03:15:28.340 | You know, this thing I call Adam Frank is really,

03:15:31.140 | you know, it's kind of a construct, you know?

03:15:33.460 | There's this process going on,

03:15:35.100 | of which I am, actually, fundamentally.

03:15:37.380 | And that's super cool, but, you know, it's gonna go.

03:15:39.820 | I don't, you know, I don't know where it came from.

03:15:41.660 | It's gonna go.

03:15:42.500 | I don't really need it to, you know,

03:15:43.820 | and then, and then who in the hell knows?

03:15:45.460 | You know, I'm not, I'm not an advocate for an afterlife,

03:15:47.540 | but just that, like, you know, what I love,

03:15:49.780 | Zen has this idea of beyond birth and death.

03:15:52.460 | And they don't mean reincarnation.

03:15:53.740 | What they mean is, dude, you don't even really understand

03:15:56.100 | what life is, you know what I mean?

03:15:57.820 | I'm like this, you know, this core level

03:15:59.660 | of your own experience.

03:16:00.860 | So, you know, your ideas about what death is

03:16:02.900 | are equally ill-formed, you know?

03:16:05.500 | And it's, so, you know, the contemplative practice

03:16:08.260 | really tries to focus on experience itself.

03:16:10.460 | Like, spend five days at a Zen session

03:16:14.460 | doing contemplative practice from, you know,

03:16:16.060 | 7 a.m. until 9 p.m., obviously with breaks.

03:16:19.860 | And you'll really get a much deeper understanding

03:16:22.100 | of, like, what my own experience is.

03:16:24.140 | What is it really like?

03:16:24.980 | It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention.

03:16:28.780 | 'Cause, you know, attention is kind of like this thing,

03:16:30.100 | like, it's usually just like, oh, over there,

03:16:31.620 | oh, my foot hurts, oh, I gotta do my taxes,

03:16:33.420 | oh, that, you know, what's that guy over there?

03:16:35.220 | Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?

03:16:37.220 | And with the contemplative practice,

03:16:38.180 | you learn how to stabilize it.

03:16:39.620 | And once you stabilize it, you can now begin

03:16:41.060 | to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it.

03:16:44.220 | So what I think I've learned from that is, like,

03:16:46.780 | kind of whatever, you know?

03:16:48.340 | I'm not really kind of real to begin with.

03:16:50.900 | The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing.

03:16:53.340 | And the part of me that is real is, you know,

03:16:56.060 | everything's coming and going.

03:16:57.060 | It's all coming and going.

03:16:58.100 | Well, how could I ever not come and go

03:17:00.020 | when the entire world is just, you know?

03:17:03.180 | Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising.

03:17:05.780 | Nothing exists, nothing has self nature.

03:17:08.620 | Nothing exists by itself.

03:17:10.060 | It's an endless, infinitely connected web.

03:17:13.860 | - But still, there's a deliciousness

03:17:17.060 | to the individual experience.

03:17:18.780 | You get attached to it, and it ends,

03:17:21.020 | and it's good while it lasts, and it sucks that it ends.

03:17:24.660 | Like, you can be like, ah, well, everything comes and goes,

03:17:27.340 | but, like, I was eating ice cream yesterday.

03:17:31.380 | Found this awesome low-carb ice cream

03:17:33.780 | called Delight's here in Austin.

03:17:36.100 | And, you know, it ends.

03:17:38.580 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:17:39.420 | - And I was like, and I was staring at the empty container,

03:17:41.820 | and it was--

03:17:42.660 | - That's beautiful, man, I love that.

03:17:44.660 | - You could say, like, yeah, well, that's how it all is,

03:17:46.900 | but--

03:17:47.740 | - Can I say that that's what I've learned from,

03:17:49.620 | 'cause I love your idea of the deliciousness of it.

03:17:52.100 | - Yeah.

03:17:52.940 | - You know?

03:17:53.780 | But what I think happens with contemplative practice

03:17:55.980 | when it deepens is that it's not just,

03:17:58.220 | you're not just saying, right?

03:17:59.620 | This is why, you know, so I do koan practice.

03:18:01.940 | So this is a tradition in Zen that it was established,

03:18:04.660 | it was a teaching method that was established,

03:18:06.700 | like, a thousand years ago, these book of koans.

03:18:09.260 | And every koan, you know, if you've ever read

03:18:11.380 | Gödel, Escher, Bach, he's got a whole chapter on koans.

03:18:13.980 | They're kind of non-logical problems

03:18:16.420 | that you have to work on.

03:18:18.140 | One of my favorite one was,

03:18:19.580 | "Stop the sound of the distant temple bell."

03:18:22.980 | You know, you're like, "What?"

03:18:24.460 | Every time my teacher gives it to me, I'm like,

03:18:26.300 | "What are you talking about?"

03:18:27.580 | You know, this whole Zen thing of like,

03:18:29.580 | "Up is down, but down is up, you must understand this."

03:18:32.380 | So, you know, your job with these koans

03:18:33.980 | is to sit with them, is to sit with them

03:18:36.100 | until you sort of kind of, you know,

03:18:38.220 | you realize what the thing is trying to teach you,

03:18:40.340 | what aspect of experience it's trying to teach you.

03:18:42.900 | So there's no answer, there's no,

03:18:44.020 | and in fact, actually, you don't give an answer,

03:18:45.740 | you actually usually have to demonstrate.

03:18:47.700 | The first time when I sat and when I did a koan

03:18:49.460 | and the guy was like, "Don't tell me the answer,

03:18:51.220 | show me the answer."

03:18:52.060 | I was like, "What are you talking about?"

03:18:54.380 | But after doing these for years now,

03:18:55.820 | you know, I've kind of learned the language of them.

03:18:59.460 | So I could never tell you, if I told you the answer,

03:19:01.340 | I could give you a koan and tell you the answer,

03:19:02.580 | you'd be like, "What?"

03:19:03.660 | You know, it's never, it's not the words, it's the, you know,

03:19:07.380 | so like your experience of like, "Yeah, the cup is empty."

03:19:10.140 | With contemplative practice, as it deepens over years,

03:19:12.700 | it really does take years, just like anything in math,

03:19:14.660 | it took me years to understand Lagrangians.

03:19:17.100 | You kind of come to a deeper understanding with like,

03:19:18.860 | yeah, the words of like, it's not just like,

03:19:20.980 | "Oh, everything changes."

03:19:22.300 | You actually feel that movement.

03:19:24.340 | Like you feel it with like breath to breath, you know?

03:19:27.780 | And it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling,

03:19:30.460 | this is messed up, but of just joy,

03:19:32.940 | and it's not connected to anything, right?

03:19:34.660 | That's what I've kind of gotten from practice.

03:19:36.140 | It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage,

03:19:38.820 | that infinite passage of moment to moment,

03:19:41.540 | that is truly the way things are, and it's okay.

03:19:44.580 | Like not, it's not okay

03:19:45.420 | because I have a feeling about it, okay?

03:19:46.860 | I want it to be okay.

03:19:48.140 | It just is okay.

03:19:49.620 | It's a really, it's a pretty awesome thing.

03:19:51.100 | - Yeah, that's beautiful.

03:19:51.940 | I mean, maybe it's the genetics,

03:19:53.740 | maybe it's the biochemistry of my brain,

03:19:55.300 | but I generally have that joy about experience,

03:19:58.100 | just amorphous joy.

03:20:00.180 | But it seems like, again,

03:20:01.500 | maybe it's my Eastern European roots,

03:20:03.300 | but there's always like a melancholy

03:20:05.100 | that's also sitting next to the joy.

03:20:07.540 | And I think it always feels

03:20:09.580 | like they're intricately linked.

03:20:12.940 | So the melancholy is about,

03:20:15.500 | maybe about the finiteness of experience,

03:20:17.860 | and the joy is just about the beauty of experience,

03:20:20.660 | and they're just kind of sitting there.

03:20:21.980 | - Yeah.

03:20:22.820 | Which is cool, actually, because that,

03:20:23.940 | you know, I'm also, you know,

03:20:24.780 | I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European

03:20:27.380 | as well, going back, and I get it, right?

03:20:29.940 | I mean, you know, but that's also the cool thing.

03:20:32.260 | I think one of the things is like,

03:20:33.780 | yeah, well, that is what it is.

03:20:35.380 | That is what it is, right?

03:20:36.300 | You don't have to do anything.

03:20:37.140 | You don't have to like manipulate it

03:20:38.340 | or move it around or like,

03:20:39.540 | yeah, this is the experience, you know?

03:20:41.140 | - Can you speak to just the practical nature

03:20:42.980 | of sitting there from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.?

03:20:44.980 | Like, what the hell are you doing, bro?

03:20:46.820 | - What's powerful?

03:20:47.660 | What's fascinating to you?

03:20:48.500 | What have you learned from just the experience

03:20:50.420 | of staring at a wall?

03:20:51.580 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:20:52.580 | So, you know, it's not really,

03:20:54.260 | I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall,

03:20:55.820 | and what you're doing is you're just sitting with,

03:20:58.260 | you know, you can,

03:20:59.100 | there's different meditative practices, right?

03:21:00.820 | There's counting breaths.

03:21:01.740 | So that's usually what I do.

03:21:02.580 | I sit down, I start counting breaths,

03:21:03.900 | and for the first half hour,

03:21:04.980 | it's just like blah, blah, blah.

03:21:07.140 | I'm thinking, like I said, I'm thinking about my taxes,

03:21:09.220 | I'm thinking about what I gotta do later on,

03:21:10.860 | yada, yada, yada.

03:21:12.060 | First time I ever did a full session,

03:21:14.420 | a two-day session, I swear to God,

03:21:15.540 | I had Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" album

03:21:17.300 | track through from the beginning to the end

03:21:19.780 | with the pauses, back in when there were LPs.

03:21:21.860 | - Yeah. - With the frickin' pauses.

03:21:22.700 | - Nice.

03:21:23.740 | - You know, 'cause my mind was just like,

03:21:24.900 | I need to do something.

03:21:25.740 | So it literally played the whole album in order.

03:21:28.380 | - That's pretty cool, actually.

03:21:29.300 | - Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see,

03:21:30.620 | you know, 'cause you really do,

03:21:31.460 | you see the dynamics of your mind.

03:21:33.580 | But what happens is, and this took me a while,

03:21:35.980 | I used to hate sitting, you know?

03:21:38.300 | I do it, but I, after a while, the mind gets exhausted.

03:21:43.300 | Like that part of the mind, the upper level,

03:21:45.700 | the roof brain chatter, it's just like,

03:21:47.260 | there's nothing else to do.

03:21:48.580 | And then you get bored, and now I realize

03:21:50.380 | that's when something interesting is gonna happen.

03:21:52.780 | 'Cause you kinda like drop down.

03:21:54.340 | And now, it's a very physical practice.

03:21:57.060 | People think you're just sitting there not thinking,

03:21:59.060 | or thinking about not thinking.

03:22:00.540 | Actually, it becomes a very physical process

03:22:02.140 | where you're really just following the breath,

03:22:04.300 | you're kinda riding the breath,

03:22:06.060 | and it gets very quiet, you know?

03:22:08.780 | And within that quietness, it's, you know,

03:22:11.660 | there's a path, you know, 'cause obviously there's been,

03:22:14.180 | Buddhism's always like, you know,

03:22:15.860 | not about thinking, but there's a huge literature.

03:22:18.660 | So these guys are always about don't think,

03:22:20.180 | I've written all this stuff.

03:22:21.540 | But they're guideposts,

03:22:22.380 | they're like the finger pointing at the moon.

03:22:24.420 | And, you know, there's the idea of first,

03:22:26.580 | you know, your mind is usually scattered, right?

03:22:28.540 | Like, right now when I walk out,

03:22:29.940 | I'm gonna go get the Uber and everything,

03:22:30.900 | my mind's gonna be all over the place.

03:22:32.420 | But with sitting, first you concentrate the mind

03:22:34.700 | so that there's no more scatter anymore.

03:22:36.100 | The thoughts are still happening,

03:22:37.020 | but you're just not, they're happening up there,

03:22:38.580 | you're not even paying attention to 'em.

03:22:40.100 | And then as time goes on, you unify the mind,

03:22:43.700 | which is this very powerful thing

03:22:45.820 | where kind of the self drops away, you know?

03:22:48.620 | And there's just this presence,

03:22:49.940 | it's kind of like a raw presence.

03:22:51.900 | And that's often where the joy upwells from.

03:22:55.860 | But you sit with whatever,

03:22:56.700 | maybe you're gonna sit and you're gonna have,

03:22:58.100 | like, you know, maybe you're gonna go through like

03:23:00.060 | an hour of being bummed out about your mom

03:23:02.420 | who died or something.

03:23:03.260 | You know, you're just gonna sit with whatever comes up.

03:23:05.420 | You're gonna make the, that's why the sitting part,

03:23:07.460 | you're making the commitment,

03:23:08.300 | "I'm gonna sit here with whatever comes up.

03:23:10.180 | "I will not be moved."

03:23:11.500 | And then what you come away with,

03:23:12.780 | it actually, over time,

03:23:13.660 | it actually changes kind of who you are.

03:23:15.460 | Like, I'm still the asshole I was from New Jersey

03:23:18.180 | growing up, but I just have more space now for things,

03:23:21.220 | you know?

03:23:22.060 | - Yeah, once Jersey, always Jersey.

03:23:25.860 | - Always Jersey.

03:23:27.020 | - But I love the Bruce Springsteen's

03:23:28.820 | just blasting in your head.

03:23:29.660 | - Yeah, that was amazing.

03:23:30.980 | - Why are we here?

03:23:31.820 | What do you think is the purpose,

03:23:33.780 | the meaning of human existence?

03:23:35.820 | - It's good that we just had the last conversation

03:23:37.740 | because I'm gonna give this answer, which is so corny.

03:23:40.540 | It's love.

03:23:42.900 | And I'm not messing around

03:23:43.820 | 'cause really actually what happens, you know,

03:23:44.860 | so within Buddhism,

03:23:46.700 | there's the idea of the Bodhisattva principle.

03:23:48.580 | You're here to help.

03:23:49.540 | You're just here to help, right?

03:23:50.900 | Compassion, like that's a really essential part

03:23:53.700 | of this path, of the Dharma path.

03:23:55.860 | And when I first started, I was like,

03:23:57.540 | "I don't care about compassion.

03:23:58.760 | "I'm here for knowledge, right?

03:24:00.940 | "I started contemplative practice

03:24:02.780 | "because of the usual thing, I was suffering.

03:24:04.020 | "I had, you know, the reason everybody

03:24:04.940 | "comes to things like this.

03:24:05.780 | "You know, life was hard.

03:24:06.620 | "I was going through stuff."

03:24:07.860 | But I also wanted knowledge.

03:24:09.580 | I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality.

03:24:11.820 | So it was like compassion, whatever.

03:24:13.540 | But then I found out that you can't get that.

03:24:16.060 | You can't get those.

03:24:16.900 | You can't go to this without compassion.

03:24:18.500 | Somehow in this process,

03:24:20.520 | you realize that it really is about

03:24:23.900 | helping all sentient beings.

03:24:27.260 | That's the way they, you know,

03:24:28.100 | just being here to help.

03:24:30.440 | So I know that sounds cornball,

03:24:32.280 | but especially for a guy from Jersey,

03:24:33.600 | which is like, you know, the main thing is to get over.

03:24:35.800 | You're like, "Your job is to get over."

03:24:37.800 | But that's really what I found.

03:24:40.200 | It is actually kind of, and that's what that joy,

03:24:42.360 | that joy, some of that joy is just, it's like this.

03:24:44.800 | One of the things I have, when I have like really,

03:24:47.000 | you know, there's a kind of experience

03:24:48.680 | I'll have in contemplative practice,

03:24:49.720 | which we'll carry out into the world,

03:24:50.960 | which is just this gratitude for the fact

03:24:52.680 | that the world is just, the world gives you everything.

03:24:55.280 | And there's a certain way, right?

03:24:56.220 | Just the blue sky and the breath,

03:24:58.640 | the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered.

03:25:01.700 | It holds nothing back.

03:25:03.520 | And yeah, that's kind of the experience.

03:25:05.040 | And then you kind of like, "Oh, I need to be helpful

03:25:06.960 | 'cause who's not having this experience?"

03:25:08.560 | You know?

03:25:09.400 | - So just love for the world as it is.

03:25:10.880 | - Love for the world and all the beings who are suffering.

03:25:12.720 | Everybody's suffering, everybody's suffering.

03:25:14.760 | You know, your worst political opponent,

03:25:16.760 | they're suffering, you know?

03:25:18.480 | And our job is just to try and drop our biases

03:25:21.760 | and our stories and see this fundamental level

03:25:24.240 | at which life is occurring.

03:25:26.260 | - And hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there

03:25:29.860 | going through the same journey

03:25:30.900 | out of suffering towards love.

03:25:32.180 | - Yeah, that would, you know,

03:25:33.700 | that may be a universal thing

03:25:35.180 | about what it means to be alive.

03:25:36.580 | - I hope so.

03:25:37.420 | - I hope so too.

03:25:38.240 | They're coming to eat us.

03:25:39.780 | - Especially if they're a type three civilization.

03:25:41.580 | - Yeah, that's right.

03:25:42.420 | And they got really big guns.

03:25:43.740 | (Adam laughs)

03:25:45.820 | - Well, this was a truly mind-blowing, fascinating,

03:25:48.300 | just awesome conversation, Adam.

03:25:49.740 | Thank you for everything you do

03:25:50.900 | and thank you for talking today.

03:25:52.180 | - Oh, thank you.

03:25:53.020 | It's been a lot of fun.

03:25:54.740 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:25:56.340 | with Adam Frank.

03:25:57.660 | To support this podcast,

03:25:58.940 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:26:01.700 | And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.

03:26:05.140 | "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

03:26:10.140 | Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us.

03:26:14.100 | There's a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice,

03:26:16.380 | a faint sensation as if a distant memory

03:26:19.700 | or falling from a height.

03:26:22.180 | We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

03:26:26.780 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

03:26:30.680 | (upbeat music)

03:26:33.260 | (upbeat music)

03:26:35.840 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455

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