Lex Fridman Podcast
#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life
Sun, 22 Dec 2024
Adam Frank is an astrophysicist studying star systems and the search for extraterrestrial life and alien civilizations. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep455-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/adam-frank-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Adam's Website: https://adamfrankscience.com Adam's X: https://x.com/adamfrank4 Adam's Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamfrankscience Adam's Books: The Little Book of Aliens: https://amzn.to/3OTX1rP Light of the Stars: https://amzn.to/4iMKC6C The Blind Spot: https://amzn.to/4gOCe4K The Constant Fire: https://amzn.to/3ZVnxX4 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Encord: AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://encord.com/lex Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress cover. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (14:22) - Planet formation (19:32) - Plate tectonics (26:54) - Extinction events (31:04) - Biosphere (34:02) - Technosphere (38:17) - Emergence of intelligence (44:29) - Drake equation (48:43) - Exoplanets (51:28) - Habitable zones (54:30) - Fermi Paradox (1:03:28) - Alien civilizations (1:12:55) - Colonizing Mars (1:25:11) - Search for aliens (1:41:37) - Alien megastructures (1:47:43) - Kardashev scale (1:52:56) - Detecting aliens (1:59:38) - Warp drives (2:05:45) - Cryogenics (2:09:03) - What aliens look like (2:17:48) - Alien contact (2:28:53) - UFO sightings (2:40:38) - Physics of life (3:06:29) - Nature of time (3:22:53) - Cognition (3:27:16) - Mortality
The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
Let me say as a side note that I had to put a bunch of podcast episodes on hold to focus deeply on preparing for conversations with world leaders. So I apologize to include more sponsors on this episode than usual. They really wanted me to mention them this year, and I'm not sure when I'm going to do another episode.
We were going to do eight episodes this month, but instead I think we're doing two. We'll see. Every single day, every single hour changes the plan, changes the situation, changes my life. So please be patient with me. There are no sponsor reads in the middle, so you can skip this long and beautiful list. But I do try to make them interesting in case you do listen, and I hope you do.
In either case, please still check out the sponsors. Buy their stuff. It is the best way to support this podcast. The sponsors are Uncord for your ML stack, Eight Sleep for naps, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, Notion for notes, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for nutrition.
If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com contact. Perhaps you could tell from my voice, on top of everything else, I'm also sick. What a wonderful, beautiful, challenging life this is, and I'm grateful for every second of it. All right, and now on to the full arteries. Let's go.
This episode is brought to you by Encord, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation. For example, if you are an independent private or government agency that is running
the drones that is flying all over New Jersey and the tri-state area, you might be doing the same kind of data annotation and collection, curation and management that Encore excels at. Also, if you're an extraterrestrial species performing the same, I wonder what kind of computation tools alien civilizations have.
At the physics level, computation is fundamentally a part of the fabric of the universe. So every advanced civilization would or surely would discover how to leverage that computation, how to organize that computation, how to access and communicate with that computation.
Anyway, think of it, if you have a swarm of drones and you are the ruler of an alien civilization and want to collect some data about New Jersey, you are going to have to do some great machine learning. And great machine learning is not just about the algorithms. It is so much more about the data.
So whoever you are running the drone program over New Jersey, go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com. That's Encore.com. By the way, in all seriousness, I will probably talk about drones in New Jersey soon. I think it's a fascinating mystery. Is it China? Is it aliens? Is it the U.S. government? Is it private companies within the U.S. government?
Is it other nation states? Are nuclear weapons involved? And what are the mechanisms that ensure that the U.S. government is transparent about communicating what they discover? These are essential questions. Okay, on to A-Sleep. This episode is brought to you by A-Sleep and it's pod 4 ultra. You know, sleep makes me think about the night. And I've been watching a lot of war movies.
I've been watching a lot of war reporting. I've been watching a lot of conversations with soldiers and I've been talking to soldiers. And there's something about the night. There's something about the quiet night that serves as the break from the hell of war. That's a song from the Second World War. A song about a soldier writing to a woman he loves. That's just it.
Just like a man's search for meaning in the darkest hours of war. Those are the things that keep the flame of the heart going. Talking about these topics makes it difficult for me to then talk about eight sleep and the technology and the comfort of good night's sleep Somewhere in America.
That's one of the things you discover when you travel, especially travel to a country that's participating in war. That the basic comforts, the basic securities, the basic dreams and hopes and the ways of life are taken away. And still, the human spirit persists. Anyway, this is supposed to be an ad read. Go to asleep.com slash Lex.
Use code Lex to get up to $600 off your Pod 4 Ultra purchase when bundled. That's asleep.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've been reading a lot about the long history of the Silk Road, especially before and after the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan.
I've been reading a lot about Genghis Khan and the influence he had on revolutionizing the trade network. A lot of networks, the trade of not just goods, but information of knowledge, of languages, of ideas, of religions, of peoples. And it's fascinating how roads of that nature, trade, first and foremost, can break down the barriers that divide peoples. I suppose it all starts with incentives.
People are people and they have stuff they don't need and they want to sell it and other people have stuff they want and they're willing to buy it. And those incentives at scale overpower any kind of emotional, psychological, historical hatreds and all those kinds of things. It's funny, the little incentives and the mechanisms of capitalism, at its best, can heal the wounds of war.
Of course, it can also fuel the military-industrial complex, which is the fuel of war. Oh, the double-edged sword. Anyway, take the Silk Road and fast forward to today and we have Shopify that you can sign up to for $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today.
This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. When I think about NetSuite and all the different administrative modules and the language, standardized language, that allows them to communicate with each other, I think about all the empires throughout history that were able to create remarkable administrative systems.
The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, as I mentioned. None of it works without paperwork. You know, bureaucracy, rightfully so, gets a bad rap. But at its best, bureaucracy is necessary to manage the affairs of large organizations. You know, humans aren't very good at working with each other when they scale beyond a thousand people. So you need great administrative systems.
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I am a person who loves conversation. And not small talk. The fake niceties that alleviate social frictions. I'm not for that. I'm in for diving deep through conversation. And I think that is something that I just can't quite do yet. And I would say not even close. It is an assistant. It is not a therapist. So...
The distinction, the difference is quite fascinating to analyze, to watch, to try to sort of elucidate and articulate clearly. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of talking to a human to explore your own mind. And BetterHelp is a very easy, accessible way of doing that. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.
This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking system service app that I use and you should use, especially if you're on a large team, to collaborate on all kinds of stuff, including notes and project management, wikis, all that kind of stuff. Nuclear weapons have been on my mind quite a bit. And I think about the Manhattan Project.
And I think about the amount of incredible, rapid organization that was involved in that project. Just think about the coordination. The coordination of brilliant people working on separate parts of an incredibly complicated project where all of it has to be secret. So many of the people working on it may not even be aware of the bigger picture of it or the different modules involved.
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My daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Did you know that salt... in ancient Rome was a currency also referred to as white gold. How crazy is that things like salt or cinnamon or frankly gold and silver are things that all of us humans imbue with value for a time and even do horrific things to each other in order to attain more of it. The human greed for salt.
So dark and so fascinating we humans are. Anyway, on a basic level, just thirst. Something I've experienced in the Amazon jungle. Thirst for water. And for that, you need electrolytes too, not just water. Water and salt, plus magnesium and potassium. That is the basic thing you want the most when it is gone. And I got the chance, the gift, to experience it.
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You wrote a book about aliens. So the big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?
Yeah, that's the question, right? The amazing thing is that after two and a half millennia of people yelling at each other or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. So in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the answer to that question.
We're going to have hard data finally that will, one way or the other, you know, even if we don't find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets. We'll be able to start putting limits on how common we are. life is. The one answer I can tell you, which was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there, right?
And just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2,500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time, right? You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered, right?
Which is pretty remarkable that in a lifetime you can have a 2,500-year-old question. The answer is they're everywhere. There are planets everywhere. And it was possible that planets were really rare. We didn't really understand how planets formed. And so if you go back to, say, the turn of the 20th century –
There was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.
So one of the things you've done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planets, like simulate your solar system through the entire evolution of the solar system? This is kind of a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there.
That actually we're able to do now. There is, you can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. So if you run the simulation, really where you wanna start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have a million times the mass of the sun in them. And so you run a simulation of that. It's turbulent. The gas is roiling and tumbling.
And every now and then you get a place where the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward. So you'll start to form a protostar. And a protostar is basically the young star of this ball of gas where nuclear reactions are getting started. But it's also a disk. So as material falls inward, because everything's rotating,
As it falls inward, it'll spin up and then it'll form a disc. Material will collect in what's called an accretion disc or a protoplanetary disc. And you can simulate all of that. Once you get into the disk itself and you wanna do planets, things get a little bit more complicated, because the physics gets more complicated.
Now you gotta start worrying about dust, because actually dust, which is just, dust is the wrong word, it's smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disk to form pebbles, right? And then the pebbles will collide to form rocks, and then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated.
But we've been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form, how you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets or planetary embryos, as we call them. And then the next step is those things start slamming into each other. to form, you know, planetary-sized bodies. And then the planetary bodies slam into each other.
Earth, the moon came about because there was a Mars-sized body that slammed into the earth and basically blew off all the material that then eventually formed the moon.
And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures? Yeah.
Yeah, so the temperature of the material in the disk depends on how far away you are from the star. So it decreases, right? And so there's a really interesting point. So like, you know, close to the star, temperatures are really high. And the only thing that can condense, that can kind of freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals.
So that's why you find mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. Yeah. And then as you go further out stuff, you know, the gas gets cooler and now you can start getting things like water to freeze, right? So there's something we call the snow line, which is somewhere in our solar system out around between Mars and Jupiter.
And that's the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all have huge amounts of ice in them or water and ice. Actually, Jupiter and Saturn don't have so much, but the moons do. The
there's oceans right that we've got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there's water on earth do you think it's possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of uh how likely an earth-like planet is can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating like what are the possible earth-like things that could be generated
Yeah, I think we can. I think we're learning how to do that now. So, you know, one part is like trying to just figure out how to how planets form themselves and doing the simulations like that, that cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos. That's hard to simulate because it's both you got to do both the gas and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding and all that physics.
Um, once you get up to a planet sized body, then, you know, you kind of have to switch over to almost like a different kind of simulation. They're often what you're doing is you're doing, you know, sort of, you're assuming the planet is this sort of spherical ball. And then you're doing what, you know, like a one D a radial calculation. And you're just asking like, all right.
How is this thing going to, what is the structure of it going to be? Like, am I going to have a solid iron core or am I going to get a solid iron core with that liquid iron core out around it like we have on Earth? And then you get, you know, a silicate, kind of a rocky mantle and then a crust.
All of those details, those are kind of beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from ab initio, from scratch. We're not there yet. How important are those details, like the crust and the atmosphere, do you think? Hugely important. So I'm part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester where we're using the giant laser. Literally, this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics.
We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to, like, slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what the conditions are like at, you know, the center of the earth, or even more importantly, the center of super earths. Like the most common, this is what's wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe we don't have in our solar system. Which is amazing, right?
So we've been able to study enough or observe enough planets now to get a census. You know, we pretty, you know, we kind of have an idea of what, who's average, who's weird. And our solar system's weird because the average planet has a mass between somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth. to maybe, you know, 10 times the mass of the earth.
And that's exactly where there are no planets in our solar system. So, um, the smaller ones of those we call super earths, the larger ones we call sub Neptunes. And they're anybody's guess. Like we don't really know what happens to material when you're squeezed to those pressures, which is like millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the earth.
So those details really will matter of what's going on in there because that will determine whether or not you have, say, for example, plate tectonics. We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on earth, for the evolution of complex life on earth.
So it turns out, and this is sort of the next generation where we're going with the understanding the evolution of planets in life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can't just be like, oh, there's a warm pond, you know, and then some interesting, you know, chemistry happens in the warm pond.
You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it's gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.
Why do you think polytectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?
There's a bunch of different things. One is that, you know, the Earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. Like, you know, we went into a period of glaciation where pretty much the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen. You know, early on in Earth history, there was barely any land.
We were actually a water world, you know, with just a couple of Australia-sized planets. cratons, they called them, protocontinents. So those, we went through these snowball earth phases. And if it wasn't for the fact that we had kind of an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of volcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever.
Like once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever, which is, you know, maybe you already had life form, but then because it's so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes, right?
So what plate tectonics does, because it fosters more volcanism, is that you're going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the snowball Earth phase. But even more, there's even more really important things.
I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the hard steps model, which is this model that's been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. And it made all these assumptions about the Earth's history, particularly the history of life and the history of the planet, or have nothing to do with each other.
And it turns out, as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably early on had a more mild form of plate tectonics. And then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up. And that ramping up changed everything on the planet. Because here's a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. You know what I mean by that, right? So all the flat earthers out there can get excited for one sec.
Clip it. Yeah.
what i mean by that is that there really weren't many mountain ranges right the beginning of i think the term is orogenesis mountain building the true himalayan style giant mountains didn't happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics where the plates are really being driven around the planet and that is when you get the crusts hitting each other and they start pushing you know into these himalayan style mountains the weathering of that
The erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans and then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they're doing. shot up by a factor of almost a thousand, right?
So the fact that you had plate tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense, you know, like we're not exactly sure how it happened, but it's clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening really got a boost from the fact that suddenly there was this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.
So it's nice to have turmoil in terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.
Yeah, that's actually really true because what happens is if you look at the history of life, that's a really, you know, it's an excellent point you're bringing up. If you look at the history of life on earth, we get, uh, you know, a biogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. And that's the first microbes. They kind of take over enough that they really do.
You get a biosphere, you get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet. But then you go through this period they call the boring billion where like it's a billion years and it's just microbes. Nothing's happening. It's just microbes. I mean, microbes are doing amazing things. They're inventing fermentation. Thank you very much. We appreciate that.
But it's not until sort of you get probably these continents slamming into each other. You really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes. that evolution has to respond to, that on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches as well as closing other ones. And biology, evolution has to respond to that.
And somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian explosion, is when suddenly every body plan, evolution goes on an orgy, essentially. So yeah, it does look like that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.
I wonder if there's some... extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. You're not going to have leaps. In human societies, we have an Einstein that comes up with a good idea, but it feels like on an evolutionary time scale, you need
some real big drama going on for the evolutionary system to have to come up to a solution to that drama, like an extra complex solution to that drama.
Well, I think what's... I'm not sure if that's true. I don't know if it needs to be like an almost extinction event, right? Because it's certainly true that we have gone through... almost extinction events where we've had five mass extinctions. But you don't necessarily see that there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those.
With the comet impact, the KT boundary, certainly lots of niches opened up And that's why we're here, right? Because, you know, our ancestors were just little basically rodents, rats living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. And it was that common impact that opened the route for us. But it wasn't, I mean, that still took another, you know, 65 million years.
It wasn't like this thing immediately happened. But what we found with this hard steps paper, because the whole idea of the hard steps paper was It was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things where Brandon Carter said, oh, look, the intelligence doesn't show up on Earth until about, you know, almost close to when the end of the sun's lifetime.
And so he's like, well, there should be no reason why the sun's lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same. Uh, and so therefore, and he goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning, and, and, and he ends up with the idea that like, oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super low. And so that's the hard steps, right?
So there was a series of steps in evolution that were, you know, very, very hard. And because of that, you can calculate some probability distributions, um, and everybody loves a good probability distribution and they went a long way with this, but it
When you look at it, of course, the timescale for the sun's evolution and the timescale for evolution on life are coupled because life and the timescale for evolution of the earth is coupled is about the same timescale as the evolution is the sun. It's billions of years. The earth evolves over billions of years and life and the earth co-evolve.
That's what Brandon Carter didn't see is that actually evolution. The fate of the Earth and the fate of life are inextricably combined. And this is really important for astrobiology, too. Life doesn't happen on a planet. It happens to a planet. So this is something that David Grinspoon and Sarah Walker both say. And, you know, I agree with this. It's a really nice way of putting it.
So, you know, plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, you know, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sort of sloshing back and forth.
And so rather than to your point about do you need giant catastrophes, maybe not giant catastrophes, but what happens is as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up, evolutionary windows. Like, for example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When life invented this new form of photosynthesis about two and a half billion years ago,
that broke water apart to work, to do its chemical shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That's why there's oxygen in the atmosphere. It's only because of life. That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever.
So the introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Like, for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big-brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism.
So you couldn't get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.
So really, on a scale of a planet, when there's billions, trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact. So the chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet.
Yeah, and we know this for a fact now. So there was this thing, Gaia theory, that was James Lovelock introduced in the 70s. And then Lynn Margulis, the biologist, Lynn Margulis together. So this Gaia theory was the idea that Planets pretty much take, or sorry, life takes over a planet.
Life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life such that it keeps the planet habitable. It's kind of a homeostasis, right? I can go out like right now outside, it's 100 degrees, right? And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to be the same.
And I can go back to, you know, Rochester, New York in the winter, and it's going to be, you know, zero degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That's homeostasis. The idea of Gaia theory was that life, the biosphere, exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet that even as other things are changing...
the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. And now when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, oh my God, you know, what are you smoking weed? You know, and like, there were all these guy and festivals with guy and dances. And so, you know, it became very popular in the new age community.
But Lovelock, actually, they were able to show that, no, this has nothing to do with the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks that the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. And now that's become, whether or not, we're still unclear whether there are true Gaian feedbacks in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control.
But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth's history. So the biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth. So, okay, what I would say right now is I don't know if I can say that scientifically. I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state and over billions of years has strongly modified the evolution of the planet.
So whether or not a true guy in feedback would be exactly what you said, right? The biosphere is this somehow, and Sarah Walker and David Grinspoon and I actually did a paper on this about the idea of planetary intelligence or cognition across a planetary scale. And I think that actually is possible. It's not conscious, but there is a kind of cognitive activity going on.
The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. So it's still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have semi-Gaian feedbacks. If there's a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, you know, insulation, how much sunlight's coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation.
Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.
Now, I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis. Open question, I guess.
Well, I'm glad you asked that question because that paper that David and Sarah and I wrote, what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet, right, when life first forms, you know, 3.8 billion years ago, it's kind of thin on the ground, right? You've got the first species, you know, these are all microbes.
And they have not yet, they're not going to, enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedback. So we call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks, keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere, right?
And the important thing, and we're going to, I'm sure later on we're going to talk about definitions of life and such. There's this great term called autopoiesis. That Francisco Varela, the neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. And he said, you know, one of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis, which means self-creating and self-maintaining.
Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself, right? It's always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. So the biosphere, from this guy in perspective, has been autopoietic for billions of years. Now, we just invented this technosphere in the last couple of hundred years. And what we were arguing in that paper is that it's an immature technosphere, right?
Because right now, with climate change and all the other things we're doing, the technosphere right now is sort of destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. So the real job for us, if we're going to last over... you know, geologic timescales.
If we want a technosphere that's going to last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we've got to become mature, which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. So as of right now, I'd say we're not autopoietic.
Well, I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that perturbations, the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations. Which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but basically go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself to strengthen the, or like drink water from the pond.
From the pond, yeah, right. Get sick a few times.
To strengthen the immune system. Yeah.
Well, you know, it's interesting with the technosphere, we can talk about this more, but like, you know, we're just emerging as a technosphere in terms of as a interplanetary technosphere, right?
That's really the next step for us is to, David Grinspoon talks about, I love this idea of anti-accretion, like this amazing thing that for the first time, you know, over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet. It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down, but now we're starting to push stuff out.
The idea of planetary defense or such, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We're going to start engineering if we make it. I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system. So we will be changed, literally engineering the solar system.
But what you can think of right now with what's happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of it, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere, right? And what you can't do is, the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere. And if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you're in trouble, right?
I mean, the biosphere is not going away. There's nothing we could do. The idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. The Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it's the conditions for us, right? Humanity emerged out of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can't tolerate very different kinds of Earths.
So that's what I mean about a perturbation.
Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper. Right. Pretty interesting. There's an interesting table here about hard steps. Abiogenesis, glucose fermentation to purific acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor, so formation of the eye. Yeah. Complex multicellularity. That's definitely one of the big ones.
Yeah, so interesting. I mean, what can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about what the difficulty of these steps are.
Right. And so this was the idea. So what Carter said was, you know, using anthropic reasoning, he said there must be a few very hard steps for evolution to get through to make it to intelligence, right? So there's some steps are going to be easy. So every generation, you know, you roll the dice and yeah, it won't take long for you to get that step, but there must be a few of them.
And he said you could even calculate what, how many there were, five, six, In order to get to intelligence. And so this paper here, this plot, is all these different people who've written all these papers. And this is the point, actually. You can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps. Each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be.
And there's this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps. But what we actually found was... that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. So what's amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field, right?
So Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved, right? And if you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a biogeophysicist, they'd look at you when you explained this to them and they'd be like, what?
Like, what are you guys doing? Turns out none of the details or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with evolution. what the people actually study the planet and its evolution.
Is it mostly about the fact that there's not really discrete big steps? It's a gradual, continual kind of process?
Well, there's two things. The first most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together. That's something that every, you know, most biogeophysicists completely accept. And it was the first thing that Carter kind of rejected. He said, like, no, that's probably not possible.
And yet, you know, like if he'd only sort of had more discussions with this other community would have seemed like, no, there are actually windows that open up. And then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not.
Because for a hard, what you mean by a hard step is that, like I said, every time there's a generation, every time there's the next generation born, you're rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. And the idea of something being a hard step, there's two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be, or actually not be a hard step at all.
One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once, right? So let's take the opposite. You see something that's happened multiple times, like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. So that's clearly not a hard, making wings is not a hard step.
There are certain other things that people say, no, that's a hard step, oxygen, you know, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they are so, they tend to be so long ago that we've lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that, you know, went, made this innovation, but they're just gone now. So you can't tell. So there's information loss.
The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder that somebody, you know, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again. So yeah, it only happened once, but it happened once because basically the creature was so successful, it took over and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it.
So yeah, so the interesting thing about this was seeing how... How much, once you look at the details of life's history on Earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. And it shows you that those details, as we were talking about, like, do you have to know about the planet? Do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you're going to have to.
I mean, to be fair to Carter on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions. And then we can sort of, from an outside perspective, analyze...
planets based on the initial conditions they create and then there's a binary yes or no will it create life but if they co-evolve it's just a really complex dynamical system where everything is becomes much more difficult from the perspective of SETI of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones are actually producing life.
But I think we're at the point now, so now there may be other kinds of principles that actually, because, you know, co-evolution actually has its own, not deterministic, you're done with determinism, right? But complex systems have patterns, complex systems have constraints, and that's actually what we're going to be looking for, are constraints on them.
And so, you know, and again, nothing against Carter was a brilliant idea, but it just goes to show, you know, there's this great XTC. I'm a theoretical physicist, right? And so I love simplified. Give me a simplified model with, you know, a dynamical equation, some initial conditions. I'm very happy.
But there's this great XTC comic where like, you know, somebody is working something out on the board and this physicist is looking over and saying, oh, oh, I just I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this? And the subtitle is why everybody hates physicists. Yeah. So sometimes that approach totally works.
Sometimes physicists can be very good at like zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. And that's very useful sometimes. Other times it obfuscates, right? Other times it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity. Yeah.
uh speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation uh let's return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and uh talk about the drake equation yeah can you uh explain the drake equation you know people have various uh feelings about the drake equation uh you know it can be abused but basically it was the the story actually is really interesting so frank drake in uh 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment he
gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. And he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody to make fun of him. And still he gets a phone call from the government says, hey, we want you to do a meeting on interstellar communications, right?
So he's like, okay. So they organize a meeting with like just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. And like the night before, Drake has to come up with an agenda. How do you come up with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one's ever talked about before, right? And so he actually breaks what he does.
What's so brilliant about the Drake equation is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are out there into a bunch of sub-problems. And he breaks it into seven sub-problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with. So the first term is the rate at which stars form.
The second term is the fraction of those stars that have planets, F sub p. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence.
After that, it's the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. And then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime. How long you have a civilization, now how long does it last? Well, you say we humans. We humans, right?
Because we're standing, we're staring at the, you know, multiple guns pointing at us, you know, nuclear war, climate change, AI. So, you know, how long in general does civilizations last? Now, each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance.
By breaking the problem up into these seven sub-problems, he gave astronomers something to do. And so this is always with a new research field. You need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don't even know really what you're trying to do. So the star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year.
The people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, these are their own fields. Essentially, by creating this equation, he's launching new fields.
He gave astrobiology, which wasn't even a term then, a roadmap. Like, okay, you guys go do this. You go do that. You go do that. And it had such far-reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful sort of marching orders for all these different groups. Like, for example, it's because of the Drake equation in some sense that
people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, two meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI, Getting NASA together to say, look, okay, look, how, you know, what's the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?
So, yeah, so, you know, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it's not a law of nature, right? It's not something that's it's not equals MC squared. And so you can see it being abused in some sense. People, you know, it's generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good. I've written some of those and some of those papers are bad.
You know, I'm not sure where my paper fits in on those. I'm saying, you know, one should be careful about what you're using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.
We could talk about each one of these, but let's just look at exoplanets. Yeah. So that's a really interesting one. I think when you look back, you know, hundreds of years from now, what is it, in the 90s when they first detected the first?
Yeah, 92 and 95. 95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun-like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.
I think that's one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. I agree. I agree. Right now, I guess nobody's celebrating it too much because you don't know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across... the entire galaxy, the entire universe.
So if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe.
You can. All you need is one. Like right now, it's an any, you know, our understanding of life. We have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So that means we could be an accident, right? It could be that we're the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example and now you're done.
Because if you have one more example, you don't have to find all the other examples. You just know that it's happened more than once. And now you are, from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, yeah, this life is not something that's hard to make.
Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You've also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer?
So the paper, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I, in 2016, where we said, look, we have all this exoplanet data now, right? So the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is, F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it's one. Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds.
I mean, it's mind boggling because every one of those, those are all places, right? They're either, you know, gas giants, probably with moons. So the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they're like terrestrial worlds where even if there's not life, there's still snow falling and there's oceans washing up on shorelines.
It's incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, right, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone. Right? On average. And it turns out to be 1 over 5. Right? So, you know, we're on 0.2. So that means you just count five of them. Go out at night and go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
One of them has an Earth-like planet, you know, in the habitable zone. Like, whoa! So what defines a habitable zone? Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in 1958 by the Chinese-American astronomer Xu Sheng. And it was, it was a brilliant idea. It said, look, this is there, you know, I can do this simple calculation.
If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what's the temperature of the planet, what's the temperature of the surface. So now you're all, you're going to ask, you give it a standard kind of, you know, earth-like atmosphere and ask, okay, Could there be liquid water on the surface, right? We believe that liquid water is really important for life.
There could be other things that's happening. Fine. But you know, if you were to start off trying to make life, you'd probably choose water as your solvent for it. So basically the habitable zone is the
band of orbits around a star where you can have liquid water on the surface you could take a you know glass of water pour it on the surface and it would just pool up it wouldn't freeze immediately which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn't just boil away if your planet's too close in so that's the formal definition of the habitable zone so it's a nice strict definition there's probably way more going on than that but this is a place to start
Right.
Well, we should say it's a place to start. I do think it's too strict of a constraint. I would agree. We're talking about temperature where water can be on the surface.
There's so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it's volcanic interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of plants that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff. Yeah.
Well, for example, we know in our own solar system, we have say Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred mile deep ocean under 10 miles of ice, right? That's not in the habitable zone. That is outside the habitable zone. And that may be the best place. It's got more water than Earth does. All of its oceans are, you know, it's twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth.
So, you know, that may be a really great place for life to form. And it's outside the habitable zone. So, you know, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there's reason, there's reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone because like Europa, I couldn't, I won't be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years.
I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa because it's under 10 miles of ice. So with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we're thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize for across 10, 50 light years. And we can see biosignatures as we're going to talk about.
So there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extrasolar life.
But for me, when I look up at the stars, it's very likely that there's a habitable planet or moon in each of the stars, habitable defined broadly.
Yeah, I think that's not unreasonable to say. I mean, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot. There's a lot of stars in the sky. So yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there's a pretty good chance that there's something habitable orbiting it is not a unreasonable scientific claim.
To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi Paradox? Why haven't we seen them?
Okay. The Fermi Paradox. Let's talk about... I love talking about the Fermi Paradox because there is no Fermi Paradox. Dun, dun, dun, dun. Yeah. So the Fermi Paradox, let's talk a little about the Fermi Paradox and the history of it. So Enrico Fermi, it's 1950. He's walking with his friends at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab to the cantina. And there had been this...
cartoon in the new yorker they all read the new yorker uh and the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of uh uh garbage cans being disappearing in new york and this cartoon said oh it's ufos because this is already you know it's 1950 the first big ufo craze happened in 47 so they'd all they were laughing about this as they're walking and they started being physicists started talking about interstellar travel interstellar propulsion blah blah blah you know conversation goes on for a while conversation turns to something else you know
they've gone to other things about 40 minutes later over lunch, Fermi blurts out, well, where is everybody? Right. Typical Fermi sort of thing.
He'd done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if one, if they're, you know, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sub light speeds, a, a civilization could cross, you know, kind of hop from one star system to the other and spread out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. And he realized this. And so he was like, why aren't they here now?
And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart, where he actually kind of went through this calculation and showed and said, well, there's nobody here now. Therefore, there's nobody anywhere that, you know. Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here now?
But something happened where people, after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, oh, we've been looking for decades now for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence and we haven't found any. Therefore, there's nothing out there. So we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox.
And there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look. SETI was always done by researchers who were kind of like scabbing some time, you know, some extra time from their other projects to, you know, look a little bit better. You know, at the sky with a telescope. Telescopes are expensive.
So Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI. You know, and imagine that's an ocean. All the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how when you look, how often you look. And then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done. They went through the literature.
And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at? And it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up, and there was no fish in it. And so now are we going to say, oh, well, there's no fish in the ocean, right?
So there is absolutely, positively no indirect Fermi Paris. We just haven't looked. Um, but we're starting to look, so that's what's, you know, finally we're starting to look. That's what's exciting. The direct Fermi paradox. There are so many ways out of that, right? There's a book called 77 solutions to the Fermi paradox that it just, you know, you can pick your favorite one.
It just doesn't carry a lot of weight because there's so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sublight speed from one star to the other, gathering resources, heading to the next one.
And so we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one IABiogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that that wave crosses, you know, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don't last forever, right? So one question is, when did they visit?
When did they come to Earth, right? So if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they're coming back, they're traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody. For, you know, millions of years.
And so if that, if we're living in one of those bubbles right now, then maybe we were visited, but we were visited a hundred million years ago. And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was like dinosaurs or aliens that was here a hundred million years ago, there's no way to tell. There's just there's no record left over.
The fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that, you know, you'd be able to find, you know, iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there's no way.
So if there was an alien camp here. Yeah. An alien village, a small civilization. Right. Maybe even a large civilization.
Even a large civilization, even if it was a large. A hundred million years ago. And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record's not going to have it. Yeah, yeah. The fossil record is too sparse, right? Most things don't fossilize. And 10,000 years is a blink in the eye of geological time.
So Gavin called this the Silurian hypothesis after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. But that paper got a lot of press. But it was an important idea. And this was really Gavin's. I was just helping with the astrobiology. To recognize that, yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago. There just would be no record. Yeah. It's kind of mind blowing.
It's really mind blowing. And it's also a good reminder that we've been intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time.
Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was like, so whenever I gave, you know, I like what I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper. And I had to always emphasize, we're not saying there was a Silurian, you know, but we're just saying that if there was. That's why I love Gavin's question. Gavin's question was just like, how could you tell, right?
It was a very beautifully scientific question. That's what we were really showing is that you really, you know, unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody's done so far, that, you know, there's not an obvious way to tell that there could have been civilizations here earlier on.
I've actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations and it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost. Yeah. And how much guessing is going on, whether it's in South America, like what happened in the jungle?
Yeah, like the Amazon, like the Amazon problem. That was, you know, the conquisters came and wiped everybody out. And especially just even like the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization? And there's a lot of theories.
And, you know, because of archaeology only looks at cities, they don't really know the origins of humans. And there's a lot of really interesting theories. And they're, of course, controversial. And there's a lot of controversial people in history. in every discipline, but archaeology is a fascinating one because we know so little. They're basically storytellers.
You're assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces. It's fascinating. It makes me, it's humbling and it's sad that there could be entire civilizations ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.
Yeah. Well, like the, the, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been like millions and millions. You know, we get this idea that like, oh, you know, this, the Europeans came and it was empty, you know, but it was, may have only been empty because the plague had swept up from the, you know, from the, what happened in Mesoamerica.
So, and yeah, and they didn't really build cities, but they had, they, I mean, they, they didn't build wooden or stone cities. They built wooden cities, you know,
Everybody seems to be building pyramids, and they're really damn good at it. What does that have to do with a pyramid?
Why does that apply?
What archetype in our brain is that? And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed, and they had a lot of similar kind of dynamics, like human nature, when it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, builds up myths and religions in a certain way, it builds pyramids in a certain way, it goes to war, all this kind of stuff, independently emerges.
Fascinating. Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on this as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such, very cool. Yeah, Santa Fe folks.
Complexity in general is really cool. Really cool. What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact. Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe, this paper that expands on the Drake equation. What are some interesting things in this paper?
Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, look, we have all of this exoplanet data, right? It's got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars that have planets.
And then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so we said like, okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation? And so we realized is, well, okay, we got to get rid of time, the lifetime thing. We can't say anything about that.
Um, but if we let that, if we don't ask how long do they last, but instead ask what's the probability that there've been any civilizations at all, no matter how long they lasted. I'm not asking whether they exist now or not. I'm just asking in general, um, about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe.
And that we were able to constrain. And so what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run.
Um, and the only way that we're the only time that this is, you know, this whole process from, you know, uh, a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed. Right. So therefore you could put a, a probability you could, we called it the pessimism line. right?
We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, right? But we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, as if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then we're not the first. It's happened somewhere else.
And to me, that was mind-blowing. It doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby. The galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that like, you know, unless nature's really against, it has some bias against civilizations. We're not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.
10 billion trillion experiments. Yeah. That's a lot of experiments. That's a lot, right? A thousand is a lot. Yeah. A hundred is a lot. Yeah. If, uh, we normal humans saw a hundred experiments and, uh, We knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built. I mean, we would say for sure in 100, you'll get another one.
Yeah, yeah. So that's why, I mean, that's why. So this, you know, these kinds of arguments, you have to be careful of what they can do. But what it really, I felt like what this paper showed was that, you know, the burden of proof is now on the pessimists, right? So that's why we called it the pessimism line.
Throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other. That's all they had to go with, right? And like with Giordano Bruno in 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We sort of thought this was like the plank length.
This was sort of the plank length of astrobiology. It gave you an actual number. That, you know, if you could somehow calculate what the probability, you know, of forming a technological civilization was, this thing sort of shows you where the limit is. As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually, absolutely, it has occurred in the history.
Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.
So to me, at least, the big question is F-E, which is basically abiogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate on a planet? Because all the other ones seem... Very likely. Everything seems very likely. The only open question to me is, like, how hard is it for life to originate?
There's lots of ways to, again, you know, we don't know unless we look. And, you know, you had Sarah walk around not too long ago. You know, she's very interested in origins of life. So, you know, lots of people are working on this. But I think it's hard looking at the history of the Earth. You know, and again, this is, you can do Bayesian arguments on this. Um, but yeah, it's forming life.
I don't think it's hard getting, getting like basic biology started. I don't think it's hard. It's still wild. It's an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn't. That's one of the things I like about Sarah's work.
Um, we're, we're pursuing on a different level, uh, about the life as that, the only process or the only system that uses information. Um, but still, regardless of all those kinds of details, uh, life is probably easy to make. That's, that's my, that's my gut feeling.
Yeah. I mean, day by day, this changes, right? for me, but as you see, once you create bacteria, it's off to the races. You're gonna get complex life. As long as you have enough time, I mean, that boring billion, but I just can't imagine a habitable planet not having a couple billion
despair yeah a couple million years to spare you know there is a mystery there about why did it take so long like with the cambrian explosion but that may be again about these windows that like you couldn't happen until until the window the planet and the the life had evolved together enough that they together kind of opened the window for the the next step um you know i i
intelligent life and how long intelligent is civil technological civilizations i think there's a big question about how long those last and how you know i'm hopeful you know um but uh but in terms of just like i think life is absolutely going to be common in the you know pretty common in the universe yeah i think it's absolutely like i think uh again if i were to bet everything uh even in advanced civilizations are common so the to me then the the only explanation is the l
our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.
Yeah, because, you know, you think about it, we've only been around, I mean, as a technical, truly, you know, when we think about, in Drake's definition, you had to have radio telescopes. That's been 100 years. You know, and if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, that would be, for us, that'd be pretty amazing, right?
But that still, that wouldn't be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the galaxy. So you really need it to be, like, hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question which I am... very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billionaire civilization, right?
How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way what happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?
How do you even simulate the trajectories that civilizations can take across that kind of time scale? When all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations. And then just, I don't know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we've been technological.
Yeah, and we're ready to blow ourselves to bits or drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. But there's got to be a way. I think that's really a frontier. So you had David Kipping on not too long ago.
And David and I did a paper, and Caleb Sharf, David really drove this, where it was a Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question, if you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older? Yeah. And you could see, I mean, this is not hard to do, but it was great.
The formalism, the formalism was hard, you know, it's kind of intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they're older, you know, probably much older. So that means you really do need to think about like, okay, how do billion year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave? And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it?
It's so much fun because you gotta, like, you have to, you have to imagine the unimaginable, right? Like, you know, would you still, I mean, obviously biological evolution can happen on, you know, on those kinds of timescales. So you wouldn't even really be the same thing you started out as, but social forms, what kind of social forms can you imagine that would be continuous over that?
Or maybe they wouldn't be continuous. You'd get, they drop out, you know, they destroy themselves and then they come back. So maybe it's, you know, it's a trunk or a punctuated evolution. I mean, but we got to sort of, this is the fun part. We have to sort of work this out. Well, I mean, one way to approach that question is like,
what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis as you get greater and greater technological innovation? So like if you expand out into the universe and you have up to Kardashev scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing. And I mean, that's an interesting question. I think it's probably simulatable.
Could be. I mean, you know, agent-based modeling, you could do it with that. So, you know, our group has used agent-based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox. That was agent-based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this. Other groups have done this to use agent-based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies.
the formation of stable hierarchies the so i think that i think it's actually very doable but um understanding the kind of assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those that is what is sort of the frontier do you think if humans colonized mars
the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now. That's the thing to load into the agent-based simulation we're talking about.
If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation. Well, no, there's already going to be nations
on Mars, that's guaranteed. The moment you have two million people, the moment you have one million people, there's gonna be two tribes. And then they're going to start fighting. And the question is, interplanetary fighting, how quickly does that happen, and does it have a different nature to it?
because of the distances, you know? Are you a fan of The Expanse? Have you watched The Expanse? Great show, because it's all about the, I highly recommend to everybody, it's based on a series of books that are excellent. It's on Prime, six seasons, and it's basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled.
And it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, the journal, what was it, Foreign Affairs, said the best show on TV about politics. it takes place is interplanetary. So yeah, I think, you know, human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict.
And I don't think it'll be necessarily all that different, you know, because really, I think within a few hundred years, we will have lots of people in the solar system. And it doesn't even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I always wanted to know about whether an idea in the expanse was really possible.
In the expanse, the asteroid belt, what they've done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside, right? Because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, wow, what a cool idea. And when I ran the blog for NPR, I actually talked to the guys and said, did you guys calculate this to see whether it's possible?
Sadly, it's not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one-third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need. for human beings, the rock would just fall apart. It would break.
But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to, you could get like a Manhattan's worth of material inside. So forget about even colonizing Mars, space stations, right?
Or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think, you know, within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people living in the solar system.
You think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary surface?
You know, it's a lot easier on some level, right? It depends on how, like with nanofabrication and such. But, you know, getting down to gravity well is hard, right? So, you know, there's a certain way in which there's a lot of, you know, it's a lot easier to build real estate out of asteroids. But we'll probably do both.
I mean, I think what will happen is, you know, the next... Should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other... And AI. The... The next thousand years of human history is the solar system, right? And so, you know, I think we'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can.
And it's, you know, it's a beautiful, what I love about, what's hopeful about it is this idea you're going to have all of these pockets. And, you know, I'm sure there's going to be a Mormon space habitat. Like, you know, there's going to be whatever you want, a libertarian space habitat.
Everybody's going to be able to kind of create their, there'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing, right? And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to sort of figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.
Do you think that's a good backup solution to go out into space sort of to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?
Well, I think, you know, I want to be always careful with that because, like I said, it's centuries that we're talking about, right? So, you know, the problem with climate change and same with nuclear war, it's breathing down our necks now.
So it's not a, you know, trying to establish a base on Mars is going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self-sufficient for a couple of, you know, a century at least. So it's not like a backup plan now. You know, we have to solve the problem of climate change. We have to deal with that.
There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do, you know, horrific things to the planet for human beings. So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way. But I do think, like I said, it's the prize. It's, you know, if we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to sort of play around in and experiment with and do really cool things with.
Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there's an urgency, like a real urgency, like a catastrophe, like maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it's like, holy shit, this is for sure, for sure a bigger one is looming.
Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates, where there's this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really accelerate.
Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self-sufficient base is so far away that, like, say, you start doing that, and then there is a full-scale nuclear exchange.
That base is, you know, it's not going to last because it's just, you know, the self-sufficiency requires a kind of economy, like literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars, that we are centuries from. Like I said, you know,
Three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries, you know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff, right? And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is sort of centuries long.
So that's why I think, I think we'd be better off trying to solve these problems than, you know, I just think the odds that we're going to be able to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So we'd have to deal with the threat.
It's an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self-sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat. Like where Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.
Yeah, yeah. Because it's really what about, you know, thinking about complex systems, right? A space habitat, you know, would have to be as robust as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing, you know, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. You know, that's why I always think that, you know, if this process of going out into space, right?
is actually will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long-term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs, and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this, right?
And so, A, how do we support, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn't mess with the biospheres, mess with the biospheres capacity to support our technosphere? So, you know, by doing this, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you're thinking about building a small scale version of this. So I think the two problems are going to kind of feed back on each other.
Well, there's also the other possibility of like the movie Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth, where we can create this kind of life gun. that just shoots, as opposed to engineering everything. Basically seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing, it seems like.
So as opposed to like, with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire space and technosphere, the whole thing by yourself. You know, if you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you'd be surprised what happens. Like, honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria...
a giant number of organisms from earth into uh on mars on uh some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system do you think like i feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive you know the moon is hard because the moon is just like there's no you know the moon may be really hard but you know that'd be i mean i wonder somebody must have done these experiments right like how because we know they're extremophiles right we know that they're you can go down you know 10
10 miles below the earth's surface. And there are things where there's no sunlight. There's, you know, the conditions are so extreme and there's lots of microbes having a great time living off the radioactivity, you know, in the rocks, but you know, they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions.
So I'm not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, you know, so somebody like somebody must've done these experiments, like, you know, how fast, uh,
could microbial evolution occur in under harsh conditions that you maybe get somebody who figures out okay i can deal with this i think the moon's too much because it's so sterile but you know mars i don't know maybe i don't know we'd have to that but it's an interesting idea i wonder if somebody has done those yeah you think somebody would like let's take a bunch of microbes the harsh the take the harshest possible condition of all different kinds temperature all this kind of stuff right
pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it, and then just see, does everybody just die? That's it.
The thing about life, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there's a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don't know if you can reconstruct...
harsh conditions plus options for survival you know what i mean like uh yeah like you have to have the the the uh the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow even when it's a super harsh condition so that so that's actually not a trivial experiment and i wouldn't even if somebody did that experiment in the lab i'd be a little bit skeptical
Because I could see bacteria doesn't survive in this kind of temperature. But then I'm going, I don't know. I don't know.
Is there enough, right? Are there other options? Is the condition rich enough? Rich enough, yeah. There's an alternative view, though, which is there's this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. So there's been a million century ship stories, like where Earth sends out a generation ship or century ship, and it goes to another planet, and they land, and they colonize.
And on this one, they get all the way there, and they think the planet's going to be habitable. And it turns out that it's not habitable for Earth life. There's bacteria or prions, actually, that just kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy.
I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I'm not necessarily supporting it, but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions. Not the planetary conditions, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just sort of be like, oh, just drop it over here and it'll, you know.
Because the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, And I kind of believe this, the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community. Yeah.
That's actually an interesting field of study is how when you arrive from one planet to another, so we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, What is the way to integrate without killing yourself or the other one? Let's stick to biology. That's an interesting question. I don't know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.
Because everybody, everything on life is, you know, has the same lineage. We all come from Luca, you know, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay. Because like that bio, that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don't even know each other, you know, right?
That the, you know, and then the other version is you get there, you land and instantly, you know, the nose bleeds and you're dead.
Unfortunately, I think it's the latter.
Yeah, it sort of feels like a very alien kind of thing.
So as we look out there, according to the Drake equations we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there's not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them?
This process of SETI. I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I am a little agnostic about, I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse. But until you know, we got to go look. It's all armchair astronomy.
That's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed. After the bong, yeah. I mean, honestly, it's really just impossible to me that there's not uh, potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.
Yeah. Yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that like making civilizations is easy. They just don't last long. So what we, when we went out there, we'd find a lot of extinct civilizations, extinct civilizations, uh,
Yeah, apex predators don't survive. They get better and better and better and they die and kill themselves all somehow. Anyway, so just how do we find them?
Yeah. So SETI, search for extraterrestrial technology, is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. I mean, some people in my field are, so I'm sorry, folks. But what I really like is the idea of techno signatures because I think – To me, SETI is the – first of all, intelligence. We're not really looking for intelligence. We're looking for technology. I mean, you know.
And SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes, you know, and contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part. It's still active. There's still great things going on with it. But suddenly, this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligent civilizations or life in general –
In a way that doesn't have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio setting. And specifically what I mean is we're not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with the classic model for a bunch of different reasons. You have to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon.
Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, you know, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a technosignature.
It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere. And that's really important. That is why kind of the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet. And you can see that from 20 light years.
So let's give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere.
oxygen right in our on earth at least we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there if life went away the oxygen and particularly oxygen and methane that pair they would disappear you know very quickly they'd react away they'd all be gone so if you find a planet with oxygen and methane that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there Okay, what about technospheres?
Technospheres, this is what, you know, so I'm the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these kind of exoplanet techno signatures. NASA was kind of, for reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun shy about funding anything about intelligent life. But OK, what's an example of a techno signature? Well, one could be atmospheric pollution.
I'm going to put pollution in quotes here because it doesn't have to be pollution, but gases like chlorofluorocarbons. So we've dumped, you know, we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone. But we put so much in there that actually this is one of the things we did.
We did a paper where we showed you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet and pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere.
And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.
So you're looking for, in the case of the biosphere, you're looking for anomalies, right? in the spectrograph?
I wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies. I'm looking for things that, for biosignature, I'm looking for things that a geosphere, right, you know, that just rock and air wouldn't produce on its own. What kind of chemicals would life produce? Right, and that's part of the, that's the interesting thing, right? So that's what, you know, so we can use Earth as an example, right?
We can say, look, oxygen, we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn't for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phyloplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it. That's sometimes mentioned. And there was even, there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, well, we're not saying we see it, but, you know, there's a bunch of noise in the spectra right there.
So, you know, there's a whole list of things that Earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures. But now we're reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic things. biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with Earth's history.
But we think that that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life, right? What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint? So one of these things could be the structure of the network of of chemical reactions, that biology always produces very different chemical networks, who's reacting with who, than just rock and water, right?
So there's been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can use, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere. And maybe that information shows you like, oh, there's too much information here. There must've been biology happening. It's not just rock. Same thing for techno.
That's what we're working on right now. That for techno signatures as well.
So how do you detect technosignatures?
Okay. So with technosignatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbons. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one because we sort of like, oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons. Maybe they will, right? And there's solar panels, right?
You can actually, the glint off of solar panels will produce a, the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, whether, no matter what it's made out of, actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in I think it was 2017. We've just followed up on it. That actually could act as a techno signature.
You'd be able to see in the reflected light, this sort of big jump that would occur because of city lights, city, artificial illumination. If the, if there's really like, you know, large scale cities like, you know, Coruscant and Star Wars or Trent or in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, you know, the spectral imprint of those across the, 20, 30 light years.
So, you know, our job in this grant is to develop the first ever library of techno signatures. Nobody's really ever thought about this before. So we're trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across, you know, interstellar distances. And are these good ones or is these ones going to be hard to detect or such?
City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.
Yeah. If you looked at Earth at night from a distance where, you know, looked at its spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you'd be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of, you know, they...
bounce off the ground right that the light bounces off the ground so you'd convolve the the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground and yeah you'd be able to see that there's city lights now increase that by a factor of a thousand you know if you had a a trantor and you'd be able to detect that across interstellar distances thomas beady did this work who's now working with us what do you think is the most detectable thing about earth
Wow, this is fun. We just have a Sophia Schiff, who's part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did Earth from Earth. If you were looking at Earth with Earth technology for a bunch of different technosignatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be, you'd have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort cloud.
But actually, it is our radio signatures still that is still most detectable.
By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the Oort cloud, that's not very close. But you mean like from an interstellar...
Interstellar distance. Because the real question, you know, we really want to know is like, I'm sitting here on Earth. I'm looking at these exoplanets. The nearest star is four light years away. So that's like the minimum distance. So what can, if I'm looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?
What is detectable about Earth with our current technology from our nearest solar system?
Oh my God, there's all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see Earth's pollution. And I think city lights, you had to be within the solar system.
If they do direct imaging of Earth,
They're going to need much more powerful. But let me tell you what things, let's talk about direct imaging for a moment because I just have to go on. This is such a cool idea, right? So what we really want and the next generation of space telescopes and such is we're trying to do direct imaging.
We're trying to get, you know, an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.
Yeah. By the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally like a picture.
A picture. But the problem is, is that even with the thing that's going to come after JWST, it's going to be a pixel, right? You're not going to get any kind of resolution. You'll be able to get the light from it, which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you're not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the Solar Gravity Lens Telescope.
I think that's what it is. And the idea is insane, right? So their general relativity says, look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve spacetime. So the sun is a massive body. And so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens, right?
So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out kind of into the Oort cloud and then look back towards the sun, towards an exoplanet that is behind, not directly behind the sun, but is, you know, in the direction of the sun. And then let the sun act like a lens and collect, focus the light onto the telescope. And you would be able to get, and they've done, it's amazing.
Like they've already, this idea is insane. They'd be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You'd be able to see Manhattan on a exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, you know, NASA, they've already got, the team has already gotten through like sort of three levels of NASA. You know, there's the NASA program for like, give us your wackiest idea.
right and then the ones that survive that are like okay tell us whether that wacky idea you know is even feasible and then and they're marching along and the idea is that like you know and they even have plans for how you'd be able to get these probes out into the oort cloud on relatively fast time scales you need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as earth is um but right now everything looks like the idea seems to hold together so probably when i'll be dead but
But when you're an old man, it's possible that something like this, could you imagine having like, yeah, that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to, you know, kilometers. So I'm very excited about that.
I can only imagine having a picture like that. And then there's some mysterious artifacts that you're seeing. Yeah. I mean, it's both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we'll be able to see a civilization where there's a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something, and then we can't.
We can't get there. But, you know, I mean, again, this is the thing about being long lived. We've got to get to the point where we're long lived enough that. So let's say we found like this is what I always like to let's imagine that we find, say, 10 light years away. We find a planet that looks like it's got techno signatures, right? It doesn't end there.
Like that would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity. And it wouldn't be like, well, okay, we're done. The first thing we do is we dig bigger telescopes to try and do those imaging, right? And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there, right?
We would figure out, like with Breakthrough Starshot, there was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, light sails, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. And So, well, you know, if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there.
Now, you know, we probably couldn't land. We could... You know, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, you know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals, right?
Those were multi-generational projects. And I think we're on the cusp. of that kind of project. I think that would probably unite humans. I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. I mean, human beings are a mess, let's face it.
But I think having that, that's why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn't matter, that to know that we're not an accident, to know that there is probably, if we found one example of life, we'd know that we're not an accident and there's probably lots of life and that we're a community.
We're part of a cosmic kind of community of life and who knows what life has done. We don't really, all bets are off with life.
Since we're talking about the future of telescopes, let's talk about our current super sexy, awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope that I still can't believe actually worked. I can't believe it worked either.
I was really skeptical. I was like, okay, guys, all right, sure.
We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I've been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There's been some direct imaging.
Yes, like a single pixel.
The kinds of exoplanets we're able to direct image, I guess, would have to be hot, right?
Hot, usually far away from the, you know, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really kind of at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there's not sexy pictures. It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line.
But be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That's where we are right now. In order to look for life, we're going to be, we need to find planets with atmospheres, right? And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere. Is there carbon?
Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that's the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra. And the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycian world. Hycian meaning hydrogen ocean world.
And that is a kind of planet that it would be a, you know, kind of in the super earth sub Neptune domain we were talking about, you know, maybe eight times that mass of the earth. But it's got a layer of hydrogen, an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water.
You can get a giant ocean of liquid water. And that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habitable planet. You know, it could be a 60 degree warm ocean. So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, oh yeah, you know what? The models, from what we understand about the models, this looks like it could be a Hycian world.
And it's 120 light years away from Earth.
Yeah. And so isn't that amazing? It's 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see into the atmosphere so well that we can be like, oh, look, methane. Methane was a five sigma detection. Like you knew that the data were so good that it was like the gold standard of science.
What about detecting maybe through direct imaging or in other ways, Megastructures that the civilizations build.
You know what's great about megastructures is, first of all, it's fun to say. Who doesn't want to say megastructure? Alien megastructure, right? Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that. So the Ur example of this is the Dyson sphere, right? Which is amazing because, you know, it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
Can you explain the Dyson sphere?
Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things, he recognized that when a civilization – as civilizations progress, what they're going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what's the best energy source in a solar system? It's the star, right?
So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines, and the limit of this would be to actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside, you could capture every photon the star produced, which is, you know, this...
insane amount of light you would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system um so that was a dyson sphere turns out that a dyson sphere doesn't really work because it's unstable you know but a dyson swarm is and that's really what he meant you know this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light
Yeah, so he didn't actually mean a rigid sphere structure. He basically meant a swarm. So that, like you said, and then the limit basically starts to look.
People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere. And we actually almost thought we might have found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. We saw, you know, the way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there's a dip in the starlight. It's a little eclipse basically. Yeah. And we know exactly what they should look like.
And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where like it was like this little dragon's tooth. And then there'd be another one and another one and another one and then nothing and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they suggested they, you know, they went through the list of, oh, it could be comets, could be chunks of a broken up planet.
And it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course the news picked up on this and like everybody's, you know, newsfeed the next day, alien megastructure is discovered. Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds. But it raised the possibility like, oh, these are observable. And people have worked out the details of what they would look like.
You don't really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They're big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they're going to produce a little blip of light because that's what they're supposed to, right? They're absorbing starlight. So people did have worked out like, well, a square one or a triangular one.
But that wouldn't be a Dyson sphere. That would be like one object.
One object.
right which is what if it's a swarm you'd expect like the light to be like blinking in and out as these things pass in front of you know if you've got thousands of these much of the time they'll be blotting out the star sometimes they won't be right and so you're going to get an irregular sort of uh signal uh transit signal yeah one you wouldn't expect from a star that doesn't have anything exactly or just a planet right or a couple of planets there'd be so many of these that it would be like beep beep beep
And that usually doesn't happen in a star system because there's only just a handful of planets.
That's exactly what it is. Everything's coag, you know, in a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, you know, 5, 10, that's it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little microtransits, you're telling you there's something else that's big enough to create a transit, but...
too many of them, and also within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.
How many people are looking for megastructures now?
Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are, again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators. The way they're looking for it, though, is for infrared light. Because the second law of thermodynamics says, look, if you capture all of this starlight, you're going to warm up the, you know, your thing's going to warm up and emit an infrared.
It's going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this. That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it. Right. And that's actually, you know, Dyson, that's actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn't really proposing it because like he was saying, this is what civilizations are going to do. He proposed it because he was like, oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations.
Here's something that would have a detectable signature. Um, Um, so, uh, Jason and company have done, you know, pretty good searches. And recently they made news because, you know, they were able to eliminate a lot of places. No, these are not Dyson spheres, but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough that they're like, well, this is kind of what it would look like.
It's not a detection. And they were saying they would never say it's a detection, but they were like, they were not non detections.
There are potential candidates.
Potential candidates, yeah.
Love it. We have megastructure candidates. That's inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? I mean, so that's, Dyson Sphere is about capturing the energy of a star.
Yeah.
Or there could be other.
Well, there's something called the Clark Belt, right? So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit, right? Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that's really useful if you want to beam things straight down or if you want to put a space elevator up. Right.
So there's this idea that if, you know, a civilization becomes, you know, advanced enough that it's really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. There's been a couple of papers written about the possibility of these Clark belts, densely occupied Clark belts being a mega structure.
It's not as mega as a Dyson swarm, but it's, you know, kind of planetary scale.
You think it's detectable, Clark belt?
It could be, I mean, like in our list of techno signatures, it would be down there. But it would be, again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, it would certainly, you'd have a Clark belt. And the question is whether or not it's detectable.
Yeah, probably Dyson Sphere is the, that's the more exciting.
That's the go-to one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let's talk through the Kardashev scales. Right. what is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it?
Right. So the Kardashev scale was the same time. This is this golden age of SETI, like kind of like 60, 59 to 65 when it just starts. Like this is, you know, Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, oh my God, this is even possible. And so people are just thrown out these ideas. And as I, you know, said in the book, science is conservative.
And what I mean by that is it holds onto its best ideas. So Kardashev comes up with this idea that look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability. If we're looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the state, what are the natural stages, natural in quotes, that a civilization goes through. And he was thinking in terms of energy use, which I like a good physicist.
So the, he said, look, the first thing hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that a civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet. He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you're doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you're using for your own ends.
The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star, right? So that's the Dyson sphere. So he actually, Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Kardashev was picking out. So that's a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. Right. So we are now, where are we now?
2300.
Yeah. So this is a log scale. Yeah. So, uh,
0.7 so type 1 is about 10 to the 16th watts type 2 is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that 10 to the 26 watts and i think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude yeah because there's 100 billion star off order 100 billion stars so that's a lot that's a lot do you think humans ever get to type one
Um, I think, you know, there's a problem with type one, which is that, you know, we already know about climate change, right? The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state. Right. And that's something that, you know, uh, Kardashev couldn't have recognized when you, you know, there's, there's, uh, The first law of thermodynamics, right?
Which is just about energy, you know, the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy. And Kardashev wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there's waste heat. You don't get to use it all, right?
You can only, second law tells you that if, you know, I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank and the rest is going to go to heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that, you know, you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, uh-oh, you know, sorry, it's going to change on you.
So there's a way in which we probably can't get to a type one without like devastating the Earth's climate. So we're probably going to have to figure out The most important thing actually here is probably this is why space becomes the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while called service worlds, right?
That at some point, you probably move a lot of your industry off world, right? We've got mercury, for example. There's nothing on mercury. There's no life on mercury. Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right? Because you can't mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are, right? And so, yeah. So, yeah.
There's limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.
It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.
This is the frontier we are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It's like you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we're going through now of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework.
And that paper we were talking about with the 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know how often – Do you go through an anthropo... Does every technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate anthropocene crisis?
And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you're doing technologically so that you're not... That all boats rise, right? You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient. So, yeah, right. It's the kind of...
I think there's probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, yeah, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you're not going to do it on world. So how do we detect energy?
alien type one, two, and three civilizations. So we've been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection. Yeah. Right. Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get like a little bit more type two, but it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won't be just the Dyson sphere. Right.
It feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned climate change, but now at the star system level, they're probably expanding. Yeah. Right, so how would you detect a type 2?
How about propulsion plumes, right? If you're expanding, no, no, we just, I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beattie, who's joined us from the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for
plumes right if you have a civil if you have a a solar system wide civilization right and you got space truckers going back and forth right you know from mars to you know they're doing the insetilus run they're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there right if you want to get to mars in a couple weeks you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there you flip and burn and have it on you know so you're all you're also always have gravity you have thrust gravity and
So would those plumes be detectable? Cause now you've got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that like, you know, the plume is going to cross your field of view becomes, could become pretty high. So yeah, that's, I think that's a good way of looking for, that's one idea. Um.
of looking for, you know, large scale interplanetary, which is kind of like when you're getting to a type two. Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining.
This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian that, you know, to be able to look for if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, can, you know, there'd be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust, you know, from just regular collisions?
So pollution of all different kinds.
Pollution of all different kinds. And trash also. Okay, so trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system, right? We are actually, there's a whole other field of techno signatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by a billion years ago, you know, and left some stuff, right? So the Earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years.
And, you know, a species like us looking at our level, looking at Earth would have been able to know that Earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by, you know, a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts. is that have been there for a long time is something that people, a number of people are doing.
We're just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated how long would the lunar lander exist on the moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down, right? How long would you be able to land on the moon and go, oh look, there's, you know, somebody was here and left some debris.
So there's this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites. And that's where you get the lunar regolith, that fine powder on the moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years. Oh, nice. Yeah, that the lunar lander will be visible.
Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.
Yeah, if there are artifacts on – and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. We have – you know, the moon has been mapped down to like a couple of meters with various probes. And all that data is sitting there. So have – why not use machine learning to like look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface?
And they did a test program where they gave it – they gave the computer – You know, sort of like, I don't know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11 or Apollo, maybe it was Apollo 17 site. And it instantly was able to pull out the lander.
I mean, the whole task of looking for anomalies, something that looks not like the lunar surface, you make it sound obvious, but it's not exactly obvious. Like anomalies is really not. I mean, detect something that doesn't look right about this room.
Yeah.
It's, it's actually really difficult.
So.
Yeah. Maybe when you're looking at a spectrograph or something like it's still, it's still like it's going to look really weird potentially. Like we're kind of hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that.
But that could be really weird stuff. That's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic algorithms. signatures, right? So, um, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, right? It's alive, right? Because as soon as it dies, it turns into, it goes back to equilibrium.
And so you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don't know whether these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not – the chemicals have not all kind of like just gone down to – they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state.
You can actually tell that in very general ways using what's called the Gibbs free energy. And that's kind of a signature. Like if you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium state. You know, that indicates that there's something happening on that planet, biosphere or technosphere, that is pumping gases, you know, into the atmosphere that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.
So is it possible we can detect anomalies in space time? Well, you could detect, and there's been some work on this, like with the Akubrae drive, you know, these proposals for warp drives. And we can talk about that later. I'm skeptical of those. Because it may really be possible you just can't go fast from the speed of light.
But people have done work on, like, you know, what would be the signature of...
uh an akubre drive what would be the signature like you know could you detect if you're using a drive like that then you certainly are distorting space-time which means any light that's passing by has gotten you know it's it's its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted space-time so yeah there are possibilities along with that you know one of the funny things i don't know if they've gotten past this but somebody calculated the problem with the akubre drive or this warp drive was that if if you dropped out of warp there would be this spread
ray of gamma rays that would like sterilize any planet in front of you so it's like well yeah you probably don't want to do that but that would be a great bios or techno signature another planet obliterated so you think it's not possible to travel faster than speak i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say that but what i think you know if you look at the physics we understand right yeah um the you know every possibility for faster than light travel right
really relies on something that doesn't exist, right? So, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations. You can actually play with them. The equations are right there. You can add things to the, you know, right or left-hand side that allow you to get something like the Ocubre Drive. That was a metric that, you know, showed you like, oh, it's a warped bubble.
It's a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime Faster than the speed of light, right? Because nothing can move across space-time faster than the speed of light, but space-time itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something.
The thing you added, the little fictional term you added into the equations is something called exotic matter, and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do.
So, you know, it's a nice fiction, but really right now, you know, you know, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where like the technology we use now is, you know, is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from a hundred years ago.
Um, but you know, I remember playing, um, uh, Assassin's Creed where everybody's like, you know, what is it? It's 1200 and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And I was like, yeah, it's a great game. And then I got Assassin's Creed two and, uh, it was 300 years later and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn't changed.
And that was actually true for most of human history, right? You used your great grandfather's tools, right? Because there was no need to have any other new tools. And you probably did his job. So, you know, we can be fooled into thinking like, oh, you know, technology is going to go on forever. We're always going to find new advances.
As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So you have to be careful about that bias that we have living in this time of great acceleration.
Yeah, but also it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. For example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we under invest in theoretical physics research. basically like we're trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus like trying to hack physics, sort of warp drives and so on.
Because it's really hard to do space travel. And it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive, the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new, totally new thing. So it's not, going to be an engineering problem. It's going to be a physics problem. A fundamental physics problem. A fundamental physics problem.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in principle, but I think there's been, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there. People, you know, string theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years. It's not like people haven't been, not like there hasn't been a lot of effort. And, you know, and again, I'm not going to predict.
I think it's entirely possible that we have, you know, there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through. In which case then, All bets are off, right? Once you get sort of, you know, interstellar, fast interstellar travel, whoa, you know, who knows what can happen. But I tend to be drawn to like science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously.
Like what kind of civilization can you build where like it takes, you know, 50 years to get to where you're going and a 50 years back. Like, so I don't know. I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say that, that we won't get warp drives, but as of right now, there's, it's all fictional. It's, you know, it's barely even a coherent concept.
Well, it's also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations. So you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years and you're not sad about it.
that you'll never see the destination because you kind of have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.
Yeah. It's a wild ethical question, isn't it? That book I told you about, Aurora? I love the book because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual. Cause you know, I've read, I love science fiction. I've read so many generation ship stories and they get to that planet. The planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It's inhabited, but it's uninhabitable for earth.
Because again, he has this idea of like, you know, life is particular to their planets. So they turn around and they come back. And then when they land, the main character goes, there's still people who are, you know, arguing for more generation ships. And she goes and she,
punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube you know with this i thought that was a really interesting inversion you know the interesting thing about about we were talking about these space habitats but if you really had a space habit not some super cramped you know crappy usual version of a sentry ship but if you had these like space habitats that were really you know like the o'neill cylinders they're actually pretty nice places to live put a thruster on those
You know, like why, why keep them in the solar system? Maybe that's, maybe space is full of like these sort of traveling space habitats that are in some sense a, you know, they're worlds in and of themselves.
There's the show Silo, which raises the question of basically if you're putting on a generational ship. what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them. You might want to tell them a story that they believe. Because there is a society, there's human nature, there's like, how do you maintain homeostasis of that little society?
I mean, that's a fascinating technical question, a social question, a psychology question.
You know, the generation ship, too, which I talked about in the book, the idea of also the, you know, you talked about extending human lifetimes, or, you know, the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction. You know, right, you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible.
But, you know, it's so interesting, and this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, right? All these ideas we're going to talk about because they've been staples of science fiction for 50 years. I mean, the whole field of cryogenics? Yeah, where are we at with that?
Yeah, I wonder what the state of the art is for a complex organism.
How long?
How long can you freeze and then unfreeze? Right. Maybe like with bacteria, you could do freeze and unfreeze.
Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, right? How long can, you know, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted? You know, if there's a common impact across bacteria. interstellar distances. That does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations.
It's not out of the realm of possibility, but a complex organism, multicellular, multisystemic or multisystems, right, with organs and such. Also, what makes an organism?
I mean, it could, you know, which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like what makes a personality, it feels like you want to preserve a set of memories, right? Like if I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.
Altered Carbon. Have you, that's a, that's a great series. I think it's on Netflix. It's, you know, that's a really great series where that's exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody's able to like, you know, you can resleeve in another body. And it raises exactly sort of this question. It's not the greatest cyberpunk, but it's pretty good. It's got, it's got some great, great action sequences too.
as we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you, it raises a question, because to me, they've already passed the Turing test, as we traditionally have defined it.
So if there's going to be an LLM that's able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it's gonna raise ethical and, I don't know, philosophical questions about what makes you you. If there's a thing that can talk exactly like you, what is the thing that makes you you? It's going to speak about your memories very effectively.
This leads us to if we're going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps, that the brain is not the minimal thing. the minimal structure for consciousness. You know, it's the whole body. It's embodied in me, actually, in some sense. It's communities, actually.
So, yeah, so I don't, I mean, you know, I could be wrong, but this is, you know, this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science. Which is interesting because it leads to this question about, you know, oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers, right? That's another story that one tells. I'm super skeptical about those.
But that's one of the narratives about interstellar travel is just like, and that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway. Whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies or it's just going to be artificial intelligence. Like there's the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last?
Maybe it's a very short period before everybody, you know, goes to, or the machines take over and, you know. or, you know, it's some hybrid.
What do you think aliens look like? So we talked about all the different kinds of biosignatures that might leave or technosignatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they going to have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?
Yeah, so great question. And this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, right, about what life is. And this is the physical part of that. There's also sort of the informational part of it. But let's just talk about the physical part of it. which is, you know, life, anything that we're going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution.
That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution. Just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic, this basic logic, that, you know, anything we'd reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles. And so, you know, evolution is about solving problems, right?
That, you know, to survive that the environment presents. And the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms so that you'd expect a kind of balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence, and evolutionary contingency. Mm-hmm.
So, you know, if you've got to move along a surface, you know, a surface between, you know, a hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick, right, legs, makes sense.
That you're probably going to trigger that, you know, if you look at Earth's history, multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of, you know, a stick-like apparatus.
So that's about movement? Yeah.
Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved. One problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right? Another problem is I got to get away from predators, right? You've seen wings. We've seen wings. The line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved wings. Insects evolved wings. Mammals evolved wings.
If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it's going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go. Evolutional trip on that. So I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with. Stay alive, reproduce. But...
One of the weird things about like with the UFO things is that you always see like, oh, they all look like humans. They're just like basically humans with, you know, triangular heads. And that's where we get to contingency, right? So what we've been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve.
Um, but contingency is accidents, right? That, you know, you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing, right? Uh, and then, you know, the climate changes and they all die out. End of story. Or, you know, an asteroid, a total accident, asteroid hits. And so contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution.
And one of the things that, you know, lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth's history over again, would you get the same creatures? Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, that you wouldn't find anything on Earth that resembled any species today. They've done experiments actually on this with E. coli.
You take a bunch of E. coli. You let them evolve for a while. You take a bunch of them out, freeze them. Let that population continue to evolve. The other one's frozen. Now start it over again with the frozen. And it seems to me that contingency tends to win. right? The contingency, at least from what we can tell.
I mean, that's not a, that's not a hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. So the idea, and this is important. So yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks. How many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess.
You know, do you expect humanoids, you know, things with a, you know, a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.
I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Where is most of the cognition computation going on? Yeah, yeah. You could see that in organisms. Actually, I don't know how the brain evolved. Why does it have to be in one place?
It doesn't have to be. So my favorite word, word of the day, is liquid brains, right? This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea. And we've come to understand how much distributed cognition there is. Obviously, eusocial animals like termites, et cetera, and ants, that's an example of distributed cognition. The organism is the whole colony.
This is one thing that's been really interesting in the state of the study when we cut to for aliens is that when we've come to recognize that human intelligence is It's not actually – it's been – the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have.
Jason Wright will describe it as like a deck of cards. The cards are all there. We got the hand that actually led to the kind of technological progress that we –
We see, but the kinds of, you know, the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye, all the things that we define as intelligence, you can find many places in many other, um, uh, places across many other line lineages across the earth.
So it could be, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe that's, you know, the hive mind idea or, you know, bacterial colonies that actually managed to, you know, come to their own version of high cognition. Yeah.
But I wonder if we stretch out time across 10, 20 billion years, whether there's an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms, and it switches to ideas, for example. Much more rapidly, you're operating maybe, I guess it's a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever.
Technology seems to operate on, and certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian. So basically, a planet...
is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that's able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete. And then it kind of stops evolving there. And then it's ideas that take off.
Right, right. Because, yeah, cultural, it's true. It's amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I'd be careful to say that, like, a planet is working hard to do this. Because, you know, it's really important, looking at us, we're
Like what we think of as ideas and culture and, you know, it's quite possible we're going to make it another 200 years and this is gone, right? Because it actually wasn't a very good idea long term. I mean, we just don't know. Oh, so maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys everything. Not the biosphere, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long-term.
It may be very potent for a short period of time, but that it's not sustainable. It doesn't become, like we were talking about before, mature. It's very hard to make it integrated into a mature bio-slash-technosphere. And of course, evolution is not working for anything. Well, here's the actually interesting thing, right?
So people are very much, you know, evolutionary biologists will get very, their hair will stand on end if you start talking about evolution having a purpose or anything. But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, yeah, then, you know, kind of all bets are off. And there is... There is teleology.
There is a, you know, now suddenly, you know, absolutely there's a direction implied. So that's kind of the cool, interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless and suddenly, yeah, we're the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that they decide on.
Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization, we're also directionless. We have a sense that there's a direction in this cluster of humans. Yeah. And then there's another cluster that has a different sense of direction. There's all kinds of religions that are competing. There's different ideologies that are competing. Yeah.
And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball system.
It's an unholy mess, but you know, but at some point, like the expansion into the solar system, say like that would be both direction. I mean, depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a, there was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti-accrete to start spreading out into the solar system.
So that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy sort of, you know, non-linear way, but it was still right. There was still, it's still a goal was set and it was achieved.
If there's advanced civilizations out there, what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike? Like, what do we do next? We detect the civilizations through all the technosignatures we've been talking about. Maybe direct imaging, maybe there's a really strong signal.
We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there. But what's the, then the general says they always do. a military industrial complex.
We've watched that movie.
Where, what kind of rockets, what kind of, and do we bring rockets? Right.
Well, I think, you know, so this also, this general question also leads to many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I am definitely of the opinion of like, you should be very careful, you know, like, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass.
Um, you know, the people who advocate like, oh yeah, we should be sending, you know, powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space. I'm like, why would you, cause we just don't know. Like, I'm not going to say they are warlike. I'm not going to say they're not warlike. I have no idea. You know, But we sure as hell – well, first of all, who gets to decide that?
The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, I don't – who speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote. So definitely we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. You used to have this idea of, well, if they're advanced, they've managed to survive, so of course they're going to be wearing togas and be singing kumbaya.
But I just wouldn't assume that. It's also possible, though, that their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings.
beings one of my favorite movies is arrival i don't know if you've ever seen that one i really love that one because you know they literally they have a different language they have a different cognitive structure in terms of language and they're literally kind of living in a different physics different physics different language different different everything yeah but in the case of arrival it can at least like recognize that they're there and they managed to cross the language barrier yeah
But that's both sides have an interest in communicating, which you kind of suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because how do you become advanced without a kind of curiosity about the mysterious, about the other?
But also, you know, if they're long-lived, they may just be like, we're not even interested. Like, we've done this. We're like, you know, 10 billion years – or sorry, say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this, in communicating with you, you know, youngins. But now we're not at all.
And that's just, you know, one of the beauties of this, again, is how to think about this systematically because you're so far past the hairy edge. Right. Of our experience of what we know that you want to think about it. Right. You don't want to be like, don't know, can't say anything because that's not fun. But you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases. Right.
So one of the things I loved about Arrival, too, was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this idea like we'll teach him math. We'll teach him our math. Then they'll teach us their math. And then, you know, we'll be telling each other knock knock jokes, you know, and swapping cures for cancer. Right. And, you know, in the movie, like, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist.
And the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, right? And it's the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head. It's actually the whole experience. And she's the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that how...
utterly different the cognitive structures the you know of of a of a different species should be so somehow we have to figure out how to think about it but be so careful of our biases or figure out like a systematic way to break through our biases and not just tell something make science fiction movies you know what i mean
Yeah, yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You've mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and we wouldn't even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question?
Got to look. got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So I, you know, I mean, I, I don't put it, it's not high on my list of, you know, things that I'm, I think are probable, but it's certainly, it needs to be explored, you know, and unless you look, you never know.
So looking on the moon, look at where would we find if, if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last 3 billion years, where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth would Probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon's a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, you know, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable.
So you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it'll last for a billion years. So those are the kind of questions I don't. Like I said, I don't, it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know.
What about, speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning like the potential of aliens, say, seeding life on Earth.
Uh, you mean like in that directed panspermia?
Directed panspermia.
Yeah. Or seeding some aspect of the evolution. Like 2001. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, it's a great story, but you know, always with Occam's razor or whatever with science, if I can, if I can answer that question without that extra very detailed, uh, hypothesis, uh, than I should. And, you know, the idea that evolution is a natural process, that's what I would go for first, right?
There's, that just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way than adding, you know, sort of, because it's kind of a duo sex machina thing of like, oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.
So to you, the origin of life Is a pretty simple thing that doesn't require an alien.
I wouldn't say that. It's not a simple thing, but it doesn't, you know, putting, I think, because, you know, all you're doing is kicking the can down the road, right? The aliens formed, right? So you're just saying like, all right, I'm just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. How did they, what was their abiogenesis event?
Well, so from a different perspective, I'm just saying it seems to me that there's obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do? You know, I've gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon.
You get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon that are in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else try to stay away from them.
They try to kind of protect them, don't talk about them, don't talk about their location and all this kind of stuff. And I've begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you're doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing.
And of course, there's always the teenager or the troll who's going to start messing with the stuff or the scientists, you know? Yeah, right. And so... It's not, from our perspective, yes.
And if you're in the Truman Show, like Occam's Razor, but like also the Occam's Razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect. Yeah.
That would not be obvious. Right. I understand the logic of what you're saying. But the problem for me with that is that, right, first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I'm not sure about it, that most of them may be dead. Or they're not, you know, while I think that life is common. And again, this is just my biases, right?
So now the problem is how do we sort out sort of, you know, the biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from... You know, from the sort of causal chain that comes out of that.
I would first want to try and do this without... Like, you know, if we're looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth, I'd want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer. Because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions, which also have their own sort of breaking of causal chains. Because I don't really... Like, the idea that...
When you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, like alien minds could be so unbelievably different, right? That they wouldn't even recognize the question you just posed.
Right.
Right. Because it's just like, you know, we're very much, we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure, you know, and we're very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about.
You know, if I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talk to a hunter-gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, you know, I might find something that's like, but we're no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, oh, that's what naturally humans do. Well, let me ask you this question. Let's together do the thought experiment.
Yeah, yeah.
If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them, or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization somewhere, on a nearby star system, what would we do?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, so, you know, it's interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions, right? Let's say that, you know, would we, we'd have to first sort of sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them.
And also, sorry, from a capitalist perspective,
What are we to gain from this interaction? Right, right, right. You look at the way the missionaries, you know, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were, you know, was the most important. That's what the gain was. So from our perspective, I mean, we'd have to sort that out.
I think given, you know, if we're doing this thought experiment, we are curious. And I think eventually we'd want to reach out to them.
I think when you say we, let's start with the people in this room, right? But there is, I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world because I think there's a lot of people the military, they will probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That's one perspective.
Then there's the capitalists who will see like how the benefits and the costs here and how can I make money off of this? There's opportunity here. There's gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientists is just not going to, unlike the movies, We're not going to get much say. They're going to put them.
Hey guys, wait a minute.
They would engage probably. I mean, it's just as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.
In our engagement.
In our engagement. Yeah, yeah, probably. So using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which brings up that old direct for me, paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?
I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think they're the standards. They just, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence.
So let's just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence, because I've made a So what people have to understand about science is we are really scientists. We are really mean to each other. We are brutal to each other because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence. And it's the idea of like you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim.
And, you know, under what conditions can you say, oh, look, I've got evidence of, you know, this claim X, Y, and Z. And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are. And that is why cell phones work.
If you didn't have super rigorous standards about what you think, oh, this little antenna, I've invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works. If you didn't have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick.
And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that this shows that we are being visited by non-human advanced civilization just doesn't even come close.
to the same standards I'm going to have to obey or whatever, live under, if my team, you know, the group I work with, if one of them says, look, we've discovered, wants to announce that, oh, we've discovered a techno signature on an alien planet. We're going to get shredded as we expect to be. We expect to be beaten up. And, you know, the UAP UFO community should expect the same thing.
You don't get, you know, you don't get a pass because it's a really cool topic. So that's where I am right now. I just don't think... any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.
Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. not scientific value, but just like, it's always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. So I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's something there. But unfortunately with this topic, there's so much excitement around it. There's a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it.
There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff. So even if there's some signal, there's just so much noise, it's very difficult to operate with. So how do we get better signal? So you've talked about sort of, if we wanted to really search, for UFOs on Earth. And maybe detect things like weird physics. What kind of instruments would we be using?
Yeah, so, you know, in the book I talked about the idea that this is really stupid, but, you know, you want to look up, you want to look down, and you want to look all around.
I think that's brilliant. I mean, it's simple, not stupid. It's like literally.
So you want to do ground-based detectors, you know, upward-looking ground-based detectors of the kind we're already building for meteors, right, for tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites. This is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, you know, we have lots of people in the sky.
There should be detectors on the planes or at least, you know, some kind of alert system that if a pilot says, oh, look, I'm seeing something I don't understand, boop, presses the red button. And that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don't understand and it's so important.
In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from, like down to the, you know, the nth degree. You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to characterize that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera.
Was it refurbished recently? Yeah. In every spectral wavelength, in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized. Because especially if you want to claim like, oh my God, I saw something take a right-hand turn at Mach 500, right? You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim.
So we have to have characterized detectors looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves. We need a rational search strategy. So let's say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors, where do you put them? There's only so much money in the world.
Do you want to put them near places where you've seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do a sparse coverage of the entire country? Then you need the data analysis.
You're going to have so much data, so many false positives or false triggering that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you're going to throw out and what you're going to keep. All of these things we're used to doing in other scientific enterprises.
And without that, if we don't do that, we're going to be having the same damn argument about these things for, you know, the next hundred years.
But if I asked you, I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocate to one place, looking out, SETI or looking at earth, which should you allocate?
Oh God, looking out, looking out because that's the best, you know, as I always like to say, here's my, my codification of this. If you said, Hey Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraskans. And I said, Oh good. Let's go to the Himalayas. You know, you'd be like, why am I going there? I'm like, well, you know, maybe there's some Himalaya, you know, some Nebraska's in Himalaya.
Say no, no, let's go to Nebraska. If we're looking for aliens. Hmm. why don't we look on alien planets where they live? Cause that's, we have that technology now, as opposed to the, you know, the, the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, oh, they're here right now. You know, they just happen to be here right now.
And also the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument. You know, to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to deal with all of... You have to answer these weird, irrational things that are happening. Like, okay, there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don't want to be detected.
They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because we keep seeing them. We keep seeing them, but then they disappear, right? I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. It's like... You know, so there's that whole sort of argument you've got to explain, like, why, if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it?
So, you know, that's why I take that level of difficulty, and then I put it on top of, where should I look? I should look at the, you know, I should look at where they're from. That makes me want to look at, do the telescopic stuff.
Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is... either the sensors are not working correctly or it's secret military technology being tested.
Absolutely. Listen, that's why again, I think UAP, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically. But if I had to make a bet and it's just a bet, I would say this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did – I did a New York Times op-ed for this in 2021, which blew up. And so I had a lot of people talking to me.
While I was doing that, I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and EINT, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the – the various videos and really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about, you know, peer state.
That's where I learned the word peer state adversaries, how like even simple drone technologies you can, you know, and you want to, you purposely want to do this. You want to, um, fake, you know, signals into the electronics, uh, of their adversary. So they crank it up. So then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.
That said, I'm not saying that that's what this is. If I wasn't, the head of an alien civilization, and I chose to minimize the amount of contact I'm doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see? That's why the big heads in the humanoid form. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of how I would approach communication.
If I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It's like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with a nail colony, I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication. Yeah, yeah. And maybe I would do a trivial thing like do like a fake ant.
Right, a robot ant.
A robot ant. But then it's not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that like moves in the way they do. And maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no. I do sort of, I just wanted to make the case for that.
This is the plot, actually, of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer. And the idea was like these sort of, you know, this is actually where my first, I got, I became sort of more than agnostic, anti-Medi. Because the idea is that, yes, our aliens come. They, you know, they sort of make their arrival. And really their point is to get rid of us. It's the dark forest hypothesis. Yeah.
And what they do is they sort of literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing. And they do it and they, you know, they arrive at the, this was during the Soviet Union. They arrive at the USSR. They arrive in China. And they're kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against.
So it was really, they did exactly kind of what you're talking about, but for nefarious purposes. Yeah.
Okay, let me ask the pothead question. Yet another pothead question.
The whole conversation is bogs before breakfast.
It's science and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of, say, ideas? What if... real pothead, is that consciousness itself, like the subjective experience, is an alien being.
Maybe ideas then is an easier one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.
I made the claim that the most important, that finding life, any kind of life, would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that, you know, life, if we're not an accident and there's other life, then there's probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right?
If I give you a star and, you know, tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically pretty much, using the laws of physics, tell exactly what's going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall, it's going to be a white dwarf, it's going to be a black hole, end of story.
If I gave you a single cell and said what's going to happen in a few billion years, you'd never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right? A kangaroo. So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative. So what it means is, and that's a part of a kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive. It goes past itself.
So give life enough time, you know, and what are the end result? Like, you know, that's why I love science fiction so much. Does at some point does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself? It becomes the laws of physics or, you know, these these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what what we mean by reality, what we mean by, you know, experience.
But I'm not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically. But, you know, they're they're open ended question about the open ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.
since you said it's the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment. What is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe. I can see the argument for how many alien civilizations or if there's other life out there. You want to speak to that a little bit?
Why is it the biggest question in your, why is it number one in your top five?
I've evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics and magnetohydrodynamics of star formation. But I always, I was a philosophy minor. I always had the sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I've come to now is the most important question for physics is what is life?
What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, and this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency. What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? happen. I'm not a reductionist.
I'm not somebody who's just like, well, I just put together enough chemicals and bing, bang, boom, and it suddenly appears. There's something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is. And so, yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool. But really, this question of
of what is life especially from by viewing it from the inside uh because it's really about the verb to be right really what is the most what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science is the verb to be what is what is being right uh this is what stephen hawking said when he talked about what puts the fire in the equations the fire right the fire is this this presence.
And this is where it touches things like, you know, whatever you want to say it, the sacred spirituality, however you want to talk about. My first book was about science and, and human spirituality. Um, so it's like, you know, so this question of life, what makes life as a physical system, um, you know, so different is to me much more. Because it's, you know, that's where being appears.
Being doesn't appear out there, right? The only place it ever appears to any of us is us. So, you know, I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God's eye view. That's a story we tell. This is where, you know, this between us is where the verb to be appears.
So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, why science cannot ignore human experience, sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it's a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?
Yeah, so the idea of The Blind Spot is that there is this thing that That is central to science. So we're using the blind spot as a metaphor, right? So the eye has an optic nerve and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can't have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you're blind to the optic nerve. There's a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is.
And what we're saying is that science has something like this. There is something without which science would not be possible, but that science, the way it's been configured. And actually, when we mean the blind spot, I'll get into exactly what I mean, what it is. But it's not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It's a metaphysics that got glued onto science.
And so what is that thing that is – what is the blind spot? It's experience. It is presence. And by experience, people have to be very careful because I'm not talking about being an observer. It's the – you know, there's lots of words for it. There's direct experience. There is presence. being the life world within the philosophy called phenomenology. There's the life world.
It's this sort of raw presence that you can't get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows, you know, that like, you know, as long as you're around, it's there. And what we're saying is that that is the way to say this. That is the precondition of, For the possibility of science. And the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved, is that it purposely pushed that out.
It pushed that out so it could make progress. And that's fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer... When we try and go deeper, there's a whole other class of problems, the nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us.
And that if we don't learn how to take, understand that that is always the background, that experience is always the background, then we just end up with these paradoxes and these yoga that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.
I think you give a bunch of examples of that, like looking at temperature as a number. There's a very sort of objective scientific way of looking at that. And then there's the experience of the temperature.
And how you build the parable of temperature that we call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term, it's a constellation. It's not just materialism. It's a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They're not what science says. But because of the evolution of the history of science and culture, they got like pin the tail on the donkey. They were sort of
pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says. So what is it? One is reductionism, that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but, you know, all the way down to quarks. That's it. So that's reductionism.
The objective frame that science gives us this God's eye view, this third person view of the world to view the world from the outside, that that's what science, you know, bequeaths to us that view. Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There's nothing else to talk about, right? That that's all there is and everything can be reduced to that.
And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this. And there's a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epiphenomena. I tend not to use the word consciousness because I think it leads us in the wrong direction.
We should focus on experience because it's a verb kind of in a way or it's verb-like. So, yeah, and by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science but also have been detrimental to society as a whole, especially where we're at right now.
So you actually say that that, from a perspective of detrimental society, that there's a crisis of meaning, and that we respond to that in a way that's counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways, the three responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism, and then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right, I think.
The postmodernists on the left and the anti-establishment people on the right. And then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in-between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?
Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that, you know, on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we're insignificant, we're not important, we're just, you know, biological machines. And, you know, so we're basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant.
In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside at cosmology. We're always the observers. We're at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. In quantum mechanics, it really comes in. The measurement problem just puts us front and center. Some people have spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem.
So on the one hand, we're insignificant, and on the other hand, we're central. So which one is it, right? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability. We can't do science without already being present in the world. We can't reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal.
A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we're substituting. That's one of the things that we – there's two philosophers we really like. who are heroes. One is Herschel, who is a mathematician who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
And Herschel came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience, that that's more important than And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let's just do the parable of temperature because I think it'll help them understand what we mean. So think about degrees Celsius, right?
We kind of have, in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degrees Celsius, they're out there. The molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience, right? We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold.
Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michelle Bitbol, a philosopher, calls the structural invariance, the things that like we could both kind of agree on.
So, you know, we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it and that, you know, hot things will be higher in that, you know, on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower. And we can both kind of figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that and And then we have thermometry. Yay.
We have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold. And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera. And then we end up at the bottom of, you know, at the end of that with this idea of like every day I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be, you know, 60 degrees out. Great.
And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole... formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. You know, it required that bodily experience that also, not just me, you, I have to tell, you know, it's part of my communication with you. Cold today, isn't it? Right?
That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world, you know, with everything that involves, I developed degrees Celsius. But then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that's called the amnesia of experience. So that's what we mean by the, you know, how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress.
But then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this, you know, what are the responses to trying to get this back in and where, where, where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that only the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths.
Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn't even exist. And anything else that's not part of it, part that can be formalized in that way, is an epiphenomenon. It's not real.
So, you know, scientific triumphalism is this response to the, you know, the weirdness of, you know, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely. So there's no other truth, you know, art, music, you know, human spirituality, it's all actually reducible just to neural, you know, neural correlates. So that's one way that it's been dealt with.
The other way is this sort of, right, you've got on the postmodern, you know, the left, academic left, you get this thing like science is just a game. You know, it's just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that's another way to push sort of science away or respond to it.
The denial, science denial that happens, that's also another way of sort of, you know, not understanding science. the balance that science is trying that we need to establish with experience.
And then there's just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say like, Oh, you know, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to have, you know, wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way, or, you know, it said that doesn't have the rigor of science.
Um, so, you know, all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, um, and we don't really have an accurate, we don't have a good way of doing it yet.
And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other. There's a, just to observe the scientific community, those who sort of gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul.
I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on the academic throne, all of those things, and the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds, and of course that, nobody likes arrogance, and so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science. It just goes back, and it's this divide that builds.
Yeah, no, that was a problem. Like when you saw, so like I said, you know, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that, like, you know, science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion, religion is about politics, right?
But about, you know, for the entire history of the species, we've had this experience of, for lack of a better word, the sacredness. I'm not connecting this God or anything. I'm just saying this experience of like the more. And then, you know, with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that, like, anybody who feels that is an idiot. You know, they just can't handle the hardcore science.
When, in fact, their views of the world are so denuded of it, they can't even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems. You know, and experience fundamentally is weird, you know, mysterious. It's like it's, you know, kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So, yeah, that arrogance then, just if you're telling everybody...
who's not hardcore enough to do the standard model of cosmology, that they're idiots, that's not going to bode well for the advance of your project.
So you're proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is fundamental. Experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is like at the core of reality.
Yeah, but I wouldn't do it – I wouldn't – because, you know, there's panpsychism, right, which wants to say that – Right, so that's all the way there. Yeah.
Panpsychism is like that's literally one of the laws of physics. Right, right.
But see, what all those do is like – just the idea of, say, like physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says all that exists is physical. Idealism says all that exists is mind. We're actually saying, look, both of these, to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third-person view. Mm-hmm.
And that third-person view, we want to really emphasize, is a fiction. It's a useful fiction when you're doing science. If I want to do the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don't want to have to think about experience at all. But if I'm asking deeper questions, I can't ignore the fact that there really is no third-person view.
And that any story I tell about the world is coming from – it's not just first person, but it's literally – because I'm going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community. That you're always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being inexperienced. So whatever account we want to give –
is of the world is going to have to take that experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, like we don't have an answer. Like that's when people are like, well, what are you suggesting as your alternative? It's like, look, that's the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this.
But what we would argue with is, and we're thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature. That doesn't sort of jump right to that third person, that fictional third person view and somehow figures out how to do science, recognizing that it always starts from experience.
It always starts from this field of experience or in phenomenology, the word is the life world that you're embedded in. You can't un-embed yourself from it. So how do you do... So one of the things that Whitehead said was, you know, we have to avoid the bifurcation of nature. And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into like sort of scientific concepts, wavelength.
You know, think about like the seeing a sunset. You can say like, oh, look, it's just wavelengths, you know, and scattering particles and your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness and all the other things. It's not just red. There's no qualia. There's no pure redness. Everything that's happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomenon.
It's just, you know, brain states or whatever. He said, you can't do that. They're both real. They're both accounts. They both need to be integrated. And so that required, I think, a really a different conception of what we mean by nature.
Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third person perspective?
I think that that's what we have to figure out, right? And so actually, you know, a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, right? Because one of the things we're arguing is like, look, in the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who's a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who's a theoretical physicist.
When I was writing the chapter on the origin of the blind spot, like, you know, sort of what how this emerged out of history, my subheader was like, well, it made sense at the time because it did. You know, it really there was a reason why people adopted this third person God's eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe.
Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you like, and no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right? Quantum mechanics slams you. with the idea of the measurement problem, you know?
The most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger equation, which, you know, you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you've got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right?
Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it's like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you. You know, that's the born, what we call the born rule. And it was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right?
So when you're asking like, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it. So, you know, there's been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there, go to a new
Like the many worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like cubism, which is I'm going to advocate for is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the Born rule at the center. right?
Instead of like focusing on the Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrodinger's cat and all that other stuff, it says, no, no, actually the real mystery is the Born rule. Let's think about the Born rule. And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.
So that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of. That's the thing you're trying to integrate at the center of the thing. And in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of uh, thing should be incorporated in, in every, uh, layer of, of study of nature.
Absolutely. That's exactly it. So, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me, so I'm, I'm, you know, I have a project, I'm part of a big project, uh, that, uh, Chris Fuchs and Jacques Pannier on cubism. So I've been part of that. And what I've been amazed by is the language they use. So what's cool about cubism is it comes from quantum information theory.
It's a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics, uh, And it's always about you have an agent who makes an action on the world. And then the information they get from that action through the experiment, that's the action in the world, updates their priors, updates their Bayesian. That's why it's called cubism, quantum Bayesianism.
updates how the information they've gotten from the world. Now, this turns out to be kind of the same language that we're using in a project that's about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.
So, you know, we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you, you know, basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning. It focuses on, and in a very simple way, just like how much of the information that the agent, the critter, is getting from the world actually helps it survive. That's the most basic idea of meaning.
We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not? And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a chemical gradient to get more food kind of has the same feel, the same sort of architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it.
How do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always – us, the agent, or life, the agent, interacting with the world and drawing it, both giving information and passing information back as a way of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.
So you think there could be something like cubism, quantum Bayesianism, that creates a theory like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of like... Hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.
Yes, that's what we're looking for. I think that is really, that's the exciting part. And it's a move, you know, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you know, and you understand why people love this. Like I have these equations and these equations. equations represent, you know, there's this platonic ideal that they are, you know, they exist eternally on their own.
It's kind of quasi-religious, right? It's sort of like somehow look, these equations are the, you're reading the mind of God. But this other approach to me is just as exciting because what you're saying is there's us and the world, they're inseparable, right? It's always us and the world.
And what we're now finding about is this kind of co-creation, this interaction, you know, between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account, like in no way am I saying these laws aren't important.
These laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, you know, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just a, you know, an epiphenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent's not the most important part of the story.
So if you pull on this thread and say there's a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, is it possible it just breaks the whole thing open? So there's this whole effort of unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are like the tip of the iceberg?
What if the agent thing is like really important?
So, you know, listen, that would be like kind of my dream. I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it. But, you know, Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with string theory. I've spent my whole life listening to talks about string theory real soon, you know.
And it's gotten ever more disconnected, right? From, you know, data observations, there were people talking for a while that it's post-empirical. And, you know, I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like physicists have been smoking their own stash, right? There's this way we've gotten used to, like, you know, you have to outweird the other person.
Like, my theory is 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, you know, psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there's been a problem. There's a problem. I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics or there's a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That's been the headline on Scientific American stories. So clearly another direction has to be found.
And maybe it has nothing to do with this. But I suspect that... Because so many times the agent or the having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency, like when it comes to time, thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. You know, clocks don't tell time. We use clocks to tell time.
So maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside, that there's a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential informational, computational view. I don't know, but that's kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.
Yeah, time is a really interesting one. Time is really important to us humans. What is time?
Yeah, that's a... Right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we've taken... This is what... When Herschel talks about the surreptitious substitution, we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we... substituted that for the actual experience of time, right?
So the block universe where like next Tuesday is already written down, you know, it's in the block universe, the four-dimensional universe, all events are already there, which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the sort of, you know, the scientific framework. But, you know, it is not lived time.
And, you know, this was pointed out to Einstein and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bergson, who was the most famous philosopher of the early 20th century, and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity, and Bergson, whose whole thing was about time and was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of
Of time from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration. Like we humans were, were duration for us is full. It's, it's sort of, um, it's stretched out. It's got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present music is the best example, right? You're hearing music. You're both already anticipating what's going to happen.
And you're, you know, remembering what's going on. there's a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And what, you know, the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, oh, no, no, the formal system is time.
But really the only place time appears is with us, right? Where we're, you know, so having a theory that actually could start with us, And then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third-person view back on us. That's a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.
I just wonder, who is the observer? I mean, define what the agent is in any kind of frame. is difficult.
Is difficult, right? And so that, but that's the good work of the science ahead of us, right? So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So, you know, we start with experience, which is irreducible. There's no atoms of experience, right? It's a whole. And we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way.
There's a philosopher, Robert Kreis, who talks about the workshop. That starting in like the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal space to work in. Sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory. where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated, and we went to the next step.
So this idea of pulling out from experience these thinner, abstract, structural invariants, the things that we could actually do science with. And it's kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction, right? So the problem with the way we do things now is we take that
those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in.
Like you literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions, neglecting experience, because that's the only way to do science, and then you think somehow, oh, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna jam experience back in and have an explanation for experience.
So do you think it's possible to show that something like free will is quote unquote real if you integrate experience back into the physics model of the world?
What I would say is that free will is a given. And that's the thing about experience, right? So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote, he says, it's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It's the job to account for the abstract. The concrete is
what's happening between us right now is just given, you know, it's just, it's presented to us every day. It's presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it, right? So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent, right? To be an agent, agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, you know, they're equivalent.
And so in some sense to be an agent is to be autonomous. And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy? that captures aspects of its arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise.
But the idea, you know, the reason why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience. You know, and the equations are a paler, you know, they don't corral experience. They are a thinner, you know, representation.
As we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain. What's happening between us right now in this, you know, all the weirdness of it, that's the terrain. The map is what I can write down on equations and then in the workshop do experiments on. Super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.
what if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion?
An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third-person view, right?
And so what we're saying is that third-person view, which now you're going to say like, oh, I've got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities, meaning things that I think exist in God's living room in spite that are independent of me and the community of living things I'm part of.
So you're pushing it elsewhere. Just like there's a stack of turtles is probably... If this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there's an observer for whom it's not an illusion. So you always have to find an observer somewhere.
Yeah, right. And that's why fundamentally the blind spot, especially the scientific triumphalist part, is following a religious impulse. It's wanting the God's eye view. And you know what's really interesting? And when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in.
And it is actually a pretty, it's only one version of philosophy, right? So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition, right? But there's even in Europe or in the Western tradition, for Western, what we'll call Western philosophy, there's phenomenology. There's Hercel and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track.
They were really interested in the structure of experience. They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle that is experience. Experience, you're not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it. It's given, so you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then
So that has not been part of this discussion about – you'll never – good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, you know, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it's a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get – the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization, right?
So there's the Western core, out of which comes the Greeks and the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia, and they developed their own. They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions.
And they, for reasons, because they had contemplative practice, they were very focused on like direct, trying to like directly probe attention and experience. they asked questions in ways that the West never really did.
Phenomenology kind of started it, but, you know, there's philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, and they're like the Plato and, you know, Aristotle of, you know, sort of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience. In the West, I think maybe because we had –
the Judeo-Christian tradition, where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame. In the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia, they started always with, they wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their argumentation was based on, I've got this experience.
I can't get out of this experience. How do I reason from it? So I think there's like a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from. You know, not like slavishly. We don't all have to become Buddhists to do it. But there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn't.
But there's also the practical fact that it's difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It's difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so it's... As science advances, we might get better and better.
Like the same as it's very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fe questions. Yeah.
I think, but I think we can do it. I think there's aspects of it. I mean, as long as you're never trying to like, this is what experience is. Like, I think that's kind of the where we're, you know, you're never going to have a causal account of experience because it's just given, but you can do lots about, and that's what the good work is, is to, how do I approach this?
How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in the, you know, this is what we're accounting with our semantic information to causal closure. Love this idea, right? The idea that, so we talked about autopoiesis a while back, right?
The idea that living systems are, they are self-creating and self-maintaining. So the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? The cell membrane, you can't have a cell without a cell membrane. The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out, right? But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it's a product of the processes that the cell membrane creates.
In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there's this strange... It's always with life. There's always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is the science that's ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure, accounting for how... The, you know, we talk about like downward causation, right?
So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms, right? That's it. You don't really, if you know, if you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you're done. You know, of course, in principle, you need God's computer, but fine. You know, in principle, you know, in principle, it can be done.
Causal closure, and I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this, there's ways in which, using epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory, that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates.
Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws. Whether that paper is true or not, it's an example of heading down that road. There's also Robert Rosen's work. He was a theoretical biologist.
He talked about closure to efficient cause, that living systems are organizationally closed, are causally closed, so that they don't depend anymore on the microstate. And he had a proof. which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it's, you know, some argue it's true, some argue it's not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church-turing complete.
They cannot be represented as formal systems. So, you know, in that way, they're not axioms. They're not, living systems will not be axioms. They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now, again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof was, you know, is valid or not. But I'm saying, I'm giving you examples of like, you know,
When you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of kinds of scientific investigations. You know, the book we thought was going to be really heretical, right? You know, obviously, you know, most public-facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphalism. So we were just like waiting, you know, waiting for the fight.
And then the review from science came out, and it was like – totally pro, you know, they was very positive. We're like, oh my God, you know? And then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive.
And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal because we kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized sort of all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blind spots. Socialism, communism, doesn't matter. These extractive, you know, had sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to, you know, resources.
The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So it feels like there's actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever. And we're not, you know, we're sort of stuck in a vortex.
Well, it is. I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there's an elephant in the room, like that we're just removing the agent. Like it's... everyone is doing it and it's like, yeah, yeah, there's the experience and then there's the third person perspective on the world. And so to, man, science from a, applying scientific rigor from a first person perspective is very difficult.
I mean, it's fascinating.
I think we can do it because it's also the thing, you know, what's really interesting is this, I think it's not just first person, it's first and second, right? Because science, because when, so like one idea is that we, you know, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third-person view. That's one way of talking about objectivity.
There's a whole other way, is that I do the experiment, you do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity. And it acknowledges that, you know, when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible, right?
So there's a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe, by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it's actually pretty fluid. Like my liver cell is an individual, but really it's part of the liver. And my liver is, you know, a separate system, but really it's part of me. But I'm, so I'm an individual, yay.
But actually I'm part of a society. Like, and I couldn't be me without the entire community of, say, language users, right? I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions. And my community of language users is part of ecosystems, right, that are alive, that I am a part of a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker stuff. And then those ecosystems are part of the biosphere, right?
We're never separable, as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphalist science view wants like Boltzmann brains. You're just a brain floating in the space, you know?
Yeah, there's a fascinating degree to which agency is fluid. Like you are an individual, but you and I talking is a kind of individual.
Yeah.
And then the person listening to this right now is also an individual.
Right.
I mean, that's a weird thing, too. That's a weird thing, right? Because there's a broadcast nature, too. Yeah.
This is why information theoretic. So the idea that we're pursuing now, which I get really excited about, is this idea of information architecture, right? Or organization, informational organization. Because, you know, right, physicalism is like everything's atoms.
But, you know, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism because he recognized that life has a weird organization that would seem specifically different from machines. And so this idea that How do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even, is sort of – it's not really quite physical, right?
It's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical. It has to instantiate in the physical. But it also has this other realm of design, you know, and some – not design like intelligent design, but there's a – Organization itself is a relationship of constraints and information flow.
And I think, again, that's an entirely new, interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.
So going back to organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots. Is it possible for machines to have agency?
I would not discount that possibility. I think, you know, there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests, that strange loop that we're talking about, that autopoiesis, I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in silicon. I think whatever it would, it would be very different from us.
Like the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated. I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don't think what we have now, like the LLMs, are really there. But yeah, I'm not going to say that it's not possible.
I wonder how far I can get with imitation. which is essentially what LLMs are doing. So imitating humans. And I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve what you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that's just fake, that's copying.
But there's some degree to which we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines. Coming from babies, we were born in this world and we're just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations, we gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, I think so. I, you know, it's possible, right? It's possible. But I think probably the view I'm advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there's something called E4, the E4 theory of cognition. Embodiment, inaction, embedding, and there's another one, extension.
But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body, which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension with other living systems as well is embodied. essential. So that's why I think the LLMs are not going to... It's not just imitation. It's going to require... This goes to the brain in the vat thing.
I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans. I was reporting on Evans, where they did the brain in the vat argument, but they said, look, in the end, actually, the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat is actually to have a brain in a body. It could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body.
So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't... You really need to be embedded in a world. At least that's the E4 idea.
The 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extracranial processes and structures. They're very much in vogue.
4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations, this is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the 4E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It's fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far, and it could go real far.
Right, there's a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who is very much a reductionist, you know, the great biologist, And Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist. And Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, you know, where's your mind? And, you know, Salk went, up here. And Bateson said, no, no, no, out here.
And what he really meant was this extended idea. It's not just within your cranium to be... To be, to have experience, you know, experience in some sense is not a thing you have, it is a thing you do, right? You almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies. from this perspective, is really important.
And it's very attractive to me. Again, if we're really going to do science with them, we're going to have to have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against... We can't just armchair it or couch quarterbacking it. But I think there's a lot of possibility here. It's a very radically different way of looking at what we mean by nature. What do you make of the fact that this...
individual observer, you as an individual observer, only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world. Does that make you sad?
No, actually, it doesn't make me sad. So, okay, so, you know, full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the Zen tradition for 30 years. I've been staring at a wall for 30 years. And it's taught me a lot, right? You know, I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience.
And one of the things it's taught me is like, you know, I don't really matter that very much. You know, this thing I call Adam Frank is really, you know, it's kind of a construct. You know, there's this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that's super cool, but you know, it's going to go, I don't know, you know, I don't know where it came from. It's going to go.
I don't really need it to, you know, and then, and then who the hell knows, you know, I'm not, I'm not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that, like, What I love, Zen has this idea of beyond birth and death, and they don't mean reincarnation. What they mean is, dude, you don't even really understand what life is. You know what I mean?
I'm like this, you know, this core level of your own experience. So, you know, your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed, you know, and it's, so, you know, the contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself, like spend time. five days at a Zen session doing contemplative practice from, you know, 7 a.m. until 9 p.m., obviously with breaks.
And you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention. Because, you know, attention is kind of like this thing, like it's usually just like, oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I got to do my taxes. Oh, that, you know, what's that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes?
Um, and with contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it. And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I've learned from that is like kind of whatever, you know, I'm not, I'm not really kind of real to begin with the Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing.
And the, the part of me that is real is, you know, everything's coming and going. It's all coming and going. Well, how could, how could I ever not come and go when the entire world is just Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising. Nothing exists. Nothing has self nature. Nothing exists by itself. It's an endless, infinitely connected web.
But still, there's a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it, and it ends, and it's good while it lasts, and it sucks that it ends. You can be like, well, everything comes and goes, but I was eating ice cream yesterday. Found this awesome low-carb ice cream called Delights here in Austin, and it ends. Yeah. And I was staring at the empty container.
That's beautiful, man. I love that.
You could say like, yeah, well, that's how it all is, but hey.
Can I say that? So this is what I've learned from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it, you know? But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that it's not just, you're not just saying, right? This is why, you know, so I do koan practice. So this is a tradition in Zen that it was established.
It was a teaching method that was established like a thousand years ago, these book of koans. And every koan, you know, if you've ever read Goodell Escher Bach, he's got a whole chapter on koans. They're kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite one was, stop the sound of the distant temple bell. You're like, what?
Every time my teacher gives it to him, I'm like, what are you talking about? This is a whole Zen thing of like, up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So your job with these koans is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you realize what the thing is trying to teach you, what aspect of experience. It's trying to teach you. So there's no answer.
There's no, and in fact, actually, you don't give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I sat, when I did a call on and the guy was like, don't tell me the answer, show me the answer. I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, you know, I've kind of learned the language of them.
So I could never tell you, if I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You'd be like, what? You know, it's never, it's not the words. It's the, you know, so like your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty, but With contemplative practice, as it deepens over years, it really does take years. Just like anything in math. It took me years to understand Lagrangians.
you kind of come to a deeper understanding with like, yeah, the words of like, it's not just like, oh, everything changes. You actually feel that movement. Like you feel it with like breath to breath, you know? And it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy and it's not connected to anything, right? That's what I've kind of gotten from practice.
It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment, that is truly the way things are. Like, it's not okay because I have a feeling about it, okay? I want it to be okay. It just is okay. And so really, it's a pretty awesome thing.
Yeah, that's beautiful. I mean, maybe it's the genetics, maybe it's the biochemistry of my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, just amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it's my Eastern European roots, but there's always like a melancholy that's also sitting next to the joy. And I think it always feels like they're intricately linked.
So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience and the joy is just about the beauty of experience. And they're just kind of sitting there.
Yeah. Which is cool actually, because that, you know, I'm also, you know, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back. And I get it, right? I mean, you know, the... But that's also the cool thing. I think one of the things is like, yeah, well, that is what it is. That is what it is, right? You don't have to do anything.
You don't have to like manipulate it or move it around or like, yeah, this is the experience, you know?
Can you speak to just the practical nature of sitting there from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.?
Like, what the hell are you doing, bro?
What's powerful? What's fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, it's not really, I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall and you, what you're doing is you're, you know, you're just sitting with, you know, you can, there's different meditative practices, right? There's counting breaths. So that's usually what I do. I sit down and I start counting breaths. And for the first half hour, it's just like, blah, blah, blah.
I'm thinking, like I said, I'm thinking about my taxes. I'm thinking about what I got to do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full session, a two-day session, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses. This was back when there were LPs. Yeah. With the freaking pauses. Nice.
You know, because my mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.
That's pretty cool, actually.
Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see. You know, because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while. I used to hate sitting. You know, I do it, but I... After a while, the mind gets exhausted. Like that part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter. It's just like there's nothing else to do. And then you get bored.
And now I realize that's when something interesting is going to happen. Because you kind of like drop down. And now it's a very physical practice. People think you're just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually, it becomes a very physical process where you're really just following the breath. You're kind of riding the breath. And it gets very quiet.
And within that quietness, there's a path. Because obviously there's been – Buddhism is always like not about thinking. But there's a huge literature. So these guys are always about don't think. I've written all this stuff. But they're guideposts. They're like the finger pointing at the moon. And, you know, there's the idea of first, you know, your mind is usually scattered, right?
Like, right now when I walk out, I'm going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind's going to be all over the place. But with sitting, first you concentrate the mind so that there's no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you're just not there happening up there. You're not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind.
which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away, you know, and there's just this presence. It's kind of like a raw presence. And that's often where the joy upwells from. But you sit with whatever. Maybe you're going to sit and you're going to have, like, you know, maybe... You're going to go through like an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something.
You know, you're just going to sit with whatever comes up. You're going to make that. That's why the sitting part, you're making the commitment. I'm going to sit here with whatever comes up. I will not be moved. And then what you come away with, it actually, over time, it actually changes kind of who you are.
Like I'm still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things, you know?
Yeah. Once Jersey, always Jersey.
Always Jersey.
I love that you had Bruce Springsteen just blasting in your head.
Yeah, that was amazing.
Why are we here? What do you think is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?
It's good that we just had the last conversation because I'm going to give this answer, which is so corny. It's love. And I'm not messing around because really actually what happens, you know, so within Buddhism, there's the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You're here to help. You're just here to help, right? Compassion. Like that's a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path.
And when I first started, I was like, I don't care about compassion. I'm here for knowledge, right? I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing. I was suffering. I had the reason everybody comes to things like this. Life was hard. I was going through stuff. But I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever.
But then I found out that you can't get that. You can't get that. You can't go to this level without compassion. Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about compassion. helping all sentient beings. That's the way they, you know, just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is like, you know, the main thing is to get over.
Like, your job is to get over. But that's really what I found. It is actually kind of... And that's what that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it's like this...
One of the things I have, when I have like really, you know, there's a kind of experience I'll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world is just, the world gives you everything. And there's a certain way, right? Just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered.
It holds nothing back. And yeah, that's kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, oh, I need to be helpful because who's not having this experience, you know? So just love for the world as it is. Love for the world and all the beings who are suffering, everybody's suffering.
You know, your worst political opponent, they're suffering, you know, and our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.
And hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey out of suffering towards love.
Yeah, that would, you know, that may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive. I hope so. I hope so too. They're coming to eat us.
Especially if they're a type three civilization.
That's right. And they got really big guns.
Well, this was a truly mind blowing, fascinating, just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking today.
Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us.
There's a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.