Why Would Aliens Be Here? With Avi Loeb and Robin Hanson

Summary

In an engaging Event Horizon interview hosted by John Michael Godier, renowned astrophysicist Avi Loeb and economist Robin Hanson explore the fascinating topic of extraterrestrial life. They delve into why alien civilizations might or might not reach out to humanity, offering two unique perspectives from their respective fields. Loeb highlights the potential limitations of human imagination in understanding alien intents, while Hanson discusses evolutionary economics that could drive space colonization. Together, they consider how the discovery of non-terrestrial technologies and interstellar objects might hint at advanced civilizations, encouraging humanity to broaden our search horizons and be prepared for new cosmic lessons.

Highlights

• John Michael Godier hosts a unique conversation with Avi Loeb and Robin Hanson about aliens and space exploration ✨.
• Loeb argues that intelligent aliens might not find Earth interesting enough to contact, much like avoiding a boring conversation 📡.
• Hanson introduces an economic perspective, highlighting how competitive evolution might drive alien expansion 🚀.
• Discussions explore possible motivations for interstellar travel, including resource acquisition and species protection 🌌.
• The intriguing concept that aliens may already be observing us but remain undetected due to their advanced capabilities 👀.
• Loeb and Hanson agree that open-mindedness and data collection are key in the search for extraterrestrial life 🔍.

Key Takeaways

• Aliens might avoid Earth due to lack of interest in primitive civilizations like ours 🌍.
• Human expectations of extraterrestrial interactions could be limited by our own imagination 🚀.
• Space exploration is crucial to understanding and possibly encountering alien life 👽.
• Scientific curiosity and open-minded exploration are essential in the quest for extraterrestrial discovery 🔭.
• The development of AI might offer clues or methods for understanding alien advancements 🤖.
• Interstellar communication could come as a result of humans leaving our Solar System 🌌.

Overview

The intriguing debate between Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, and Robin Hanson, an economist, brings together two diverse fields to explore the potential reasons why extraterrestrial civilizations might or might not be engaging with Earth. Loeb suspects that if advanced aliens are aware of us, they are likely uninterested, akin to advanced societies having little interest in primitive forms. Hanson, on the other hand, posits that evolutionary imperatives might compel aliens to seek new resources, potentially leading them to contact or avoid humanity based on their strategic calculations.

As the conversation meanders through various cosmic and philosophical considerations, both experts highlight the significance of open-mindedness and curiosity in scientific endeavors. They discuss the role artificial intelligence may play in bridging the gap between human understanding and potential alien technologies. Both agree that humanity must remain vigilant and curious, with Loeb emphasizing the need for empirical data to guide theories about extraterrestrial life and Hanson stressing adaptive strategies from an economic standpoint.

They ponder the exciting possibility of humans making contact with extraterrestrial beings upon venturing beyond our solar system. Loeb imagines this eventuality might open a vast new domain of knowledge and opportunity, potentially revolutionizing human understanding of science and technology. The dialogue ultimately underscores the importance of interdisciplinary approaches and innovative thinking in answering age-old questions about our place in the cosmos and the probability of other life forms sharing this universe with us.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to Event Horizon and Interview Setup The introduction chapter sets the stage for a unique interview on 'Event Horizon' featuring two guests from different academic backgrounds: economics and astrophysics. The interviewer highlights their usual interviewing style, allowing guests to provide full, uninterrupted answers. However, in this session, the approach is different as it involves a dialogue between the guests, showcasing their differing viewpoints and ideas. The conversation began even before the recording started, indicating an already engaging discussion.
• 01:30 - 04:30: Introduction of Avi Loeb and Robin Hanson The chapter focuses on an introduction to Avi Loeb and Robin Hanson. The narrator describes being absorbed in a fascinating discussion between Loeb and Hanson. The conversation was so engaging that the recording was delayed, and the narrator opted to not interrupt, resulting in a limited presence in the recording. This set the stage for an intriguing discussion that will unfold in the chapter.
• 04:30 - 10:30: Discussion on Aliens and Intelligence The chapter titled 'Discussion on Aliens and Intelligence' revolves around a captivating discussion between Economist Robin Hansen and Astrophysicist AI Lobe. Hosted by John Michael on the show Event Horizon, this conversation delves into the topic of 'grabby aliens' and explores vastly beyond the conventional understanding of intelligence. The dialogue stands out due to its depth and the intriguing insights shared by the esteemed guests.
• 10:30 - 15:00: Fermi Paradox and Human Imagination This chapter explores the enigma of the Fermi Paradox and its implications on human imagination. It features insights by Ay Lobe, a prominent figure in science, who is a Frank B Bird Junior professor of science at Harvard University. He also serves as the chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation. The discussion delves into the contradictory nature of the Fermi Paradox, which questions why, given the vast number of stars and potential planets in the galaxy, humans have yet to detect evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.
• 15:00 - 20:30: Possibilities of Human Survival and Space Expansion The chapter titled "Possibilities of Human Survival and Space Expansion" delves into the contributions of a leading scientist who holds prominent positions across various prestigious astrophysical and scientific organizations. This expert is deeply involved in initiatives such as the Breakthrough Starshot and other projects under the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. Additionally, they serve as an advisor on physics and astronomy matters nationally. With a prolific academic career, the expert has authored four books and over 700 scientific papers, and is recognized as a fellow in several esteemed scientific academies and societies, reflecting their influential role in advancing human understanding of space and potential expansion beyond Earth.
• 20:30 - 25:30: Economic Perspective on Alien Civilizations This chapter introduces the topic of alien civilizations from an economic perspective, featuring insights from notable individuals in the fields of astronautics and economics. It highlights the recognition of certain figures by professional academies and provides background on Robin Hansen, an influential economist with strong academic credentials and a focus on health policy, showcasing his journey through academia and his contributions to the economic discourse on space-related topics.
• 25:30 - 30:00: Technological Challenges of Space Expansion In this chapter, Robin Hansen and an AI entity discuss the intersection of regulation, political theory, and technology, particularly focusing on the expansion into space. The conversation highlights the academic freedom necessary to innovate and take risks while considering the long-term impacts and standards of technological progress. Despite feeling less prestigious than AI, Hansen emphasizes the shared academic values and long-term goals within the field.
• 30:00 - 35:00: Potential of AI and Interstellar Exploration In the chapter titled 'Potential of AI and Interstellar Exploration,' the discussion revolves around the motivations behind research in AI and space exploration. The conversation highlights the pursuit of long-term goals over short-term recognition or immediate results. The speakers emphasize taking 'long shots' because they believe the endeavor should focus on enduring impacts that extend into the future. Additionally, one speaker humorously mentions that part of their interest in seeking intelligence in outer space stems from its scarcity on Earth.
• 35:00 - 45:00: UFOs and Government Secrecy In discussing the Fermi Paradox, the chapter delves into the theory that intelligent extraterrestrial beings might simply choose to avoid humanity, suggesting that they wouldn't necessarily make an effort to communicate with or hide from us unless they felt threatened. The chapter encourages readers to consider what evidence of such beings' existence might look like, urging a re-evaluation of how we interpret potential signals or signs given the dismissive nature humans might infer from their apparent absence.
• 45:00 - 53:00: Life on Other Planets and Panspermia The chapter explores the concept of life on other planets through the lens of human effort in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. It uses an analogy of a lonely person not actively seeking partners to discuss how humanity might not be effectively searching for alien civilizations. The text questions our ability to recognize or understand highly advanced civilizations, suggesting that advanced extraterrestrial life may be millions of years ahead of us, and thus, we may not even know what signs to look for in the search for alien life.
• 53:00 - 60:00: Speculations on Alien Motivations In this chapter titled 'Speculations on Alien Motivations,' the discussion revolves around the challenges of detecting unfamiliar phenomena that might indicate alien presence. The approach suggested is not to have preconceived notions but to be open to noticing anomalies that don't resemble known objects like asteroids, comets, or drones. The essence of true scientific inquiry is highlighted as being centered around curiosity and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, free from ego or the desire to impress. This attitude is crucial in seeking extraterrestrial life or phenomena.
• 60:00 - 67:00: AI as a Laboratory for Understanding Alien Intelligences The chapter titled 'AI as a Laboratory for Understanding Alien Intelligences' discusses the approach of real scientists towards understanding reality. It emphasizes that real scientists prioritize gathering evidence and data to guide thinking and reduce the vast possibilities to those that accurately describe reality. The process of collecting evidence is recognized as a challenging task, explaining why some may shy away from scientific endeavors.
• 67:00 - 81:00: Final Thoughts and Social Implications of Alien Contacts The chapter discusses the importance of balancing theoretical work with empirical evidence in scientific research, using alien contact as an example. The speaker emphasizes that while having opinions and working on mathematical concepts is valuable, it should not replace actual experimental testing. He argues that true learning and discovery come from actively observing the world and gathering unfamiliar evidence. The chapter underlines that the best scientific practices involve integrating both theoretical and empirical approaches.
• 81:00 - 83:30: Conclusion and Reflections on the Discussion The chapter focuses on the methodology of using theories to understand findings and predict outcomes. It suggests a dual approach: seeking to explain observations using existing theories, while also testing predictions made by the best theories. The process involves balancing theoretical insight with empirical data. The chapter also hints at applying these methodologies to the search for extraterrestrial life.

Why Would Aliens Be Here? With Avi Loeb and Robin Hanson Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this event horizon interview will be a little different you know my interviewing style I ask a question and then let the guest give a complete full answer until they are finished that way we get maximum information but today we have two guests of differing viewpoints from two completely different academic disciplines economics and astrophysics discussing the respective ideas with each other this report started before we began recording and I was immediately
• 00:30 - 01:00 absorbed and Spellbound in listening to them discussed their ideas and bounc them off each other so much so that producer Ross had to remind me that we were not yet recording and really needed to get started I told the guests to Simply continue doing that and I became a fly on the wall listening to a very fascinating conversation that I did not want to interrupt unnecessarily which is why you don't hear me much I simply didn't have to intervene to keep the
• 01:00 - 01:30 information flow going the result was one of the most interesting discussions I've heard in a very long time so today I give you Economist Robin Hansen and astrophysicist AI lobe on the subject of grabby aliens and far beyond maximum information indeed you have fallen into Event Horizon with John Michael G [Music]
• 01:30 - 02:00 ay lobe is a Frank B bird Junior professor of science at Harvard University chair of Harvard's Department of astronomy founding director of Harvard's black hole initiative and director of the institute for Theory and
• 02:00 - 02:30 computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center for astrophysics he also chairs the advisory committee for the Breakthrough starshot initiative serves as a science theory director for all initiatives of the Breakthrough prize Foundation as well as chair of the board on physics and astronomy of the nationaly he's the author of four books and over 700 scientific papers he is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the American physical Society and the International
• 02:30 - 03:00 Academy of astronautics in 2012 time selected lobe as one of the 25 most influential people in space Robin Hansen is an associate professor of economics and received his PhD in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech he joined George Mason's economics faculty in 1999 after completing a 2-year postdoc at UC Berkeley his major fields of Interest include Health policy
• 03:00 - 03:30 regulation and formal political Theory Robin Hansen and AI lob welcome back to the program to both of you thank you for having us thank you always a pleasure I want to say that I'm nowhere nearly as prestigious or prominent as as AI but I think we do share this sense of Academia that we were talking about just before the recording started that the whole point is to get some freedom to take some chances and I to hold yourself to a long-term standard of progress and accompl lishment and not be so in a rush
• 03:30 - 04:00 to get short-term accolades or Publications or whatever it is we both are saying what in our limited lifetime can we achieve over the lifetime that will be lasting thing into the future and we're both taking long shots in some sense appropriately because that's what the game should be yeah and I I should add to that that one reason I'm seeking intelligence in outer space is that I don't often find it here on Earth and and and one more thing that
• 04:00 - 04:30 it's there is one simple answer to fer Paradox where is everybody and that is if they are truly intelligent they would avoid us I wonder about that they might not bother to reach out to us but also might not bother to hide from us if if they don't feel very scared or threatened by us they would just do whatever they do oblivious to us and we have to wonder like what will that look like and look for whatever that is yeah yeah if you think about it F's question is very pretentious it's similar to a
• 04:30 - 05:00 lonely person asking where is everybody and you tell that person look you're not that attractive you want expect the potential Partners to be next to you you need to put some work into finding them you know either go to dating sites or at the very least look through your windows and the firmy didn't build the telescope to search for any aliens well there's something could be said for the idea that would we even know what to look for with a highly Advanced a million years more advanced of ization than we are
• 05:00 - 05:30 would we even know what to look for well we we don't need to know what to look for you just look for something unfamiliar okay so you look for something that doesn't look like asteroids comets Birds drones airplanes that we are familiar with and once you find it you get as much data as possible you know the Curious mind I mean a real scientist let me Define a real scientist a real scientist is driven by curiosity not by the ego not by trying to show of
• 05:30 - 06:00 a real scientist is not working on extra Dimensions just because the mathematics is complex a real scientist wants to figure out what reality is and and so for a real scientist the biggest value is getting as much data as possible as much evidence as possible about the world because that can guide our thinking and there are so many possibilities you know how do we narrow them down to what describes reality is by collecting evidence that's a lot of work that's why it's difficult to do science and most people prefer to to
• 06:00 - 06:30 have a shortcut to have an opinion or to work on some mathematical Concepts that are not being tested experimentally I mean that obviously is a very good way to feel good about yourself but it doesn't teach us about reality so if we wanted to find something new we just need to look out and and and check that it's by collecting as much evidence as possible that it's not familiar that's that's my my Approach well the best science or thinking in general has always included both you both just go
• 06:30 - 07:00 look for stuff and then when you find stuff ask which of my theories could make the most sense of this but then you also have your best theories and you say what does this Theory predict I should see and you go look for what the theory predicts as as well as trying to explain what you see with your theories and so we should be doing both of those sitting in the middle between Theory and data trying to match them yeah that works as long as our imagination is fertile but my argument with respect to aliens because that's the subject of our
• 07:00 - 07:30 discussion today my point is our imagination is is limited to our experiences on Earth and of course if we go on a date with a human we can pretty much imagine what this human might be like the hair color might change but it would look like a human however if we are about to meet with an entity from another star all bets are off it could be something that our imagination cannot really foresee and therefore you know it's more like an exploration you just
• 07:30 - 08:00 open your mind to something different I recently Flew Over the Amazon basin on my way to Brazil and the most striking fact was I flew for several hours without any sign of humans at all no lights no roads no buildings no boats no nothing that's when I would say where is everybody because I had expectations of the sort of things you might see that you just don't see there and that's what you might say when you look up into the sky you say what might we look like from a distance or especially in a million
• 08:00 - 08:30 years and then we say we look out and we say we're not seeing the thing we might expect to see if our descendants in a million years were anything like what we are but bigger yeah if you just think about the Earth okay so if you go back more than a few million years you know our ancestors were no different in nature I mean there was no evidence that there is a an unusually intelligent species about to to emerge right so Earth is 10,000 times older so it's just
• 08:30 - 09:00 the last very little bit of terrestrial history where we appeared now an interesting question is to ask what would Earth look like in a million years just going the same amount of time into the future and um you know one if I'm a pessimist I would say you will find a desert full of lifl lets of those protesters that always have a problem with the society they live in and they argue for the destruction if they live
• 09:00 - 09:30 in America for the destruction of America and you know and um that would be the pessimistic approach that you will find a planet that was destroyed by some catastrophe that was self-inflicted by humans it could also be a natural catastrophe like a giant impact by an asteroid or the sun brightening or global climate change which we triggered or not doesn't really matter if the outcome is that the Earth would be
• 09:30 - 10:00 inhabitable another possibility is that humans will not be just on Earth which is the one I really prefer where you know we will avoid the risk of being eliminated by occupying many Platforms in space it doesn't need to be another rock you know we think about Mars Elon Musk thinks about Mars but that's just another residue of the formation of the solar system so we have the Earth as one rock then there is another one next to next to it which is called Mars
• 10:00 - 10:30 and and this is just like being in the jungle you are sitting on One Tree and you're saying oh here is another tree that I can move to to me that's not very appealing because we know that moving to a city that has a design artificial design can provide a much better quality of life and so we could aspire to build a space platform that will host people and create a habitat that is artificially designed instead of us relying on the nuclear fusion reactor
• 10:30 - 11:00 that the sun is we will create the our nuclear fusion reactor on on that habitat and so um I think that would be a better approach for long-term survival but um time will tip Robin your view I completely agree that the key question here is to lay out sort of the distribution of possibilities plausible for our future and then try to use that as a guide to what to look for in the sky for other analogist you know
• 11:00 - 11:30 descendants of aliens the most striking fact about human history is just how many orders of magnitude of size difference there has been across history in terms of enormous change and then for many elements of of human history today or recently we have sort of power law distributions with very thick Tails if you think about war or pandemics and so when I think into the future the median scenario May well be an empty desert but it's important to think about the thick
• 11:30 - 12:00 tail of the largest possibilities for our future right because if there's a distribution of things like us out in the universe we can see so far that if it's a thick tail most likely the median thing we see would be in that thick that highest tale of the distribution that is in history the median person who died in a pandemic or War probably died in nearly the largest pandemic or largest War ever because those things have such thick tails and probably if we see any
• 12:00 - 12:30 evidence of aliens out there they are probably in the thick tail of the largest most impactful aliens out there so I think we do want to think about if they could manage to survive and grow just how big might they get how much energy might they use how much might they change their physical environment that's the sort of thing to be looking for out there even if it's very rare as a descendant of where we are it still has disproportionate impact so yeah that's the question is and that's you know what our analysis of grabby aliens
• 12:30 - 13:00 we're basically assuming something of that sort and then looking for that even knowing of course it's probably a very unlikely outcome from where we are today but still the expected value of the future is still dominated by that thick tail highend of the distribution scenario yeah I I I completely agree that um we can get our inspiration from the taale of the distribution because we are probably somewhere in the middle and the question is how far does the tail go
• 13:00 - 13:30 and whether it's dominated by AI for example rather than biological systems and what are the capabilities for propulsion in particular how far can you go over a billion years at what speed these are really parameters that establish the reach of those of that taale and indeed if you if you even have just one civilization within the milkyway Galaxy that produced within the last 10 billion years produced self-replicating probes those probes could fill up the Milky Way galaxy even
• 13:30 - 14:00 if they're driven by chemical propulsion so we really don't know how far the tail goes and as you say Robin one way to find it is by looking at the sky I completely agree now have we looked enough in other words do we have any kind of a sampling now we do have a sampling of an alien civilization because we are someone else's alien civilization but there are also many other things about us but that to me
• 14:00 - 14:30 would suggest that we're part of a statistical population of like occurrences in the universe and they may be far from each other they may be near but what would make and I I'll direct this first at Robin and let you guys go what would make a civilization grabby enough to cross vast amounts of SpaceTime to expand well I'm an economist but of course I know a lot of what rest of us know biology in our history on Earth both among humans and among biology we've just seen a
• 14:30 - 15:00 competitive tendency wherein if there's no central power to limit it different parts grow as much as they can fill as whatever niches they can and that's what produces a natural tendency to grow and fill available resources and if you then had an alien civilization that had no Center but had many competing Parts Each of which was able to explore different Technologies and different social strategies Etc then what we might expect is the selection effect by by even if
• 15:00 - 15:30 99% of them are very peaceful and happy to not stay home the 1% that isn't would then dominate the longer term future in terms of going out and doing stuff and so the question is do we have a reason to think the selection effect of decentralized competition would produce any limits on just how far they might go and what they might do is there things they wouldn't touch because it would be easier to touch something else so one standard story is the stuff we see is not the most efficient resource to touch
• 15:30 - 16:00 or use or grab so maybe there's another thing we don't see and they're all so happy using that other thing that they can't be bothered to waste their extra effort to to to grab and use the stuff we see that could be an explanation for why there's all this stuff we see that seems untouched but that is a bit of a stretch but I'm willing I'm open to hearing an explanation like that but my default is the stuff we see is useful could be used for do to-do stuff and if you greedy and growing and competing you
• 16:00 - 16:30 would grab the stuff we see like stars and change them and use them yeah it really depends on on the way we apply darwinian selection in the interstellar context because if you look at on Earth you know the the species that is currently manipulating most of the resources are humans and they're not necessarily the strongest physically and not necessarily the most aggressive physically among all animals so I think in interstellar space what matters is
• 16:30 - 17:00 the ability to go across large distances and survive the journey and accomplish your goals after a very long amount of time and the goals are not clear to me you know it's not necessarily bringing resources back home because just using chemical propulsion to go to Proxima centari the nearest star takes 50,000 years one way so that's the amount of time that elapsed roughly since the
• 17:00 - 17:30 first humans left Africa and if we were to grab something from Proxima centu B it would take a 100,000 years not everyone would be patient enough for such a a procedure so unless you find a propulsion technology that reaches close to the speed of light then can do whatever the the Starship booster did recently which is to accelerate and then this accelerate get to the destination
• 17:30 - 18:00 grab something and then accelerate and decelerate again close to the speed of light and one thing to keep in mind is moving at the speed of FL makes every obstacle along the way basically more energetic than a nuclear explosion it's a you basically if you move at the speed of light you release as much as the rest mass energy of that obstacle so it's very easy to destroy a probe that moves too fast by even dust particles along the way if you are crossing distances of
• 18:00 - 18:30 the order of the size of the Milky Way galaxy so it's not at all obvious to me that technologically speaking the Ambitions we have on Earth can be realized in interal space and the one ambition that I would imagine for us going to interal space would be to maintain the longevity of the of of whatever we find Precious on Earth either maintaining the human culture civilization out there or maintaining our knowledge are just showing that we existed building a monument on
• 18:30 - 19:00 exoplanets and all of these would not be very grabby there would be more in the spirit of we existed here and here you are some more details about it or we appreciate this and that and we are using 3D printers and the AI to recreate those things on your planet and if we had a visitor with similar Ambitions then perhaps you know it wouldn't be as grabby it wouldn't be as dangerous I mean Stephen Hawking was very worried
• 19:00 - 19:30 about predators and he argued that we should be careful but I see any encounter with a more advanced civilization that arrives to our doorstep as an opportunity for us to learn I don't see that as a threat so we're recording this on what used to be called Columbus Day I guess now also indigenous people's day and the effects of Columbus voyage weren't that dependent on his motives for the voyage he and the various people on the boat
• 19:30 - 20:00 had a variety of motives many of which were of the sort you describe and I agree with you that if people today are thinking why would I want to go into a space they aren't mostly with gravy motives uh I would just say that we have these deep robust theories of biological evolution and cultural Evolution and they are basically dependent on selection effects not really on motives and the selection effect is also pretty strong and clear if any part of the distribution decides to go out and
• 20:00 - 20:30 expand and use resources then it will happen it's it's not really about where the median of the distribution is or what they motive or what they'll do the question is just will there be any part of the distribution certainly going to the to the new world here we didn't need the median European colonist to be especially hostile or especially grabby as long as some of them were it happened yeah well you have to distinguish between the will the the intent and the
• 20:30 - 21:00 ability to accomplish it because it may well be that you know technologically speaking it's not possible to be very grabby because it takes so much time to bring stuff well again most of colonization of biology or in culture wasn't to bring stuff back to home it was just to go out there and be there and and have descendants further on that's the selection of frck just predicts the people will go it doesn't predict they will bring stuff back so the question is just can our descendants
• 21:00 - 21:30 in say 10 million years or more not in the next hundred or thousand in 10 million years with these sort of further technological and economic advances we can expect will we then be possible to leave here go to another star system not bring stuff home just survive regrow and then be able to send out another colonist further and then there's the further question of what's the fastest feasible speed for that so if if people go out at different speeds of
• 21:30 - 22:00 colonization there'll also be in a selection effect the fastest strategy will win right it will dominate the frontier so it is a question about the limits of this thick tail of distribution just how far can we go so you might even say we can go within a Galaxy but couldn't go between galaxies say you might think it's just too hard to go between galaxies but because that's even farther it's too long it's not too hard I mean let's talk about propulsion right so so far all the
• 22:00 - 22:30 spacecraft that we launched to Interstellar space are moving at tens of kilometers per second that's one part in 10,000 of the speed of light 10,000 times slower than the speed of light I just wrote a paper with an undergraduate student at Harvard sh Cruz kakaro a month ago where we calculated where will Voyager be in a billion years in two billion years it will be on the other side of the Milky Way disc of stars okay so so it really takes billions of years
• 22:30 - 23:00 for the chemical rockets that we produced to Traverse the Milky Way now you can ask okay is there some other propulsion method that will do it much faster and that was the question that Yuri Milner asked me in 2015 about a decade ago when he came to my office and wanted to invest funds in a research program to reach Proxima centuri within our lifetime and we are both at the same age so that means getting there within 20 years that since
• 23:00 - 23:30 the star is four light years away it means moving at a fifth of the speed of light and the only method so I worked on it for half a year with my students and and postdocs and we looked at various engines that you can dream about such as matter antimatter Annihilation you can think of nuclear fusion nuclear fishing all kinds of engines and right now the only feasible method that brings you close to the speed of light let's say a fifth of the
• 23:30 - 24:00 speed of light is light sails if you have a very lightweight probe that is just a few grams attached to a sail the size of a person and you push it with a powerful laser of about 100 gigawatt for a few minutes it could reach a fifth of the speed of light but that will not transport people that will not reach the objectives of actually landing on it because you need to slow down when it arrives to a destination so that you
• 24:00 - 24:30 know if you move it to a fifth of the speed of light how do you stop it without having a laser on the other at the other end so I think the the technological challenges are really huge in terms of imagining A system that can approach the speed of light do you have any solution for that Robin so there's several key parameters here to think about one is the mass of the delivered product and what would be the minimum Mass required to deliver something like
• 24:30 - 25:00 us that could reproduce and rebuild a civilization at the other end so you're thinking I think of our humaniz masses maybe and saying a gram is way too way too little another key parameter here is the speed and as you know we do have ways to move small things very fast given pretty large but feasible energy budgets but a third key parameter is what is the Future Energy budget that we are anticipating used to to to do this project so if we project current energy
• 25:00 - 25:30 growth rates into the future then in 10,000 years you'll have plenty of energy to send even a humaniz thing near the speed of light but you know as you say it's not just the energy you need Shields and or ways to shoot things out of the way Etc you'll need ways to decelerate you also you're not allowed to go above 10g because that's what pilots fighter well
• 25:30 - 26:00 so I I was an artificial intelligence researcher for nine years and I've been around futurists for many decades including my friend Eric Drexler Mr nanotechnology and so in that world we've always assumed that our descendants who would be going to the Stars just wouldn't be meat humans like us it would be other sorts of creatures so so I have this book called the age of M work love and life when robots rule the Earth which is about brain emulations they would certainly be implemented in Silicon or whatever and
• 26:00 - 26:30 able to be sent on much smaller mass in you know much harder environments but regardless of whether that's our kind of descendant or other kinds of AI yes I I think that by the time we would actually send something to another star it wouldn't be meat like you or I it would be some sort of a digital descendant I I completely agree I mean I think the future might be techn AI rather than biological but let me ask you are you intrigued by
• 26:30 - 27:00 reports from the Director of National Intelligence and other military personnel that there might be objects near Earth that are anomalous or do you disregard them I I don't at all disregard them so I'll just my my quick so basically we're having this conversation in part because a couple years ago I published this paper in the astrophysical journal on what we call grabby aliens it's analysis of where aliens are in SpaceTime and I'm proud of that analysis I don't think it's at all definitive but I think it's
• 27:00 - 27:30 thought-provoking at least and then being someone who in that sense was an expert on Aliens I thought it was my duty to engage this hypothesis that's often prominent in our civilization that in fact there are signs that are hard to explain except via their aliens so my way I would frame that is to say an analysis of UFOs and whether they're aliens or other sorts of strange objects or events is the the basian way to do that is to have a prior na
• 27:30 - 28:00 likelihood and that I've looked at enough of the particular data to say this isn't easily dismissed and it's complicated and I'm not an expert in the things you need to know to judge those particular events but I am kind of an expert in the prior in the sense that my analysis sets me up to analyze the prior and then you might ask okay what prior do I come off and what would be a relevant standard for the prior and I'd say think about a murder accusation in our Society on average one out of a
• 28:00 - 28:30 thousand people is murdered on average maybe they have a thousand people around them who plausibly could have done it so the prior probability for anyone murder accusation is roughly one in a million and if you thought that's so crazy low we should never even consider murder accusations well that's just wrong we often do have evidence that's able to rise above to elevate a one in a million prior up to above 50/50 that's just the fact of the kind of evidence we often have in our world so if you can get a prior on UFOs being aliens above one in
• 28:30 - 29:00 a million I think you have to at least look at the evidence and if it's well above that you'll have to look at it more and my rough estimate from my analysis was roughly one in 10,000 to one in a th000 prior that is given my basic background analysis of aliens in space you know in SpaceTime that's roughly what I'd assigned to there're being aliens right here right now looking roughly like they do the two key features are they're here now but not anywhere visible else in in the sky that's one key feature and the other key
• 29:00 - 29:30 feature is they're hanging out near the edge of visibility they could be really obvious or they could be completely invisible and for some strange reason they aren't doing either of those two things by hypothesis and so you need to explain that so again I came up with what I thought were the the most likely auxiliary assumptions given my basic analysis that would predict they're here in those forms and I say roughly one and 1,000 to 110,000 and so I say to conclude you got to look at the evidence that's strong enough prior that you got
• 29:30 - 30:00 to look right exactly so here we come we come together so here we come together because my Approach is not to have a prior in a way I just want to seek the evidence I think the mistake being made by a lot of people is they have an opinion and it's just like in politics people are driven to the extremes you have Believers and you have Skeptics and you know the common sensical thing to do is just collect as much evidence as possible and figure out what what what
• 30:00 - 30:30 is out there and then you know you unfortunately you can't train AI on common sense because it's not very common unfortunately the middle of the road in politics or in science is not populated much most people just have an opinion which is one extreme or the other and in the context of objects near Earth my Approach is to collect as much data as possible and just figure out if all of them are rocks so it and we will learn something new about rocks from
• 30:30 - 31:00 outside the solar system because even my colleagues who criticize me they keep arguing that UA mua this first Interstellar object was a rock of a type that we've never seen before so even if they are right since we haven't seen such a rock before it teaches us something new and we learn something in the process and that's the benefit of doing science and therefore we should get as much data as possible and by the way the only danger to such a process of collecting data are people like the
• 31:00 - 31:30 expert that told me after hearing a talk about uua he said that om muamua is so weird I wish it never existed and that's to me exactly the opposite attitude to the one that a a curious scientist should have and which is to say oh nature is showing me some anomalies perhaps I'm missing something that's an opportunity to learn something new and you know rather than being attached to past knowledge let's figure out what these things are and so I completely
• 31:30 - 32:00 agree with you now why do I not assign a prior when I decide what to do because I've seen it over and over again in human history in philosophy where people made mistakes assigning the wrong priors you know that was true during the days of Copernicus and in fact just earlier this year I was invited by the Polish government to give a lecture honoring uh the 550th birthday of Nicolas Copernicus and I dedicated it to the next copernican Revolution meaning that we
• 32:00 - 32:30 are not at the intellectual center of the universe and Galileo galile the same thing and the church admitted in 1992 that Galileo was right that was 20 years after humans landed on the moon it was a bit late so it's just that the church had the wrong prior Aristotle had the wrong prior bless Pascal argued we should all believe in God because if it's out there you know the implications are huge again he assigned I guess a uniform prior to whether God exists or
• 32:30 - 33:00 not I really don't want to assign priors I just want to examine what's out there because even if we find just rocks from other stars it will teach us something new so I say what do we have to lose you know we invested billions of dollars in the search for Dark Matter 85% of the matter in the universe has a nature that we are not familiar with and we are just experimenting looking for various types and you know people are having conjectures and I say well we should at least invest as much money in the search
• 33:00 - 33:30 for objects near Earth for the reasons that you Robin mentioned and also because we haven't done so and it's such an important question that the public cares about so let's just do it agnostically without assuming anything rather than having an opinion and ridiculing whoever collects the evidence I agree that it's easy to be overconfident and that it's often been a failure in history especially of theorists to be overconfident and I am a theorist and I take that to heart and try to less overconfident but I'll also point out that it's really hard to observe
• 33:30 - 34:00 without some priors so I'll note that for example you're not sorting you know dust in the on in the in your living room floor there uh looking for signs you your priors don't expect the evidence to be there you expect for example to especially be interested in objects from outside the solar system when you looking for maybe evidence of an object in the ocean you're looking for pieces of metal those are all based on priors they're based on theoretical presumptions that give you expectations
• 34:00 - 34:30 about what to look for and that's completely appropriate yeah the par the parameters of the search definitely depend on some assumptions you completely right but I would compare it to a detective who is seeking evidence in a crime scene and I would be happy to find things that I did not expect it's just that it's it will take too much time if I were to look at everything so I'm I'm primarily guided first by reports on unusual things the US government reports about it there will be perhaps a hearing in the US Congress
• 34:30 - 35:00 in November about some additional whistleblowers and and in addition you know astronomers are finding for the first time over the past decade objects from outside the solar system and next year the ruin Observatory will use a 3.2 gigapixel camera to survey the southern Sky every four days and could find more objects like U mua so I'm saying there are these opportunities that come our way and we should not lose sight of the the benefit that they
• 35:00 - 35:30 could bring if we examine whether all these objects are rocks or familiar objects versus something completely new that we never imagined Here We Come Together you come at it from a point of view of you know let's try and imagine what are the what is the tale of the distribution I should mention that indeed most stars are dwarf stars that are a tenth of the mass of the Sun they live for up to a thousand times longer than the sun will and so you would expect us to exist in
• 35:30 - 36:00 the future next to a dwarf star how come we exist right now next to a star like the sun and the answer is that it's quite possible that dwarf stars have a ultraviolet flares x-ray flares that sterilize planets next to them so they don't support Life as we know it and that's why we find ourselves next to a rare star called the Sun and so um you know I I w't give too much weight to the Future necessarily because the sun is
• 36:00 - 36:30 roughly at the middle of its lifespan most stars formed billions of years before the Sun so most stars finished the part of their history that where they had a habitable planet next to them and and I'm talking about most sunlike stars so we are sort of at a typical we are living at a typical time for us to exist and I really wouldn't be too much worried that something completely unexpected will happen in our future
• 36:30 - 37:00 which is one of the points you make in your paper so as we both agreed we want to try to be open-minded and not impose overconfident priors but then we also want to use the priors that we have to some degree to know where to look and that shows up in this time argument the most agnostic position would be that there's lots of different paths to advance life and therefore our particular path isn't especially informative about the space of all possible paths and from that point of
• 37:00 - 37:30 view we might say look half of all planets are deep ocean worlds and all these problems that everybody's identified with these dwarf stars are just not a problem for ocean worlds maybe you could say maybe ocean worlds just can't support Advanced life but that's one of these prior ifs how how would they see the star how would imagine an intelligent being under the ocean how would they see the stars and know that they have a place to go to so so if you look at the history of our life on Earth and where we came to one
• 37:30 - 38:00 of the key inferences we're trying to draw about history is which of the steps along the way to where we are were very hard and unlikely and which of the steps were relatively easy and the time duration that steps took is an important clue to how hard they were so when we see billions of years taken to achieve you know sexual selection or eukaryotes or you know multicellularity we'd say those are plausibly hard things because
• 38:00 - 38:30 they took billions of years but pretty much anything that's happened in the last million years isn't very plausibly a hard Step At least of the sort that you would have done to try over and over again it might have been a hard step in the sense of there were several directions to go and if you went the wrong way you could never undo that and you just always be stuck going the wrong direction so we might have had try one steps like that in the last million years where we just got lucky to go in the right direction but the sort of TR TR steps those in the last million years
• 38:30 - 39:00 those can't have been very hard so we have clearly in the last million years achieved fire and metals and Technologies and gone into the ocean and into the sky and even into space and on an ocean World those steps might in fact be substantially harder maybe a factor of a thousand or a million but you know what that still makes them easy compared to the early history that we have where things took billions ions of years again this all of this stuff
• 39:00 - 39:30 happened in the last 10,000 years really so I I just if I see something that we achieved very quickly even if I'm willing to accept that that step would be harder on an ocean world I still don't it's not obvious that it's hard enough to be hard compared to the other clearly really hard things that happen well you know that there are astrobiologists who argue that you really need the interface between Rock and water between land and ocean in
• 39:30 - 40:00 order to concentrate chemical compounds and eventually achieve a complex life and if that's true then when we examine Europa you know the Europa Clipper is about to launch very soon and it will look for signatures of Life under the ice in Europa the moon of Jupiter because the ice has cracks in it and there are plumes of vapor coming off and we could look for organic molecules and
• 40:00 - 40:30 any signature of Life under the eyes but you know it may well be that only primitive forms of life are able to develop under these circumstances simply because of the rate by which chemical reactions take take place in a Pure Water World and and their ability to to make complex molecules compared to a situation where you can concentrate uh those molecules by evaporating the the
• 40:30 - 41:00 liquid and and allowing them to make more complex organisms time will tell I it's quite possible that ocean worlds are unable to support intelligence I would not be surprised if that's the case you know speaking about the liquids there is only one other body in the solar system that has liquids on its surface and that is Titan a moon of Saturn and the Tian has liquid methan and Ethan because its temperature
• 41:00 - 41:30 surface temperature is three times lower than the Earth surface temperature relative to absolute zero it's about 92 degrees Kelvin and um what I would like during my the remainder of my life is to have a trip to Titan and go fishing there because I wonder if there is any fish in on that planet it would be life as we don't know it because it's a completely different liquid than water and of course I will not dare to eat
• 41:30 - 42:00 that fish because it may be very dangerous to do so so uh as you probably know there was this dramatic paper roughly a week ago showing that a rock on Earth had life isolated inside it for two billion years and the life is still going that is the life had been feeding off of clay inside a rock on Earth for two billion years that greatly to me UPS the estimate of the feasibility of
• 42:00 - 42:30 panspermia which then UPS the estimate of the likelihood of panspermia so I got to say now I'm guessing that in fact many of the rest of the solar system will have primitive life on it and may well find that elsewhere in this the Galaxy near us yeah that's quite possible and and you know the if you are correct then Mars is a smaller body than Earth so it cooled earlier indeed and we might all be martians because life
• 42:30 - 43:00 started on Mars earlier and in that case Elon musk's Ambitions are dwarf because um going home you know microbes were T tiny astronauts that made it from Mars to Earth long before musk was born and they they accomplished the task and his ambition is just like returning to our childhood home in a way so I I mentioned that I tried to come up with the most likely scenario in which UFOs could be aliens and one key element of that scenario was
• 43:00 - 43:30 panspermia siblings the idea that in order for the universe to be so empty but we still have aliens near us they could have a common origin with us and therefore if only the ones with the common origin they chose not to go expanding and making a big difference that could explain why we don't see much near us but they're here now because that would also explain why they're here they want us not to expand because they didn't do it and if we did it we would break whatever purpose they had in
• 43:30 - 44:00 preventing themselves from doing it so yeah uh and then of course in principle there could be other panspermia siblings you know roughly our Stellar Nursery probably had like 10,000 Stars Each of which spread into a ring around the Galaxy and those are the best candidates for looking for other life and we can actually see their spectral signature to find them and to look specifically at them I agree and one thing to keep in mind that in interstellar space there are only legal aliens aren't any illegal aliens because the the legal system
• 44:00 - 44:30 applies only to to Earth or to humans in particular yes right so I mean certainly part of what's going on here is I'm an economist I'm not an astrophysicist but my willingness to jump into this area is the fact that I see things more from an economist point of view yeah and see maybe the future of our civilization as a analogy for aliens in economic terms and we economists tend to think that growth will be more like and even grabbin will be more likely and
• 44:30 - 45:00 I think astrophysicist are often a little shy about presuming our descendants will be so go or crude as to be grabbing okay so so Robin I have an offer for you I will uh search for them and if I find evidence I will come back to you you will be the first that I inform of my findings and you will tell me how to device an economic strategy so as to raise enough funds to continue to further the research so that we can
• 45:00 - 45:30 learn much more about them so there is an economic aspect to the search and that is how many funds are allocated to the search because people often say you know extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence my point is extraordinary evidence requires extraordinary funding absolutely and and so most of the time what happens is people have an opinion they don't put the the the funding or the um intellectual resources to actually explore possibilities the way as you
• 45:30 - 46:00 know some astronomers did in the context of dark mattera there was huge amounts of effort right nothing was found yet absolutely and I'm saying why not invest similar similar resources on a question that the public cares so much about and I haven't heard a reasonable answer so far well as an economist I study Academia as a social institution and I would say my simplest summary of ademia is that academics sell
• 46:00 - 46:30 association with credential impressiveness that's the main thing we sell so students and journalists and funders all gain Prestige by association with credential impressive people that's what we are our product isn't actually intellectual progress or Discovery it is association with credential oppress so when a referee you know report evaluates a paper they are primarily asking how impressive was this not how important or interesting is it and that's what we
• 46:30 - 47:00 sell so unfortunately this world of impressiveness prestige humans are such that we tend to trust the prestigious to tell us what's prestigious right and so it is the dominant players in Academia who decide what counts as prestigious impressive academic work and so there happens to be a fat or culture for a half century that looks down on this topic as foolish and ignorant low class
• 47:00 - 47:30 and as a result academics have been really quite energetically running away from it for a long time right which makes it a problem if you want funding you're asking the funer to associate with your alternative interpretation of what should be considered prestigious you basically need a contrarian fun of sorts who right will be willing to embrace that contrarian identity there are such but they are a smaller fraction right most people who donate to universities and Grant organizations in
• 47:30 - 48:00 general are merely trying to be conservatively prestigious by association with the usual organizations doing the usual things yeah but I should say well first of all I do have such funders and I do get you know a lot of attention to the research I'm doing so in fact this week I had a podcast that garnered more viewers than Kamala Harris on the same day and I do think that the public is excited by the science so and of course some members of the public are wealthy
• 48:00 - 48:30 enough to contribute to This research but I would give all the money in the world even if I was offered it I would give all the money in the world all the prestige in the world just for knowing if there is an intelligent partner in our Cosmic neighborhood just knowing that is worth more than the Noel prize then academic tenure than everything because and that's all I I'm trying to find out you know that okay well let me I have a downer message for you which is
• 48:30 - 49:00 okay the most likely scenario I can come up with of why UFOs would actually be aliens has their agenda not being very fun they are here they made some rule at their home World a long time ago that they're not going to allow generic expansion and colonization they successfully enforced that for at least 100 million years they realized that if any of their siblings arose and might they would break that rule so their primary motive is to come here and
• 49:00 - 49:30 convince us not to expand or grow and they hope to do that voluntarily persuasively otherwise they would have just killed us so you're saying they're members of Academia they're here to keep us from being too ambitiously you know colonizing expanding which which is what some of our colleagues are doing yes yes and they their agenda for us is limited that is they want us to agree and accept a limited agenda for our future to be in their Shadow following their rules
• 49:30 - 50:00 that's why they're here and unfortunately they've got plenty of time they don't need to be in a rush about it eventually we'll figure it out but then when we finally do they're not really going to tell us much they're not going to help us much they're just going to set up this limit on us and say accept our greater judgment and wisdom because we are your superiors and you should just do what we say which is to stay here and not leave and that's it yeah well let let let me give you an
• 50:00 - 50:30 indicator of the fact that I have a good marriage uh because a decade ago when I asked my wife what does she think about these these subjects she said well it looks to me like um you be you know you're you're a bit different than the rest of us and if aliens come to our backyard to pick you up because you must have come from somewhere else just make sure that you leave the car keys with me and ask them not to ruin the loan when they lift off and uh I asked her again
• 50:30 - 51:00 this year and she said that she's so frustrated with what's going on around the world that she will actually join me okay and just yesterday I got an email from someone who said that they read my latest book Interstellar and they cried while reading some of the paragraphs there because it resonates with their wishes to go somewhere else [Music] unfortunately that just seems very
• 51:00 - 51:30 unlikely that is clearly if aliens are here they had the option to be very visible to be very clear and then to help us give us technology keep you know imposing world peace they definitely had that option and chose not to do it they are not here to help us to show us things to teach us things they have chosen not to do that yeah they're there's nothing we're going to really be able to do to change their mind about that I expect well you see um so Robin
• 51:30 - 52:00 we are different in that aspect because I believe that we are not that important that we are completely irrelevant to what they're here for and so that's why we don't hear from them if they are here they may employ technologies that are not easily detectable By Us by but we just don't matter in the big scheme of things and for a good reason you know we we are just not sufficiently intelligent and perhaps once we leave our solar system you know we will hear a message
• 52:00 - 52:30 saying welcome to the interstellar Club but until we do that we're just uninteresting so I find that hard to scare with the basic evidence here again presuming that you have those are aliens that the most basic thing we know about them is some of them are here now or recently and they could have been everywhere we see in the Galaxy near us that clearly again they have been around for long enough and have powers they could have re made the Galaxy around us so they didn't there's clearly some
• 52:30 - 53:00 information in the fact they did not do that that means most everywhere out there hasn't been touched much so they're here now touching this now but not most everything that just makes us special like for some reason they are here now but not most everywhere well just think about AI okay as an example where you might have a relationship with the Chad GPT that will sound very sincere and authentic but in fact there are millions of subscribers that would also have an authentic conversation of that nature so it's not it's not really
• 53:00 - 53:30 about you well like if stuff at our level is very common in the Galaxy then they could be hanging out near all sorts of stuff like us almost everywhere yeah right that's my point but then I have to infer that the probability that we would go from our level to something very visible is enormously small so that's the great filter the phrase I gave 25 years ago to the fact that we don't see anything you need an explanation for that great filter I'm guessing you're
• 53:30 - 54:00 thinking in terms of just technological infeasibility it's just not possible to go out and make big Visible Changes that just doesn't fit with the physics I know and the engineering I know it does seem physically possible no I I'm not saying I'm not saying that you know even with chemical Rockets it will take us a billion years which is 10% of the age of the Galaxy so there could have been objects that were launched with chemical rockets that are in our backyard that definitely is the case and that's why we should search all I'm
• 54:00 - 54:30 saying is that we were not significant we were not noticeable when the journey started and therefore they have their own goals that are completely unrelated to us and we keep thinking that we are in their mind but I say forget about it why didn't they take their home star and remake it into a very different more useful structure to them or take a whole cluster of stars and remake that that was certainly feasible in the time scale you're talking about well maybe maybe they did but at the same time they could have sent ambassadors and these could be
• 54:30 - 55:00 AI systems with 3D printers or things that are but the question is what is the goal of you know the dandelo seeds are sent in the wind the dandel flower sends seeds in the wind in order to replicate itself and it's not connected with an umbilical cord to any of the seeds and right doesn't care about what happens to them and they land in some fertile grounds and recreate that flower so you can imagine a situation similar to that where they sent lots of probes I mean
• 55:00 - 55:30 they have their own Mega structure that they enjoy and that's their they have their private yard and so forth but at the same time they send these Messengers that are pursuing something else and and those are spreading throughout the Galaxy reproducing themselves and we might see some of them near us but why don't they do massive reproduction not just have a dandelion seed float past a island why don't they land on the island and grow and fill the island maybe they do but we just just don't notice them I don't know how small they
• 55:30 - 56:00 are obviously we want we will not notice small things flying in our atmosphere on earth a desolate desert island is different from a jungle filled Island we definitely see that life when it can reproduce on the surface of the Earth at least makes a visible difference true even if each particular cell is invisible to us the net effect of their exponential growth filling the island is definitely visible and that's the sort of thing I would expect to see in our galaxy if dandelion seeds have been
• 56:00 - 56:30 floating around for billions of years growing everywhere they could they would just be different now well let me give you a a a context here because based on the meteor that was discovered by the US government satellites in 2014 a decade ago we can say that there are about a million such objects roughly half a meter in size right now within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and we were not aware of that the the only reason we became aware of one of them a decade ago is because it collided with Earth as the
• 56:30 - 57:00 Earth orbits the Sun and the Earth has a small cross-sectional area right so every decade it sweeps across such an object but there you know there are millions of them going through this region all the time and it just to me illustrates the fact that we haven't really searched very carefully omua mua was the size of a football field that's huge that's bigger than Starship sure Starship is a relatively narrow cylinder that gets close to a scale of 100 met
• 57:00 - 57:30 but but om mua mua was most likely flat across such a huge scale and was pushed away from the Sun by some mysterious Force so I'm saying there might be smaller objects that we can't detect because they don't reflect enough sunlight with our current telescopes we can see them and we are really blind you know and except if they come really close to Earth and these are the APS the the unidentified anomalous phenomena if they were dandelion seeds and they would
• 57:30 - 58:00 be looking for fertile ground to land in to grow and you'd think they would be better at it a million things floating in the solar system seem to be incompetent at the task of landing and growing in the solar system if that's what they're there for well it dep it depends it depends whether they have their own will whether they can maneuver or they're just following you know forces that nature applies to them like gravity or radiation pressure
• 58:00 - 58:30 in which case it's a matter of chance for them to to meet planets and even today you know we have many organisms that are smaller than we can see that have self-directed sensing and and and planning so these huge large structures could easily afford a tiny fraction of themselves with a little sensing and intelligence and planning so yeah definitely the only question here is whether it will survive over billions of years which is necessary because you
• 58:30 - 59:00 know but that's where this rock thing comes in we've had life on Earth survive in a rock for two billion years running only on the energy of the CL reactions in that rock completely sealed off so it's definitely possible to last that on by the way the the yeah by the way the Earth went through a very dramatic transitions in terms of its climate in terms of I mean there was actually about 200 million years ago there was a major event that resembled climate change yeah and then you know the question is what
• 59:00 - 59:30 triggered that and and there are theories for that but my point is there could have been visits in our past you know in 200 million years is just 5% of the age of the of the earth so there could have been events in the past that are not documented because documented human history is just 5,000 years old so sure and we we are just not aware of it and we measure everything by what we have seen over the past hundreds of years and and that's a very limited field of view for us but the implication
• 59:30 - 60:00 of that hypothesis is that they didn't really care to land intelligences like themselves down here to reproduce like themselves they just were happy to send out any sort of some sort of life like them that was very you know not very smart basically because whatever landed on Earth in the last five billion years it's either us we are their descendants or they didn't make intelligent descendants of themselves now what so what is your conjecture do you think human intelligence came from
• 60:00 - 60:30 out of this Earth or do you think it emerged naturally you know a while ago I guess there was this hypothesis by gold or whatever that there was just this steady stream of life from you know the universe raining down on Earth and that virus bursts were due to an asteroid with a new virus coming down and that sort of thing like my understanding is most biologists don't find that very plausible anymore right so I can't really support that but if I can't support that I'd have to think something
• 60:30 - 61:00 very unusual comes down and it would just be really weird so like if octopi were aliens that would kind of make sense because they're pretty different from the rest of stuff down here so I would be looking at the most weirdly different things down here as the most plausibly something that came down from the sky as opposed to being here on Earth for billions of years but clearly even octopi aren't as smart as we might think the aliens that could have sent them would be right so somehow they still allowed a huge degradation in their capacity that's just not very
• 61:00 - 61:30 plausible it seems like it wouldn't cost them that much for the cost of sending these huge asteroids you're talking about right having a little part of them that save some memory of what they are and how they think wouldn't be very expensive so I just I agree I agree and and of course if you imagine artificial intelligence in addition to biological intelligence natural intelligence then the the the realm of possibilities is far greater that we haven't employed AI I in space as of now because the human brain uses 12 watts of power and the AI
• 61:30 - 62:00 are CH GPT or large language models use gigawatts and we AI is not ready to replace this yet but maybe within a century not ready to go to space yeah but um by the way I should say that AI is an abbreviation not just to artificial intelligence but also to alien intelligence because the those systems are made of silicone chips very different from the flesh and blood that are brain is made sure now we are trying to align those systems with us and you
• 62:00 - 62:30 know that that may be similar to putting a lipstick on a on a pig you know and and uh because in fact the strongest traits of of those systems might be in Thinking Beyond what humans can think like differently and then I think it would be useful for science to allow those systems to process data in a way that does not necess imitate as not that will not be a digital mirror of a human
• 62:30 - 63:00 looking at the day you and I completely agree I don't know if you know I've been discussing this subject with futurists for a while now I don't know the person the person who is most known for being the AI Warrior lowski first discussed his worries in a blog he shared with me for you know seever for half a decade at least and so we discussed that for a long time there and yes many of them are very worried that AIS won't be very faithful to obey and do what we tell them but my position
• 63:00 - 63:30 continues to be that you should just compare them to our other descendants we never really expected our other descendants to be so obedient or subservient to our plans and culture and we shouldn't expect more of the AI than we expected of our other descendants yeah this is by the way we have it's amazing because I expressed exactly this view without knowing about yours and I say those who Express these concerns must not be good parents because when
• 63:30 - 64:00 you become a parent and I have two daughters you realize that you can't be a helicopter parent you can't control them you have to allow them to do you can't you can and people try but nevertheless every generation does end up being different well people try but but it doesn't work it doesn't end up well and and and and the the approach that was of course developed over centuries is to educate those intelligent systems to follow your guiding principles and ethical rules
• 64:00 - 64:30 such that they will most likely do the thing that operate in unpredictable environments in the way that you hope them to operate and and and there is no guarantee and so that's the way to deal with intelligent systems and you know we can be helicopter parenting the perseverance Rover on mars or the helicopter that we landed on Mars the Ingenuity just because these are robots OTS that do not have intelligence but once we venture beyond the solar system
• 64:30 - 65:00 we will have to rely on the probes being autonomous because they will not be able to transmit the information back to us they could send us a postcard the way my you know I think what people are worried about though is something like cultural autonomy what they want is for the AIS to retain our overall cultural values and attitudes even as they as individuals can deal with local circumstances but in fact I think Humanity has a serious problem with I what I've called cultural drift our
• 65:00 - 65:30 cultural Evolution process isn't going well and AIS being free to evolve their own culture would actually fix that so I think there's an extra reason to want AIS to be free to pursue their own ways to change themselves and decide what they want is because that will fix a key problem Humanity now has but that's another conversation so here is an interesting question that connects what we are just discussing to what we discussed for and that is whether AI systems can serve as Laboratories for us
• 65:30 - 66:00 to imagine the type of intelligences that we may encounter from outer space so in other words sure in physics we learned about the laws of physics that happen to be valid Across the Universe you know we are able to understand how the universe started since the Big Bang thanks to experiments that were done a century ago in the laboratories on Earth they allowed us to reveal quantum mechanics and you know and then study general relativity and special relativity and so forth and in the same
• 66:00 - 66:30 way um we need a Sandbox where we can test ideas about intelligences that are different than ours and perhaps AI will serve that purpose it was not yet imagined how it might do that because everyone wants to make it a digital mirror of humans they want to align those systems so so the the field of cognitive science and artificial intelligence has in the last half century pretty much explored every conceivable way to imagine what a mind could be and for each of those ways we
• 66:30 - 67:00 imagine we think is that how humans really are or is that how AI could be so I we haven't been shy at all about exploring the space of possible minds and I doubt that we will for a while my field of Economics actually has for the last half century preferred Game Theory models of Agents which are basically assuming some reasoning Perfection and they aren't that bad as models of humans so there a sense in which we already are able to Encompass a pretty wide range of
• 67:00 - 67:30 what Minds could be like in the way that we reason about economics and and computer science so but don't you think AI could open a new sure yeah we will definitely continue I mean this is going to let us explore the space of Minds bigger that is right almost surely whatever we decide the space of Minds is that's what we will decide the space of possible alien Minds is I don't think we'll have any particular constraints about how they couldn't be anywhere in the space we and see we are only constrained by what we can imagine Minds could be right so here is an interesting
• 67:30 - 68:00 question suppose we will have a conversation like this one in about 20 years you know we will both be older but we could have an oracle that is an AI system with as many connections or more connections than the human brain and that system might think differently and and more effectively than us of course it will and then we ask that Oracle how do we search for aliens and and and the question is Will it give better answers than the two of us well unfortunately that will probably be slaved to our then
• 68:00 - 68:30 current concepts of prestige even today you can ask very smart people how to think about UFOs but then if the prestigious academics say no no that's foolish then people will just believe the prestigious academics and that'll also be true even with AIS they won't be willing to believe it as you know we do this special training of AIS we the way we train AI we do this generic training on all possible data and then we do this finishing SC where we make them talk the way that people who building that AI want them to talk and you know stay away
• 68:30 - 69:00 from forbidden subjects and be conventional in the way they want them to be conventional and that sort of training will continue to have them be poo poo AIS exactly because the people training them that's what they want them to say well but okay so I will take an AI system and train it in my at my home you know just like I do with my kids and and and train it to be more Innovative more openminded and and not not give it tenure and not not give it the in incentive that we have in Academia so perhaps that would be the one to have
• 69:00 - 69:30 the you know beginner's mind and figure out what sure but when you then tell it to make its most persuasive case to think about aliens it will be competing in its rhetorical context with the most persuasive AIS generated by the ones who are get the endorsement and budgets of the main academic prestigious people and it may not win those arguments right okay but all of this is the virtual world and you know as a physicist what I care as a physicist is about the physical world and of course I can get guidance from Agents like AI but
• 69:30 - 70:00 ultimately it's about what I find and nature might be far more imaginative than we are and so I don't really care what people say what AI systems say for me it's about collecting the evidence and the the most dangerous thing that can happen is for someone to be so immersed in the virtual world as to not seek the evidence now you know that's one solution to the FM is to F his Paradox that why don't we see them here it's because they put goggles and live
• 70:00 - 70:30 in the metaverse you know and they do not care about the physical reality that we all share they have they are high on drugs you know because you can feel pleasure by divorcing yourself from the physical reality because of all of its constraints for me it's actually a blessing because the physical reality that we all share you know if we happen to understand it to figure out all of its details we can adapt to it we can use it if we know that we are not at the center of the world we can build
• 70:30 - 71:00 spacecraft that will bring us to places like Mars and so forth and if we know that we have a partner we have a neighbor we can perhaps get a quantum liap in our abilities by learning from their Technologies their science and so I'm all after seeking the evidence and I'm saying that even though I started as a theories theoretical astrophysicist for about 40 years in recent years you might say that I matured in a way because I pay more attention to collecting the evidence and in this
• 71:00 - 71:30 context that we discussed collecting the evidence is really not done by many and it's about time for us to do it I read one of your books a while back and not necessarily the most recent one and if I recall you were somewhat dismissive of the usual UFO evidence favoring this asteroid out there and I got to say that my default is if there are aliens around the probably are behind some of these UFO reports in which case we've had 100,000
• 71:30 - 72:00 UFO reportings at least documented in the last 70 years and so some of those reports have to be actually pretty credible and and and compelling well so so here is what I do here is what I did over the past few years I established the Galileo project at Harvard University we built an observatory and that Observatory is different from the ones built by astronomers in the past because astronomers usually focus on a small region of the sky they look at the
• 72:00 - 72:30 very great distances and our Observatory is monitoring the entire Sky all the time in the infrared Optical radio and audio and we're analyzing the data with machine learning trying to look at objects that are not familiar that are different and in fact very soon we are about to release the first paper reporting about data from this Observatory we looked at half a million objects over the past few months and we described the analysis the results uh
• 72:30 - 73:00 and then we will keep looking at more more and more objects we are building two additional observatories at other locations and so altogether within a year or so we should have three Observatory is monitoring the sky everywhere now on top of that you know I'm really curious to know what the government really knows because as you said before the data that they made public is not sufficiently convincing and if they have much better dat you know they should share it with Scientists like myself because their interest I mean their job description is
• 73:00 - 73:30 National Security my job description is what lies outside the solar system and if they saw things that have nothing to do with adversarial Nations I very much hope that they will share it with us I hope so too but again I was about to say some of these reports probably were very credible and convincing but still our social processes wouldn't accept that that and therefore I got to think that Academia and government are reluctant to
• 73:30 - 74:00 change their mind and so it require a substantial social Revolution not just collecting evidence to make this switch well so what happened during the days of Copernicus that also required a a revolution right but as you may know a number of US presidents when they got in office said okay tell me about what we know about UFOs and they said nothing and basically they they blew them off and and wouldn't disclose what they did know so that suggests that maybe some
• 74:00 - 74:30 new president will have to push harder than the other ones did and say no really you you I need to see everything you know now I'm the president and even that you wonder they could just push back and because how much time does a president have to go like pushing back on these things so well you see I met the Director of National Intelligence ail Haynes in The Green Room of the Washington National Cathedral and that was a few months after delivered the report to the US Congress the first report and I said averil um you have a
• 74:30 - 75:00 bachelor's degree from in physics from the University of Chicago so we speak the same language because I'm a physicist what do you make of these objects and she said I don't know and I believed her so I think the government that that that's what I've heard privately from people in the background they privately are willing to say we don't know what this is yeah but clearly government officials are very sensitive about Public Image and degrading the reputation of their organization Etc and the coordination of of the rest so I think you have to have to ask on a
• 75:00 - 75:30 what's the time scale between social Revolutions of the scale that we're asking for here and that's the time scale on which you should expect eventually people to you know reveal stuff and admit stuff yeah and that's not necessarily tied to the quality of the evidence yeah you may be right because recently I had a podcast with Sean Ryan and and the one before that was with Cliff Sims who served as the deputy director of national intelligence and he mentioned that there was a discussion about unidentified anomalous
• 75:30 - 76:00 phenomena with the Director of National Intelligence and he was asked to leave the room it was of the highest classification possible and you may wonder why that is the case now of course it could be that they are worried that UAP are representing technologies that adversarial Nations possess but it could also be that it's something we don't fully understand and they're worried about it in that case Cas scientists should be involved in the process of evaluating what it means so I
• 76:00 - 76:30 don't think we can brush aside and ignore the discussion within government because these these are serious people and we can't just say it's nonsense the way Academia reacts to it right now I completely agree on the other hand I just don't see any particular reason to believe stuff will happen soon okay well I you and I are playing the long game in the long run we're trying to do stuff that we seem important no no I'm I'm not I'm not playing no Robin I'm not playing the long game I will try to make it
• 76:30 - 77:00 happen I will try with you but still if the primary obstacle here is sort of a social equilibrium of just looking down on something and not wanting to change your mind then that'll take a while to change so so here is my view on that I say uh that sometimes it makes sense to rock the boat sure you know most people don't want to rock the boat but when the boat is heading in the wrong direction that's when you need to Rock It but you should also choose your battles as they all say uh this this is the battle I'm willing to die on and I've got a half
• 77:00 - 77:30 dozen other battles so I'm not sure this is my top one but I'm happy to support it as I can now gentlemen it here it's worth noting though that there can be elements within a government entrenched elements that see a president as a temporary employee in other words trustworthy he's going to be gone in four years wait him out and that's happened you know so it's not that it's not that unexpected that a president isn't going to know everything
• 77:30 - 78:00 or be given all information but it does seem very strange how dodgy the US government is on this subject because if there's nothing there there's nothing there and it gets harder and harder to explain that by well they're trying to protect their sensors and capabilities and methods and all that in this it's getting a little bit weird or well it has been for years I should say uh earlier this week um I had a special event at the Boston Museum of Science
• 78:00 - 78:30 with a best-selling author named Patricia Cornwell and she came with two bodyguards you know she writes crime novels and then apparently she had a book that came out and I was told at the event that she was inspired with the main character being me so she was inspired by my work uh yeah and uh the only unfortunate fact is that because it's a crime novel The that astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize
• 78:30 - 79:00 but I didn't but at any event getting is getting killed and and and and there is this theory that he was killed by aliens dropped off an a UAP and and then the detective figures out based on the autopsy a more terrestrial origin for the death I was I said I I will not take it personally but you know it's it's really interesting to figure out what the government knows because it may open
• 79:00 - 79:30 a whole new dis mode of discussion as Robin is referring to that where uh the narrative will change as a result of that now one question that I had listening intently I'm like the student in the lecture hall professors and I'm listening to the professors and enjoying myself and my audience is the same way I'm just the the student that occasionally raises his hand but but uh you and I want to hear complete answers and it's been wonderful but let me ask you this a trigger for the intervention
• 79:30 - 80:00 of an alien civilization that is present in the solar system could be some technology that is developed that may present a threat to them therefore they mitigate the threat by having a presence and they watch us could this be artificial intelligence getting out of hand eventually and that's when you see them as when you get too close to artificial generalized intelligence that is indeed super
• 80:00 - 80:30 intelligent and perhaps that's the reason to be here like the zoo hypothesis we were flirting with that and that's the reason they intervene but they aren't actually intervening they're hanging at the edge of visibility at best so clearly if they had a plan of okay they've gone too far we need to step in and slap their face and tell them we're here and and there's rules around here then they would have done that so if they're just going to wait till we pass some threshold and then drop the bomb on us we'll never get a warning about that right so we we can
• 80:30 - 81:00 make our own guesses about how far might be too far that they would be scared of almost surely if aliens are near here they have a bomb of some sort in a button and if we are past some threshold of danger we'll just be gone the question is just do they give us a warning before that and what what possibly could be the threatening point at which we are so close to something that they would push the button and presumbly because at some point we would be beyond their button but I think most plausibly we're we we are just not
• 81:00 - 81:30 remotely beyond their button at the moment like an alien civilization 100 million years more advanced than us like what sort of a bomb could they have on us it could be way bigger than we could handle now and we are not remotely close to being able to protect against that or defuse it or anything like that so for if that's the threshold we're pretty safe now I'd say well just just think about the fact that quantum mechanics was discovered century ago we still don't have a predictive theory that unifies it with curvature of SpaceTime
• 81:30 - 82:00 as expression of gravity we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is we don't know what's inside a black hole we don't know what happened before the Big Bang some very basic questions about the universe and we are really in our baby steps in developing science and technology so yeah we need to get much farther before we will get the respect we we might hope to get all right gentlemen and I uh really enjoyed this this this mesmerized me wonderful
• 82:00 - 82:30 discussion and I hope someday maybe we can do it again as as more information comes to light in the Galileo project perhaps learns more I can't wait to see that data and I have to thank the senior partner here oh no I don't I don't at all I'm just a farm boy you know just I haven't changed since I was 5 years old and people that know me say that so to me seniority is completely IR relevant in fact I I don't think of me as having any seniority in this I I in fact I I
• 82:30 - 83:00 really enjoyed I mean you you are brilliant and that's one of the most interesting conversations I had for a long while so thank you Robin well thank you this has been absolutely fascinating but I do Wonder because H the firy Paradox where are they thank you gentlemen and I hope to do this again sometime thank you all thank you it was a pleasure Event Horizon and my channel are now available as a podcast on Apple podcasts Spotify and YouTube memberships
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