Could We Be Domesticated by Aliens? The Statistical Odds of How AI & Aliens Are Connected and What It Means for Your Future

Are we alone in the universe—or already living alongside an ancient alien intelligence? In this mind-bending exploration, Professor Robin Hanson (George Mason University & Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute) breaks down the statistical odds that alien life exists and why it may have already been found in our own solar system. From AI-driven extraterrestrials silently observing us, to the chilling theory that humans are being domesticated by advanced alien civilizations, Hanson reveals where alien life is most likely to emerge, why UFO sightings might actually be real, and how our understanding of “quiet” vs. “loud” aliens could change everything we know about our future. Robin Hanson's Book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life: https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/ BialikBreakdown.com https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ YouTube.com/mayimbialik https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOocPnDh2YQZZwh86K2OxA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mayim Bialik?

  The fact is, there's something out there that is much more sophisticated than we can even comprehend. And one of your only options is that they're watching us

• 0:16Mayim Bialik?

  and waiting.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  When we look at where we are in our developmental history, we've come a long way, we've advanced a lot. And when we look into our near future, say, the next million years, we think we've got enormous potential to become much bigger and more impactful and much more visible and obvious. People have estimated you could colonize the whole galaxy in less than a million years. And the universe is 14 billion years old. So something's weird because if life were everywhere else and all those other places could easily have done what we did, then...

• 0:48Mayim Bialik?

  Why haven't they done it?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  So there's this question. Where is everybody?

• 0:53Mayim Bialik?

  For most things, there are explanations. But there does remain a category of things for which there are no explanations we yet have.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  After a billion years of expansion, these would be like huge volumes in space that would be just really obvious.

• 1:10Mayim Bialik?

  If something originated elsewhere and got here, that means it also got other places.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Which is a problem.

• 1:18Mayim Bialik?

  Tell me.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  The key thing is, why hang out at the edge of Isabella? They are domesticating us.

• 1:23Mayim Bialik?

  Hold on a second.

• 1:31Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Iain Bialik.

• 1:32Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:34Mayim Bialik?

  Welcome to our breakdown. Today, I feel broken down by what's about to happen.

• 1:40Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's just not bury the lead. It's possible that aliens are here observing us for the purpose of domesticating us so that we don't leave the planet and go explore the solar system.

• 1:54Mayim Bialik?

  That's not necessarily the way that I would lead into today's episode, but that's not untrue. We have on a professor today who was a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He's got a doctorate from Caltech. He's a physicist, also a social scientist, and spent nine years as a research programmer at Lockheed and NASA. And his specialty that we're going to be talking about today is a fascinating exploration into not just the possibility that aliens exist, but the statistical analysis and theoretical

• 2:35Mayim Bialik?

  conceptual framework that we all need to have in order to understand how we got here, how our planet has produced life, and the very, very real statistical possibility that we are not alone in the universe. And the question is, what do we do differently now that we know that? How do we interact with each other? How do we understand our motives? And how do we wrap our heads around the fact that we are likely currently either being observed or existing alongside an artificial intelligence-driven alien universe?

• 3:19Jonathan Cohen?

  That might all sound wild, but

• 3:21Mayim Bialik?

  It's wild.

• 3:22Jonathan Cohen?

  also fairly grounded in the way that he explains it.

• 3:26Mayim Bialik?

  Our guest is Robin Hanson. He's a professor at George Mason University in Washington DC. He has a blog, overcomingbias.com, with 8 million visits. He's a speaker, he's a writer. His books include The Age of M: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and his most recent book, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life that he co-authored with Kevin Simler, which is a really, really great read, which we're not going to touch on in detail today because we really, really want to get to what is going on with this new framework for understanding our place in the universe and how that can change how we view our current life.

• 4:08Jonathan Cohen?

  The other part of the episode that really stuck out to me is thinking about the trends in the advancement and evolution of humankind as it relates to artificial intelligence and Really, how we, I guess, move along the spectrum of advancement? And he thinks about it not in terms of the specifics, but in terms of the macro trends. And when you think about the macro trends, you're able to zoom out a little bit and get a picture of where we might go in a few hundred years and then even a few thousand years. And I find that to be truly fascinating.

• 4:44Mayim Bialik?

  It's a pleasure to welcome to the Breakdown, Robin Hanson. Break it down. Robin Hanson, welcome to the Breakdown.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 4:53Mayim Bialik?

  Your book, The Elephant in the Brain, in particular, is dealing with so many aspects of what it means to be human. But one of your main areas of expertise is about something really outside of our normal human understanding. You believe that we have found already alien life in the solar system.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  My, I've seen studies of asteroids and the microfossils seen inside asteroids, and they seem convincing to me. When people say, why don't they believe that? The usual answers I hear is, oh, we need to need a really high standard of evidence for this. And I go, why? They say, because it's important. Well, I, yeah, but that doesn't mean you should hold an extra high standard of evidence. It seems like what's going on is that this topic of is there life off of Earth? That, you know, is really high status. And whole, large organizations like NASA, that much of their funding is justified on the basis of we're going to go out there answering this question.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  And so it seems like people have agreed, well, we aren't going to say that somebody's answered the question unless they are a really prestigious person who spent a lot of money with a big organization behind them to do a really big impressive thing. And then we're maybe we'll give them the crown of the person who discovered life off of Earth. But that's not how evidence works.

• 6:15Mayim Bialik?

  How does evidence work?

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Well, you have different hypotheses. Bayesian analysis of evidence is you have different hypotheses. They get a prior based on a background analysis of what seems how likely. And then each new piece of evidence weighs for one hypothesis or another a little bit, if it's a small evidence, and more if it's big evidence. And then just slowly over time, the weight of evidence accumulates on different hypotheses, and your beliefs slowly change. And there's no magic threshold.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Where all of a sudden, it's officially true. You just slowly get more evidence. So that's how you should approach even a really important question. And I did some analysis on what the prior should be because I did this analysis of what I call grabby aliens and aliens in the universe. And so I think the prior is actually pretty plausible that there would be life off of Earth. And so then it's about, well, each piece of evidence, what happens? So, you know, a standard story is, look, even if life started in the solar system, which, you know, is a relatively conservative hypothesis. It would have more chances to form where things cooled down first. So, you know, the sun was really hot, stuff near the sun was hot, then it cooled with time.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And asteroids were flying around, but they were flying around more near the center than far away. So on both temperature and asteroid smashing things grounds, things farther away from the center of the solar system would have been when life could have started first.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  And so if life started somewhere, then the question is, well, how far, where would it move? So at early on, there were all these rocks flying around. So it was lots of chances for life to move from any one part of the solar system to other parts. So if you think, well, pretty high chance, life starting anywhere in the solar system would have spread around elsewhere early on. Then you have to say, well, the place where it could have started first is more likely to be the first place it was. And so outside of Earth, farther away from the sun is actually more plausible. Your prior should be life started there and came to Earth rather than life started here and went to there.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So I gotta say, my prior for life in the solar system is pretty high that there's life elsewhere in the solar system just because so many rocks have been flying around and we can see that life could plausibly survive on a rock. Now you say, yeah, but you need evidence, but you don't need to like have this huge weight against the hypothesis that there's life elsewhere in the solar system. Because your prior was, look, it's more likely it was elsewhere than here. I think we found a in the last year or two, some chunk of rock on Earth that was sealed in the sense of like on the outside of the rock was just sealed with some way the rock had been formed. But inside there were these life from 300 million years ago.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And it was still alive. So life can survive inside a rock for 300 million years.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  So that's, that means in the solar system, rocks could be flying off a planet and then circling around for a really long time before landing on some other place and giving life there.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Not only that, I mean, interestingly, our star was formed as part of a stellar nursery, which roughly had 10,000 stars, all close to each other, formed at the same time and place, with lots of rocks flying back between them, too. It also raises the prior that, okay, one of these other siblings of our star, of which the roughly 10,000 formed four billion years ago, one of them plausibly could have had life seeding it. Anyway, this is a long answer to like, the prior is pretty high. So when I looked at the stuff of the actual guy saying, here's my micrographs, look, I got some earth life and I did the micrographs and here's what they look like and here's the stuff in the asteroids and here's what it looked like and looks pretty similar. I go, yeah, I guess he did, I guess he showed.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  But this guy said, somebody published this in 1962 in a top science magazine, that they had apparently seen life in asteroids. And then the academic world just crushed them and like got him fired and everything else by saying, no, no, no, we insist that that's not true. But apparently like this has been going on for a long time. But even the asteroid, he's, you know, when the asteroids he found, like the very first time they found this asteroid in the 1880s, they opened it up and they go, this is kind of squishy bio stuff. This is, looks different than the other asteroids. This is what the carbonaceous asteroids are, they're, they're more carbon-y stuff. When you hear a murder accusation, you're hearing a one in a million prior accusation. You could say, that's so crazy unlikely, I'm not going to listen to your evidence.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  How could it possibly be that this person murdered that one? That's just crazy unlikely, I'm not going to listen, right? But of course we don't, we say, no. Ordinary evidence that you can supply it, trials can in fact overcome on a one in a million prior. That's the sort of thing typical court evidence can do. And so I think if you have a prior that's much better than one in a million.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  You've got to look at the evidence and take it seriously. But people are often tempted to just wave their hands and go, either that's so crazy unlikely, I'm not going to look at it. Or they say, this is so very important. We couldn't possibly draw this conclusion on the basis of some low status person's evidence.

• 11:33Mayim Bialik?

  I've been in a lot of biology classes in my life. And we learn all about, you know, the primordial stew and the electrical charge that, you know, activates some slushy pond that we have to imagine, you know, existed. To me, I was taught that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that as a theory of life on this planet. Why do I need to think that life originated elsewhere if it can originate here?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  It presumably had to originate somewhere. So we're not denying that something like that must have happened somewhere. We're asking, what happened after that? Did that happen here or did it happen somewhere else? Okay, you know, because if it happened here, you don't have to add a transport part of the scenario.

• 12:17Mayim Bialik?

  I see. Well, and I think also, I mean, for me, this notion of could life have originated elsewhere is also more intriguing to engage with because it allows you to then not think of Earth as the center of all existence in the galaxy, which is what we're supposed to do. Meaning if something originated elsewhere and got here, that means it also originated elsewhere and got other places besides here.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Which is a problem, really.

• 12:49Mayim Bialik?

  Tell me.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  So the key thing is, we're special somehow. When we look at where we are in our developmental history, right? We've come a long way, we've advanced a lot. And when we look into our near future, say, the next million years, we think we've got enormous potential to become much bigger and more impactful than we are now and much more visible and obvious. If we think about, you know, people have estimated you could colonize the whole galaxy in less than a million years, maybe even 100,000 years. And the universe is 14 billion years old. So it seems like, within a relatively short time cosmologically, we could, from this point on, just get really big and obvious in the universe. We could make a splash.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  But we look out and there are no splashes like that that we see. That's the puzzle. That's what makes us now special or wrong. Either we're just wrong about our potential and no way do we have this chance of being really visible in the future. Or if we do, then something's weird because if life were everywhere else and all those other places could easily have done what we did, then

• 13:54Mayim Bialik?

  Why haven't they done it? Right.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So that means we're special somehow. Now, one of the ways we could have been special is life only appeared on Earth and nowhere else. And, you know, that's why

• 14:04Mayim Bialik?

  I find that highly unlikely.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Well, but we have to be special somewhere along the path. That's so that's I have this phrase, the great filter that I introduced where I talk about, you know, the idea that there's this long path from simple dad matter to where we hope to become. And the basic datum is that has to be a really hard path to go down because look around, we don't see anything that's gotten to the end of that path. And so the question is, where on that path is the filter? The easiest place to put it would have been at the very beginning of the path. Because that's the thing we understand least and honestly, if you look at it, it looks really damn hard. That's just the easiest place to put it. If you have to put it somewhere, right? But if we actually see life coming from elsewhere, then we have to maybe back off on that and put it elsewhere on the path.

• 14:54Mayim Bialik?

  I did not know there was a difference between loud aliens, quiet aliens. Can you sort of break down what the distinctions are when we think about aliens?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Two distinctions, maybe to make clear. One is we right now are aliens to somebody else, maybe. And we're not very loud. That is, you'd have to look really carefully at us to see us. We're not doing that much. We haven't

• 15:21Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, we're we've destroyed the ozone, which is apparently detectable from space.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  If we dumped nuclear waste into our star, it would change the spectrum. People could see that from a really long way away. So there are some things we could have done by now that it was made our star really visible from really far away. But we haven't done them yet. So mostly, we're pretty small.

• 15:39Mayim Bialik?

  We're keeping we're keeping all of the chaos to the planet.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Plausibly, the other extreme is an alien civilization that leaves its home world.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Spreads out to other worlds nearby and then keeps spreading. And there's a competitive process that would make that spreading happen as fast as possible. That is, there are people at the front edge of this colonization waves. Whoever could get to the front first would have an advantage. So they would compete to go fast. And so the colonization wage would plausibly expand as fast as it possibly could. And then people behind the front of the wave, they can't go out to the wave, but they've got a bunch of stuff they could use and they would, in say a million years or two, start to use a lot of it and change it, right? And so the image here is of a cone in spacetime of expanding usage of this big volume of spacetime.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And that using it would change it somehow. And so the the image here of a loud alien civilization is one that you see this big expanding sphere of stuff. And it looks different somehow. We we don't know exactly how it would look different, but the point is if they're just using their stuff, it would look different. And certainly that's true on Earth. When humans use an area of the Earth's surface, we we make it look different, right? Especially at night, say, but other times and other ways, it just looks different. So a loud civilization would be one that's expanding and makes something look different. And there's a sense of which that shouldn't be that hard to find. Look, maybe in the first, I don't know, hundred years it would be hard to find. But after a billion years of expansion,

• 17:15Speaker 01

  these would be like huge volumes in space that would be just really obvious. And so that's part of the reason for making this distinction between loud and quiet aliens.

• 17:24Mayim Bialik?

  So we don't, we don't see those. We don't see those in the visible spectrum with the technology we have.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Right, but that's the point. We can confront loud aliens with our evidence. Quiet ones is hard to confront, like, are they there or not? Well, it'd be really hard to tell. But loud ones, we'd go, look, if they were there, they would not be hard to see. So then we can use that datum as part of an analysis to to figure out the distributions of aliens in spacetime, actually. And that's part of what we did in our grabby aliens analysis is to focus on the loud aliens. We had a three parameter model of the aliens and we fit each of those parameters to a data point. And so we say, look, we've roughly got the model of where loud aliens are in spacetime. And then we could talk about the quiet ones.

• 18:08Mayim Bialik?

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• 19:34Mayim Bialik?

  And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was my MB Alex breakdown. It's the best way to support our show.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  A, you know, addendum, but the loud ones are the simplest ones to analyze. The second distinction might be between sort of independently.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Evolved or aliens versus siblings. So what happens if aliens are correlated in spacetime? That is, they have a common ancestry. Then the distribution changes.

• 20:02Mayim Bialik?

  Why?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  The simple analysis I said of loud aliens. We take the three data points. We take our current date. We take a certain data about the history of life on Earth. And we take the fact that we don't see any in the sky. Each of those three data lets us fit a particular parameter in the three parameter model. And that gives us a model of where aliens are in spacetime. And that basically tells us that loud aliens appear once per million galaxies. And that we'd meet them in a billion years if we were to head out to meet them like they meet each other. So then they're really rare, but we know roughly how common loud aliens are in the universe. But that's based on this assumption that they appear separately independently.

• 20:40Mayim Bialik?

  There's four possibilities that you talk about. That aliens arise so rarely that the nearest ones are too far to see. Right? That's a possibility. Aliens are common, but can't travel between stars or make big visible changes. Aliens are common and travel everywhere, but enforce rules against visible changes. And they arise rarely but in clumps. The first in clump to appear can, in theory, control the others. What are these four different perspectives on the possibility of alien life?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So there's this puzzle, the Fermi question. Where is everybody? That is, in principle, there could be advanced aliens out there. We don't see anywhere is everybody, right? Now, that puzzle gets worse if they can actually travel faster than the speed of light. Because then they could have come from anywhere in spacetime to here. And now the question of why isn't anybody here is the question, why didn't anybody anywhere in spacetime choose to come here? Then the simplest story is the one I described to you, the statistical model of where they arise in spacetime and they're expanding. But people look for others because, of course, that's what you should do. Try to find some other story that you could possibly make sense of. And so one story is that, you know, they are here, but we still can't see them because

• 22:00Speaker 01

  they don't want to be seen. And the stuff we would think they would mess with, for some reason, they don't want to mess with. Another story people like is this, used to be called the Berserker story, but now people call it the Dark Forest story after the Three-Body Problem, science fiction novel that gave it that name. Which is, everybody's hiding from everybody else. So that's a decentralized story. There's not a central power controlling everything. Everybody's hiding from everybody else. I don't think that story works very well. It's a, you know, it's a nice basis for dramatic fiction, but I just don't think that equilibrium could last very long. Not 14 billion years. But the story where there's a power out there that's hiding and controlling things and then doesn't want to do anything and doesn't want anybody else to do anything.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  That story works best with the sibling story. That is, like I told you, the simple story is independent ones would arrive once per million galaxies and be really far away. In which case, they wouldn't be here controlling stuff, most likely. So the chance that they would have appeared before us here and we independently appeared a bit later after them is just really unlikely because of the independent statistics. But if they were siblings, now it can make more sense that we and they have appeared closer in time and space than random things would appear. Then you want to think through the sibling story to work out scenarios of what if they're here but they're hiding?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And that's an exercise I tried to do as a follow-up to my Gravy Aliens analysis is to try to figure out, well, how could that make sense?

• 23:40Mayim Bialik?

  We had Adam Frank on and I know you've written a bit about his little book of aliens. And one of the things that Jonathan and I found so interesting and significant about our conversation with Adam Frank, and I feel it in the conversation with you as well, is how much the conversation about aliens does not revolve around

• 24:02Mayim Bialik?

  The stories of abductions that we hear. It doesn't revolve around the comic books of my childhood and Star Trek and Star Wars and things like that. We're in kind of a whole different universe, for lack of a better word, of talking about aliens. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about what your perception is of what people interpret as aliens are here. They're visiting me, they're taking me away in spaceships, you can't tell me otherwise, I don't need evidence because it happened. How is that conversation different from the one that we're having about aliens right now?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  All right, um, I have this other book I'll pitch here called The Age of M: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth. It's about a future AI scenario. And the thing I would say is it's like science fiction, except it has no plot and no characters, and it all makes sense. And that last part is the hard part, having it all make sense. So much of science fiction, including alien science fiction, just goes for the emotional juggler of finding a scenario that would just, you would feel emotionally, that would grab you, and then piling on details to make that story seem compelling and pull you through into it, without actually having it make sense if you thought through the details.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Most consumers of science fiction don't really think these things through, so they don't really need them to actually make sense. So when we're talking about, well, are there really aliens and what they're like? We have to be focusing on scenarios that actually make sense when you think them all the way through. And that's the thing that's just going to pull you into a whole different world of scenarios. So just like my book, The Age of M, has little to do with all the robot AI movies you've ever seen. It's strange, but it's not strange in the ways that most of those stories are strange. It's more alien, in fact, that's what you should expect, is you expect the stories we tell to be at a certain level familiar and relatable, because that's what grabs us emotionally. A really weird world is just hard to relate to and hard to tell stories about.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  But you should expect the real world to actually be weirder than your stories. And that's true for aliens as well. The challenge here is to find any scenario that makes sense, honestly, just starting from scratch. That's where we're working at, right? So the simplest story that makes some degree of sense is we are completely alone in the universe. There have never been anything else, there will never be anything more. At least we can make sense of that scenario, at least we can picture it in some sense. But how believable is it? How plausible is it? You go, well, the universe is pretty damn huge. How come we're so special? Okay, okay, fine. Let me add some aliens to the scenario. But then as soon as I do that, it has consequences. Like, well, the aliens aren't just gonna sit there. They're gonna do things and then grow and then, you know, become visible.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  And now that messes with my observations in ways that's hard to explain. So the challenge with talking about aliens is to find scenarios that make any sense with respect, just the basic things we understand about the universe. That's why they sound so different from fiction and even most UFO stories. Like, it's really hard. Look, I've tried to work out if UFOs were aliens, how could that make sense? But even then, I'm gonna go with the most basic facts we know about UFOs. But if you try to throw on the, you know, the abductions and stuff like that, I go, oh, for God's sake. How am I supposed to make any sense of that? It just gets weirder and weirder, right? I mean, I can start to pile on more and more assumptions to explain weirder and weirder scenarios.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  But I should be conscious of how I'm diving into a more and more unlikely corner of scenario space. So I'd rather start at the most likely corners of scenario space and like, work out what we know there and, you know, go the other places more slowly.

• 27:45Mayim Bialik?

  And with all due respect, the likely corner of the universe we are inhabiting is a centralized alien government enforcing a rule against large visible changes.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I'm gonna tell you the degree to which I agree and don't agree with that. I did this analysis of grabby aliens that again, three data points, made a statistical model where they are in spacetime. That model says the big loud ones that you should see from a long way off, those are pretty rare, once per million galaxies, we'll see them in a billion years, okay? Then I thought, look, I'm a world expert on aliens now because I have our world's best model of where aliens are in space-time. There's all these UFO people who say there are aliens around now. I should apply what I know to that and see what I can do with it. And I, the simplest way to set it up is there are these reported sightings and we want to do a Bayesian analysis. We want a prior of how likely they are and then a likelihood of each datum. And I'm an expert on the prior, not the likelihood. So you need to go talk to Navy

• 28:38Speaker 01

  pilots, whatever, to analyze the particular scenarios they've seen and what other explanations they could have for those. That's not my area of expertise. But many people I know have said, "Look, if you told me you saw aliens, I'm just not going to believe it because that scenario is so crazy unlikely. I'm just more likely to believe you are delusional than that you actually saw what you said you saw." That's based on saying the prior here is crazy low. And if the prior were crazy low, that would be appropriate, really, honestly. How unlikely is it that UFOs could be aliens? Develop a scenario in which the main features of UFOs are explained and you didn't have to pay too much in terms of the assumptions you made to

• 29:21Speaker 01

  construct that scenario. Every assumption you make, you have to penalize the scenario for it in the prior and you're trying to make the highest prior scenario you can to explain these key facts. And then I took my task and so I'd say my summary is I found there's two main sort of puzzles about UFOs as aliens. I found a way to explain those two main puzzles with a prior of, say, one in a thousand and one in 10,000. I say, "That's good enough that you should be looking at the evidence." Okay? That's not enough that if you didn't see any evidence, you'd believe it. Just like with the murder accusation, if nobody's accused somebody of murder, you don't actually believe they murdered somebody, that somebody was killed by murder. But if there's an accusation on the table, you should look at the evidence

• 30:06Speaker 01

  because the prior isn't crazy low. If this UFOs aliens evidence actually plays out, then that's the scenario I'm going to have to go with as the most likely scenario to explain.

• 30:17Mayim Bialik?

  And I appreciate your humility, you know, you can just be like, I'm just the Bayesian analysis guy, like, don't ask me, but I can't help but ask you about, you know, all of the satellite conversations that come from opening up the door to a conversation about aliens, about UFOs. I mean, I, the, the thing that's so challenging for me is when we have all of these reports, we have people testifying, right? We have people saying that they have video, right, of, of craft that are moving in ways that we cannot calculate.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Right, but they say a lot of stuff, and even if we're gonna believe some of them, we can't believe all of them, really. So we are gonna need some theoretical structure to try to pin on these observations to make sense of them. And that may force us to believe some of them about some of it. So that's, that's still why we need to do this theory analysis.

• 31:14Mayim Bialik?

  Of, of course, and I, I appreciate it, and I want it. And we had, we had Lou Elizondo on, and, you know, it's, it's mind blowing, and the fact is, so much of what he reports, he, he did not see, we cannot have access to, right? And the US government has admitted there are things that they have been looking into for decades and decades and decades that they were not transparent about, they were not clear about. I'm always a fan of not causing hysteria, and if there are things that the government can't explain, they're just gonna pretend like they can explain it, or they're gonna keep it a secret.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  I actually don't mind causing hysteria. There's actually a whole literature on what happens when you tell people extreme things, and they tend to do very well. The Titanic, people were pretty orderly, lots of other big disasters of ships sinking, people are, movies and TV love this idea that if you tell people dire things, you know, there's riots in the streets, and everybody's burning everything down and killing everybody, and that's just not how humans behave. It's not true. It's not true. People do pretty well with pretty extreme information.

• 32:18Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, so hold on. There are things that the government has kept from the American public regarding things that they can't explain. Is that true?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Certainly seems to be, but their main motivation just seems to be pride and embarrassment at apparent incompetence or lack of capacity to manage and understand these things. That seems to be the primary motive.

• 32:41Mayim Bialik?

  We can go down the Grush rabbit hole because Jonathan and I have.

• 32:46Mayim Bialik?

  What do we make of, of reports of things like materials not created on Earth that we can't explain that are creating spaceships that no one has been able to produce, you know, evidence of at this point it is, it's hearsay.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  In my mind, there's this huge chasm between are there any aliens visiting us at all lately and like which particular ones have which particular materials and which particular devices and all that sort of thing, right? So I think overwhelming first question like, is there any, are there any aliens visiting us at all lately, right? And for that thing, I need to sort of again, go to the very basics of what we know about the universe to say what scenarios could even make any sense. And then what are the most, you know, the simplest, most obvious facts about if you were aliens that we need to explain and come up with a theory to make sense of that. And I think I have a best shot at that. But that theory doesn't work very well tacking on lots of other assumptions

• 33:43Speaker 01

  you might make. That is, the more weird things you need this theory to explain, the weirder it's going to get and more likely it's going to get, right? So that's why I want to sort of start at the, the things we could have the most confidence in if we're going to have confidence in anything. And then from that go down the list to like, if that made sense, what else could make sense?

• 34:02Mayim Bialik?

  So with that framework, the notion that, and just like, I'm going to just say it out loud and you're going to tell me if it's right or wrong. The notion that the way that an alien species might make contact with us by accidentally being seen flying over bodies of water is not likely.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  So let's talk about if UFOs were aliens, what are the hard things to explain about that scenario? Okay.

• 34:32Mayim Bialik?

  They could be non-alien, they could be government doing research and they just don't want us to know. It could be like things from China that we didn't want to know about, right? It doesn't have to be aliens.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  The four major categories of explanations that you should be thinking in terms of are one, just mistakes and hallucinations first, right? People are just drunk on LSD, misremember, you know? That's one category of explanations.

• 35:00Mayim Bialik?

  But hold on, United States Air Force pilots, I'm assuming are not in that category.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  There are many cases that that doesn't seem very plausible. I'm happy to agree with, but I would just logically want to separate out the scenarios here. Okay.

• 35:11Mayim Bialik?

  Got it.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  The first, because a lot of people, this is their first, this is where people want to go first. Mistakes and hallucinations, right? The second category, which should be taken seriously, is purposeful lies and hoaxes. Like governments through history have actually had a lot of times where they made stuff up, say to convince an enemy at war for various purposes. And they can put a lot of resources into that. And if you can get people to lie, you could, you know, fool a lot of people. And you can make up pictures and videos and all sorts of things. So hoaxes and lies deserve consideration as a second category of explanation. The third category is some more familiar nearby organization,

• 35:52Speaker 01

  like some country, some secret military project, you know, some, you know, I don't know, billionaires' pet project, something close to us in a world of social causation that we could have some idea of, you know, why it would do things and what, why it would be there and recorded capacities would have. That's category number three. And category number four is, well, aliens, like something really far from our near categories of organizations and actors in terms of.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  What they could do, their capacities, and their inclinations, and their history with respect to our history. That's, those are the four categories of explanations. And I've took my job, having done this gravity aliens work, as working out a prior for that last category.

• 36:38Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I mean, as we talked about with Adam, for, for most things, there are explanations. But there does remain a category of things for which there are no explanations we yet have. And yeah, for me, as a person thinking about the things that I know, you know, on a very basic level about the universe, life. You know, they would like accidentally be seen flying and then like disappear. Like, I don't know, I don't know how to get my head around that. Like, I'm trying hard.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  So if you want to go for, again, we can take any of these categories and dive into the.

• 37:15Mayim Bialik?

  I want aliens.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Okay, let's go for it.

• 37:16Mayim Bialik?

  I want to go for aliens.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  So if we want to say, like, what are the most basic things you need to explain about aliens if you're going to explain them? If UFOs is aliens, you know, so the most basic thing is, by assumption, they are here now, but you look up and they aren't there then. Okay, why here now, but not there then? That's the first puzzle. Okay?

• 37:38Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe they are not detectable. They're not detectable in the visible spectrum. They're not detectable with our technology. I don't know. They like slide into like a magic envelope pocket in the universe. Like, if we're talking about aliens, can't that be true?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  You know, if they arose at some place in space time, and they have some internal competitive evolutionary process. That process tends to make them go everywhere they can. Using all resources available, using all space available, and then doing whatever is most competitive locally, without much regard to how it looks from a long distance, what we would expect. Because that's what happened on Earth, right? To our humans and the rest of biology. Here, in our history, biology basically has gone everywhere it can. All sources of energy and material that it can find a way to make use to, it does. And then it does that the most efficient way it can regardless really of how it looks for a long distance unless it's purposely trying to hide.

• 38:37Mayim Bialik?

  So if they were sophisticated enough to exist and have some sort of supersonic amazing intergalactic aircraft, they probably wouldn't be super concerned about not being seen by some pilots over the water.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  So there may be like lots of resources in the universe we don't understand and can't see, but there are resources we do understand and can see, and why wouldn't they use those? Just like, just in general, when you own resources here on Earth, you use them every way you can. Within the scope of your control, you use all the things available there, right? So if aliens are out there, why aren't they using the stuff we can see? Because we do know that stuff has a lot of potential for making stuff out of it and for energy and resources. So the puzzle is the stuff we can see, why aren't they using it? Of course, they might be using other stuff we don't see, but why would they not also use the stuff we can see? That's the puzzle about why are they not there then, but here now?

• 39:33Mayim Bialik?

  I feel like you just burst my alien bubble.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Now, like, if you just look at individual actors, they can have a wide range of weird and idiosyncratic preferences or habits. But if you look at a whole civilization, unless it's controlled by some central power, then you expect it to contain just a lot of different parts that go a lot of different directions and use lots of different things. So like, just like here on Earth, any one animal, like a squirrel or something, it might ignore some nuts that were nearby because it liked the other nuts or something else. But if you look at the set of all squirrels or the set of all life, it's using everything it can, basically. So the puzzle of, the first puzzle of UFOs as aliens is by assumption

• 40:18Speaker 01

  they're here now, but they're not there then. Like, so almost surely, they would be at least 100 million years more advanced than us. If we look at like, what's the coincidence? They could have arisen at exactly the same time we did. It would be kind of crazy for them to be 1,000 years. In front of us only, they would be millions of years in front of us, which meant they could have done, they could have remade the whole galaxy, for example, if they had wanted to. That would be completely within their capacity if they had been so inclined, or even just refused to stop it. If they had a diverse population of parts that had different inclinations and abilities, we just expect everything that anyone could have got to to be used somehow, by some way, some of them wanted to.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  And so for them not to do that, it requires some pretty special assumptions, but that's the assumption we're gonna have to make to explain this, right? So if we say, we need to find a scenario that explains aliens here now, but not out there, we're gonna have to go there, we're gonna have to say, let's think of what scenarios could in fact induce them to not go out and use all this stuff. And the scenario that makes sense to me is that they have chosen a civilization-wide policy of not using the universe, of not taking it over. And there are several reasons that that could be. One is just a simple religious or environmental sort of respect, and they don't want it touched. But a more basic one is they don't want to split and diverge. So

• 41:50Speaker 01

  a basic fact about the world today is that the world is a unified culture, especially among elites. And we are today making many decisions as a world culture together. And a lot of regulation and policy around the world is really quite convergent, not be, we don't have a world government, but we have a convergent world culture. That means we do a lot of things the same in banking regulation and airline regulation and nuclear power and pandemics and medical ethics and a wide range of things. Our whole world does things pretty much the same because we share this world culture. And that's an achievement. For in the past, this was a dream people had, and we finally achieved this dream. In the past, people said the world is always fighting with each other and has all these divergent parts, and all we ever do is fight and disagree. But now we have created this unified world.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  That means when we face new technologies, if we think it's too weird or strange, we can say no, and the whole world can say no. And that's a thing we've actually done several times so far. With nuclear power in particular, the world kind of said no to nuclear power. And it's regulated heavily at most everywhere. And that's a thing we're kind of proud of. So if there were some way which competition or, you know, AI or something would make us strange, we feel like we could say no to that. We have a world culture that could say no. And that'll continue to be true when we spread out into the solar system.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Because even across the solar system, we're close to each enough to each other to have rapid communication and to basically punish any deviants. Everybody in the solar system is really susceptible to rocks being thrown from a distance to smash them. And so, just like everybody in the world is susceptible for retaliation if they piss off the rest of the world, everybody in the solar system will continue to be susceptible to that. But as soon as colonists leave the solar system for other stars, that era ends. It's just not going to be possible to maintain control over a civilization spread across hundreds of light years. And to collectively make decisions and prevent people from getting weird. You know, if the star system, you know, 10 light years away wants to do nuclear power, well, it can't, and nobody can stop it.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And if they want to evolve into strange creatures who have three wings and claws, they can do that, too. That is, once we leave the solar system, we can diverge. Not only that, if we let anybody leave the solar system, after a while, their descendants could come back and contend for us for control over the center. There's no particular reason to expect we could beat them.

• 44:17Mayim Bialik?

  How far off is expanding outside of the solar system?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Within a thousand years.

• 44:24Mayim Bialik?

  Hold on a second. Hold on, just hang on a second. In half the time between Jesus living and me living, we're gonna be living outside of the solar system.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  If we continue it at our current growth rates, yes. Now, I have some doubts about that, so it might put it off for a few thousand years. But certainly within 10,000 years, I'm pretty confident that. And that's 10,000 years are just a really tiny time on the cosmological scale, so it hardly matters.

• 44:50Mayim Bialik?

  Of course, people do talk about like the extinction of us. Is that on the docket?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  There are scenarios in which we could go extinct, yes, but that's a pretty different discussion here. So clearly, if UFOs are aliens, they didn't go extinct, right? So we need to assume they didn't go extinct. So that's one of the things we have to assume about, right?

• 45:08Mayim Bialik?

  I also wanted to get into AI and sort of the AI and the robot of it.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Of course, they're AI. I mean, that's just, yes, of course, they're AI. They're all artificial. They have been for millions of years. That's just the obvious thing about them. So don't even doubt it. It would be really hard for them to retain any bio squishy, you know, parts or things like that. I mean, they may have done that out of some, you know, respect or museum sort of reverence or some zoo or something where they retain old things. But mostly, yeah, they're all AI.

• 45:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Let's expand on this point because when people think about alien life, they're thinking in terms of the images that they've seen, little green people or gray people. And they think maybe they don't bleed exactly like us, but they think of some sort of biologic form.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Again, the most basic thing we would know about aliens is it would be crazy unlikely for them to have arisen at exactly the same moment as us in a really old universe. Okay, so either they appear after us, at which we don't see them yet, or they appeared before us, in which case they appeared a long time before us, hundreds of millions of years possibly. That's how much more advanced they are than us. And so you have to ask how, what would happen in that 100 million years? And the most, one of the most obvious things that will happen is, of course, they will go artificial. That's what we've been doing. We've been going artificial as fast as we can for 100,000 years.

• 46:31Mayim Bialik?

  I don't want to. I don't want a cellphone. I don't want a television.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Now we are a collective civilization, all in one star system together, where we do have a shared culture and we do talk together about what we want to happen. And now you do have a vote, but as soon as you let colonists leave, that's over. So that's a reason why. Advanced civilizations might decide to not allow colonists as part of the strategy to not allow change or to control change, to have a collective vision of who we are and what we choose together and what we'll allow. That appeals to many people. It doesn't appeal to me so much, but it definitely appeals to a lot of people. And I think, once letting colonists go from here, once people understand the consequences of that, I could understand they might well want to hold off on that for a while. And the longer they held off, the more they might get used to that being okay.

• 47:20Jonathan Cohen?

  What appeals to you more? Because it seems hard for me to believe that they could restrict those people who are really hell-bent on heading out into the galaxy.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  There are several implications right off the bat from that. One is, they lasted a long time. Like, they lasted hundreds of millions. That's, that's pretty impressive. Good job. Another is, they enforced this rule successfully for a really long time. Right from the bat, we gotta say, they have a pretty impressive capability here to have made this choice and enforced it successfully for a really, really long time. Because any one, any one failure of enforcing this rule, and it's all over.

• 47:56Mayim Bialik?

  Right.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  And they, they knew that, of course, and so that would motivate them to really be trying to enforce this rule well. But still, pretty impressive they managed to do that. Another implication we have is, this gives a clear agenda for why they're here. Once you know that they were obsessed for a hundred million years with preventing anybody from leaving and colonizing the universe, and they would know they have these panspermia siblings,

• 48:23Speaker 01

  other life that came from the same origin as them that could eventually reach their level and go expanding now. Either they let them break their rules, or they go out there and enforce the rules on them. That's the only choice. So that's a reason why they would be here now, is to enforce this rule. Furthermore, we can draw the conclusion that a simple way to enforce this rule would have just been to exterminate us. And they chose not to do that. So, from just one assumption, we have drawn a whole bunch of conclusions here. So plausibly, some other motives they might have had would be to say, "Help us out, you know, raise us up, teach us their ways." And clearly, that wasn't so important, because they're not doing that. But they are here making something to make us follow their rule.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Now, the second other thing to explain about aliens being here now. The way they are is this thing you mentioned before, which is if they're a hundred million years more advanced, they could have either been completely invisible and seen everything they wanted to, or been completely obvious. Those were just clear options they had. And apparently, they did not choose either of these two extreme plausible options to be completely invisible or completely obvious. What are they doing instead? They're hanging out at the edge of visibility. We need an explanation for that, because that's pretty weird. Because, you know, we can understand the two extremes here being completely invisible, because wanting to hide, not take any chances, being completely obvious, taking over, ruling us, and telling us what to do. Those all make sense.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Why hang out at the edge of visibility? That's the more puzzling thing we have to explain. But still, why hang out at the edge of visibility? And for that, my simple explanation is that they are domesticating us. So the way we make other animals do what we want is to domesticate them. In fact, we domesticate each other. And how do you domesticate an animal? You slot into their status hierarchy and you be at the top. You be impressive, you be local, you be not too mean. And then you are the top dog, top horse, whatever it is. That's how we've domesticated other animals. So their strategy is to come here and domesticate us by being the most impressive thing around, being local, not being too harsh punishment.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  And then we will naturally see them as top dog, want to follow their lead. And we can figure out their agenda, so we'll just do it that way. And a lot of people who believe in UFOs, in fact, typically believe that they are good guys, better than our governments. And, you know, that we should follow their lead. So that seems to be working. But why couldn't they do that by just being really visible? But the key problem is, even on Earth, when humans have tried to domesticate other humans, if we're different enough that it doesn't work, we find even little things that we hate about foreign humans to put us off. So they knew that they're actually much more different from us than we are from each other. And so we are much more likely to actually hate something about them. Maybe they eat babies, who knows?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  But they gotta know, there's something that if they told us about them, we would hate it. And that would sort of break the spell of this domestication. So that's why they can't reveal too much. They just need to be visible, be impressive, and not say very much. And another consideration here is that for 100 million years, they enforced this rule against expansion, right? And any expedition to the sibling stars is threatening to break that. If this expedition goes rogue, it's all over. So they cannot give this expedition a lot of discretionary powers. They have to approve a strategy from home that's very simple. Only give them the tools necessary to implement that strategy and then send them off that way. Do not give them a lot of discretion and freedom and powers to figure things out for themselves.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Nope. And so the question is, what simple strategy could you have approved from home? That would robustly work for any social species out there to make them do what we want? And domestication is just the obvious thing that we've always done to make other animals do what we want. And so they would have figured that out. And so they figured out the obvious thing is to just send them over with the ability to hang out the edge of visibility and just be impressive and not to me. So that's my hypothesis. Again, I said a roughly 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 1,000 prior. It doesn't explain abduction, abductions and a whole bunch of other weird stuff.

• 52:37Mayim Bialik?

  I'm glad you tackled the simple things like we're possibly being domesticated by overlord aliens.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Right. Now, this is not a pretty picture. That's the thing to be really clear here. These are not kumbaya aliens here to save us from, you know, give us world peace and eternal life. And they're not in any rush here. Like their deadline is whenever we would actually be able of leaving the solar system. And they can pretty clearly tell we're just, we're not close. Okay? So they're not at a deadline where they need to start doing desperate things to like, you know, convince us at the last minute. We're not at the last minute.

• 53:09Jonathan Cohen?

  Can I just repeat some of this in the most general terms, just as a reflection for anyone who's listening? So if they're possibly domesticating us, they're hanging out on the edge of visibility to monitor us to make sure that we don't get the capability to

• 53:28Speaker 01

  No, they're just hanging out. They don't need to be seen at all to monitor us.

• 53:31Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  They could just be completely invisible. They're just to impress us.

• 53:34Jonathan Cohen?

  To impress us, to make us sort of, you know, curious. And the goal is just to make sure we don't evolve too far that we can leap off this planet and go cause havoc elsewhere? Like, is there another form of domestication that like, how would they be influencing us?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  So basically, when you domesticate an animal, you convince them that you are superior to them and that you are, you can be supportive enough that they should submit to you. And then they look to you for what to do and you tell them.

• 54:06Jonathan Cohen?

  So this is a slow roll. So revealing themselves in these very small moments is a slow path to getting a larger awareness that they exist and they have superior capabilities. So it's like, it's a narrative that they're building.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  To domesticate us, they just need us to see them, to see that they're impressive. And that they're not too hostile. And then to figure out what their agenda is. That's, that's all they need from the whole story. They don't need anything else to happen. The first step is that we see them and see they're impressive. And plausibly, they've already done this tens of thousands of times. So their simple strategy of impress this is to go around the world and impress individuals. And apparently, like, they might even be surprised we haven't been convinced yet. But, you know, but they've got lots of time. There are no particular rush and maybe they plausibly know that this is a hard thing to convince people of, but they're just going to slowly repeat the strategy of showing up and being impressive and then waiting till we figure it out.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Because they don't need to tell us anything. They should be able to figure out our agenda, their agenda right now, right? We can just, we've already done this here. We can figure out why they're here and what they want. And as soon as we are convinced they're there and figure out what they want, then plausibly, we will do what they want. And in fact, most, they could take centuries more if that's what it takes. There are no particular rush. You know, different groups will be in control of the evidence and drawing conclusions about this and having different fights. And at any one time, they might not convince us, but they don't need to convince us at any one time. They just need, eventually, we decide, yeah, I guess we believe it. I mean, you probably know, there have been things like UFOs that were easy, that were just dismissed

• 55:48Speaker 01

  out of hand in the past that we now accept, right? Like meteors, the pink, high level pink lightning, like ball lightning. There are some things that even today we have, you know, poor evidence on, but we believe they exist because over time we just got strong enough evidence that we changed our mind. So it's not crazy. We will eventually change our mind about UFOs.

• 56:09Jonathan Cohen?

  What do you think the upside for humanity would be if we were not domesticated?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  If we chose to defy them.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Almost surely they have a button. That will deal with that problem. That's the simple thing to do with this expedition. You can't give much discretion to, right? The one decision it has is, are they obeying us? No, push the button. If yes, success. That's it. That's the only decision they have to make. And it doesn't need a lot of, you know, infrastructure, probably. So if we defy them, this is the obvious implication is they win. You lose the defiance. So now you might ask, well, could we sneakily defy them somehow and trick them?

• 56:54Jonathan Cohen?

  Probably not.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  So that they didn't know we were defying them.

• 56:57Jonathan Cohen?

  It doesn't seem like it if they had that level of intelligence. Also, it's plausible that they could just destroy the technology that we're using to make those advancements instead of destroying all of us depending on their attitude towards us.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Right. Now. Here's another side of the story, though, which is on Earth. We consistently see old organizations rotting. Just like we see old organisms rotting. There's just a consistent way up until now in human history and all of biological history.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Things rot, and the main way we've ever solved rot is to replace old things with new things. So our bodies, you're in my body, our bodies rot over time and decay. And we just replace old bodies with young bodies. Civilizations rise and fall. Companies rise and fall and get replaced by new companies. Software actually rots consistently and is thrown away and replaced with new software. So. But it's also a thing about a civilization that's managed to keep some structure going for hundreds of millions of years.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  That's prevented it from, you know, expanding. That structure would plausibly suffer rot over a long period. And so there's this open question. They've managed to maintain some capabilities like to get here and to enforce their rule. But what capabilities have they lost? That's not crazy to think they could have lost a lot of capabilities through this obsession with maintaining this structure for that long a period. We don't know. So maybe they found ways to avoid rot that we don't understand, and maybe they they just have enormous capabilities. Maybe their capabilities are much weaker than we think, but that's another reason for them not to show much.

• 58:43Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, seemingly, if our objective is not to leave the planet, then we kind of have free rein and and it's not that negative for the future of humanity.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  If you're willing to limit your ambitions in a way compatible with their their hopes and expectations for you, yeah.

• 59:00Jonathan Cohen?

  The other consideration is that they may have some information about how the rest of the universe functions that we do not.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  They haven't at all seemed inclined to share it with us. And again, according to this theory, there's just no point in time where it really makes sense for them to do that either, right?

• 59:16Jonathan Cohen?

  A hundred percent, and I'm kind of addressing the fatalistic. You know, they're here watching us sort of suppressing our advancement. It may be that they know that going out there doesn't yield great benefit and they sort of have taken those follyed steps in the in the past, given their advanced and they're just trying to say, hey, if you go down this path, it's going to lead to bad things beyond what you can understand.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  That's exactly the domestication effect. Once you believe they are superior and they are wiser, then you want to follow what they do under the presumption that they know better. Yes, that's how that works.

• 59:54Jonathan Cohen?

  So you would say that we need to go and make those explorative journeys to figure this out for ourselves?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Again, you know, if they fear that we are about to defy them, they may have, they just have another plan.

• 1:00:06Jonathan Cohen?

  If you remove their control just for a moment to say that there's no cap on our ability to explore and go out into the into the universe. That would be the the better trajectory for humanity.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Oh, well, surely we can see into the universe without making ourselves much more visible than we are now. So those are separate choices. We could just grow because we want to grow and we want to be bigger and do more things. Or we could want to see farther, but we can make telescopes and other sorts of things that see a really long way without being much more visible at all. So, for example, there's this way to use the sun as a gravitational lens. And you put a telescope like 600 AU, which is the distance where it's the sun out from the sun. And then you can see on the opposite side of the sun with really, really high resolution. How visible we make ourselves is somewhat separate from how far we see.

• 1:00:58Mayim Bialik?

  The book is The Elephant in the Brain. Robin Hanson, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for talking about the wide variety of things that we consider you an expert in. And really, just such a pleasure to talk to you.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:01:14Mayim Bialik?

  I have a lot of respect for this man. I have a lot of respect for the way he uses statistics and theories and true scientific rigor to explore things on a level that I did not expect we were going to explore. But I did not realize what we were going to talk about today. And yeah, we're talking about if we exist. And as Adam Frank said, we cannot be the only things to exist. The fact is, there's something out there that is much more sophisticated than we can even comprehend. And one of your only options is that they're watching us and waiting.

• 1:01:57Jonathan Cohen?

  I love how my little summary led him to say, that's exactly what they want you to think.

• 1:02:08Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, we're being domesticated that whatever's out there is far more intelligent than we are. Because again, the probability that they, whoever they are, were created at exactly the same second that we were is pretty unlikely. This is like not how it works. Meaning they're made of something different, which means they would need an entire other environment in which to thrive. Like their Petri dish was real different and likely a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago, so that they are at a level of sophistication where they can, in theory, visit if they wanted to. And if they haven't, why haven't they? Because they're likely observing.

• 1:02:49Mayim Bialik?

  And yes, the best way to observe something is to subtly or secretly control or make you think that you're having this conversation right now, talking about them existing.

• 1:03:04Jonathan Cohen?

  I'm either short sighted in the arc of human development, or I'm being domesticated in my thinking, but I don't really want to leave the planet.

• 1:03:15Mayim Bialik?

  Well, a lot of people do, enough people do. I mean, Katy Perry just got to go away for 10 seconds. That's just the start of it, and she had such a cute suit on.

• 1:03:23Jonathan Cohen?

  I just think that there's a lot we could do here still, and this planet's pretty good. Maybe it's because I haven't been anywhere else and I haven't seen anything else, but I kind of like it here.

• 1:03:35Mayim Bialik?

  We didn't get to talk about it here, but we'll be talking about elsewhere, The Elephant in the Brain, which is Robin Hanson's most recent book, which also we highly recommend. Much more the social science kind of component, but so grateful that Robin engaged with us today. And from our breakdown to the one we hope we never have, we will see you next time.