Are We Alone In The Universe? | Adam Frank

Professor Adam Frank is an Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, Author and a Founder of the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Get ready to blast your brain off into interstellar space as this badboy is my absolute favourite episode so far. Discover the likelihood of other alien civilisations in the universe, how we could colonise the galaxy in 700,000 years, where the future descendants of the human race are heading, the implications of global warming and an awful lot more. If you love this episode, share it with a friend! It would make me very happy. Further Reading: Adam's Website: http://www.adamfrankscience.com/ Adam's new book: Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth: http://amzn.eu/d/5J3oyly NPR Cosmos & Culture Blog: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/ - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends. Are you ready to blast off into outer space? Because this week is nothing short of mind blowing. Professor Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, an author and a founder of the NPR blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture. Now, you may have heard him recently on Joe Rogan's podcast, and that's where I fell in love with the material that he works on. In short, today, we're going to find out, are we alone in the universe? Or at least, what's the likelihood that we're alone in the universe? This episode honestly ranks as my favorite one that I've recorded so far.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  It felt like every two minutes, there was some insane new statistic that I'd never heard of, or insight that I'd never thought of before. From how humans could colonize the galaxy in as little as 700,000 years, to where the future descendants of the human race are heading, and the implications of global warming with an awful lot more thrown in. This episode really is jam packed. Hopefully, you'll love this episode as much as me. And if you do, I'm going to ask a favor for the first time since I started the podcast. If you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. One friend, two friends, fire it in a group chat, screenshot the Apple Podcasts image,

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  or copy the link to listen from Spotify. However you do it, I don't mind. But sharing this podcast and increasing the number of exposures that we get is a real key for me over the coming months. And if you could help me in that way, it would be really appreciated. Coming up soon, we have the long awaited Life Hacks 105. Me, Jonny and Youssef, back in the hot seat again to give you our favorite tips for a productive and efficient life, along with some slightly more useless tips as well. But we'll leave that for you to make your own mind up about. In the meantime, it's Adam Frank's turn to take the microphone. Here we go.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  Professor Adam Frank, how are you?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's great to be here. Thanks for having given me the opportunity.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  No worries at all. Where in the world are you at the moment?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  I'm currently in my office at the University of Rochester in beautiful upstate New York.

• 2:38Chris Williamson?

  That sounds lovely. And tomorrow's your birthday, right?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Tomorrow's my birthday. Going to party like it's my birthday.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Which at 56 means I'll probably just like chill out and play video games.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you know, 56, 56 or 16, it could be exactly the same thing.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it's no dip.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Right, let's get into it. So what, what, what is the likelihood that we're the only instance of life in the universe?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so that is a, that's a $50 million question. And, you know, depending on how you want to argue it, you can get, you know, different kinds of opinions. But what we did, my collaborator and I did a couple of years ago, is we used the actual empirical data from the Kepler

• 3:23Speaker 01

  results, the, you know, the basically our studies of exoplanets. We now recognize that there are exoplanets everywhere. Pretty much every star you see in the sky has a world, at least one world going around it. And so what we did is we use that data to at least set a limit on the kind of answer you want to give. And so here's, you know, with science, often the most important thing is to, what question can you answer with the data you have?

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  So all of that exoplanet data, this question we could ask was, how, how bad does the probability per planet have to be for us to be alone, like deeply and truly alone? And it turns out that, given what we now know, the only way that we are the first, the only time it's ever happened in civilization has happened in cosmic history is if the probability per planet of making a civilization is one in 10 billion trillion.

• 4:19Chris Williamson?

  That's a pretty big number.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's a, well, it's a, the, the, the big number is the number of planets, the number of, but it's a pretty small number for, in terms of, yeah, the odds of us being alone.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Right. As you said, that's, you're, you're right to point out that really what's important here is how many um habitable zone planets there are, how many planets there are where life has had the chance to run the experiment, right, of, of forming life and then the life going on to become intelligent and a civilization forming. And that, that, yeah, that number is 10 billion trillion. There are 10 billion trillion planets in the cosmos that are in the right place for life to form. So the only way that it hasn't happened before is if on every one of those 10 billion trillion planets, somehow the experiment failed. And, you know, I think those numbers now are so, they're so large that it really falls to the pessimists to tell us, to explain to us, how could nature run the experiment

• 5:15Speaker 01

  so many times and what's happened here never happened uh anywhere else?

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  I understand. Am I right in thinking that a, a, an observation effect occurs with this, though? That the odds could be actually an awful lot uh less likely than one in 10 billion trillion? And we would still be the only uh potential viewer to see it? It could actually be in the other direction, right? As well as it could be more likely, it could actually be less likely because as far as we can see, there's only one instance.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Right, but we haven't really, so, so let me, yeah, so let me just address that question. So what we really were able to do, the thing that we could put a, a, a data-driven limit on was how bad would the probability have to be?

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  In order for us to be alone. So, so like the actual probability per habitable zone planet is something you'd have to go out and do observations and, and you have to need real data in terms of observations to figure it out, right? So nature has that, like, nature over the course of cosmic history um has actually established for each planet how, you know, it's all about the processes of evolution and then sociology, if you want to get into civilization. So we don't know what those are. We don't know what nature actually did. What we could do is we could set a limit and we called it the pessimism line. As long as nature is not this pessimistic, as long as nature hasn't set up her rules of chemistry and physics and evolution,

• 6:48Speaker 01

  such that the odds are less than one in 10 billion trillion.

• 6:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  And then it's happened before. And one in 10 billion trillion is so small that it seems like you don't, nature doesn't have to do much to get it above that. And if it's above that, even if it's a little bit above that, it means this has happened before. This meaning a technological civilization and that is mind blowing to me.

• 7:10Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so it's running, nature's running the experiment an awful lot of times.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  So if, if that's the case, then rolling it forward, why is it likely, or why does it seem likely that we haven't seen any galaxy conquering civilizations?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Right, that's a great, uh, that's a great question. So that's like, that's the Fermi paradox, right?

• 7:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And so the Fermi paradox actually breaks down into two parts. So when Fermi, you know, Fermi's famous question that he blurted over lunch in 1950 was, because it's, you know, they've been talking about aliens and he said, well, where are they all? Right? And so that question eventually by people, scientists like Hart and Tipler eventually became what we now think of as that Fermi paradox. But really, there's two ways to think about it. One is why aren't they here now? Right? Why haven't we, as you said, why haven't they landed on the White House lawn? But the other part is why haven't we seen them in our observations? Right? And so the, the second part, people often talk about the silence of the stars, about, you know, why are there stars? Why haven't, you know, we seen

• 8:17Speaker 01

  alien intelligence and since, you know, signals and since that we haven't seen it yet, that we must be alone in the universe. But what they really don't realize is that we've hardly looked, right? Uh, I think most people have this idea that scientists have been scanning the skies for alien signals for, you know, 50 years and really, you know, there's no money for it. Nobody's doing that. So the number, you know, the, the amount of actual searching we've done is miniscule, as Jill Tarter says. Um, if the, you know, if the ocean is the amount of space, parameter space too, you know, actual stars that we have to look at, radio frequencies. If that's the ocean, all we've looked at is a symbol of full of.

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that, does that seem like an appropriate analogy as well?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, you can't look thimble and say, oh, I didn't find any life in the thimble and go, well, there you go. The whole ocean's dead. So, you know, so people need to understand that really we have just, we've barely begun to actually search for evidence in among the stars, telescopic evidence of, of alien, of other civilizations. But when it comes to the earth, you know, them visiting the earth, that is actually, because we're working on a paper on that one, that is a bit more of a problem, but there's kind of lots of ways around that. Like, maybe, maybe interstellar travel is really, really, really hard.

• 9:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Right? And, and it's so hard that nobody gets to do it very much. And actually, that's kind of on my opinion. So, so, you know, the first part of the Fermi paradox, I worry less about. And the second part of the, a part of the Fermi paradox is not even a paradox, because we haven't even looked yet. So I would say, the question is completely open about whether or not there are other civilizations out there.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  So in terms of the Fermi paradox still being used as a basis for inquiry, it seems like the, the current field has moved forward a little bit, and that the questions have now evolved a little bit more. So with that in mind, your recent research, how accurate or how important is it to still consider the Drake equation for, as a basis for inquiry? And could you briefly explain what the Drake equation is for the?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. The Drake equation has a really amazing history. So Frank Drake was a radio astronomer who, in the 1959, he was the first guy to ever point a radio telescope at a star and actually look for a signal from, you know, for, you know, an intelligent signal, some kind of signal that could be interpreted as being from civilizations. And that was really the beginnings. So both Fermi and Drake, in the, this is all happening in the 50s.

• 10:49Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, the 50s, the 50s are shit up for getting some, searching for some aliens, right?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Well, it was the beginning, really, of us thinking scientifically about exosocializations, right? People have been asking this question as long as there's been people, you know, do the stars, are we the only ones, the only intelligent species in the universe? And people have been asking that question. You can see it back to the Greeks. But- Ferby and Drake were the beginning of people starting to ask this question scientifically, trying to ask a question that you could actually formulate in a way that you could build a research program from. So Drake really, he's the first one to ever actually look, you know, because now we actually had telescopes that could do it. And then, um, two years after, or a year after he does this, you know, the search, people found out about it, you know, it went, you know, it was big news. And then the United States government asked him to hold a meeting on interstellar communications.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And he invited, you know, there's maybe 10 people at the meeting, Carl Sagan, um, you know, so other people. And, uh, he, in order to set up the meeting, he wanted a way to sort of frame the agenda. And so he came up with this equation, which was basically, uh, was an equation for the number of civilizations that, that we could contact in the galaxy, like how many are out there. And his equation had seven individual terms in it. And each term in the equation was really a sub-question. So he asked, um, how many, uh, how many stars are there in the galaxy? How many galaxies are there? Or sorry, how many planets? What fraction of those stars have planets? Uh, the number of, of planets in the habitable zone, the right place for life to form around

• 12:23Speaker 01

  those planets, et cetera, et cetera. And so, uh, but that, that way of formulating it, of breaking the problem of how many civilizations are there into a bunch of sub-problems, that's what's enduring. And his, that formulation has become so powerful for us in terms of thinking about what you need to get a civilization. And that's what we used in our own research. We modified the Drake equation to get that one in 10 billion trillion number.

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay. So it actually provided a framework for you to move forward from. That's really interesting.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  And it does, still does. I think it's, you know, for, for what was really just supposed to be an agenda, you know, for a meeting, it turned out to be enormously potent.

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. Um, so. There's still, if the chance of life only occurring once appears to be pretty low, it seems like it should have happened from both the recent research that you've done and the Drake equation, we should have seen something by now, right? I've read an awful lot about von Neumann probes. And there's some crazy fast colonization statistics that are cited for being able to take over a galaxy. For the listeners who don't know, von Neumann probes are self replicating robots that go to a particular system, they suck up some of the resources, they replicate themselves and they go again. Is that right?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. It's a way of settling the solar system, touching every star, every planetary system in the galaxy. And yeah, in about 700,000 years, you can cross the entire, even if you're going at like, you know, a tenth of the speed of light, in about 700,000 years, you can pretty much touch every system in the galaxy.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so, you know, why have we not seen that?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really interesting, and we're working on a paper on this right now.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  You're working on a lot of papers at the moment. You're working this off to the bone.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Here's the interesting question, right? The question, the question really should be, when did they visit, right? Because it's, so there's, there's lots of ways out of this, right? But, but let me just say, let's just assume that there were colonizers, you know, that there are settlers, or there was a species that wanted to settle, you know, settle the different star systems. If they arrived three billion years ago, right? And they lasted, every civilization's a finite lifetime, right? Nobody lasts forever. So if they were here three billion years ago and they lasted for a million years, which would be a long time, all evidence that they ever existed is gone, at least on Earth.

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Over so deeply. So, you know, you have to take both space and time into account. And so that's one of the things we're looking at, like, how far back could they have visited and still, you know, really left some kind of evidence? So, so, so that's one way around it. They just visited so long, it happened, but it didn't happen, you know, close enough for us to see evidence. Another thing is that. Like I said, that, you know, von Neumann machines assumes a certain level of being able to produce artificial intelligence. We don't know that's true. You know, that's a nice science fiction idea, but we don't know that's true. So, and then, you know, if you need, if you don't have von Neumann machines and artificial intelligence, then you need actual living beings to do that.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And, you know, space travel, building a world ship, are you familiar with the idea of world ships or century ships?

• 15:48Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  So it's the idea that if you have to, like, if we want to travel from one star to the other, and we don't have some kind of superdrive that can take us out, you know, first of all, the speed of light is a, is a limit. As far as we know, it's an absolute physical limit. We don't even know if a warp drive is even a physically meaningful thing.

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  So, you know, let's just say the laws of physics that we understand hold, then you have to go at the speed of light or less than that. And to say, let's say you could manage, it would be a miracle to be able to get up to 10% of the speed of light, it would still take you hundreds of years to get to even the closest stars. So therefore, you'd have to build a ship that, they call it a century ship or a generation ship, where, you know, you put people in the ship, and they'd have to live their entire lives in the ship on the way, you know, crossing over to the next star.

• 16:33Chris Williamson?

  Live and die and live and die, and then there would be generations that would never get off it. And then finally, you may be born in the generation that does actually get to see dry land, so to speak, again.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right? So that could be like, yeah, it could be your great, great grandchildren who actually get there. And that has all kinds of issues, moral issues. Like, what does it mean to condemn, you know, your future generations to live in a, in a tin can their entire lives?

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  So, a lot of, a lot of great science fiction written on, on that subject.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  For sure.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  But I, I just recently read a paper where, um, the, the scientist estimated the size of the economy that you would need to be able to build one of those things. And it would basically, you would need on the order of like a thousand Earth economies, you know, in order to have the resources to build a machine of that scale.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  And so, right, right. And I was really surprised by that. And it just sort of speaks to the fact that... You know, we always have these science fiction ideas like, oh, technology is going to progress endlessly. But, you know, we don't really know if that's true. There may really be real limits that we can't get around. And so, you know, it's quite possible that it's just so expensive and hard to travel between the stars that you rarely do it.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, so what can you see as being the most likely hurdles for civilizations to get over before they can colonize the galaxy? Is it a pandemic? Is it resource exhaustion? Is it malignant AI? Is it a combination of the few? I think there's a great, is it the Great Barrier or the?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Climate change. And climate change is the first major hurdle. Because the difference between climate change and, say, nuclear war or pandemics, well, but maybe not, but, you know, AI, A, we don't even know if AI is possible. Nuclear war, you know, there could be some species that are like, I'm not building those things. That's crazy, you know. But climate change, you know, this is the thesis of the book. Everybody hits climate change. If you build a world girdling civilization, as I like to say, there's no way, there's almost no way around climate change. Because at least triggering it, because if you're using that much energy to build a large scale civilization, the planet, which is a giant

• 18:42Speaker 01

  thermodynamic system, has got to notice. So, you know, triggering climate change, I think, is universal. And the question is whether or not you're smart enough to make it through.

• 18:52Chris Williamson?

  Or fast enough to negate the effects, I guess, before it makes it uninhabitable for you. Because by its very nature, evolution has allowed us to evolve on a planet which is, we are fine tuned for it, rather than it being fine tuned for us. And as we begin to make amends to that climate, we can actually make it inhospitable for ourselves to exist on, right?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  That's exactly it. You know, people often talk about climate change as being like, oh, we've got to save the earth, you know, as if the earth was like a furry little bunny. And, you know, the earth is going to be just fine. You know, there's literally nothing we could do to destroy the biosphere. We'll change the biosphere, we'll set it on a new path. But the biosphere will be just fine. It's us, right? We're the one.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  We're gonna be fucked.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. As you said, you put it exactly, you put it beautifully. It's, you know, the earth, we're fine tuned to the planet, not the other way around. And so if we push the climate hard enough and it drifts off into a new state, as it has many times before, you know, this complex technological society is the thing that probably won't make it.

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, wow. Um, you've touched on a term there that I did want to, I did actually want to get your thoughts on. It's a little bit of a segue. Do you, do you have any ideas yourself as an explanation for why the universe seems fine tuned for life?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Wow, that is, uh, that is such a powerful and profound question. And, um, I don't.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Because, no, no, that problem speaks to something. Now we're, we're doing, you know, we're heading off into a slightly different territory, but it's fun territory. So we should talk about it. You know, the laws of physics, right? We, there's, there's a lot of questions about why the laws of physics look the way they do.

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  The universal constants and such like that, right?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, so there's, there's, you know, anybody who's taken high school physics remembers Newton's laws of gravity. And there's that G sitting in there. There's this number that just sits there. And you're like, well, where'd that come from? It's like, well, the universe just gave it to us. You know, the value of it, right? 6.67 times 10 to the minus 11 Newton kilogram meter squared. Um, I think that might be it. I might score points for getting that right, you know? Um, so, uh, you know, why did nature choose that value of the constant and not a little bit different? And then there's all these other constants that go along with the laws that we understand. And it seems like if any of those laws were just slightly different, then life as we know it couldn't have formed.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Um, and this has been, you know, a major question for physics. Why did the universe choose that? Now, some philosophers look at that problem and are like, look, it's not a big deal. It's just the ones you ended up with, right? There's not, you know, I mean, if I go outside and it's raining today, you know, that's, that's the day you found that it was raining. It's not, you know, it's, it's not some strange, uh, uh, uh, something that needs to be explained. You know, there's, there's past history, et cetera. But of course, with the universe, if there's only one universe, then, you know, at some point you run into, you know, you run out of past history.

• 21:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  So for some philosophers, this is not a problem. It's just a given. For physicists, we feel like there could have been, you know, that the, we, we tend, and this is the problem. We tend to think of the universe as being like a, an experiment on a table. Like I could have run the experiment differently.

• 22:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  So maybe I could have run, but maybe that's the problem, right? Maybe, I think this is really a problem both in physics and philosophy. Because here's the question, how do you do the science of something that has only happened once?

• 22:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  You know, how do you talk about the probability? How do you talk about the statistics of something that you don't have statistics for? You know, um, and so, you know, in, in physics now, I am not, I'm not a big fan of like things like the multiverse and string theory. I think there's real problems with that.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  And so the idea that like, oh, you know, people, some people are really very happy about the idea. There's lots of universes, they are popping off all the time. And, and then, you know, the, the reason why the universe appears fine tuned for life is we just happen to live in a mediocre universe. And, and that's the, that's the value that most of the universes have gotten.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  And I, yeah, I think that whole way of thinking, first of all, there's no data for it, you know? So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a fiction. And second of all, it comes from mistaking this one time thing, which is the universe. Uh, for, uh, you know, something that's reproducible, that, that you could, that, that's like an experiment on a table.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  I understand completely, yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the big, that, you know, um, um, you just had Sabine Hoffensberger on your.

• 23:25Chris Williamson?

  I very, I very recently did, yeah. She, uh, she had a lot, a lot to say about the dogma and the ideology, which appears to be really, really prevalent in physics. I was very interested and shocked to find out that not only are physicists humans, but they're also, they're also subject to, uh, the emotions and the cognitive biases that the rest of us are.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Right, right. Well, the problem is, and so I, I really, I, I agree with a lot of things she has to say. And the problem, it's not all physics, it's just this, what we might call the frontiers, like the absolute frontiers of space and time and cosmology, right? And the problem for them is particularly when it comes to particle physics, is that there's, there's no data. That they've run, that we're kind of, we've run to the edge of where we can get data. And, you know, science has got to have data. And if you run out of data, then you become subject to all of the cognitive biases, et cetera. So, um, you know, things like the multiverse and such to me are, are, uh, enigmatic of the fact that those branches of physics, as exciting as they are, have.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Kind of reached their limit of what of having data. And so we got to go back really now and think much more deeply and philosophically. We have to realize, I think, addressing these philosophical, I'm a big fan of philosophy. And I think it's very important in science when you run into these boundaries. Um, so yeah, so fine tuning presents a real challenge. Um, but I think, you know, there's going to be scientific answers to it, but it may take us in really exotic and interesting places.

• 25:00Chris Williamson?

  It's as big of a question as you, as we can get to, right? So let's get, let's get back onto the core tenets. So, um, the Kardashev scale.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:09Chris Williamson?

  I absolutely love this concept. I think it's, it's so cool. I just think it's such an awesome way to categorize civilizations. And it gives you a real sense of awe and is, uh, it, it's quite grounding as well. You know, when we think, we look back at 1,000 years ago, even a hundred years ago. Or you think, how far have we come? And you realize just how much further there is to go.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  But it's also, and yeah, and also built into it is an assumption that I think we have also stopped. We've, we've realized how wrong that assumption is. So let's just go through what the Kardashev scale is, right? Just so everybody's on the same page. Okay, so, um, just as Frank Drake was writing down the Drake equation, there were, uh, Kardashev was a astronomer in Russia, who was also interested in extraterrestrial civilizations. And he came up with this idea because he was actually thinking about what you should look for. And he came up with this idea that civilizations would naturally progress through three different categorizable stages or types. And it was all based on energy.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  And type one civilization would be a civilization that could harness all of the energy available to its home planet. And that's basically solar energy or stellar energy. You know, they go, they could harvest all the energy falling on the planet from the star.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Then a type two would be a civilization that could harvest all the energy that came from the star itself. By saying, you know, wrapping a giant sphere around the star with solar panels on the inside and harvesting, you know, the entire energy output of the star.

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  A type three was where a civilization could harvest all the energy coming from their home galaxy with its 400 billion stars.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  So, um, So that is like, you know, that that idea has also been, you know, both for science fiction and for people thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence. That has become, you know, a kind of a keystone idea that a lot of people have worked with and developed.

• 27:10Chris Williamson?

  And where about where about a naught point seven, right? I think.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah. So I think Carl Sagan, who, you know, was the master of all of this, did a calculation and said in log, in log scale, we're at a point seven. But here's the thing, here's, you know, that for me, what's really important, right? So, um, you know, my whole thesis in my book is that we've been looking at climate change all wrong. We think of climate change as some kind of weird political issue, or, you know, it's, the question is, did we or didn't we change, you know, the climate? But in fact, actually, when you look at it from, you know, a kind of the 10,000 light year view, we're just, uh, you know, and any, any exo civilization, any civilization on a planet will just be something that the biosphere of that planet evolves.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  It's just going to, just like there were dinosaurs and grasslands, a technological civilization is going to be, uh, one of the things that's possible for a biosphere to evolve.

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  And when it does, that civilization is no less subject to the laws of the biosphere, to the laws of planets and how planets evolve than dinosaurs or grasslands, right?

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Do you, do you think that we are potentially, um, wrapped up in our own genius to a degree?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly the problem. We think, this goes back to this idea of like, oh my God, we're going to destroy the planet. We, we just have, we just have a very large view of our, a larger view of ourselves than we deserve, right? We're, you know, we are what the planet, what the biosphere and the planet is doing now, you know? And there's no guarantee we're what's going to, the planet's going to be doing a thousand years from now. And we're not going to destroy the planet. We don't have that kind of power.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. The, the, the concept to say that we are going to destroy the planet, it's, it's all based on perspective of what exist and destroy are, right? Because to destroy the planet by melting the polar ice caps is probably going to be pretty good for some fish, but it's going to be pretty shit for us. So what they mean is that we're going to change the nature.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Right, we're gonna change, right, we'll alter, we will, we will move the biosphere into a new state, which probably won't include us anymore, right? But we're not gonna destroy the biosphere. In fact, the biosphere has gone through many changes, including, the only reason we're here is because of a mass extinction 65 million years ago, right? So, mass extinctions, from the biosphere's perspective, can be an opportunity to fill niches, right? So, now, clearly, we don't wanna trigger a mass extinction now, because we depend on all of that biodiversity for our own complex civilization. But the idea that, like, somehow, what we're gonna do is going to destroy the biosphere is just insane. And that goes to the mistake in Carteschev's scale.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Because the Carteschev scale was all about energy use, right? And it was a very kinda 1960s, you know, shiny, future, kind of, science fiction idea, right? So, in the 1960s, you know, we had all the, you know, you look at the movies of then, everybody's flying around in gleaming, perfect spaceships, and, you know. And so, there was the idea that if you just could, you know, marshal enough energy, if you had enough energy, you could bring a planet to heel, you know?

• 30:26Chris Williamson?

  Was it almost as if the technology was just gonna be a byproduct of time going by? And it was simply resource acquisition that was the only, that was gonna be the only hurdle to get over?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Right, right. And the lesson of climate change, and what we call the Anthropocene. So, I talk a lot in the book about the idea of the Anthropocene, which is this new geologic era that we've triggered, the human-dominated era. So, the last 10,000 years, we've been in what we call the Holocene, the last, the interglacial period. And now, we've pushed the Earth out of the Holocene, and we're doing it, we're pushing it into a new era, which people call the Anthropocene.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  What, Anthropocene is in anthropology, right?

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Nice etymology of the word.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Right, right. So it's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's gonna be an era where human effects dominate. Even if we're gone, we will have already pushed the planet into that era by our, our, our activity. Um, up to now. So, so what, uh, the lesson of the anthropocene, which goes against what Cartescheff was saying, was that it's not just energy. It's not just how much energy you have available to you. You know, you've already got a planet and a biosphere which is incredibly powerful, and it's got its own rules, you know, and those rules are more, are just as much about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics as they are about just harvesting energy.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, Cartescheff, Cartescheff doesn't take into account that by using all of that energy, you feed back on the planet in ways that could end your civilization. So, you know, I, I, I, I think it's, I mean, I love Cartescheff's scale, but I think it's really important to notice that we've gone now beyond Cartescheff's scale to recognize that it's more complicated. The, the, the transition for civilizations, at least planetary civilizations, is more complex than just harvesting energy.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it definitely seems to be so. So regardless of how unlikely it seems that we're alone, at the moment, we are, as far as we can tell.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  And if we are on our own, what implications does this have for our behavior? Both personally and globally a, a, and environmentally? The, it sounds to me, it seems to me an awful lot like the stakes have been raised for everybody.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I said, okay, I'll think about this in two ways. So on one level, right, we're not, there's no other planet for us to go to. You know, Mars, I'm, I'm a big fan of, you know, uh, settling the solar system, and I kind of think of it as the prize we get for making it through climate change. But, you know, Mars, there, there's, we're not gonna be going to Mars. We're not gonna get enough people to Mars anytime soon to, you know, to make, you know, uh, living on Earth easier. So that's out of the picture. But I do think- From my perspective, we now know so much about planets because of the, we've visited every kind of planet in the solar system. And we've also now know that there's all these other planets. And we also know an amazing amount about Earth's 4.5 billion year history.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  That even if we don't, even if we haven't found exo civilizations, as I like to say, we now have, you know, we have good arguments for why they should have existed, you know, that they're probably, what I would say is they probably have existed in the past, doesn't mean there's anybody around now. But, but we know enough now to ask ourselves, what is the generic consequence of a civilization emerging from a biosphere?

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  Are you saying, are you, would you say that it's inevitable that any civilization, unless they get something incredibly right or incredibly fortunate, that this is, this is part, this is par for the course? This is, you're along for the ride?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm saying. I, I think, and I think that's, that's why it's really important to start thinking seriously about exo civilizations. Cause what we realize is we're just one of many, right? And, and that the, the stage, you know, of, of, we now know there's so many planets that, you know, unless nature is insanely biased against it, this has happened before. It's probably happened a lot and everybody's triggered climate change.

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  So the question becomes is, you know, what on average, how long on average does anybody last? And what do you have to do on average in order to make it through, right? So in that way, what's happening with us, we're just cosmic teenagers, right?

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I get that. Do you think, do you think that by framing the question in this way, that it takes global warming a little bit out of the political sphere and into the civilization shit we need to fix this fear?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I, I think it changes everything. And that's why, you know, as the book has come out, you know, it's been great that the book's gotten a lot of attention. I've had the opportunity to talk with a lot of people about this. You know, and some people are always like, well, what does this change? And for me, it changes everything because, you know, this- As I like to say, you can't solve a problem until you understand it. And you can't understand it until you can tell its story. And when it comes to climate change, we've been telling the wrong story. And because we've been telling the wrong story, that's one of the reasons why after thirty years of knowing about it, we haven't done shit, right? You know, the Paris Accord was a great beginning, but it wasn't even close to dealing with this. You know, and so with the climate change, it seems either you end up with denial,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  people saying it's not happening, or it just seems so overwhelming that people's, their heads just turn off, right?

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I totally understand that. You've just got this distribution at both ends of the curve. People, people think there's nothing that we can do, or people think we don't need to do anything.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Right, right. And then the people who are even, you know, who want to do something about it, you just get locked into this thing like, oh, my God, human beings, we just suck. We're disease on the planet, you know, and it becomes this really negative story. And with this, when you look at it from the astrobiological perspective, as I like to say, you know, from the ten thousand light year view, you see like, look, climate change is not a problem that you have to make go away. It is a, it's a transition, an expected and predictable transition that is dangerous and that you have to navigate, right? Nobody says adolescence has to go away, right? When your kid turns twelve, you're not like, oh, my God, stop with the adolescence.

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  You know, gonna have to go through adolescence. Adolescence is a very dangerous phase. Not everybody makes it through. And, you know, what you hope for is the wisdom to be able to make that transition. And when you come out on the other side, you have enormous opportunities and potential if you make it through the other side.

• 36:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So where do we go from here? What are the directions that we can go in from two thousand and eighteen?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first thing is this beginning, you know, the recognition that as we talk about climate change is the recognition that climate change is really our Copernican revolution. Right? So, you know, you look at the Copernican Revolution and before the Copernican Revolution, everybody, you know, when they went outside and they saw the sun, you know, over the eastern horizon, they said, oh, you know, the earth is the center of the universe and the sun is orbiting the earth. And then after the Copernican Revolution, everyone was like, no, the earth is just another planet orbiting the sun. Like, the whole universe changed, everything, and it had huge consequences for politics and philosophy and religion. And, you know, it was a fundamental transition in how human beings saw themselves in the world.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  And that's what climate change is. It's the moment when we are forced, like many other civilizations across cosmic space and time, we are forced to grow up. We are forced to enter into our maturity. And so that's the first thing to understand. And that to understand that actually, it's, you know, it's very dangerous, but it also signals something, I mean, this sounds weird, but there's a way in which we could be proud of triggering climate change, right? We are, we have, with our collective project of civilization, we changed the atmosphere of an entire planet, right? That's not bad for a bunch of hairless monkeys, you know? So the real question now is, okay, we triggered climate change,

• 38:28Speaker 01

  we didn't do it on purpose, right? It was a, it was an unintended consequence of just doing what we've been doing forever, which is using energy to build civilization.

• 38:37Chris Williamson?

  I think that's, I think that's such a good point, that you, you touched on it earlier on, people think humans suck and we're disgusting to the planet and we're mistreating it and all the rest of things, you know. Sure, there are some energy companies throughout the years that could have probably been more responsible, but I'd bet that, I would wager that none of them went out of their way and thought, you know what I really fancy waking up and doing today? I really fancy fucking up the planet. Like, no one thought that.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Right. Not at the beginning, nobody knew, right? So when we discovered, you know, when we discovered oil and coal, right? You know, all we were doing was the exact same thing we'd been doing since, you know, the birth of agriculture, where we were like, you know, we started using animals to do work for us. We started using their poop to burn, you know? And we found oil. And we were like, oh, my God, this shit is awesome, you know, you can heat your home with it. You can build an internal combustion engine. I mean, you know, we didn't know that we were going to trigger climate change with it. We just built a great civilization with it. Once we realized that, you know, climate change was happening, Allah, the 1980s, you know, then the companies who knew that it was happening and purposely, you know, drove climate denial

• 39:47Speaker 01

  or purposely, you know, didn't do anything about it. Yeah, it's that now it does get to fault. Now it does get to they they are going to be the folly that will lead to, you know, our civilization not reaching its potential of us potentially collapsing. Um, but, you know, for most of us, right, for for you and me, you know, we didn't purpose. It's not like we're we're shitheads for, you know, uh, uh, coming into a world where we drive cars, right? I mean, you know, now the question is, as a collective society, can we make a transition to a different kind of energy infrastructure? So, you know, it changes the the whole way we think about this is we've got to understand that this is a transition that we should have expected, you know?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  And now that it's happening, you know, we've got to, uh, marshal our forces and see whether or not we've got the evolutionary, um, you know, potential to to make the next step and and and have a, you know, a a long history in front of us.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, definitely. The evolutionary cojones to keep on keep on.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  That's the word I was looking for. Yeah, right. Step up to the plate. Because, you know, when you think about, okay, there's all these civilizations out there, I think, that have gone through this before, and, you know, lots of them have probably not made it. Maybe some of them did make it. What was it that distinguished distinguished the winners from the losers, right?

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  Conceptually, what what can you what can you think of? What can you conceive of that would get them through it?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, so it's funny. So one of the things I talk about in the book and that, you know, is a recent paper that we just published where we modeled, we did these sort of, uh, you know, simplified models of the interaction between a civilization and it and a planet and a planet as an ecosystem. And what we wanted to see sort of like, what are the generic kinds of histories? You know, once, and what we found is there were three basic kinds of trajectory for civilization and planet together. The first was sustainability. You actually, you know, the civilization started using the planet's energy. It was the population went way up because of it. The planet started to heat up because of it, but you came to a nice, stable equilibrium. You know, the planet stopped heating and the populations came to a steady state. That was good, right?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And that was, okay, so that showed you that at least, you know, from the mathematical modeling, yeah, okay, it is possible to have sustainability.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  The other, the other two classes of trajectory were a little bit more worrisome. One was just straight out collapse. You know, the population rose really fast. The planet heated up. The population overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and it just dropped like a stone. It basically went extinct.

• 42:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Um, as the planet just drove off into an entirely new climate state. So that was bad. And then the other one was sort of like intermediate where you had a huge die off. You didn't, you know, you didn't go extinct, but you lost 70% of your population. So, you know, from those three different classes of trajectory, what it tells you is like, okay, it should be possible to have an, you know, come to a, some kind of equilibrium, some kind of sustainability. But, you know, you're going to have to navigate, you're going to have to be really thoughtful and navigate these treacherous waters to make sure you don't end up on one of those other kinds of trajectories. And there's, in the future, you know, we're going to make these models more complex, more realistic, and hopefully we'll be able to see really in fine detail what distinguished the winners from the losers.

• 43:01Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. So in this particular projection, what are some of the key elements? Is population control something that we need to really be, be carefully thinking about? Or is energy the first port of call? Is the greenhouse gases, you know, what are the, what's the low hanging fruit, so to speak?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, you know, I mean, I, I, if I, the answer I give is gonna be, is not gonna be based on my models, because the models didn't have that kind of fine detail in them.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  But I would say, but, but, okay, what I would certainly say is it's not just population, it's energy per capita, right? So, you know, um, for example, if you look at like the energy, so here's a, if you look at energy per person versus happiness or wellness, like, you know, the UN has a wellness index. And what you find is, is that, um, you know, for, for countries that use very, very little energy and are very poor, people are pretty miserable, right? But then, as you ascend the amount of energy you use, you find people get, you know, their wellness index goes up, people are happier. But once you get to about Italy's level of, uh, energy use, it kind of tops off. So we like, you know,

• 44:10Speaker 01

  an average American or Canadian uses way more energy than the average Italian, but they're really not much happier, right? So the question is, can you find, you know, if you've got seven billion people on the planet, um, can you, you know, what's the right amount of energy that each person can get to have a fulfilling life, right? Maybe everybody doesn't get three cars, you know, but you still get, you know, you get, you get, you know, easy transportation and you get to fly around every now and then.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  Minimum effective dose, right?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it is. And so that's what I think we really have to think about. We have to recognize that every kind of energy we use has, has a consequence. Like even, you know, if we switch to all renewables, that doesn't mean we're not gonna have, uh, any impact on the planet. We're always gonna have an impact on the planet. The question is, how do we, how do we tune those impacts so that actually we're helping the biosphere rather than, you know, hindering its own, uh, flourishing?

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  So who does the responsibility lie with here? Is it scientists to improve the science? Is it politicians to improve the politics? Is it individual people, uh, of the, the societies to alter their usage and reduce their usage? Is it, uh, governments to better educate those people?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  I think it falls to, I mean, you know, really what it falls to is it's the level, I'd say it's the level of cities or town, you know, really cities on up, right? Um, because, you know, I mean, you and I, we should, we should recycle and we should be careful about our, you know, our impacts on the planet. We should not practice ecological hooliganism, you know, just like dumping your crap in the river because you just fell.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  I've got, I've got LED bulbs in, in the house. So, you know.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But, but you know, in the long run, you, you know, our individual actions mean less than, because this is really an infrastructure problem, right? And it's, it's on some level, it's not much more than that, right? And so, you know, you and I can't control what kind of energy comes into my house, right? You know, plug, when I plug my thing in, you know, my, my, you know, my plug into the wall, I get electricity out of it. But, you know, there's only so much control I have over where that, how that energy was generated, right? So, um, it's really on the level of what we, you know, so, so what we really need to do is put pressure on governments from the city level on up and companies too, to

• 46:32Speaker 01

  like make the sweeping infrastructure changes that we need in order to solve this problem. Like, you know, so the zeroth order, we've got to be done with fossil fuels. Like, that is the simplest thing that we could do.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  That's your number one low hanging fruit.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  That's the low, that is the low hanging fruit. If we did that, we would be so far along the curve to a new kind of, you know, relationship with the biosphere. It's so simple to be done. I mean, it's, it's, you know, uh, building a new infrastructure is non-trivial. But on the other hand, you know, we've done that a lot across civilization. I like to point out that, um, here in Rochester, there's a place I can stand where I'm, I'm, I'm looking at the Erie Canal, which was this, you know, this canal that ran across New York State. It was a big deal when it was built in the 1830s. And then, um, that was like the main mode of creating wealth and infrastructure, move, you know, of transportation in 1830. But then around the 1850s, 1870s, train lines came in and I can come to, I can stand on a place where that, one of those train lines was put in, uh, and I can see

• 47:28Speaker 01

  the train line. And then a little bit further than that, I can see the highway. And then above that, I can see the airplanes landing, right? Those are four different transportation infrastructures that we built in the space of, you know, a hundred years, you know, 150 years, and they required enormous blood and and effort and money. And but we just built them. And in some cases, we abandoned them, right? So the idea of like that, oh, my God, switching from, you know, a fossil fuel to something else is impossible. Is just like you just look at our recent history. And it's like, that's what we're good at.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  We overcome stuff, right?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Our our ingenuity. So, um, you know, making that switch is important, and it has to happen at the higher levels. Because what one of the problems with climate change, as we were talking about before, is people feel like every choice they make has like this overwhelming moral consequence, like, oh, my God.

• 48:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I left the light on. Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I'm a horrible person. I suck. And you know what? The problem is actually bigger than you individually. So for those of us who live in democratic societies, the real effort is not just voting once, right? Not just voting once, you know, what, you know, if we have an election like in the United States, you know, once a year, we should be voting all the time. We should be showing up, you know, we got it. Like in America, in my town, I've got an opportunity to vote probably every week. I could go down to the city council and, you know, um, push for for responsible, climate-friendly energy modalities, you know, I can help choose the candidates. I should make sure that the candidate who's going to run next year is, you know, thinking about climate change. So that's what I say is really, you know, the most important thing is to put pressure

• 49:03Speaker 01

  on the, you know, the the systems that we're part of, um, to affect change.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think what's lovely about the way that you've presented it is that you've created the foundations for reframing the the whole concept, the whole argument, taking it out of the political sphere to a degree, making it less of a emotionally charged and passionate, um, issue, passionate topic. And what's actually happening now is it's like, look, this is happening. Don't beat yourself up about it. Just work out how the fuck we can fix it.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. That's really the thing. And we should have, it's happening because it was supposed to happen. Right? That's really the thing. Of course, this happens.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  The same way, the same way that you turn the light bulb, you turn a traditional light bulb on, it gives off light, which is what you want, but it also gives off heat, which is not necessarily what you want. A byproduct of us developing as a civilization was this effect on the biosphere.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Chris Williamson?

  You didn't mean for it to happen.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  Now, how do we now, how do we move forward?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Right, that's exactly it. That's exactly, that's, you know, that's a really nice analogy, that idea of the lightbulb, right? Yeah. So like, oh, we were using these light bulbs that did what we wanted them to do, but they had this negative side effect. Oops. Okay, just fucking change the light bulbs, man.

• 50:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  You know?

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  A hundred percent.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  That big a deal. The people, right, the problem is, you know, because of climate denial, because there are people who stand to lose a lot of money. You know, if we make this change, they've sort of, they've kept us from changing the light bulbs, right? I know the analogy I like to use is, look, you know, when I was, when I was a young man, we had this thing called typewriters. You know, and there were the, there were these big machines that you'd push buttons on and you could write, you know, you'd write things. And then, of course, you know, when the computers came around, you know, came in the mid eighties, the typewriters all went away, right? That business just went away. If you, if you owned a typewriter company, I'm sorry, you're screwed.

• 50:54Chris Williamson?

  Unlucky.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Right. And now what's happening is it's as if the typewriter company somehow convinced the government to not allow computers to ever be developed.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Right? Oh, computers, man, they're all a bunch of tree huggers, you know, they're bad, they're anti-democratic. It's like, no, man, it's just a new technology. I'm sorry, you're gonna lose money, but like, that's capitalism, pal. Sorry.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Get yourself on, get yourself on the forefront of what's coming next, so to speak.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right, right. You know, so, yeah.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  I understand. So to round up, what's your general sentiment at the moment? Obviously, you are, as I would put it, you're dick and balls in this particular subject field at the moment.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  What's your, what's your sentiment like? Can you sometimes, do you sometimes struggle to have perspective? Can you see the wood for the trees, so to speak?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the great thing about being an astronomer is it's all forest, you know what I mean? The, you know, I mean, the great thing about being astronomer is it gives you a superpower and that is time, right? So, you know, it's really, you know, the idea of thinking on century time scales is just, you know, it comes really easily. Cause that's what I'm training, you know, centuries, shit, millennia time scales comes easily. So, you know, in that sense. You know, when I wear my astronomer hat, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. I don't know if we're gonna make it, but on some level, it doesn't really matter because you've got a whole universe out there. You know, our story is just one story out of a very large book of the universe. And, you know, I really feel very confident that there's other places where this is happening. And, you know, maybe somebody makes it through. If I put my dad hat on, because I got two kids, then I'm like, holy shit, we gotta do

• 52:26Speaker 01

  something about this. So, um, I, I, but I, I am generally optimistic, you know? Things are pretty bad right now, but on the other hand, human beings have an enormous capacity for resilience and optimization, or, you know, or, yeah, or resilience and innovation, excuse me. And I really feel like, you know, this is kind of the dark, the dark time before we really kick in. Because, you know, I teach a lot of students and when I talk to students, you know, millennials and the younger generation, I find them to be pretty amazing, pretty amazing and pretty full of ideas. And, um, I, you know, I, I think we're gonna be able to do it.

• 53:02Chris Williamson?

  I think so as well. So, Adam, would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online, please? I'll make sure that Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth will be linked in the description below. I recommend everybody to go and pick the book up. Is there an audiobook version as well? I know a lot of listeners.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  There is an audiobook version, yeah, yeah. So you can get those both on your favorite, you know, website, Amazon, obviously, you know, lots of people go there, you can get the book. Um, my own, if you want to follow my stuff, I'm on Twitter at Adam Frank four, the number four. Um, I also have a Facebook author page. Uh, I spend, I do most of my time on Twitter, social media wise. Um, and I also have a, um, website, adamfrankscience.com. And if you want to, you know, send me a question or something, I'm, I'm very, I suck at email, so it's gonna be very hard sometime. It may be two months before I answer. Uh, but there's also a place there where, you know, and I'd love it when people do, uh, you know, you know, do shoot me at least, you know, comments or things they're thinking about.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, at least two months isn't a cosmic time scale, though.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right. Yeah, right.

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  In the grand scheme of things, you waited a little while for a reply, but it wasn't, it wasn't millennia.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  That's right. It wasn't, yeah. The earth hadn't switched into a new climate state in that time.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Adam, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this. I'll make sure that everything's linked in the show notes below and enjoy your birthday tomorrow.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, sir. Cheers, bye bye. Fair man, bye bye.