Part Two: Searching for Alien Life, the UFO Disclosure Era, the Great Filter & How Much Time Earth Has Left | Dr. David Kipping

Are We ALONE…or Already Being WATCHED? The Truth Might Be Stranger Than Sci-Fi What if aliens could already find Earth, but we still can’t find them? What if the reason we haven’t detected nonhuman intelligence is actually more disturbing than proof that they exist? Is the universe teaming with life, or are we screaming into a void? In this episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown, Dr. David Kipping (Columbia University professor and Director of the Cool Worlds Lab) discusses why the ‘proof’ of alien life might be hidden in plain sight—and why our human brains struggle to accept it. From the Fermi Paradox to the terrifying reality of the Great Filter, we’re breaking down the science of the stars and the psychology of solitude. From controversial Mars discoveries to theories about communicating with aliens through time, not space, this episode will challenge everything you think you know about our place in the universe. ARE WE ON THE VERGE OF PROVING ALIEN LIFE? - Latest on possible biosignatures & microbial evidence on Mars - Why we still don’t have definitive proof of life beyond Earth - Emotional “heartbreak” scientists experience when alien signals turn out to be false alarms WHY EARTH MIGHT NOT MATTER AS MUCH AS WE THINK - Could humans be the most primitive intelligence in the universe? - Why we’re likely either far ahead, or dangerously behind alien civilizations - How proving the multiverse could completely erase our sense of uniqueness THE UNSETTLING TRUTH ABOUT ALIENS FINDING US - Why it would actually be easy for aliens to locate Earth - Eerie idea that not finding aliens might make you believe in God - Why aliens might be interested in something as specific as…our DNA WE’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT ALIENS ALL WRONG - Why it’s “intellectually lazy” to assume aliens explain unknown phenomena - Nonhuman intelligence might be so different, they may not even recognize us as conscious - Are aliens just a reflection of our own hopes, fears, and imagination? TALKING TO ALIENS THROUGH TIME - Why communication across time could be easier than across space - Paradox of UAP sightings: visible one moment, undetectable the next - What kind of scientific evidence would actually prove alien encounters HOW LIFE REALLY BEGAN (AND WHY IT TOOK SO LONG) - Biggest mysteries behind the origin of life on Earth - How understanding our beginnings could help us discover life elsewhere - Why Earth could become uninhabitable in under 1 billion years BLACK HOLES, WORMHOLES, & BREAKING REALITY - What actually happens when something falls into a black hole - Black hole information paradox & why it could unlock the universe - Lab-created “mini” black holes - Wormholes, negative energy, & what might exist on the other side - How the Holographic Principle is shaking the foundations of physics AI, BABY UNIVERSES & THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE - How AI is accelerating discovery, but also creating new risks - Why the public is starting to feel misled by science - What baby universes mean for reality FROM OUR GALAXY TO THE EDGE OF EVERYTHING - How recent tech advancements have transformed our understanding of the cosmos - Why exoplanets could have been discovered much earlier - What makes Earth scientifically special…and why it might not be that special at all If you’re curious about aliens, the origin of life, black holes, or the ultimate fate of humanity, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss! Don’t forget to vote for us for this year’s Webby Awards: ⁠https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/shows/health-wellness-fitness⁠ https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/shows/health-wellness-fitness Learn more about Dr. David Kipping’s work with Cool Labs: ⁠https://www.coolworldslab.com/⁠ https://www.coolworldslab.com/ Cool Labs on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@CoolWorldsLab⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@CoolWorldsLab Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0 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.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:05Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:06Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. David Kipping, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University and director of the Cool Worlds Lab. In part one of our conversation with Dr. Kipping, he explained what it looks like to actually search for life on other planets. We also talked about what's so special about Earth and our evolution on this planet. Are we the most primitive life form out there? Or are we the most advanced? He also talks about the age of disclosure and how it's changing the way we search for life on other planets. In part two, we'll talk about what aliens might want with our DNA, black holes, wormholes, Havana syndrome, and the impact of AI on the way we view science.

• 0:50Mayim Bialik?

  We can't wait for you to hear part two of our conversation with Dr. David Kipping.

• 0:57Mayim Bialik?

  I'm wearing this T-shirt that Jonathan got me, which I like very much because I like anthropomorphizing aliens. But there's a lot of conversation. And we recently had on a man who claims to be channeling an alien hybrid. Different story. His name is Bashar, and people all over the world listen to the channeling of Bashar. But one of the things that Bashar talks about, and one of the things a lot of people talk about, is that aliens are wanting our DNA. And they are performing abductions, and they are placing probes, and all these things. And it's been the subject of many incredible movies, trying to understand what an interface with aliens might look like.

• 1:43Mayim Bialik?

  Can you imagine a world, or a galaxy, or a universe, where aliens would be at the level of sophistication where they could, for example, fly about undetected, but then selectively drop in? If they were at that level of sophistication, why would they want our DNA that they have to suck through our nose with a probe? I'm asking. For a friend, but I'm asking for, you know, for sort of a, I'm not just trying to be, you know, cheeky here. I'm saying that like, where, where is that level of interface? And how do we have conversations? Do we just shut that down and say, guess what?

• 2:26Mayim Bialik?

  Anything that can fly undetected doesn't need to then suck you into a UFO? Or do we say, all bets are off? And maybe there are beings that are operating on a level that we literally can't understand.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I've heard that rash, that argument by some of my colleagues that it doesn't make any sense why UFOs, if they're so advanced, would be undetectable in some data and then trivially detectable by eye, with a human eye in other data, or with a simple camera in other data. I mean, it is often, by the way, with cameras, I always find it amazing that the best image of a UFO hasn't improved since 1950, right? The camera technology has exploded, and yet we still have this grainy crappy photo every time. That's, that's maybe a red flag, right, to some degree. But in terms of the motives, it's impossible to debunk it. I think it's a waste of time to try to debunk motivation, because we have no idea of what the motives

• 3:23Speaker 02

  of an alien would be. Maybe that, maybe it's a teenager who's drunk and he's just flying around, you know, messing with us. I don't know. Like, you can't, whatever, whatever you say to someone who's, who really is a believer about that, they're not going to accept that as, as a, as a counterargument. I think when I hear these, these stories, and I don't, I don't want to, I would never tell someone, well, you're wrong. That didn't happen, because I don't know. I wasn't there. There must be some bare minimum who are just, who are either fantasizing this or having a waking dream or something. That would be, you would, it'd be weird if that wasn't true, because we, we have such vivid imaginations. You look like some fraction of the time that'd be true. And Jill Tarter, who's often, you know, the movie Contact was about her. And it's Carl Sagan wrote the book Contact with her in mind.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  She's sort of seen as the, the, the mother of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. She has this beautiful quote where she says that, you know, when we look for aliens, it's like a cosmic mirror. And what we're really looking for is reflection of our own fears and our own dreams and aspirations. And so when we look for a planet that we think is undergoing nuclear war. That is a reflection of our own fear of nuclear war. And when we look for a planet that has achieved, you know, solar panels covering the planet, that's a reflection of our own dream of achieving this kind of eco utopia. And, you know, maybe with some of these stories of, you know, medical experiments or whatever,

• 4:50Speaker 02

  those are, again, reflections of our own internal fears that are just manifesting in these different ways. And I do think that's very true, that everything we think about aliens is pretty much just, it's coming from us. It's a manifestation of our own aspirations and dreams. And so I think that is, there's a lot of us in these stories, more than there is aliens in these stories.

• 5:17Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, all of our narratives have that aspect to them, whether it's extrasensory abilities, God, aliens as well. We're all trying to find our place, right? And how we fit and how the world around us works. What I'm about to say, I don't think contrasts that, but in the same regard, it does shed more light and intrigue on the things that we used to think are ridiculous. And recently, the Havana syndrome has come up again as one of the topics that was dismissed over and over again, where these people are experiencing very intense medical issues,

• 5:58Jonathan Cohen?

  headaches, nausea, impacts on their vision. And it was totally dismissed like they're absolutely crazy. And now 60 Minutes, through nine years of research, has been releasing episodes on the fact that there are some crazy, previously unknown weapons that could shoot wavelengths that impact people in a way that we could never have imagined. So I think people hear that and then get...

• 6:30Jonathan Cohen?

  To thinking they're like, well, what else really can't we?

• 6:34Speaker 02

  To extrapolate from that, yeah.

• 6:35Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:38Jonathan Cohen?

  And again, I agree with you that we need evidence, but it's like, sometimes in the absence of enough evidence, people are trying to put those pieces together and say, what else haven't we just figured out yet?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I was reading recently about a story that reminds me of is alchemy and Isaac Newton with gold. So, you know, people were convinced at the time, you could probably turn base metals into gold, especially lead, we thought you could turn to gold. And it seems strange to us, but you know, at the time, it was thought, well, if this was true, this would be great and we could become rich and we really wanted it to be true. And so that's, you know, that's kind of an important bias. And I always think it's amazing that Isaac Newton, we didn't know this until like, we discovered his writings in the 20th century, but he spent like, as much time doing, you know, inventing calculus and physics as he did trying to turn lead into gold. And it seems in hindsight bizarre that he would do

• 7:33Speaker 02

  that. But, you know, we, he was, he was motivated by not only this, this dream of what he wants to be true, but just that these, there were these stories at the time, right, that this could be possible. There were these people who were saying, these charlatans mostly, who were saying, you know, to kings, I can turn lead into gold. And so I think the lesson is not the, you know, not to dismiss the Havana syndrome thing at all, but just that we're often wrong. I think that's the lesson, that we often hear these rumors and when we hear, when these rumors originally come out, it's very difficult to say whether it will pan out to a yes or a no. And so that's, that's why I try to remain with UFO stuff, just very open minded about what the, what the real answer is. But I don't think the

• 8:14Speaker 02

  lesson to take away is these rumors often end up being true. I think, because we've seen time and time again, it goes the complete opposite direction as well. There are many cases where it ends up being true, but there's also a lot of cases where it was completely yes. And, and we kind of, we forget about those cases. And we have that problem in, in medical journals and nutritional science a lot, where you hear about the, the positive cases. Oh, eating tomatoes, you know, increased your libido by 10% or something like this. But you never hear about the negatives where they did that experiment 10 times. It made no difference, but they couldn't get it published because no one wanted to publish that stupid null result. And so we often don't give as much emphasis as probably we should to all the times that we were wrong.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  And when you put that all together, you get this balanced picture that we just often, we often make mistakes and we often mess up. And that's, that's the nature of how science works.

• 9:08Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think also, you know, one of the things that, you know, persnickety people like me get very frustrated about is, you know, yes, it's important and amazing that we can disseminate information and people can look things up about their health and learn things about the world in ways that they previously could not. But many people sort of don't know what to look for or how to read data. And, you know, I think we've all learned bits and pieces about how, for example, you know, pharmaceutical companies can selectively publish the data that supports the mass dissemination of medication that actually may not be doing what they say that it does. Right? That's astounding and makes me lose faith in humanity, but that's for a different episode.

• 9:53Mayim Bialik?

  But I think that this is one of those things that when you have, you know, also a political climate for us where we're told not to trust, it, it, it sort of grows this sort of notion that my experience is the entire experience. And what I think when I read an article is true as opposed to what is the data? And, you know, I go over this with my mother, God bless her, who will see something on Instagram and say, oh my gosh, I didn't know that, you know, insert, insert the food, the treatment, the celebrity, like whatever it is. And I think that's sort of something that, you know, for, for people who are kind of trained in the ivory tower of academia, there is a different set of standards.

• 10:38Mayim Bialik?

  Right? And that doesn't necessarily translate well to, you know, popular media.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 10:46Mayim Bialik?

  I'd like you to take us down a black hole because one of the other things we wanted to talk to you about was black holes. You know, the, the sort of simple notion of why black holes don't make sense. Can, can you walk us through, you know, for someone who's like, I really want to, and we've had Jana Levin on, like literally the black hole person, you know? But I, I wonder if you can try and walk us through a layperson's explanation, because I think a lot of people want to understand this and they want to understand the conflict that happens when we imagine a black hole. And it opens up the possibility, obviously, for conversations about wormholes. But if you can talk a little bit about sort of like energy conservation and, you know,

• 11:30Mayim Bialik?

  mass conservation and things like that, help us understand what we should know about black holes, why they should delight us and confound us, and also what some possible explanations are for the paradox that they present.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, I think probably the, the biggest paradox you're alluding to there is this thing known as the black hole information paradox. And, you know, black holes are just incredible. It's actually wild to think they're really out there. And sometimes you just have to like, take a step back and think, this is not just like an idea, like we know those actually exist. And it's terrifying that there's these things out there which nothing can escape from. I think it's such a bizarre idea. But I guess the paradox here is that we know that there's plenty of black holes. There's probably of order of like a million or so in our own milky way. We only know of maybe dozens in our own milky way that, that have these accretion discs.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  That's when stuff is falling in, it rubs together, a lot of friction, it gets very hot and we can see it. But there's probably lots of black holes which are almost naked. They're just, they're just floating through space. There's nothing really falling into them at the moment, and so we just can't see anything. They are black, of course, that's why you can't see them. The, the paradox of, of them is really about what happens to the stuff that falls in.

• 12:50Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sorry, wait, wait a second. Did you just say they're floating around?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Well, maybe not floating is the right word, but they are, they are moving through space, yeah, with some peculiar velocity, yeah.

• 13:01Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, this is something I've never thought about. I've always studied black holes or thought about black holes as sort of like static. They have the ability to move, though this is a new piece of information for me.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Well, it's not like by their own power per se, but everything in the solar, everything in the galaxy is moving. So I mean, the solar system is orbiting around the center of the galaxy and has a fairly circular orbit, but there are some objects which are orbiting on highly elliptical orbits and they're not stable. They will, they will move around. We have, we had an interstellar asteroid, three of them, passed through the solar system quite recently. So, um, stuff can hit each other, can go through solar systems. It's, it's a messy, busy place out there.

• 13:42Mayim Bialik?

  Okay, got it. It's just like it, it changes a little bit of the computation that I'm doing about them to picture them as a receptacle for potentially everything that never comes back. And we don't know what's happening in there, but also it moves about because then it asks the question like, what vector are things moving on if it's, anyway, okay, keep going.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, there is a chance a black hole could pass through the solar system and be a very bad day for us, right? It's, it's possible. It's not very likely, but it is possible. Uh, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't lose sleep about that particular chance, but it is possible.

• 14:17Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:00Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:42Mayim Bialik?

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• 15:47Speaker 02

  But yeah, the question is what happens to stuff that falls in. When something falls in, obviously, it adds to the mass, to the black hole. So if you throw in a book, like an encyclopedia, with all of the words and the information scribed on those pages, at the very basic level, the black hole just gets one encyclopedia heavier. That's about it. That's all that really happens to it. But the, and I think we could live with that. If that was the end of the story, we could be like, well, the information on those pages and even just the matter itself, more, more at a quantum level, is just somehow hidden behind that event horizon. It stays there forever, and that's okay. But the problem that black holes introduced was really because of

• 16:27Speaker 02

  Stephen Hawking, who suggested that they they lose mass over time. They evaporate. And we now have, we haven't got direct evidence that they do this, but it is widely accepted that this has to be true to make sense of them with quantum theory. You can actually see this happen with acoustic versions of black holes. So you can create kind of sonic versions of black holes in the laboratory, and they also produce this so-called Hawking radiation where they will evaporate over time. So we really have lots of reasons to think this is something they really do. It just happens on vast time scales. I mean, trillions and trillions and trillions of years that they will slowly lose mass. So eventually, the black hole goes away. You know, this this mass

• 17:12Speaker 02

  will just completely disappear, and it will just pop out of existence at a certain point far in the future.

• 17:17Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, that's troubling, because you're thinking of all the mass that has been added to it as it goes around the galaxy, like a giant trash can from which there is no return. Things just can't disappear. Matter cannot just disappear.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Right. So I think that energy and the mass conservation, we can, we're okay with that, actually, because all the mass that goes in comes back out as photons. And of course, equals mc squared. So you can, you can keep all your books in in order there. The account, you know, if you're measuring your budget, everything makes sense. The problem is information, actually, not necessarily mass. There was this complex information, this entropy encoded within that book. And presumably it hits the singularity. And if you calculate how long it takes for things to hit the singularity, it's not that long. It's of order of, depends on the black hole, but it could be anywhere from seconds to hours. So eventually this stuff will hit the singularity. And the singularity is thought, I mean, we don't know, no one's ever peered inside one,

• 18:17Speaker 02

  but it's thought to be this point of infinite density. And so that is complete destruction of any information. It should totally destroy it. So then, what, this raises a problem with quantum theory, because quantum theory says all processes are essentially reversible. That if you write down the Schrödinger equation, the equation of how we think systems evolve in a quantum universe, you can always time reverse them and get the, and everything makes sense. Whereas here, you can't time reverse it, right? Because it's destroyed. There's an endpoint to the story. You can't go back. Once it's crossed that horizon, the information is gone. And so this kind of violates, I mean, a simpler way of thinking about it is just that quantum theory demands information conservation. There's the conservation of energy, the conservation of mass, and quantum theory says there's

• 19:02Speaker 02

  really, there should be a conservation of information. And black holes seem to just ruin that story for quantum theorists. And so this is where there's a fascinating intersection of general relativity, which is a theory of how spacetime folds and moves and bends, of which one of the consequences is a black hole, and quantum theory, which is the theory of the very, very small. And it's, black holes seem to be the keyhole, where both of those two worlds talk to each other, in a way that we don't see with any, almost any other system. And so that's why I think so many particle physicists, quantum physicists, and cosmologists,

• 19:44Speaker 02

  everyone in the physics world are so fascinated with them, because they can solve so many problems, because they are the bridge between all of these different scales, in a sense. And so there's a lot of work going on, a lot of thinking, I'm sure Jana spoke about some of this, about how can that information get out? Because it has to, for this theory to make sense.

• 20:05Mayim Bialik?

  What about this kind of concept of wormholes? Obviously, this is something real that has been expanded in, you know, kind of popular culture to include conversations about, you know, kind of anomalies like the, you know, sci-fi show or even sort of the multiverse. Can you speak a little bit to wormholes and how that leads to these other conversations?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's actually my next, my last video. My last video on Cool Worlds was all about worms. So it's very well timed because I spent a lot of time researching wormholes in preparation for that video. People originally thought black holes could be connected to wormholes in a sense. And Einstein actually wrote about that with this idea called the Einstein Rosen bridge. But the version he imagined was not a wormhole a human being or even a particle could ever take. It was a slice through space, but particles always have to go forwards through time. And because of the very fact we have to go forwards through time prevents you from ever like tunneling through the black hole and coming out of the other end of what would

• 21:08Speaker 02

  be some kind of hypothetical wormhole or hypothetical extra universe. So if you look at the math, you can kind of reflect the math and predict, oh, there should be another universe, there should be the inverse of the black hole, the white hole on the other side. And in principle, if you could travel infinite speed, you could kind of work your way through that. But in real physics, it doesn't seem possible. So then Kip Thorne, who of course is famous for Interstellar because he was the science advisor on the movie Interstellar, he was actually prodded by Carl Sagan to start thinking about this. And Carl Sagan, when he was writing Contact that we've already mentioned, was asking Kip Thorne, you know, is there a way, I know that Einstein Rosen bridge doesn't work,

• 21:51Speaker 02

  but could you imagine a way of making this work? And so him and Morrison Thorne came together and they came up with an actual traversable wormhole. It really did work and they kind of reverse engineered it. They said, well, here's a wormhole. Let's solve the equations to figure out what the mass has to look like to create it. And the solution they came up with works, but it requires this weird thing of negative energy. And so that's where everyone kind of scratched their head and was like, well, how would you do that? There are some examples of negative energy that we know of, like the Casimir effect, for instance, in physics. But this would be a huge amount of it. I mean, you're talking like Jupiter masses of negative energy put in one place, but maybe an advanced civilization could do that.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  And then further, I think people often stop there and they say, that's the big problem, that you need negative energy. But you also need to basically take two regions of spacetime and glue them together by the negative energy. That's actually the harder part. It's not having the negative energy in one place, it's then grabbing somehow, like a god, grabbing spacetime in two separate places and somehow putting them together and gluing it with the negative energy. That's the part that people don't talk enough about as a big problem. Like, how the hell are you supposed to do that? Because we live in the spacetime. So you almost have to be outside of the spacetime to create the wormhole in the first place. It's like a chicken and egg type problem.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  So, you know, that still remains one of our most realized mathematical descriptions of what a wormhole might look like, in a sense for human beings to pass through. But recently, there's been a lot of work looking at microscopic wormholes that could naturally emerge inside these black holes, especially charged black holes. If you put a bit of charge on them. It's thought that wormholes, microscopic, Planck-scale wormholes, are inevitable inside black holes. And that could be a way of explaining this information paradox that we talked about. Because maybe the information tunnels out using these microscopic wormholes and somehow gets back out into the universe. So that's one of the leading ideas, actually, to solving this paradox, is that wormholes

• 24:01Speaker 02

  are real, but they're just very, very small, and they live on the interior of black holes and are a way of stuff getting out, basically.

• 24:11Mayim Bialik?

  Is there an alternate version of all of us on the other side of those wormholes?

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I mean, possibly. I mean, we, yeah, it depends what kind of, for these microscopic ones, they really do live in kind of regular spacetime, if you like. You don't have to do anything too exotic. But certainly for the original Einstein Rosenberg, or even to a certain extent, what Kip Thorne had in mind, it's not obvious what that other universe is. Is it just a distant part of our universe? Is it a completely separate universe? It's never defined. You don't have to define it to write down it, to write it down mathematically. You don't have to define what it is. You just have to say, there is another spacetime region. And you, you figure out what you want that to be, but that's, that's all the math says. So you'd have to, you know, I always think it'd be fascinating, if I had the option of how to die,

• 24:58Speaker 02

  and I could do anything I want in the universe, I think I would fall into a black hole. Right? Because I think that would be amazing because you would be the only, only you could know what's inside it. Right? Because you can never send back out. Only those who fall through the event horizon know what's inside the black hole. And you would, you could survive in principle for maybe a few hours for some of the big black holes. And you wouldn't be totally ripped apart immediately. You could pass through the event horizon as Cooper showed us in Interstellar. And, and, and see what it's like. And I, I, I would, that'd be awesome. Because otherwise, there's no way to know until, until someone does it.

• 25:34Jonathan Cohen?

  I stopped at you won't be ripped apart immediately.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you will eventually. Yeah. You will eventually be ripped apart. If you're okay with spaghettification at some point, maybe you have a cyanide pill. And as, as you start to feel stretched, you're like, okay, this is, this is the moment. I've seen enough at this point.

• 25:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Spaghettification is our new focus here on the podcast.

• 25:56Jonathan Cohen?

  Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman and his exploration that there is a, a space outside of spacetime? That

• 26:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Controls the simulation, or you can take yourself out of his version of what he believes is reality and that in so doing changes the, our ability to be constrained by the current laws of this, of this space.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Well, some of those ideas ring a bell, but not, not specifically Hoffman's ideas. So maybe you can talk more about that, yeah.

• 26:32Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know if I can summarize properly, honestly, but basically, you know, his version, his belief that this is a simulation and it's not, we're not living in a computer game, but that the world is simulated and our brain is constructing the reality around us.

• 26:48Mayim Bialik?

  And also at a very, at a very basic level, you know, when we spoke to him, we titled the episode, "Everything You See Is A Lie," because he took even the basic explanation of, you know, how we perceive visual information. And, you know, at the most basic level, we think that we are seeing the world, right? Like, this is how we're raised to see the world. But there is an alternate reality, right? Which is all the wavelengths that are not absorbed, right? By all the, the things that we are, again, saying, "This is a table and this is a computer and I know what red is," right? So his sort of framework, you know, comes from that, that everything you're seeing is filtered, you know? It's filtered

• 27:30Mayim Bialik?

  not just through, you know, kind of brain structures, but it's filtered through, you know, a, a construct.

• 27:36Jonathan Cohen?

  Very helpful. And his belief is that, you know, the thing next behind me isn't actually there until I turn to render it and then it exists again. He is working with mathematicians and experts on the hard science that can create the ability to control our version of reality, basically manipulate the headset in his analogy. And so in so doing, that breaks open the limits of our physical limitations. And it could mean, you know, moving about the world outside of the current limitations. And it could be changing our ability to, you know, repair physically and so on and so on. But was just curious

• 28:20Jonathan Cohen?

  if, if, like, there's, there's elements of the wormhole math that seem to overlap here?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also the holographic principle, it reminds me of, so yeah, with one of the discoveries of studying the mathematics of black holes is that it is possible to actually equate wormholes with quantum entanglement in certain descriptions of the universe. This thing called anti-decider space. If you if you write down the equations of what happens in anti-decider space, you can basically have quantum entanglement on the boundary of this of this anti-decider space look like wormholes on the interior, but the wormholes are just holograms. They're not they're not really there. They're just projections of the quantum entanglement. And so you can

• 29:07Speaker 02

  kind of unify these two apparently disparate ideas, which both seem to allow for instant communication as being just mirrors of the same thing, just different ways of thinking about them. And the holographic principle is got a lot of interest right now in physics that if you extend this, then all 3D objects in the universe are actually just really projections of this 2D surface out into 3D universe. And I think it's amazing that that seems to work. Like, if you take the whole universe, the observable, the Hubble volume, and you just take that surface, you could take all the information that's inside that 3D volume and put it on the surface and it would fit on there exactly, which

• 29:50Speaker 02

  seems like really compelling argument for this holographic principle, which is obviously very disturbing for our own sense of who we are and what we see. Like, nothing's really there.

• 30:01Mayim Bialik?

  One of the things that I wonder if you can speak to, and we've spoken a little bit about, you know, sort of what popular technology has done to science in terms of information coming in, in many cases anecdotal information. It's also introduced a lot of the conversation around sort of, you know, what the government knows about, let's say, other aspects of our existence. And I think that One thing that we're seeing that is changing the way that science functions at all is AI. And I wonder if you can speak a little bit to some of the exciting things that AI is doing that that impact science and also some of the dangers of the the entry

• 30:46Mayim Bialik?

  of AI into sort of scientific rigor, reliability and consistency.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's a very fast moving train. And so my thoughts on this, like many people, are evolving almost daily as as we see the capabilities change and the use cases change and people try different things and make different mistakes and different successes. I have to say, up to about a month ago, personally, I wasn't really using AI very much. I know you said you don't use it at all. I was using it a little bit with ChatGPT for just sort of proofing things, maybe rewording some stuff, things like that. And then when I started using the more coding versions of it, like Claude Code, for instance, I was really kind of blown away because I did a podcast about this, a solo episode where

• 31:36Speaker 02

  I went to Princeton and they were all basically singing praises about how great this this coding framework is and that it was a better coder than they were. And you know, these were very reputable software developers in terms of making astrophysics simulations and things. So I was really surprised by that. So I thought I'd try it out for myself. And I would say it's not such a question of it being better, but just way faster. I mean, it can just do stuff. You have the idea and it would maybe take you a couple of days to to put it together. It will just do it in an hour or two, but it will make mistakes and then you spend another hour or two fixing those mistakes with it and identifying

• 32:17Speaker 02

  them. But even then, it's still four hours. It's still a much more efficient use of your time than spending two solid days banging your head against the wall trying to get it to work. So it's a it's like many tools, you know, like the when the internet first came around or Wikipedia or, you know, when Python exploded in terms of its use among scientists. It's a tool that makes it easier for us to do the the menial tasks that you often have to do in science to get to the interesting part.

• 32:48Mayim Bialik?

  Like completing your bibliography for your thesis, which almost made me give up on getting a doctorate.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Right, that's a very painful thing. I would actually, that's one of the cases I'd be worried about using AI, actually, because I've noticed it, it seems to hallucinate references a lot. I don't know what is about references.

• 33:03Mayim Bialik?

  I don't care. I just needed something in those, you know, 100 pages.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  If you just want filler, it'll put something in there.

• 33:10Mayim Bialik?

  Anyway, go ahead.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  And no one reads the references anyway, so it probably doesn't even matter. But one note, I had a story recently because I was in Denver for an Exoplanet conference meeting. And a colleague spoke to me and she said about AI that her student had written this really beautiful first draft of a paper. Had really nice figures, the explanations were clear, and they submitted it to a journal and got the referee report back. And then the student took, she didn't admit this, but after much digging, it was found out this is what she did. She'd taken the referee report and the paper and put it into ChatGPT or whatever it was, and got back the next version of the paper. The whole thing, I mean, this is, this is, I think, what you shouldn't do with AI. You shouldn't give it the entire damn thing and just say, solve that.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  You need to like really break it down. And so what she got out was absolute garbage. The paper was like twice as long, all the figures were ruined, made no sense. And the advisor was, really had to prod her and be like, what, you know, what tools did you use to do this? And eventually got it out of her that she had just literally copied and pasted the damn thing and ruined the project. And so they had to go all the way back and, you know, and undo that damage. So I'm hearing both cases, like, I think people, I do think people who are more senior, like myself as scientists, know how to advise graduate students, know how to advise undergraduate students in research. We break down the problem into small bite-sized pieces for them and then we let them do it, we test it, and we know the checks to do.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Like, we know these order of magnitude calculations, we get a piece of paper and we check, does that make sense? Yeah, that's in the right ballpark, that seems to make the right sense. We know how to do those checks. Whereas I think the students coming in often aren't familiar with how to break down problems like that. And they have this overwhelming faith that it'll, it'll, it'll work and it can be ruinous in those cases. So it is a tool that's very powerful, but can, in the wrong hands, can just lead to absolute nonsense. And of course, there's lots of journal papers which are being submitted right now, which are complete nonsense, which appear to be AI-generated. So it's a big problem.

• 35:19Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I've also heard of, you know, students who are not using AI, who also have to run things through an AI checker. So it doesn't seem like you're using AI when you're not, which is incredibly maddening because imagine being accused, right, of using AI when you've done the research and did not. I mean, that level, you know, of kind of fear is it's raising a very interesting generation of students, to say the least.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think also you see it with with sometimes with my videos. And maybe you've encountered this as well with YouTube. I think the YouTube audience is getting very frustrated with AI content, AI-generated content, and the AI slop is like the slogan, right, that goes around. And sometimes you work really hard on a video. There's no AI involved whatsoever. You put it out, they'll watch the first 10 seconds and say, AI slop, because they they they're so they're so hit with so much of it, this avalanche of AI stuff, that the, you know, the barometer has been almost desensitized a little bit to it. And so they're just they're just kind of call everything that surprises them. You make any kind of surprising statement, I think, well, that must be AI.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  And so in this era of people just not trusting what they're seeing. And some people are probably watching this podcast thinking, this whole thing's AI. But no, we're really talking to each other.

• 36:45Mayim Bialik?

  We're all part of the simulation anyway, as we're hurtling towards a black hole.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Right. So it is it's having it's having a big impact in in public trust in science, in the use case of science. And of course, I think the greatest danger really is probably, as we've heard about many often within businesses as well as interns, and those sort of training of junior scientists, because it is so much cheaper and easier often to be lazy and just get the AI to do it rather than a graduate student, that I do worry about the the exposure of graduate students to breaking down problems, because it's so tempting for senior people just to skip to the to the 20 bucks a month answer, rather than spending $100,000 a year to actually teach. Someone how to think.

• 37:30Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, and this is something that if we ever do get to meet in person, I'd love to just like chat with you over a, you know, a beer. Because, you know, as a, as a undergrad and as a graduate student, I was trained to do all sorts of things that were mind numbing and boring. You know, I, I learned to code, like, I learned to code so we could process and smooth MRI scans to create a, you know, atlas of the human brain. And it's like, those were important hours, weeks, months and years of my life. But I wonder, you know, how much are we learning versus how much do we need to automate? So that our, you know, minds are, um, you know, ready for other, other challenges.

• 38:13Mayim Bialik?

  Our producer Valerie and I both like cute things and we'd like you to explain what a baby universe is. Because A, it sounds cute and B, I just think we, we need the explanation from you.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, well, there is the idea that you could, um, there's many different contexts which baby universes actually could emerge.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  There is this idea that our universe is not the only universe called the multiverse. And it's often spoken about in terms of explaining, kind of come back to God almost and like, you know, creation. Like, why is it that all the constants of nature seem to be perfectly balanced to allow for life? Because any kind of small perturbation to them would generally make atoms even impossible. So it's kind of wild that even anything is possible, you know, structure is possible at all. So some people might really lean on a creator to explain that. But a lot of scientists lean on this idea of a multiverse, that there's, you know, millions and millions, billions of universes out there.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  And they're in this higher hyperspace domain, maybe you call it the brain or the book or something. And they'll all be different sizes and those sizes will ultimately be set by how fast they expand. So we have a cosmological constant which causes the universe to expand. And it's tuned at just the right rate, actually, coincidentally, or not, that galaxies are possible. Because if you made the universe expand too quickly, everything would just fly apart and you'd never have anything. Like, we'd all just be dust, like, spread out. But if you made the cosmological constant really small, then actually the universe would barely expand and then it would come back down and crush. And so that might be a baby universe in that instance, like a very small universe that pops up, but it wouldn't live very long.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  It would just collapse back down into itself. And of course, we couldn't live in those baby universes because they wouldn't last long enough for galaxies or people to ever emerge. And similarly, we wouldn't emerge in the gigantic universes because they just spread apart too fast. And so this is kind of this anthropic reasoning to explain, why, why has everything seemed the way it is? Let's invent other universes. I'm not, I think a lot of scientists are a bit uncomfortable with it. It's weird to say, there's just loads of universes out there. That's how we get around a bit. But it does avoid the god situation, which a lot of scientists are desperate to avoid that at all costs.

• 40:36Mayim Bialik?

  To speak to the sort of multiverse, you know, concept, we've had it explained to us, you know, in many ways that are elegant and beautiful and, you know, I think scientifically appropriate. But practically speaking, you know, what is your, what is your take? Like, if every electron has, you know, options for spin and there are infinite numbers of ways, you know, my favorite example, you know, for me to get from here to this door, there's an infinite number of possibilities, one of which includes me jumping out the window, you know, flying to the Bahamas, you know, getting married and coming back and then, you know, exiting the door, right? What does that mean for, for the possibility of other

• 41:18Mayim Bialik?

  versions of us, other opportunities? As Jonathan often describes it, sort of the sliding doors of our existence?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might be the last great demotion, or one of the last great demotions. I mean, we've had this sequence in history, Carl Sagan used to talk about this of, you know, we used to think Earth was the center of the solar system. Then we realized, actually, the sun is the center of the solar system. We're just a planet that goes around it. And then we realized there isn't just the solar system. Each star is also another sun, which also, you know, and they have other planets. And that changed our view. We had to get demoted again. The solar system is not special. And then we thought the galaxy, the Milky Way, was all there was. And then we realized these other nebulae in the sky were actually other galaxies. And again, we got demoted. And so maybe in that sense, it's just natural that this will continue. And the idea that the universe is all there is,

• 42:09Speaker 02

  is again, eventually going to slip away from us. And even the sense of self-identity that we are all there is, you know, I am the only version of me, will also have to evaporate. Because if science is taught as anything, is that every time we think we have the audacity to believe there's something special or unique about us, it just, it will pull that away. It's the ultimate humility machine in that sense. So it would be very in keeping with the history of all of our advancements of understanding.

• 42:38Mayim Bialik?

  This was really fantastic. We're really so grateful for you to help walk us through some of the most basic and most complicated concepts in the universe and galaxy.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  That was my pleasure. Yeah, and you know what? My wife is such a big fan of your podcast.

• 42:52Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, thank you.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's, she's like, you've got to do this one. Yeah, make sure. And I was like, yeah, we're doing it. Yeah, whatever.

• 43:00Mayim Bialik?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

• 43:06Mayim Bialik?

  You know, Jonathan, I think that Dr. Kipping is delightful. I think that his pronunciation of words is very elegant. He also used some super big words like perturbation, which is like perturb, perturbation. Also, shout out to the word obliquity. Like obliqueness?

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Also, spaghettification.

• 43:27Mayim Bialik?

  Spaghettification?

• 43:29Speaker 02

  You know what I'm going to say, actually? Anytime something feels uncomfortable, I'm going to say, this is starting to feel a lot like spaghettification. This conversation is spaghettifying me.

• 43:39Mayim Bialik?

  Um, this felt like, honestly, a fantastic SAT list of words. Just like, whatever happens at Cambridge that created this guy, it's working.

• 43:50Jonathan Cohen?

  Next date night, let's jump into a black hole together and see what happens.

• 43:53Mayim Bialik?

  I do want to actually mention this, and you know, a lot of what Dr. Kipping's lab, you know, explores is a lot of statistics, it's a lot of modeling, you know, it's a lot of mathematics.

• 44:06Jonathan Cohen?

  I can't, I can't focus on what you're saying because Valerie just sent us a gif of Will Smith being buried in a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, which is the greatest thing I've ever seen.

• 44:21Mayim Bialik?

  We're trying to do an outro and Valerie is showing us spaghettification. The conversation about black holes, the fact that we're having conversations that are literally based on equations is just, it's unbelievable to me. Like, when Einstein was studying this, when we're talking about Carl Sagan's interpretations of these things, these are conversations about things that exist. We only know they exist because we have the mathematical explanation for why they can't exist. And that's why some people study physics.

• 44:58Jonathan Cohen?

  I don't know, there's something about, like, trying to understand some of the firsthand accounts that, like, I want to sit down with the analysis of the craft that pilots have seen and recorded that are moving in ways that can't be explained. I want, like, a full review and, like, I want, yes, I want the physics, I want to understand the movement patterns, like, has he reviewed all of that information? And yes, there is an overwhelming data that has been released by the government, and I understand, I understand the approach. And at the same time, like, I really want more of a reconciliation. He was hedging, obviously, he doesn't want...

• 45:41Jonathan Cohen?

  You have to. I get it. You can't take a firsthand account. I get that.

• 45:45Mayim Bialik?

  The reason is that one of the only explanations is that there is a conspiracy, there is a government cover-up that is protecting us from having access to information about aliens. That is the explanation.

• 46:00Jonathan Cohen?

  And he was like really open-minded, right? Like, he wants to believe and needs the burden of proof. And also, like, we can't think that everything that's being shared is delusional. You know, like, I can't imagine that these people are going in front of Congress and saying, "This exists, this happened to me, and it's a mass-shared delusion." Like, that doesn't track for me.

• 46:25Mayim Bialik?

  I think that one of the things that's compelling, you know, is when we think about UFOs, or UAPs, you know, whatever you'd like to call them, when we think about these things, for many of us, including myself, the only explanation, right, would be like, "Well, either this person's hallucinating and delusional, or UFOs exist," right? Like, those are my choices. But what's also true, and I don't think anyone would be surprised to learn this, is that there are many things that our government does experiments on, there are many things that our government is researching that they do not want the general public to know, there

• 47:07Mayim Bialik?

  are many things from other countries that may be adversarial, that are surfacing in our world, that the government refuses to acknowledge. That's also a possibility. So while it is true that one possibility is that people are delusional, or hallucinating, or having some mass, you know, mental illness that's, you know, has some epidemic proportions, or there are aliens, right, and this is a flying saucer, the other answer is, there is information that we do not know, that the government is not giving us, and you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that, but if we want an open and transparent

• 47:50Mayim Bialik?

  Economy, if we want an open and transparent defense system. Yes, the government does need to tell us, what are you researching? I can handle it. I'm a big girl. I can handle whatever you're looking at. I can handle the truth.

• 48:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Can you? Can you really handle it, though?

• 48:08Mayim Bialik?

  That's what Lu Elizondo is saying. Like, whatever fears the government pretends to be having, that, oh, if we tell people that aliens exist, it's gonna be mass hysteria. It's gonna be like The Purge, or like, everybody could be like drinking Coca-Cola in the morning. Like, people will go crazy.

• 48:24Jonathan Cohen?

  That's the example of people going crazy, just starting the day with a Coke.

• 48:30Mayim Bialik?

  I just mean, whatever, whatever people might be trying to forgive the government. Oh, they're protecting you, like, they're your daddy, and they're gonna protect you from all this information. I don't need that kind of protecting. I wanna know what's happening. If you have evidence of a spaceship that is made of a material and you don't know how to make it, someone's making it. It's either Russia, China, like, name the country. Or it's from someplace other than this place. Let's all talk about it. I want Dr. Kipping on it. I don't want all these people on the internet trying to explain it. I want scientists like Dr. Kipping and Adam Frank having access to this information and being able to say, guess what?

• 49:12Mayim Bialik?

  This is carbon-based, this is silica-based, like, I don't know, let's do it. I'm ready for that revolution.

• 49:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Yes, and it also goes to the Havana Syndrome energy weapon of it all, where it isn't extraterrestrial technology. It's actually technology that we didn't understand previously, but it was being deployed, and it was being deployed against us. So, who has it? Where did it get developed? How is it being used? How do we know how to protect ourselves from it? Or treat people who it's been used on? And without more information, then we're at risk.

• 49:54Jonathan Cohen?

  So if there is technology and materials that we don't understand, it's true that it could be extraterrestrial, it could be something else, or it could be that there are advancements in science that we need to understand in order to keep pace with adversaries.

• 50:13Mayim Bialik?

  Keep pace with adversaries, a number one objective right now. Seriously?

• 50:19Jonathan Cohen?

  It's important. Um, one of my favorite lines and phrases he had was the misbehaving stars that he sees.

• 50:28Jonathan Cohen?

  Yeah, that's right. This one, right here. And rocks falling from the sky, it was seen as crazy, right? You literally would have told, someone would have said, this is happening.

• 50:41Mayim Bialik?

  That's literally what happened.

• 50:42Jonathan Cohen?

  The pilots who are seeing this upside down lightning, you may be like, what is happening up there? So I agree that there is so much more happening in our environment and in our atmosphere that we're still trying to understand. But that doesn't preclude there being an extrasensory or other forces at play that we may not be able to understand. And it's true, like, there are no aliens on AM radios trying to be like, hey, Mime, I want to connect with you. So like, it makes sense that that's not the case. But there have been a lot of movement, exos, space debris that's been seen out there that signifies that there could be things

• 51:27Jonathan Cohen?

  that we don't quite understand further than we can access.

• 51:30Mayim Bialik?

  Absolutely. And look, I think, I think what Dr. Kipping is kind of showing us is that we, we need more information. We deserve more information, whether it's coming from the government or whether it's coming from the stars themselves.

• 51:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Also, one thing that he talked about that I think is, is really important, and I really appreciated Robin Hanson's thought experiment. Because there's science and then there's thought experiment. And the thought experiment helps us get out of the human centric mentality that we're going to meet, you know, an ET and they're going to come live with us and ride in our. Bike handlebar basket and then shoot us up to the moon like it could be very well that they don't have a physical form that it is more of a consciousness at this point not being in physical form on earth like it could be that intelligent life other places

• 52:25Jonathan Cohen?

  outside of earth doesn't have the physical representation that we have and then if you start to think about that then their movement their ability to appear that is totally different than we may have been imagining.

• 52:38Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, this would be the the the big cosmic joke, right? What if we could solve the issue of aliens and telepathy and extrasensory perception and energy fields and what if there are beings that can communicate but guess what? It's all through deep meditation. You can only access it when you're meditating. I don't know, maybe that's how we get to that consciousness plane. Maybe they visit people on psilocybin journeys. DMT Terrence McKenna said the tiny little aliens.

• 53:16Jonathan Cohen?

  Show everyone your shirt. What does it say at the top? Things I do in my spare time.

• 53:24Mayim Bialik?

  Really, really fun episode, Jonathan. Really, really glad we got to talk to Dr. Kipping and the work that he does is incredible. Please join us over on Substack. There's going to be a lot of conversation about this over there in our Breaker community. So please be part of it and contribute. We want to know what you think, what your experiences are and how you can add to this larger body of knowledge that we're all collecting and from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  It's my and Bialik's Breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's gonna break down, it's a breakdown, she's gonna break it down.