Are We Alone? Cosmic Loneliness and the Longing to Believe (with Adam Kirsch)

Has the earth been visited by extraterrestrials? Are we alone? Despite no formal evidence for conscious life outside of earth, the belief that we are not alone has become more common among both scientists and everyday people. Listen as author Adam Kirsch talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the urge to believe that there are sentient beings elsewhere in the universe and that these aliens want to connect with human beings. Topics discussed include why belief in extraterrestrials has become more mainstream, existential loneliness, religion, extinction, and Elon Musk's desire to get to Mars.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is June 27, 2026, and my guest is Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine. Adam was last here in January of 2025, discussing his book On Settler Colonialism. Our topic for today is his latest book, We Want to Believe: How Aliens Went Mainstream and Why It Matters. Adam, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. I'm really glad to be back with you.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Now, I have to confess, I wasn't interested in the topic of this book. So if you're listening, don't hang up, don't switch off, because if it doesn't excite you, I think this will be a very interesting conversation. It's a lovely book. It's full of things I didn't know, and it's also very provocative. So I'm excited about our conversation. Despite the topic of the book, my faith in the author was rewarded. Now, the first part of the book is about, and it's very short, by the way, listeners, it's 130 short pages. The first part of the book is about the change in the public conversation about aliens. And

• 1:44Speaker 00

  by aliens, we're talking about would-be visitors from outer space. It's a hard phrase to actually explain, sentient non-humans from a different place. You're right. In the last decade, however, the way we talk about ETs and UFOs has undergone a significant change, actually, two complementary changes. First, the government and the media begin to treat the subject much more seriously. For reasons this book will explore, UFO sightings that would once have been dismissed as hoaxes are relegated to the pages of supermarket tabloids are now respectfully discussed in the mainstream press and on the floor of Congress. As a direct result, public opinion

• 2:29Speaker 00

  on the subject has changed significantly, with more Americans than ever saying they believe the Earth has been visited by aliens. Now, Adam, I missed this. My first reaction is, what the heck? What is going on?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Well, your reaction is a common one. In fact, I say in the introduction to the book that while I was writing this book, when I told people I'm writing a book about aliens and UFOs, a lot of people were like, okay, check, please. I don't want to talk about this. I don't want to hear about this. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that there have been aliens or UFOs on Earth. In fact, I'm quite sure that there haven't been. But as you say, the thing that made me want to write about this was that in 2017, there was a really significant shift in the way that this subject is covered and talked about in the media, and it can be pinpointed pretty closely. So in December 2017, The New York Times and The Washington Post both published front-page stories about the so-called Pentagon

• 3:26Speaker 01

  UFO videos. And these were videos that had circulated online in a sort of leaked or rumored clandestine fashion, but now we're being officially reported that they were videos taken by Navy fighter planes, showing strange things in the air, hovering orbs. One thing that was described is looking like a Tic Tac. And they moved, and they looked like things that weren't conventional aircraft. And what was significant about these videos was that the Pentagon had historically had a policy of denying that it took any notice of UFO reports. So going back to the 1960s, the official Pentagon stance was, there are no

• 4:08Speaker 01

  UFOs, none of our people have seen UFOs, and this is not a subject that we pay any attention to. And now it turned out that, in fact, there were these videos, people within the military had seen things like this, there had been reports of them, and that fed into this idea, which has always been important for the UFO believer community, that the government is hiding things that it knows. At the same time, these reports showed that there had been a Defense Department program called ATIP, which was a short-lived, five-year program that had a budget of $22 million to collect and analyze reports of

• 4:50Speaker 01

  UFOs by military personnel. And again, that was something that the Pentagon had always officially denied, said did not exist, and then it turned out that there was this small program, more or less buried in the enormous bureaucracy of the Pentagon with a few people working on it. So these two things were reported for the first time in December 2017, and it really changed the way that mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and then others, talked about this story. Because before then, I think anyone who talked about UFO sightings, the presumption was that they were a crank or a hoax or something like that. And now, for the first time, it seemed like, well, maybe there is a story here. Maybe there's something that we could get to the bottom to and report. Maybe there's more to this than meets the eye. And I think that that

• 5:33Speaker 01

  change, which I saw happening as a journalist, working at the time at The Wall Street Journal, and seeing how other publications were covering this story, was really interesting to me, because after all, the idea that there might be UFOs is pretty interesting, if it's true, right? It's big if true, as people say. So the book starts with that. That's the first chapter. But then it goes on to talk in more, in broader terms, about why people are interested in UFOs, why people want to believe in them, and how it demonstrates some of the same dynamics that we've seen over the last 10 years going on in politics about other issues. And then it looks at the science of, well, what actually is the state of science about life outside of Earth? What do scientists think about it? What are they doing to find it?

• 6:18Speaker 00

  So you talk, many, many books have been written about this, and you talk about this community of believers, as your want, very respectfully. But fundamentally, what it comes down to is, despite this surge of interest, despite this openness on the part of the government, say, to admit to certain things that have been going on, there's really no evidence, none, not like weak evidence, or all the evidence is what we would call, the fancy name would be testimonials, the other name for it would be stories. There

• 7:03Speaker 00

  are things that happened to a single person, a pilot, who could be credible in some dimension because he seems to lead a normal life. And there are other people, maybe, you know, are a little more troubled and who make claims about being sucked into spaceships and so on. Summarize the lack of evidence, just to be blunt about it.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Sure. So after this sort of initial revelations, these revelations in 2017, there was a lot of interest in finding out, are there actually secret videos, or artifacts, or things that could be revealed or disclosed that would really clinch the case that there have been UFOs on Earth, and that the government knows about it and has been hiding it. And there have been a number of people, not a number, but let's say about half a dozen people, who, as you say, are credentialed, who have histories working for the Defense Department or the State Department.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Military.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Military officers, who have made these claims pretty vocally, including in 2023 in front of Congress. There was a House hearing in which three people who were military pilots testified about things that they had seen. And so there have been people promoting the idea that military pilots have encountered UFOs, or more provocatively, that the government has alien spacecraft in a warehouse somewhere, or even corpses of aliens that have been retrieved from crash sites. And there have been people who have said, quite seriously, I know that this is true, but I can't tell you exactly where they are, or someone who I know knows, but they won't tell me exactly where they are. So there's always like one

• 8:47Speaker 01

  step removed of, I can't actually point it out to you myself, but trust me, because I'm sure that this exists. And so when it comes down to it, there is no evidence. And in fact, I saw a discussion about this on social media, where a lot of this discussion takes place, where someone was quoting something that I had written in this book about how there's still no evidence. And someone said, that's not true. There might not be proof, but there is evidence. So to me, what that gets to is one of the main things I write about in the book, which is, what does it mean for there to be evidence of something? What's the difference between evidence and testimony? And to get into the sort of deeper questions of, what does it mean to think scientifically about the world? How do we

• 9:32Speaker 01

  evaluate scientific claims? Especially for someone like me who's not a scientist, I'm a humanist, if anything, with my interests are in literature and religion. And so I am not an astronomer or anything like that. So putting myself in the position of someone who, like most of us, is hearing scientific claims, how do we think about these claims? How do we evaluate them not being experts, right? And I think that that's an important question that we have to deal with in lots of ways. In a democracy, most recent example might be public health. There are a lot of public health claims where people who are scientists and experts say one thing, and then there's a large number of laypeople who disagree with them or won't listen to them and believe something else is true.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And how do you reconcile those two claims in a democracy where, on most issues, the majority rules?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  And it's fascinating to me, because there's been no time in human history

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Where we have as much access to information as we have right now, it's really at an exhilarating time for a curious person. I've said this many times on the program. And yet, there is this nagging suspicion that many of us have that even though information is plentiful, very few people are well-informed. And their willingness, the willingness of so many people to believe in conspiracies, to believe in something because the experts believe the opposite and they must be being exploited, the citizen is, is, it's a bad, it seems like a crazy thing to say, but

• 11:14Speaker 00

  certain medieval level of knowledge and misinformation, disinformation, something akin to witch hunts and demons in the Middle Age, in the medieval times, it's just kind of extraordinary. And in this particular case, if we really were being visited by alien beings, you'd think there'd be quite a bit of that. It's not the kind of, first of all, it'd be really hard to cover it up. The second thing is, it wouldn't be like, you know, I saw something, I wasn't sure what it was. And that would be, that seems to be like the main evidence.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  It's not like there were a group of people, say, at a 7-Eleven, and a person with four heads came in and spoke in a language no one understood, and they were all swept up into the spaceship together, and they gave them a piece of metal that isn't available in, on Earth. I mean, these are the things that we would normally call evidence. And there's nothing. It's just not a plausible, not a plausible hypothesis on the surface.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  It's not plausible for, for a couple of reasons. One is, just looking at the question of images, right? There've been, there are billions and billions of people all the time with a camera in their hand, walking around all over Earth with cameras in their hands. And no one has ever taken a picture of what's really clearly an alien or an alien spaceship. Whenever these images are proposed, it's always something that's sort of an infrared radar image that looks like a blurry circle, or a light in the sky, something like that. There's never a clear image of anything to look at. And in fact, that's always been true. And one, one thing I quote in the book is that in the 1950s, Carl Jung, the psychologist, wrote a book about UFO sightings in the 1950s, where he talked about, you know, well,

• 13:11Speaker 01

  what's, what's really going on when people say that they're seeing UFOs? And he said, one thing about UFOs is that they're not photogenic, meaning that like even people who say, I've seen a UFO, can never actually seem to take a picture of one. He talks about a friend of his who was like, I saw UFOs in the sky above my head for an hour. And Jung says, well, then why didn't you take a picture of it? And he says, well, I just forgot, you know, I was so absorbed with it, I never, I didn't even think it occurred to me to take my camera out and take a picture, that kind of thing. So there's always a reason why an actual image is never produced. And then the other kinds of evidence that you might expect if there was an alien spacecraft would be, you know, something that would show up on a space telescope, or a radar, radar facility, or a radio astronomy observatory.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  There are lots of people who study space and the atmosphere, who are monitoring it all the time, and who'd be able to tell us if something came to our planet from somewhere else. And certainly nothing like an artifact, like here's something you can hold in your hands, you can analyze, for example, the isotopes in it, and say, well, this is a kind of metal that isn't found on Earth, or something like that. Those are all the kinds of things that you would expect if we were talking about normal scientific evidence. And so, there's a famous phrase on this subject that Carl Sagan said, because Carl Sagan, who was a real astronomer, who was very interested in the idea of extraterrestrial life, and wrote about it and thought about it, said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  So if you're going to claim that something as extraordinary as a UFO or an alien has come to Earth, then you have to have some piece of extraordinary evidence to back up that claim. And that's something that has never been produced. So I think the, the sort of obvious answer is, this evidence doesn't exist because these things haven't happened. But, and this is sort of the reason why I found this interesting subject, because that in and of itself is not that interesting of a statement. It's like, yes, that is sort of the obvious thing to say. The real interesting part is, well, why do people believe things for which there's no evidence? And that's a question that isn't, that you can ask about UFOs, you could also ask it about God, or the Bible, or religion, or a whole lot of other things that people, a lot more people believe in, and take a lot more seriously than UFOs.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  So if you, if you say, I've seen, I had an experience of, you know, in communion with God, or I saw an angel, or something like that, those are the kinds of things that religions are built on. But for that too, there's never any evidence. There's never a photograph, right? There's never an artifact. So, one question that this leads to is, well, how do you distinguish between different kinds of claims for which there are no evidence? What, when presented by someone with a claim, something happened to me. For example, some of these people, as you mentioned, say, I was taken aboard in a UFO, and I saw an alien, or an alien performed an experiment on me. That is a claim for which there's no evidence. Another kind of claim for which there's no evidence is, I saw the face of God, or God

• 16:03Speaker 01

  spoke to me. How do you evaluate these kinds of claims? What do you do when someone brings a claim into the public sphere like that, for which you, that can't be rationally discussed because it can't be falsified? There's no way to prove that it's wrong. What kind of authority does that kind of claim have? If you say to people, well, all the scientists say there's no UFOs, but I know, because it happened to me, that there is a UFO. How do you respond to that? How can, how can you say to that person, well, you're wrong about what happened to you, what you think happened to you didn't happen? Those are all questions that go beyond the issue of just UFOs, which ultimately, you know, I think, still are in the category of, no one really believes it, except people

• 16:46Speaker 01

  who are quite, quite convinced. And then the sort of further question is, well, if there aren't any UFOs, why aren't there? Because that raises a whole other set of cosmological questions, which I get into in the second half of the book.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  We'll talk about it. We'll talk about that in a minute. I want to stick with what you just said. First couple of footnotes. You said it's something that looked like a Tic Tac. You mean the breath mint?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Yes, the breath mint.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Meaning, something that's not, it's not aerodynamically shaped, like most things that take flight in our air, in our atmosphere.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  You can think of it as like a little oval or tube with rounded edges, with no wings and no visible engine. So if you see something like that, and it's, it's zooming across the sky, it doesn't seem to make sense as a human-made aeronautical device.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  And then you also said, you've used UFO to mean flying saucer, but of course, technically UFO means an unidentified flying object, which could include, would include things that are just, you know, visual illusions, explicable through, it's a balloon, or a some atmospheric event, or a drone, or some other things, right?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  But it's come to mean aliens in a spaceship, a UFO.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's a good example of how language changes around this subject. So now, people don't say UFO anymore, they say UAP. UAP is sort of the new approved acronym, it's what the government uses, for example, and it's what people who discuss the subject usually say now. And that change happened about 10 years ago, around the same time as this surge of new reporting on the subject. And UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomenon. And originally, it stood for unidentified aerial phenomenon. But then it was expanded from aerial to anomalous, because some people said, well, maybe these are things that aren't coming from the air, but they're coming from under the surface of the Earth, or under the ocean, or another time dimension, like they're coming from the future.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  So anything that doesn't seem to make sense is a UAP. Essentially, it means the same thing as UFO. And one thing I say in the book is that, as you say, UFO now connotes a flying saucer, and sort of something we would think of as science fiction. But in fact, unidentified flying object was created to be a term exactly like UAP. It was supposed to be a neutral term. It was supposed to sound neutral and scientific. And it was invented by the Air Force in the early 1950s, because people were talking about flying saucers. And they said, well, that, no one takes flying saucers seriously, that sounds like a, comes from a comic book. Let's call it UFOs, that's the neutral descriptive term. The problem is that the phenomenon itself is what's the problem, not the way we talk about it.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  So it's what, what people sometimes call a euphemism treadmill, where the, the name keeps changing, but the, because there's a problem with the thing that's being named. So you don't call it a flying saucer, you call it UFO, you don't call it a UFO, you call it a UAP. But the problem is, not what you call it, the problem is the thing you're talking about.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  I just want to say one thing about defense of believing in God. Believing in God, it's, I agree, does not have the scientific evidence behind it that we would use to, I don't know, show that the dinosaurs were killed by a comet, and not by something else. A meteor landing, a large meteor making an impact with the Earth, and dirkening the atmosphere for a long time. But, but people who believe in God, I would just make a distinction between people who think God has spoken to them, which is unverifiable, and even with recording.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  And people who have intellectual reasons for believing God, I just want to make a small vote for the belief in God is not the same level of an angel picked me up and did XYZ to me, that's all.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  That's definitely, definitely true, that's a good, a good thing to emphasize. And there, there's actually, I think, two important distinctions. One is, people mean a lot of different things when they say believing in God, they mean a lot of different things by God, not just in the sense of different religions, but different ways of thinking about that religion, you know, the way that Rambon believes in God is very different from the way that, you know, the Babur Terebi might experience God, those are all, they're all talking about the same God, but they mean different things by it, so that's one thing. But then another thing is that, the reason why UFOs or UAPs are interesting is that if they exist, they're not supernatural, right? They're not something that's supposed to be miraculous, that you have to have faith to understand.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  They are supposed to be physical objects that exist in the physical universe in three dimensions like everything else, so they are something that should be susceptible to empirical proof, which is, sort of by definition, religious faith is not supposed to be susceptible to empirical proof, and that's why you say it's faith rather than evidence. Evidence is the faith, faith is the evidence of things not seen, is what the New Testament says. So UFOs are not supposed to be that kind of category. What I'm really talking about more is, and this is an example I use in the book, Lourdes is a Catholic holy site because in the 19th century, there was a young girl named Bernadette who said that she saw the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mary appeared to her on a number of

• 22:07Speaker 01

  occasions and spoke to her, and at first, the local priest in Lourdes in France, in southern France, didn't believe her, and said, this is, you know, this is a girl making stuff up. And then as the word spread and more and more people heard about it, the church changed its mind and said, we recognize that this is true, we believe it happened, and Lourdes became an official pilgrimage site, and sort of, this became a recognized part of Catholic belief. So, that's an example of how, the same kind of, that original claim is the same kind of claim as, I saw a flying saucer, I can't prove it, but I'm telling you, this happened to me. So then, really the question is, how do you get from, I'm telling you this happened to

• 22:51Speaker 01

  me, to, you're a crank versus, you are a revered figure because we believe you?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say, you know, it is evidence for that person, but not for me, because I didn't experience it, and certainly, religious believers have, not necessarily hearing voices of God or angels, but have emotional, whatever we want to call it, experiences of, of the divine, that are evidence for their own personal set of beliefs. But I would make a distinction between that and say, a claim of, say, you know, mass revelation for the Jewish Bible, or, you know, someone who on the road to somewhere sees something unique. I think there, there's gradations of different kinds of what would convince a non-believer. But, coming back to aliens for a second, you write the following, you say, "Some people

• 23:39Speaker 00

  claim to know for certain that aliens exist because they've encountered one, seen an alien spaceship close up, or even been taken aboard, but the majority of UFO enthusiasts are not true believers, they are want-to believers, hoping that they will live long enough to seek conclusive proof that human beings are not the only intelligent species in the universe," end of quote. Are you in that group?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  I would say yes, although, and I'd say, yes, and that's why I got interested in this story when I first started to follow it and read about it, and over the course of reading about it, I'd say that I've become more, less of a want-to believer, or at least more reconciled to the idea that we will not see that in, in my lifetime, or maybe ever. But I'd say that the basic instinct of wanting to believe, yes, I think that, and that's something that I think a lot of people share, both laypeople and scientists, is, it would be truly amazing if we could find evidence that there's intelligent life not on Earth, in some other part of the cosmos. It would change the way we think about, you know, the universe, about life, about intelligence,

• 24:48Speaker 01

  about ourselves and our destiny. This is again, something that Carl Sagan writes about, in a pretty moving way. So, I think that wanting to believe that is a very natural instinct and desire, and the question is, what would justify that belief? What kind of, what would we need to find to justify that belief?

• 25:09Speaker 00

  And just one last thought on, you know, revelation and feeling of, something's happened to you personally that you cannot communicate. I always thought that, one of the most magnificent, and I've spoken about this before, one of the most magnificent aspects of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Spielberg movie is, you know, I'm blanking on his name, Richard?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Dreyfus.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Richard Dreyfus, thank you. Richard Dreyfus is, has been visited. There's been a revelation to him, only to him, and maybe some others, but no one else around him has experienced it, so, he of course becomes obsessed. And I love the scene where he's, you know, he has a vision in his head of the mountain he's supposed to find, where the, the aliens are going to come visit him, and his family suddenly stops in silence to see that he's shaped his mashed potatoes in the form of the mountain, and, you know, if you're a, if you've had a religious revelation, or

• 26:11Speaker 00

  you've had a experience with aliens that is meaningful to you, it would not be a small thing, it would not be like, oh yeah, by the way, did I mention? It would become an obsession, and the people you talk about, and it's not a big part of the book, but the community of people who feel that this is true, have, obviously, they're a, they feel very much like a oppressed minority, that they, they've been, they have not been given the credence that their personal experience demands.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and one of the things I talk about in the book is, there's a scholar who writes about this subject named D.W. Pasulka, an American academic, Diane Pasulka, and she has, she writes about something called a book experience. The book experience is, people who have had things that happened to them and they don't understand what they were, read a book about UFOs, and then they understand that what happened to them was they saw a UFO. So it's like, you have an experience that you can't interpret, and then the concept of UFOs and aliens allows you to interpret it, it gives you the vocabulary to interpret it. Other people might find the vocabulary to interpret things that happened to them in religion, or mysticism.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  These people say, now I realize that what happened to me was, I saw a UFO, I saw an alien, I was taken aboard a spaceship, and it gives you, it gives you clarity, it gives you a way to make meaning out of, out of your experiences, which is something that we all want and need. So if someone incorporates that idea very deeply into their sense of self and into their worldview, but it's an idea that most people think is ridiculous, it puts them in a sort of strange position, where most people don't take them seriously, or don't listen to them, and I think that that's why, for a lot of people who do believe in UFOs, the idea of disclosure is so important.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  So you mentioned Close Encounters, the most recent Steven Spielberg movie, which is also about aliens, is called Disclosure Day, and it's about, it's not as good as Close Encounters, I don't think, but it's about the idea that the government has a bunch of evidence, like video evidence, of UFOs and aliens dating back to the 1940s, and a couple of brave whistleblowers are trying to leak this, these videos and get them out into public, and that's something that in the UFO world is called disclosure. Disclosure is, the government has hiding these secrets, one day they will be disclosed, they will be revealed, and everyone will see all along that the believers were right and the skeptics were wrong. So the idea that you want some evidence, some vindication, is a big part of, I think,

• 28:54Speaker 01

  what feeds this, this UFO discourse.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  And the last thing I'll say about this, and then we'll turn to the scientific community, which is, in a way, much more disturbing and fascinating than the layperson's beliefs in this. Again, I'm, you know, I'm a religious person. I have a lot of respect for religion, but what strikes me in reading your summary, which is very artfully done, again, it's very respectful of the people who have had experiences like this, and despite the fact that there's no, quote, "real evidence," the persistence of that is just, for me, another brick in the wall of my view that human beings aren't so interested in the truth.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  The truth is, truth won't set you free. The truth is, truth is depressing a lot of the time, and it's more pleasant thinking about other things. Now, you confessed earlier that you would love, it would be amazing and extraordinary and world-changing if aliens visited humans, or we could get direct evidence of some confirmable kind of their presence, but you looked into it, you spent some time doing research for this book, and you have to confess that, well, this just isn't, the evidence isn't there. Most people don't want to dig, and I just think about this moment, coming back to what I said earlier about, you know, the extraordinary amount of information we have, and yet how uninformed we are.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  One of the reasons we're uninformed, it's really hard to know what information's reliable and what information is not. In the old days, the gatekeepers were the experts of that information. They were sometimes reliable and often not, and we've now come to this place where there are no really credible gatekeepers anymore. I'm sure some people look to you, sometimes people, I'm embarrassed by it, but people look to me, they trust me because they've heard me talk about things and they assume I'm a person of, you know, of good faith in examining things, and we're all flawed as human beings. There's no, you know, reliable source that can be perfectly trusted, because we're all

• 31:11Speaker 00

  human, and I just think this moment is so extraordinary in that way. Yes, there have been times in the past where we struggle, always, where we didn't know what was true and what was untrue, but I feel that we've become unmoored in a certain way in 2026, where, you know, the amount of effort it takes to figure out, just to take a, you know, you can pick any, almost any example in the modern, in modern, I'll pick something that's not controversial, whether Argentina behaved well or badly in the World Cup. Well, there's a whole bunch of people who want you to think they'd behave badly, and then it's a bunch of people who want to defend Argentina, and as an outsider who's not deeply

• 31:54Speaker 00

  immersed in football, you know, I'm sort of interested in it, but I don't really have any idea what's true, and that's true of so many things these days, and it's troubling.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I think that's, yeah, that's definitely true, and it's one of the reasons why I think it's not a coincidence that UFOs had this upsurge of interest at just the same moment as a lot of populist movements in politics, in economics.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  Conspiracy, conspiracy theories.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Conspiracy theories about COVID and populist politics, like I talk a little bit about Brexit, because Brexit was an example where every, I mean, every economist, or 98% of economists said, "This is going to be very bad for us, we shouldn't do this," in Britain, said, "This is going to be bad for us to leave the European Union, we shouldn't do it," and yet voters approved it anyway. They didn't believe or want to listen to, they didn't care about what the experts said, they said, "We want to do this." Similarly, with COVID, experts said, "Take this vaccine, it'll stop you from getting COVID," and a surprising number of people said, "I don't believe you, I'm not going to take it. I would rather take, you know, a horse deworming medicine," which is also a medicine, right?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  It's just that, it's not a medicine you, the expert, told me to take, it's a medicine that someone on social media told me to take. So what's, it seems to me that sort of what's at the bottom of this is, who has the right to tell me what to do? Who has the right to make up my mind for me? And I think that people don't like the idea that someone else is telling them what to do, or telling them what they should think and not think, and just the very fact of being told, "This is what you must think, this is what you must do," for a lot of us provokes a reaction, "Well, I'm not going to do it just because you told me to do it, I want to do what I want to do, and if that's something that you would think is wrong, I don't care." So yes, I mean, there are still, I think, trustworthy gatekeepers about the news, it's just that, for example, you know, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal,

• 33:44Speaker 01

  or as a journalist, of course, I would say that, but having worked in some of these places, I've seen from the inside and can say that people who work at these places really do take quite seriously the idea that they're telling the truth, that they're finding out what really happened. People outside who don't trust the mainstream media have no faith in that, and they say that you're serving some kind of agenda, you're trying to serve someone's interest. So there, I think there are some, at least, gatekeepers out there. The problem is, people don't believe in gatekeeping or gatekeepers, and then another problem is just the convenience of it, like by far the most convenient way to find out what's going on in the world is, especially for young people, you open TikTok, scroll through it, and you'll find dozens of people sort of giving you a little spiel about what's happening in the world.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  The problem is, those people don't necessarily know. They are, they could be completely ignorant, they could be telling you lies out of some self-interested reason. So if you don't have any standard for evaluating the claims that you're getting, it does create a pretty bad situation. I think people are uninformed about a lot of things that they need, ought to know better about, that it would be better if we all could agree, at least on some guides to reality.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  And I'll just finish this with the observation that when I think about the lessons that we should have learned, it's one thing to learn a lesson and then forget it, that's very human, and it's very true of humanity at large. I've just become very aware of the fact that certain fads and trends just come back over and over and over again, because I interviewed Milton Friedman in 2006, and I actually made this claim that because there was no demand for price controls at that time, when gas prices had gone up a lot, that showed that economic education was effective, and he laughed at me and said, "No, no, no, it's because there are a lot of people alive who

• 35:37Speaker 00

  were alive in the 1970s, and remember how horrible they were, and when they die off, there'll be a demand for price controls, and now we have, you know, a demand for rent control in New York City, and with great popularity and so on." You know, the other example would be the Great Depression. My father was born in 1930, he never bought a stock, he only bought bonds. A terrible decision, in my view, but it was impossible for him. Stocks were dangerous, he, his parents had been troubled, you know, had challenges, his relatives, because of this crash in the stock market, and they talked about it all the time. So I get that, I get that we forget things, but that we don't learn things to start with is a different level of failure.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  So if you said, you know, "What are the lessons of the financial crisis of 2008?" Most people would pick whatever their ideological bent is and wave it around like a hammer. If you ask people, "What's our lesson from the COVID virus?" It's the same thing. Now, I do think that people who lived through COVID will be skeptical of the idea, say, of closing schools and keeping kids at home, but it very well could be the case that that's the wrong lesson to learn about the next virus, because it actually could be really bad for kids, whereas this one was relatively safe for kids. I just think it's fascinating to me how hard it is for us as a species to learn lessons and remember them.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, definitely, and part of the problem is maybe the distinction between facts and interpretations, or facts and how we respond to facts. It's one thing to say, you know, "COVID, we shouldn't have closed schools," or "There should have been mask mandates," which I think at the time, experts said, "We have to close schools, we have to have mask mandates," and now in retrospect, I think there's a lot of evidence that we didn't need to do those things, but the idea that, you know, COVID was caused by a certain coronavirus is a fact. So the distinguishing between facts and how you respond to facts, there's always going to be disagreements of opinions about actions and policies, but if people can't even agree

• 37:45Speaker 01

  on the basic facts of what happened, of reality, of existence, then you can't even have those discussions. And one thing that I sort of realized on a deeper level in thinking about the subject of UFOs is that most, I mean, I think of myself as a scientifically, you know, literate and rational person, but when I thought about, well, how do we know, how did people discover that the Earth rotates around the Sun and not vice versa? And I started to look into, to read about, you know, what did Copernicus, what did Galileo? In fact, it's an extremely complicated idea, and the proof of it is not at all clear. So you have to really do a lot of thinking even to understand that level of scientific fact. So basically, when most of us say, "The Earth revolves around the Sun," what we mean is,

• 38:30Speaker 01

  we've always been taught the Earth revolves around the Sun, and we trust the people who taught us that. So if you don't trust the people who are teaching you things, then you have almost no basis for understanding reality.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  I would just say one thing about that, which is usually it's a little more complicated this, but usually the people who are telling you that the Earth goes around the sun and vice versa are not going to profit from misleading you. So you have a certain, perhaps naive, trust in them. The reason it's a little naive is that while they don't profit from it, they might have a worldview or not an ideology, but a scientific framework that they've become accustomed to, that is part of their sense of self, their prestige and their profession. So it's just really hard, you know, let's leave it at that.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, bringing back to UFOs, one of the common things that UFO believers say is, one of the rhetorical strategies is, we are actually more scientific than the scientists. Because the definition of, they would say, of science is you keep an open mind and evaluate the evidence. And whenever we come to the scientists and say, I saw UFO, they won't listen to us at all. They won't consider the evidence. So by dismissing the evidence out of hand, by saying that couldn't possibly be a UFO, they're not being scientific. So the anti-scientific people are the more scientific than the actual scientists. And I write about this in the book as to where that idea comes from, and the idea of a paradigm shift that

• 40:01Speaker 01

  everyone believes that the world operates one way until you get this sort of anomaly, and the anomaly shows that the existing framework has to be changed. There are a lot of people who would say, well, UFOs are a paradigm shift like that. We have to go beyond sort of Western scientific rationalism and acknowledge that there are dimensions of reality that can't be explained that way. That's part of the appeal of it for a lot of people is to say, there are things that science doesn't know that we know better.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would not go that far personally. And yet, I have a certain respect for that viewpoint. I think it's a rhetorical position to some extent. But the idea that we should be open minded about it, obviously, again, as a religious person, I've confronted so many people who just assume, they're not interested in hearing anything talked to you about at all. They just know you're a crack. By definition, you're an irrational moron. And it's been, you know, we don't have to go into the details, but the examples we've been talking about COVID and the response to COVID and both the medical and the social response to it, a lot of people were pretty close minded about it. And we found out later that they knew that, that they were protecting either themselves or their reputation, or

• 41:10Speaker 00

  they wanted power. It's, as again, it's a complicated thing. I want to go to the scientists because it's, in a way, as I said a minute ago, in a way, it's more fascinating and disturbing that the scientific community has become more open. So while they do not accept the person who, and perhaps are disrespectful of a person who was claimed to have been whisked into a spaceship and experimented on for a length of time, they have their own need, like the laypeople we've been talking about, to believe that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. So let's talk about that first. Where does that come

• 41:54Speaker 00

  from? Why do they, why do scientists, and when I say scientists, the most prominent one in your book is Avi Loeb, who's an astrophysicist at Harvard, Wizard Two. That's about as good as you get, you know? Astrophysics at Harvard is not a small thing. And yet, he wrote a book and talks about a UAP, an anomalous phenomenon, that he made the case for it being, coming from an intelligent source somewhere else. What's going on? What's their, first talk about the philosophical questions we're dealing with, and how is it possible that scientists have become evangelists, to pick a deliberately pointed word for this viewpoint?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Well, Avi Loeb is definitely an outlier, and I'll talk about him. But first, I'll talk about the wider question. So until, say, like, the mid 20th century, the assumption of scientifically minded, free thinking, progressive people in the West was, there must be intelligent life on other planets. And that was a sort of deductive process, which is, the only reason to think that Earth is special is if you believe that God created Earth for special reasons. And that's sort of the traditional religious or biblical idea that God created our planet to be the home of humanity, has a special interest in our

• 43:20Speaker 01

  planet. Starting with the scientific revolution, scientifically minded people started to say, well, what Copernicus taught us is that Earth is just another planet, right? Earth is not the center of the universe, it's one of many planets, one of eight planets, we now say, revolving around the sun. And so if there's something special about Earth, there's no special reason why there should be life on Earth and nowhere else. So if you look at

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Don't forget Darwin.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  And don't forget Darwin. So if you look at philosophers and natural scientists in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, the sign of being a sort of, of being a smart, progressive thinker was to say, there are definitely intelligent life on other planets. Immanuel Kant said that, he wrote about it. I got to talk about other philosophers who wrote about this in the Enlightenment. Alfred Russell Wallace, in the early 20th century, who is known as the rival to Darwin, or the person who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, was one of the first people to say, well, actually, maybe it's not that simple. Maybe there, maybe we could have a scientific universe, and still

• 44:30Speaker 01

  there might only be life on Earth. But for most, most people would say, by the logic of Copernicanism or perspectivism, there's nothing special about Earth, there's no reason why life can only be on Earth. And if we could only see other planets, we would find people like us, or intelligent beings like us, on other planets. That was sort of like a common idea. And so in the mid 20th century, when it became possible for the first time to actually observe other planets using radio astronomy, and then space probes, and spacecraft, and deep space observatories, and we found that in fact, there isn't intelligent life on any of the planets in our solar system, and as far as we can tell, we have never found evidence of intelligent life outside of our solar system either, or even of any

• 45:15Speaker 01

  kind of life yet. That upset the standard scientific worldview, which was, there's nothing special about life on Earth. So now it turns out that as far as we know in the year 2026, it actually, there is something special about life on Earth, which is that there's no life anywhere else that we know of. We have yet to find evidence of life anywhere else. So what I say in the book is that for laypeople, the problem is that UFOs have been seen. And for scientists, the problem is that UFOs haven't been seen. Because there's no real reason to explain why that is. So what I talk about in the second half of the book is the attempt, the scientific attempt to understand, why is

• 45:54Speaker 01

  life, why is intelligent life seemingly much more rare than we once thought that it was? And Avi Loeb, who became sort of prominent, and maybe amongst scientists notorious, for saying that some of the things that have come into our solar system from outside of our solar system might be technological, that they're not just rocks, but they might be, his example is a light sail, a sail from an alien spacecraft designed to capture the force of light to propel it. Even Avi Loeb doesn't say, that's definitely what this is. What he says is, in an interest, so to go back to the parallels of religion,

• 46:36Speaker 01

  there's a famous idea known as Pascal's wager. The Christian thinker Pascal said, we should believe in God, just upon the logic of a bet, because if you, if God exists and you believe in him, you win eternal life. And if he doesn't exist and you believe in him, you haven't really lost anything. So just on like calculating, what's of benefit to you, what are the best odds, you should believe in God. Avi Loeb says, drawing a direct comparison, there was this thing that came into our solar system called Umumua, which was the first object that was ever sort of confirmed to come from outside of our solar system. It was the first thing that we, that scientists said, based on its orbit and trajectory, we know this thing is not orbiting the sun, it must have come from somewhere else. He

• 47:17Speaker 01

  says, we should make Umumua's wager. We should say, even if this thing isn't alien technology, we should act as if it is alien technology, because then we'll take seriously the idea of aliens, we will develop tools to detect aliens and alien technology, so that the next time, if there really is alien technology, we'll be able to find it. The thing about Avi Loeb that I think has made him suspicious to a lot of astronomers and other scientists is that he has since found like two or three more examples of this. And he's, he's starting to say that like, lots of things are alien technology, or could be alien technology. Again, he never comes right down and says, this is definitely an alien spaceship. What he says is, well, this other interstellar object could also be for an alien technology.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  It's anomalous.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  It's anomalous, right. Or that it could have this other explanation. And that annoys other scientists, because in fact, there isn't sufficient reason to say that. But he wants to keep open this possibility. He wants to allow us to keep thinking about it.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  And just to come back to this question of this belief, this presumption that there's life everywhere, by the way, not just, there might be one other. sentient creature in the universe that there must be frequent. You know, it's the law of large numbers. There's, you know, one with 22 zeros after its roughly stars. Many of them will have planets around them. So the denominator is very large. And presumably, there's no reason they wouldn't have some kind of life. And we'll come back in a minute. We'll talk about how you might think about what the odds of that are and so on. But the other, of course, it's very much like religion or a hypothesis that cannot be refuted. Is if people say, well, why haven't, why haven't they visited us? Or why haven't we found the evidence?

• 49:02Speaker 00

  The answer is, well, it's far away. And it is far away, which is a fascinating reality as far as we understand science. You know, if you lived in, in primitive times, the stars looked like maybe some kind of circle, a sphere that it was around the earth that had points of light. And when we start to realize them, the distances, you know, you quote Pascal, "La silence éternel des espaces infini me frérait." So I think I got it right. It's the most pretentious thing I know. Sorry, I had to get it in there. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. When people start, and that was then, that was Pascal, that 1600s, maybe.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  When we think about what we know now, that not only is the universe so vast, not only is every piece of it sort of moving away from, from any kind of center, that there's, there's a cosmic sense of loneliness and despair. So on the one hand, oh, they're out there, but we just can't communicate with them because they're really far away. But in another sense, if they're that far away, it almost doesn't matter because we're going to be alone. And it's really hard for people to deal with that, which is fascinating in and of itself. So talk about that, because I have my own view on it. I'd love to hear what you have to say.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, well, so what you say about the, the number of planets or our knowledge of how big the universe is. And, and so when in, you know, medieval times or early modern times, when people thought the number of planets is five, because those are the ones that you can see with an unaided eye. So there are five planets. And then when telescopes were developed, people discovered, you know, planets beyond Jupiter and Saturn, and that there are actually eight or nine, as we used to say now, eight. And then as time goes on, and we get a better sense that the universe is so large and potentially infinite, that there is a truly staggering number of potential planets. So if the number of planets goes from five to, you know, something like a sextillion

• 51:06Speaker 01

  or septillion, which is what current estimates are, then the odds of there being life on one of those planets seem to be enormous. However, the number of planets where we actually know that there's life is exactly the same, one. So, and that's ours. So if denominator gets really huge and the numerator is still one, then you start to think, well, maybe life is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rare. It's inconceivably rare. So that changes the way that we think about ourselves as a species, that what if we're this lonely outpost of life and intelligence in a completely dead universe that goes on infinitely in every direction? What if, and so then that's one possibility. Another possibility is, what if life does exist elsewhere,

• 51:49Speaker 01

  but it's so rare that it's basically, it's effectively alone in time or space? That it happens so infrequently in time or space that one civilization, one intelligent being will never encounter another one? So first of all, how would you know the difference between those two things? How, because if you can't see or contact something, how do you know it exists? What would be the proof of it? And then what does that mean for us in our sense of our future? One of the big revelations or transformations of modern science in the way that humanity thinks about itself in the 19th century was the idea of extinction. The idea that there are species that have lived on earth before us that went extinct. And that the same thing is going to happen to us.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  One day, our species will go extinct. If we're the only species that has mind, if we're the only species that thinks, that explores the universe, that's capable of, of science or, or religion, or all the things that we think of as distinctively human, and then we're going to go extinct, that means all those things are going to disappear. And that's a conclusion that I think all of us see with dread and want to resist. So how can we escape that conclusion? Is there a way around it? Are there ways that we could think about life and intelligence that would keep us from being the only outpost of it in the entire universe? That's one of the things that I think motivates scientists. That's one of the reasons why scientists really dislike the idea that we are alone in the universe and want to find some way around that conclusion.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Two basic ways around that conclusion are to find life somewhere else. And I talk a bit about the attempts that are going on to do that. The other is to become the life somewhere else, to leave our planet, to spread ourselves across the galaxy. And that's something that motivates someone like Elon Musk. Elon Musk quite explicitly has always said, "The reason why I want to develop all these space technologies is so that earth won't be bound to one planet, humanity won't be bound to one planet. We'll put ourselves on Mars, and from there, we'll go elsewhere, and eventually, we'll colonize the universe."

• 53:51Speaker 00

  So I've never understood this, and then maybe it's just my blind spot. There are many religious scientists, but, but let's take the ones who purport to not believe in, in any kind of God, who are purely materialist. There's no mysteries in the universe that we will not eventually plumb, except for maybe the first plunk time, you know? Otherwise, we're going to find everything out eventually. Why does it matter if we're alone? Why does it matter? I mean, really, who cares? If you're a believer, if you think God has a purpose for the universe or for human beings, which even as a believer, I think is a bit presumptuous. But, but there is a, a certain feeling that, that, that there's, there's something to appeal to.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  If there's nothing to appeal to, if we are alone, why does it matter that we spread ourselves? Why does it matter that we're the only sentient creature that is aware of its place in the universe, that develops, say, Fermat's Last Theorem? What's the point? And why is it, why is the point redeemed if, if there's some other randomly? Again, if you're not a believer, it's just another piece of random carbon or not carbon based life, a zillion light years away that we can't talk to or can, doesn't matter. I mean, again, why don't I just take comfort that they're there and you can't reach them? Would that make you feel better if you're not, if you're not, if you're, if you're a material, a pure materialist? Explain that, I don't get it.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Because I, I think that it actually matters more if you don't believe in God, if you don't believe in a transcendent dimension, if everything is, is material or, or natural in some way. And as far as we know, there's nothing that thinks except us. If you believe that thought is important and understanding is important, then it's up to us to preserve it, right? That there is no divine understanding, there's no transcendent understanding, there's only human understanding. So if understanding matters, it's up to us to make sure that it survives. So then the question is, does anything matter at all? Where does the idea of mattering come from? And there are definitely people who say that it only, it only makes sense for something to truly matter if it matters to God.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Only God can be the source of, of meaning. But if you don't believe in God, you still have an instinct for meaning. So then the question is, where does that meaning come from? It can only come from us. Meaning only comes from human beings. We decide if things have meaning. And we have decided, and especially for people like scientists or technology people who, for whom intelligence and mind is how they think about themselves, and that's what matters most to them. The idea that the universe could exist and there would be no mind in it, no one to see it or understand it, it would just be dead, dead matter for eternity, is, is sort of terrifying. It would be like an eternity of meaninglessness. So then-

• 56:43Speaker 00

  Isn't, but isn't that the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition? I mean, isn't that because these people have, have, for better, for worse, grown up in a culture and a civilization that, why should that matter? I don't get it.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  I think that you-

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Why should meaning matter? Why, why should we care about meaning? It seems silly. That comes from our religious, you know, heritage. We should just, if you don't believe in religion, you should just push that aside? And why would, why would it matter whether, whether thinking is preserved? How would one justify that?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  I think the answer is, mattering is something that only happens with human beings. And so it's the same answer as morality. Why, why is it important to do what's good instead of what's evil? One answer is because God told us to. But if God didn't tell us to, then what are the other answers? People who don't believe God told us to still believe in good and evil. They still want things to happen and other things not to happen. But they would say that the basis of that is us. It's not, it's not God, it's us. We are the ones who decide for whom it matters that there's good rather than evil. We're the ones for whom it matters whether there's mind in the universe or not. And in fact, on a sort of materialist view, that's always been the case. I mean, that there's never really been any other point of view except ours.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  There's no, a human being can have no point of view except a human point of view. And so if something matters, it means it matters for us. And that, I think that's the answer. It matters for us because it matters for us. And we are, are sort of the kind of creature for whom it matters, or we have decided that it matters, but that there's no better explanation than that.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't find that persuasive, but for a topic for another conversation, I want to move on to two other parts of the scientific response to this question, which I thought were extremely interesting. The first is, we spent, we have spent, maybe we're still spending, you'll know, and I've forgotten, but you're right about it. We spent a lot of time on radio transmission, sending out radio signals, receiving radio signals. You know, we sent out, I think it was Voyager we sent out into the, I forget which mission it was.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, one and two.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  With all kinds of things that we thought if someone found them, they would understand that we were trying to, that we cared, which obviously we do, by the way, regardless of whether it's rational or not, I think we do care. I don't mean to suggest that that's, I was, you know, doing a reductio ad absurdum there. But you make the fantastic point that, which I just never thought about, which is, you know, a civilization that's capable of communicating over enormous light numbers of light years and have reached a, you know, if, if, if human beings were able to avoid extinction for a million years, presumably we'd be able to do a bunch of things a million years from now that we can't do now, extraordinary things that we can't, of course, imagine. But we probably wouldn't be using radio waves.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  So the, the, the window for detecting radio transmissions is something akin to, you know, finding a horse-drawn carriage, you know, there's a period where they exist, but after that, it's left behind and it's not going to be the fingerprint of intelligence anymore. Fascinating to me, I never thought about it.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and one thing I say in the book is that when people, when we talk about aliens, non-human intelligence, we're always talking about ourselves, we're always drawing our own self-portrait, because until and unless we actually find an alien, there's absolutely nothing for us to talk about, except our own experience, what comes out of our own experience. So, one thing that you see as, over the last 75 years, as in the so-called space age, is that our ideas about what the future looks like, what an advanced civilization might look like, is based on changes in our own civilization, our own ideas about technology. So, in the 1950s, when radio astronomy was first invented and developed, people thought,

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  well, of course, aliens out there will be so advanced, they'll also have radio astronomy and will be able to pick up their signals. Then, as time went on, and we didn't hear any radio signals, and we still haven't, although there are some people listening for them, people started to say, well, actually, if you look at what's happening on Earth, we're using fewer radio signals, radio transmissions, and everything is fiber optic cables, maybe in the future, a really advanced technology would basically be invisible, because they would be so advanced, their technology would be so shrunk down and so dense, and every bit would contain meaning, that it would essentially disappear from the sky. Instead of being bigger, it would be smaller. That's, that's a reflection of the way our technology has developed.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  And one of the sort of unknowable things about this is, as long as you have a sample of one, you don't know whether what's happened to humanity is a rule or an exception. There are all kinds of reasons to think that the development of advanced intelligence on Earth was extremely, extremely unlikely. So, instead of taking it as, this is something that's going to happen everywhere at some point, you know, just by the odds, because there's so many planets, you could, you could also argue the contrary case, which is, this is something that almost never happens, and it's so rare that we will never come across another example of it, because there, there are so many prerequisites for intelligent life to evolve, that the, that all of them aren't going to come together, except on very, very rare occasions.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  And you talk about the Drake equation, which is an attempt to try to vaguely quantify some of these things. I found this fascinating, you know, the idea that life on Earth probably needed a moon, something like our moon, meaning eventually became roundish, very close to something more like sphere-like, rather than just some kind of crazy rock or oblong thing. The idea that plate tectonics might be important to the development of life, it's just, these are not things that, you know, we've thought about, and, but people are increasingly thinking about them and realizing that it's a little more complicated than it seemed.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yes, and there's this whole field called astrobiology, which is, again, is sort of a contradiction in terms, because we have never encountered any biology among the stars, we've only encountered biology on Earth, but astrobiology is really an attempt to think about that question of, what are the prerequisites of life, and under what conditions could life exist? So, right now, the sort of general rule of thumb is, we know that on Earth, there's no life without liquid water. So, the places we should look are planets where there could be liquid water. And that means they have to be the so-called Goldilocks planets. If they're too close to a star, the water all dissolves and evaporates. If they're too far from a star, the water all freezes and becomes ice. So, you want to look for planets that are within a certain distance range from a star,

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  so there could be liquid water. And that is just sort of the, the most basic rule of thumb, no liquid water, no life. But that doesn't mean that where there's liquid water, there is life. It doesn't go the other way around. It's, it's a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. And as we come to learn more about biology and about the history of life on Earth, all kinds of things that you would never intuitively think of as necessary for life, people are starting to say, well, maybe we need not just liquid water, but a moon, and maybe we don't just need a moon, but we need Jupiter. Because if it weren't for Jupiter, Earth would be constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets and things from outer space, and it would keep destroying life on Earth. The fact that that only happens rarely in the history of Earth is because we have this

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  big planet that's outside and has a big gravitational pull that's taking these things away from us. So, if you had a planet just like Earth, but it didn't have a Jupiter near it, that planet would just be destroyed repeatedly by impacts, and then life couldn't evolve there. So, there are all kinds of interesting ways to think about that, that as science progresses, makes life actually seem rarer and more unique, rather than more common.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, one thing that's beautiful about this whole field, either mainly from the scientific perspective, is it forces you to think about how limited our knowledge is, and, and we learn more and more in trying to, this to give Bobby Loeb his due, when we start to think about what, if we're open to it, there are certain things we might not otherwise, we might not otherwise learn. And of course, the other part of it is, we're so limited by our, the one data point. You know, when we, when we think about aliens, you know, you pointed out, there's, there's an alien emoji.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  It's a long head with, with weird little black slitted, slitted eyes, and we assume it would look something like us, you know, maybe have extra fingers, or maybe, you know, be tall, or really tall, or really short, or, but that's kind of the best we can do. We're so, our understanding of, of consciousness is so primitive, and of intelligence is so primitive, we really can't even think, I think, it's hard to think carefully about what form it might take if it weren't developed on Earth.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Definitely. We're, we're always the model for what we're imagining, and it's hard to see how it could be otherwise, right? We are thinking from a position of, we're humans on Earth, we don't know about anything else, any other kind of experience or life, except that of, of humans, or maybe animals, or other living things on Earth. So, when we think about, what does it mean to be an intelligent being, we think it's something like us. And how could we imagine something that's not like us, that's very different from us? It's extremely challenging, because it's so different. It's hard to imagine something totally different from what we know.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  So, let's, I want to close with a, well, one other thing, I'm, sorry, one other thing I'll get in, which is so interesting. This 2015 speech by Stephen Hawking, that communicating with aliens, which I think, you know, there's an enormous, obviously bifurcated sci-fi literature of aliens come to Earth and kill us, and aliens come to Earth and cure cancer and do, and do good things. People like to be scared, so I think most of them are on the, on the negative side. But, you know, the, coming back to Steven Spielberg, E.T. is a, is a love story.

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  E.T. is about how glorious it would be to have any kind of communion with an alien creature. And Hawking said, that's probably not, that's probably shouldn't be our default. What was his argument? It's fascinating.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, there's definitely an argument which says that, I think what Hawking said specifically is, that it could be more like Europe discovering the New World, and conquering it, and invading it, and destroying it. So, if we invite the attention of a technologically advanced species, and it comes to Earth, and it's much more technically advanced, technologically advanced than we are, it could just wipe us out, and there would be nothing we could do about it. That's one way of looking at it. And then H.G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds, thought of it even more as, as sort of like the way we think about germs. Aliens might think about us the way we think about germs or bacteria, like they wouldn't even think of us as something to, to spare, or have any concern for at all, they would,

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  they would just go on their way, do what they want to do, and we would pay the price for it. So, the idea of, would aliens be benevolent, is something that we always sort of think about, but until we actually meet an alien, there's no way to know.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  And I would just add, it reminds me of your point about, we're limited by our own understanding of ourselves, using the, Stephen Hawking is a very smart man, high IQ, but using the European destruction of the Aztecs, say, which was horrific, is maybe not the best, it's a data point, for sure, but something that was so technologically advanced, had survived extinction, maybe they'll have a different, maybe they won't think of us as bacteria, maybe they'll think about us the way vegans think about dogs, you know?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Right, no, it's, it's completely impossible to know, it all depends on what metaphor you want to use.

• 1:08:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so, close with a quote, perhaps that is what...

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  Humanity really needs from extraterrestrials not conclusive proof of their existence, but a sense of possibility. In an age when scientific knowledge has banished naive belief in divine and demonic beings, aliens are the last remaining candidate for other minds to share the universe with us. They are imminent, existing in the real physical world, but also transcendent, experiencing reality in ways we can hardly imagine. They relieve us of a single-handed responsibility for the survival of mind and so of the universe's meaning and value. They preserve a horizon of genuine mystery in a cosmos increasingly laid bare to scientific explanation. Close quote. Just reflect on that.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that gets to this question of why do we want to believe in aliens? That there's a place in our map of the universe that we want there to be something there. We want there to be something other than us there. And for people who, for whom that space is not occupied by God or anything supernatural, it can only be occupied by something natural, aliens is a way to answer that question. It's a way of saying, here's something that doesn't require religious belief, but it sort of does for us a lot of what religious belief would do. It opens up the universe. It gives us something to hope for and to communicate with and another kind of mind.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  And I think that that's why it appeals to a lot of people, a lot of thoughtful people who would like for there to be something like that in the universe, who want that horizon of mystery, right? Who want the sense that we don't know everything. There's things we don't know. There's another step for us to take. And so I think in the end, I came away from writing this book with a sort of respect for the desire for aliens, a respect for the desire to believe in aliens. It's something that I think we have not, we don't have grounds for proving. I mean, I would say we would still have to believe because we don't have evidence. But I understand why people want to believe in that, and I think it's a worthy belief.

• 1:11:07Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Adam Kirsch. His book is We Want to Believe. Adam, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to econ talk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.