#455 – Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Adam Frank is an astrophysicist studying star systems and the search for extraterrestrial life and alien civilizations. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep455-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/adam-frank-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Adam’s Website: https://adamfrankscience.com Adam’s X: https://x.com/adamfrank4 Adam’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/adamfrankscience Adam’s Books: The Little Book of Aliens: https://amzn.to/3OTX1rP Light of the Stars: https://amzn.to/4iMKC6C The Blind Spot: https://amzn.to/4gOCe4K The Constant Fire: https://amzn.to/3ZVnxX4 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Encord: AI tooling for annotation & data management. Go to https://encord.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/encord-ep455-sc Eight Sleep: Temp-controlled smart mattress cover. Go to https://eightsleep.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/eight_sleep-ep455-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep455-sc NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/netsuite-ep455-sc BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/betterhelp-ep455-sc Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/notion-ep455-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep455-sc AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep455-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (14:22) – Planet formation (19:32) – Plate tectonics (26:54) – Extinction events (31:04) – Biosphere (34:02) – Technosphere (38:17) – Emergence of intelligence (44:29) – Drake equation (48:43) – Exoplanets (51:28) – Habitable zones (54:30) – Fermi Paradox (1:03:28) – Alien civilizations (1:12:55) – Colonizing Mars (1:25:11) – Search for aliens (1:41:37) – Alien megastructures (1:47:43) – Kardashev scale (1:52:56) – Detecting aliens (1:59:38) – Warp drives (2:05:45) – Cryogenics (2:09:03) – What aliens look like (2:17:48) – Alien contact (2:28:53) – UFO sightings (2:40:38) – Physics of life (3:06:29) – Nature of time (3:22:53) – Cognition (3:27:16) – Mortality

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

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Adam Frank, an astrophysicist interested in the evolution of star systems and the search for alien civilizations in our universe.

• 0:12Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. Let me say as a side note that I had to put a bunch of podcast episodes on hold to focus deeply on preparing for conversations with world leaders. So I apologize to include more sponsors on this episode than usual. They really wanted me to mention them this year, and I'm not sure when I'm going to do another episode. We were going to do eight episodes this month, but instead I think we're doing two. We'll see. Every single day, every single hour changes the plan, changes the situation, changes my life. So please be patient with me. There are no sponsor reads in the middle,

• 0:57Lex Fridman?

  so you can skip this long and beautiful list. But I do try to make them interesting in case you do listen, and I hope you do. In either case, please still check out the sponsors, buy their stuff. It is the best way to support this podcast. The sponsors are Encore for your ML stack, Aidsleeve for naps, Shopify for e-commerce, NetSuite for business, BetterHelp for the mind, Notion for notes, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for nutrition. If you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. Perhaps you could tell from my voice on top of everything else, I'm also sick. What a wonderful, beautiful, challenging life this is,

• 1:41Lex Fridman?

  and I'm grateful for every second of it. All right. And now on to the full ad reads. Let's go. This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, and management, and for model evaluation. For example, if you are an independent, private, or government agency that is running the drones that is flying all over New Jersey and the tri-state area. You might be doing the same kind of a data annotation and collection, curation and management that Encore excels at. Also, if you're an extraterrestrial species performing

• 2:25Lex Fridman?

  the same, I wonder what kind of computation tools alien civilizations have. At the physics level, computation is fundamentally a part of the fabric of the universe. So every advanced civilization would, or surely would, discover how to leverage that computation, how to organize that computation, how to access and communicate with that computation. Anyway, think of it, if you have a swarm of drones and you are the ruler of an alien civilization, want to collect some data about New Jersey, you are going to have to do some great machine learning. And great machine learning is not just about the algorithms. It is so much

• 3:07Lex Fridman?

  more about the data. So whoever you are running the drone program over New Jersey, go try out Encore to curate, annotate, and manage your AI data at encord.com/lex. That's encord.com/lex. By the way, in all seriousness, I will probably talk about drones in New Jersey soon. I think it's a fascinating mystery. Is it China? Is it aliens? Is it the US government? Is it private companies within the US government? Is it other nation-states? Are nuclear weapons involved? And what are the mechanisms that ensure that the US government is transparent

• 3:48Lex Fridman?

  about communicating with the discover? These are essential questions. Okay, on to Aesleep. This episode is brought to you by Aesleep and its Pod4Ultra. You know, sleep makes me think about the night. And I've been watching a lot of war movies. I've been watching a lot of war reporting. I've been watching a lot of conversations with soldiers and I've been talking to soldiers. And there's something about the night. There's something about the quiet night that serves as the break from the hell of war. "Тёмная ночь, токопули систят на степи." That's a song from the Second World War. A song about a soldier writing to a woman he loves. That's just it. Just like a man's search for meaning

• 4:32Lex Fridman?

  in the darkest hours of war. Those are the things that keep the flame. Of the hard going. Talking about these topics makes it difficult for me to then talk about Aesleep and the technology and the comfort of a good night's sleep somewhere in America. That's one of the things you discover when you travel, especially travel to a country that's participating in war, that the basic comforts, the basic securities, the basic dreams and hopes and the ways of life are taken away. And still, the human

• 5:11Lex Fridman?

  spirit persists. Anyway, this is supposed to be an ad read. Go to asleep.com/lex. Use code Lex to get up to $600 off your Pod4Ultra purchase when bundled. That's asleep.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've been reading a lot about the long history of the Silk Road, especially before and after the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan. I've been reading a lot about Genghis Khan and the influence he had on revolutionizing the trade network. A lot of networks, the trade of not just goods, but information, of knowledge,

• 5:54Lex Fridman?

  of languages, of ideas, of religions, of peoples. And it's fascinating how roads of that nature, trade first and foremost, can break down the barriers that divide peoples. I suppose it all starts with incentives. People are people and they have stuff they don't need and they want to sell it and other people have stuff they want and they're willing to buy it. And those incentives at scale overpower any kind of emotional, psychological, historical hatreds and all those kinds of things. And it's funny, the little incentives and the mechanisms of capitalism at its best can heal the wounds

• 6:36Lex Fridman?

  of war. Of course, it can also fuel the military industrial complex, which is the fuel of war. Oh, the double edged sword. Anyway, take the Silk Road and fast forward to today, and we have Shopify that you can sign up to for $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system. When I think about NetSuite and all the different administrative modules and the language, standardized language that allows them to communicate with each other, I think

• 7:20Lex Fridman?

  about all the empires throughout history that were able to create remarkable administrative systems, the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, as I mentioned. None of it works without paperwork. You know, bureaucracy, rightfully so, gets a bad rap, but at its best bureaucracy is necessary to manage the affairs of large organizations. You know, humans are very good at working with each other when they scale beyond 1,000 people. So you need great administrative systems. And thankfully, today, we have technology, we have tools like NetSuite to do just that. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing

• 8:05Lex Fridman?

  plan at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. One day in the distant future, AI systems will make for great therapists, but I think that's a very dangerous road to walk down in the short term. I am a person who loves conversation and not small talk. The fake niceties that alleviate social frictions, I'm not for that. I'm in for diving deep.

• 8:39Lex Fridman?

  Through conversation, and I think that is something that AI just can't quite do yet. And I would say not even close. It is an assistant. It is not a therapist. So the distinction, the difference is quite fascinating to analyze, to watch, to try to sort of elucidate and articulate clearly. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of talking to a human to explore your own mind. And BetterHelp is a very easy, accessible way of doing that. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking system service app that I use

• 9:24Lex Fridman?

  and you should use, especially if you're on a large team, to collaborate on all kinds of stuff, including notes and project management, wikis, all that kind of stuff. Nuclear weapons have been on my mind quite a bit. And I think about the Manhattan Project. And I think about the amount of incredible, rapid organization that was involved in that project. Just think about the coordination. The coordination of brilliant people working on separate parts of an incredibly complicated project where all of it has to be secret. So many of the people working on it may not even be aware of the bigger picture of it or the different modules involved.

• 10:08Lex Fridman?

  Just imagine the coordination required there. Just truly, truly, truly incredible. And of course, imagine what modern day tools can do for that. Obviously, the Manhattan Project is a top secret project and a controversial one and a complicated one. And one that I've done many episodes on in terms of its implications. But there's a less controversial perspective on the Manhattan Project of just seeing it as a project. That the entirety of a nation, or maybe the entirety of a civilization, takes on the moonshot project. We're going to go to Mars. We're going to go out there. We're going to build something big together. I love projects like that at any scale.

• 10:51Lex Fridman?

  Just the big togetherness where all the bullshit of distraction is thrown away and you just focus. So yeah, Notion helps with that kind of thing. And they integrate AI extremely well. So you should try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Did you know that salt in ancient Rome was a currency also referred to as white gold? How crazy is it?

• 11:31Lex Fridman?

  Things like salt or cinnamon, or frankly, gold and silver are things that all of us humans imbue with value for our time? And even do horrific things to each other in order to attain more of it? The human greed for salt. So dark and so fascinating we humans are. Anyway, on a basic level, just thirst. Something I've experienced in the Amazon jungle, thirst for water. And for that, you need electrolytes too, not just water. Water and salt plus magnesium and potassium. That is the basic thing you want the most when it is gone.

• 12:13Lex Fridman?

  And I got the chance, the gift to experience it. Get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drink element.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1. A drink I drink every day to feel better about myself. It's basically a great multivitamin. It's delicious. And frankly, I feel quite sad that I'm out of travel packs. And I'm going to be gone for time. And I will not have AG1. AG1 and Element are things that make me feel like I'm home, like everything's going to be okay. I am bringing Element with me because it has these packets.

• 12:57Lex Fridman?

  But I went through all the AG1 travel packs. So that silly little thing.

• 13:05Lex Fridman?

  Is one of the things that will make me feel homesick. Funny how that is. It's the little things. Anyways, the crazy things I do in terms of physical and mental perturbations to the bodily equilibrium on a daily basis is something that is rescued in part by making sure I get AG1 every single day. What am I going to do without AG1? You know what? I'll probably bring some with me. I changed my mind now, and you should do the same. They'll give you one month's supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex. If you're still listening to this, thank you.

• 13:49Lex Fridman?

  I'm deeply grateful for you, for your support, for being there for so many years. I love you all.

• 13:57Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Adam Frank.

• 14:22Lex Fridman?

  You wrote a book about aliens. So the big question, how many alien civilizations are out there?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the question, right? The amazing thing is that after two and a half millennia of, you know, people yelling at each other or setting each other on fire occasionally over the answer, we now actually have the capacity to answer that question. So in the next 10, 20, 30 years, we're going to have data relevant to the answer to that question. We're going to have hard data, finally, that will, one way or the other, you know, even if we don't find anything immediately, we will have gone through a number of planets, we'll be able to start putting limits on how common life is. The one answer I can tell you, which is was an important part of the problem, is how many planets are there, right?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And just like people have been arguing about the existence of life elsewhere for 2,500 years, people have been arguing about planets for the exact same amount of time, right? You can see Aristotle yelling at Democritus about this. You know, you can see they had very wildly different opinions about how common planets were going to be and how unique Earth was. And that question got answered, right? Which is pretty remarkable that in a lifetime you can have a 2,500 year old question. The answer is they're everywhere. There are planets everywhere. And it was possible that planets were really rare. We didn't really understand how planets formed. And so if you go back to say, the turn of the 20th century, there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely,

• 15:52Speaker 02

  and then material was gravitationally squeezed out. In which case, those kinds of collisions are so rare that you would expect one in a trillion stars to have planets. Instead, every star in the night sky has planets.

• 16:05Lex Fridman?

  So one of the things you've done is simulated the formation of stars. How difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planets? Like simulate a solar system, the entire evolution of the solar system? This is kind of a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  That actually we're able to do now. There is, you can run simulations of the formation of planetary system. So if you run the simulation, really where you want to start is a cloud of gas, these giant interstellar clouds of gas that may have, you know, a million times the mass of the sun in them. And so you run a simulation of that. It's turbulent. The gas is roiling and tumbling. And every now and then you get a place where the, uh, the gas is dense enough that gravity gets hold of it and it can pull it downward. So you'll start to form a protostar. And a protostar is basically the young star of, uh, you know, this ball of gas where, uh, nuclear reactions are getting started. But it's also a disk. So you, as material falls inward, because it's, everything's rotating.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  As it falls inward, it'll spin up and then it'll form a disk. Material will collect in what's called an accretion disk or a protoplanetary disk. And you can simulate all of that. Once you get into the disk itself and you want to do planets, things get a little bit more complicated because the physics gets more complicated. Now you got to start worrying about dust. Cause actually dust, which is just, dust is the wrong word. It's smoke, really. These are the tiniest bits of solids. They will coagulate in the disk to form pebbles, right? And then the pebbles will Collide to form rocks and then the rocks will form boulders, et cetera, et cetera. That process is super complicated, but we've been able to simulate enough of it to begin to get a handle on

• 17:51Speaker 02

  how planets form, how you accrete enough material to get the first proto-planets or planetary embryos, as we call them. And then the next step is those things start slamming into each other to form, you know, planetary sized bodies. And then the planetary bodies slam into each other. Earth, the moon came about because there was a Mars sized body that slammed into the earth and basically blew off all the material that then eventually formed the moon.

• 18:18Lex Fridman?

  And all of them have different chemical compositions, different temperatures?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the the temperature of the material in the disk depends on how far away you are from the star. So it decreases, right? And so there's a really interesting point. So like, you know, close to the star, temperatures are really high. And the only thing that can condense, that can kind of freeze out, is going to be stuff like metals. So that's why you find mercury is this giant ball of iron, basically. And then as you go further out, stuff, you know, the gas gets cooler. And now you can start getting things like water to freeze, right? So there's something we call the snow line, which is somewhere in our solar system out around between Mars and Jupiter. And that's the reason why the giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn,

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Uranus and Neptune, all have huge amounts of ice in them or water and ice. Actually Jupiter and Saturn don't have so much, but the moons do. The moons have so much water in them that there's there's oceans, right? That we've got a number of those moons have got more water on them than there's water on Earth.

• 19:22Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible to do that kind of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of how likely an Earth-like planet is? Can we get the physics simulation? Done well enough to where we can start estimating like what are the possible Earth like things that could be generated?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we can. I think we're learning how to do that now. So, you know, one part is like trying to just figure out how to how planets form themselves and doing the simulations like that that cascade from dust grains up to planetary embryos. That's hard to simulate because it's both you got to do both the gas and you got to do the dust and the dust colliding and all that physics. Once you get up to a planet sized body, then you know, you kind of have to switch over to almost like a different kind of simulation. There often what you're doing is you're doing, you know, sort of you're assuming the planet is this sort of spherical ball. And then you're doing what you know, like a 1D radial calculation. And you're just asking like, all right, how is this thing going to what is the structure of it going to be like, am I going to have

• 20:23Speaker 02

  a solid iron core? Or am I going to get a solid iron core with that liquid iron core out around it like we have on on Earth? And then you get, you know, a silicate kind of a rocky mantle and then a crust, all those details, those are kind of beyond being able to do full 3D simulations from ab initio from scratch. We're not there yet.

• 20:44Lex Fridman?

  How important are those details like the crust and the atmosphere? Do you think?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Hugely important. So I'm part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester where we're using the giant laser. It's literally this is called the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. We got a huge grant from the NSF to use that laser to like slam tiny pieces of silica to understand what the conditions are like at, you know, the center of the Earth, or even more importantly, the center of super Earths, like the most common. This is what's wild. The most common kind of planet in the universe, we don't have in our solar system, which is amazing, right? So the we've been able to study enough or observe enough planets now to get a census, you know, we pretty, you know, we kind of have an idea of what who's average, who's weird. And our solar system is weird because the average

• 21:31Speaker 02

  planet has a mass between somewhere between a few times the mass of the Earth to maybe, you know, 10 times the mass of the Earth. And that's exactly where there are no planets in our solar system. So the smaller ones of those we call super Earths, the larger ones we call sub Neptunes. And they're anybody's guess. Like, we don't really know what happens to material when you're squeezed to those pressures, which is like millions, tens of millions of times the pressure on the surface of the earth. So those details really will matter of what's going on in there, because that will determine whether or not you have, say, for example, plate tectonics. We think plate tectonics may have been really important for life on earth, for the evolution of complex life on earth.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  So it turns out, and this is sort of the next generation where we're going with the understanding, the evolution of planets and life. It turns out that you actually have to think hard about the planetary context for life. You can't just be like, oh, there's a warm pond, you know, and then some interesting, you know, chemistry happens in the warm pond. You actually have to think about the planet as a whole and what it's gone through in order to really understand whether a planet is a good place for life or not.

• 22:40Lex Fridman?

  Why do you think plate tectonics might be useful for the formation of complex life?

• 22:44Speaker 02

  There's a bunch of different things. One is that, you know, the earth went through a couple of phases of being a snowball planet. Like, we, you know, we went into a period of glaciation where the, pretty much, the entire planet was under ice. The oceans were frozen. You know, early on in earth's history, there was no, there was barely any land. We were actually a water world, you know, with just a couple of Australia-sized cratons, they called them, proto-continents. So those, we went through these snowball earth phases. And if it wasn't for the fact that we had kind of an active plate tectonics, which had a lot of volcanism on it, we could have been locked in that forever. Like, once you get into a snowball state, a planet can be trapped there forever, which

• 23:26Speaker 02

  is, you know, maybe you already had life form, but then because it's so cold, you may never get anything more than just microbes, right? So what plate tectonics does is it, because it fosters more volcanism, is that you're going to get carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, which warms the planet up and gets you out of the, uh, the, uh, snowball earth phase. But even more, there's even more really important things. I just finished a paper where we were looking at something called the hard steps model, which is this model that's been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life in the universe will be really rare. And it made all these assumptions about the Earth's history, particularly at the history of life and the history of the planet, or have nothing to do with each other.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  And it turns out, as I was doing the reading for this, that Earth probably early on had a more mild form of plate tectonics. And then somewhere about a billion years ago, it ramped up. And that ramping up changed everything on the planet. Because here's a funny thing. The Earth used to be flat. What I mean by that, right? So all the flat-earthers out there can get excited for one second.

• 24:28Lex Fridman?

  Clip it.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  What I mean by that is that there really weren't many mountain ranges, right? The beginning of, I think the term is orogenesis, mountain building, the true Himalayan-style giant mountains, didn't happen until this more robust form of plate tectonics, where the plates are really being driven around the planet. And that is when you get the crusts hitting each other and they start pushing into these Himalayan-style mountains. The weathering of that, the erosion of that, puts huge amounts of nutrients, things that microbes want to use, into the oceans. And then what we call the net primary productivity, the bottom of the food chain, how much sugars they are producing, how much photosynthesis they're doing, shot up by a factor of almost a thousand, right?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  So the fact that you had plate tectonics, supercharged evolution in some sense. Like, we're not exactly sure how it happened, but it's clear that the amount of life, the amount of living activity that was happening, really got a boost from the fact that suddenly there was plate, this new vigorous form of plate tectonics.

• 25:34Lex Fridman?

  So it's nice to have turmoil, in terms of temperature, in terms of surface geometries, in terms of the chemistry of the planet, turmoil.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's actually really true. Because what happens is if you look at the history of life, that's an excellent point you're bringing up. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we get a biogenesis somewhere around at least 3.8 billion years ago. And that's the first microbes, they kind of take over enough that they really do, you get a biosphere, you get a biosphere that is actively changing the planet. But then you go through this period they call the boring billion, where like it's a billion years and it's just microbes. Nothing's happening. It's just microbes. I mean, they're doing, the microbes are doing amazing things. They're inventing fermentation. Thank you very much. We appreciate that. But it's not until sort of you get probably this, these continents slamming into each other. You really get the beginning of continents forming and driving changes that

• 26:27Speaker 02

  evolution has to respond to. That on a planetary scale, this turmoil, this chaos is creating new niches as well as closing other ones. And biology, evolution has to respond to that. And somewhere around there is when you get the Cambrian explosions, when suddenly every body plan, you know, evolution goes on an orgy essentially. So yeah, it does look like the, that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to evolution.

• 26:54Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if there's some extremely elevated levels of chaos, almost like catastrophes behind every leap of evolution. Like you're not going to have leaps. Like in, in human societies, we have like an Einstein that comes up with a good idea, but it feels like on an evolutionary timescale, you need some real big drama going on for, for the evolutionary system to have to come up to a solution to that drama, like an extra complex solution to that drama.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Well, I think what's, I'm not sure if that's true. I don't know if it needs to be like an, an almost extinction event, right? Because it's certainly true that we have gone through almost extinction events, right? We've had, you know, five mass extinctions, but you don't necessarily see that like there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those. So, you know, with the comet impact, the KT boundary, certainly, you know, lots of niches opened up. And that's why we're here, right? Because, you know, our ancestors were just little, basically rodents, rats, living under the footsteps of the dinosaurs. And it was that comet impact that opened the, the route for us. But it wasn't, I mean, that still took another, you know, 65 million years. It wasn't like this thing immediately happened. But what we found with

• 28:07Speaker 02

  this hard steps paper, because the whole idea of the hard steps paper was It was one of these anthropic reasoning kinds of things where Brandon Carter said, oh, look, the intelligence doesn't show up on Earth until about, you know, almost close to when the end of the sun's lifetime. And so he's like, well, there should be no reason why the sun's lifetime and the time for evolution to produce intelligence should be the same. And so therefore, and he goes through all this reasoning, anthropic reasoning, and he ends up with the idea that like, oh, it must be that the odds of getting intelligence are super low. And so that's the hard steps, right? So there was a series of steps in evolution that were, you know, very, very hard. And because that you can calculate

• 28:50Speaker 02

  some probability distributions. And everybody loves a good probability distribution and they went a long way with this. But it turns out that the whole thing is flawed because on, you know, when you look at it, of course, the time scale for the sun's evolution and the time scale for evolution on life are coupled because life and the time scale for evolution of the Earth is coupled is about the same time scale as the evolution as the sun. It's billions of years. The Earth evolves over billions of years and life and the Earth co-evolve. That's what Brandon Carter didn't see is that actually, the fate of the Earth and the fate of life are inextricably combined. And this is really important for astrobiology too. Life doesn't happen on a planet. It happens to a planet. So this is something

• 29:35Speaker 02

  that David Grin spoon and Sarah Walker both say, and you know, I agree with this. It's a really nice way of putting it. So, you know, plate tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, you know, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sort of sloshing back and forth. And so rather than to your, your point about, do you need giant catastrophes? Maybe not giant catastrophes, but what happens is as the Earth and life are evolving together, windows are opening up evolutionary windows. Like, for example, life put oxygen into the atmosphere. When, when life invented this new form of photosynthesis about two and a half billion years ago.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  That broke water apart to, you know, work to do its its shenanigans. It broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That's why there's oxygen in the atmosphere. It's only because of life. That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen. But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. So the evolution, the introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever. And it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Like, for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big brained creatures need an oxygen-rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  So you couldn't get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed.

• 31:05Lex Fridman?

  So really, on a scale of a planet, when there's billions, trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:17Lex Fridman?

  So the chemical shenanigans of an individual organism, once scaled out to trillions, can actually change a planet.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we know this for a fact now, like this is. So there was this thing, Gaia theory, that, you know, was James Lovelock introduced in the 70s. And then Lynn Margellis, the biologist Lynn Margellis, together. So this Gaia theory was the idea that planets pretty much take, or sorry, life takes over a planet. Life hijacks a planet in a way that the sum total of life creates these feedbacks between the planet and the life, such that it keeps the planet habitable. It's kind of a homeostasis, right? I can go out like right now, outside it's 100 degrees, right? And I go outside, but my internal temperature is going to the same. And I can go back to, you know, Rochester, New York in the winter, and it's going to be, you know, zero degrees, but my internal temperature is going to be the same. That's homeostasis.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  The idea of Gaia theory was that life, the biosphere, exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. Now, when this theory came out, it was very controversial. People were like, oh, my God, you know, what are you smoking weed? You know, and like, there were all these Gaian festivals with Gaian dances. And so, you know, it became very popular in the new age community. But LoveLock, actually, they were able to show that, no, this has nothing to do with like the planet being conscious or anything. It was about these feedbacks that by the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. And now that's become, whether or not, it's still, we're still unclear whether there are

• 32:47Speaker 02

  true Gaian feedbacks in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth's history.

• 32:58Lex Fridman?

  So the biosphere fights for homeostasis on Earth?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  The biosphere, okay, what I would say right now is, I don't know if I can say that scientifically, I can certainly say that the biosphere does a huge amount of the regulation of the planetary state and over billions of years has strongly modified the evolution of the planet. So whether or not a true Gaian feedback would be exactly what you said, right? The biosphere is somehow, and Sarah Walker and David Grinspoon and I actually did a paper on this, about the idea of planetary intelligence or cognition across a planetary scale. And I think that actually is possible. It's not conscious, but there is a kind of cognitive activity going on. The biosphere, in some sense, knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. So it's still unclear whether we have these full Gaian feedbacks, but we certainly have

• 33:46Speaker 02

  semi-Gaian feedbacks. If there's a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, insulation, how much sunlight's coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down.

• 34:02Lex Fridman?

  Now, I wonder if the technosphere also has a Gaian feedback or elements of a Gaian feedback such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis? Open question, I guess.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's, I'm glad you asked that question because that paper that David and Sarah and I wrote, what we were arguing was, is that over the history of a planet, when life first forms, 3.8 billion years ago, it's kind of thin on the ground, right? You've got the first species, these are all microbes. And they have not yet, they're not going to, enough of them to exert any kind of these Gaian feedbacks. So we call that an immature biosphere. But then as time goes on, as life becomes more robust and it begins to exert these feedbacks, keeping the planet in the place where it needs to be for life, we call that a mature biosphere, right? And the important thing, and we're gonna, I'm sure later on, we're gonna talk about definitions

• 34:55Speaker 02

  of life and such. There's this great term called autopoiesis that Francisco Varela, the neurobiologist Francisco Varela came up with. And he said, you know, one of the defining things about life is this property of autopoiesis, which means self-creating and self-maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself, right? It's always trying to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. So the biosphere, from this guy in perspective, has been autopoietic for, you know, billions of years. Now, we just invented this technosphere in the last, you know, couple of hundred years. And what we were arguing in that paper is that it's an immature technosphere, right? Because right now with climate change and all the other

• 35:37Speaker 02

  things we're doing, we don't, we're destroying, the technosphere right now is sort of destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. So the real job for us, if we're gonna last over, you know, geologic time scales, if we want a technosphere that's gonna last tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, then we've got to become mature, which means to not undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive. So as of right now, I'd say we're not autopoietic.

• 36:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that perturbations, the technosphere should create perturbations as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations, which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but basically, uh, go out and play in the yard and hurt yourself to strengthen the, or like, drink water from the, from the pond.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  From the pond, yeah, right. Get sick a few times.

• 36:40Lex Fridman?

  To strengthen the immune system.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, what's interesting with the technosphere, we could talk about this more, but like, you know, we're just emerging as a technosphere in terms of as a interplanetary technosphere, right? That's really the next step for us is to, David Greenspoon talks about, I love this idea of anti-accretion, like this amazing thing that for the first time, you know, over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet, right? It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down, but now we're starting to push stuff out. And, you know, like the idea of planetary defense or such, you know, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We're going to start engineering if we make it, right? I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system,

• 37:24Speaker 02

  right? So we will, we'll be changed, literally engineering the solar system. But what you can think of right now with what's happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that, that is the technosphere, you know, is the creation, that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere, right? And what you can't do is, you know, the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere and the techn, if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you're in trouble, right? I mean, the biosphere's not going away. There's nothing we could do. Like, the idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous. Like, the Earth is not a furry little bunny that we need to protect. But it's the conditions for us, right? We, humanity emerged out of this, out

• 38:08Speaker 02

  of the Holocene, the last 10,000 years interglacial period. We can't tolerate very different kinds of Earths. So that's what I mean about a perturbation.

• 38:17Lex Fridman?

  Before we forget, I gotta ask you about this paper. Pretty interesting. There's an interesting table here about hard steps. A biogenesis, glucose fermentation, tuberamic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to Homo sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor, so formation of the eye.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  Complex multicellularity.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  That's definitely one of the big ones.

• 38:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So interesting. I mean, what can you say about this chart? There are all kinds of papers talking about what the difficulty of these steps.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Right. And so this was the idea. So what Carter said was, you know, using anthropic reasoning, he said, there must be a few very hard steps for the evolution to get through to make it to intelligence. Right? So there's some steps are going to be easy. So every generation, you know, you roll the dice and yeah, it won't take long for you to get that step. But there must be a few of them. And he said, you could even calculate what, how many there were five, six in order to get to intelligence. And so this paper here, this plot is all these different people who've written all these papers. And this is the point, actually, you can see all these papers that were written on the hard steps, each one proposing a different set of what those steps should be. And there's this other idea from biology of the major

• 39:32Speaker 02

  transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps. But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. So, you know, this, what's amazing about this model is it shows how important it is to actually work with people who are in the field, right? So, you know, Brandon Carter was a, you know, brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this. But the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved, right? And if you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a bio geophysicist, they'd look at you, when you explained this to them, and they'd be like, what? Like, what

• 40:15Speaker 02

  are you guys doing? Turns out, none of the details or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people actually study the planet and its evolution.

• 40:29Lex Fridman?

  Is it mostly about the, the fact that there's not really discrete, big steps? It's a gradual, continual kind of process?

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Well, there's two things. The first, most important one was that the planet and the biosphere have evolved together. That's something that every, you know, most bio geophysicists completely accept. And it was the first thing that Carter kind of rejected. He said, like, no, that's probably not possible. And yeah. You know, like if you'd only sort of had more discussions with this other community would have seen like, no, there are actually windows that open up. And then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what you mean by a hard step is that, like I said, every time there's a generation, every time there's the next generation born, you're rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. And the idea of something being a hard steps, there's two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be, or actually not be a hard step at all.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  One is that you see something that has occurred in evolution that has only happened once, right? So let's take the opposite. We see something that's happened multiple times, like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. So that's clearly not a hot, making wings is not a hard step. There are certain other things that people say, no, that's a hard step. Oxygen, you know, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they are so, they tend to be so long ago that we've lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that, you know, went, made this innovation, but they're just gone now. So you can't tell. So there's information loss. The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder, that somebody, you know, some species makes the innovation, but then it fills the niche and nobody else can do it again.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it only happened once, but it happened once because basically the, the, the creature was so successful, it took over and there was no space for anybody else to evolve it. So, yeah, so the interesting thing about this was seeing how, how much, once you look at the details of life's history on earth, how it really shifts you away from this hard steps model. And it shows you that those details, as we were talking about, like with, do you have to know about the planet? Do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you're going to have to.

• 42:32Lex Fridman?

  I mean, to be fair to Carter, on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co-evolving. Because it's not, it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:48Lex Fridman?

  And then we can sort of, from our outside perspective, analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create. And then there's a binary yes or no, will it create life? But if they co-evolve, it's just like, it's a really complex dynamical system where everything. Is uh becomes much more difficult from the perspective of SETI of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:12Lex Fridman?

  Are actually producing life.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  But I think we're at the point now. So now there may be other kinds of principles that actually, because you know, co-evolution actually has its own, not deterministic, you're done with determinism, right? But but you but complex systems have patterns, complex systems have constraints. And that's actually what we're going to be looking for, our constraints on them. And so, you know, and again, nothing against Carter was a brilliant idea, but it just goes to show, you know, this is great XTC, I'm a theoretical physicist, right? And so I love simplified, give me a simplified model with, you know, it's a dynamical equation, some initial conditions, I'm very happy. But there's this great XTC comic where like, you know, somebody's working something out on the board and this physicist is looking over and saying, oh, oh, I just, I just wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. Do you guys even have a journal for this?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  And the, you know, subtitle is why everybody hates physicists.

• 44:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  So sometimes that approach totally works. Sometimes physicists, you know, can be very good at like zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside. So you can get to the heart of an issue and that's very useful sometimes. Other times it obfuscates, right? Other times it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.

• 44:26Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let's return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake equation.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:36Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain the Drake equation?

• 44:39Speaker 02

  You know, people have various feelings about the Drake equation, you know, it can be abused, but basically it was the, the story actually is really interesting. So Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrobiological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. And he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody to make fun of him. Instead, he gets a phone call from the government, says, hey, we want you to do a, a meeting on interstellar communications, right? So he's like, okay, so they organize a meeting with like just eight people, a young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  And like the night before, Drake has to come up with a, an agenda. How do you come up for an agenda with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one's ever talked about before? Right? And so he actually, he breaks what he does, what's so brilliant about the Drake equation is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of sub problems, right? And he breaks it into seven sub problems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with. So the first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have planets, F sub P.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an abiogenesis event, life forms, occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence. After that, it's the fraction of planets where that intelligence goes on to create a civilization. And then finally, the last term, which is the one that we really care about, is the lifetime. How long you have a civilization, now how long does it last?

• 46:31Lex Fridman?

  What you say, we, we humans.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  We humans, right? Cause we're standing, we're staring at the, you know, multiple guns pointing at us. Nuclear war, climate change, AI. So, you know, how long on in general does civilizations last? Now, each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance. Right? By breaking the problem up into these seven sub problems, he gave astronomers something to do. Right? And so, you know, this is always with a new research field. You need a research program or else you just have a bunch of vague questions. You don't even know really what you're trying to do. So, you know, the star people could figure out how many stars were forming per year. The, the people who were interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera.

• 47:13Lex Fridman?

  I mean, these are their own fields. Essentially by creating this equation, he's launching new fields.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's exactly, he gave astrobiology, which wasn't even a term then, a roadmap. Like, okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that. And it had such far reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful, you know, sort of marching orders for all these different groups. Like, for example, it's because of the Drake equation, in some sense, that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978, 192 meetings, 1978 and 1979, that were driven in some part by the people who were involved in SETI getting NASA together to say, look, okay, look, how, you know, what's, what's the roadmap for us to develop technologies

• 48:05Speaker 02

  to find, find planets? So, um, yeah, so, you know, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it's not a law of nature, right? It's not something that's, it's not E equals mc squared. And so you can see it being abused in some sense, people, you know, it's generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good. I've written some of those and some of those papers are bad. Um, you know, I'm not sure where my paper fits in on those. I'm saying, you know, one should be careful about what you're using it for. But in terms of understanding the problem that, that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.

• 48:44Lex Fridman?

  We could talk about each one of these, but let's just look at exo planets.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:48Lex Fridman?

  So that's a really interesting one. I think when you look back, you know, hundreds of years from now, what is it, in the 90s, when they first detected the first?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  92 and 95, 95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sun like star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken.

• 49:04Lex Fridman?

  I, I think that's like one of the greatest discoveries in, in the history of science.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I agree, I agree.

• 49:10Lex Fridman?

  Right now, I guess nobody's celebrating it too much because you don't know what it really means. But I think once we almost certainly will find life out there, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy, the entire universe. So if you can find life on a planet, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing. Across the entire universe.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  You can. All you need is one, like, right now, it's an any, you know, our understanding of life, we have one example. We have N equals one example of life. So that means we could be an accident, right? It could be that we're the only place in the entire universe where this weird thing called life has occurred. Get one more example, and now you're done. Because if you have one more example, now you're, you know, even, you know, you don't have to find all the other examples. You just know that it's happened more than once. And now you are, you know, in, from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, yeah, yeah, this life is not something that's hard to make.

• 50:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you, what do you think is the answer?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  So the paper, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I, in 2016, where we said, look, we have all this exoplanet data now, right? So the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it's one. Every frickin' star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it's mind boggling because every one of those, those are all places, right? They're either, you know, gas giants, probably with moons, so that the moons are places you can stand and look out, or they're like terrestrial worlds where even if there's not life, there's still snow falling and there's oceans washing up on, you know, on shorelines.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  It's incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So, right, the first term was F sub P, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone, right? On average. And it turns out to be one over five, right? So, you know, you know, around point two. So that means you just count five of them, go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an, an Earth-like planet, you know, in the habitable zone, like, whoa.

• 51:24Lex Fridman?

  So what, what defines a habitable zone?

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese-American astronomer Xu Sheng. And it was, it was a brilliant idea. It said, look, this is there, you know, I can do this simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what's the temperature? Temperature of the planet. What's the temperature of the surface? So now you're all you're going to ask you give it a standard kind of earth like atmosphere and ask, could there be liquid water on the surface? Right? We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that's happening. Fine. But you know, if you were to start off trying to make life, you'd probably choose water as your solvent for it. So basically the habitable zone is the band of orbits around a star

• 52:10Speaker 02

  where you can have liquid water on the surface. You could take a glass of water, pour it on the surface and it would just pool up. It wouldn't freeze immediately, which would happen if your planet is too far out and it wouldn't just boil away if your planet's too close in. So that's the formal definition of the habitable zone. So it's a nice strict definition. There's probably way more going on than that, but this is a place to start.

• 52:30Lex Fridman?

  Right. Well, we should say it's a place to start. I do think it's too strict of a constraint.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I would agree.

• 52:36Lex Fridman?

  We're talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There's so many other ways to get the aforementioned turmoil.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:47Lex Fridman?

  Where the temperature varies, whether it's volcanic, so interaction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of planets that are much farther away, all this kind of stuff.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, for example, we know in our own solar system, we have, say, Europa, the moon of Jupiter, which has got a hundred mile deep ocean under 10 miles of ice. Right? That's not in the habitable zone. That is outside the habitable zone. And that may be the best place. It's got more water than Earth does. All of its oceans are, you know, it's twice as much water on Europa than there is on Earth. So, you know, that may be a really great place for life to form and it's outside the habitable zone. So, you know, the habitable zone is a good place to start and it helps us. And there's reason, there's reasons why you do want to focus on the habitable zone because like Europa, I couldn't, I won't be able to see from across telescopic distances, across light years. I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa because it's under 10 miles of ice.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Right? So with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we're thinking they have atmospheres. Atmospheres are the things we can characterize for across 10, 50 light years. And we can see biosignatures as we're going to talk about. So there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extrasolar life.

• 54:00Lex Fridman?

  But for me, when I look up at the stars, it's very likely that there's a habitable planet or moon and each of the stars habitable defined broadly.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's that's not unreasonable to say. I mean, especially since the the formal definition, you get one in five, right? One in five is a lot. There's a lot of stars in the sky. So, yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there's a pretty good chance that there's something habitable orbiting it is not a unreasonable scientific claim.

• 54:30Lex Fridman?

  To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi paradox? Why haven't we seen them?

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Okay, the Fermi paradox. Let's talk about the I love talking about the Fermi paradox because there is no Fermi paradox. Dun dun dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi paradox, let's talk about the Fermi paradox and the history of it. So Enrico Fermi, it's 1950, he's walking with his friends at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab to the Cantina. And there had been this cartoon in The New Yorker, and they all read The New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, oh, it's UFOs because this is already, you know, it's 1950, the first big UFO craze happened in 47. So they'd all, they were laughing about this as they're walking and they started being physicists, started talking about interstellar travel, interstellar propulsion, blah, blah, blah.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  You know, conversation goes on for a while, conversation turns to something else, you know, they've gone to other things. About 40 minutes later, over lunch, Fermi blurts out, well, where is everybody? Right? Typical Fermi sort of thing. He'd done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that, look, if one, if they're, you know, if intelligence is common, that even traveling at sublight speeds, a civilization could cross, you know, kind of hop from one star system to the other and spread out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. And he realizes, and so he was like, why aren't they here now? And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart, where he actually

• 56:09Speaker 02

  kind of went through this calculation and showed and said, well, there's nobody here now, therefore, there's nobody anywhere that, you know. Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here now? But something happened where people, after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence. People got this idea in their head that like, oh, we've been looking for decades now for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence and we haven't found any. Therefore, there's nothing out there. But that, so we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox. And there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look. They're really, SETI was always done by researchers who were kind of like scavenging some time,

• 56:51Speaker 02

  you know, some extra time from their other projects to, you know, look a little bit, you know, at the sky with a telescope. Telescopes are expensive. So Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for SETI. You know, and imagine that's an ocean, all the different stars you have to look at, the radio frequencies you have to look at, how, when you look, how often you look. And they, they look, then they summed up all the SETI searches that had ever been done. They went through the literature. And what they found was if the, if the, if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at? And it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  And so now are we going to say, oh, well, there's no fish in the ocean, right? So there is absolutely, positively no indirect Fermi paradox. We just haven't looked. But we're starting to look. So that's what's, you know, finally, we're starting to look. That's what's exciting. The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that, right? There's a book called 77 solutions to the Fermi paradox that it just, you know, you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn't carry a lot of weight because there's so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Jonathan Carroll, one of my collaborators, we actually simulated the galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sublight speed from one star to the other, gathering resources, heading to the next one.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  And so we could actually track the expansion wave across the galaxy, have one, a biogenesis event, and then watch the whole galaxy get colonized or settled. And it is absolutely true that that wave crosses, you know, Hart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly. But civilizations don't last forever, right? So one question is, when did they visit? When did they come to Earth, right? So if you give civilizations a finite lifetime, you know, let them last 10,000, 100,000 years, what you find is you now have a steady state. Civilizations are dying, they're, you know, they're, they're coming back, they're traveling between the stars. What you find then is you can have big holes opened up. You can have regions of space where there is nobody for, you know, millions of years. And so if that, if we're living in one of

• 58:57Speaker 02

  those bubbles right now, then maybe we were visited, but we were visited 100 million years ago. And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was like dinosaurs or aliens that was here 100 million years ago, there's no way to tell. There's just, there's no record left over. The fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that, you know, you'd be able to find, you know, iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is, there's no way.

• 59:33Lex Fridman?

  So if there was an alien camp here?

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:37Lex Fridman?

  An alien village, a small civilization, maybe even a large civilization?

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Even a large civilization, even if it was a-

• 59:43Lex Fridman?

  100 million years ago.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  And it lasted 10,000 years, fossil record's not going to have it. Yeah, yeah. The fossil record is too sparse, right? Most things don't fossilize.

• 59:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  And 10,000 years is a, you know, blink in the eye of geological time. So we call, Gavin called this the Silurian hypothesis, after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures, the Silurians. And so that, but that paper got a lot of press. But it was a, you know, it was, it was, it was an important idea. And it was really Gavin's, I was just helping with the astrobiology, that to recognize that like, yeah, you know, we could have been visited a long time ago, there just would be no record.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing.

• 1:00:20Lex Fridman?

  It's really mind blowing. And it's also a good reminder that we've been intelligent, species have been here for a very short amount of-

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Very short amount of time. Yeah. This is not to say that there was, like, so, oh, whenever I gave, you know, I, like, I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we're not saying there was a Silurian, you know, but we're just saying that if there was, that's why I loved Gavin's question. Gavin's question was just like, how could you tell? Right? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That's what we were really showing is that you really, you know, unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody's done so far, that, you know, there would, there's not an obvious way to tell that there, there could have been civilizations here earlier on.

• 1:01:04Lex Fridman?

  I've actually been reading a lot about ancient civilizations. And it just makes me sad how much of the wisdom of that time is lost.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Lex Fridman?

  And how much guessing is going on, whether it's in South America, like what happened in the jungle?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the Amazon, like the Amazon problem, that was, you know, the conquistadors came and wiped everybody out. And especially just even like the plague may have decimated. So yeah, how much of that civilization?

• 1:01:33Lex Fridman?

  And there's a lot of theories and, you know, because of archaeology only looks at cities. They don't really know the origins of humans. And there's a, there's a lot of really interesting theories and they're of course controversial. And there's a lot of controversial people in every discipline, but archaeology is like a fascinating one. Cause we know so little, they're basically storytellers. You're assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces. And it's fascinating. It, it makes me, it's, it's, it's humbling and it's sad that there could be entire civilizations, ancient civilizations that are either almost entirely or entirely lost.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, like the, the indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been like millions and millions. You, we get this idea that like, oh, you know, this, the Europeans came and it was empty, you know? But it was, may have only been empty because the plague had swept up from the, you know, from the, what happened in Mesoamerica. So, and yeah, and they didn't really build cities, but they had, they, I mean, they, they didn't build wooden or stone cities. They built wooden cities, you know?

• 1:02:37Lex Fridman?

  Everybody seems to be building pyramids and they're really damn good at it. I don't know.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  What is up with the pyramid, like what is, why, why is that apply, like what archetype in our brain is that?

• 1:02:47Lex Fridman?

  And it is also really interesting, speaking of archetypes, is that independent civilizations formed? And they had a lot of similar kind of dynamics, like human nature. When it, it builds up hierarchies in a certain way, builds up myths and religions in a certain way. It builds pyramids in a certain way.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Lex Fridman?

  It goes to war, all this kind of stuff.

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Lex Fridman?

  Independently, it emerges. Fascinating.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Santa Fe Institute, the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on this, as complex systems, you know, the, the origin of hierarchies and such. Very cool.

• 1:03:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool. What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, A New Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in the Universe, this paper that expands on the Drake Equation. What are some interesting things in this paper?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, look, we have all of this exoplanet data, right? It's got to be good for something, especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake Equation. So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars that have planets. And then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone. Those are the second and third term in the Drake Equation. So what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so we said like, okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake Equation? And so what we realized is, well, okay, we got to get rid of time. The lifetime thing, we can't say anything about that. But if we let that, if we don't ask, how long do they last?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  But instead ask, what's the probability that there have been any civilizations at all? No matter how long they lasted. I'm not asking whether they exist now or not. I'm just asking in general about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe. And that we were able to constrain. And so what we found was basically that the, there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that are, those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're the only time that this is, you know, this whole process from, you know,

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed, right? So therefore you could put a probability, you could, we called it the pessimism line, right? We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations, right? But we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, as if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, one in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then there We're not the first. It's happened somewhere else. And to me, that was an annoy, that was mind blowing. Doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby. The galaxy could be sterile. It just told me that like, you know, unless nature's really against, it has some bias against civilizations.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  We're not the first time this has happened. This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history.

• 1:05:53Lex Fridman?

  10 billion trillion experiments.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a lot of experiments.

• 1:05:59Lex Fridman?

  That's a lot.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:00Lex Fridman?

  A thousand is a lot.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Lex Fridman?

  A hundred is a lot.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Lex Fridman?

  If we normal humans saw a hundred experiments and

• 1:06:09Lex Fridman?

  we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built, I mean, we would say for sure in a hundred, you'll get another.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So that's what I mean. That's why. So this, you know, these kinds of arguments, you have to be careful of what they can do. But what it really, I felt like what this paper showed was that, you know, the burden of proof is now on the pessimists. Right. So that's why we called it the pessimism line. There's been, you know, throughout history, there's been you know, alien pessimists and alien optimists, and they've been yelling at each other. That's all they had to go with, right? You know, and like with Giordano Bruno and 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. This, you know, we sort of thought this was like the plank length. This was sort of the plank length of astrobiology, gave you an actual number that, you know, if you could somehow calculate what the probability, you know, of forming a technological civilization was,

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  this thing sort of shows you where the limit is. As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually, absolutely, it has occurred in the, in the, in the history. Other civilizations have occurred in the history of the universe.

• 1:07:10Lex Fridman?

  So to me, at least the big question is FE, which is basically a biogenesis. How hard is it for life to originate on a planet? Cause all the other ones seem very likely. Everything seems very likely. The only open question to me.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Lex Fridman?

  It's like, how hard is it for life to originate?

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  There's lots of ways to, again, you know, we don't know unless we look and that, you know, you had Sarah Walker on not too long ago. You know, she's very interested in origins of life. So, you know, lots of people are working on this, but I think it's, it's hard looking at the history of the earth. You know, and again, this is. Can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, it's forming life. I don't think it's hard. Getting getting like basic biology started, I don't think is hard. It's still wild. It's an amazing process that actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn't. That's one of the things I like about Sarah's work. We're pursuing on a different level about the life as that the only process or the only system that uses information.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That's that's my that's my gut feeling.

• 1:08:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, day by day, this changes for me. But I just see that once you create bacteria, it's off to the races. You're gonna get complex life.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Lex Fridman?

  As long as you have enough time, I mean, that boring billion. And but I just can't imagine a habitable planet not having a couple of billion to spare.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple of years to spare. You know, there is a mystery there about why did it take so long? Like with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again about these windows. So like you couldn't happen until until the window, the planet and the the life had evolved together enough that they together kind of opened the window for the the next step. You know, intelligent life and how long intelligent is civil technological civilizations? I think there's a big question about how long those last and how, you know, I'm hopeful, you know? But but in terms of just like, I think life is absolutely going to be common in the, you know, pretty common in the universe.

• 1:09:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think is absolutely like, I think, again, if I were to bet everything,

• 1:09:21Lex Fridman?

  even even advanced civilizations are common. So the to me, then, the the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you know, you think about it, we've only been around, I mean, as a technical lot, truly, you know, when we think about in Drake's definition, you had to have radio telescopes. That's been 100 years. You know, and if we got another 10,000, 100,000 years of history, that would be for us, it'd be pretty amazing, right? But that's still that wouldn't be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations in the in the galaxy. Galaxy. So you really need it to be like hundreds of millions of years. And that raises a question which I am very interested in, which is how do we even talk about, I call it the billionaire civilization, right? How do we even begin to hypothesize or think about in any kind of systematic way? What happens to a technological civilization across hundreds of millions to a billion years?

• 1:10:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like, how do you even simulate the trajectories that civilizations can take across that kind of time scale?

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:22Lex Fridman?

  When we all the data we have is just for the 10,000 years or so, 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations.

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Lex Fridman?

  And then just, I don't, I don't know what you put it at, but maybe 100 years that we've been technological.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we're ready to blow ourselves to bits or, you know, drive ourselves off the planet. Yeah, no, it's really interesting, but there's got to be a way that I think that's really a frontier. So you had David Kipping on not too long ago. And David and I did a paper and Caleb Scharf, David really drove this. Where we, you know, it was Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question, if you if you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or, you know, a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger, your age or older? And you could see, I mean, this is not hard to do, but it was great, the formalism, the formalism was hard. You know, it's kind of intuitive, but the formalism was hard to show that, yeah, they're older, you know, probably much older. So that means you really do need to think about like, okay, how do billion year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave?

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it? It's so much fun because you gotta, like, you have to, you have to imagine the unimaginable. Like, you know, would you still, I mean, obviously biological evolution can happen on, you know, on those kinds of time scales. So you wouldn't even really be the same thing you started out as, but social forms, what kind of social forms? Can you imagine that would be continuous over that? Or maybe they wouldn't be continuous, get, they drop out, you know, they destroy themselves and then they come back. So maybe it's, you know, it's a trunk or a punctuated evolution. I mean, but we gotta sort of, this is the fun part, we have to sort of work this out.

• 1:11:55Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, one way to approach that question is like, how, what are the different ways to achieve homeostasis? As you get greater and greater technological innovation. So like, if you expand out into the universe and you have optocardia scale, what, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself? Just achieve stability while still growing?

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's an interesting question. I think it's probably simulatable.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Could be. I mean, you know, agent based modeling, you could do it with that. So, you know, our group has used agent based modeling to do something like the Fermi paradox. That was, that was agent based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this. Other groups have done this to do use agent based modeling to track the, the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. The, so I think that, I think it's actually very doable. But um, understanding the kind of assumptions and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those, that is what is sort of the frontier.

• 1:12:56Lex Fridman?

  Do you think if humans colonized Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now? Like that, that's the thing to load into the simulate, the agent based simulation we're talking about.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  If we settle it, Mars will very quickly want to become its own nation.

• 1:13:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, there's already going to be nations on Mars. That's guaranteed.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Lex Fridman?

  The moment you have two million people, one, the moment you have one million people, there's going to be two tribes.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:28Lex Fridman?

  And then they're going to start fighting.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:30Lex Fridman?

  And the question is, interplanetary fighting, how quickly does that happen? And does it have a different nature to it? Because of the distances, you know?

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  Are you a fan of The Expanse? Do you have you watched The Expanse? Great show. Cause it's all about the, I highly recommend to everybody. It's based on a series of books that are excellent. It's on Prime, six seasons, and it's basically about the settled solar system. It takes place about 300 years from now, and the entire solar system is settled. And it is the best show about interplanetary politics. The first season, actually, um, the journal, what was it? Uh, Foreign, Foreign Affairs said the best show on TV about politics. It takes place is interplanetary. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict. Um, and I don't think it'll be necessarily all that different, you know, because really I think within a few hundred years, we will have lots of people in the solar system.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  And it doesn't even have to be on Mars. We did a paper where we look based on, because I was wanting to know about whether an idea in the expanse was really possible. In the expanse, the asteroid belt, what they've done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside, right? Because they have the Coriolis force. And I thought like, wow, what a cool idea. And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, did you guys calculate this? See if whether it's possible? Sadly, it's not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one-third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings, the rock would just fall apart. It would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nano-fiber bag, and spin those up, it would inflate the bag. And then even a small couple of kilometer-wide asteroid would expand out to,

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  you could get like Manhattan's worth of material inside. So forget about even colonizing Mars, space stations, right? Or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think, you know, within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions of people, living in the solar system.

• 1:15:35Lex Fridman?

  And you think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars and on the planetary surface?

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  You know, it's a lot easier on some, on some level, right? Depends on how, like with nano fabrication and such. But, you know, getting down a gravity well is hard, right? So, you know, there's a certain way in which there's a lot of, you know, it's a lot easier to build real estate out of asteroids. But we'll probably do both. I mean, I think what will happen is, you know, the next, should we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other, and AI, the, the next thousand years of human history is the solar system, right? And so, you know, I think we'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can. And it's, you know, it's a beautiful, what I love about, what's hopeful about it is this idea, you're going to have all of these pockets. And, you know, I'm sure there's going to be a Mormon space habitat, like, you know, there's going to be whatever you want, libertarian space habitat.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  Everybody's going to be able to kind of create there. There'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to sort of figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom.

• 1:16:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you think that's a good backup solution to go out into space? So to avoid the possibility of humans destroying themselves completely here on Earth?

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think, you know, I want to be always careful with that because like I said, it's centuries that we're talking about, right? So, you know, the problem with climate change, you know, and same with nuclear war, it's breathing down our necks now. So it's not a, you know, trying to establish a base on Mars is going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self sufficient for a couple of, you know, a century at least. So it's not like a backup plan now. You know, we have to solve the problem of climate change. We have to deal with that. There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do our, you know, horrific things to the planet for human beings. So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way, but I do think, like I said, it's the prize. It's, you know, if we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to sort of

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  play around in and experiment with and do really cool things with.

• 1:17:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there's a urgency, like a real urgency, like a catastrophe, like a, maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it's like, holy shit, this is for sure. For sure, a bigger one is looming.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  Maybe if geopolitically the war between China and the United States escalates, where there's this tension that builds and builds and builds and it becomes more obvious that we need to really, really, really.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think my, my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a self sufficient base is so far away that like, say, you start doing that and then there is a full scale nuclear exchange, that basis, you know, it's not going to last because it's just, you know, the self sufficiency requires a kind of economy, like literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars, that we are centuries from. Like I said, you know, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries. You know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff, right? And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is sort of centuries long. So that's why I think, I think we'd be better off trying to solve these problems than, you

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  know, I just think the odds that we're going to be able to create a self sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small. So we'd have to deal with the threat.

• 1:18:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self sufficient colony on Mars or out in space as a space habitat, like where? Earth entirely could be destroyed, you could still survive.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, because it's really what about, you know, thinking about complex systems, right? A space habitat, you know, would have to be as robust as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing, you know, you go out and you see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. You know, that's why I always think that, you know, if this process of going out into space is actually will help us with climate change and with thinking about making a long term sustainable version of human civilization. Because you really have to think about these webs, the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this, right? And so, A, how do we support, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  doesn't, you know, mess with the biospheres, mess with the biosphere's capacity to support our technosphere? So, you know, by doing this, by trying to build space habitats, in some sense, you're thinking about building a small scale version of this. So I think, I think the two problems are going to kind of feed back on each other.

• 1:20:08Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's also the other possibility of, like, the movie Darren Aronofsky's Postcard from Earth, where we can create this kind of life gun that just shoots, as opposed to engineering everything.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Lex Fridman?

  Basically seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing, it seems like. So as opposed to like, with a space habitat, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole, the whole thing.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  The whole thing.

• 1:20:38Lex Fridman?

  By yourself.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:39Lex Fridman?

  You know, if you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think you'd be surprised what happens.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Lex Fridman?

  Right?

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Lex Fridman?

  Like, honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, like, a giant number of organisms from Earth into, on Mars.

• 1:21:00Lex Fridman?

  On some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system. Do you think like, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  I, you know, the moon is hard because the moon is just like, there's no, you know, the moon may be really hard. But you know, that'd be, I mean, I wonder if somebody's must have done these experiments, right? Like how, because we know they're extremophiles, right? We know that they're, you can go down, you know, 10 miles below the earth's surface. And there are things where there's no sunlight. There's, you know, the conditions are so extreme. And there's lots of microbes having a great time, living off the radioactivity, you know, in the rocks. But, you know, they had lots of time to evolve to those conditions. So I'm not sure if you dumped a bunch of bacteria, you know, so somebody like, somebody must have done these experiments. Like, you know, how fast could microbial evolution occur in, under harsh conditions?

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  That you maybe get somebody who figures out, okay, I can deal with this. I think the moon's too much because it's so sterile. But, you know, Mars, I don't know, maybe, I don't know. We'd have to, but it's an interesting idea.

• 1:22:01Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if somebody has done those experiments.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd think somebody would, like, let's take a bunch of microbes.

• 1:22:06Lex Fridman?

  The harsh, the, take the harshest possible condition of all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Pressure, salinity, and then just like dump a bunch of things that are not used to it. And then just see, does everybody just die? You know, that's it, there's, you know.

• 1:22:18Lex Fridman?

  The thing about life, it, it flourishes in a non-sterile environment where there's a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh. In the lab, I don't know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean?

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:35Lex Fridman?

  Like you have to have the, the, the, the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow, even when it's a super harsh condition. So that, so that's actually not a trivial experiment. And I wouldn't even, if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I'd be a little bit skeptical. Because like if, because I could see bacteria doesn't survive in this kinds of temperature, but then I'm being, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Is there enough, right? Is there, you know, is there, are there other options? Like, you know, is the condition rich enough?

• 1:23:05Lex Fridman?

  Rich enough, yeah.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  You know, there's, there's an alternative view, though, which is there's this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora. You know, so there's been a million century ship stories, like where, you know, Earth sends out a, you know, generation ship or century ship and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. And on this one, they get all the way there and they think it's, the planet's going to be habitable. And it turns out that it's not habitable for Earth life like that. You know, there's, there's like, you know, bacteria or prions, actually, you know, super that just like, you know, kill people in the simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that like, you know, life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I'm not necessarily supporting it, but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions that not the planetary,

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy this to, to just sort of be like, oh, just drop it over here and it'll, you know, because the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, and I kind of believe this, the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community. Yeah.

• 1:24:11Lex Fridman?

  That's actually an interesting field of study is how, when you arrive from one planet to another, so we humans arrive to a planet that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or?

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Or the other one.

• 1:24:30Lex Fridman?

  Or the other one. That's, let's stick to biology like that. That's an interesting question. I don't know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Because everybody, everything on life is, you know, has the same lineage. We all come from Luca, you know, the last universal common ancestor. And what you see is often in science fiction, people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay, because like that bio, that metabolism, that biochemistry is so different from ours that we can coexist because they don't even know each other, you know, right? That the, you know, and then the other version is you get there, you land and instantly, you know, the nose bleeds and you're dead.

• 1:25:06Lex Fridman?

  Unfortunately, I think it's the latter.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sort of feels like. It feels like a very alien kind of thing.

• 1:25:12Lex Fridman?

  So as we look out there, according to the Drake Equations, we just discussed, it seems impossible to me that there's not civilizations everywhere. So how do we look at them? This process of SETI?

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  I have to put on my scientist hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak, is common. I am a little agnostic about, I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until, you know, we gotta go look. It's all, it's all armchair, armchair astronomy.

• 1:25:39Lex Fridman?

  That's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective. From my bro science perspective, it seems, again, smoking the aforementioned weed.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  After the bong.

• 1:25:49Lex Fridman?

  I mean, honestly, it's, it's really just, it's impossible to me that there's not

• 1:25:56Lex Fridman?

  potentially dead, but advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The potentially dead part, I think, right. It could be that like, making civilizations is easy, they just don't last long. So when we went out there, we'd find a lot of extinct civilizations.

• 1:26:09Lex Fridman?

  Extinct civilizations. Yeah, apex predators don't survive. Like, they get better, better, better, and they die, kill themselves all somehow. Anyway, so just how do we find them?

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So SETI, search for extraterrestrial technology, is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. I mean, some people in my field are, so I'm sorry, folks. But I'm really, what I really like is the idea of techno-signatures, because I think, to me, SETI is the, first of all, intelligence. We're not really looking for intelligence, we're looking for technology. I mean, you know.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  And SETI, the classic idea of SETI is the radio telescopes, you know, in contact, Jodie Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part, it's still active, there's still great things going on with it, but suddenly this whole new window opened up. When we discovered exoplanets, we now found a new way to look for intelligent civilizations, or life in general. In a way that doesn't have any of the assumptions that had to go into the classic radio study. And specifically, what I mean is, we're not looking for somebody sending us a beacon. You really needed that with the classic model for a bunch of different reasons. You had to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon. Now, because we know exactly where to look and we know exactly how to look, we can just

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilizationing business, you know, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a techno-signature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere. And that's really important. That is why kind of the whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological, that biospheres and technospheres are so potent, they change the entire planet. And you can see that from 20 light years. So let's give an example of a biosignature to start off with, which would be a signature of a biosphere. Oxygen, right?

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  On Earth, at least, we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear, you know, very quickly. They'd react away, they'd all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there. Okay, what about technospheres? Technospheres, this is what, you know, so I'm the principal investigator on the first grant NASA has ever given to do these kind of exoplanet techno-signatures. NASA was kind of, for reasons we can talk about, NASA had gotten pretty gun-shy about funding anything about intelligent life. But, okay, what's an example of a techno-signature? Well, one could be atmospheric pollution.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  I'm going to put pollution in quotes here because it doesn't have to be pollution, but gases, like chlorofluorocarbons. So we've dumped, you know, we dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake. It was affecting the ozone, but we put so much in there that actually, this is one of the things we did, we did a paper where we showed, you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet. Pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that there was a technological civilization there. Because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons, except through some kind of industrial process.

• 1:29:35Lex Fridman?

  So you're looking for, in the case of the biosphere, you're looking for anomalies in a spectrograph?

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  I wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies. I'm looking for things that, for biosignature, I'm looking for things that a geosphere, right, that just rock and air wouldn't produce on its own.

• 1:29:51Lex Fridman?

  What kind of chemicals would life produce?

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  Right, and that's the interesting thing, right? So we can use Earth as an example, right? We can say, look, oxygen, we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn't for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that phytoplankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it, that's sometimes mentioned. And there was even, there was a paper that somebody wrote where it was like, well, we're not saying we see it, but you know, there's a bunch of noise in the spectra right there. So you know, there's a whole list of things that Earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures. But now we're reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with Earth's history.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  But we think that that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life, right? What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint? So one of these things could be the structure of the network of chemical reactions. That biology always produces very different chemical networks, who's reacting with who, than just rock and water, right? So there's been some proposals for networked biosignatures. Information theory, you can use, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that you find in the atmosphere. And maybe that information shows you like, oh, there's too much information here, there must have been biology happening, it's not just rock.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Same thing for techno, that's what we're working on right now, that for techno signatures as well.

• 1:31:22Lex Fridman?

  So how do you detect? Techno-signatures.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so with techno-signatures, I gave the example of chlorofluorocarbon. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non-agnostic one because we sort of like, oh, we produced chlorofluorocarbons, maybe they will, right? And there's solar panels, right? You can actually, the glint off of solar panels will produce a, the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, no matter what it's made out of, actually. There was a paper that Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb did in, I think it was 2017. We've just followed up on it. That actually could act as a techno-signature. You'd be able to see in the reflected light, this sort of big jump that would occur because of city lights, city, artificial illumination. If there's really like, you know, large-scale cities like, you know, Coruscant in Star Wars

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  or Trantor in the Foundation, those city lights would be detectable, you know, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years. So, you know, our job in this grant is to develop the first-ever library of techno-signatures. Nobody's really ever thought about this before. So we're trying to come up with all the possible ideas for what a civilization might produce that could be visible across, you know, interstellar distances. And are these good ones or is these ones going to be hard to detect or such?

• 1:32:41Lex Fridman?

  City lights. So if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years, we can see it.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you looked at Earth at night from a distance where, you know, looked at its spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you'd be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of, you know, they bounce off the ground, right? The light bounces off the ground. So you'd convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectra from the ground and yeah, you'd be able to see that there's city lights. Now, increase that by a factor of a thousand, you know, if you had a Trantor and you'd be able to detect that across interstellar distances. Thomas Beatty did this work, who's now working with us.

• 1:33:20Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the? Most detectable thing about Earth?

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Wow, we just, this is fun. We just have a Sophia Schiff, who's part of our collaboration, just did a paper. We did Earth from Earth. If you were looking at Earth with Earth technology for a bunch of different techno-signatures, how close would you have to be to be able to detect them? And most of them turn out to be, you'd have to be pretty close, at least out to the Oort Cloud. But actually, it is our radio signatures still that is still most detectable.

• 1:33:47Lex Fridman?

  By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close, and then you said the Oort Cloud, that's not very close. But you mean like, from an interstellar?

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  Interstellar distance. Because the real question, you know, we really want to know is like, I'm sitting here on Earth, I'm looking at these exoplanets. The nearest star is four light years away. So that's like the minimum distance. So what can, if I'm looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I see?

• 1:34:07Lex Fridman?

  What is detectable about Earth with our current technology from the, our nearest solar system?

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Oh my God, there's all kinds of stuff. Well, like our, the chlorofluorocarbons, you can see, you know, you can see Earth's pollution. And, you know, I think city lights, you had to be within, you know, within the solar system.

• 1:34:25Lex Fridman?

  If they do direct imaging of Earth?

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  They're gonna need much more powerful. But let me tell you what, let's talk about direct imaging for a moment, because I just have to go on, this is such a cool idea, right? So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes and such, is we're trying to do direct imaging. We're trying to get, you know, an image of a planet separated from its star, to be able to see the reflected light, or the actual emission from the planet itself.

• 1:34:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, by the way, just to clarify, direct imaging means literally like a picture?

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  A picture. But the problem is, is that with the, even with the, the thing that's going to come after JWST, it's going to be a pixel, right? You're not going to get any kind of resolution. You'll be able to get the light from it, which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you're not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the Solar Gravity Lens Telescope, I think that's what it is. And the idea is insane, right? So their general relativity says, look, massive bodies distort space. They actually curve spacetime. So the sun is a massive body. And so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens, right? So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out kind of into the Oort Cloud, and then look back towards

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  the sun, towards an exoplanet that is behind, not directly behind the sun, but is, you know, in the direction of the sun. And then let the, let the sun act like a lens and collect focused the light onto the telescope.

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  And you would be able to get, and they've done, it's amazing, like they've already, this idea is insane. They'd be able to get, if everything works out, 24 kilometer resolution. You'd be able to see Manhattan on a exoplanet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, you know, NASA, they've already got, the team has already gotten through like sort of three levels of NASA, you know, there's, there's the NASA program for like, give us your wackiest idea, right? And then the ones that survive that are like, okay, tell us whether that wacky idea, you know, is even feasible. And then, and they're marching along and the idea is that like, you know, and they even have plans for how you'd be able to get these probes out into the Oort Cloud on relatively fast time scales. You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as Earth is.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  But right now, everything looks, the idea seems to hold together. So probably when, I'll be dead, but when you're an old man, it's possible that something like this, could you imagine having like, yeah, that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to, you know, kilometers. So I'm very excited about that.

• 1:36:49Lex Fridman?

  I can only imagine having a picture like that. And then there's some mysterious artifacts that you're seeing.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's both inspiring and, and almost heartbreaking that we can see, like,

• 1:37:06Lex Fridman?

  I think we would be able to see a civilization where there's like a lot of scientists agree that this is very likely something and then we can't.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  We can't get there. But you know, I mean, again, this is the thing about being a long-lived. We've got to get to the point where we're long-lived enough that, so let's say we found, like, this is what I always like to, let's imagine that we find, say 10 light years away. We find a planet that looks like it's got techno signatures, right? It doesn't end there, like that would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity. And I wouldn't be like, well, okay, we're done. The first thing we do is we'd big, bigger telescope to try and do those imaging, right? And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there, right? There's, there, we would figure out, like with breakthrough, breakthrough star shot. There was this idea of trying to use, you know, giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts, uh, light sails almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures.

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  So we'll, you know, if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse. There would be the effort to actually try and send something to, to get there. Now, you know, we probably couldn't land, we could, but. You know, so maybe we maybe we take 30 years to build 10 years to get there 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, you know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals? Right? Those were multi-generational projects. And I think we're on the cusp of that kind of project.

• 1:38:30Lex Fridman?

  I think that would probably unite humans.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  I think would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. I mean, human beings are a mess, let's face it. But I think having that, that's why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn't matter, that to know that we're not an accident, to know that there is probably, if we found one example of life, we'd know that we're not an accident and there's probably lots of life and that we're a community. We're part of a cosmic kind of community of life. And who knows what life has done, right? We don't really, all bets are off with life.

• 1:39:00Lex Fridman?

  Since we're talking about the future of telescopes, let's talk about our current super sexy awesome telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope that I still can't believe actually worked.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  I can't believe it worked. I was really skeptical. I was like, okay, guys, all right, sure.

• 1:39:15Lex Fridman?

  We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold. So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I've been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There's been some direct imaging.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  Yes, like a single pixel.

• 1:39:31Lex Fridman?

  The kinds of exoplanets we're able to direct image, I guess would have to be hot.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Hot, usually far away from the, you know, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really kind of at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there's not sexy pictures. It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line. But be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That's where we are right now. In order to look for life, we're going to be, we need to find planets with atmospheres, right? And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that's the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K218B,

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  which had, they did a beautiful job getting the spectra. And the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a Hycean world. Hycean meaning hydrogen ocean world. And that is a kind of planet that it would be a, you know, kind of in the super Earth, sub Neptune domain we were talking about, you know, maybe eight times that mass of the Earth. But it's got a layer of hydrogen, of an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the, the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water. You can get a giant ocean of, of liquid water. And that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habitable planet. You know, it could be a 60 degree warm ocean.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, oh yeah, you know what? The models, from what we understand with the models, this looks like it's a, could be a Hycean world.

• 1:41:18Lex Fridman?

  And it's 120 light years away from Earth.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so isn't that amazing? You can, it's 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see to the atmosphere so well that we can be like, oh, look, methane. Methane was a five sigma detection. Like you knew that the data were so good that it was like the, the gold standard of science.

• 1:41:37Lex Fridman?

  What about detecting maybe through direct imaging? Or in other ways, megastructures that the civilizations build?

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  You know what's great about megastructures is, first of all, it's fun to say. Who doesn't want to say megastructure? Alien megastructure, right? Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that. So the, the, the, the example of this is the Dyson sphere, right? Which is amazing because, you know, it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.

• 1:42:03Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain the Dyson sphere?

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, you know, one of the greatest physicists ever, who had, was very broad minded and thought about a lot of different things. He recognized that, you know, when a civilization, as civilizations progress, what they're going to need is ever more energy to do ever more, you know, amazing things. And what's the best energy source in a solar system? It's the star, right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines, um, and the, the limit of this would be if you actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside, you could capture every photon the star produced, which is, you know, this insane amount of light, you would have enough power now to do anything, to re-engineer your solar system. Um, so

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  that was a Dyson sphere. It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn't really work because it's unstable, you know, but a Dyson swarm is, and that's really what he meant, you know, this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light.

• 1:43:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So he didn't actually mean a rigid

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:04Lex Fridman?

  sphere structure.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Lex Fridman?

  He basically meant a swarm. So

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Lex Fridman?

  That, like you said, in the limit, basically starts to look

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere. And we actually almost thought we might have found one of these, um, uh, back with, uh, Bajorian star. We saw, you know, the way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there's a dip in the starlight. It's a little eclipse, basically. And we know exactly what they should look like. And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where like, it was like this little dragon's tooth. And then there'd be another one and another one and another one, and then nothing, and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they suggested they, you know, they went through the list of, oh, it's could be comets, could be chunks of a broken up planet, and it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course, the news picked up on this and like everybody's, you know, news feed the next day, alien megastructure

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  is discovered. Turns out sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably like gas or dust clouds. Um, but it raised the possibility like, oh, these are observable. And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don't really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They're big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they're going to produce a little blip of light because that's what they're supposed to, right? They're absorbing starlight. So people did have worked out like, well, a square one or a triangular one.

• 1:44:19Lex Fridman?

  But that wouldn't be a Dyson sphere. That would be like one object.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  One object, right. Which is what you, if it's a swarm, you'd expect like the light to be like blinking in and out as these things pass in front of, you know, if you've got thousands of these, much of the time they'll be blotting out the star. Sometimes they won't be, right? And so you're going to get an irregular sort of, uh, signal, uh, transit signal.

• 1:44:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. One you wouldn't expect from a star that doesn't have anything.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. Or just a planet, right? Or a couple of planets. There'd be so many of these that it would be like beep beep, blip blip blip.

• 1:44:47Lex Fridman?

  And that usually doesn't happen in a star system because there's only just a handful of planets.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  That's exactly what it is. Everything's coagulating. In a stable solar system, you get a handful of planets, you know, five, 10, that's it probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see lots of these little micro transits, you're telling you there's something else that's big enough to create a transit, but you know, too many of them, and also within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these are, these could be mega structures.

• 1:45:18Lex Fridman?

  How many people are looking for mega structures now?

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  Well, the main groups looking for mega structures are, again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators. The way they're looking for it, though, is for infrared light, because, you know, the second law of thermodynamics says, look, if you capture all of this starlight, you're going to warm up the, you know, your thing's going to warm up and emit in infrared. There's going to be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this.

• 1:45:45Lex Fridman?

  That feels like a louder, clearer way to detect it.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  Right. And that's actually, you know, Dyson, that's actually why Dyson proposed it. He wasn't really proposing it because like he was saying, this is what civilizations are going to do. He proposed it because he was like, oh, we want to start looking for alien civilizations. Here's something that would have a detectable signature. So Jason and company have done, you know, pretty good searches. And recently, they made news because, you know, they were able to eliminate a lot of places. No, these are not Dyson spheres, but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough that they're like, well, this is kind of what it would look like. It's not a detection. And they were saying, they would never say it's a detection, but they were like, they were not non-detections.

• 1:46:23Lex Fridman?

  They're potential candidates.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  Potential candidates, yeah.

• 1:46:26Lex Fridman?

  Love it. We have mega structure candidates. That's inspiring. What other mega structures do you think that could be? I mean, so that's Dyson spheres about capturing the energy of a star.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Lex Fridman?

  There could be other.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Well, there's something called the Clark Belt, right? So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit, right? Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that's really useful if you want to beam things straight down, or if you want to put a space elevator up, right? So there's this idea that if, you know, a civilization becomes, you know, advanced enough that it's really using geosynchronous orbit, that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. Uh, there's been a couple of papers written about the possibility of these Clark Belts, densely occupied Clark Belts, being a megastructure. It's not as mega as a Dyson Swarm, but it's, you know, kind of planetary scale.

• 1:47:20Lex Fridman?

  You think it's detectable, Clark Belt?

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  It could be. I mean, like, in our list of techno-signatures, it would be down there. But it would be, again, if you had an advanced enough civilization that did enough of this, it would certainly, you'd have a Clark Belt, and the question is whether or not it's detectable.

• 1:47:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, probably Dyson Sphere is the, that's the more exciting.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  That's the go-to one.

• 1:47:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of the Dyson Sphere, let's talk through the Carter-Shev scales.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:47:43Lex Fridman?

  What is the Carter-Shev scale and where are humans on it?

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Right, so the Carter-Shev scale was the same time, this is this golden age of SETI, like, kind of like 60, 59 to 65, when it just starts, like, this is, you know, Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, oh my god, this is even possible. And so people are just throwing out these ideas. And as I, you know, said in the book, science is conservative. And what I mean by that is it holds on to its best ideas. So Carter-Shev comes up with this idea that, look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability. If we're looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the state, what are the natural stages, natural in quotes, that a civilization goes through? And he was thinking in terms of energy use, which, like, a good physicist. So the, he said, look, um, the first

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  Hurdle in terms of energy or threshold that civilization will go through is using all the starlight that falls onto a planet. He called that a type one civilization. In whatever way you're doing it, some large fraction of the starlight that falls on your planet, you're using for your own ends. The next would be to use all the starlight there is from that star. Right? So that's the Dyson sphere. So he actually Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Cartier Chef was picking out. So that's a type two civilization. Type three is galactic scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. Right? So we are now, where are we now remarkably on a log scale? We're at point seven of a type one.

• 1:49:12Lex Fridman?

  So we're not even type one?

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  No, no, no, we're not even type one. But according to, uh, there was a paper written by a group that said, you know, if we continue on our path, we'll be at a type one at around 2300.

• 1:49:25Lex Fridman?

  2300.

• 1:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Lex Fridman?

  So this is on a log scale.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:28Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, point seven, so type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders of magnitude larger than that, 10 to the 26th watts. And I think estimate for the galaxy is another 10 orders of magnitude.

• 1:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause there's a hundred billion star of order, a hundred billion stars.

• 1:49:47Lex Fridman?

  So that's a lot.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  That's a lot.

• 1:49:50Lex Fridman?

  Do you think humans ever get to type one?

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  Um, I think, you know, there's a problem with type one, which is that, you know, we already know about climate change, right? The effects of our harvesting energy to do the work of civilization is already changing the climate state. Right? And that's something that, you know, Cartier Chef couldn't have recognized. When you, you know, there's, there's, uh, the first law of thermodynamics, right? Which is just about energy, you know, the different forms of energy. Then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy. And Cartier Chef wasn't thinking about the second law. If you get all that energy and you use it, there is waste heat. You don't get to use it all. Right? You can only, second law tells you that if, you know, I have a tank of gasoline, I can only use a certain fraction of the energy in that tank and the rest is going to go to

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  heating up the engine block. So that second law tells you that, you know, you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, uh-oh, you know, sorry, is going to change on you. So there's a way in which we probably can't get to a type one without like devastating the earth's climate. So we're probably going to have to figure out. The most important thing actually here is probably this is why space becomes so the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while called service worlds, right? That at some point, you probably move a lot of your industry off world, right? We've got Mercury, for example. There's nothing on Mercury. There's no life on Mercury. Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right? Because you can't mess with the biosphere.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  The biosphere is more powerful than you are, right? And so, yeah, so there's limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere.

• 1:51:34Lex Fridman?

  It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology, but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  This is the frontier we are, and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars. It's like you've got, you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we're going through now of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework. And you know, that paper we were talking about with the 10 billion trillion worlds, that was actually in service of the work I was doing for this other book where I wanted to know, how often are, do you go through an Anthropo? How, you know, does every civilization, technological civilization, trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate Anthropocene crisis? And the answer, we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably. And then the question is, are you smart enough to figure out how to readjust what you're doing technologically so that you're not, you know, that all boats rise, right?

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  You want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and resilient. So, yeah, right, it's the kind of technology. I think there's probably absolutely limits on how much energy you can use, but how do you use that energy? And then also, yeah, getting off planet eventually. If you want to use 10 times more energy than that, you're not going to do it on world.

• 1:52:56Lex Fridman?

  So how do we detect? Alien type one, two and three civilizations. So we've been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection.

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:53:08Lex Fridman?

  Maybe with the Dyson sphere, you start to get like a little bit more type two. But it feels like if you have a type two civilization, it won't be just the Dyson sphere.

• 1:53:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:53:19Lex Fridman?

  It feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned. Climate change, but now at the star system level, they're probably expanding. Right. So how, how would you detect a type two?

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  How about propulsion plumes, right? If you're expanding, no, no, we, we just, I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who's joined us from the, he's at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes. Right. If you have a civilization, if you have a solar system wide civilization, right? And you got space truckers going back and forth, right? You know, from Mars to, you know, they're doing the Enceladus run. They're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there, right? If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on, you know, so you're, you're also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable?

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  Cause now you've got spaceships going all over the place and the odds that like, you know, the plume is going to cross your field of view becomes, could become pretty high. So yeah, that's, I think that's a good way of looking for, that's one idea of looking for, you know, large scale interplanetary, which is kind of like when you're getting to a type, type two. Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea, it was a group at Harvard Smithsonian that, you know, to be able to look for, if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats, can, you know, there'd be dust particles left around. And would they look different from just say the dust, you know, from just regular collisions?

• 1:54:54Lex Fridman?

  So pollution of all different kinds.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  Pollution of all different kinds.

• 1:54:57Lex Fridman?

  And trash also?

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  Okay. So trash is an interesting idea when you come to the actual solar system, right? We are actually, there's a whole other field of techno signatures, which are things in the solar system. What if somebody came by a billion years ago, you know, and left some stuff, right? So the earth has been showing biosignatures for billions of years. And you know, a species like us, looking at our level, looking at earth would have been able to know that earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by, you know, a half a billion years ago. So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts is that have been there for a long time is something that people, a number of people are doing.

• 1:55:40Speaker 02

  We're just working on a paper where we just calculated, this was super fun. We calculated, how long would the lunar lander exist on the moon before micrometeorites just chewed it down, right? How long would you be able to land on the moon and go, oh, look, there's, you know, there's somebody was here and left some debris. So there's this process called gardening, which is just the micrometeorite, constant rain of micrometeorites. You know, and that's what, where you get the lunar regolith, that fine powder on the moon is because of this gardening. And it turns out it is literally hundreds of millions to billions of years.

• 1:56:13Lex Fridman?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  That the, yeah, that the lunar lander will be visible.

• 1:56:18Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts.

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, if there's artifacts on, and people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. We have, you know, the moon has been mapped down to like a couple of meters with various probes and all that data is sitting there. So have, why not use machine learning to like, look through all those things and look for anything that looks not like the lunar surface? And they did a test program where they gave it, they gave the computer, you know, sort of like, I don't know, 50 miles around the Apollo 11, or Apollo, maybe it was Apollo 17 site, and it instantly was able to pull out the lander.

• 1:56:51Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the whole task of looking for anomalies, something that looks not like the lunar surface, you make it sound obvious, but it's not exactly obvious. Like anomalies is really not, I mean, detect something that doesn't look right about this room.

• 1:57:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's actually really difficult.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  Really difficult. It's really difficult. And it's, you know, what's cool, it's a really information theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say like, what's the background? What's, you know, well, how do I define something that I can say that looks weird?

• 1:57:21Lex Fridman?

  So. Yeah, maybe when you're looking at a spectrograph or something like, it's still, it's still like.

• 1:57:28Lex Fridman?

  It's gonna look really weird, potentially. Like, we're kind of hypothesizing all the things that humans would build.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:57:35Lex Fridman?

  And how do we detect that?

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:57:37Lex Fridman?

  But that could be really weird stuff.

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  That's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures, right? So, actually disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium, right? It's alive, right? Because as soon as it dies, it turns into, goes back to equilibrium. And so you can look at all chemicals in an atmosphere, even if you don't know whether, these could be chemicals that you have no idea whether or not they have anything to do with life. But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, you know, the chemicals have not all kind of like just gone down to, you know, they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what's called the Gibbs free energy. And that, that's kind of a signature. Like, if you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium,

• 1:58:24Speaker 02

  you know, that indicates that there's some, there's something happening on that planet, biosphere or technosphere, that is pumping gases, you know, into the, into the atmosphere that is keeping the whole system from relaxing.

• 1:58:37Lex Fridman?

  So is it possible we can detect anomalies in spacetime?

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Well, you could detect, and there's, there's been some work on this, like with the Akubre drive, you know, these proposals for warp drives. And we could talk about that later. I'm skeptical of those, but, um, because it may really be possible you just can't go faster than the speed of light. But people have done work on like, you know, what would be the signature of an Akubre drive? What would be the signature, like, you know, could you detect if you're using a drive like that? Then you certainly are distorting spacetime, which means any light that's passing by has gotten, you know, its, its, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted spacetime. So, yeah, there are possibilities along with that. You know, one of the funny things, I don't know if they've gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Akubre drive, or this warp drive,

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  was that if, if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would like sterilize any planet in front of you. So it's like, well, yeah, you probably don't want to do that, but that would be a great bios or techno signature. Another planet obliterated.

• 1:59:38Lex Fridman?

  So you think it's not possible to travel faster than the speed of light?

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. But what I think, you know, if you look at the physics we understand, right?

• 1:59:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:47Speaker 02

  The, you know, every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn't exist, right? So, so, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations, you can actually play with them. The equations are right there. You can add things to the, you know, right or left hand side that allow you to get something like the Akubre drive. That was a metric that, you know, showed you like, oh, it's a warped bubble. It's a warping of spacetime that moves through spacetime faster than the speed of light, right? Because nothing can move across spacetime faster than the speed of light, but spacetime itself can move faster than the speed of light. But here's the problem with all of those proposals is they all need something.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  The thing you added, the little fictional term you added on the, into the equations is something called exotic matter, and it doesn't exist. It's really just something we dreamed up to make the equation to do what we wanted them to do. So, you know, it's a nice fiction, but really right now, you know, you know, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration, where like the technology we use now is, you know, is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago, is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago. But, you know, I remember playing Assassin's Creed where everybody's like, you know, what is it? It's 1200 and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And I was like, yeah, it's a great game.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  And then I got Assassin's Creed 2 and it was 300 years later and everybody's like stab, stab, stab. And it was like 300 years and the technology hadn't changed. And that was actually true for most of human history, right? You used your great grandfather's tools because there was no need to have any other new tools. And you probably did his job. So, you know, we can be fooled into thinking like, oh, you know, technology is just going to go on forever. We're always going to find new advances. As opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time. So you have to be careful about that bias that we have, living in this time of great acceleration.

• 2:01:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but also it is a great acceleration and we also are not good at predicting what that entails if it does keep accelerating. So for example, somebody like Eric Weinstein often talks about we under invest in theoretical physics research.

• 2:02:04Lex Fridman?

  Basically, like, we're trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus like trying to hack physics, sort of warp drives and so on. Because it's really hard to do space travel. And it seems like in the long arc of human history, if we survive, the way to really travel across long distances is going to be some new, totally new thing.

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 2:02:31Lex Fridman?

  So it's not going to be an engineering problem. It's going to be a physics.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  A fundamental physics.

• 2:02:37Lex Fridman?

  Fundamental physics.

• 2:02:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in principle, but I think there's been, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there, people, you know, string theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years. It's not like people haven't been, not like there hasn't been a lot of effort. And, you know, and again, I'm not going to predict, I think it's entirely possible that we have, you know, there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through, in which case then all bets are off, right? Once you get sort of, you know, interstellar, fast interstellar travel, whoa, you know, who knows what can happen. But I tend to be drawn to like science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. Like, what kind of civilization can you build where like it takes, you know, 50 years to get to where you're going and 50 years back?

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  Like, so, I don't know, I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say that, that we won't get warp drives, but as of right now, there's, it's all fictional. It's, you know, it's barely even a coherent concept.

• 2:03:32Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of, of time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.

• 2:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Lex Fridman?

  So you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years.

• 2:03:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:55Lex Fridman?

  And it, you're not sad. That you'll never see the destination because you kind of have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a wild ethical question, isn't it? One of that book I told you about Aurora. I love the book because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual because, you know, I've read, I love science fiction. I've read so many generation ship stories and they get to that planet. The planet turns out to be uninhabitable. It's inhabited, but it's uninhabitable for Earth because again, he has this idea of like, you know, life is particular to their planets. So they turn around and they come back. And then when they land, the main character goes, there's still people who are, you know, arguing for more generation ships and she goes and she punches the guy out because she spent her whole life in a tube, you know, with this. I thought that was a really interesting inversion. You know, the interesting thing about, about we were talking about the space habitats. But if you really had a space habit, not some super cramped, you know, crappy usual

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  version of a century ship. But if you had these like space habitats that were really, you know, like the O'Neill cylinders, they're actually pretty nice places to live. Put a thruster on those, you know, like, why, why keep them in the solar system? Maybe that's, maybe space is full of like these sort of traveling space habitats that are in some sense, a, you know, they're worlds in them in and of themselves.

• 2:05:13Lex Fridman?

  There's the show Silo, which raises the question of basically if you're putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them.

• 2:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Lex Fridman?

  You might want to tell them a story.

• 2:05:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:05:27Lex Fridman?

  That they believe.

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:05:28Lex Fridman?

  Because there is a society, there's human nature. There's like, how do you maintain homeostasis of that little society?

• 2:05:37Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's a fascinating technical question, a social question, a psychology question.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  You know, the generation ship too, you know, which I talked about in the book, the idea of the also the, you know, you talked about extending human lifetimes or, um, you know, the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction, you know, that, you know, right, you can be put to, you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible, but you know, it's so interesting. And this is why I love science fiction, the way it seeds ideas, right? All these ideas we're going to talk about because they've been staples of science fiction for 50 years.

• 2:06:07Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the whole field of cryogenics.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, where are we at with that?

• 2:06:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I wonder what the state of the art is for a complex organism.

• 2:06:13Speaker 02

  How long?

• 2:06:14Lex Fridman?

  How long can you freeze and then unfreeze?

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  Maybe like with bacteria, you could do freeze.

• 2:06:19Speaker 02

  Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about panspermia, right? How long can, you know, how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted? You know, if there's a comet impact across, you know, interstellar distances? That does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kinds of calculations. It's not out of the realm of possibility, but a complex organism, multi-cellular, multi-systemic or multi-systems, right, with organs and such?

• 2:06:44Lex Fridman?

  Also, what makes an organism? I mean, it could, you know, which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe the, for humans, it seems like, like what makes a personality? It feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. Like, if I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I'd pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  Altered Carbon, have you watched? That's a, that's a great series. I think it's on Netflix just to, it's, you know, that's a really great series where that's exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody's able to like, you know, you can re-sleeve in another body. And it raises exactly sort of this question. It's not the greatest cyberpunk, but it's pretty good. It's got, it's got some great, great action sequences, too.

• 2:07:25Lex Fridman?

  As we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine tuned on you. It raises a question because I, to me, they've already passed the Turing test as we traditionally have defined it. So if there's going to be an LLM that's able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it's going to raise ethical and, I don't know, philosophical questions about what makes you you? Like what, if there's a thing that can talk exactly like you, like what is the thing that makes you you? Is it, is it, it's going to speak about your memories very effectively?

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  This leads us to, if we're going to get to the, the blind spot. I, you know, I'm of the opinion, heretical in some camps, that, you know, the brain is not the minimal. The minimal structure for consciousness, you know, it's the whole body, it's embodied in me, in some sense, it's communities, actually. So yeah, so I don't, I mean, I could be wrong, but this is, you know, this is this whole work that I did with Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science, which is interesting because it leads to this question about, you know, oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers, right? That's another story that that one tells. I'm super skeptical about those, but is that's one of the narratives about interstellar travel is just like, and that anybody we meet is going to be a machine anyway,

• 2:08:47Speaker 02

  whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies, or it's just going to be artificial intelligence. Like, there's the whole idea of how long does biological evolution last? Maybe it's a very short period before everybody, you know, goes to, or the machines take over and, you know, kill you, or, you know, it's some hybrid.

• 2:09:03Lex Fridman?

  What do you think aliens look like? So we talked about all the different kinds of bio-signatures they might leave or techno-signatures, but what would they look like when we show up? Are they gonna have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they going to be carbon-based?

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, great question. And this question gets to the heart of thinking about life, right? About what life is. And this is the physical part of that. There's also sort of the informational part of it. But let's just talk about the physical part of it, which is, you know, life, anything that we're going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution. Just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic, this basic logic, that, you know, anything we'd reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles. And so, you know, evolution is about solving problems that, you know, to survive,

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  that the environment presents. And the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms, so that you'd expect You expect a kind of balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence, and evolutionary contingency. So, you know, if you've got to move along a surface, you know, a surface between, you know, hard surface and air, then the idea of some kind of jointed stick, right, legs, makes sense that you're probably going to trigger that. If you look at Earth's history, multiple times, multiple lineages that had nothing to do with each other are going to solve the problem of getting towards energy sources using some kind of, you know, a stick-like apparatus.

• 2:10:42Lex Fridman?

  So that's about movement?

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved. One problem that has to be solved is they got to get to food, right? Another problem is they got to get away from predators, right? You've seen wings. We've seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds evolved wings, insects evolved wings, mammals evolved wings. If the gas is dense enough that a curved surface, if you move through the curved surface, it's going to produce lift. Yeah, there you go, evolutionary trip on that. So I think you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is gonna, is gonna be presented with, stay alive, reproduce. But one of the weird things about like with the UFO things is that you always see like, oh, they all look like humans, they're just like basically humans with, you know, triangular heads.

• 2:11:27Speaker 02

  And that's where we get to contingency, right? So what we've been talking about is convergence. You expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents, right? That, you know, you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing, right? And then the climate changes and they all die out, end of story. Or, you know, asteroid, that total accident, asteroid hits. And so contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that, you know, lots of evolutionary biologists have talked about is the idea that if you ran the tape of Earth's history over again, would you get the same creatures?

• 2:12:08Speaker 02

  Now, Stephen Jay Gould was of the opinion that no way, that you wouldn't find anything on Earth that resembled any species today. They've done experiments actually on this with E. coli. You know, you take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, you let that population continue to evolve, the other one's frozen, now start it over again with the frozen. And it seems to be that contingency tends to win, right? The contingency, at least from what we can tell, I mean, that's not a, that's not a hard result. But in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. So the idea, and this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks. How many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess.

• 2:12:50Speaker 02

  You know, do you expect humanoids, you know, things with a, you know, a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system? Like where is most of the cognition competition going on?

• 2:13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:11Lex Fridman?

  You could see that in organisms like, actually, I don't know how the brain evolved, like, why does it have to be in one place?

• 2:13:19Speaker 02

  Doesn't have to be. So my favorite word, word of the day is liquid brains, right? This idea of distributed cognition, which fascinating idea. And we've come to understand how much

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  distributed cognition there is. Obviously, you social animals like termites, et cetera, and ants, that's an example of distributed cognition. The organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that's been really interesting in the state of the study when we cut to for aliens is that when we've come to recognize that human intelligence, it's not actually, it's been distributed. The kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere. Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright will describe it as like a deck of cards. The cards are all there. We got the hand that actually led to the kind of technological progress that we, we see. But the kinds of, you know, the basic idea of using tools, the basic idea of recognizing each other eye to eye,

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  all the things that we define as intelligence, you can find many places in many other places across, many other line, lineages across the earth. So it could be, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe that's, you know, the hive mind idea or, you know, bacterial colonies that actually managed to, you know, come to their own version of high cognition.

• 2:14:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, I wonder if there's, if we stretch out time across 10s, 20, 20 billion years, whether there's an Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms and it switches to ideas.

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:51Lex Fridman?

  For example, it's much more rapidly you're operating, maybe I guess it's a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  Technology seems to operate on, and yeah, but certainly markets can operate in ways that look very Darwinian.

• 2:15:06Lex Fridman?

  So basically, a planet is working hard to get to the first kind of organism that's able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.

• 2:15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:17Lex Fridman?

  And then it kind of stops evolving there and then then it's ideas that take off.

• 2:15:21Speaker 02

  Right, right. Cause yeah, cultural, like it's true. It's amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from from the Darwinian process. But I'd be careful to say that like a planet is working hard to do this because you know, it's really important to be looking at us like what we think of as ideas and culture and you know, it's quite possible we're going to make it another 200 years and this is gone, right? Cause it actually wasn't a very good idea long term. We just don't know.

• 2:15:45Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.

• 2:15:50Speaker 02

  Not the biosphere because again, but it destroys itself. It may not be very long term. It may be very potent for a short period of time, but that it's not sustainable. It doesn't become like we were talking about before mature. It's very hard to make it into integrated into a mature bio slash technosphere. And of course, you know, evolution is not working for anything. Well, here's actually interesting thing, right? So people are very much, you know, evolutionary biologists will get very, their hair will stand on it. If you start talking about evolution having a purpose or anything. But the very interesting thing about purpose is that once you do get to a idea generating species or collective organism, um, yeah, then, uh, you know, kind of all bets are off and there is goals. There is teleology. There is a, you know, the now suddenly, you know, absolutely there's a

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  direction implied. So that's kind of the cool, interesting thing that once you get to that, evolution stops being goalless and directionless. And suddenly, yeah, we're the ones who supply or any kind of creature like us has an absolute direction that they decide on.

• 2:16:49Lex Fridman?

  Although you could argue that from a perspective of the entire human civilization. We're also directionless. We have a sense that there's a direction in this cluster of humans.

• 2:17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:01Lex Fridman?

  And then there's another cluster has a different sets of direction. There's all kinds of religions that are competing. There's different ideologies that are competing.

• 2:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:09Lex Fridman?

  And when you just zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pinball.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  It's an unholy mess. But you know, but at some point, like the expansion into the solar system, say, like that would be both direction, I mean, depending on how you look at it, it was directional. There was a, there was a decision that the collective of human beings made to like anti accrete to start spreading out into the solar system. So that was definitely a goal there that may have been reached in some crazy sort of, you know, nonlinear way, but it was still right. There was still, it's still a goal was set and it was achieved.

• 2:17:48Lex Fridman?

  If there's advanced civilizations out there,

• 2:17:52Lex Fridman?

  what do you think is the proper protocol for interacting with them? Do you think they would be peaceful? Do you think they would be warlike?

• 2:18:01Lex Fridman?

  Like, what do we do next? We detect, we detect the civilizations through all the techno signatures we've been talking about. Maybe direct imaging, maybe there's really strong signal. We come up with a strategy of how to actually get there.

• 2:18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:13Lex Fridman?

  But what's the, uh, then the generals, as they always do, military industrial complex.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  We've watched that movie.

• 2:18:21Lex Fridman?

  Where? What kind of rockets?

• 2:18:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:24Lex Fridman?

  Kind of, and do we bring rockets?

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  Right. Uh, well, I think, you know, so this also, this is general question also leads to many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I am definitely of the opinion of like, you should be very careful. You know, like, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. Um, you know, the people who advocate like, oh yeah, we should be sending, you know, powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space. I'm like, why would you? Cause we just don't know. Like I'm not going to say they are warlike. I'm not going to say they're not warlike. I have no idea. You know? But we sure as hell, well, first of all, who gets to decide that? The idea that a bunch of astronomers who happen to have a radio telescope, I don't, you know, who speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book somebody wrote.

• 2:19:08Speaker 02

  So, you know, definitely, we should, we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you used to have this idea of, well, if they're advanced, they've managed to survive, so of course they're going to be wearing togas, you know, and be singing kumbaya. But I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't assume that. It's also possible, though, that like their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even living in the same universe in a certain way. I think we have to be prepared for that. We may not even be able to recognize each other in some way as cognizing beings. One of my favorite movies is Arrival. I don't know if you've ever seen that one. I really love that one because, you know, they're literally, they have a different language, they have a different cognitive structure in terms of their language, and they're literally kind of living in a different physics.

• 2:19:49Lex Fridman?

  Different physics, different language, different, different everything.

• 2:19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Lex Fridman?

  But in the case of Arrival, it can at least like recognize that they're there.

• 2:19:58Speaker 02

  And they managed to cross the language barrier. Yeah.

• 2:20:02Lex Fridman?

  So, but that's, both sides have an interest in communicating, which you kind of suppose that an advanced civilization would have a curiosity. Because like, how do you become advanced without a kind of curiosity about the mysterious about the other?

• 2:20:18Speaker 02

  But also, you know, if they're long-lived, they may just be like, we're not even interested. Like, we've done this, we're like, we, you know, you know, 10, 10 billion years, or sorry, say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in that, in this, in communicating with you, you know, young, youngins, but now we're not at all. And that's just, you know, one of the beauties of this, again, is how to think about this systematically, because you're so far past the hairy edge, right, of our experience of what we know, that you want to think about it, right? You don't want to be like, don't know, can't say anything, because that's not fun. But you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases, right? So, one of the things I loved about Arrival, too, was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this idea, like, we'll teach them math, we'll teach them our math, then they'll teach us

• 2:21:01Speaker 02

  their math, and then, you know, we'll be telling each other knock-knock jokes, you know, and swapping cures for cancer. And, you know, in the movie, like, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, right? And it's the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied. Language is not just something that happens in your head, it's actually the whole experience. And she's the one who breaks through. And it just points to the idea that, um, how Utterly different, the cognitive structures that, you know, of, of a, of a different species should be. So somehow we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases or figure out like a systematic way to break through our biases and not just tell something, make science fiction movies. You know what I mean?

• 2:21:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. Speaking of biases, do you think aliens have visited Earth? You've mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and wouldn't, we wouldn't even know about it if it was a hundred million years ago. How can we even begin to answer this question?

• 2:21:56Speaker 02

  Got to look, got to look, got to figure out ways to look. So I, you know, I mean, I, I don't put it, it's not high on my list of, you know, things that I'm, I think are probable, but it's certainly, it needs to be explored, you know? And unless you look, you never know. So looking on the moon, look at where would we find if, if aliens had passed through the solar system anytime in the last three billion years? Where might we find artifacts? Where might artifacts still be around? Earth, probably not because of weathering and resurfacing. The moon's a good place, certain kinds of orbits, you know? Maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable. So you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it'll last for a billion years. So those are the kind of questions I, I don't, like I said, I don't, it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know.

• 2:22:43Lex Fridman?

  What about, speaking of biases, what about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room? Meaning like the potential of aliens, say seeding life on Earth?

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  You mean like in that directed panspermia?

• 2:22:56Lex Fridman?

  Directed panspermia?

• 2:22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Lex Fridman?

  Or seeding some aspect of the evolution?

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  Like 2001?

• 2:23:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, you know, it's a great story, but you know, always with Occam's razor or whatever with science. If I can, if I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And you know, the idea that evolution is a natural process, that's what I would go for first, right? There's, there's, that just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way than adding, you know, sort of, because it's kind of a do it, doo, sex, mock in a thing of like, oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.

• 2:23:36Lex Fridman?

  So to you, the origin of life?

• 2:23:40Lex Fridman?

  Is a, is a pretty simple thing that doesn't require an alien.

• 2:23:43Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say that. It's not a simple thing, but it doesn't, you know, putting, I think, because you know, all you're doing is kicking the can down the road, right? The aliens, the aliens formed, right? So you're just saying like, all right, I'm just kicking the can down the road to the aliens. How did they, how did, what was their a-biogenesis event?

• 2:23:59Lex Fridman?

  Well, so from a different perspective, I'm just saying, it seems to me that there's obviously advanced civilizations everywhere throughout the galaxy and through the universe from the Drake equation perspective. And then if I was an alien, what would I do?

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  You know, I've gotten a chance to learn about the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. I recently went to the Amazon, you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon that are

• 2:24:27Lex Fridman?

  in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the uncontacted tribes. First of all, the uncontacted tribes are very violent towards the outside world, but everybody else tries to stay away from them. They try to kind of protect them, don't talk about them, don't, don't talk about their location and all this kind of stuff. And I've begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you're doing that. And if I was an alien civilization, if I probably would be doing a similar kind of thing. And of course, there's always the teenager or the troll who's going to start messing with the stuff or the scientist, you know?

• 2:24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:24:59Lex Fridman?

  And so it's not, from our perspective, yes. And if you're in the Truman Show, like Occam's razor, but like also the Occam's razor from the perspective of the alien civilization, we have to have the humility to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect. That would not be obvious.

• 2:25:20Speaker 02

  Right. I understand the logic of what you're saying, but the problem for me with that is that right there, that first you have to assume that alien civilizations are common, which I'm not sure about it, that my, most of them may be dead or they're not yet. So, you know, like I, while I think that life is common, and again, this is just my biases, right? So now the problem is how do we sort out sort of, you know, the, the biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from?

• 2:25:46Speaker 02

  You know, from the the sort of causal chain that comes out of that. I would first want to try and do this without it like, you know, if we're looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I'd want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer. Because I there requires a bunch of these other assumptions, which also have their own sort of breaking of causal chains. Because I don't really like the idea that when you ask, what would you do if you were an alien? But again, like alien minds could be so unbelievably different, right? That they wouldn't even recognize the question you just posed.

• 2:26:19Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  Right? Because it's just like, you know, we're very much, we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure or cognitive, you know, and we're very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about. You know, if I could suddenly magically appear 100,000 years ago and talk to a hunter gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, you know, I might find something that's like or no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, oh, that's what naturally humans do.

• 2:26:44Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me, let me ask you this question. Let's, let's together do the thought experiment.

• 2:26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:47Lex Fridman?

  If we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them.

• 2:26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:52Lex Fridman?

  Or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system. What, what would we do?

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, so, you know, it's interesting how that even brings up the ethical questions, right? Let's say that, you know, would we, we'd have to first sort of sort out what are the consequences for them and what do we feel our ethical responsibilities are to them?

• 2:27:15Lex Fridman?

  And also, sorry, from a capitalist's perspective, what are we to gain?

• 2:27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 2:27:20Lex Fridman?

  With this interaction?

• 2:27:20Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. You look at the way the missionaries, you know, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were, you know, was the most important. That's what the gain was. So from our perspective, I mean, we'd have to sort that out. I think, given, you know, if we're doing this thought experiment, we are curious. And I think eventually we'd want to reach out to them.

• 2:27:42Lex Fridman?

  Now, I think when you say we, let's start with the people in this room, right?

• 2:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:47Lex Fridman?

  But there is, I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world, because I think there's a lot of people. The military.

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:27:55Lex Fridman?

  They they will probably move first so they can steal whatever advantage they can from this new discovery so they can hurt China or China hurt America. That's one perspective. Then there's the the capitalists who will see like how the benefits and the costs here and how can I make money off of this? There's opportunity here. There's gold.

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:28:17Lex Fridman?

  In them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientist is just not going to, unlike the movies.

• 2:28:22Speaker 02

  We're not gonna get much say.

• 2:28:24Lex Fridman?

  They're gonna put them.

• 2:28:25Speaker 02

  Hey, guys, we, uh, wait a minute.

• 2:28:26Lex Fridman?

  They would engage, probably. I mean, it's just as as a human society as we are now, we would engage and we would be detectable, I think.

• 2:28:35Speaker 02

  In our engagement.

• 2:28:36Lex Fridman?

  In our engagement.

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, probably.

• 2:28:39Lex Fridman?

  So using that trivial bias logic, I just, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way.

• 2:28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:48Lex Fridman?

  That just brings up that old direct for me paradox for me. What do you make of all the UFO sightings?

• 2:28:56Speaker 02

  I am all in favor of an open, agnostic, you know, transparent, scientific investigation of UFOs and UAPs. But the idea that that there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non-human technology, I just think they're the standards, they just, none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So let's just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence because I've made a big deal about this, both, you know, in the book and elsewhere, whenever I talk about this. So what people have to understand about science is we are really, scientists, we are really mean to each other. We are brutal to each other because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence. And it's the idea of like, you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim.

• 2:29:41Speaker 02

  And, you know, under what conditions can you say, oh, look, I've got evidence of, you know, this claim X, Y, and Z. And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are. And that is why cell phones work, right? If you didn't have. Have super rigorous standards about, you know, what you think that's, oh, this little antenna. I've invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and it, you know, I can show you that it works. You know, if you didn't have these standards, you know, you did, every cell phone would be a brick, right? And when it comes to UFOs and UAPs, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that, you know,

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  we are being visited by non-human, uh, advanced civilization just doesn't even come close to the same standards I'm gonna have to obey or whatever live under. If my team, you know, the group I work with is one of them says, look, we've discovered, wants to announce that, oh, we've discovered techno-signature on an alien planet, we're gonna get shredded as we expect to be, we expect to be beaten up. And, you know, the UAP UFO community should expect the same thing. You don't get, you know, you don't get a pass because it's a really cool topic. So that's where I am right now. I just don't think any of the evidence is even close to anything that could support that claim.

• 2:31:03Lex Fridman?

  Well, I generally assign a lot of value to anecdotal evidence from pilots. Not scientific value, but just like, it's always nice to get anecdotal evidence as a first step. So I was like, hmm, I wonder if there's something there. But unfortunately with this topic, there's so much excitement around it. There's a lot of people that are, uh, basically trying to make money off of it. There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff. So even, even if there's some signal, there's just so much noise, it's very difficult to operate with. So how do we get better signal? So you, you've talked about sort of, if we wanted to really search for UFOs on earth.

• 2:31:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:31:41Lex Fridman?

  And maybe detect things like weird physics. What kind of instruments would we be using?

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, you know, in the book I talked about the idea, this is really stupid, but you know, you, you want to look up, you want to look down and you want to look all around.

• 2:31:54Lex Fridman?

  I think that's brilliant. I mean, that's, it's simple, not stupid. It's like literally.

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  So you want to do ground-based detectors that, you know, upward-looking ground-based detectors of the kind we're already building for meteors, right? For tracking meteors. You want to have space-based detectors, put them on satellites. This is what the NASA UAP panel was thinking about. And then probably on, you know, we have lots of people in the sky. There should be detectors on the planes, or at least, you know, some kind of alert system that if some pilot says, oh, look, I'm seeing something I don't understand, boop, presses the red button, and that triggers the ground-based and space-based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don't understand, and it's so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from, like down to the, you know, the nth degree.

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to characterize that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Was it refurbished recently? In, you know, in every spectral wavelength, in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and have them all characterized. Because especially if you want to claim like, oh, my God, I saw something take a right-hand turn at Mach 500, right? You better have all of that nailed down before you make that kind of claim. So we have to have characterized detectors, looking up, down, and maybe on planes themselves. We need a rational search strategy. So let's say you want to lay out these ground-based detectors. Where do you put them, right?

• 2:33:30Speaker 02

  There's only so much money in the world. So, you know, do you want to put them near places where you've seen a lot of things beforehand? Or do you want to, you know, have them try and do a sparse coverage of the entire country? And then you need the data analysts, analysis, right? You're going to have so much data, so many false positives, or, you know, false triggering, that you need a way of sorting through enormous amounts of data and figuring out what you're going to throw out and what you're going to keep. And all these things we're used to doing in other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don't do that, we're going to be having the same damn argument about these things for, you know, the next 100 years.

• 2:34:03Lex Fridman?

  But if I asked you, I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocate it to one place, looking out.

• 2:34:12Lex Fridman?

  SETI or looking at Earth, which should you allocate?

• 2:34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, God, looking out, looking out, because that's the best, you know, as I always like to say, here's my my codification of this. If you said, hey, Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraskans. And I said, oh, good, let's go to the Himalayas. You know, you'd be like, why am I going there? I'm like, well, you know, maybe there's some Himalayas, you know, some Nebraska's in Himalaya. Say, no, no, let's go to Nebraska. If we're looking for aliens, why don't we look on alien planets where they live? Because that's we have that technology now as opposed to the, you know, the the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say like, oh, they're here right now. You know, they just happen to be here right now. And also, the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument. You know, to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to deal with all of you have to answer

• 2:34:58Speaker 02

  these weird irrational things that are happening like, OK, there is an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly. They don't want to be detected. They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck at using it because they we keep seeing them, we keep seeing them, but then they disappear. Right? I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. It's like, you know, so there's that whole sort of argument you've got to explain like, why, if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So, you know, that's why I take that level of difficulty. And then I put it on top of where should I look? I should look at the, you know, I should look at where they where they're from. That makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff.

• 2:35:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it's secret military technology being tested.

• 2:35:51Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, if you had, listen, that's why, again, I think UAP, you know, the absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically.

• 2:36:00Speaker 02

  But if I had to make a bet, and it's just a bet, I would say this is, you know, this is peer state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a New York Times op ed for this in 2021, which, you know, blew up. And and so, you know, I had a lot of, you know, people talking to me. While I was doing that, I sort of looked at the signals intelligence people, the SIGINT and and EINT, electronic intelligence communities and what they were saying about. You know, the New York Times articles and the various videos. And really, none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about, you know, peer state. That's where I learned the word peer state adversaries. How like even simple drone technologies, you can, you know, and you want to, you purposely want to do this. You want to fake, you know, signals into the electronics of their adversary. So they crank it up.

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  So then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do.

• 2:36:49Lex Fridman?

  That said, I'm not saying that that's what this is. If I was the head of an alien civilization and I chose to not, to minimize the amount of contact I'm doing. I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see?

• 2:37:09Lex Fridman?

  That's why like the big heads in the humanoid form.

• 2:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:12Lex Fridman?

  Like, I mean, that's kind of like how I would approach communication. If I, if I was much more intelligent, I would observe them enough. It's like, all right, if I wanted to communicate with a nail colony.

• 2:37:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:37:22Lex Fridman?

  I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication.

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:28Lex Fridman?

  And maybe I would do a trivial thing like do like a fake ant.

• 2:37:31Speaker 02

  Right, a robot ant.

• 2:37:32Lex Fridman?

  A robot ant. But then it's not enough to just do a robot ant. You have to do a robot ant that like moves in the way they do.

• 2:37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:37:38Lex Fridman?

  And maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants. But no, I do sort of, I just wanted to make the case for that.

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  This is the plot, actually, of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg Baer. And the idea was like these sort of, you know, this was, this is actually where my first, I got, I became sort of a more than agnostic anti Medi. Because the idea is that, yes, our aliens come, they, you know, they sort of make their arrival. And really their point is to get rid of us. It's the, it's the dark forest hypothesis. And what they do is they sort of, literally, the way they present themselves is in this sort of classic UFO thing. And they do it and they, you know, they arrive at the, this was during the Soviet Union, they arrive at the USSR, they arrive in China. And they're kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against. So it was really, they did exactly kind of what you're talking about, but for nefarious purposes.

• 2:38:27Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let me ask the pothead question, another, yet another.

• 2:38:31Speaker 02

  The whole conversation.

• 2:38:32Lex Fridman?

  I'm sorry.

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  Boggs before breakfast.

• 2:38:34Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's science and pothead questions back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of traditionally envision?

• 2:38:47Lex Fridman?

  In analyzing physical objects, what if they take the form of, say, ideas? What if, real pothead, if it's consciousness itself, like the subjective experience, is an alien being? Maybe ideas is an easier one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from human to human.

• 2:39:08Speaker 02

  When, you know, I made the claim that the most important, that finding life, any kind of life, would be the most important discovery in human history. And one of the reasons is, again, as I said, that, you know, life, if we're not an accident and there's other life, then there's probably lots of other life. And because the most significant thing about life is it can innovate, right? If I give you a star and, you know, give, tell you the mass and the composition, you can basically, pretty much using the laws of physics, tell exactly what's going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime. Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall, it's going to be a white dwarf, it's going to be a black hole, end of story. If I gave you a single cell and said what's going to happen in a few billion years, you'd never be able to predict a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face, right? A kangaroo. So life has this possibility of innovating, of being creative.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  So here's, so what it means is, and that's a part of a, kind of a fundamental definition of what it means to be alive, it goes past itself. So give life enough time, you know, and what are the, what are the end result? Like, you know, there's, there's, you know, like, that's why I love science fiction so much. Does, at some point, does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself? It becomes the laws of physics? Or, you know, these, these sort of lie at the, the extreme limits of thinking about what, what we mean by reality, what we mean by, you know, experience. But I'm not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically, but it, you know, they're, they're open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do.

• 2:40:38Lex Fridman?

  Since you said it's the biggest question, which is an interesting thought experiment, what is the biggest scientific question we can possibly answer? You know, some people might say about like what happened before the big bang, some big physics questions about the universe.

• 2:40:54Lex Fridman?

  I can see the argument for, you know, how many alien civilizations or if there's other life out there. You want to speak to that a little bit like why?

• 2:41:02Speaker 02

  Why is the?

• 2:41:03Lex Fridman?

  Why is it the biggest question in your, why is it number one in your top five?

• 2:41:07Speaker 02

  I've evolved in this, right? You know, I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics and magnetohydrodynamics of star formation. But I always, you know, I was a philosophy miner. I always had the sort of bigger questions sort of floating around the back of my mind. And what I've come to now is the most important question in the, for physics is what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, and this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is the, is agency? What does it mean to be an autonomous agent? How the hell does that happen? You know, it's so, I'm not a reductionist. I'm not somebody who's just like, well, I just put together enough chemicals and bing bang boom. And you know, it suddenly appears.

• 2:41:47Speaker 02

  There's something that really is going to demand a reconception of what nature itself is. And so, yeah, black holes are super cool. Cosmology is super cool, but really this question of, of what is life? Especially from, by viewing it from the inside. Because it's really about the verb to be, right? Really, what is the most, what is the most impressing philosophical question beyond science? Is the verb to be, what is, what is being, right? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about what, what puts the fire in the equations? The fire, right? The fire is this, this presence. And this is where it touches things like, you know, whatever you want to say. It's the sacred spirituality, whatever you want to talk about. My first book was about science and, and human spirituality.

• 2:42:32Speaker 02

  So it's like, you know, so this question of life, what makes life as a physical system, you know, so different is, is to me much, because it's, you know, that's where being appears. Being doesn't appear out there, right? The only place that ever appears to any of us is us. So, you know, I can do this kind of projection into this third person thing, but nobody ever has that, that God's eye view. That's a story we tell. This is where, you know, this between us is where the verb to be appears.

• 2:43:00Lex Fridman?

  So this is something that you write about in The Blind Spot, Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, sort of trying to pull the fire.

• 2:43:11Lex Fridman?

  Into the the process of uh science and it's a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book?

• 2:43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the idea of the blind spot is that there is this thing uh that is central to science. So the blind, we're using the blind spot as a metaphor, right? So the eye has an optic nerve and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can't have vision without the optic nerve, but actually you're blind to the optic nerve. There's a little hole in your vision where the optic nerve is. And what we're saying is that science has something like this, that there is something that without which science would not be possible, but that's science, the way it's been configured. And actually, when we mean the blind spot, and we'll get into exactly what I mean, what it is, but it's not really science. It is a, it is a set of ideas that got glued on to science. It's a metaphysics that got glued on to science.

• 2:44:04Speaker 02

  And so what is that thing that is, what is the blind spot? It's experience. It is presence. And if I experience, people have to be very careful because I'm not talking about being an observer. It's the, you know, there's lots of words for it. There's direct experience. There is presence, being, um, the life world within the philosophy called phenomenology. There's the life world. It's this sort of raw presence that you can't get away from until you die. And then who the hell knows, you know, that like, you know, as long as you're around, it's there. And what we're saying is that that is the, the way to say this, that is the, the precondition for the possibility of science. And the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out so it could make progress.

• 2:44:50Speaker 02

  And that's fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try and go deeper, there's a whole other class of problems. The nature of consciousness, the nature of time, quantum mechanics, that comes back to bite us. And that if we don't learn how to take, understand that that is always the background, that experience is always the background. Then we just end up with these paradoxes and prop, these yoga that, that require this intellectual yoga to get out of.

• 2:45:17Lex Fridman?

  I think you give a bunch of examples of that, like looking at temperature as a number. There's a very sort of objective scientific way of looking at that. And then there's the experience of the temperature.

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  And how you build the parable of temperature that we we call it. So what what is the blind spot? We use the term, it's a constellation. It's not just materialism. It's a constellation of ideas that are all really sort of philosophical views. They're not what science says. But because of the evolution of the history of science and culture, they got like pin the tail on a donkey. They were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science says. So what is it? One is reductionism, that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but, you know, all the way down to quirks. That's it. So that's reductionism. The objective frame that science gives us this God's eye view, this third person view of the world to view the world from the outside, that that's what science, you know, bequeaths to us, that view.

• 2:46:10Speaker 02

  Physicalism, that everything in the world is basically made of stuff. There's nothing else to talk about, right? That that's all there is and everything can be reduced to that. And then also the reification of mathematics, that mathematics is somehow more real than this. And there's a bunch of other things. But all these together, what they all do is they end up pushing experience out and saying experience is an epi phenomena. Consciousness, I don't, I tend not to use the word consciousness because it's, I think it get, you know, it it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience because it's a verb, kind of in a way. It's verb, it's verb like. So, yeah, and that this, by being blind to that, we end up with these paradoxes and problems that really not only block science, but also have been detrimental to society as a whole,

• 2:46:55Speaker 02

  especially where we're at right now.

• 2:46:57Lex Fridman?

  So you you actually say that that from a perspective of detrimental society, that there's a crisis of meaning. And they will respond to that in a way that's counterproductive to these bigger questions, scientific questions. So the three ways, the three responses you mentioned is scientific triumphalism. And then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right. I think the postmodernists on the left and anti establishment people on the right. And then just pseudoscience that kind of does this in between thing. Can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning?

• 2:47:32Speaker 02

  Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that, you know, On the one hand, science wants to tell us that we're insignificant, we're not important, we're just biological machines. And so we're basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant. In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside at cosmology. We're always the observers. We're at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in. It comes in, the measurement problem just puts us front and center. We've spent 100, some people have spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we're insignificant, and on the other hand, we're central. So which

• 2:48:14Speaker 02

  one is it? Right? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability. We can't, it's, we can't do science without already being present in the world. We can't reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal, it's a lot of it is about, we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we're substituting. That's one of the things that we, there's two philosophers we really like who are heroes. One is Herschel, who is a mathematician who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And Herschel came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  system, a calculus of data, for actual experience, that that's more important. And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let's just do the parable of temperature, because I think it'll, people can, it'll help them understand what we mean. So think about a degree Celsius, right? We kind of have, in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, a degree Celsius, they're out there, the universe, it's, you know, the molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience, right? We started off with science by, we had the experience, the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michelle Bitbowl, a philosopher, calls the structural invariance, the things that like we could both kind of do agree on. So, you know, we figured out like, oh, we could make a radiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it and that, you know, hot things will be higher in that, you know, on that gradient cylinder, cold things will be lower. And we can both kind of figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that. And then we have thermometry. Yay. We have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold. And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera. And then we end up as at the bottom of, you know, at the end of that, with this idea of like, every day I wake up and I check

• 2:50:25Speaker 02

  my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be, you know, 60 degrees out. Great. And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold, that thermodynamics, the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. You know, it required that bodily experience that also not just me, you, I have to tell you, you know, it's part of my communication with you. Cold today, isn't it? Right? That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world, you know, with everything that involves, I developed degrees Celsius. But then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that's called the amnesia of experience. So that's what we mean by the, you know, how the blind spot emerges, how we end up,

• 2:51:10Speaker 02

  how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress. But then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this, you know, what are the responses to trying to get this back in? And where, where, where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that only, the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths, right? Unless it can be codified in a formal system, represented as data, you know, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn't even exist, right? And any, anything else that's not part of it, part that can be formalized in that way is an epiphenomenon. It's not real. So, you know, scientific triumphalism is this response to, to the mist, you know, the weirdness of,

• 2:51:55Speaker 02

  you know, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely. So there's no other truth, you know, art, music, you know, human spirituality, it's all actually reducible just to neural, you know, neural correlates. So that's one way that it's been dealt with. The other way is this sort of right. You've got on the, on the postmodern, you know, the left, academic left. You get this thing like, science is just a game. You know, it's just a game by the, from, from the, the powerful come up with. Which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that's another way to push sort of science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens, that's also another way of, of sort of, you know,

• 2:52:36Speaker 02

  not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience. And then there's just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say like, oh, you know, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to have, you know, wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way, or, you know, it's, that doesn't have the rigor of science. So, you know, all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning. And we don't really have an accurate, we don't have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is and what its effects are in the various sciences.

• 2:53:19Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses, they kind of feed each other. There's a, just to observe the scientific community, those who sort of gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, they, there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul. If you, I mean, it has to do with PhDs, it has to do with sitting on the academic throne, and all, all of those things, and the natural, the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. And of course, that, nobody likes arrogance. And so the, those that reject science, that the arrogance is fuel for the people that reject science.

• 2:53:57Speaker 02

  I absolutely agree.

• 2:53:57Lex Fridman?

  It just goes back and it's just, is this divide that builds.

• 2:54:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, and that was a problem, like when you saw, so like I said, you know, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that like, you know, science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion, religion's about politics, right? But about, you know, for the entire history of the species, we've, we've had this experience of, for a better, lack of a better word, the sacredness. I'm not connecting this God or anything, I'm just saying this experience of like the more. And then, you know, with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that like, anybody who feels that is an idiot, you know, they just can't handle the hardcore science, when in fact, their views of the world are so denuded of, they can't even see the role that experience plays and how they came up with their formal systems, you know, and experience fundamentally is weird, you know, mysterious. It's like,

• 2:54:46Speaker 02

  it's, it's, you know, kind of goes down forever in some sense. There is always more. So yeah, that arrogance then just if you're telling everybody who's not hardcore enough to do the, you know, standard model of cosmology, that they're idiots, that's not going to bode well for your, you know, the advance of your project.

• 2:55:01Lex Fridman?

  So you're proposing at least to consider the idea that experience is a, is fundamental. Experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is like at the core of reality.

• 2:55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't because, you know, there's panpsychism, right? Which wants to say that-

• 2:55:23Lex Fridman?

  So that's all the way there. So panpsychism is like, that's literally one of the laws of physics is-

• 2:55:27Speaker 02

  Right, right. But see, what all those do is like, just the idea of say, like, physicalism versus idealism, which are kind of the two philosophical schools you can go with. Physicalism says, all that exists is physical. Idealism says, all that exists is mind. We're actually saying, look, both of these, to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third person view, right? And that third person view, we want to really emphasize is a fiction. It's a useful fiction when you're doing science, right? If I want to do like, you know, the Newtonian physics of billiard balls on a pool table, great. I don't want to have to think about experience at all, right? But, you know, if I'm asking deeper questions, I can't ignore the fact that there really

• 2:56:08Speaker 02

  is no third person view and that any story I tell about the world is coming from, it's not just first person, but it's literally because I'm going to argue that experience always involves all of us. Experience always originates out of a community, that, you know, you're always telling those stories from the, the perspective of already existing, of already being inexperience. So whatever account we want to give is of the world is going to have to take that as experience as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately- Like, we don't have an answer. Like, that's when people are like, well, what are you suggesting as your alternative? It's like, look, that's the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this.

• 2:56:51Speaker 02

  But what we would argue with is, and we're thinking about the next book, is this is really going to require a new conception of nature, right? That doesn't sort of jump right to that third person, that fictional third person view, and somehow figures out how to do science, recognizing that it always starts from experience. It always starts from this field of experience, or in phenomenology, the word is the life world, that you're embedded in. You can't unembed yourself from it. So how do you do? So one of the things that Whitehead said was, you know, we have to avoid the bifurcation of nature. And what he meant by that is the bifurcation into like, sort of, scientific concepts, wavelength, you know, think about like, the seeing a sunset. You can say like, oh, look, it's just wavelengths, you know, and scattering particles.

• 2:57:33Speaker 02

  And your experience of the redness, the actual experience of the redness, and all the other things. It's not just red. There's no qualia. There's no pure redness. Everything that's happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomena. It's just, you know, brain states or whatever. He said, you can't do that. They're just, they're both real. They're both accounts. They both need to be integrated. And so that required, I think, a really a different conception of what we mean by nature.

• 2:57:58Lex Fridman?

  Is it something like incorporating in the physics, in the study of nature, the observer, the experiencing observer, or is that still also looking from a third person?

• 2:58:08Speaker 02

  I think that that's what we have to figure out, right? And so actually, you know, a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, right? Because one of the things we're arguing is like, look, in the, in the chapter that I wrote on, because it was, I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who's a wonderful philosopher, and Marcelo Gleiser, who's a theoretical physicist. When I was writing the chapter on the origin of the blind spot, like, you know, sort of what, how this emerged out of history, my, the subheader was like, well, it made sense at the time. Because it did. You know, it really, there was a reason why people adopted this third person, God's eye deterministic view. This view of sort of like, yeah, the perfect clockwork of the universe. Yeah, totally made sense. But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you like, eh eh. And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right?

• 2:58:53Speaker 02

  Quantum mechanics slams you.

• 2:58:56Speaker 02

  With the idea that the of the measurement problem, you know. The most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrödinger equation, which, you know, you put in, like we talked about before, you have initial conditions and now you've got a differential equation and you crank out the differential equation and it makes predictions for the future, right? Exactly like Newtonian physics or its higher versions of the Lagrange or Hamiltonians. But then this other thing happens where it's like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole nother set of rules for you, you know, that's the born, what we call the born rule. And I was telling you right from the beginning that measurement matters, right? So when you're asking like, how will we do this? Quantum mechanics is actually pointing to how to do it.

• 2:59:40Speaker 02

  So, you know, there's been all these different interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the, the many worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter. And then you get something like cubism, which is I'm going to advocate for is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, which puts the born rule at the center, right? Instead of like focusing on the Schrödinger equation and the weird things that come out of it, like Schrödinger's cat and all that other stuff. It says, no, no, actually the real mystery is the born rule. Let's think about the born rule. And like you said, that puts the agent, the agent and information at the center of the whole thing.

• 3:00:25Lex Fridman?

  So that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of. That's, that's the thing you're trying to integrate at the center of the thing. And in quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in, in every layer of, of study of nature.

• 3:00:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That's exactly it. So, you know, one of the things that's really interesting to me, so I'm, you know, I have a project, I'm part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Peneur on cubism. So I've been part of that. And what I've been amazed by is the language they use. So what's cool about cubism is it comes from quantum information theory. It's a pretty modern version of thinking about quantum mechanics. And it's always about, um, you have an agent who makes a, an action on the world. And then the information they get from that action through the, the experiment, that's the action in the world, updates their priors, updates their, their, you know, their Bayesian. That's why it's called cubism, quantum Bayesianism. Updates how the information they've gotten from the world.

• 3:01:25Speaker 02

  Now, this turns out to be it's kind of the same language that we're using in a project that's about the physics of life, where we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells. So, you know, we have Shannon information, which is a probability distribution that tells you, you know, basically how much surprise there is in a, in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focuses on, and in a very simple way, just like what is, how much of the information that I'm, that the agent, you know, the critter is getting from the world actually has, uh, helps it survive, right? That's the most basic idea of meaning, right? We can get all philosophical about meaning, but this is it. Does it help me stay alive or not?

• 3:02:10Speaker 02

  And the whole question of agency and autonomy that occurs in this setting of just asking about how do cells move up a, a chemical gradient to get more food, kind of has the same feel, the same, you know, sort of architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics. So I think what you said is exactly it. How do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always us, the agent, or life, the agent, interacting with the world and drawing it, both giving information and passing information back as a way of, of doing science, doing hardcore science with experiments, but never forgetting that agency, which also means experience in some sense, is at the center of the whole thing.

• 3:02:50Lex Fridman?

  So you think there could be something like cubism, quantum Bayesianism, that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of like hardcore, real theories that put the agent at the center?

• 3:03:06Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what we're looking for. I think that is really, that's the exciting part. And it's a move, you know, the scientific triumphalist thing says, you know, we understand why people love this, like I have these equations and these equations represent, you know, there's this platonic ideal that they are, you know, they exist eternally on their own. It's kind of quasi-religious, right? It's sort of like somehow look, these equations are the, you're reading the mind of God. But this other approach- To me is just as exciting because what you're saying is there's us and the world. They're inseparable, right? It's always us and the world. And what we're now finding about is this kind of co-creation, this, this interaction, you know, between the agent and the world such that these powerful laws of physics that need an account,

• 3:03:51Speaker 02

  like in no way am I saying these laws aren't important, these laws are amazing, but they need an account, but not an account that strips, you know, that turns the experience, turns the agent into just a, you know, an epiphenomena, that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent's not the most important part of the story.

• 3:04:09Lex Fridman?

  So if you pull on this thread and say there's a whole discipline born of this, putting the agent as the primary thing in a theory, in a physics theory, like, how is it possible it just like breaks the whole thing open? So there's this whole effort of, you know, unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of like coming up with a theory of everything. What if these are like the, the tip of the iceberg? What, what if the, the agent thing is like really important?

• 3:04:42Speaker 02

  So, you know, listen, that, that would be like kind of my dream. I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it. But, you know, Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with string theory. I've spent my whole life listening to talks about string theory real soon, you know? And it's gotten ever more disconnected from, you know, data observations. There were people talking for a while that it's post empirical. And I, you know, I want to always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like physicists have been smoking their own stash. Right? There's this way we've gotten used to like, you know, you have to out weird the other person. But like my theory is 38 dimensions, my theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, you know,

• 3:05:27Speaker 02

  you know, psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there's been a prob, there's a problem. I'm, I don't need to tell you there's a crisis in physics or there's a crisis in cosmology. Other people have used that. That's been the, you have the headline on Scientific American stories. So there clearly another direction has to be found and maybe it has nothing to do with this. But I, I suspect that.

• 3:05:50Speaker 02

  Because so many times, the agent or the having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency, like when it comes to time, thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time, you know, clocks don't tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside, that there's a new physics theory that is going to come from, that comes from this agential informational computational view. I don't know, but that's kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.

• 3:06:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like time is a really interesting one. This time is really important to us humans. What is time?

• 3:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a right. What is time? So the way we have tended to view it is we've taken, this is what when Herschel talks about the surreptitious substitution, we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time, and we substituted that for the actual experience of time, right? So the block universe where like next Tuesday is already written down, you know, it's in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there, which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the sort of, you know, the scientific framework. But, you know, it is not lived time. And, you know, this was pointed out to Einstein and he eventually

• 3:07:16Speaker 02

  recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Bercksen, who was the most famous philosopher of like the, you know, 20, early 20th century and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Bercksen, whose whole thing was about time and was about duration. He wanted to separate the scientific image of time, the map of time, from the actual terrain, which he used the word duration. Like we humans, where duration for us is full, it's sort of, it's stretched out. It's got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present. Music is the best example, right? You're hearing music, you're both already anticipating what's going to happen and you're, you know, remembering what's going on.

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  There's a kind of phenomenal structure there, which is is different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. And what, you know, the way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot is it says, oh, no, no, the formal system is time. But really, the only place time appears is with us, right? Where we're, you know, so having a theory that actually could start with us, you know, and then stretch out into the universe rather than imposing this imaginary third person view back on us, you know, could, that's a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem.

• 3:08:37Lex Fridman?

  I just wonder, who is the observer? I mean, defining what the agent is.

• 3:08:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:08:40Lex Fridman?

  In any kind of frame is difficult.

• 3:08:44Speaker 02

  Is difficult, right? And so that, but that's the good work of the science ahead of us, right? What, so what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So, you know, we start with experience, which is irreducible. There's no atoms of experience, right? It's a whole. And we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There's a philosopher, Robert Crease, who talks about the workshop that's starting in like the 1700s, 1600s, we developed this communal

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  space to work in. Sometimes it was literally a physical space, a laboratory, where these ideas would be pulled apart, refined, argued over, and then validated, and we went to the next step. So this idea of pulling out from experience these thinner, abstract, structural invariance, the things that we could actually do science with. And it's kind of like, we call it an ascending spiral of abstraction, right? So the problem with the way we do things now is we take that, those abstractions, which came from experience, and then with something like, you know, a computational model of consciousness or experience, we think we can put it back in. Like, you literally pulled out these super thin things, these abstractions, you know, neglecting experience because that's the

• 3:09:53Speaker 02

  only way to do science. And then you think somehow, oh, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna jam experience back in and, you know, have an explanation for experience.

• 3:10:00Lex Fridman?

  So do you think it's possible to show that something like free will is quote unquote real if you integrate experience back into this physics, into the physics model of the world?

• 3:10:09Speaker 02

  What I would say is that free will is, is a given. And that's the thing about experience, right? So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote, he says, "It's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete. It's the job to account for the abstract." The, the concrete. What's happening between us right now is just given, you know? It's just, it's presented to us every day. It's presented to me. If you want an explanation, fine, but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it. Right? So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent, right? To be an agent, agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, you know, they're, they're, they're equivalent. And so in some sense, to be an agent is to be autonomous.

• 3:10:51Speaker 02

  And so then the question really to ask is, can you have an account for agency and autonomy? That captures aspects of its, its arising in the world or the way it and the world sort of co-arise. Um, but the idea, you know, the reason why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience. You know, and the equations are a paler, you know, they don't corral experience. They are a thinner, you know, representation. As we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain. What's happening between us right now in this, you know, all the weirdness of it? That's the terrain.

• 3:11:32Speaker 02

  The map is what I can write down on equations and then in the workshop do experiments on super powerful, needs an account, but experience overflows that.

• 3:11:41Lex Fridman?

  What if the experience is an illusion? Like, how, how do we know? What if the agency that we experience is an illusion?

• 3:11:49Speaker 02

  An illusion looking from where? Like, right? Cause that already requires to, to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third person view, right? And so what we're saying is that's a, that third person view, which now you're going to say like, oh, I've got a whole other set of entities, of ontological entities, meaning, you know, things that I think exist in God's living room in spite, you know, that are independent of me and the community of living things I'm part of.

• 3:12:15Lex Fridman?

  So you're pushing it elsewhere. It, this, just like there's a stack of turtles is probably, if, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there's an observer. For whom it's not an illusion, so you always have to find an observer somewhere.

• 3:12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And that's where, that's why, you know, fundamentally, the, the blind spot, that especially the scientific triumphalist part is, is following a religious impulse. You know, it's wanting the God's eye view. And you know what's really interesting? And when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, you know, there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in. And it is actually a pretty, it's only one version of philosophy, right? So it is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition, right? But there's even in Europe or in the Western tradition and the, you know, for Western, what we'll call Western philosophy, there's phenomenology. There's Herserel and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, which took an entirely different track. They were really interested in the structure of experience.

• 3:13:13Speaker 02

  They spent all their time trying to understand, trying to develop a language that could kind of climb into the circle that is experience, right? You experience, you're not going to be able to start with axioms and work your way to it. It's all, it's given. So you have to kind of jump in and then try and find a language to account for its structure. But then, so that, that has not been part of this discussion about, you'll never, good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, you know, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it's a huge branch of philosophy. And then you get the philosophies that occurred from other cores of civilization, right? So there's the, there's the Western core, out of which comes the Greeks and the, you know, the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. But then you get India and you get Asia, and they developed their own.

• 3:13:58Speaker 02

  They were highly complex societies that developed their own responses to these questions. And they, for reasons, because they had contemplative practice, they were very focused on like direct, trying to like directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did. Phenomenology kind of started it, but you know, there's, there's philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu, and they're like the Plato and Aristotle of, you know, sort of those philosophies. And they were really focused on experience. In the West, I think maybe because we had the Judeo-Christian tradition, where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame.

• 3:14:39Speaker 02

  The, in the, the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of India and Asia. They started always with, they wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and their, their argumentation was based on, I've got this experience, I can't get out of this experience, how do I reason from it? So I think there's like a lot of other philosophical traditions that we could draw from, you know, not like slavishly, we don't all have to become Buddhists to do it, but there are traditions that really tried to work this out in a way that the Western traditions just didn't.

• 3:15:10Lex Fridman?

  But there's also the practical fact that it's difficult to build a logical system on top of experience. It's difficult to have the rigor of science on top of experience. And so it's, as science advances, we might get better and better. Like the same is it's very difficult to have any kind of mathematical or kind of scientific rigor to why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects, sort of the Santa Fei questions.

• 3:15:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, but I think we can do it. I think there's aspects of it. I mean, as long as you're never trying to like, this is what experience is. Like, I think that's kind of the where we're, you know, you're never going to have a causal account of experience because it's just given, but you can do lots about, and that's what the good work is, is to, how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so, for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in the, you know, this is what we're accounting with our semantic information too, causal closure. Love this idea, right? The idea that, so we talked about autopoiesis a while back, right? The idea that living systems are, they are self-creating and self-maintaining. So the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right?

• 3:16:23Speaker 02

  The cell membrane, you can't have a cell without a cell membrane. The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out, right? But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it's a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane creates itself. So there's this strange, it's always with life, there's always this strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is, you know, the science that's ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure, accounting for how the- You know, we talk about like a downward causation, right? So reductionism says everything only depends on the microstate. Everything just depends on the atoms, right? That's it.

• 3:17:06Speaker 02

  You don't really, if you know, if you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you're done. You know, of course, in principle, you need God's computer, but fine. You know, in principle, it can be done. Coastal closure, and there's, I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this. There's ways in which using epsilon machines and all this machinery from information theory that you can see ways in which the system can organize itself so that it decouples from the microstates. Now, the macrostate fundamentally no longer needs the microstate for its own description, its own account of the laws. Whether that paper is true or not, it's an example of heading down that road. There's also Robert Rosen's work. He was a theoretical biologist who he was, you know, he talked about closure to efficient

• 3:17:50Speaker 02

  cause, that, that living systems, you know, are organizationally closed, are causally closed so that they don't depend anymore on the microstate. And he made, he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it's, you know, some argue it's true, some argue it's not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church touring complete. They cannot be represented as formal systems. So, you know, in that way, they're not axioms. They're not, living systems will not be axioms. They can only be partially captured by algorithms. Now, again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof was, you know, is valid or not. But I'm saying, I'm giving you examples of like, you know, when you, when you see the blind spot, when you acknowledge the blind spot, it opens up a whole other class of

• 3:18:34Speaker 02

  kinds of scientific investigations. You know, the book we thought was going to be really heretical, right? You know, obviously, you know, most, most public facing scientists are very sort of in that, especially scientific triumphalism. So we were just like waiting, you know, waiting for the fight. And then the review from Science came out and it was like totally pro, you know, they was very positive. We're like, oh, my God, you know? And then a review came out in Nature Physics and it was totally positive. And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal because we kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized sort of all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blind spot. Socialism, communism, doesn't matter. These extractive, you know, had sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to, you know, resources.

• 3:19:21Speaker 02

  The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So I feel like there's actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view and a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like, jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever and we're not, you know, we're sort of stuck in a vortex.

• 3:19:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, it is, I mean, I think there is a hunger to acknowledge that there's an elephant in the room, like that we're just removing the agent. Like it's, everyone is doing it and it's like, yeah, yeah, there's the experience and then there's the third person perspective on the world.

• 3:19:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:19:58Lex Fridman?

  And so to, man, science from a, applying scientific rigor from a first person perspective is very difficult. I mean, it's fascinating.

• 3:20:07Speaker 02

  I think we can do it because it's also the thing, you know, what's really interesting is this, I think, it's not just first person, it's first and second, right? Because science, because when so, like, one idea is that we, you know, the idea that, oh, science gives us this objective third person view. That's one way of talking about objectivity. There's a whole other way, is that I do the experiment, you do the experiment, we talk to each other, we agree on methods, and we both get the same result. That is a very different way of thinking about objectivity. And it acknowledges that, you know, when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible, right? So there's a great paper, speaking of Santa Fe, by David Krakauer, where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality. And what you find is it's actually pretty fluid.

• 3:20:50Speaker 02

  Like, my liver cell is an individual, but really, it's part of the liver. And my liver is, you know, a separate system, but really, it's part of me. But I'm, so I'm an individual, yay. But actually, I'm part of a society, like, and I, I couldn't be me without the entire community of, say, language users, right? I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions. And the, my community of language users is part of ecosystems, right? That are alive, that I am a part of a lineage of. This is like Sarah Walker's stuff. And then that, those ecosystems are part of the biosphere, right? We're never separable, as opposed to this very atomizing, the triumphal, this science view is wants like Boltzmann brains. You're just a brain floating in the space, you know?

• 3:21:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there is a fascinating degree to which, uh, agency is fluid. Like, you are an individual, but you're not talking, is a kind of individual.

• 3:21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21:41Lex Fridman?

  And then... Uh, the person listening to this right now is also an individual.

• 3:21:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:21:47Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that's a weird thing.

• 3:21:48Speaker 02

  That's a weird thing, right?

• 3:21:49Lex Fridman?

  Because there's like, there's a broadcast nature too.

• 3:21:52Speaker 02

  This is why information theoretic, so, so the idea that we're pursuing now, which I get really excited about is this idea of information architecture. Right? Or organization, informational organization, because you know, right? Physicalism is like, everything's atoms, but you know, Kant recognized, Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism. Cause he recognized that life has a weird organization that would seem specifically different from machines. And so this idea that, how do we engage with the idea that organization? Which is often, I can be cast in information theoretic terms, uh, or computational terms even, is sort of, it's not really quite physical.

• 3:22:31Speaker 02

  Right? It's, it's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical, it has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of, of design. You know, and so not design like intelligent design, but there's a, you know, organization itself is, is a relationship of constraints and information flow. And I think, again, that's an entirely new, interesting way that we might get a very different kind of science that would flow out of that.

• 3:22:53Lex Fridman?

  So going back to Kant and organism versus machine. So I showed you a couple of legged robots.

• 3:23:04Speaker 02

  Very cool.

• 3:23:04Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible for machines to, to have agency?

• 3:23:08Speaker 02

  I would not discount that possibility. Um, I think it, you know, it, there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could, whatever it manifests, that strange loop that we're talking about, that auto poesis. I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in, uh, in silicon. I think whatever it would, it would be very different from us, like the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated. I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don't think, I don't think what we have now, like the L L M's are really there. But, uh, but I, yeah, I, I, I'm not going to say that it's not possible.

• 3:23:49Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how far I can get with imitation, which is essentially what L L M's are doing, so imitating humans. And I, I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation, you can achieve.

• 3:24:02Lex Fridman?

  What you would call consciousness or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most of us humans to think, oh, that's just fake, that's copying. But there's some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines. Coming from babies, we were born in this world and we're just learning to imitate each other. And through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations, we gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff.

• 3:24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. I, you know, it's possible, right? It's possible, but I think probably the view I'm advocating would say that one of the most important parts of agency is there's something called E4, E4, the E4 theory of cognition. Embodiment, inaction, embedding, and there's another one, extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body, which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the, of the extension in, with other living systems as well, is essential. So that's why I think the LLMs are not gonna, it's not just imitation. It's going to require, this goes to the brain in the vat thing.

• 3:25:15Speaker 02

  I did an article about the brain in the vat, which was really Evans. I was reporting on Evans, where they did the brain in the vat argument. But they said, look, in the end, actually, the only way to actually get a real brain in the vat is actually to have a brain in a body. And it could be a robot body, you know, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't, you know, you really need to be embedded in a world, at least that's the E4 idea.

• 3:25:37Lex Fridman?

  The E4, the 4E approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended by way of extracranial processes and structures, though very much in vogue.

• 3:25:53Lex Fridman?

  4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. This is a paper. By reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the 4E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses. It's fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far and it could go real far.

• 3:26:12Speaker 02

  Right. There's a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who is very much a reductionist, you know, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist. And Bateson always loved to poke people. And he said to Salk, he said, you know, where's your mind? And, you know, Salk went up here and Bateson said, no, no, no, out here. And what he really meant was this extended idea. It's not just within your cranium to be, to be, to have experience. You know, experience in some sense is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. Right? It's a, you almost perform it in a way, which is why both actually having a body, but having the body itself be in a world with other bodies is, from this perspective, is really important.

• 3:26:56Speaker 02

  And it's very attractive to me and, you know, seeing, again, if we're really going to do science with them, we're going to have to like have these ideas crash up against data, you know, crash up against, we can't just armchair it, you know, or, you know, or quarter, you know, couch quarterbacking it. But I think there's a lot of possibility here. It's a very radically different way of looking at, at what we mean by nature.

• 3:27:16Lex Fridman?

  What do you make of the fact that this individual observer, you as an individual observer, only get a finite amount of time to exist in this world? Does it make you sad?

• 3:27:28Speaker 02

  No, actually. It doesn't make me sad. So, okay, so, so, you know, full reveal, I have been doing contemplative practice in the Zen tradition for 30 years. I've been staring at a wall for 30 years and it's taught me a lot, right? You know, I really, I really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things it's taught me is like, you know, I don't really matter that very much. You know, this thing I call Adam Frank is really, you know, it's kind of a construct, you know? There's this process going on of which I am actually fundamentally, and that's super cool, but you know, it's going to go. I don't, you know, I don't know where it came from. It's going to go. I don't really need it to, you know, and then, and then who the hell knows? You know, I'm not, I'm not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that like.

• 3:28:12Speaker 02

  What I love, Zen has this idea of beyond birth and death. And they don't mean reincarnation. What they mean is, dude, you don't even really understand what life is. You know what I mean? Unlike this, you know, this core level of your own experience. So, you know, your ideas about what death is are equally ill-formed, you know? And it's, it's, so, you know, the contemplative practice really tries to focus on experience itself. Like, spend five days at a Zen session doing contemplative practice from, you know, 7:00 AM until 9:00 PM, obviously with breaks. And you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like, what my own experience is. What is it really like? You, it forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention. Because, you know, attention is kind of like this thing, like, it's usually just like, oh, over there. Oh, my foot hurts. Oh, I gotta do my taxes.

• 3:28:57Speaker 02

  Oh, that, you know, what's that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes? And with contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it. And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So, but I think I've learned from that is like, kind of whatever, you know? I'm not, I'm not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank part, the identity, the thing. And the, the part of me that is real is, you know, everything's coming and going. It's all coming and going. Well, how could, how could I ever not come and go? When the entire world is just, you know? Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising. Nothing exists, nothing has self-nature. Nothing exists by itself. It's an endless, infinitely connected web.

• 3:29:38Lex Fridman?

  But still, there's a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it's, it's good while it lasts and it sucks that it ends. Like, you can be like, ah, well, everything comes and goes. But like, I was eating ice cream yesterday. Found this awesome low-carb ice cream called Delights here in Austin. And, uh, you know, it ends.

• 3:30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30:02Lex Fridman?

  And I was like, and I was staring at the empty container and it was...

• 3:30:06Speaker 02

  That's beautiful, man. I love that.

• 3:30:08Lex Fridman?

  You could say like, yeah, well, that's how it all is, but...

• 3:30:11Speaker 02

  Can I say that, that's what I've learned from, from, because I, I love your idea of the deliciousness of it.

• 3:30:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:16Speaker 02

  You know? But what I think happens with contemplative practice when it deepens is that it's not just, you're not just saying, right? This is why, you know, so I do koan practice. So, this is a tradition in Zen that it was established, it was a teaching method that was established like a thousand years ago. There's these Book of Koans. And every koan, you know, if you've ever read Godel Escher Bach, he's got a whole chapter on koans. They're kind of non-logical problems that you have to work on. Uh, one of my favorite one was stop the sound of the distant temple bell. You know, you're like, what? Every time my teacher gives it to I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, this is a whole Zen thing of like, up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So, you know, your job with these koans is to, is to sit with them, is to sit with them until you sort of

• 3:31:01Speaker 02

  kind of, you know, you realize what the thing is trying to teach you, what aspect of experience it's trying to teach you. So there's no answer, there's no, and in fact, actually you don't give an answer. You actually usually have to demonstrate. The first time when I sat, you know, I did a call on and the guy was like, don't tell me the answer. Show me the answer. I was like, what are you talking about? But after doing these for years now, you know, I've kind of learned, under, learned the language of them. So I could never tell you, if I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer. You'd be like, what? You know, it's never, it's not the words, it's the, you know? So like your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, it really does take years, just like anything in math. It can be, it took me years to understand Lagrangian's. You kind of come to a deeper understanding with like, yeah, the words of like, it's not just like, oh, everything changes.

• 3:31:46Speaker 02

  You actually feel that movement, like you feel it with like breath to breath, you know? And it really becomes, sometimes I have this feeling, this is messed up, but of just joy. And it's not connected to anything, right? That's what I've kind of gotten from practice. It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage, that, that infinite passage of moment to moment. That is truly the way things are and it's okay. Like not, it's not okay because I have a feeling about it. Okay. I want it to be okay. It just is okay. It's a really, it's a pretty awesome thing.

• 3:32:14Lex Fridman?

  That's beautiful. I mean, I, I, maybe it's the genetics, maybe it's the biochemistry of my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience. Just amorphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it's my Eastern European roots, but there's always like a melancholy that's also sitting next to the joy. And I think it always feels like they're intricately linked.

• 3:32:37Lex Fridman?

  So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience and the joy is just about

• 3:32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:32:43Lex Fridman?

  the beauty of experience and they're just kind of sitting there.

• 3:32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which is cool, actually, because that, you know, I'm also, you know, I come from Eastern, my roots are Eastern European as well, going back. And I get it, right? I mean, you know, the, but that's also the cool thing. I think one of the things is, is like, yeah, well, that, that is what it is. That is what it is, right? You don't have to do anything. You don't have to like manipulate it or move it around or like, yeah, this is the experience, you know?

• 3:33:04Lex Fridman?

  Can you speak to the, just the practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM?

• 3:33:08Speaker 02

  Like, what the hell are you doing, bro?

• 3:33:10Lex Fridman?

  What's, what's powerful? What's fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall?

• 3:33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, you know, it's not really, I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall and what you're doing is you're, you know, you're just sitting with, you know, you can, there's different meditative practices, right? There's counting breaths. So that's usually what I do. I sit down, I start counting breaths. And for the first half hour, it's just like blah, blah, blah. I'm thinking, like I said, I'm thinking about my taxes. I'm thinking about what I gotta do later on, yada, yada, yada. First time I ever did a full sashin, a two day sashin, I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses, back when they're LPs.

• 3:33:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:45Speaker 02

  With the fricking pauses.

• 3:33:47Lex Fridman?

  Nice.

• 3:33:47Speaker 02

  You know, because my mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order.

• 3:33:52Lex Fridman?

  That's pretty cool, actually.

• 3:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see, you know, because you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind. But what happens is, and this took me a while. I used to, I used to hate sitting, you know, I do it, but I, after a while, the mind gets exhausted. Like that part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter is just like, there's nothing else to do. And then you get bored and I, now I realize that's the, that's when something interesting is going to happen. Cause you kind of like drop down and now it's a very physical practice. People think you're just sitting there not thinking or thinking about not thinking. Actually becomes a very physical process where you're really just following the breath, you're kind of riding the breath and it gets very quiet. You know, and within that quietness, it's, you know, there's, there's a path, you know,

• 3:34:36Speaker 02

  you, because obviously there's been Buddhism is always like, you know, uh, you know, not about thinking, but it's a huge literature. So these guys are always about, don't think I've written all this stuff, but they're guideposts. They're like the finger pointing at the moon. And, you know, there's the idea of first, you know, your mind is usually scattered, right? Like right, you don't want to, right now, when I walk out, I'm going to go get the Uber and everything. My mind's going to be all over the place. But with sitting, first you concentrate the mind so that there's no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening, but you're just not there happening up there. You're not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing where kind of the self drops away, you know, and there's just this presence. It's kind of like a raw presence. And that's often where the, the, the joy up, up wells from, but you sit with whatever. Maybe you're going to sit and

• 3:35:21Speaker 02

  you're going to have like, you know, maybe you're going to go through like an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You know, you're just going to sit with whatever comes up. You're going to make that. That's why the sitting part, you're making the commitment. I'm going to sit here with whatever comes up. I will not be moved. And then what you come away with, it actually, over time, it actually changes kind of who you are. Like I'm still the asshole I was from New Jersey growing up, but I just have more space now for things, you know?

• 3:35:47Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah. Once Jersey, always Jersey.

• 3:35:49Speaker 02

  Always Jersey.

• 3:35:50Lex Fridman?

  But I love the Bruce Springsteen just blasting in your head.

• 3:35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was amazing.

• 3:35:54Lex Fridman?

  Why are we here? What do you think is the, is the, is the purpose, the meaning of human existence?

• 3:35:59Speaker 02

  It's good that we just had the last conversation because I'm going to give this answer, which is so corny. Um, it's love. And I'm not messing around because really actually what happened, you know, so within Buddhism, there's the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You're here to help. You're just here to help, right? Compassion, like that's a really essential part of this path of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, um, I don't care about compassion. I'm here for knowledge, right? I'm here, you know, I, I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. I had, you know, the reason everybody comes to things like this, you know, life was hard. I'd gone through stuff, but I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion, whatever. But then I found out that you can't get that. You can't get though, you can't go to

• 3:36:40Speaker 02

  this without compassion. Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about.

• 3:36:48Speaker 02

  Helping all sentient beings. That's the way they, you know, just being here to to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is like, you know, the main thing is to get over. You're like, your job is to get over. But that's really what I found. It's, it is actually kind. And that's what that joy, the joy, some of that joy is just, it's like this, one of the things I have, when I have like really, you know, there's a kind of experience I'll have in contemplative practice, which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world is just, the world gives you everything. And this is a certain way, right? Just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that's kind of the experience. And then you kind of like, oh, I need to be helpful because who's not having this experience, you know?

• 3:37:32Lex Fridman?

  So just love for the world as it is.

• 3:37:34Speaker 02

  Love for the, and all the beings who are suffering, everybody's suffering, everybody's, you know, your worst political opponent, they're suffering, you know? And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring.

• 3:37:50Lex Fridman?

  And hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey out of suffering towards love.

• 3:37:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would, you know, that may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.

• 3:38:00Lex Fridman?

  I hope so.

• 3:38:00Speaker 02

  I hope so too. They're that or they're coming to eat us.

• 3:38:03Lex Fridman?

  Especially if they're a type three civilization.

• 3:38:05Speaker 02

  That's right. And they got really big guns.

• 3:38:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, this was a truly mind blowing, fascinating, just awesome conversation. Adam, thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking today.

• 3:38:15Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. This was a lot of fun.

• 3:38:18Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Adam Frank. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There's a tingling in the spine, a catching the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.