The Contact Paradox: Where Are All The Aliens? | Keith Cooper | Modern Wisdom Podcast 130

Keith Cooper is the Editor of Astronomy Now and an author. Why is searching for aliens so hard? How would they contact us? How would we decode a message? What are the potential dangers of responding? Should the general public be told if we find them? Should we be freely sending messages out into space? Extra Stuff: Buy The Contact Paradox - https://amzn.to/2EXuFsR Follow Keith on Twitter - https://twitter.com/21stCenturySETI The End Of The World Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-end-of-the-world-with-josh-clark/id1437682381 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:02Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Keith Cooper. We're currently on planet Earth, but I'm not sure for how much longer. Keith, welcome to the show.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on, Chris.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  So we're talking about The Contact Paradox today, which is your new book. And it's all about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and messages from the sky, right?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Yes. And our attempts to send messages into space as well for extraterrestrial life to hear, that's a major part of it as well.

• 0:37Chris Williamson?

  I see. Yes. So it's a conversation, not just us listening. So why, why does this book need to be written at the moment?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  SETI has had, or SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, for anybody not familiar with the acronym. It's had a big resurgence recently. For many years, it was kind of the pariah of the sciences. It didn't get much funding at all. Mainstream science didn't really pay much attention. NASA weren't interested in it. And then a couple of years ago, Yuri Milner and the Breakthrough Foundation, he's a billionaire philanthropist, he donated $100 million to a 10-year SETI project, using all the big radio telescopes in the world to listen for extraterrestrial signals. And that's given it a real boost. Now NASA are starting to get a little bit more interested, and other parties as well. So it's really

• 1:28Speaker 01

  starting to come into its own and mature as a science. And everybody likes space and aliens.

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  Why was it so lambasted in the first place? Or why was it sort of looked down on?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I think there was a stigma attached, you know, with flying saucers, UFOs. It was around 1960, when Frank Drake did the first SETI radio search. And I think at the time, it was too small a project for anybody really to notice. But as time went by, I think people did associate it with, with flying saucers and little green men. And I don't know, I mean NASA, you know, they talk about astrobiology and searching for microbes on Mars and things like that. But they never seem to take it to the next level and look for more complex life. So it's a strange kind of thing, especially when you consider how popular, you know, science fiction and aliens and things like that are. But the scientific community hasn't really...

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Um, you know, reacted to it in the way that you would expect.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Didn't get embraced as a real science, then it doesn't sound like. And perhaps Hollywood caused that issue in part that because, you know, there's not, there's not many Hollywood blockbusters about microbes in space. Like, but there's a lot about that and it might just make people feel like, well, this is us just trying to replicate uh film in reality. It's a waste of money.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, when people think of aliens on, on, you know, movies on TV, they think of, you know, xenomorphs from aliens or Independence Day, War of the Worlds. You know, aliens coming here to steal our water and our women, which seemed to be a, a common theme in nineteen fifty's.

• 3:11Chris Williamson?

  Two resources that they desperately need, yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Yes, um, so I think, you know, I think that's in the back of a lot of people's minds when I think of SETI. And hopefully it won't be in the back of a lot of people's minds when I think of my book. I don't want that to put them off.

• 3:26Chris Williamson?

  Water and women.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's, you know, one of the things I discovered writing the book is that SETI is as much about us as it is about aliens. We don't know anything about aliens. I know as much about aliens as you or any scientist.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  But when we, when we consider what extraterrestrial life might be like, the only thing we have to go on is life here on earth and human life. So we're kind of extrapolating from that to explore what alien life might be like. And in doing so, I think we learn a lot about ourselves. There's a phrase I use in the book that the stars are like a mirror. And whenever we look to the stars, we see our own self reflected back. And that's a big theme from the book. It doesn't matter, I mean, I don't know if aliens exist. There may be no life out there. We may be on our own in the universe, but that doesn't, I don't think that devalues the search because we're going to learn about ourselves in the process. And that could be more valuable than anything.

• 4:24Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, so you mentioned that we're extrapolating forward how us as a species have developed, how our planet has developed as well. Is that leading to some assumptions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which are limiting?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  I think so, I think so. One of the big ones I talk about in my book is the nature of altruism. So, back in the early days of SETI, and, and, and still I think quite a lot today. There's this idea that aliens are going to be an advanced civilization that are wise and the, you know, they've grown past war and all that kind of thing. And that they're going to be altruistic. This is the phrase that comes out, that aliens are going to be altruistic. And it's usually radio astronomers saying this. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking, you don't actually know what altruism means. Altruism doesn't just mean being kind to somebody. Um, in, in, you know, evolutionary biologists and, and, and, and,

• 5:25Speaker 01

  you know, people studying animals and things, in, in nature, there are two different kinds of altruism. The first kind is kin altruism. Basically, you're going to be altruistic to, um, your siblings, your children, your cousins, your nieces and nephews, because they carry your genes forward. So, you know, when a, you know, when, you know, I've got a couple of dogs, I take them out into the park, they chase squirrels. And you hear sometimes hear the squirrel squawking, you know, it's like a warning, there's a dog, get out of here. They're putting themselves at risk, betraying where they are so the dog can find them, to save, you know, their, their, their siblings that carry their genes forward. So, so that's kin altruism. And we certainly don't have any kin with, you know, extraterrestrial life, we don't share any genes with them or anything like that.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  So, that's not going to work. The other kind of altruism is reciprocal altruism. Boil it down to, I'll do something for you, you do something for me. And that's how most of us get by in life. You, you, you know, I mean, of, of course, we, we, we display pure altruism to an extent. But I don't think it's the most common kind of altruism that humans show. Otherwise, the world would be a much better place. People tend to do things for themselves, for their family, or they do something in return for something else. Um, sadly. And I I don't see any reason why alien life would react differently. So if you think that aliens aren't going to bend over backwards from the bottom of their hearts for us, when

• 6:52Speaker 01

  they don't even know us, and don't even know that we exist for sure, then that changes how you approach SETI, because, you know, we're looking for a radio signal from space, you know, these are coming from, if if if any civilization is out there, they're going to be many light years away, and the power they need to transmit a signal, not just once, but, you know, if you want to stand a good chance of it being detected, you've got to transmit it over and over and over again for years and years and years. That's a lot of power, a lot of resources. So that already starts to make you think, well, how much power are they going to devote to that? How many, how many of their resources are they going to devote to, you know, sending this massive beacon into space that nobody may ever hear? Um, and, you know, it could also play into how they're going

• 7:35Speaker 01

  to react to us when they discover that we exist. Um, you know, this idea again, that, you know, they're going to give us all their knowledge is, I think, um, a bad assumption. Um, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're also going to wipe us out or anything, but I don't know if it's going to be the reaction that we expect. And if we do engage in any kind of contact with them, extended contact, even if it's just radio signal swaps, you know, every few dozen years, you know, the information that they could give us could end up being disruptive to our society. Um, so I don't think we have to, you know, we shouldn't assume that any alien civilizations that may exist, we shouldn't assume that they have our best interests at heart.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  It's a total paradigm shift, isn't it? When you talk about this, when you actually think from a first principles perspective about what will happen if first contact is made, like, everything, there's everything sort of out, baby bathwater, full works, like, and you're totally starting afresh. Really quite terrifying. You mentioned that twice about, um, radio signals being the the chosen mode of communication. Is that, I mean, I don't know how technology works. Do aliens have radio? Is is radio this ubiquitous technology which is inevitable across the the universe? Or how's it work?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. That's another huge assumption. Um.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  The historical reason for searching in radio wavelengths is just that radio was a mature technology when we first started doing it. And radio does have some advantages. It's not absorbed by interstellar dust. So it's able to penetrate through, you know, the gas and dust clouds and be detectable at longer distances. But it disperses, radio waves disperse, they're not that great in that in that sense. And their bit rate isn't as high as something as similar like a laser. That's a much higher bit rate can transfer a lot more information. But when Frank Drake did the first SETI search in 1960, the laser was just being invented by Charles Townes about 50 miles down the road. And when the

• 9:47Speaker 01

  laser was invented, you know, other physicists called it a solution without a problem. Nobody knew what to do with them. I mean, obviously, today, that sounds ridiculous because we use them everywhere.

• 9:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And now we have lasers that can outshine the sun for, you know, a nanosecond. And problem with lasers is they do get absorbed by interstellar dust. So you can transmit them, but they they don't go as far. You could use an infrared laser, which would pass through some of the dust. So I think if we could start SETI again, we'd certainly continue to look, you know, for radio waves. And another rationale for that is that astronomers study the universe in radio waves anyway. So the idea is that alien astronomers are going to want to use that wavelength because that's what we're looking in. And then they might assume that we'll be.

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  More extrapolating out, isn't it? It's more we did it, therefore we must presume that someone else might.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  It's so limited. Well, it's both limiting and enabling, isn't it? The fact that we have this viewer perspective.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  If, you know, there might be a million year old civilization and we're thinking they're still going to be using AM and FM. But we cannot, yeah, but we can only look for what we can detect, you know, maybe they're using some kind of fantastic technology we don't have. Well, we can't detect that. You know, some people have suggested maybe they could transmit using gravitational waves. That's the, you know, the new big frontier in, in science. Having discovered gravitational waves from emerging black holes recently. Um, that's great, but you have to, you know, manipulate very massive objects to produce gravitational waves. The radio waves seem much more simpler, you know, um.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Uh, neutrinos are another um possible method, but they don't interact with matter very much. And I'm not sure that you could convey as much information as you could with a laser or with radio. So I think lasers and radio are certainly, you know, the best modes of communication that we should look for at the moment. But of course, you know,

• 11:53Speaker 01

  maybe using something else.

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so that's when we're talking about the kind of technology that aliens might use. How about what would be in that message or how we would decode it? I mean, like, if I got an email from someone in Chinese and I wasn't able to use Google Translate, that might as well be from an alien. I have no idea how to use that. So how would we even begin to decode or translate a message? I, I remember once reading a blog post a very, very long time ago about the um

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  ubiquity of mathematics across the universe, that there are certain things. I think the number pi was one of them and perhaps some of the uh cosmological constants, the, for instance, gravity, et cetera, et cetera. There are some of these numbers which will be universal and would be recognizable perhaps. It, does that tie into it and how would we decode a message?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that has been mooted, um, that perhaps um aliens will use mathematics as a starting point to establish communication. Um, you know, one plus one equals two, right? You've got that, we'll get more advanced. Trouble is, I I don't think you can, you know, communicate culture with mathematics or, you know, take us to your leader. I'm not sure you can communicate that in mathematics.

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Um, and I think if we ever did discover a signal, I'm not sure we'd ever be able to decode it, um, fully anyway. That's kind of, I mean, you know, just discovering the signal would be amazing enough. That would tell us that they're out there. Um, and if they're close enough, we could send a reply and and maybe we could kind of figure something out in terms of communication. Um, but one of the big stumbling points, I think, is going to be culture and, you know, we, e- e- even in human language, there is, you know, there are cultural idioms in there that we don't even realize we're using. And to an age, it's been meaningless. Well, I don't, was it, was it the film Mars Attacks?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Where the Martians mistook applause as as some kind of insult or something? I I I can't remember.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  But but think, just stupid things like that. But, you know, that, you you know, you made the analogy of receiving an email from somebody in China. You can't understand. Now, if you met that person from China, you might still not be able to understand their language, but you'd understand what a smile meant.

• 14:28Chris Williamson?

  Mm, mm, mm.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Or or wave, or if they were frowning. So we have that kind of commonality, but which we would not have with with extraterrestrial intelligence. Um, the other thing, um, this was really cool that I talk about in in in my book, is something, um, these two things called Shannon entropy and Ziff's law, and it's all about the complexity of language. Um, and, you know, we might find that extraterrestrials have a far more complex language than we do. And what I mean by that is, I make this analogy, um, with a gorilla. There was a captive gorilla called Coco, um, and she died recently at, I think, she got to about the age of forty six. But it was remarkable because with her, um, trainer, I guess,

• 15:12Speaker 01

  um, she was, you know, able to learn up to a thousand words in sign language. But certain concepts she had difficulty with. So if you said to her that, um, you're going to take her for a walk tomorrow, she would understand what tomorrow means. But if you told her that it was raining yesterday. She'd understand that would mean in the past, but if you mix the past and future tenses. So if you said we would have finished lunch by this time tomorrow, she wouldn't understand that mix of tenses. Now imagine if aliens have such a complex language that we couldn't understand it the same way Coco couldn't understand that same mixing of past and future tenses.

• 15:54Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Difficult maybe to correspond with, you know, an extraterrestrial life form so advanced. Um, they may, you know, they might not even be biological. They could be machines.

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  You know, they might have their own machine language. And, you know, again, how would we even know how to communicate with, with a machine life form like that when we don't have anything like that here on earth? Um, there's just so many, you know, unknowns. Um, science fiction, I think, you know, the best science fiction touches on some of these, but, you know, I, I don't think we can say what it's going to be like until it happens. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, but it's, it's not going to be as easy as in Star Trek and, you know, healing frequencies open and, um.

• 16:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It, it, it just seems there's so many open loops and open doors and potentials. What would be said? How would you then translate it? What's the medium that it's going to be broadcast on? Um, but there's certain things that we can talk about with a fair bit of certainty. And one of those would be, how could we respond and then, well, first off, should we respond? Like if we receive a message, as we've already identified, we don't know how friendly or altruistic this civilization is. Uh, the presumption, I think, is that because the universe, the universe's age

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  compared with the age of humanity as a civilization is quite long. So I think the presumption is that we're not likely to be the most advanced civilization if there are others out there. That's, am I correct there? Yeah?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's correct. There's been billions of years for other species to evolve. Intelligence around, you know, modern humans, what 12,000 years and modern human civilization is nothing. So the chances are that they're going to be much, much older than we are.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  And if they are technological, then you. And correspondingly, expect them to be technologically more advanced as well.

• 17:58Chris Williamson?

  I get that. So we've got that. We presume that this is going to be some more advanced civilization. We receive, let's say that we receive this, this message. First off, if you were, let's say it goes to SETI as well, because it could just be like some guy, I guess, but the, the people who have the resources are supposed to be looking for this. Firstly, should SETI tell, should that be publicized? Uh, what would the implications of that be, do you think?

• 18:27Speaker 01

  I don't think they could keep it secret.

• 18:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Um, Seth Shostak, the SETI Institute is the senior astronomer there and he, he wrote a great book called Confessions of an Alien Hunter. And he starts it out, um, in the first chapter, uh, he's talking about a signal they picked up in the mid nineties. And they were up all night trying to figure out what the signal is and thought this, this could be it, this could be it. And all of a sudden he gets a phone call from a journalist in New York asking about this signal. It's like, who told you, you know, we, nobody outside this building knows. And somehow it got back to him.

• 18:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, God.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And that was, and it turned out to be a, an orbiting satellite. Um, so it wasn't aliens. So I, I just, you know, I don't think that they would be able to keep it secret. First of all, it's not like a secret, top secret government. You know, project, these are just citizen, you know, civilian scientists.

• 19:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Um, it, it will get out, people talk. Um. A bigger question is, should they divulge the coordinates from where they detected the signal? Again, that's going to be difficult because if you detect a signal, you want to be sure you're right. So you have to share the coordinates there. So again, I don't think you can keep that secret. Um, in SETI, in the SETI community, they're, see, one of the things I love about being a science journalist is, is when I find scientists arguing. And one of the things that drew me to writing about this is this issue of whether we should respond has caused a huge schism in the SETI community and some real arguments. So, so that's, you know, I honed in on that straight away and thought this is going to be great.

• 19:58Chris Williamson?

  Love a bit of drama, some serious drama going on in SETI.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah, and you know, and there are two entrenched viewpoints. One is it's safe to transmit messages into space or to reply. You know, the alien's gonna be nice, don't worry about it, the cat hurts us anyway because it's too far away. And the other viewpoint is we don't know anything about what's out there. Let's not be hasty, let's think this through, let's be careful and not respond straight away. And there is something called the SETI protocol that was drafted by SETI scientists. The detail is basically what a scientist should do if they think they've detected a signal. But part of it is, you know, don't reply until, you know, there's some kind of authorization from the UN or whatever. You can't just reply on your own. Let's have a chat. It's not legally binding. Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not legally binding, so if somebody wanted to send reply, there'd be nothing to stop them. They did want to have a second protocol that was going to forbid just sending messages into space willy-nilly. You know, in the hope that a civilization out there would hear us.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  That got, that didn't get the support that the people drafting the protocol wanted. So one of the arguments that, you know, they call this messaging extraterrestrial intelligence or METI. And the idea is, you know, you target a star, maybe a star where astronomers have found planets around could potentially be habitable. So you send radio messages there in case there is anybody there to detect your signal. And maybe they'll reply. Because, you know, we haven't, you know, we've been listening for going up to sixty years now. We haven't really detected any showfire SETI signals. Maybe they're not transmitting, maybe they're waiting for us to message them before they send to us.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  And, you know, they say, you know, the argument is it's safe because they're too far away. So if they wanted to invade or whatever, they wouldn't be able to do that, wouldn't be able to reach us unless they had some kind of anti-aircraft drive.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Which isn't likely. But the opponents to that say, well, let's look at human history. And every time a less advanced civilization has met a more advanced civilization, it's ended bad. The less advanced civilization.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is when you look at history, things are more complicated than that. Contact is a very complex issue, which I discovered writing, writing the book. You know, often the analogy brought up is the fall of the Aztec Empire when the conquistadors marched in.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  The Aztecs, even though there was conflict, the Aztecs didn't fall because the conflict, ultimately they fell because the Europeans brought diseases over.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  You know, and another analogy I make in my book is something called the tulip, tulip mania, which apparently hit the Netherlands in the 1500s, I think, when tulips were imported from far off lands. And it caused an economic bubble. Everybody was buying and trading these tulip bulbs until the bubble burst and people lost their money and homes or what have you. It turns out that that was over exaggerated a little bit, but there was an economic bubble. And what that tells us is that if we introduce a, a new idea, a new technology, a new, a new thing into society, it can, can prove disruptive.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Even things that we invent ourselves, cars have proven disruptive. Yes, they get us from A to B and that helps with the economy and helps get jobs and things, but you know, air pollution from the cars is, you know, an undesirable side effect. So that's an example of, of something that has, you know, a mixed, mixed consequences. And basically,

• 23:58Speaker 01

  if we make contact with an alien civilization, we don't know what the consequence is going to be. It might be mixed, it might be good, it might be bad. And the point that people opposed to sending messages into space are saying is that we don't know. You can't assume it's all going to be good. There's probably going to be some bad things that come from contact. So we should wait. We should not send messages into space. We should not reply until we know what we're doing. And to be honest, I probably fall on the side of being cautious.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of that's probably going to be personality preclivity, right? It's just going to be, do you tend toward a slightly more conservative mindset with these things or not? Because as you've mentioned before, the actual understanding of what's going on here is fairly limited, right? Or is it a game theoretic perspective where most people have just looked at the odds?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Possibly. I think you're probably right about the slightly more, I don't know if I want to use the word conservative mindset, but certainly more of a safety first.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  You know, you want civilization to be bold and ambitious and to explore new frontiers. And I agree with that.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  But at the same time, you don't want to move, you don't want to get ahead of yourself. You don't want to move too fast that you don't really know where you're going. And the great thing about astronomy is that, you know, we're exploring exoplanets. You know, we're finding, you know, new star systems, new planetary systems nearby. We're beginning to study their atmospheres. In a couple of decades, I imagine that we'll have discovered planets, you know, that are possibly like Earth with an oxygen, nitrogen atmosphere and water. So we're starting to get a good idea maybe of where we could find life. And I think if we just wait and look, do a bit of reconnaissance. And if we say we find a civilization on a planet and on a 20 light years away, you

• 26:01Speaker 01

  know, let's listen, can we pick up any of their radio leakage? Can we learn anything about them? Before we start transmitting. And I'd like us to do that. I'd like us to do it responsibly. If we want to be, you know, a cosmic civilization on the cosmic stage and, you know, to act responsibly, I think to just be a bit grown up about it, not rush into things. And just, you know, do things carefully and.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:33Chris Williamson?

  I suppose the bias that we all have if we're not, if we're not Professor Nick Bostrom or someone else who's able to look at existential catastrophes with a very, very unbiased view. The issue is that we think within our own lifetimes as time scales, right? Or perhaps within hundreds of years as time scales. But if you decide to reply to a signal and that leads to a complete collapse of human civilization, that, that is not a decision to be rushed. That, that's a decision to take millennia over. That's a decision that takes 10,000 years. And why not?

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Because if the, the consequence of getting it wrong is so great. It, it's asymmetric, right? There's a bottomless downside, but there's an upside. Upside is maybe we get some cool information and get to meet some aliens. Downside is everyone dies.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. You know, I'd be cautious of saying that would be the ultimate conclusion, that everybody's gonna, everybody would die. But, and, and long, you see, long term, it might be that contact is gonna be great. But it might be short time, it could end up being disruptive.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  You know, maybe, you know, maybe aliens have a religion that supersedes the religions here on earth. And is that going to, what's that gonna do to human religions? And that could cause disruption. So it's that kind of level of disruption I'm talking about, rather than a kind of invasion or, I don't know, any kind of A from Andromeda scenario, if anybody's seen the old science fiction series. Basically, for anybody who doesn't know, it was written by Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist in the 1960s. And it depicts scientists detecting a signal from another planet. And it carries instructions to build a computer. And, you know, there's a big debate, should we build this? Is it gonna take us over or is it here to help us? Turns out it's here to take us over and they stop.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  Of course it is.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  On the other hand, yeah. On the other hand, you've got Carl Sagan's Contact where the signal was to build an apparatus. You know, again, what's it going to do? Well, it was to transport humans to them so they could introduce themselves and and say hi. Um. So they're kind of like the two extremes, and I think contact is going to be somewhere in the middle, I think, with both good and bad. And uh we don't know how we're going to react. We don't know how they're going to react. Uh. We may not even be able to understand them. Men may not even care about us. There's so many permutations. Um. It's just fascinating to think about it.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  It really is. I I did a podcast with Robin Hanson about the elephant in the brain, not about his The Great Filter. But I did want to discuss that about the fact that the silence from the stars at the moment lends us toward thinking that nothing is out there, or at least there's no proof that anything is out there yet. And The Great Filter is a hypothesis that's been put forward by Robin. I wondered if you might be able to explain that and then and then give your views on it. I'd love to hear that.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so The Great Filter is this idea that somewhere in the evolution of life, of all life, there is something that is like, it's like when I, I think Ian M. Banks described it as when a sentence meets her full stop. The end. Um. So, you know, maybe The Great Filter is something that happens early in the evolution of life. Maybe it is, maybe it is the origin of life in the first place. Maybe life is so rare um that it's just a huge fluke that it happened here on Earth. Maybe it's the jump from single-celled life to complex life that is so difficult that hardly any planet developed life, complex life. Um. Maybe it is the jump from, you know.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Dolphins to technological life. Um. Somewhere along the, the theory is that somewhere along the line, there is something that stops life in its tracks. Um. We don't know whether it's in our past and we've just managed to sneak through, or we don't know if it's waiting for us in the future. And Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, he said that um. If we found microbial life on Mars, for example. A lot of astrobiologists would be, that's brilliant, another. Another planet with life, um surely there's life elsewhere in the universe then. But he would be a little bit weird because he would say, well, why didn't it evolve? Past. Microbial stage to more complex life.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Um, so that brings the great filter a little bit.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  If you see what I mean, um it's. And. You know, maybe it is something like an asteroid strike or supernovae or. You know, climate change that that inevitably. Brings a civilization to its knees and that would be why we don't detect anyone because they've all died out. Hmm. Uh. I. Don't know. See, I view all these things, you know, all these potential obstacles, whether it's nuclear war or climate. Uh, crisis or asteroid strikes or disease or or one of all these things that could cause a collapse of civilization. To me, I I view them as challenges for for civilization, for society to overcome.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I think every generation has its own challenges. And, you know, it's a measure of that society. Of whether it can progress. So the great filter. I. I don't think we should be afraid of the great filter if it's real. It may not be real, there might be life everywhere in the universe, we just haven't detected it yet for various reasons, but if it is real. I I I think we should view it as something to overcome rather than something to fear. Um.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Because that's all we can do, really.

• 32:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a much more proactive approach, isn't it, rather than just being scared of it? I do love the, I do love thinking about the great filter hypothesis and the fact that it does suggest that somewhere down the line, there is a very, very high hurdle. And you're right, it could be the pro chaotic, is it pro chaotic to you chaotic life is one of the ones that

• 32:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  Forward. And then there's potentially, what happens if all civilizations develop artificial general intelligence? Perhaps that the control problem might be one of the concerns. Maybe it's nuclear war, maybe they all do that. I saw, I can't remember where I was reading it, it wasn't, it wasn't contact paradox, it was somewhere else. It was, it was Professor Adam Frank, actually. And what he said was that pretty much all civilizations are likely to have to deal with some form of global warming. Because a byproduct of energy creation would inevitably be some sort of heating. There would have to be some sort of heating going on.

• 33:36Chris Williamson?

  So he suggested that one potential suggestion, I don't think he believed in it, but it was one potential suggestion was, well, it might be, might be global warming or climate change of some kind.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  But yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I think he's, I, I, I think he's, again, he's drawing assumptions that they're going to follow the same sort of development as human society.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  Can you, can you think of any others? What, what other sort of?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Well, imagine, imagine the life that has evolved on a planet where to survive, it's had to be very in tune with its environment. Maybe it's a slightly difficult environment, more difficult than, than, than we have here on earth. And the only way that they've been able to evolve and survive is by being in tune with that environment. And then, you know, suddenly building factories and being at odds with that environment isn't going to be part of their nature. So possibly they would identify that that's going to cause a problem and they won't go down that path. Um, or maybe they don't invent, you know, industry or technology, uh, you know, look at dolphins. They are intelligent. I don't care what anybody says. They are another intelligent life form.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Um, I don't have opposable thumbs. They can't manipulate things. So maybe they're never going to develop top technology. Who knows if they are sophisticated enough to have poetry or whatever, but you know, there's certainly a degree of intelligence there that should be respected. And maybe life in the universe is all dolphins. Maybe there's not many human kind of life, but you know, astronomers suspect that a lot of planets are water worlds. You know, there's this idea that, you know, water is rare. That's rubbish. It's made of the two of the most common atoms in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen. There's water everywhere and a lot of models of planetary formation predict that, um, there's going to be a lot of planets that are basically just going to be covered in ocean.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  And, and maybe they're full of dolphin-like societies that don't invent, you know, don't invent technology, but nonetheless are intelligent.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what I reckon it'll be? It's, it's, it's octopuses and cephalopods. They're terrifying. All of them. They're here. They're here to take over the universe. I'm telling you, Keith. That's who we need to be concerned about. We need to be concerned about the octopuses. Um, but yeah, the, the underwater thing's interesting. I've read, um, a blog post about how underwater civilizations would naturally be on a back foot because they can't do stuff like metallurgy as easily.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  Which would really restrict their ability to develop certain, in certain sort of ways.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. And, and if you, you know, Jupiter's moon Europa, um, is covered by an icy shell, but, you know, several dozen kilometers thick. But underneath is a global ocean. And if there's life in there, they may never know that there's anything outside of their ocean. They'd have to go through all the ice and maybe they never will.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  I was reading.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Um, so the outside universe.

• 36:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  So that might be why we're not detecting audio signals.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I get what you mean. It's it's interesting just thinking about all the different ways that life could develop. There's a fantastic podcast called The End of the World with Josh Clark. Have you heard of this?

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow. You've not heard of it? Oh, Keith, man, let me let me send it to you. Once we're done, it it will. I mean, it'll all be low hanging fruit for you, but it is amazing. To the listeners, I will be linking it in the show notes below if you want to go and check it out. But it's a nine part series done by iHeartRadio. So super mega, mega high quality sound production. And it's essentially all of the different ways that civilization could end. And it's framed nicely at the beginning. There's an episode about the Fermi paradox. It moves forward into biological worries about the great filter. There's all sorts about artificial general intelligence. Absolutely amazing. And

• 37:25Chris Williamson?

  one of the things is he really gets towards the end and he really starts sort of pushing the limits that he mentioned was any sufficiently advanced civilization would realize that the best way for them to live potentially would be by using computing power. I can't remember if it was to simulate themselves or for something else. And that with that in mind, the most effective way to do this would be to essentially go to sleep until the universe itself was a lot, lot cooler. Is this a theory that you've heard before?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Who's who came up with that? Do you know where it where the origins of it?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Um. I don't know if it was any single one person who came up with the idea. I want to say Brandon Carter might have had some ideas that way Frank Tipler, John Barrow, people like that. So yeah, so it comes down to it's like, you know, you have your computer servers and they're kept in a cool room. That's because they produce a lot of heat and they need to get rid of that heat. Otherwise they're going to melt. So the colder the environment around them, the faster they can get rid of that heat and the faster than they can process information. So that's the idea that really advanced life that is.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  You know, I I guess if you're existing as some kind of computer simulation or machine, you know, your life is going to be based around thought process and and data. Um, and, you know, that is going to generate heat and you're going to have to shed that heat. So you're going to want to go to the coldest place possible. Um, some people have suggested that if there's intelligent life out there now, may have gone to the edge of the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, because uh, that's, you know, space is going to be colder out in intergalactic uh, space. And they're going to be able to run their giant computer, computers.

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

  How much colder? Are we talking like tiny, tiny fractions of a degree?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  I don't know, to be honest.

• 39:35Chris Williamson?

  But it's not much, it's not much, it's not the difference from going in like from a hot bath to a cold shower, surely.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I thi- I think, I mean, obviously in in the, you know, in the galaxy, you have hot gas, you have outing into galactic space. There's you're you're far away from all the stars. Um, I imagine it's probably pretty close to absolute zero. Um, and that's great for for any, you know, kind of advanced computing life um, that needs to to um, get rid of the heat from its own processing of its own thoughts. Um, and the idea of of, you know, going to sleep now is because, you know, the universe at the moment is hot, there's stars and accretion discs around black holes and supernovae, there's all kinds of radiation. You know, in the far, far, far future, when protons have decayed and galaxies are disintegrated

• 40:26Speaker 01

  and there's nothing left but just a soup of photons that, you know, the temperatures equalize and everything is just, you know, almost absolute zero. You can't get colder than that. And um, whether life could survive in those circumstances, I I don't know. Um, you know, reading a lot of Stephen Baxter's science fiction novels, you know, often his advanced aliens are like that. Um, but again, that, you know, that's extrapolating from how we perceive life is going to develop in the future and what its motivations are going to be, and we don't know. Um, but it is fun to speculate, I think.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  I love that idea.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  And again, you know, if if, yeah, but if, you know, if advanced life has gone to the edge of the so of of the the galaxy, where it's colder, when they can run their giant servers or whatever it is, um. Then we may be looking in the wrong direction for their signals if we're looking into the galaxy. Maybe we need to look out.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  There's all these different permutations and I think detecting a signal is going to be more than a look than anything else.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I do like doing when we're thinking about these more grand, more universal scale approaches is that it does remind me about just how much of a paradigm shift or how many different ways of looking at the universe or potential life in the universe there is, right? When you're talking about potentially waiting, going to sleep somehow until the universe has cooled down. Like until the the whole universe and just all of matter has chilled out and everything's like gone except for, like you say, this sort of photon soup and you're, you know, fractions above absolute zero. All right, brilliant. Well, now it's more efficient.

• 42:11Chris Williamson?

  You think, what? Well, what a ridiculous approach, but that's, you know, been postulated as one potential solution for this sort of stuff. I just find it, I find it so interesting to think about things in that sort of a way.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  So as we move forward now, you've got a little bit more funding behind SETI because of this, this crazy super billionaire that's given them, you know, a hundred million, it's not, it's not shitloads, but it'll go, it'll go a fair way, I'm going to guess. Like, what do you think or what would, if you were directing the funds at SETI and you had to put, put your money on the table, your hundred million on the table, what would you be doing at the moment?

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I'd be training new scientists to do SETI.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  You've got, you know, people like Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak, Frank Drake. They've been doing SETI for years and years, but they're not getting any younger. And you need trained scientists to be able to to replace them when they retire.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  You know, until recently was very difficult to be able to do a PhD in SETI or anything like that. They used to do it by stealth. Um, Dan Wertheimer at Berkeley, he would do PhDs. It would be in building equipment, but the equipment would be for SETI experiments.

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  They could do it. Um, so yeah, we we need a lot, because we need a lot more scientists thinking about this. Because as I said, it's even though it's been going for sixty years, modern, you know, SETI, it's still very immature science because it just hasn't had the numbers of people doing it, the funding, um, to really develop those ideas. So, yeah, we need more scientists being trained to do SETI. We need to remove that stigma for them so that they can see, you know, when they're going to do their PhDs, they can see it as a reasonable career path.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  There's no point doing a PhD in SETI and finding you can't get any jobs in it. Um, but once we can do that, once we get more people doing it and it, you know, the stigma is removed. And then we're going to, you know, have more people thinking about new ideas, new possibilities, and that's going to broaden our horizons. Um, and I think that is going to be worth just as much as as any, you know, extra radio SETI search that we could do.

• 44:23Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Um, because it is gonna, you know, it's gonna be a long-term project, probably. Um, we may get lucky in detector signal next year, but it might take a hundred years, thousand years, maybe never. Um, hopefully, I think, um, Seth Shostak always says that, um, you know, he alludes to Moore's law, which is this, um, law that, you know, seems to be holding so far, number of transistors on a circuit doubles every couple of years, uh, which increases your computing power, uh, and enables you to process much more data faster and and possibly find signals faster. Um, that's speeding things up. Um.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But yeah, yeah, I I just get more people doing SETI, I think, has got to be the main thing.

• 45:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  And not being, you know, not being. embarrassed by by doing SETI and getting, you know, not just radio astronomers, but getting historians, getting evolutionary biologists, getting anthropologists, getting people from all kinds of walks of life and disciplines doing it because they're all going to bring their different perspectives on things like contact and how civilizations might evolve and things like that. At the moment, SETI has been a discussion among radio astronomers and, you know, planetary scientists and people like that. And we need to broaden it because, you know, we're talking about looking for another civilization. So we want to try and understand what that civilization may be like. So let's get the people in who, you know, who are going to be able to shed new light on that. And again, that's something that hasn't been done historically. We've really, you know, pushed away those other

• 45:54Speaker 01

  people from other disciplines. And really, we need to be embracing them and getting them thinking about it as well. Because as I said, you know, SETI is, we're going to learn about ourselves as much as we, well, more probably than than we are going to learn about alien life, at least in the short term. So I think it's going to benefit those other disciplines as well to do SETI.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  What things are we learning about ourselves through the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I think at the moment, we haven't learned anything for sure because,

• 46:27Speaker 01

  I mean, for example, we don't know whether there are any other habitable planets or whether Earth is the only planet. Now, we can look at the only planet that can support life in the universe. So we can look at what things make Earth habitable and understand why Earth is habitable. When we discover another Earth-like planet that could support life, that would further inform us about our own planet and, you know, where we came from. The, you know, just the idea of imagining what other civilizations are going to be like, you know, the the whole discussion of altruism, that, you know, we we learn about our own levels of altruism and how altruism has affected development of human society.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Just imagining, you know, what kind of technology advanced life might have and thinking about where our own technology might go in future, you know, the whole idea of, of, you know, the great filter, you know, if it's something that we do to ourselves, can we learn from that and preempt things and avoid things, you know, like nuclear war or the climate crisis?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  So I think it's an ongoing project.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  It's just getting us to think more about ourselves and in the context of of the universe at large and any other life that may or may not be out there.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I, like I say, one of the things that really does fascinate me and I absolutely love to do as the, this kind of thinking comes about is trying to take that total first principles, back to basics, look at human civilization on a, you know, interstellar, universal scale, exactly what is it that we're taking for granted and what are the sort of assumptions and and bits and pieces like that?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  One thing I want to say about that is I worked on the book for 10 years.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  And I had two agents. It got rejected by about three dozen publishers.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  And eventually I found a home for it with with Bloomsbury and Jim Martin, the commissioning editor there was very kind to to take a risk on it and and and to accept it. But it is a lesson that, you know, if first you don't succeed, just keep trying.

• 48:41Chris Williamson?

  Try three dozen more times.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were times when I thought this was never gonna happen. My, my agent got rid of me because they just weren't getting anywhere with it. So it's like, get rid of him.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  And yeah, there were really times when I didn't think it was gonna happen. But if you believe in something and, you know, if you're that reasonably good at what you do, and I think writing is probably the pretty much the only thing I do well. I wish I could speak as eloquently as I could write. I don't know how how well this conversation is is coming over. But yeah, it's certainly a testament to perseverance, I think so. And hopefully, you know, other people who have want to write a book and have an idea and and can write a little bit, hopefully that would give them hope that if, you know. They don't first find a publisher for it, just keep trying because there will be a publisher out there eventually for you.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  Man, I mean, you know, it's not like you've landed with with someone. This is Bloomsbury's Premier League. Like, you know, some of the guys that I've been speaking to recently, I had Douglas Murray on the other week. I've had, um, who else we had? Several times over, Sunday Times bestselling author Peter Franco Pan, who wrote The Silk Roads. So, you know, you're swimming in some, as I would say on this podcast, you are swimming in some big dicked waters. And it's a, it's a really nice thing to hear, especially considering that a lot of people look at kind of science and physicists as quite cold and calculating. It's nice to have something that sort of humanizes the process of writing this. And if it's taken 10 years, then, man, I think, I honestly think it's worth it.

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  It's so, like I say, it is crazy dense. It reads very well. So, yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't recommend it more. Any of the people that have listened to this, any of the listeners, you know where to go. It will be linked in the show notes below. And obviously, if you follow the link to Amazon on there, you will be supporting this podcast at no extra cost to yourself. But for now, Keith, I'm gonna let you go, man. Thank you so much for today's conversation. It's been, it's been awesome.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's been a pleasure. It's been great fun.