Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455

if we don't ask how long do they last 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 um 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 uh 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 um and the only way that we're the only time that this is you know this whole process from you know a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed right so therefore you could put a 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 Theus 22 one in 10 billion trillion then yeah we're alone if it's anywhere larger than that then they're we're not the first it's happened somewhere else and to me that was an an that was mindblowing 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 has some bias against civilizations we're not the first time this has happened this has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history 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 this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Adam Frank you wrote a book about aliens so the big question how many alien civilizations are out there 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 it anything immediately we will have gone through a number of planets we'll be able to start putting limits on how common life is uh the one answer I can tell you uh which is was an important part of the problem is how many planets are there right and just like people have been arguing about the uh 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 democratus 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 uh 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 uh there was a theory that said planets formed when two stars passed by each other closely and then mat was gravitationally squeezed out in which case those kinds of uh 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 so one of the things you've done is uh simulated the formation of stars how difficult do you think it is to simulate the formation of planets like simulator solar system the through the

entire evolution of the solar system this is kind of a a numerical simulation sneaking up to the question of how many planets are there 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 pull it downward so you'll start to form a protostar and a protostar is basically the young star of you know this ball of gas where uh nuclear reactions are getting started but it's also a dis so you as material falls inward because it's everything's rotating as it falls inward it'll spin up and then it'll form a disc material will collect in what's called an accretion disc or a protoplanetary disc and you

can simulate all of that once you get into the disc 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 because 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 dis to form Pebbles right and then the Pebbles will collide to form rocks and then the rocks will form Boulders etc etc that process is super complicated but we've been able to simulate enough

of it to begin to get a handle on how planets form how you creat enough material to get the first Proto planets or planetary embryos as we call them and then then some the next step is those things start slamming into each other to form you know planetary siiz 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 then then eventually formed the moon and all of them have uh different chemical compositions different

temperatures yeah so the the the temperature of the material in the disc 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 um Uranus and Neptune all have huge amounts of ice in them or water and ice um 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 do you think it's possible to do that of simulation to have a stronger and stronger estimate of uh How likely an earthlike planet is can we get the physics simulation done well enough to where we can start estimating like what are the possible earthlike things that could be generated yeah I think we can and I think we're learning how to do that now um 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 uh 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 um once you get up to a plane 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 you know like a 1D a 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 have 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 aono from scratch we're not there yet uh how important are those details like the crust and the atmosphere

do you think hugely important so I'm part of a collaboration at the University of Rochester where we're using uh 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 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 uh 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 um and our solar system is weird because the average 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 um 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 squeezed to those pressures which is like Millions tens of millions of times the 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 PL tectonics we think PL tectonics may have been really important for life on Earth for the evolution of complex life on Earth so it turns out and this is sort of the Next Generation

where we're going with the 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 why do you think PL tectonics might be uh useful for the formation of complex

life 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 went into a period of glaciation where the pretty much the entire planet was under ice the the oceans were Frozen um 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 um australas sized cratons they called them protoc continents so those uh 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 vulcanism on it um we could have been locked in that forever like once you get into a snowball State a planet can be trapped there forever which 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 PL tectonics does is it because it Fosters more um vulcanism 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 hard steps model which is this model that's been out there for a long time that purports to say intelligent life of the universe will be really rare and it made all these assumptions about the Earth's history particularly that the history of life and the history of the planet or have nothing to do with each other and it turns out as

I was doing the reading for this that uh Earth probably early on had a 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 cuz 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 clip it but at 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 you know into these Himalayan style mountains the weathering of that the erosion of that puts huge amounts of nutrients you know things that microbes want to use uh into the oceans and then the what we call the net primary productivity the you know the photo the the 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 so the the fact that you had play tectonics supercharged evolution in some sense you know like we're not exactly sure how 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 so it's nice to have turmoil in terms of temperature in terms of uh surface geometries in terms of the chemistry

of the planet turmoil yeah that's actually really true because what happens is if you look at the history of life that's a really you know it's an excellent point you're bringing up if you look at the history of life on Earth we get uh you know 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 do the microbes are doing amazing things they're inventing uh um fermentation thank you very much for we appreciate that um 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 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 explosion is when suddenly every body plan um you know Evolution goes on an orgy essentially uh so yeah it does look like the that chaos or that turmoil was actually very helpful to Evolution I wonder if there is some uh extremely elevated levels of chaos almost like catastrophes behind every Leap of evolution like you're not going to have Leaps um like in in in human societies we have like an Einstein that comes up with a good idea but it feels like on an evolutionary time scale 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 extra ra complex solution to that drama 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 had you know five ma mass extinctions but you don't necessarily see that like there was this giant evolutionary leap happening after those so you know with the uh comet impact

um 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 um 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 this hard steps paper because the whole idea of the hard steps paper was it was one of these uh anthropic reasoning kinds of

things where Brandon Carter said Oh look The intelligence doesn't show up on Earth until about um you know almost close to when the end of the sun's lifetime uh and so he's like well there should be no reason why the sun's Lifetime and the time for evolution to produced intelligence should be the same uh and so therefore and he goes through all this reasoning anthropic reasoning and and 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 some probability distributions um 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 one 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 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 uh and this is really important for astrobiology too um life doesn't happen on on a planet it happens to a planet so this is something that David grinspoon and Sarah Walker both say and you know uh I agree with this it's a really nice way of putting it um so uh you know

PL tectonics um the evolution of oxygen of an oxygen atmosphere which only happened because of life um these things you know these are are things that are happening where life and the planet are sort of slashing 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 that broke water apart to you know work to do its its shenan chemical Shenanigans um 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 um that opened up huge possibilities new spaces for evolution to happen but it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever so the Evol the introduction of of a 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 o oxygen big brained creatures need an oxygen rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent um for metabolism so you couldn't get intelligent creatures 100 million years after the planet formed so really on a scale of a planet when there's a billions trillions of organisms on a planet they can actually have planetary scale impact yeah so the chemical Shenanigans of an individual organism once scaled out to trillions can actually change a plan 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 um and then Lin margalis the biologist Lin margalis 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 um 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° 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 the idea of Gia 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 like oh my God you know what are you smoking weed you know and like

there were all these guyan festivals with guyan uh dances and so you know became very popular in the New Age Community but love loock 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 that bi 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 true guyan feedbacks in the sense that the planet can really exert complete control but it is absolutely true that um the biosphere

is a major player in Earth's history so the biosphere fights for homostasis on Earth the bio so 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 guy a true guy in feedback would be exactly what you said right the guy the biosphere is 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 um so but so it's still unclear whether we have these full guyan feedbacks but we certainly have semian feedbacks if there's a pertubation on the planetary scale temperature you know insulation how much sunlight's coming in the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that pertubation temperature

goes up the biosphere starts doing something temperature comes down now I wonder if the technosphere also has a guyan feedback or elements of a guyan feedback such that the technosphere will also fight to some degree for homeostasis open question I guess well that's I'm glad you asked that question because that that that paper that David and uh Sarah and I wrote what we were arguing was is that over the history of a planet right when life first forms you know 3.8 billion years ago it's kind of thin on the ground right you've got the first

species you know um these are all microbes and they have not yet uh been they're not going to enough of them to exert any kind of these guyan feedback so we call that an immature biosphere but then as time goes on his 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 spere right and the important thing and we're going to I'm sure later on we're going to talk about definitions of life and such there's this

great term called autop poesis uh that Francisco uh verel the neurobiologist Francisco verela came up with and he said you know one of the defining things about life is this property of autop poesis 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 perspective has been autoptic 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 things we're doing you know we're destroy 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 going to last over you know geologic time scales if we want a technosphere that's going to last tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of years then we've got to become mature which means to not uh 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 autopoetic well I wonder if we look across thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years that perturbations the technosphere should create perturbations a 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 to strengthen the or like drink water from the from the pond from the pond yeah right get sick a few times to strengthen the immune system yeah well you know

it's interesting with the technosphere we could talk about this more but like you know the te 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 um David grinspoon 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 used to be everything just fell down all the meteorites fell down but now we're starting to push stuff out um and you

know like the idea of planetary defense or such you know we are actually going to start exerting pertubations 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 that the end is the solar system right uh so we will um we'll be change literally engineering the solar system but what you can think of right now with what's happening with the anthropos scine the great acceleration that that uh the is the technosphere you know is

the creation of that is a giant pertubation on the biosphere right and what you can't do is you know the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere and the tech if the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability then you're in trouble right I mean the biosphere is 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 of the holos scene the last 10,000 years interglacial period we can't tolerate very different kinds of earths um so that's what I mean about a puration before we forget I got to ask you about this paper pretty interesting uh it's an interesting table here about hard steps abiogenesis glucose fermentation to perovic acid all kinds of steps all the way to homo sapians animal intelligence land ecosystems endoskeletons eye precursor so formation of the eye yeah complex multicellularity that's definitely one of the big ones 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 right and so this was the idea so what said was you know using anthropic reasoning he said there must be a few very hard steps for 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 transitions in evolution mte 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 um 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 talk to an evolutionary biologist or a biog geophysicist they'd look at you when you explain this

to them and they'd be like what like what are you guys doing turns out none of the uh details or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with what the people actually study the planet and its evolution is it mostly about the the fact that there's not really discret big steps is it's a gradual continual kind of process 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 biog geophysicists completely accept and it was the first thing that Carter

kind of rejected he said like no that's probably not possible and yet you know like if he'd only sort of had more discussions with this other community would have seemed like no there you 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 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 one is that you see something that is a heard an evolution has only happened once right so let's take the opposite uh you 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 making wings is not a hard step there are certain other things that people say no that's a hard step uh oxygen

you know the oxygen photosynth synthesis 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 uh 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 so yeah it only happened once but it happened once because basically the 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 PL tectonics yeah you're going to have to I mean to be fair to Carter on the

first point it makes it much more complicated uh if life and the planet are coold evolving because it's not it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions yeah and then we can sort of from a outside perspective analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create and then then there's a binary yes or no will it create life but if they cool it's just like a it's a really complex dynamical system where everything is uh becomes much more difficult from the perspective of SEI of looking out

there and trying to figure out which ones yeah are actually producing life but I think we're at the point now so now there may be other kinds of principles that actually because you know coevolution actually has its own not determin IC 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 there's this great XT you

I'm a theoretical physicist right uh 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 xdc 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 I solved your problem do you guys even have a journal for this and you know subtitle is why everybody hates physicists yeah so sometimes that approach totally works sometimes physicists you know

we 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 uh speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation uh let's return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and uh talk about the Drake equation yeah can you uh explain the Drake equation you know people have various

uh feelings about the Drake equation uh you know it can be abused but basically it was the the story actually is really interesting so Frank Drake in uh 1960 does the first ever astrobiological IC 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 um and he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody to make fun of him in still he gets a phone call from the government says

hey we want you to have do a um a meeting on Interstellar Communications right he's like okay so they organize a meeting with like just eight people a young Carl Sean is going to be there as well uh and like the night before Drake has to come up with a uh an agenda how do you come up for an with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one's ever talked about before right and so he actually write 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 ofp the next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone the place where we think life could form uh

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 what you say we we humans we humans right because we're standing we're staring at the you know multiple guns

pointing out you know nuclear war climate change AI um so you know how long on in general does civilizations last now each one of these terms 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 um

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 uh etc etc I mean these are their own Fields essentially by creating this equation he's launching new Fields yeah that's exactly gave astrobiology which wasn't even a term then a road map 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 uh uh 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 um people who were involved in seti pushed NASA to develop the Technologies for Planet hunting there 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 road map for us to develop Technologies to find find planets so um yeah so you know

the Drake equation is absolutely uh uh 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 equals MC squ 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 we could talk about each one of these but let let's just look at EXO planets yeah so that's a really interesting one I think when you look back you know hundreds of years from now what it in the 90s when they first detected the' 92 and '95 '95 to me was really that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sunlike star to me that was the water the damn being broken I I think that's like one of the greatest

discoveries in the in the history of science I agree I agree 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 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 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 basian perspective you can start thinking like yeah yeah this life is not something that's

hard to make well let me get your sense of uh estimates for the Drake equation you also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation but what what do you what do you think is the answer so the paper there was this paper we wrote uh Woody Sullivan and I in 2016 where we said look we have all this exoplanet data now right the so the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before have nailed is f subp the fraction of stars that have planets it's one every freaking star that

you see in the sky hosts a family of Worlds I mean it's mindboggling because every one of those those are all places right they're either you know gas giants probably with moons so there the moons are places you can stand and look out or they're like terrestrial world where even if there's not life there's still snow falling and there's oceans washing up on you know on shorelines it's incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there so right the first term was FS subp 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 1 two 3 four five one of them has an an earthlike planet you know in the habitable zone like whoa so what what defines a habitable zone habitable zone is an idea um that was developed in the um uh 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer xuang and it was it was a

brilliant idea it said look this is there you know I can do the simple calculation if I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what's the 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 you know earthlike 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 where you can have liquid water on the surface you could take a you know glass of water pour it on the surface and it would just pull 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 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 right well we should say it's a place to start I I do think it's too strict of a constraint I would agree we're talking about temperature where water can be on the surface there there's so many other ways to get uh the aforementioned turmoil yeah where the temperature varies whether it's volcanic so interact fraction of volcanoes and ice and all of this on the moons of plants that are much farther away all this kind of stuff yeah well for example we know in our

own solar system we have say Europa the moon of Jupiter which has got a 100 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 or 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 Lighty years I I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa because it's under 10 miles of ice right so with the important thing about um planets in the habitable zone is that we're thinking they have atmospheres um atmospheres are the things we can characterize for across 10 50 light years and we can see bio signatures as we're going to

talk about so there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of extra solar life 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 yeah I think that's that's not unreasonable to say I mean especially since the the formal definition you get one and five right one and five is a lot there's a lot of stars in the sky so yes 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 to me it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere why the fmy Paradox why haven't we seen them okay the fmy Paradox let's talk about the I love talking about the fmy Paradox because there is no fmy Paradox yeah so the fmy par let's talk a little about the fmy Paradox and the history of it um so uh enrio fery it's 1950 he's walking with his friends at Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab to The Cantina and there had been this um

cartoon in the New Yorker they all read the New Yorker uh and the cartoon was trying to explain why there there had been this rash of uh uh 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 physicist started talking about Interstellar travel Interstellar propulsion blah blah blah you know conversation goes on for a while conversation turns to something else you know

they gone on other things about 40 minutes later over lunch fmy blurts out well where is everybody right typical fmy sort of thing he done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that look if one if there you know if intelligence is common that even traveling at sublight speeds a uh 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 realized this and so he was like why aren't they here now um and

that was the beginning of the fmy Paradox it actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart where he actually 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 firmy Paradox why aren't they here now but something happened where people after seti began where people started to there there's 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 fmy Paradox and there absolutely is no indirect fmy Paradox for the most mundane of reasons which is money there's never been any money to look there really SEI was always done by researchers who were kind of like scabin time you know some extra time from their other projects to you know look a little bit uh you know at the sky with a telescope telescopes are expensive so um Jason Wright my one

of my collaborators he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for se 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 looked then they summed up all the sety 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 SC 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 an a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it and so now are we going to say up well there's no fish in the ocean right so there is absolutely positively no indirect firmy pars we just haven't looked um 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 fmy Paradox there are so

many ways out of that right there's a book called 77 solutions to the fmy 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 uh Jonathan Carol um one of my collaborators we actually simulated the Galaxy and we simulated probes moving at sublight speed from one uh uh star to the other Gathering resources heading to the next one um and so we could actually track the expansion wave across the Galaxy have one

IA 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 fmy 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 thousand 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 those bubbles right now then maybe we were visited but we were visited a 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 a 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 uh uh Str uh 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 or toppled buildings after a 100 million years is there's no way so if there was an alien Camp here yeah an alien Village a small civilization maybe even a large civilization even a large civilization even if it was million years ago 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 um and 10,000 years is a you know blink in the eye of geological time so we call or Gavin called this the sorian hypothesis after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures the sorians um 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 it was really Gavin's I was just helping with the astrobiology that to recognize that like yeah you know we

we could have been visited a long time ago there just would be no record yeah it's kind of mind-blowing it's really mindblowing and it's also a good reminder that we've been intelligent uh species have been here for a very short amount of time very short amount of time yeah this is not to say that there was like so oh whenever I gave you know I like when I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper and I had to always emphasize we're not saying there was a soran you know um but we're just saying that

if there was that's why I love Gavin's question Gavin's question was just like how could you tell right it was a very beautifully scientific question um that 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 that there could have been civilizations here earlier on 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 yeah and uh how much guessing is going on whether it's in uh South America like what happened in the jungle yeah like the Amazon like the Amazon prob that was you know the coners came and wiped everybody out and especially just even the like the plague may have decimated um so yeah how much of that Civilization and there's a lot of theories and uh 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

there's a lot of controversial people in every discipline but Archaeology is like uh a fascinating one because we know so little basically storytellers you're assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces 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 yeah well like the uh 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 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 uh in meso America so and you know 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 everybody seems to be building pyramids and they're really damn good at it I don't know what with do with a p like what is why why does that apply like what archetype in our brain is that uh 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 uh it uh it builds up hierarchies in a certain way it builds up myths and religions in a certain way it builds pyramids in a certain way yeah it goes to war all this kind of stuff independently ores fascinating Santa Fe Institute the stuff the Santa Fe Institute does on this as complex systems you know the origin of hierarchies and such very cool yeah Sant folks complexity in general is

really cool cool uh what phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact uh go going back to this uh this paper a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe this paper that uh expands on the Drake equation what are some interesting things in this paper 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 subp that's the second term fraction of stars that have planets and then N Sub 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 we realized is well okay we got to get rid of time the lifetime thing we can't say anything about that um but if we

let that if we don't ask how long do they last but in that 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 um 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 uh 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 um and the only way that we the only time that this is you know this whole process from you know a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed right so therefore you could put a 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 10-22 one in 10 billion trillion then yeah we're alone if it's anywhere larger than that then they're we're not the first it's happened somewhere else and to me that was an En that was mindblowing 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 has some bias against civilizations we're not the first time this has happened this is has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history 10 billion trillion experiments yeah that's a lot of experiments that's a lot right

a thousand is a lot yeah 100 is a lot yeah if uh we normal humans saw 100 experiments and uh we knew that at least one time uh there was a successful human civilization built I mean we would say for sure in in a 100 you'll get another one yeah yeah so that's why 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 uh uh you know alien pessimists and alien Optimist and they've been yelling at each other that's all they had to go with right you know and like with girano 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 link this was sort of the 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 this thing sort of shows you where the limit is if as long as you're above 10 Theus 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 so to me at least the big question is Fe which is basically a biogenesis how hard is it for life to originate in a planet cuz all the other ones seem very likely everything seems very likely

the only open question to me is like how hard is it for life to originate there's lots of ways to again you know we don't know unless we look and then you know you had Sarah Walker on not too long ago you know she's very interested in origins of life um uh 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 you can do basian arguments on this um but yeah it forming life I don't think is

hard getting getting like B 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 um we're pursuing on a different level uh about the life as that the only process the only system that uses information um but still regardless of all those kinds of details uh life is probably easy to make that's that's my that's my gut feeling you know yeah I mean

day by day this changes for me but I I just see once you create bacteria it's it's it's Off to the Races you're going to get complex life yeah 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 yeah a couple billion 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 have be again about these windows that like it couldn't happen until

until the window the planet and the the uh life had evolved together enough that they together kind of opened the window for the The Next Step um you know intelligent life and how long intelligent civil technological civilizations I think there's a big question about how long those last and how you know I'm hopeful you know um but uh but in terms of just like I think life is absolutely going to be common in the you know pretty common in the univers yeah I think it's Absolut like I I think again if I were to bet

everything uh even Advanced civilizations are common so the to me then the the only explanation is the L our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations yeah because you know you think about it we've only been around I mean as a techn lot truly you know when we think about in in Drake's uh 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' be pretty amazing right um but that still that wouldn't be long enough to really pop

up the number of civilizations in the in the 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 you even talk about I call it the billion year 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 yeah like how how do you even simulate the trajectories that civilizations take across that kind of time scale yeah

uh when we all the data we have is just for the 10,000 Years or or so 20,000 years that humans have been building civilizations yeah and then just I don't I don't know what you put it at but maybe 100 years that we've been technological 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 I think that's really a frontier so you had David Kipping on not too long ago um and David and I did a paper

uh and Caleb sharf David really drove this where we you know it was a basian calculation to sort of ask the question if you f 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 signatur will they leave and yeah can you even I mean what's so cool about it it's so much fun because you got to like you have to you have to imagine the unimaginable like you know would you still I me 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 You' get they'd drop out you know they destroy themselves and then they'd come back so maybe it's you know it's a a trunk or a punctuated uh Evolution I mean but we gotta sort of this is the fun part we have to sort of work this out you know 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 uh op the cage have scale what what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself just achieve stability while still growing yeah and I mean that's an interesting question I think it's probably simulatable 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 firmy 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 use agent-based modeling

to track the the or 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 assumption and principles that are going into it and what you can extract from those that is what is sort of the frontier do you think if humans colonize Mars the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars will be fundamentally different than dynamic between individual Nations on Earth right now like that that's a thing to load into the simul the agan based simulation we're talking about if

we settle it Mars will very quickly want to become its own Nation well no there's already going to be Nations on Mars that's guaranteed the moment you two million people one the moment you have one million people there's going to be two tribes right and then they're going to start fighting right 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 are you a fan of the expanse do have you watch the expanse great show because 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 and it doesn't even have to be on Mars we did a paper where we uh look based on CU I was wanted to know about whether an idea in the expanse was really possible in the expanse the 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 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 talk to the guys and said did you guys calculate this see 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 uh oneir gravity which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings uh the rock would just fall apart it would break but we came up with another idea which was

that if you take small asteroids put a giant bag around them a nanofiber bag and spin those up it would inflate the bag and then even a small couple of kilometer wide asteroid would expand out to um you could get like a 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 is you think most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars and on the planetary surface I you know it's a lot easier on some on some level right it depends on how like with Nano fabrication and such but you know getting down a gravity well is hard right um 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 the asteroids um but we'll probably do both I mean I think what'll happen is you know the next should

we make it through climate change and nuclear war and all the other and AI um 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 a Libertarian space habitat everybody's going to

be able to kind of create their 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 uh 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 well I think you know I want to be always careful with that because you like I said it's centuries that we're talking about right um

so you know the 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 a 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 um 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 hard

you know horrific things to the planet for human beings um 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 play around in and and experiment with and do really cool things with 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 this is for sure for sure a bigger one is looming maybe 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 exate I think my my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a a self-sufficient base is a so far away that like say you start doing that and then there is a fullscale nuclear exchange that Bas is you know it's not going to last because it's just you

know the self-sufficiency required is a kind of an 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 mes 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 know I just think the odds that we're be able to create a self-sufficient uh Colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small so we'd have to deal with the threat 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 yeah yeah because it's really what about you know thinking about complex systems right um 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 I always think that uh 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 the 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 vibr powerful technosphere that also doesn't you know mess with the biospheres mess with the biospheres 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 well there's also the other possibility of uh like the movie uh Darren aronowski uh postcard from Earth where we can create this kind of Life gun that just

shoots so is opposed to uh engineering everything yeah 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 by yourself uh you know if you just hey the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria place it in Europa uh I think you'd be surprised what happens yeah right like honestly if you put a huge amount of bacteria like a giant number of

organisms from Earth into uh on Mars on uh some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system you think like I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive 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 somebody 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 that you maybe get somebody who figures out okay I can deal with this I think the moon's too

much cuz it's so sterile but you know Mars I don't know maybe I don't know we'd have to that but it's an interesting idea I wonder if somebody has done those experiment yeah you think somebody would like let's take a bunch of microbes the harsh the take the harshest possible condition of all different kinds temperature all this kind of stuff right 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 the thing 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 like a yeah like you have to have the the the uh the huge variety of resources that are always available on a planet somehow even when it's in 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 but I'd be a little

bit skeptical cuz like if cuz I could see bacteria doesn't survive in this kinds of temperature but then I'll be like I don't know I don't know you is there enough right is it you know is there are there other options like you know the is the condition Rich enough Rich enough yeah you know there's a there's an alternative view though which is there's this great book um by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora you know so there's been a million um Century ship stories like where you know Earth sends out a you know Generation ship

or Century ship and It Go go 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 plant'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 prons actually you know super that just like you know kill people in the simplest way um and his 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 this was a really interesting idea I'm not necessarily supporting it but that actually life reflects the planetary conditions that not the planetary the planet itself the whole lineage the whole history of the biosphere and it may not be so easy to to to just sort of be like oh just drop it over here and it all 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 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 planet that has a biosphere maybe a technosphere what is the uh way to um integrate yeah without killing yourself or or the other one or the other one that's let's just stick to biology like that that's an interesting question I don't know if we uh have a rigorous way of investigating that 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 science fiction people will do things like oh well it's okay because like that bio uh 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 so it's unfortunately I think it's the latter yeah it sort of feels like alien kind of thing so as we look out there

according to the Drake equations we just discussed seems impossible to me that there's not civilizations everywhere so how do we look at them this process of SE 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 I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse yeah but but until you know we got to go look it's all it's all armchair armchair astronomy that's that's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective from My Bro Science

perspective it seems again smoking this the forementioned weed uh after the bong head I mean honestly just it's it's really just seems impossible to me that there's not uh potentially dead but Advanced civilizations everywhere in our galaxy 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 we when we went out there we'd find a lot of extinct civilizations extinct civilizations uh yeah apex predators don't survive like they they get get better better better and they right die kill themselves all somehow

anyway so just how do we find them yeah so SEI 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 um but I'm really what I really like is the idea of techno signatures because I think you know 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 um and CTI the classic idea of C is the radio telescopes you know contact Jody Foster with the headphones

that whole thing 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 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 um 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 go about looking for Passive signatures of the civilization going about its civilizing business you know without asking whether they want to be contacted or not so this is what we call a bio signature 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 you know that that that why kind of the

whole Gaia idea ends up being astrobiological that biospheres and technospheric 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 technospheric 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 technos signature well one could be atmospheric pollution 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 um 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 the lines the fingerprint the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere and

that would for sure tell you that that were there was a technological civilization there because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process so you're looking for in the case of the biosphere you're looking for anomalies in the spectrograph I wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies I'm looking for things that for bios signature I'm looking for things that a geosphere right you know that just rock and air wouldn't produce on its own what kind of chemicals would life produce right and that's that's part of the that's the interesting thing right

so that's what you know so we can use Earth as an example right we can say look oxygen we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere for wasn't for dimethyl sulfide which is a compound that phop Plankton dump into the atmosphere a lot of it that's sometimes mentioned and there was even there was a paper that somebody wrote where uh 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 um so so you know there's a whole list of things that

Earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be bios signatures but now we're reaching an interesting point the field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic bios signatures things that have nothing to do with Earth's history but we think that that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life right what 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 so there's been some proposals for networked uh you know uh um uh uh bio signatures uh information Theory you can use you can try and look at the information that is in the different um compounds uh that are you find in the atmosphere and maybe that information shows you like oh if there's too much information here there there must have been biology happening it's not just rock same thing for Tech we're that's what we're working on right now that for techno signatures as well so how do you

detect techno signatures 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 um will produce a the way the light is reflected off of solar panels whether no matter what it's made out of actually um there was a paper that um uh manaz lingam and AI L 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 uh uh City Lights City artificial illumination if the if there's really like you know large scale cities like you know corusant and Star Wars or tranor in the foundation those City Lights would be detectable you know the spectral imprint of those across 203 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 uh you know uh Interstellar distances and are these good ones or is these ones going to be hard to detect or such City Lights so if a planet is all lit up with artificial light across 20 to 30 light years we can it yeah if you looked at Earth at night from a distance where you know looked at it Spectra and you had sensitive sensitive enough instruments you'd be able to

see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of you know they they um bounce off the ground right that the light bounces off the ground so you'd convolve the 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 a tranor and you'd be able to detect that across Interstellar distances Thomas Bey did this work who's now working with us what do you think is the most detectable thing about

Earth uh wow we just this is fun we just have a Sophia sheif gu 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 or Cloud but actually it's it is our radio signatures still that is still most detectable by the way when you said you

had to be close and then you said the or Cloud that's not very close but you mean like from an Interstellar Interstellar distance cuz the real 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 um so what can if I'm looking at exoplanets what kind of signals could I see what is detectable about Earth with our current technology from the our near solar system oh my God there's all kinds of stuff well

like our our the the the um chlorofluorocarbons you can 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 if they do direct Imaging of Earth they're going to need much more powerful but let me tell you what let's 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 uh 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 yeah by the way just to clarify direct Imaging means literally like a picture a picture but the problem is is that with the even with the the the pre 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 the general relativity says look massive bodies distort space they actually curve SpaceTime so um 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 ort cloud and then look back towards the sun

towards an exoplanet that is behind not be 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 Focus the light onto the telescope 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 kmet resolution you'd be able to see Manhattan on a Exel planet and this thing it sounds insane but actually you know n 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 ort Cloud on relatively fast time scales you need to be about 500 times as far from the Sun as Earth is um but

right now everything looks like the idea seems to hold together so probably when I'll be dead but when you're an old man um it's possible that something like this could you imagine having like yeah res that kind of resolution a picture of an exoplanet down to you know kilometers so I'm very excited about that I can only imagine having a picture like that and then there's some uh mysterious artifacts that you're seeing yeah yeah I mean it's both um inspiring and and almost heartbreaking that we can see like 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 we can't get there but you know I mean again this is the thing about being 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 it wouldn't be like well okay we're done the first thing we do is we big bigger telescopes 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 starshot there was this idea have trying to use you know giant lasers to propel small spacecrafts uh light Sals almost to the speed of light so they would get there in 10 years and take pictures and 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 couldn't but you know so maybe we maybe would 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 I mean so it becomes now this multigenerational 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 I think that would probably unite humans I think it 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 Rec 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 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 I can't believe it worked either I was really skeptical I was like okay guys all right sure 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 I've been just looking through uh different kinds of anouncements that have been detected there's been some direct Imaging yes like a single Pixel the kinds of exop plants were able to direct image I guess would have to be hot 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 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 um and that's the most exciting thing for example there was this planet k218b

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 hean World hean meaning hydrogen ocean world and that is a kind of planet that it would be a uh you know kind of in the superar sub Neptune domain we were talking about you maybe eight times the 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 uh of liquid water and that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habital Planet you know it could be a 60 degree warm ocean 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 about the models this looks like it's a could be a high-an world and it's 120 light years away from Earth 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 what about detecting uh maybe uh through direct Imaging or in other ways Mega structures that this the civilizations build you know what's great about Mega structures is first of all it's fun to say who doesn't want to say mega structure alien mega structure right every morning I'm

looking for an opportunity to say that um so the the the the ER example of this is the Dyson Sphere right which is amazing because you know it was literally 1960 that this idea came up can you explain the Dyson Sphere yeah the Dyson Sphere so Freeman Dyson you know one of the greatest physicists ever um 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 and the the limit of this would be 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 that was a Dyson Sphere 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 yeah so he didn't actually mean a rigid right sphere structure yeah he basically meant a swarm so yeah that like you said in the limit basically starts to look 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 ban 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 could be comets could

be chunks of a broken up planet and it could also be an alien mega structure and of course the news picked up on this and like everybody's you know Newsfeed the next day alien mega structure is discovered turns out sadly they were not alien mega structures they were probably 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 do right they're absorbing Starlight so people did have worked out like well square one or a triangular one but that wouldn't be a d sphere that would be like one object one object right which is what 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 yeah one you wouldn't expect from a star that doesn't have anything 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 and that usually doesn't happen in a uh in a star system because uh there's only just a handful of planets that's exactly what it is everything's coagul in a stable solar system you get a handful of planets you know 5 10 that that's it probably and

nothing else so if now suddenly you see all lots of these little microt 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 the regular shape the transit itself that these are these could be Mega structures how many people are looking for Mega structures now 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 thermod damic 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 an infrared just going to be waste heat waste heat and waste light from this that feels like a louder clear way to detect it 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 um so uh 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 dson spars 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 they're potential candidates potential candidates yeah love it we have mega structure candidates that's

inspiring what other Mega structures do you think that could be I mean that so that's D spere is about capturing the energy of a star yeah but there could be other well there's uh 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 orbits 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 um so uh 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 Papers written about the possibility of these Clark belts densely occupied Clark belts being a mega structure it's not as Mega as a Dyson swarm but it's you know kind of planetary scale you think it's detectable Clark belt 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 you'd have a Clark belt and the question is whether or not it's detectable yeah probably Dyson spere is the that's the more exciting that's the goto one yeah yeah speaking of the the Dyson spere let's talk to the Carter shf scales right what is the Carter shf scale and where are humans on it right so the cter chef scale was the same time this is this golden age of seti like kind of like 6059 to 65 when it just starts like

this is you know um Frank Drake has done his first experiment people like oh my God this is even possible and so people are just thrown 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 CEF comes up with this idea that look if we're again it's always about detectability if we're looking for civilization we should think about what are the STA what are the natural stages natural in quotes that a civilization goes through and uh

he was thinking in terms of energy use which like a good physicist so the he said look um the first hurdle in terms of energy or or threshold that a 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 star light that falls on your planet you're using for your own end the next would be to use all the star light there is from that star right so that's the Dyson sere so he actually

Dyson had already proposed uh uh his idea of the Swarm and CF was picking up 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 at7 of a type one so we're not even type one 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 can we continue on our path we'll be at a type one

at around uh 2300 2300 yeah so this is on a log scale yeah so uh 7 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 yeah because there's 100 billion star of order 100 billion stars yeah so that's a lot that's a lot energy do do you think humans ever get to Tye one 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 CF couldn't have recognized when you you know there's there's uh the first law of ther thermodynamics right which is just about energy you know the different form ter of energy then there's the second law which is about when you use that energy and card Chef wasn't thinking about the second law if you get all that energy and you use it there's 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 heating up the engine block um so that second law tells you that you know you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like uhoh 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 um 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 put your energy harvesting there right because you know you can't mess with the biosphere the biosphere

is more powerful than you are right and so yeah so so there's limits to how much energy we can Harvest to do work on the earth Without Really adversely affecting the biosphere it does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology but to to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects 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 anthropos scene you have

to see the transition that we're going through now of the anthropos scene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework and you know that paper we were talking about with a 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 anthr how of you know does every civiliz technological civilization trigger it own planetary crisis its own climate anthropos 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 you want to figure out how to do this so that the biosphere becomes even more productive and healthy and um 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 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 you're

not going to do it on on world so how do we detect uh Alien type one two and three civilizations so we've been kind of talking about basically type one civilization detection yeah right maybe with the Dyson Theory 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 a dce spere right it feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned climate change but now at the uh star system level uh they're probably expanding right so how how would you

uh detect a type two how about um propulsion plumes right if you're expanding no no we we just I literally just put in a NASA proposal now um Thomas Bey who's joined us from he's at the University of Wisconsin uh has an idea to look for um plumes right if you have a civil if you have a a a solar systemwide civilization right and you got space truckers going back and forth right you know from Mars to you know they're doing the Inus run they're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there right if you want

to get to Mars in a couple 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 cuz now you've got spaceships going all over the place and the ODS 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 um of looking for uh you know

large scale interplanetary which is kind of like when you're getting to a type type two um another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining this was an idea it was a group at um Harvard Smithsonian that you know to be able to look for if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitat can you know there' be dust particles left around and would they look different from just say the dust you know from just regular collisions so pollution of all different kinds pollution of all different kinds and trash also 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 bio signatures 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 bio sign had a biosphere for billions of years so maybe somebody sent

something by you know a half a billion years ago so um 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 we were 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 micro meteorites just chewed it down right how long would you be able to land on the moon go oh look there's you know there somebody was here and left some

debris um so there's this process called gardening which is just the microm meteorite 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 oh nice that the yeah that the lunar lander will be visible oh so we should be able to find artifacts yeah if there's if there artifacts on the and people have proposed doing this with um 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 was Apollo 17 site and it instantly was able to pull out the Lander I mean the whole task of looking for anomaly something that

looks not like the lunar surface you make it sound obvious but it's not exactly obvious like an anomalies is really not I mean detect something that doesn't look right about this room yeah it's it's actually really difficult 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 what's you know how do I Define something that I can say that looks weird so yeah maybe when you're looking at a spectrograph or something like it's

still it's still like it's going to look really weird potentially like we're kind of we're kind of hypothesizing all the things that humans would build and how do we detect that right but there could be really weird stuff that's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures right so um actually disequilibrium is a nice one one way to define is it is a system that is far from equilibrium right it's alive right because as soon as it dies 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 a GI that gies free energy and that that's kind of a signature like if you see an atmosphere that is wildly out

of equilibrium 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 um into the atmosphere that is keeping the whole system from relaxing so is it possible we can detect anomalies in in space time well you could detect and there's there's been some work on this like with the acbra drive you know these proposals for warp drives and we can 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 uh an acub 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 it's it's its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted SpaceTime so yeah there are possib abilities 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 acub drive or this warp drive 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 bio or techno signature another planet obliterated so you think it's not possible to travel fast than speak 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 yeah um 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-and side that allow you to get something like the acub 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 the thing you added the little fictional term you added on the into the equations is something called um exotic matter and it doesn't exist it's really just something we dreamed up to make the equations 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 um but you know I remember playing um uh Assassin's Creed where everybody's like you know what is it 12200 and everybody's like stab stab stab I was like yeah it's a great game and then I got Assassin's Creed 2 and uh 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 uh so you know we could be fooled into thinking like oh you know technolog is 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 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 um Eric Weinstein often talks about we underinvested chemical propulsion on Rockets versus like trying to hack physics sort of War D and so 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 right right so it's not going to be an engineering problem it's going to be a physics a fundamental physics fundamental physics

problem yeah I mean I agree with that in princible 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 strength 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 again I'm not going to predict I I think it's entirely possible that we have you know there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be uh 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 um but I I 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 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 well it's also a really exciting possibility of hacking this whole thing by extending human lifespan or extending our notion of uh 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 yeah so you can have something like a generational ship that travels for hundreds of thousands of years yeah and it you're not sad uh that you'll never see the destination because you kind of have the value for the uh prolonged survival of humanity versus

your own individual life yeah it's a wild ethical question isn't it one of that book I told you about Aurora it was S I love the book because it was such a sort of inversion of the usual cuz 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 for 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 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 the usual version of a century ship but if you had these like space habitats that were really

you know like the O'Neal 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 their worlds in them in and of themselves there's the show Silo which raises the question of basically if you're putting on a generational ship uh what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship you might want to lie to them yeah you might want to tell them

a story right that they believe right because there is a society there's human nature there's like how do you maintain homeostasis of that little Society um I mean that that's a fascinating techical question the social question of psychology question 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 main state 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 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 I mean the whole field of crow genics yeah where are we at with that yeah I wonder what the state-ofthe-art is for a complex organism can you freeze how long can you freeze and then unfreeze right may maybe like with bacteria you could do freeze bacteria can

last this is the thing about panspermia right P how long can uh you know how long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted you know if there's a common impact across uh you know Interstellar distances that does seem to actually be possible people have done those kind of calculations it's not out of the realm of possibility but a complex organism multicellular multi- systemic or multi- systems right with organs and such also what makes an organ I mean it could you know which part do you want to preserve cuz maybe the for humans

it seems like uh 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 pretty much I would feel like I would be the same person altered carbon have you 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 leave in another body um 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 as we get better and better advancements in large language models that are able to be fine-tuned on you it's it raises a question because I to me they've already passed the toring 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 gonna raise ethical and I don't know philosophical questions about what makes you you like what if 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 it's going to speak about your memories very effectively this leads us to if we're going to get to the the blind spot I I you know I of the opinion heretical but in some camps that you know the brain is not the minimal the minimal stru for Consciousness you know it's the whole body it's embodied in may actually in some sense it's communities actually um so yeah so I don't I mean you know I could be

wrong but this is you know this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo gazer and Evan Thompson the um 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 it going to be a machine anyway 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 what do you think aliens look like so we talked about all the different kinds of Bio signatures they might leave or techos signatures but what would they look like when we show up are they going to have arms and legs are they uh going to be recognizable at all are they going to be carbon based 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 um but let's just talk about the physical part of it which is you know life B 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 um 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 um that the environment presents and the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms so that you'd expect um you expect a kind of balance between what we call Convergence evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency MH so you know if you 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 you know 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 so that's about movement yeah so that's one problem that has to be solved one problem has to be solved I got to get to food right another problem is I got to get away from predators right um you've seen Wings we've seen Wings the

line that went through dinosaurs to birds involved 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 evolutional trip on that so I think you you can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to is going to uh be presented with stay alive reproduce um 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 and that's where we get to con um contingency right so what we've been talking about is Convergence you expect that EV Evolution will Converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that Wings can solve um but con contingency is accidents right that you know you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of Wing a leathery Wing right uh and then you the climate changes and they all die out end of story or you know an asteroid at total accident asteroid hits and so uh

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 now um Stephen J 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 uh ecoli you you know you take a bunch of ecoli you let them evolve for a while you take a bunch of them out

Freez them let one you let that population continue to evolve the other one's Frozen now start it over again with the Frozen MH 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 there going to be anybody's guess um 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 I guess what is a brain versus the nervous system like where is most of the cognition competition going on yeah yeah you could see that in organisms like actually I I don't know how the brain evolve like why does it have to be in one place doesn't have to be so my favorite word word of the day is liquid brains right this idea of distributed

cognition which um fascinating idea and we've come to understand how much uh distributed cognition there is obviously usocial animals like termites Etc 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 come to for aliens is that we've come to recognize that human intelligence it's not actually it's been distri 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 all the things that we Define as intelligence you can find many places in many other um uh places across many other line lineages across the Earth so it could be they could be very very different with something like yeah maybe it's you know the

hive mind idea or you know bacterial colonies that actually manag to you know come to their own version of high cognition well I wonder if there's if we stretch out time across 10 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 for example it's much more rapidly you're operating maybe I guess it's a kind of darwinian evolution on this space of memes or whatever is technology seems to operate on in and and you know but

certainly markets can operate in ways that look very darwinian 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 yeah and then it kind of stops evolving there and then then it's ideas that take off right right because yeah cultural it's true it's amazing that cultural Evolution totally disconnects from from the Darwin process but I'd be careful to say that like a planet is working hard to do this because you know it's really impos looking at us like what we

think of is ideas and culture and you know it's quite possible we're going to make it another 200 years and this is gone right because it actually wasn't a very good idea long term I we just don't know oh so maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys 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 biosash technosphere and of course you know evolution is not working for anything well here's the actually interesting thing right so people are very much you know evolutionary biologist will get very their hair will stand on and 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 teolog there is a you know

there now suddenly you know absolutely there's a 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 way they decide on 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 yeah and then there's another cluster as a different set of direction there's all kinds of religions

that are competing there's different ideologies that are competing yeah and when you just zoom out across if we survive across thousands of years it will seem directional it will seem like a pinball 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 still a goal was set and it was achieved if there's Advanced civilizations out there 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 like what do we do next we detect we detect a civilization through all the technal 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 yeah but what's the uh then the generals as they always do the military industrial complex we watch that movie where what kind of rockets what kind of and do we bring Rockets right uh well I think you know so this also this general question also leads to medy 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 power messages that are easily detectable into Interstellar space I'm like why would you because 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 who speaks for earth I think which I think was a great book somebody wrote

um so you know I 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 toas you know and be uh 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 in 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 as cognizing beings one of my favorite movies is arrival I don't know if you ever seen that one I really love that one because you know they literally they have a different language they have a different cognitive structure in terms of language and they're literally kind of living in a different physics different physics different language different different everything yeah but in the case of arrival it can at least like recognize that they're there right and they managed to cross the language barrier yeah

so but that's both sides have an interest in communicating which you you kind of suppose that uh an advanc civilization would have a curiosity because like how do you become Advanced without a kind of yeah curiosity about the mysterious about the other 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 uh you know 10 10 billion year or sorry say 10 million years ago we were really interested in that in this in communicating with you you know young youngans

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 cuz that's not fun but you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases right so the one of the things I loved about arrival too was You Know Carl Sean always had this idea like we'll

teach him math we'll teach him our math then they'll teach us 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 Sean guy in and a linguist and the Carl San 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 make science fiction movies you know what I mean yeah yeah speaking of biases do you think aliens have visited Earth you've mentioned that they could have visited and started civilizations and would we wouldn't even know about it if it was 100 million years ago how

can we even begin to answer this question whe 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 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 um the moon's a good place uh 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 it could happen I certainly can't unless you look you don't know what about speaking

of bias what about if aliens visiting Earth as the elephant in the room meaning like the potential of aliens say seeding life on Earth uh you mean like in that directed panspermia directed panspermia or seeding some aspect of the evolution like 2001 yeah yeah uh you know it's great story but you know always with aam's razor or whatever with science if I can if I can answer that question without that extra very detailed uh 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 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 du duox moina 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 so to you the origin of life is a is a pretty simple thing that doesn't require an alien I wouldn't say that it's not a simple thing but it doesn't you know putting I I think because you know all you're

doing is kicking the can down the road right the aliens some 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 abiogenesis event 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 you know I've got a chance to learn about the UNC conted 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're in contact with the Civilized world how they interact with the onc contacted tribes first of all the oncon tribes are very violent towards the outside world but everybody else try 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 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 scientists you know right and so it's not from our perspective yes and if you're in The Truman Show like aam's Razer but like also the aam's Razer from the perspective of the alien civilization we have to have the humil to understand that that interaction will be extremely difficult to detect that will not be obvious 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 might most of them may be dead or they're not still 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 the biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from you know from the 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 about 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 um 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 right right cuz it's just like you know we're very much we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure or cogni you know and and we're very governed by you even if you went and talked to this is an interesting thing to think about you know if I could suddenly magically appear uh 100,000 years ago and talk to a hunter gatherer about their worldview and their motivations you know I might find something that like B no resemblance to things that I think are sort of oh that's what naturally

humans do well let me let me ask ask you this question let's let's together do the thought experience yeah if we either create a time machine that allows us to travel back and talk to them yeah or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system what what would we do yeah I think uh 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 and also sorry from a capitalist perspective what are we to gain this interaction right right right 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 uh um thought experiment we are curious and I think eventually we'd want to reach out to

them now I think when you say we let's start with the people in this room right but there's I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world because I think there's a lot of people the military yeah 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 capitalis who will see like how the benefit the cost here and how can I make money off for this there's opportunity here there's gold right

in them Hills and I wonder and I think the scientist is just not going to unlike the movies We're Not Gonna Get Much say they're G put hey guys we uh wait a minute 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 in our engagement in our engagement yeah yeah probably so using that trivial bias logic I just it just feels like aliens would need to be engaged in in a very obvious way yeah yeah yeah which brings

up that old direct for me Paradox for me uh what do you make of all the UFO sightings 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 the standards they just none of what is claimed to be the 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 a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim 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 um and that is why cell phones work right if you didn't 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 I you know I can show you that it works you know if you didn't have the these standards you know you did every cell

phone would be a brick right and when it comes to UFOs and ufs the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that you know we are being visited by non-human uh uh Advanced civilization just doesn't even come close to the same standards I'm going to 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 a techno signature on an alien planet we're going to 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 that 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 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 I was like H 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 right 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 right and uh maybe detect things like weird physics what kind of instruments will we be using yeah so 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 I think that's brilliant I mean that's it's simple not stupid it's like literally right so you want to do groundbased detectors that you know upward looking groundbased 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 uh on the planes or at least you know some kind of alert system that if some a pilot says oh look I'm seeing something I don't understand Boop presses the red button and that triggers the groundbased and uh space-based um uh uh 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 the nth degree

you have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths you have to have characterized 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 was it refurbished recently um in you know in every spectral wavelength in all of its data um collection and and 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 Mock 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 on planes themselves we need a rational search strategy so let's say you want to lay out these uh groundbased detectors where do you put them right 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 a

sparse coverage of the entire country um and then you need the uh the data analyst 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 hundred years

but if I asked you I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocated to one place looking out said or looking at Earth which would you allgate oh God looking out looking out because that's the B 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 Himalaya you know some Nebraska in Himalayas

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 cuz 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 highbeam argument you know to deal with the UFO stuff you have to deal with all of you have to answer these weird

irrational things that are happening like okay there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly they don't want to be detected they've got superp powerful technology but they really suck at using it because they we keep seeing them we keep seeing them but then they dis here right I mean explain to me what rational world that works under 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 the you know I should look at where they where they're from that makes me want to look at do the telescopic stuff yeah I think the more likely explanation is is uh either the sensors are not working correctly or it's secret military technology being tested absolutely I mean if you had listen that's what again I think UAP you know the absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically um uh 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 a New York Times oped for this in 2021 which you know blew up and um 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 eent electronic intelligence communities and what they were saying about you know the New York Times articles and the 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 um fake you know signals into the electronics uh of their adversary so they Crank It Up So then can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those Advanced Radars can do that said I'm not saying that that 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 MH I would try to figure out what would these humans what would these aliens like to see that's why like the big heads in the humanoid form yeah yeah 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 right I would observe it long enough to see what are the basic elements of communication yeah yeah and maybe I would do

a trivial thing like do like a fake ant a robot ant 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 and maybe aliens are just shitty at doing the robot ants but no I I do s I just wanted to make the case for that this is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Eon by Greg bear and the idea was like these sort of you know this this is actually where my first I

got I I I became sort of uh more than agnostic an medy 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 U this was during the Soviet Union they arrive at the USR they arrive in China and they're

kind of Faking us out to 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 okay let me ask the pad question another yet another podast another the whole conversation I'm sorry bongs before breakfast it's it's science and Pad questions back and forth okay uh what if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of tradition Envision in analyzing um physical objects what if they take the form of say ideas what if um real pothead if it's Consciousness itself like

the subjective experience is an alien being maybe ideas is an easy one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities traveling from Human to human 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 uh 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 the 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 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 climbs into the laws of physics itself it becomes the laws of physics or you know these these

sort of lie at the the the extreme limits of thinking about what what we mean by reality what we mean by you know uh uh uh experience um but I'm not sure there was much we can do with them scientifically but it you know they their open-ended question about the open-ended nature of what it means to be alive and what life can do 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 like some big physics questions about the Universe 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 why is the why is it the biggest question in your why is it number one in your top five or I've evolved in this right you know I started off as a theoretical physicist I went into um computational astrophysics and Magneto hydrodynamics star formation but I always you I was a philosophy minor I always had these

sort of bigger question 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 um 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 you just put together enough chemicals and Bing Bang Boom and you know it suddenly appears there something 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 uh 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 what is being right uh this

is what Stephen Hawkings 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 the sacred spirituality whatever you want to talk about my first book was about science and and human spirituality um 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 so this is something that you uh write about in the blind spot why science cannot ignore Human Experience sort of trying to pull the fire into the the process of uh uh science uh and it's a kind of critique of uh

materialism can you explain the main thesis of this book 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 um 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

there is something that without which science would not be possible but that science the way it's been configured and actually when we mean the blind spot I'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 onto science it's a metaphysics that got glued on to science and so um what is that thing that is what is the blind spot it's experience it is presence and by 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 um 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 has evolved

is that it it purposely pushed that out it pushed that out so it could make progress um and that's fine for certain class of problems uh 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 and prop these yoga that that require

this intellectual yoga to get out of I think you give a bunch of examples of that like looking at temperature as a number there a very sort of objective scientific way of looking at that and then there's the experience of the temperature and how you build the parable of temperature that we we call it so 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 the donkey they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what science say 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 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 epip phenomena Consciousness I I don't I tend not to use the word Consciousness because it's I think it get you know 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 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 especially where we're at right now so you you actually say that that from a perspective of detrimental society that there's a crisis of meaning and that we respond to that in a way that's counterproductive to these bigger questions scientific questions

so the three ways the three responses you mentioned scient ific uh triumphalism and then on the other side is rejecting science completely both on the left and the right I think the post modernist on the left and antiestablishment people on the right and then just pseudo science that kind of does this in between thing um can you just speak to those responses and to the crisis of meaning 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 you

know biological machines um and uh you know 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 you know uh collapsing wavefront of light um you know quantum mechanics it really comes in it comes in you know the measurement problem just puts us front and center we 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 other hand we're Central so which one is it right uh 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 uh what happens in science to some sort of formal it's a lot of it is about we love our formal systems you know our mathematics and and we're substituting that's one of the things that we uh there's two philosophers we really

like our heroes one is um uh heral who is a ma matician who invented phenomenology and the other is um Whitehead who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and herro came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system a calculus of you know data for actual experience that that's more important than 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 it'll help them understand what

we mean so think about uh degrees Celsius right we kind of have in the modern scientific culture we live in we think like oh yeah degrees Celsius they're out there Universe it's you know the the a molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees you know Kelvin um the way we got there is we forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience right we started off with science by we had the exper the subjective experience of hot and cold I feel hot I you I feel cold you feel hot you feel cold science was this process

of trying to ex distract from those experiences what uh Michelle bitbol 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 gradiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it and that you know uh hot things will be higher in that you know on that gradiated cylinder Co things will be lower and we can both kind of figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that um and then we have thermometry yay we have a

way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal U experience of hot or cold and then from that we can come up with thermodynamics Etc 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 my phone and I'm like oh it's going to be you know 60 degrees out great and we start thinking that 60° 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 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 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

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 uh you know what are the responses to trying to get this back in and where where where this crisis of meaning emerg 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 and represented as data you know captured in some kind of scientific causal uh uh 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 epip phenomenon it's not real so you know scientific triumphalism is this response to to the m you know the weirdness of you know I could call it the mystery the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it in completely so there's no other truth you know art music you know human spirituality it's all actually reducible just to neuro you know neural correlates uh 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 uh 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 from from the powerful come up with um which is also not true science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening uh so that's another way to push sort of science away um or respond to it the denial science denial that happens that's also another way of of sort of you know not understanding the balance that science

is trying that we need to establish with experience and then there's just pseudo science 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 so that doesn't have the rigor of science um 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 um 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 and by the way we should mention that uh at least the 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 I mean it has to do with

PhD is he has to do with sitting on an academic Throne all all those things and the natur 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 I absolutely agree it just goes back and and it's just is this divide that builds yeah no 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 is about politic itics right but about you know for the entire history of the species we've we've had this experience of For 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 system you know and experience fundamentally is weird you know mysterious it's like 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 kind of bode well for your you know the advance of your project 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 yeah but I wouldn't do it I wouldn't because you know there's pan psychism right which wants to that's all the way there pan psychism is like that's literally one of the laws of physics is 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 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 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 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 inexperienced so whatever account we want to give is of the world is going to have to take

that as IR 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 the 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 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 or in phenomenology the word is the life world that you're embedded in you can't uned yourself from it so how do you do so so one of the the things that Whitehead said was you you know you 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 and your experience of the redness the actual experience of the redness and the all the other things it's not just red there's no qualia there's no pure redness everything that's happening in the experience part is just an epip phenomena it's just you know brain States whatever he said you can't do that they're just they're both real they're both accounts or both they both need to be integrated and so that required I think a really a different conception of what we mean by nature 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 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 mechanics right cuz 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 giser who's a theoretical physicist um 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 and no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics right quantum mechanics

slams you with the idea that the of the measurement problem you know uh the most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation the schroer equation which you know you put in like we talked about before you have initial conditions and now you 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 lrange 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 a measurement is made I have a whole another set of rules for you you know that's the born what we call the born Rule and that 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 so you know there's been all these different interpret ations of the quantum mechanics many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there go to enormous lengths like the uh 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 Schrodinger equation and the weird things that come out of it like Schrodinger'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 so that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of that's that's a thing you're trying to integrated at the center of the thing in quantum mechanics it becomes super obvious but maybe the same kind of uh thing should be incorporated in in every uh layer of of study of nature absolutely that's exactly it so you know one of the things that's really interesting to me so I'm I'm you know I have a project I'm part of a big project uh that Chris

fuks and jacqu spaner 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 do 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 of the world updates their priors updates their their you know their basian that's why it's called cubism Quantum basanis updates

how the information they've gotten from the world 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 um we have a grant from the uh 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 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 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 uh and drawing in both giving information and passing information back as a way 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 so you think that could be something like cubism Quantum beanis that creates a theory like a Nobel

prizewinning Theory sort of like hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center 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 and you understand why people love this like I have these equations and these equations represent you know there's this platonic idea 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 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 epip phenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seem as if the agent's not the most important part of the story 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 uh you know um unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of like coming up with The 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 so you know listen that that would be like kind of my dream uh I'm not going to be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it uh 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 the I've spent my whole life listening to talks about String Theory real soon you know um and it's gotten ever more disconnected from you

know data observations there were people talking for a while that it's post empirical uh and you know I want 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 like my theory has 38 dimensions and my theory has 22 Dimensions but it's got you know uh you know psychedelic squirrels in it and so there's been a problem 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 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 because so many times the agent or the the the having to deal with the the view from the inside or the the 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 a new physics theory that is going to come from that comes from this agential informational computational view um I don't know but that's kind of what I I I think it would be fertile ground to explore yeah like time is a really interesting one this time is really important to us humans what is time 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 herel talks about the ctitious 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 un the four dimensional Universe all events are already there uh 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 uh you know this was pointed out to Einstein and he eventually

recognized it very famous meeting between hre burkson who was a the most famous philosopher of like the you know 20 early 20th century and Einstein where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and burkson 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 where duration for us is full it's it's sort of um 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 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 uh you know the way we would look at this is that the problem with the cupti 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 time 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 I just wonder who's the Observer I mean defying what the agent is right in any kind of frame is difficult 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 um and we go through the whole process which is a communal process by the way there's a philosopher Robert Cree who talks about the workshop that starting in like the 1700s 1600s we developed this communal uh uh 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 only way to do science and

then you think somehow oh I'm going to put I'm going to jam experience back in and an you know have a an explanation for experience 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 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 it 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 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 and so then the question really to ask is can you have an account for agency and autonomy that captures aspects of its it's 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 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 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 what if the experience is an illusion like how how do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion an illusion looking from where like right because 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 independ dependent of me and the community of living things I'm part of so you're pushing it elsewhere 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 yeah right and that's where that's why you know fundamentally the the blind spot the 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 um but there's even in Europe in the or or in the western tradition in the you know for Western what we'll call Western philosophy there's phenomenology these herel and Ider and merlu panti which took an entirely different track they were really interested in the structure of experience 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 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 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 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 atten and experence 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 um narina and vasu bondu and they're like the Plato and the

you know Aristotle of you know sort of those philosophies and they were really focused on experience in the west I think maybe because we had uh 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 the in the uh the 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 but there's also the practical fact that uh 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 uh uh why complexity emerges from simple rules and simple objects sort of the Santa Fe questions 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 um but so for example I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about in the you know this is what we're countering with our semantic information too causal closure love this idea right the idea that so we talked about autop poesis a while back right the idea that living systems are um they are self-creating and self-maintaining so the the membrane cell membrane is

a great example of this right 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 me self 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 um uh downward causation right so reductionism says everything only depends on the micro State everything just depends on the atoms right that's it you don't really if you know if you know the lran for the standard model you're done you know of course in principle you need God's computer but fine you know in you know in principle it could be done clal 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 micro States now the macro State fundamentally no longer needs the micro state 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 cause that that living systems you know are organizationally closed are are causally closed so that

they don't depend anymore on the micro State and he made that 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 Turing 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 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 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 Triumph 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 yeah 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 sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to you know uh resources The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review so it feels 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 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 we there's uh the the the experience

and then there's the third person perspective on the world right and so to man science from a applying scientific rigor from a first-person perspective is very difficult I mean it's fascinating I think we can do it because it's also the thing you know what's really interesting is it's 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 Flex right so there's a great paper speaking of Santa Fe by David Kau where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality and what you find is it's actually pretty fluid 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 stuff and then that those ecosystems are part of the biosphere right we're never separable as opposed to this very

atomizing the triumphalist science view is want like Bulman brains you're just a brain floating in the space you know yeah there there's a fascinating degree to which uh agency is fluid like you are an individual but you and I talking is the kind of individual yeah and then uh the person listening to this right now is also an individual I mean that's a weird thing too that's a weird thing right because there's like there's a broadcast nature too 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 recogn Kant is apparently the one who came up with the word organism because he recognized that life has a weird organization that would see 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 right it's it's embodied in physical you know

in the physical has to instantiated in the physical but it also has this other realm of of design you know and some not design like in 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 so going back to content organism versus machine so I showed you uh a couple of uh legged robots very cool is it possible for machines to to have

agency I would not discount that possibility um I think it you know 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 autop poesis um I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in uh in a 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 and I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature um

I don't think I don't think what we have now like the llms are really there um but uh but I yeah I I I I'm not going to say that it's not possible I wonder how far you can get with imitation which is essentially what llms are doing so imitating humans and I I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve uh what you would call Consciousness or uh agency or the ability to have experience I think for most us humans they think oh that's just fake that's cop cing but there's some

degree to which us we humans are just copying each other we just are really good imitation machines come 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 uh gain personality perspective all that kind of stuff yeah I think so I 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

Co 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 LS are not going to the it's not just imitation it's going to require this goes to the brain in the vat thing I did a an article about the brain in the vat which was really evidence 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 if it could be a robot body you know but you still needing 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 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 extra cranial processes and structures they very much invogue 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations this is a paper by reflecting on two uh recent collections this article reviews the 4E Paradigm with a view to uh assessing the strengths and weaknesses that's fascinating I mean yeah they're the branches of what is cognition extends and it could go real far right there's a great um story about an interaction between Jonas sulk who was very much a reductionist you know the great

biologist and um Gregory Bateson who was a cyberneticist and uh Bateson always loved to poke people and he said to su he said you know where's your mind and you know Sul went up here and Bon 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 and it's very attracted to me 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 or you know or or quarter you know couch quarterbacking it um but I think there's a lot of possib ility here it's a very radically different way of looking at uh at at

what we mean by Nature 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 no actually it doesn't make me sad so okay so so uh uh 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'm really I I really value what that practice has given me about the

nature of experience um and one of the things that taught me is like you know I don't really matter that very much you 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 G 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 afterlife but just that like you know what 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 on like 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: a.m. until 9:00 p.m. obviously with breaks uh and you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like what my own experience is what is it really like you 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 got to do my taxes oh that you know what's that guy over there why is he wearing those stupid shoes um and with contemplate 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 what 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 how could I ever not come and go when the entire world is just you know uh Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising nothing exists

nothing has self nature nothing exists by itself it's an endless infinitely connected web but still there's a delicious to the individual experience you get attached to it and 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 uh ice cream yesterday found this awesome low carbo ice cream called Delights here in Austin and uh you know it ends yeah and I was like and I was staring at the empty container and it was that's

beautiful man I love that you could say like yeah well that's how it all is but can I say that that's so this is what I've learned from from because I Al I love your idea of the deliciousness of it yeah you know um 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 Coan 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 these book of coons and every Coan you know if you've ever read Goodell eer Bach he's got a whole chapter on Coons 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 whole Zen thing of like Up Is Down but down is up you must understand this so you know your job with these colons is to is

to sit with them is to sit with them until you sort of 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 when I did a call 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 learn un learned the language of them so I could never tell you if I told you the answer I could give you a con 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 it contemplative practice as it deepens over years and it really does Take Years just like anything in math take me took me years to understand the lran you kind of come to a deeper understanding with like yeah the

words of like it's not just like oh everything changes 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 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 yeah that's beautiful I mean I I maybe it's the genetics maybe it's the biochemistry in 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 um like they're intricately linked so The Melancholy is about maybe about the final Ness of experience and the joy is just about the beauty of experience

and they're just kind of sitting there yeah which is cool actually because that you know I'm also you know I come from Eastern my 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 can

you speak to the just the Practical nature of sitting there from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. I'm like what the hell are you doing bro what's what's powerful what's fascinating to you what have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall yeah yeah so um you know you're 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 got to do later on yada yada yada first time I ever did a full session a two-day session I swear to God I had Bruce Springsteen's to run album track through from the beginning to the end with the pauses this was back in when they were LPS with the freaking paes you know cuz my mind was just like I need to do something so it literally played the whole album

in order that's pretty cool actually 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 the roof brain ch it's 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 because

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 um 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 because obviously there's been Buddhism is always like you know uh you know not about thinking but there a huge literature so these guys are always about don't think I've written all this stuff

but they're guid poost they're like the finger pointing at the moon and you know there's the idea first you know your mind is usually scattered right like right you know 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're 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 we're 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 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 the 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 I was from New Jersey growing up but I used have more space now for things you know uh yeah once Jersey always Jersey always Jersey but I love they had boo Springsteen just blasting in your head yeah that was amazing why are we here what do you think is the is the is the purpose the meaning of human

existence 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 happens you know so within Buddhism there's the idea of the bodh SAA 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 paath and when I first started I was like I'm I don't care about compassion I'm here for knowledge right I'm here I know I 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 going through stuff but I also wanted knowledge I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality so it's 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 this L without compassion somehow in this process you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings that's the way they you know just 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 like your job is to get over um uh but that's really what I found it's to it is actually kind and that's what that joy that Joy some of that Joy is just it's like this one of the things I have exper 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 there's a certain way right just the blue sky and the the breath the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered it holds nothing back and uh 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 so just love for the world is it is love for the and all the beings who are suffering everybody's suffering everybody's suffering you know your worst political opponent 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 and uh hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there going through the same Journey out of suffering towards love Yeah that would I you know that may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive I hope so I hope so too either that or they're coming to eat us especially if they're a type three civilization that's right and they got really big guns uh well this was truly mindblowing fascinating just awesome conversation

Adam thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking today oh thank you this was a lot of fun 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 Sean the cosmos is all that is or ever was orever will be our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos ster us there's a tingling in the spine a catch in 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