Can we explore the galaxy with self-replicating probes?

27:05So I'm fascinated by the technical questions you raised about whether we could actually put this thing together and make it happen, build a factory that can make factories to make factories. But let's take a break and come back and then dive into those technical details.

27:48We'll be right back. you love. Watch live Sunday on CBS at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. Aging is real, and so are the benefits of adding Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides to your daily routine. New Vital Proteins Collagen Sparkling Water. Your daily glow-up, now in three fresh flavors. Strawberry Blossom, Lemon Lime, and Blood Orange. Improved skin health in as little as 30 days thanks to collagen peptides. Cheers to that. Or go with our classic collagen peptides so you can stay vital, stay you. Visit VitalProteins.com to learn more and where to buy.

28:23These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn, the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week, I'm sitting down with author Matt Dinneman and narrator Jeff Hayes to talk about dungeon crawler Carl. Matt had one line in a notebook from middle school, Alien Game Show. It took him until 2019 to finally write it, but what came out was an out-of-this-world audiobook phenomenon. We talked about that origin, a talking cat with a charisma stat that breaks the game, and what it takes to voice an entire world.

29:05Fiction is bullshit, so you gotta trick me into caring about what you're talking about. and that's always what I have thought of as my job. So as a narrator, I always want to keep you engaged by making you feel as if I care as a narrator and when I do dialogue, I don't want to tell you what the characters are saying. I want you to hear firsthand. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

30:09We'll be right back. as they remain active on the Boost$25 Unlimited plan.

30:24All right, we're back and we're talking to Phil Metzger about building self-replicating probes that go out and explore the galaxy and maybe get the attention of those crazy Dyson minds so we can learn what they know about the universe. That would be pretty awesome. So this sounds like a pretty daunting task to build a machine that could build machines to make more machines. Let's talk about the first piece of it, how you get the materials, how you mine it. Because if our machine is like landing on some alien moon or orbiting some gas giant, it's got to find the bits to make more of itself, right?

30:58So it needs whatever it's made out of. It's got to find all of those bits locally. How does that work? How do you build a machine which is capable of like mining pieces for itself? Can we build autonomous mining devices? Yeah, there's no new physics required, but the technologies are very immature. Some of them are only conceptual. As we have conceived of these, they are all very doable. It's just going to take some time and some industrial engineering to develop them. I love your optimism, Phil. Yeah, it's just going to take a few trillion dollars. Exactly, whatever. We know how to do it. It's just an engineering problem.

31:38We just got to get it done. Right. Yeah. So here on the earth, we do it using human intelligence, human labor. And we've scoured this planet for thousands of years looking for all the best resources. And we've discovered there are special metals. We've discovered certain types of rock, certain type of ore that we can extract these metals out of. And so we don't just grab any material off the ground and start trying to build robots out of it. Right. We have this gigantic logistical network on the earth, transportation hubs and giant container ships. And we have mining is distributed all over the planet, bringing together the materials we need to build this industry.

32:20So if you wanted to set up an industry on the moon, the first problem you have is that we don't have that logistical. We don't have thousands of years of developing that logistics, nor do we have all the deep understanding of where the resources are in the moon. The second problem we have is that the moon lacks a lot of the geological processes that the Earth has had. So going back to what we said at the start of this conversation, Galileo argued that it was a planet because it has the same geological processes. But now we know that it doesn't have all the same geological processes. And Earth is pretty special.

32:56So if we want to build industry on the moon or other simpler objects, we're going to have to develop tech to extract the resources out of minerals that we would normally pass over. It can be done, but it's not as efficient. It takes a lot more energy, and the chemical processes to do that haven't been developed yet. So people have conceived of how to use sodium hydroxide to break down rock to get all the different atoms out of the rock or how to use fluorine to do that processing. But we've never had anybody get funding to go build a fluorine metal extraction device, which would be very dangerous.

33:39Working with fluorine is hazardous. And so it's going to take a lot of money and there's not really a market for it. Nobody wants to go build it because you're not going to make any money off doing it. So this is the problem we get into that the technologies that we need to live and operate beyond Earth are pre-economic. We think that eventually they will have a very important role in our civilization, but not yet. We had a question from a listener where they said they really wanted to hear about how engineering on the moon would differ from engineering here on Earth. Tell me if this is too far afield, but could we talk a little bit about how the moon environment differs from the Earth environment in ways that would make engineering interesting, but also perhaps more complicated?

34:21Yeah. So it's extremely challenging to try to build hardware to operate outside of planet Earth because the environments are so radically different. On the moon, you're dealing with a temperature swing of, I forget the number, but it's like 400 degrees difference between day and night. We're dealing with hard vacuum. Materials like plastics will outgas and lose their flexibility, and therefore washers and O-rings will start to fail. We're dealing with this tremendously abrasive dust, which comprises between 20 and up to 50 % of the mass of the soil in some locations, because the moon lacks a water cycle to wash the dust out of the soil and to turn it into mud and then mudstone.

35:08And so the dust just builds up over geological timescales. And working in that extremely abrasive dust is maybe the biggest challenge. Then you've also got low gravity. and then you've got the radiation environment. We don't have Earth's atmosphere to shield us from these high energy particles coming down from space. It doesn't have a magnetic field to also deflect particles away. The ultraviolet light ruins materials. The space plasma effects, you know, so we can go on and on listing the challenges of working in space. And we don't even understand all the physics of some of that. We don't understand the space plasma environment and how it interacts with the lunar surface.

35:52So it's a really interesting field to be in. I've always worked in groups that typically have a ratio of one-third physicists, two-thirds engineers. And it's a really cool working environment because the scientists are trying to understand the basic physics, and then the engineers are taking that knowledge and creating the technology. And then we need the technology to go learn the physics. So it's a feedback. They're both supporting each other, which makes it a really interesting field. It's also a really hard field to work in because you can't do the tests that you want to do on your hardware.

36:28You just cannot replicate the lunar environment or even the Martian environment well enough here on Earth. Even in the giant chamber, you can't get the gravity right and, you know, et cetera. So we have to rely on simulations, but we can't write computer simulations that are good enough because we don't understand the physics yet. So we really have to get data from those objects. We got to do more missions to the moon, more missions to Mars to learn the science. But it also sounds fun, like a fun challenge to have all of those pieces. I don't know. I like a good challenge. Oh, it's tremendous fun.

37:03It is tremendous fun. And when I speak to students, undergraduates or high school students, I'll show them pictures of the amazing things that humans have done already, like these fabulous skyscrapers or these unbelievable bridges. And, you know, when I go for a bridge, I'll look at it and like, I think, how did we get all this mass up here in the sky before there was a bridge? You know, and these are really daunting problems, but we've managed to solve them by doing straightforward engineering, break it down into smaller problems, get the funding, do the engineering. But it needs to be done for space still.

37:42We need to have young people working on these problems. And there's so much work to be done, so much discovery still ahead of us that I think is a great time for young people to be getting into these fields. I have that same feeling when I see like the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like, look upon my works, ye mighty. Right? It is awesome. And I like how you describe the scope of this challenge. I mean, here on Earth, we're not capable of building robots that can do very much yet. certainly not capable of building robots that can make more robots. And it's supported by this incredibly vast mining industry, which requires a lot of human work, you know, many cases like terrible labor conditions, right?

38:23So we're so far from being able to do this. Give us a little bit of that Phil optimism. What are we capable of doing? Or what do you think is the first thing? I mean, you've studied like actual lunar industry, you know, processing regolith, etc. What do you think is going to be the first thing we accomplish down the road towards being able to do this? Well, we're currently seeing a lot of progress in robotics and in automation. And there's one company, for example, that has robots. They typically will post on social media pictures of their robots folding the laundry and able to pick up these cloth pieces and fold them very carefully.

38:59So the dexterity and the machine vision, the autonomy to be able to do tasks like that is making tremendous progress. And again, it comes down to an economic question. Is there a consumer need for these technologies? Because there's not a lot of funding going into them unless they can make a profit. People aren't going to put their retirement money into something unless it's going to help them retire. So we're seeing a lot of advancement. I think the big killer app is going to end up being AI. I truly believe AI servers are going to have to go to space because the environmental costs are greatly increasing.

39:37The pushback to building servers is growing for good reason. And already servers could be profitable if they went to space, just not as profitable if they build them on the ground. But I think that the tipping point is going to come where they start going into space. There are already people like Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman in the AI world talking about how there is inevitable we're going to build servers in space. Do you mean service in space to support space industry or do you mean service in space to support like people who want help organizing their day through JAT-GBT on Earth? Yeah, I think that all the AI servers that are supporting people on the Earth are eventually going to be in orbit around the Earth, maybe distant orbit, because the latency doesn't matter that much for most compute.

40:25And so Eric Schmidt and Sam Altman, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about putting the AI servers that we would have built on the Earth, putting them in space instead because of the environmental impact costs of excessively building data servers on the Earth. But how do you balance that against the issues of like cooling, right? Because in space, you have to cool everything radiatively and, you know, technical support. How do you go reboot those servers if they're in distant orbit? Is that really going to be economically feasible? Or harden them against radiation? Yeah, yeah, those are good questions.

40:58And as far as the radiative cooling, the energy in has to equal the energy out. And that's the same for every spacecraft. So the scale of solar panels and radiators, that ratio will be the same on servers that it is on any other spacecraft. It's just a matter of scaling it up to an unbelievably gigantic scale, which is super ambitious. But nonetheless, that's where people are talking about going. And as far as being able to have radiation hardening, yes, that's going to require additional mass around the servers to harden them against radiation. And as far as being able to prepare it, yes, that's going to require better robotics and more autonomy.

41:41But this is, I think, is going to be an economic driver that will push those technologies forward because I don't believe there's ever going to be an upper limit of demand on intelligence. I think the intelligence will become the customer for more intelligence and it'll create that feedback loop, which will have exponential growth, which would destroy our planet if we don't push it off into space. Well, I want to invest in Phil's space optimism company at this point. All right. So we've talked a little bit about the resources that you would need to find in space and then extract and why that might be difficult.

42:20So say you have those resources. What's the next step? Yes. So the next step is, well, beneficiation. That's where you improve the quality of your resources before actually doing the extraction process. I have some patents in beneficiation. My university owns them, but they were inventions that I had. And I like to tell people, if you go to the patent search and look on patents on concrete, there's literally over a million patents on concrete. But if you look at concrete for off the planet, there's only two. And I have one of those, too. And so there's still room for 999 ,000 more patents. on concrete.

43:06And that's why it's such a great field to go into. We've only just begun developing these technologies. What do you call that? Exoconcrete or Astroconcrete or something? Yeah, we didn't come up with a name for it. But our idea was that if you're going to be making concrete by absorbing microwaves, microwaving the lunar soil until it melts, some minerals are better at absorbing microwaves than others. And so using magnetic fields, we can sort the minerals out and improve the microwave absorption by something like 70%, which results in a dramatic reduction in the energy and a much greater efficiency.

43:46So that's an example of beneficiation. Let me just mention, the reason we need beneficiation is because we're not going to be able to go all over the moon and find these native ore bodies of each mineral. Instead, we're going to be scooping up the dirt off the ground, which is a mixture of minerals. And so sorting the grains is an early step. After that, then you have chemical processing. And there has been some work on this. One of the processes is called molten regolith electrolysis. That's where you melt the soil. You have an anode and a cathode, and you run an electrical current through the molten, well, basically lava.

44:26And that electric field breaks down some of the minerals so that the oxygen is released and then the metals will sink to the bottom. And you get two melted materials. One is the oxides on the top, which you can use to make ceramic. And the other one are the pure metals. Now, we call that a mongrel alloy because it's going to be a mixture of iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and even some silicon. And so it's a iron silicon mongrel alloy. It's very heavy. It's weaker than steel, but it's pretty good. You know, it's stronger than iron. And so there's a very rudimentary building material. But if you want to do better than that, now you need to have metallurgy.

45:14You need to further refine the metals to separate them from each other using the standard processes we here on the earth, but adapted for lower gravity. And so it'll just be hardcore industrial engineering, doing electrochemical processes to break down the atoms and then separating the different material streams into making feedstock. And then it's just standard industry after that. It's casting, forging parts. You could do 3D printing, although the throughput may not be as high on 3D printing. 3D printing is very automatable. So making parts, then you have to have assembly robots that can put all the parts together.

45:55Typically, we envision these being humanoid robots so that they have flexibility analogous to a human, but they needn't be humanoid. They could be any kind of robots that can build things. Now, one of the challenges we get into is that here on Earth, our industrial supply chain includes something like 20 ,000 different types of screws. And you don't want to have enough machines on the moon to make 20 ,000 types of screws if you can get by with three types of screws. And so we need to do a lot of industrial ecology to figure out how to create a self-replicating or a closed ecosystem of machines using fewer parts and fewer machines.

46:40So there's a gigantic field of work that hasn't even started yet for industrial engineers, architects, computer programmers, mathematicians. The math on writing an industrial economy is really complex and fascinating math and has really fabulous theoretical approaches, but it hasn't been applied far enough yet to look at doing this on the moon. So there's a lot of work ahead still. Would we need to get to the point where we're making like computer chips for our humanoid robots in space? Is that like how far we need to get before they can replicate? Not at first, but I think eventually you will need that.

47:19In the modeling that I've done, we assumed that you would start making simple things like metal. And then you would go through a series of generations of hardware to, and it's all a material science question. It's what material can we make next? And then what material after that? And the goal is to make an increasing fraction of the parts for your industry. and during that interim time, you're continuing to bring things from the Earth. And then the assembly robots are putting your parts together with the ones that were brought from Earth. And over time, you wean yourself off of the Earth-made parts.

47:55Now, the very last thing that we assumed is that you're making computer chips. I've done some modeling for Mars where humans would be on Mars. And so in that modeling, the very last thing you would make would be the pharmaceuticals. And it's a question of the mass of product divided by the mass of capital. You want that ratio to be sequenced. You want to make the industries that have the highest ratio first and then work your way down through all the sectors of the economy and do the ones that produce the least mass last, which would be pharmaceuticals and computer chips. So the things that are the least mass you want to do last because those are cheapest to bring from Earth because they're low mass.

48:37Exactly. I see. Yep. But yet very expensive to stand up those industries on the new planetary body. I mean, even here on Earth, like to make computer chips is like one company that can make them. And they rely on several single source manufacturers of like devices and lenses and stuff like that. So we're talking about replicating that entire supply chain in a robot that can replicate that entire supply chain. It just it seems sort of fantastical. Yeah. So I think we should get away from the idea of self-replicating robots and talk about self-replicating industry or self-replicating factories. Because it will be a whole family of robots at these factories on this icy moon around a Jupiter-like object.

49:23I see. Yeah. So trying to do this in one robot, I just don't see that happening. I mean, we have self-replicating biology. we call it self-replicating. Like raccoons can make other raccoons, but they're not independent. They are part of a biosphere and they depend on other species. Are you suggesting we send raccoons to space to explore the galaxy? Eventually. Yeah, I would love to see that. I think I've seen that movie. Yeah. I mean, Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah, rocket. Yeah. But even self-replicating biology is not really standalone. Maybe some simple bacteria can go live off of rocks and self-replicate.

50:04But if you want to produce anything economically useful for civilization, then I think it has to be ecospheres of robots and ecospheres of factories. But you still have to have the initial thing which lands for the first time on that planet and begins replicating. I think I'm getting that you're saying it's not just a robot which makes other robots that look like it. It's got to make like a foundry and it's got to make like a helper robot that it's going to make the whole industry. But you still need the thing which lands and starts everything off like the seed, as you were saying earlier. Right.

50:36One way you could think about it is you're going to have to relive the entire industrial revolution that we went through on Earth on this new planet. it. And so you're going to have a box and that box is going to contain computers that know the whole process. You know, it knows where it's going, but in the first generation, it's not going to make everything. It's going to have some supplies, even a seed, you know, a seed has food in the seed so that it can live off of what it has stored until it can make its own food. And so you're going to need some supplies in that box to live off of until it creates the ability to replicate everything.

51:19So we're going to have like a coal-powered steampunk era on every planet we land on? Yeah, I used to say something like that. And somebody once pointed out that that's probably not how it's going to happen because maybe we'll invent nanotech. And maybe nanotech can be smaller scale and support the self-replication. as a smoother process. But, you know, that's something we're just speculating about at this point. Well, do you know anything about this argument between Eric Drexler, who wrote Engines of Creation, who is a big proponent of nanotech, and Richard Smalley, the guy who won the Nobel Prize for Buckminster Fullerene, who argues essentially that you can't have nanotech self-replication because the pieces need to be nanotech and they can't just, like, force the chemistry together?

52:07Have you followed that conversation? No, I have not. Well, Smalley essentially says you don't make a girl and a boy fall in love by pushing them together. He's essentially saying that, you know, you can't just manage chemistry by squishing things together at a nanotech level. They had some like two years of open letters where they were arguing with each other about whether this is ever going to be possible. But what? You're not just smooshing them together, right? Like, you know, we know you can smoosh things together and expect certain chemical reactions depending on what you're smooshing together.

52:37I'm going to weigh in on an argument I don't know anything about, but it seems like probably people had more complicated opinions than just we're going to smoosh things together, right? Well, I think this series of letters, which people should go out and check out, is not an example of good faith arguing, as we often see online. Got it. All right. Well, let's take a break. And when we get back, we'll talk about energy sources and autonomy.

53:34We'll be right back. during 11 a.m. Pacific and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. Aging doesn't stop, and neither should you, with Vital Proteins Collagen and Protein Shakes. Because around the age of 30, your body needs more support for movement and recovery. On workout and rest days, reach for a 30-gram total protein shake or go with our classic collagen peptides. Help support healthy hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints, so you can stay vital, stay you. Visit VitalProteins.com to learn more and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

54:08This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary. Massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. and what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?

54:46And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch.

55:19He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier Contracts tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the nonstop group chat trash talk. He clears on goal and he shoots. No! Unlimited data for$25 a month forever. Visit your local Boost Mobile store today to get unlimited data with a price that never changes. Boost Mobile. After 30 GB, customers may experience lower speeds. Customers will pay$25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost$25 Unlimited plan.

55:57All right, we're back. So we're talking about self-replicating robots and all of the steps that would go into making them. And I feel like maybe we want to have an energy discussion at two different scales here. Phil was talking about like smelting and things that would require very high temperatures. And so I'm wondering what would be the source of power for that. And then I also on a tinier scale want to know what would be our source of power for the robots that are building everything. Yeah. So in the paper I wrote on this topic, we assumed everything would be solar powered. And so the question came down to, can a self-replicating set of robots create solar panels that will create enough energy for that process?

56:42In other words, does the metabolism close? And there was a lot of hand-waving in that paper. In fact, I didn't expect the paper to get as much attention as it did. in the opening of the paper, we said, this is a preliminary study, which is just designed to get more people interested so that then later we can do a proper study. But everybody got real interested and it took off and we never did the proper study. There's never been funding for it. So in our hand-waving arguments, we used the evidence we had available on how much energy will it take to make metal and, you know, a lot of hand-waving.

57:20And then for a safety factor, I said, well, let's assume that in every generation, we create 30 times more solar panels than we think we're going to need in the next generation. So I had a factor of 30 uncertainty. And even with a factor of 30 uncertainty, the metabolism closed. So solar alone should be enough to do it, but you will be making a lot of solar panels. And we know that you can make solar panels out of lunar soil. There are already two companies doing it. Blue Origin has a technology for making solar panels out of lunar soil. And there's another company called Mana Electric, M-A-A-N-A.

58:01They're in Europe, and they also have technology to do this. And they claim they can make solar panels using something like 99.8 % lunar soil and only 0.2 % brought from Earth. Wow. Okay. So how are they doing that? So are they doing it from like they're extracting the resources, they're manufacturing them in space, they're doing all of that stuff just using like equipment that they shipped from Earth? So I haven't seen the details from either of those two companies, but the press announcements tell us that they have made solar panels out of simulated lunar soil. And the way you do it is use a process like molten regular electrolysis or fluorine or sodium hydroxide or, you know, some method to break apart the molecular bonds in these minerals.

58:50So we're dealing with minerals like basalt and ilmanite and anorthosite, you know, types of rock and mineral that are in the lunar soil. And we know the composition of these minerals. So we know there's iron and aluminum, and we know there's calcium. Typically, you're going to have a hard time finding hydrogen on the moon unless you go to the polar regions. But I don't know if these companies process requires hydrogen. Carbon is another one that's hard to get on the moon. We know there's some carbon in the ice at the poles of the moon, but not much. And it's only at the poles. But maybe you don't need carbon in these processes.

59:32So anyways, apparently they're doing the chemical reactions. They're producing these materials and And they're laying them down in a wafer so that you have PN junctions, so that they are electronic devices and are photosensitive, so that they can convert photons of energy into voltage. And they claim that they've made it work. But why try to do solar power? I mean, if you're landing on some random surface, you don't know how far away that planet is from its star, how bright that star is. Isn't nuclear power something that's going to be more robust? We already know how to build those things fairly miniaturized for stuff here on Earth.

1:00:10Why not nuclear-powered probes? Yeah. So for the actual self-replicating probes, I think Fretas did talk about nuclear. And that's part of the reason why he wanted it at a gas giant planet, so that you would have a lot of hydrogen and you would have helium, so that you could do fusion, for example. I don't remember if he was using fusion or fission in his analysis. But yeah, that is the goal to eventually have nuclear power so that you're not bound to being too close to a star. It's a crawl, walk, run type situation. So the technologies we're actually developing right now are ones that we think will be useful for NASA and useful for commercial companies in the near term.

1:00:55And it'll be a while before you can get your whole supply chain up to making nuclear reactors. All right. So let's imagine we've got the power figured out. We are replicating these robots. We're scaling up. Let's start talking about the ethics and some of the other bigger problems we might encounter. So first of all, how do you make sure you don't get bad copies? This is like humanity's ambassadors that we're sending out into the solar system. How do we make sure that they remain good ambassadors? Yeah, that's a big problem. So I'm not actually working on that problem because it's still pretty far down the road.

1:01:34But it is something that we need to consider. We need to have ethicists and philosophers thinking about these things. And surprisingly, there are people working on these problems. One of the reasons that we're thinking about it is because we're trying to detect, is there already life in the cosmos outside of Earth? And we're asking the question, why don't we see radio signals coming from all the other stars? You know, why is it not a Star Wars galaxy? galaxy. So this is the question of the Fermi paradox or the great silence. Why is it so silent out there? And there's a number of theories. One of the theories is the dark forest hypothesis, where in game theory, you have to consider the possibility that there are bad actors, that if they discover your presence, they're going to come and wipe you out because they know that you might develop self-replicating probes and the probes you develop could take over the galaxy and wipe them out.

1:02:30And so in the game theory, it becomes a part of the puzzle. Like, how does self-replicating probes fit into the dark forest hypothesis? Also, if self-replicating probes are possible, why are they not already here? Because we think we can get there in, you know, a few hundred years or less. I honestly think that we could get there by the end of the century or maybe within 100 years. And so I think there are people alive today that can see this happening. That's my biggest question, right? Like if this really is possible, if we're close to it, then surely aliens have been close to it. And if it doesn't take more than 50 ,000 or 100 ,000 years to explore the whole galaxy with these probes, then why haven't we been visited?

1:03:14So what's your personal answer to that, Phil? Yeah. So there's, I think there's three or four really interesting hypotheses. One is the dark forest one. Another one is that life is just incredibly improbable. And so Earth might be alone within the visible universe. And just to underscore that, this is such a powerful technology that it would allow any alien civilization in the entire galaxy to visit us in a fairly small amount of time. And we're talking 100 ,000 years or so. So you're suggesting that the lack of visiting self-replicating probes suggests that we might be alone in the Milky Way, not just like rare, but like literally alone.

1:03:51Yeah. In terms of advanced intelligent life, technological species. In fact, it's worse than that. There was a paper done by a philosopher at Oxford a few years ago. His name is slipping my mind. It might've been Stuart Anderson, where he showed that one civilization in another galaxy could set up a linear accelerator and dismantle one planet the size of Mercury, turning all that mass into self-replicating probes. And if they did that a billion years ago, then every single galaxy in the entire visible universe would already have every single star colonized. And so it's not just the galaxy, it's all the galaxies that are involved in this question.

1:04:40Okay, so yeah, it's a great and very important question. There's also the theory that civilizations always go extinct and they don't get that far. I don't think that's very plausible anymore because we're already close to that point. You know, that's the great filter hypothesis. The other hypothesis is that it's the transcendence hypothesis. And I like this one a lot. And the idea is that civilizations go so intelligent that they actually figure out that self-replicating probes are dangerous. So then they don't set them loose and they don't really need the material of the rest of the galaxy. And they're more interested in just watching and seeing how other star systems develop rather than colonizing.

1:05:29And so they're not our peers. They're far above us. If that's possible, maybe that window of danger where you unleash self-replicating probes is a very narrow window. and maybe they're watching out for that. You know, I mean, if we're going to get contacted by aliens, I think we're close to the point where it would happen because we're just about to transition to having super intelligence and self-replicating probes and we're just about to become a danger to our part of the cosmos. And you're trying to hasten that. We all know I'm a wet blanket, right? And so, but you said this is your favorite hypothesis.

1:06:08That feels to me like you wouldn't want to be working on self-replicating probes then. What am I missing? He wants to get us to the place where we are responsible with our self-replicating probes. Is that the idea? Yeah. One of the problems I have in life is I always try to take a very nuanced approach to everything. And it's really hard to describe a nuanced position. And so the nuance in this one is that I think we need to have industry outside of planet Earth in order to save the Earth. But there is a danger. In fact, there's multiple dangers. So as we're going forward towards this bright future, we're going to have to solve major ethical problems along the way.

1:06:48And so preventing runaway destroyer probes from setting out from our planet, destroying our planet, and then all the other ones, that's one of the big concerns. There's other concerns even before then. Like if you've got self-replicating industry in space, whoever owns that industry is not going to need to dilute their equity. They won't need any labor. They won't need anybody's property on planet Earth. They can just go out there and replicate. And within 20 years, they can have more industry than our entire planet. And therefore, even if the whole planet pooled all of our resources together, we would not be able to buy a significant share of that industry, even if the owner wanted to sell.

1:07:32And so there's the potential for more wealth concentration once we've removed labor from the equation and once we've removed the planetary scale limits from the resource equation. And so that major sociological and ethical problem has to be solved. And we only have about 40 years to solve it, in my opinion. So yeah, there are major issues we got to solve, but still nonetheless, I think that we're not going to be able to slow down industrial growth on our planet. We're not going to be able to slow down demand for intelligence because it's geopolitical. And if we want to save our planet, we're going to have to start developing these technologies off of the planet.

1:08:11So then the Phil's optimistic view of the future is that over the next few decades or centuries, we develop these off-planet resources as a way to salvage Earth and stop putting such a great environmental burden on it and to expand out to the rest of the solar system. But that once we develop self-replicating industry, we are wise about it and we don't release it out into the universe to run like a crazy virus and take over the rest of the universe. And we're still here because aliens have also been responsible with their technology? Well, either they don't exist or, yes, they became smart along the way.

1:08:47They underwent this crisis, this point of crisis where your technology becomes truly dangerous. You know, you have AI that exceeds the sum of human capability. And, you know, at that level of danger, at that crisis time, either you come through it or you don't. I think inevitably we're going to get there. Honestly, I'm not I don't feel like I need to push for industry to happen off the planet. I think it's going to happen no matter what. And so what I'm trying to push for is to democratize it so that people all over the world are involved in the process and owners developing equity as we go to try to improve the odds that we will solve those societal problems.

1:09:33Well, this conversation has given me a lot of things to be optimistic about and a lot of things to panic about tonight when I'm trying to fall asleep. Yeah, I just hope that if there are aliens listening to this podcast, that they take Phil's comments to heart and that they are wise and responsible with the use of their self-replicating technology. Thanks so much for being on the show, Phil. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

1:10:01Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Ice Cube's Big 3 basketball is heating up.

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