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

29:14It's billions of years. The earth evolves over billions of years. And life and the earth co -evolve. That's what Brandon Carter didn't see is that actually the fate of the earth and the fate of life are inextricably combined. And this is really important for astrobiology too. Life doesn't happen on a planet. It happens to a planet. So this is something that David Grinchpoon and Sarah Walker both say and I agree with this. It's a really nice way of putting it. So, you know, play tectonics, the evolution of oxygen, of an oxygen atmosphere, which only happened because of life. These things, you know, these are things that are happening where life and the planet are sort of sloshing back and forth.

29:58And so rather than to 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 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 chemical shenanigans, it broke water apart and pushed oxygen into the atmosphere. That's why there's oxygen in the atmosphere. It's only because of life. That opened up huge possibilities, new spaces for evolution to happen.

30:35But it also changed the chemistry of the planet forever. So the introduction of oxygen photosynthesis changed the planet forever, and it opened up a bunch of windows for evolution that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Like for example, you and I, we need that amount of oxygen. Big -brained creatures need an oxygen -rich atmosphere because oxygen is so potent for metabolism. 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 billions, trillions of organisms on a planet, they can actually have planetary scale impact.

31:16Yes. So the chemical shenanigans of an individual organism when scaled out to trillions can actually change a planet. Yeah. And we know this for a fact now. Like this is, so there is this thing, Gaia theory that you know with James Lovelock introduced in the 70s and then Lynn Margallas, the biologist Lynn Margallas together. So this guy a theory was the idea that Planets pretty much take a or sorry life takes over a planet life and hijacks a planet in a way that The some 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?

31:53I can go out like right now outside. It's a hundred degrees, right? I'm gonna go outside, but my internal temperature is gonna the same and I can go back to you know Rochester New York in the winter and it's gonna be zero degrees, but my internal temperature's gonna be the same. That's homeostasis. The idea of Gaia theory was that life, the biosphere exerts this pressure on the planet or these feedbacks on the planet, that even as other things are changing, the planet will always stay in the right kinds of conditions for life. And now when this theory came out, it was very controversial people were like, oh my God, you know, what are you smoking weed?

32:24You know, and there were all these Gaian festivals with Gaian dances. And so, you know, it became very popular in the new age community. But love lock 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 by the biology, the biosphere can exert these feedbacks. And now that's become, whether or not it's still, we're still unclear whether there are true, guy in feedbacks. In the sense that the planet can really exert complete control. But it is absolutely true that the biosphere is a major player in Earth's history.

32:58So the biosphere fights for homeostasis 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 true guy in feedback would be exactly what you said. Right, the biosphere is somehow, and Sarah Walker and David Grinchpin 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.

33:33It's not conscious, but there is a kind of cognitive activity going on. The biosphere in some sense knows what is happening because of these feedbacks. So it's still unclear whether we have these full -guy -in feedbacks, but we certainly have semi -guy -in feedbacks. If there's a perturbation on the planetary scale, temperature, you know, So, installation, how much sunlight's coming in, the biosphere will start to have feedbacks that will damp that perturbation. Temperature goes up, the biosphere starts doing something, temperature comes down. Now, I wonder if the technosphere also has a guy in feedback or elements of a guy in feedback such that the technosphere will also fight some degree for homeostasis.

34:13Open question, I guess. Well, that's, I'm glad you asked that question because that paper that David and Sarah and I wrote, what we were arguing was, is that over the history of a planet, 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, these are all microbes. And they have not yet been, they're not going to, enough of them to exert any kind of these guyian 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.

34:50We call that a mature biosphere. 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 auto -poesis that Francisco Varelova neurobiologist Francisco Varelo came up with. And he said, you know, one of the defining things about life is this property of auto -poesis, which means self -creating and self -maintaining. Life does not create the conditions which will destroy itself, right? It's always trying to to keep itself in a place where it can stay alive. So the biosphere from this guy in perspective has been auto -polytic for billions of years.

35:26Now we just invented this technosphere in the last 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, we're just, the technosphere right now is sort of destroying the conditions under which it needs to maintain itself. So the real job for us, So if we're going to last over 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 undermine the conditions, to not subvert the conditions that you need to stay alive.

36:04So as of right now, it's they were not auto -poetic. Well, I wonder if we look across thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, that perturbations, the technosphere should create perturbations, as a way for developing greater and greater defenses against perturbations, which sounds like a ridiculous statement, but basically go out and playing the yard and hurt yourself to strengthen them or like drink water from the pond. From the pond, yeah, right? To strengthen. Just strengthen the immune system. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting with the technosphere. We can talk about this more, but like, you know, we're just emerging as a technosphere in terms of as a interplanetary technosphere, right?

36:51That's really the next step for us is to David Greenspoon talks about, I love this idea of anti -acretion, like this amazing thing that for the first time, you know, over the entire history of the planet, stuff is coming off the planet, right? It used to be everything just fell down, all the meteorites fell down. But now we're starting to push stuff out. And you know, like the idea of planetary defense or such, you know, we are actually going to start exerting perturbations on the solar system as a whole. We're going to start engineering if we make it, right? I always like to say that if we can get through climate change, the prize at the end is the solar system, right?

37:25So we will be changed literally, engineering the solar system. But what you can think of right now with what's happening with the Anthropocene, the great acceleration that is the technosphere, is the creation of that is a giant perturbation on the biosphere. right? And what you can't do is, you know, the technosphere sits on top of the biosphere and the techn... If the technosphere undermines the biosphere for its own conditions of habitability, then you're in trouble, right? I mean, the biosphere's not going away. There's nothing we could do. Like, the idea that we have to save the Earth is a little ridiculous.

38:01The 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 out of the whole of the scene, the last 10 ,000 years interglacial period. We can't tolerate very different kinds of earths. So that's what I mean about a perturbation. Before we forget, I got to ask you about this paper. Pretty interesting. There's an interesting table here about hard steps. Ebiogenesis, glucose fermentation, tuberovic acid, all kinds of steps, all the way to home -o sapiens, animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoscalyptans, eye precursor, so formation of the eye.

38:36Yeah, complex multi -cellularity 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 Carter 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.

39:30And there's this other idea from biology of the major transitions in evolution, MTEs, that those were the hard steps. But what we actually found was that none of those are actually hard. The whole idea of hard steps, that there are hard steps, is actually suspect. So 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 Brandon Carter was a brilliant physicist, the guy who came up with this. And then lots of physicists and astrophysicists like me have used this, but the people who actually study evolution and the planet were never involved.

40:07And if you went and talked to an evolutionary biologist or a biogeophysicist, they'd look at you when you explained this to them and they'd be like, what? Like, what are you guys doing? Turns out none of the details or none of the conceptual structure of this matches with with what the people actually study the planet and its evolution. Is it mostly about the fact that there's not really discrete big steps? Is this 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 biogeophysicists completely accept.

40:46And 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 seen like, no, there are actually windows that open up. And then the next thing is this idea of whether a step is hard or not. Because for hard, what you mean by a hard step is that like I said, every time there's a generation, every time there's a next generation born, you're rolling the dice on whether this mutation will happen. And the idea of something being a hard step, there's two ways in which something might even appear as a hard step and not be, or actually not be a hard step at all.

41:20One is that you see something that has occurred an evolution that has only happened once, Right? So let's take the opposite. We see something that's happened multiple times, like wings, lots of examples of wings over lots of different evolutionary lineages. So that's clearly not a hot. Making wings is not a hard step. There are certain other things that people say, no, that's a hard step. Oxygen, you know, the oxygen photosynthesis. But they are so, they tend to be so long ago that we've lost all the information. There could be other things in the fossil record that, you know, went, made this innovation, but they're just gone now, so you can't tell, so there's information loss.

41:56The other thing is the idea of pulling up the ladder that somebody, 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 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 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, do you have to know about the planet?

42:28Do you have to know about plate tectonics? Yeah, you're going to have to. I mean, to be fair to card on the first point, it makes it much more complicated if life and the planet are co -evolving. Because it would be nice to consider the planet as a static thing that sets the initial conditions. And then we can sort of from our outside perspective analyze planets based on the initial conditions they create and then there's a binary yes or no it will create life. But if they co -wall it's just like a really complex dynamical system where everything is because much more difficult from the perspective of setty of looking out there and trying to figure out which ones Yeah, I actually producing life.

43:14But I think right the point now so now there may be other kinds of principles That actually because you know co -evolution actually has its own not deterministic. You're done with determinism But but you but complex systems have patterns complex systems have constraints and that's actually what we're gonna be looking for or Constraints on them and so you know and again nothing against Carter was a brilliant idea But it just goes to show you this is great XTC. I'm a theoretical physicist, right? And so I love simplified, give me a simplified model with, you know, it's a dynamical equation, some initial condition, some very happy.

43:47But 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 wrote down an equation for that. I solved your problem. You guys even have a journal for this? The subtitle is why everybody hates physicists. Yeah. So sometimes that approach totally works. Sometimes physicists can be very good at like zooming in on what is important and casting the details aside so you can get to the heart of an issue. And that's very useful sometimes. Other times it obfuscates, right? Other times it clouds over actually what you needed to focus on, especially when it comes to complexity.

44:25Speaking of simplifying everything down to an equation, let's return back to the question of how many alien civilizations are out there and talk about the Drake equation. Can you explain the Drake equation? People have various feelings about the Drake equation. It can be abused, but basically it was the story, actually, is really interesting. Frank Drake in 1960 does the first ever astrological experiment. He gets a radio telescope, points it at a couple of stars, and listens for signals. That was the first time anybody done any experiment about any kind of life in the history of humanity. And he does it and he's kind of waiting for everybody to make fun of him.

45:05Instead, he gets a phone call from the government says, Hey, we want you to have to do a meeting on interstellar communications. Right? So he's like, okay. So they organize a meeting like just eight people. A young Carl Sagan is going to be there as well. And like the night before Drake has to come up with a, an agenda. How do you come up for an agenda with an agenda for a meeting on a topic that no one's ever talked about before. Right? And so he breaks what he does with so brilliant about the Drake equation. Is he breaks the problem of how many civilizations are there out there into a bunch of subproblems?

45:41Right? And he breaks it into seven subproblems. Each one of them is a factor in an equation that when you multiply them all together, you get the number of civilizations out there that we could communicate with. So the first term is the rate at which stars form. The second term is the fraction of those stars that have planets, F sub T. The next term is the number of planets in the habitable zone, the place where we think life could form. The next term after that is the fraction of those planets where actually an A biogenesis event, life forms occurs. The next one is the fraction of planets on which you start to get intelligence.

46:19After 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? Well, you say we humans. We humans, right? Because we're standing, we're staring at the, you know, multiple guns, point in, nuclear war, climate change, AI. So, you know, how long in general does civilizations last? Now, each one of these terms, what was brilliant about what he did was, what he was doing was he was quantifying our ignorance, right?

46:50By breaking the problem up into these seven subproblems, he gave astronomers something to do, right? And so, you know, this is always with a new research field. You need a research program, or else you just have a bunch of vague questions, you don't even know really what you're trying to do. So, you know, the star people could figure out how many stars we're forming per year. The people who are interested in planets could go out and find techniques to discover planets, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, these are their own fields essentially by creating this equation. He's launching new fields. Yeah.

47:20That's exactly. He gave astrobiology, which wasn't even a term then, a roadmap. Like, okay, you guys go do this, you go do that, you go do that, and it had such far reaching effect on astrobiology because it did break the problem up in a way that gave useful, you know, sort of marching orders for all these different groups. Like for example, it's because of the Drake equation in some sense that people who were involved in SETI pushed NASA to develop the technologies for planet hunting. There was this amazing meeting in 1978 and 1972 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 the roadmap for us to develop technologies to find planets?

48:07So, yeah, so, you know, the Drake equation is absolutely foundational for astrobiology, but we should remember that it's not a law of nature, right? It's not something that's, it's not equals MC squared. And so you can see it being abused in some sense, people, you know, that generated a trillion papers. Some of those papers are good. I've written some of those and some of those papers are bad. You know, I'm not sure where my paper fits in on those. I'm just saying, you know, one should be careful about what you're using it for. but in terms of understanding the problem, that astrobiology faces, this really broke it up in a useful way.

48:43We could talk about each one of these, but let's just look at excellent planets. Yeah. So that's a really interesting one. I think when you look back, you know, hundreds of years from now, what is in the 90s when they first detected the first? Yeah, 92 and 95. 95 to me was really, that was the discovery of the first planet orbiting a sunlight star. To me, that was the water, the dam being broken. I think that's like one of the greatest discoveries 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, it will obviously allow us to generalize across the entire galaxy, the entire universe.

49:28So if you can find life on A -plan, even in the solar system, you can now start generalizing across the entire universe. You can. Old you need is one, like right now, it's an, 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, you don't have to find all the other examples. You just know that it's happened more than once.

49:59And now you are, you know, in, from a Bayesian perspective, you can start thinking like, yeah, this life is not something that's hard to make. Well, let me get your sense of estimates for the Drake equation. You're also written a paper expanding on the Drake equation, but what do you think is the answer? So the paper, there was this paper we wrote, Woody Sullivan and I in 2016, where we said, look, we have all this exoplanet data now, right? So the thing that exoplanet science and the exoplanet census I was talking about before or have nailed is F sub P, the fraction of stars that have planets, it's one.

50:34Every fricking star that you see in the sky hosts a family of worlds. I mean, it's mind -boggling. Because every one of those, those are all places, right? They're either, you know, gas giants, probably with moons. So the moons are places you can stand and look out. Or they're like terrestrial worlds, where even if there's not life, there's still snow falling, and there's oceans washing up on, you know, on shorelines, It's incredible to think how many places and stories there are out there. So right, the first term was FCP, which is how many stars have planets. The next term is how many planets are in the habitable zone, right, on average.

51:11And it turns out to be one over five, right? So, you know, around .2. So that means you just count five of them. Go out at night and go one, two, three, four, five. One of them has an Earth -like planet, you know, in the habitable zone, like, whoa! So what defines a habitable zone? Habitable zone is an idea that was developed in the 1958 by the Chinese American astronomer Xu Shang. And it was a brilliant idea. It said, look, this is there. You know, I can do this simple calculation. If I take a planet and just stick it at some distance from a star of what's the temperature of the planet? What's the temperature of the surface?

51:47So now you're all you're going to ask, you give it a standard kind of, you know, earth -like atmosphere and ask, could there be liquid water on the surface? Right? We believe that liquid water is really important for life. There could be other things that's happening fine But you know if you were to start off trying to make life you 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 up 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's too close in So that's the formal definition of the habitable zone.

52:25So 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 do things too strict of a constraint. I would agree. We're talking about temperature where water can be on the surface. There's so many other ways to get a form mentioned turmoil where the temperature varies, whether it's volcanic, So interaction 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 hundred mile deep ocean under ten miles of ice, right?

53:08That's not in the habitable zone. That is outside the habitable zone And that may be the best place. It's got more water than Earth does all of its oceans are you know 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 wouldn't be able to see from across telescopic distances across light years. I wouldn't be able to see life on Europa because it's under 10 miles of ice, right?

53:40So, with the important thing about planets in the habitable zone is that we're thinking they have atmospheres, atmospheres are the things we can characterize for across 10, 50 light years, and we can see biosignatures as we're going to talk about. So there is a reason why the habitable zone becomes important for the detection of 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 not unreasonable to say. I mean, especially since the formal definition, you get one in five, right?

54:18One in five is a lot. There's a lot of stars in this guy. So, yeah, saying that in general, when I look at a star, there's a pretty good chance that there's something habitable orbiting it is not a unreasonable scientific claim. To me, it seems like there should be alien civilizations everywhere. Why the Fermi Paradox? Why haven't we seen them? Okay. The Fermi Paradox. Let's talk about the Fermi Paradox. Because there is no Fermi Paradox. Dun dun dun dun. Yeah, so the Fermi Paradox, let's talk about the Fermi Paradox and the history of it. So Enrico Fermi, it's 1950. He's walking with his friends at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab to the Cantina.

55:02And there had been this cartoon in the New Yorker. They all read the New Yorker. And the cartoon was trying to explain why there had been this rash of garbage cans being disappearing in New York. And this cartoon said, oh, it's UFOs. Because this is already, you know, it's 1950. The first big UFO craze happened in 47. So they were laughing about this as they're walking and they started being physicists started talking about interstellar travel interstellar propulsion bottle blah You know conversation goes on for while conversation turns to something else, you know They've gone to other things about 40 minutes later over lunch Fermi blurt's out.

55:35Well, where is everybody? Right typical Fermi sort of thing he'd done the calculation in his head and he suddenly realized that look if One if they're you know if intelligence is common that even traveling at sub light speeds a civilization could cross, you know, kind of hop from one star system to the other, and spread it out across the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years. Many realized this, and so he was like, why aren't they here now? And that was the beginning of the Fermi paradox. It actually got picked up as a formal thing in 1975 in a paper by Hart, where he actually kind of went through this calculation and showed and said, well, there's nobody here now, therefore there's nobody anywhere.

56:14That, you know. Okay, so that is what we will call the direct Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here now? But something happened where people after SETI began, where people started to, there was this idea of the great silence, people got this idea in their head that like, oh, we've been looking for decades now for signals of extraterrestrial intelligence. We haven't found any. Therefore, there's nothing out there. But that, so we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox. And there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look.

56:46There really, a setty was always done by researchers who were kind of like scab and some extra time from their other projects. So, you know, look a little bit at the sky with the telescope. Telescopes are expensive. So, Jason Wright, one of my collaborators, he and his students did a study where they looked at the entire search space for setty. 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 then they summed up all the steady searches that had ever been done. They went through the literature.

57:17And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean, and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at? And it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up, and there was no fish in it. And so now are we going to say, well, there's no fish in the ocean, right? So there is absolutely, positively, no indirect for me, Paris. We just haven't looked. But we're starting to look. So that's what's, you know, finally, we're starting to look. That's what's exciting. The direct Fermi paradox, there are so many ways out of that, right?

57:51There's a book called 77 Solutions to the Fermi paradox. That it just, you know, you can pick your favorite one. It just doesn't carry a lot of weight because there's so many ways around it. We did an actual simulation, my group, Johnson Carroll, one of my collaborators. We actually simulated the galaxy. And we simulated probes moving at sublight speed from one star to the other, gathering resources, heading to the next one. 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, heart was right, Fermi was right, that wave crosses very quickly.

58:30But 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, a hundred 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 hundred million years ago.

59:03And there was a paper that Gavin Schmidt and I did that showed that if there was a civilization, whether it was like dinosaurs or aliens that was here 100 million years ago, there's no way to tell. There's just, there's no record left over. The fossil record is too sparse. The only way maybe you could tell is by looking at the isotopic strata to see if there was anything reminiscent of an industrial civilization. But the idea that you know, you'd be able to find, you know, iPhones or toppled buildings after 100 million years is there's no way. So if there was an alien camp here, an alien village, a small civilization, maybe even large civilization.

59:41Even a large civilization, even if it was 100 million years ago. And it lasted 10 ,000 years, fossil records not going to have it. Yeah, yeah. The fossil record is too sparse, right? Most things don't fossilize. Yeah. And 10 ,000 years is a, you know, blink in the eye of theological time. So we call our Gavin called this the psilorian hypothesis. after the Doctor Who episode with the lizard creatures, the psilorians. And so that paper got a lot of press. But it was an important idea. I know it was really Gavin's. I was just helping with the astrobiology. That to recognize that like, yeah, we could have been visited a long time ago.

1:00:16There just would be no record. Yeah, it's kind of mind -blowing. It's really mind -blowing. And it's also a good reminder that we've been intelligent species have been here for a very short amount of time. very short amount of time. This is not to say that there was. So whenever I gave, I was on Joe Rogan for exactly this paper, and I had to always emphasize, we're not saying there was a cylorean, 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? It was a very beautifully scientific question. That's what we were really showing is that you really, unless you did a very specific kind of search, which nobody's done so far, there's not an obvious way to tell.

1:00:59that 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 how much guessing is going on, whether it's in South America, like what happened in the jungle? Yeah, like the Amazon, like the Amazon problem. That was, you know, the conquistures came and wiped everybody out, And especially just even the like the plague may have decimated So yeah, how much of that civilization and there's a lot of theories and you know because of archaeology Only looks at cities.

1:01:39They don't really know the origins of humans Yeah, and there's a there's a lot of really interesting theories in there of course controversial There's a lot of controversial people and every discipline but archaeology is like the fascinating one because we know so little They're basically storytellers. You're assembling the picture from just very few puzzle pieces. It's fascinating. It makes me, 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 indigenous peoples of North America, there could have been millions and millions.

1:02:17We get this idea that like, oh, you know, the Europeans came and it was empty, you know? But it was, it may have only been empty because the plague had swept up from the, you know, from the what happened in Mesoamerica So and you know, and they didn't really build cities, but they had they I mean they they didn't build wouldn't or stone cities They built wooden cities, you know, everybody seems to be building paramets and they're really damn good at it I don't know what happened with a parrot like what is why is that apply like what archetype in our brain is that? And it is also really interesting speaking of archetypes is that that independent civilizations formed, and they had a lot of similar kind of dynamics, like human nature when 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, it goes to the war, all this kind of stuff, independently, it just fascinating.

1:03:12Santa Fe Institute, the stuff that Santa Fe Institute does on this, as complex systems, the origin of hierarchies and such, very cool. Yeah, Santa Fe folks, complexity in general is really cool. Really cool. What phenomena emerge when a bunch of small things get together and interact? Going back to this paper, a new empirical constraint on the prevalence of technological species in the universe, this paper that expands on the Drake equation, what are some interesting things in this paper? Well, so the main thing we were trying to do with this paper is say, look, we have all of this exoplanet data, right?

1:03:45It's got to be good for something. especially since two of the terms that have been nailed down empirically are two terms in the Drake equation. So F sub P, that's the second term, fraction of stars that have planets, and then N sub E, the average number of planets in the habitable zone, those are the second and third term in the Drake equation. So what that means is all the astronomical terms have been nailed. And so we said like, okay, how do we use this to do something with the Drake equation? And so we realized is, Well, okay, we got to get rid of time. The lifetime thing, we can't say anything about that.

1:04:16But if we don't ask how long they last, but instead ask, what's the probability that there have been any civilizations at all, no matter how long they last? I'm not asking whether they exist now or not. I'm just asking in general, about probabilities to make a technological civilization anywhere and at any time in the history of the universe. And that we were able to constrain. And so what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that are those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're the only time that this whole process from, you know, a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.

1:05:09So therefore you could put a probability, we call it the pessimism line. We don't really know what nature sets for the probability of making intelligent civilizations. But we could set a limit using this. We could say, look, if the probability per habitable zone planet is less than 10 to the minus 22, 1 in 10 billion trillion, then yeah, we're alone. If it's anywhere larger than that, then we're not the first. It's happened somewhere else and to me that was an annoyed mind blowing doesn't tell me there's anybody nearby the galaxy could be sterile It just told me that like you know Unless nature's really against it has some bias against civilizations We're not the first time this has happened.

1:05:50This has happened elsewhere over the course of cosmic history 10 billion trillion Experiments yeah, that's a lot of experiments as a lot right a thousand is a lot. Yeah 100 is a lot Yeah. Yeah. If we normal human saw a hundred experiments and we knew that at least one time there was a successful human civilization built, I mean we would say for sure in a hundred you'll get another one. Yeah. So that's what I mean, that's why. So these kinds of arguments have to be careful of what they can do. But what it really, I felt like what this paper showed was that the burden of proof is now on the pessimists.

1:06:28Right? So that's what we call the pessimism line. There's been, throughout history, there's been alien pessimists and alien optimists. And they've been yelling at each other. That's all they had to go with, right? And with Jardin O 'Bruneau and 1600, they burned the guy at the stake for being an alien optimist. But nobody really knew what pessimism or optimism meant. We sort of thought this was like the plank length. This was sort of the plank length of astrobiology. It gave you an actual number that if you could somehow calculate what the probability of forming a technological civilization was.

1:06:59This thing sort of shows you where the limit is. As long as you're above 10 to the minus 22, then you actually, absolutely, it has occurred in the 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? Because 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, And you know, we don't know unless we look. And you know, you had Sarah walk around not too long ago.

1:07:33You know, she's very interested in origins of life. So, you know, lots of people are working on this. But I think it's hard looking at the history of the earth. You know, and again, this is you can do Bayesian arguments on this. But yeah, it's forming life, I don't think it's hard. Getting like basic biology started, I don't think it's hard. It's still wild, it's an amazing process. That actually I think requires some deep rethinking about how we conceptualize what life is and what life isn't. That's one of the things I like about Sarah's work. We're pursuing on a different level about the life as the only system that uses information.

1:08:11But still, regardless of all those kinds of details, life is probably easy to make. That's my gut feeling. Yeah, I mean, day by day this changes for me, but I just see that once you create bacteria, Yeah, it's off to the races. You're gonna get a complex life. 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 billion to spare. Yeah, a couple of years to spare. You know, there is a mystery there about why did it take so long, like with the Cambrian explosion, but that may be again about these windows, that like you couldn't happen until the window, the planet and the life had evolved together or enough that they together kind of opened the window for the next step.

1:08:59Intelligent life and how long intelligence, civil and technological civilizations, I think there's a big question about how long those last and how I'm hopeful, but in terms of just like, I think life is absolutely gonna be common in the, pretty common in the universe. Yeah, I think it's absolutely, I think, again, if I were to bet everything, even in advanced civilizations are common. So to me then, the only explanation is the L. Our galaxy is a graveyard of civilizations. Yeah, Keesu, you think about it. We've only been around, I mean, that's a tech lot, truly, when we think about in Drake's definition, you have to have radio telescopes.

1:09:40That's been a hundred years. And if we got another 10 ,000, 100 ,000 years of history, that would be for us, it would be pretty amazing, right? But that still, that wouldn't be long enough to really pop up the number of civilizations 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?

1:10:16Yeah, like how do you even simulate the trajectories that civilizations can take across that kind of time scale? When we all the data would 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 know what you put it at but maybe a hundred 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 that I think that's really a frontier So you had David Kipping on not too long ago. And David and I did a paper and Caleb Sharf, David really drove this, where we, you know, it was a Bayesian calculation to sort of ask the question, if you were to find a detection, if you were to find a signal or a techno signature, would that come from a civilization that was younger your age or older?

1:11:03And 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, I'm probably much older. So I mean, you really do need to think about like, okay, how do billion -year civilizations manifest themselves? What signatures will they leave? And yeah, can you even, I mean, what's so cool about it? It's so much fun because you gotta, like you have to imagine the unimaginable. Like, would you still, I mean, obviously, biological evolution can happen on, you know, on those kinds of timescales.

1:11:34So you wouldn't even really be the same thing you started out as, but social forms. What kind of social forms can you imagine and that would be continuous over that. Or maybe they wouldn't be continued. You should get they drop out, they destroy themselves and they come back. So maybe it's a punk -weighted evolution. But we gotta sort of, this is the fun part. We have to sort of work this out. 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 optocardish have scale, what are the ways you can avoid destroying yourself?

1:12:14Just achieve stability while still growing. And 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. So, you know, our group has used agent -based modeling to do something like the Fermi -Parrot Ox, that was agent -based modeling. But you can also do this. People at Santa Fe have done this, other groups have done this. to do use agent -based modeling to track the formation of hierarchies, the formation of stable hierarchies. So I think it's actually very doable, but understanding the assumptions and principles that are going into it, and what you can extract from those, that is what is sort of the frontier.

1:12:56Do you think if humans colonize Mars, the dynamic between the civilization on Earth and Mars Mars will be fundamentally different than the dynamic between individual nations on Earth right now. That's the thing to load into the agent -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 we have two million people, the moment we have one million people, there's going to be two tribes. And then they're going to start fighting. Right. And the question is interplanetary fighting.

1:13:33How quickly does that happen? And does it have a different nature to it? Uh, you know, are you a fan of the expanse? Do you have you watched the expanse? Great show because it's all about the highly recommend to everybody. It's based on 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, The journal was it, foreign affairs said the best show on TV about politics. It takes place is interplanetary.

1:14:07So yeah, I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict. 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 look at based on, because I was wanted to know about whether Another idea in the expanse was really possible. In the expanse, the asteroid belt, what they've done is they have colonized the asteroid belt by hollowing out the asteroids and spinning them up and living on the inside.

1:14:37They have the Coriolis force. And I thought, wow, what a cool idea. And when I ran the blog for NPR, actually talked to the guys and said, did you guys calculate this, see if whether it's possible? Sadly, it's not possible. The rock is just not strong enough that if you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one third gravity, which is what I think the minimum you need for human beings. The rock would just fall apart, it would break. But we came up with another idea, which was that if you could take 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, you could get like Manhattan's worth of material inside.

1:15:18So 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 eating most of them will be in space habitats versus on Mars on the planetary service I you know, it's a lot easier on some on some level right depends on how what like with nanophappocation and such But you know getting down a gravity well is hard right? So, 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.

1:15:53But we'll probably do both. I mean, I think what will happen is, oh, you know, the next, should we make it through climate change in nuclear war and all the other, and AI? The next thousand years of human history is the solar system, right? And so, you know, I think we'll settle every nook and cranny we possibly can. And it's, you know, it's a beautiful, what I love about what's hopeful about it is this idea you're going to have all of these pockets. And you know, I'm sure there's going to be a Mormon space habitat, like, you know, there's going to be whatever you want, libertarian space habitat.

1:16:23Everybody's going to be able to kind of create there, there'll be lots of experiments in human flourishing. And those kinds of experiments will be really useful for us to sort of figure out better ways for us to interact and have maximum flourishing, maximum wellness, maximum democracy, maximum freedom. Do you think that's a good backup solution to go out into space, sort of 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, like I said, it's centuries that we're talking about. So, you know, the problem with climate change, you know, and same with nuclear war, it's breathing down our necks now.

1:16:58So it's not a, you know, trying to establish a base on Mars is going to be so hard that it is not even going to be close to being self -sufficient for a couple of, you know, a century at least. So it's not like a backup plan now. We have to solve the problem of climate change. We have to deal with that. There's still enough nuclear weapons to really do our horrific things to the planet for human beings. So I don't think it's like a backup plan in that way, but I do think like I said, it's the prize. It's, if we get through this, then we get the entire solar system to sort of play around in an experiment with and do really cool things with.

1:17:35Well, I think it could be a lot less than a couple of centuries if there's urgency, like a real urgency, Like a catastrophe, like maybe a small nuclear war breaks out where it's like holy shit. This is for sure for sure a big O1 is looming. Yeah. 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 be that story. Yeah. I think my only dilemma with that is that I just think that a bit a self -sufficient base is so far away that like say you start doing that and then there is a full scale nuclear exchange.

1:18:15That basis, you know, that's not going to last because it's just, you know, the self -sufficiency requires a kind of economy, like literally a material economy that we are so far from with Mars, that we are centuries from. Like I said, you know, three centuries, which is not that long, two to three centuries, you know, look at 1820, nobody had traveled faster than 60 miles an hour unless they were falling off a cliff, right? And now we routinely travel at 500 miles an hour, but it is sort of centuries long. So that's why I think we'd be better off trying to solve these problems. Then, you know, I just think the odds that we're going to be able to create a self -sufficient colony on Mars before that threat comes to head is small.

1:18:57So we have to deal with the threat. Yes, an interesting scientific and engineering question of how to create a self -sufficient colony on Mars or out in spaces, 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? A space habitat, you know, would have to be as robust as an ecosystem, as the kind of thing, you know, you got to see a pond with all the different webs of interactions. You know, that's why I always think that, you know, if this process of going out in the space is actually will help us with climate change and with thinking about making long -term sustainable version of human civilization.

1:19:38Because you really have to think about these webs, that the complexity of these webs and recognize the biosphere has been doing this forever. The biosphere knows how to do this, right? And so A, how do we support, how do we build a vibrant, powerful technosphere that also doesn't mess with the biosphere, the mess with the biosphere's capacity to support our technosphere. So, you know, by doing this, by trying to build space habitats in some sense, you're thinking about building a small scale version of this. So I think the two problems are gonna kind of feed back on each other. Well, there's also the other possibility of, like, the movie, Derenar and Oski's postcard from Earth, where we can create this kind of life -gun that just shoots, It's supposed to engineering everything, basically seeding life on a bunch of places and letting life do its thing, which is really good at doing.

1:20:29It seems like, so it's supposed to, with a space habit, you basically have to build the entire biosphere and technosphere, the whole thing by yourself. You know, if you just, hey, the aforementioned cockroach with some bacteria, place it in Europa, I think it'd be a surprise what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Like honestly, if you put a huge amount of bacteria, like a giant number of organisms from Earth into on Mars on some of these moons of the other planets in the solar system, do you think like, I feel like some of them would actually find a way to survive. I, you know, the moon is hard because the moon is just like, there's no, you know, the moon may be really hard.

1:21:13But you know, that'd be, I mean, I wonder, or somebody's must have done these experiments, right? Because we know they're extreme of files, 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, It's 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.

1:21:54I think the moon's too much because it's so sterile. But you know, Mars, I don't know, maybe. I don't know. We'd have to, but it's an interesting idea. I wonder if somebody has done those experiments. Yeah, I mean, you think somebody would like, let's take a bunch of micro. The harsh, the, take the harshest possible condition, all different kinds, temperature, all this kind of stuff. Right, pressure, salinity, and then just dump a bunch of things that are not used to it. And then just see, does everybody just die? That's it. The thing about life, it flourishes in a non -sterile environment where there's a bunch of options for resources, even if the condition is super harsh.

1:22:27In the lab, I don't know if you can reconstruct harsh conditions plus options for survival. You know what I mean? was available on a planet somehow, even when it's a super harsh condition. So that's actually not a trivial experiment. And I wouldn't even, if somebody did that experiment in the lab, I'd be a little bit skeptical. Because I could see bacteria doesn't survive in this kind of temperature. But then I'm building that. I don't know. You'd play. Is there enough right? Is there other options like, you know, I think, is the condition rich enough? Rich enough, yeah. There's an alternative view, though, which is there's this great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called Aurora.

1:23:12There's been a million century ship stories. Earth sends out a generation ship or a century ship and it goes to another planet and they land and they colonize. On this one, they get all the way there and they think it's going to be habitable. It turns out that it's not habitable for earth life. There's bacteria or prions actually, super, that just kill people in this simplest way. And the important thing about this book was the idea that life is actually very tied to its planet. It may not be so easy. I just thought it was a really interesting idea. I'm not saying that I'm sorry, supporting it, but that actually reflects the planetary conditions.

1:23:50They're not the planetary, the planet itself, the whole lineage, the whole history of the biosphere. And it may not be so easy to just sort of be like, oh, just drop it over here at all. Because the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, and they kind to believe this, the true unit of life. It's not DNA, it's not a cell. It's the biosphere. It's the whole immunity. 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 that has a biosphere, maybe a technosphere, what is the way to integrate without killing yourself or the other one?

1:24:30or the other one, let's stick to biology. That's an interesting question. I don't know if we have a rigorous way of investigating that. Because everybody, everything on life has the same lineage. We all come from Luca, the last universal common answer. And what you see is often in science fiction people will do things like, oh, well, it's okay because that metabolism, that biochemistry, 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 it instantly, you know, the nose bleeds and you're dead.

1:25:05It's so it's unfortunate. I think it's the latter. Yeah, it sort of feels like it's a more 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 setting. I have to put on my scientists hat and just say, my gut feeling is that dumb life, so to speak is common. and I am a little agnostic about, I can see ways in which intelligent civilizations may be sparse, but until you know, we gotta go look, it's all armchair, armchair, stride. That's from a sort of rigorous scientific perspective.

1:25:41From my broad science perspective, it seems again, smoking the aforementioned weed. After the bonnet, it's, I mean honestly, it's really just impossible to me that there's not, 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 when we went out there, we'd find a lot of extinct civilizations. Extinct civilizations. Yeah, apex predators don't survive. Like they get better, better, better, better, and they die. Kill themselves all somehow. Anyway, so just how do we find them?

1:26:20Yeah, so SETI, search for extraterrestrial technology, is a term that I am not fond of using anymore. I mean, some people in my field are, so I'm sorry, folks. But I'm really, what I really like is the idea of techno signatures, because I think, to me, SETI is the, first of all, intelligence. We're not really looking for intelligence. We're looking for technology, you know. And SETI, the classic idea, SETI is the radio telescopes, you know, in contact, Jody Foster with the headphones. That whole thing is still part. It's still active. There's still great things going on with it, but suddenly this whole new window opened up when we discovered Exoplanets we now found a new way to look for intelligent civilizations or life in general in a way that doesn't have any 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.

1:27:11You really needed that with the classic model for a bunch of different reasons. You had to assume they wanted to be found and they were sending you a super powerful beacon. Now, because we know exactly where to look, and we know exactly how to look, we can just go about looking for passive signatures of the civilization, going about its civilization in business, you know, without asking whether they want to be contacted or not. So this is what we call a biosignature or a techno signature. It is an imprint in the light from the planet of the activity of a biosphere or a technosphere. And that's really important.

1:27:48Yeah, that is why kind of the whole guy idea ends up being astrobiological. That biosphere and techno spheres are so potent, they change the entire planet and you can see that from 20 light years. So let's give an example of a bio signature to start off with, which would be a signature of a bio sphere oxygen, right? And on Earth at least we know that oxygen is only in the atmosphere because life put it there. If life went away, the oxygen, and particularly oxygen and methane, that pair, they would disappear, you know, very quickly. They'd react away, they'd all be gone. So if you find a planet with oxygen and methane, that's a good bet that there's a biosphere there.

1:28:29Okay, what about techno spheres? Technosphere is, this is what, you know, so I'm the principal investigator on the first grant, NASA has ever given to do these kind of exoplanet techno signatures. NASA was kind of, for reasons we We can talk about NASA, had gotten pretty gun shy about funding anything about intelligent life. What's an example of a techno signature? 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. We dumped a huge amount of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere by mistake.

1:29:02It was affecting the ozone. We put so much in there that actually this is one of the things we did. We did a paper where we showed you could detect it across interstellar distances. You could look at the atmosphere, look at the light coming from a distant planet, pass the light through a spectrograph and see the spectral lines, the fingerprint, the spectral fingerprint of chlorofluorocarbons in an atmosphere. And that would for sure tell you that that word, there was a technological civilization there, because there's no other way to make chlorofluorocarbons except through some kind of industrial process.

1:29:35So you're looking for, in the case of the biosphere, you're looking for anomalies in the special graph. I wouldn't necessarily call these anomalies. I'm looking for things that, for biosignature, I'm looking for things that a geosphere, right? Yeah, they're just rock and air wouldn't produce on its own. What kind of chemicals would life produce? Right, and 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 say, look, oxygen, we know there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere if it wasn't for dimethyl sulfide, which is a compound that the phylo plankton dump into the atmosphere, a lot of it.

1:30:08that's sometimes mentioned. And there was even, there was a paper that somebody wrote where I was like, well, we're not saying we see it, but there's a bunch of noise in this spectra right there. So there's a whole list of things that Earth has done that are in the atmosphere that might be biosignatures. But now we're reaching an interesting point. The field has matured to the point where we can start asking about agnostic biosignatures, things that have nothing to do with Earth's history. But we think that would still be indications of this weirdness we call life, right? What is it in general that life does that leaves an imprint?

1:30:44So 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, then just rock and water, right? So there's been some proposals for networked, you know, biosignatures. Information theory, you can use, you can try and look at the information that is in the different compounds that are you find in the atmosphere. And maybe that information shows you're like, oh, there's too much information here. There must have been biology happening. It's not just rock. Same thing for technosignatures as well.

1:31:22So how do you detect technosignatures? Okay, so with technosignatures, I gave the example of chloro -phorocharmine. So that would be an example of, and again, that one is a non -agnostic one, because we sort of like, oh, we produced chloro -phorocharmines. Maybe they will, right? And there's solar panels, right? You can actually, the glint off of solar panels will produce the way the light is reflected off of solar panels, whether, no matter what it's made out of actually. There was a paper that, Manazui Lingam and Avi Loeb did in, I think it was 2017, we've just followed up on it. That actually could act as a techno signature.

1:31:56You'd be able to see in the reflected light this sort of big jump that would occur because of city lights, city artificial illumination. And if there's really like large scale cities, like Coruscant and Star Wars or Trent or in the foundation, those city lights would be detectable, the spectral imprint of those across 20, 30 light years. So 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 interstellar distances.

1:32:37And 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 see it. Yeah, if you looked at Earth at night from a distance where it looked at its spectra and you had sensitive enough instruments, you'd be able to see all the sodium lights and the reflected light off of, you know, they bounce off the ground, right? The light bounces off the ground. So you'd convolve the sodium lamps with the reflected spectre from the ground. And yeah, you'd be able to see that there's city lights.

1:33:09Now, increase that by a factor of a thousand, if you had a trantor, and you'd be able to detect that across interstellar d 'ances. Thomas Beady, did this work? Who's now working with us? What do you think is the most detectable thing about earth? Wow, this is fun. We just have a Sophia Shift, who is 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 earth cloud.

1:33:43But actually, it is our radio signatures. Still, that is still most detectable. By the way, when you said you had to be pretty close and then you said the earth cloud, that's not very close. But you mean like from an interstellar distance? Interstellar distance. Because the real quick, you know, we really want to know, is like, I'm sitting here on earth, I'm looking at these exoplanets. The nearest star is four light years away. So that's like the minimum distance. So if I'm looking at exoplanets, what kind of signals could I say? What is the tech to well about Earth with our current technology from the near solar system?

1:34:13Oh my god, there's all kinds of stuff. Well, like the chloro -flora carbons, you can see Earth's pollution. And I think city lights you had to be 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 things, let's talk about direct imaging for a moment, because I just have to go on. This is such a cool idea, right? So what we really want, and the next generation of space telescopes, and such, is we're trying to do direct imaging. We're trying to get, you know, an image of a planet separated from its star to be able to see the reflected light or the actual emission from the planet itself.

1:34:48Yeah, but I just clarified, direct imaging means literally like a picture. A picture. But the problem is, is that even with the, the, the, the, the, the thing that's going to come after JWST, It's going to be a pixel, right? You're not going to get any kind of resolution. You'll be able to get the light from it, which you'll be able to pass through a spectrograph, but you're not going to be able to take a picture. But there is this idea called the solar gravity lens telescope. I think that's what it is. And the idea is insane, right? So their general relativity says, look, massive bodies distort space.

1:35:16They actually curve space time. So the sun is a massive body. And so that means that the light passing through the sun gets focused like a lens, right? So the idea is to send a bunch of telescopes out kind of into the art cloud and then look back towards the sun towards an exoplanet that is behind not directly behind the sun but is you know in the direction of the sun and then let the let the sun act like a lens and collect focus the light onto the telescope and you would be able to get and they've done I get what's amazing like they've already this idea is insane They'd be able to get if everything works out 24 kilometer or resolution.

1:35:55You'd be able to see Manhattan on a Excel planet. And this thing, it sounds insane, but actually, you know, Nath, they've already got the team, has already gotten through like sort of three levels of NASA, you know, there's the NASA program for like, give us your wackiest idea, right? And then the ones that survived 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 art cloud would unrelatively fast timescales.

1:36:25You need to be about 500 times as far from the sun as Earth is. But right now everything looks, the idea seems to hold together. So probably when I'll be dead, but when you're an old man, it's possible that something like this, could you imagine having, like, yeah, that kind of resolution, a picture of an exoplanet down to, you know, kilometers. So I'm very excited about that. I can only imagine having a picture like that and then there's some mysterious artifacts that you're saying. Yeah. I mean, it's both inspiring and almost heartbreaking that we can see. I think we'll be able to see a civilization where there's a lot of scientists to agree that this is very likely something, and then we can't.

1:37:13We can't get there. But you know, I mean, again, this is the thing about being a long lived. We've got to get to the point where we're long lived enough that, so let's say we found, like this is why 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'd big, bigger telescope to try and do those imaging, right? And then the next thing after that, we plan a mission there, right?

1:37:41There's, there we would figure out like, would breakthrough, breakthrough star shot. There was this idea of trying to use giant lasers to propel small space crafts, light sales, almost to the speed of light. So they would get there in 10 years and take pictures. So if we actually made this discovery, there would be the impulse, there would be the effort to actually try and send something to get there. Now, we probably couldn't land, we could, but maybe we'd take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, You know what I mean?

1:38:18So it becomes now this multi -generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals, right? They 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 wrecking, 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.

1:38:46to 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. I was really skeptical. I was like, okay guys, We only got one shot for this incredibly complicated piece of hardware to unfold.

1:39:21So what kind of stuff can we see with it? I've been just looking through different kinds of announcements that have been detected. There's been some direct imaging. Yes, like a single pixel. The kinds of exoplanes were able to direct image. I guess we'd have to be hot. Usually far away from the, you know, reasonably far away from the store. I think, you know, JWST is really kind of at the hair edge of being able to do much with this. What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there's not sexy pictures. It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line.

1:39:51But be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That's where we are right now. In order to look for life, we're going to be, we need to find planets with atmospheres, right? And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere. Is there carbon? Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that's the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K218B, 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 high sea in world, high sea in meaning hydrogen ocean world.

1:40:33And that is a kind of planet that it would be a, you know, kind of in the super -earth sub -neptune domain we were talking about. You know, maybe eight times that mass of the earth, but it's got a layer of hydrogen, an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water. You can get a giant ocean of liquid water. And that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habitable, you know, there could be a 60 degree worm 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 could be a high sea in the world.

1:41:18And it's 120 light years away from Earth. Yeah. And so it's not amazing, 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, like, oh, look, methane, methane was a five sigma detection. Like you knew that the data were so good that it was like the gold standard of science. What about detecting maybe to direct imaging or in other ways, megastructures that the civilization's built? You know what's great about megastructures? Is, first of all, it's fun to say. Who doesn't want to say megastructure? Alien megastructure, right? Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that.

1:41:55So the the the the the Err example of this is the Dyson sphere, right? Which is amazing because you know was literally 1960 that this idea came up Can you explain the Dyson? Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, you know one of the greatest physicists ever Who had was very broad -minded and thought about a lot of different things he recognized that you know when a civilization A civilization's progress what they're gonna need is ever more energy to do ever more you know amazing things and what's the best energy source in a solar system? them, it's the star, right? So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines, and the limit of this would actually be able to sphere an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside, you could capture every photon to star produced, which is, you know, this insane amount of light you would have enough power now to do anything to reengineer your solar system.

1:42:47So that was a Dyson sphere. It turns out that a Dyson sphere doesn't really work because it's unstable. But a Dyson swarm is, and that's really what he meant. This large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light. Yeah, so he didn't actually mean a rigid sphere structure. He basically meant a swarm. So, like you said, an element basically starts to look like a sphere. People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere. And we actually almost thought we might have found one of these back with Bajoyan 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 star lights 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 were like it was like this little dragons tooth and then there'd be another one and another one and another one and then nothing and then three more and And in the paper that was written about this, they suggested they, you know, they went through the list of, oh, it could be comments, could be trunks of a broken up planet.

1:43:47And it could also be an alien mega structure. And of course, the news picked up on this and like everybody's, you know, news feed the next day, alien mega structures discovered. Turns out, sadly, they were not alien mega structures. They were probably like guests or dust clouds. But it raised the possibility like, oh, these are observable. And people have worked out the details of what they would look like. You don't really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? they're big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they're going to produce a little blip of light because that's what they're supposed to, right?

1:44:14They're absorbing star light. So people did have worked out like, well, a square one or a triangular one. But if that wouldn't be a decimal sphere, there 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 signal, transit signal. Yeah, one you wouldn't expect from a star that doesn't have anything. Exactly.

1:44:42Or just a planet, right? Or a couple of planets. There'd be so many of these that it would be like, BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP And that usually doesn't happen in a star system because there's only just a handful of planets. That's exactly what it is. Everything's coag, you know, an unstable solar system, you get a handful of planets, you know, five, ten, that's it, probably, and nothing else. So if now suddenly you see all the planets lots of these little micro -transits. You're telling me there's something else that's big enough to create a transit, but too many of them, and also within a regular shape, the transit itself, that these could be megastructures.

1:45:18How many people are looking for megastructures now? Well, the main groups looking for megastructures are again, Jason Wright at Penn State and collaborators. The way they're looking for it, though, is for infrared light, because the second law of thermodynamics He makes us look, if you capture all of this starlight, you're gonna warm up the, you know, your thing's gonna warm up and emit an infrared. You're gonna be waste heat, waste heat and waste light from this. That feels like a louder, clear way to deduct it. Right, and that's actually, you know, Dyson, that's actually why Dyson proposed it.

1:45:51He wasn't really proposing it because like he was saying, this is what civilizations are gonna do. He proposed it because he was like, oh, we wanna start looking for alien civilizations. Here's something that would have a detectable signature. So Jason and company have done pretty good searches. And recently they made news because, you know, they were able to eliminate a lot of places, no, these are not die -scissors -fares, but they did have a couple that were like anomalous enough that they're like, well, this is kind of what it would look like. It's not a detection. And they were saying they would never say it's a detection, but they were like, they were not non -detections.

1:46:23And they're potential candidates. But they still candidates, yeah. Love it. We have megastructures candidates. That's inspiring. What other megastructures do you think that could be? I mean, so that's that's fears about capturing the energy of a star. Yeah. There could be other. Well, there's something called the Clark belt, right? So we have a bunch of satellites that are in geosynchronous orbit. Nothing naturally is going to end up in geosynchronous orbit, right? Geosynchronous orbit is one particular orbit that's really useful if you want to beam things straight down or if you want to put a space elevator up, right?

1:46:55So there's this idea that if you know a civilization becomes, you know, advanced enough that it's It's really using Geosynchronous orbit that you actually get a belt, something that would actually be detectable from a distance via a transit. 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 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'd have a Clark belt And the question is whether or not it's detectable.

1:47:35Yeah, probably Dyson spheres the that's the more exciting That's the go -to one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, speaking of the Dyson sphere. Let's talk to the Kardashev skills right What is the Kardashev scale and where are humans on it? Right? So the Kardashev scale was the same time this is this golden age of SETI like kind of like 60 59 to 65 when it just starts. Like this is, you know, Frank Drake has done his first experiment. People are like, oh my god, this is even possible. And so people are just 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.

1:48:10So Kardashev comes up with this idea that look, if we're, again, it's always about detectability, if we're looking for civilizations, we should think about what are the state, what are the natural stages, natural, in quotes, that a civilization goes through. And he was thinking in terms of energy use, which is like a good physicist. So the, he said, look, the first hurdle in terms of energy 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 starlight that falls on your planet you're using for your own ends.

1:48:48The next would be to use all the starlight there There is from that star, right? So that's the Dyson Swayer. So he actually Dyson had already proposed his idea of the swarm and Carter chef was picking out. So that's a type two civilization. Type three is Galactic Scale, a civilization that could use all the starlight in a galaxy. So we are now, where are we now? Remarkably on a log scale, we're at point seven of a type one. So we're not even type one? No, no, no, we're not even type one. But according to there was a paper written by a group that said, you know, okay, we continue on our path. We'll be at a type one at around 2300 2300.

1:49:26Yeah. So this is on a log scale. So, uh, point seven. So type one is about 10 to the 16th watts. Type two is 10 orders and 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 a hundred billion star of order, a hundred billion stars. So that's a lot. That's a lot energy. Do you think humans ever get to type one? I think there's a problem with type one, which is that 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?

1:50:06And that's something that Carter Chef couldn't have recognized. When you, you know, there's the first law of thermodynamics, right, which is just about energy, you know, the different forms of energy, then there's the second law, which is about when you use that energy. 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, a 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.

1:50:39So that second law tells you that, you can only use so much energy before the climate state is like, uh -oh, you know, sorry, is gonna 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 gonna have to figure out, the most important thing actually here is probably, this is why space becomes so the colonization or settlement of space. If we have an idea that we've been working on for a while called service worlds, right? that at some point you probably move a lot of your industry off -world, right? We've got mercury, for example.

1:51:14There's nothing on mercury. There's no life on mercury. Why don't you put your energy harvesting there, right? Because you can't mess with the biosphere. The biosphere is more powerful than you are, right? And so, yeah, so there's limits to how much energy we can harvest to do work on the earth without really adversely affecting the biosphere. It does seem that the best response to the climate change is not to use less technology but to invent better technology and to invent technology that avoids the destructive effects. This is the frontier we are and that was the topic of my last book, Light of the Stars.

1:51:52It's like you've got, you have to do the astrobiology of the Anthropocene. You have to see the transition that we're going through now of the Anthropocene on a kind of planetary astrobiological framework. And you know, that paper we were talking about with 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 do you go through an anthropo? How, you know, does every civil, is that technological civilization trigger its own planetary crisis, its own climate, anthropocene crisis. And the answer we actually came up from doing models was like, yeah, probably.

1:52:24And 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 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 not going to do it on, on world. So how do we detect alien type 1, 2, and 3 civilizations?

1:53:02So we've been kind of talking about basically type 1 civilization detection. Yeah. Right. Maybe with the Dyson Sphere, you start to get a little bit more type 2. But it feels like if you have a type 2 civilization, it won't be just a Dyson Sphere. Right. It feels like that just for the same reason you mentioned, climate change, but now at the star system level, they're probably expanding, right? So how would you detect a type two? How about propulsion plumes, right? If you're expanding, no, no, we just, I literally just put in a NASA proposal now. Thomas Beatty, who's joined us from the East at the University of Wisconsin, has an idea to look for plumes, right?

1:53:46If you have a solar system -wide civilization, right? And you got space truckers going back and forth, right? You know, for Mars, they're doing the insettilist run. They're accelerating and decelerating the whole way there, right? If you want to get to Mars in a couple of weeks, you have your fusion drive on the entire way out there. You flip and burn and have it on, you know, so you're also always have gravity. You have thrust gravity. So would those plumes be detectable? Because now you've got spaceships going all over the place. And the odds that like, you know, the plume is going to cross your field of view becomes, could become pretty high.

1:54:21So yeah, that's, I think that's a good way of looking for, that's one idea of looking for you know, large -scale interplanetary, which is kind of like when you're getting to a type type two. Another possibility is looking for the tailings of asteroid mining. This was an idea. It was a group at Harvard's Smithsonian that you know to be able to look for if you're really chewing up asteroids to build space habitats can, you know, there'd be dust particles left around. And would they look different from just say, the dust, you know, from just regular collisions? So pollution of all different kinds.

1:54:56Pollution 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 biosignatures for billions of years. A species like us looking at our level, looking at Earth would have been able to know that Earth had life on it, had a biosphere for billions of years. So maybe somebody sent something by, you know, a half a billion years ago.

1:55:31So this idea of looking, say, at the moon for artifacts is that have been there for a long time. It's something that people, a number of people are doing. We're just working on a paper where we just calculated,

1:55:46this was would the lunar lander exist on the moon before micro -media rights just chewed it down, right? How long would you be able to land on the moon and go, oh, look, there's, you know, there's somebody who was here and left some debris. So there's this process called gardening, which is just the micro -media right, constant rain of micro -media rights. And that's 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 or longer, will be visible.

1:56:18Oh, so we should be able to find artifacts. Yeah, if there are artifacts on it. And people have proposed doing this with artificial intelligence. 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 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.

1:56:51I mean, the whole task of looking for an omelie, something that looks not like the lunar surface, you make it sound obvious, but it's not exactly obvious. An omelie is really not, I mean, detect something that doesn't look right about the serum. Yeah. It's actually really difficult. Really difficult. It's really difficult. And it's really cool. It's a really information and theoretic kind of proposal. You really have to use information theory to say like, what's the background? What's, you know, well, how do I define something that I can say that looks weird? So. Yeah, maybe when you look in a spectrograph or something, like, it's still, it's still like, it's gonna look really weird potentially.

1:57:31Like we're kind of, we're kind of hypothesizing all the things that humans would build. Right. And how do we detect that? But there could be really weird stuff. That's why there's this emphasis now on these agnostic signatures. So actually, disequilibrium is a nice one. One way to define life is it is a system that is far from equilibrium. It's alive. Because as soon as it dies, it turns into, it goes back to equilibrium. And so you can look at 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.

1:58:01But the degree of disequilibrium, the degree to which they show that that atmosphere has not, the chemicals have not all kind of like just gone down to it, they've all reacted away to an equilibrium state. You can actually tell that in very general ways using what's called the Gibbs free energy. That's a signature. If you see an atmosphere that is wildly out of equilibrium, that indicates that there's something happening on that planet, biosphere or technosphere that is pumping gases into the atmosphere that is keeping the whole system from relaxing. So is it possible we can detect anomalies in space time?

1:58:41Well, you could detect, and there's been some work on this, like with the accubray drive, you know, these proposals for warp drives. And we can talk about that later, I'm skeptical of those, but because it may really be possible, you just can't go fast on the speed of light. But people have done work on like, you know, what would be the signature of an accubray drive? What would be the signature? You're like, you know, could you detect if you're using a drive like that, then you certainly are distorting space time, which means any light that's passing by has gotten, you know, its trajectory has gotten altered because it had to pass through the distorted space time.

1:59:15So yeah, there are possibilities along with that. You know, one of the funny things, I don't know if they've gotten past this, but somebody calculated the problem with the Acubre drive, where this warp drive, was that if you dropped out of warp, there would be this spray of gamma rays that would like sterilize any planet in front of you. So it's like, well, yeah, you probably don't want to do that, but that would be a great BIOS or techno signature. Another planet obliterated. So you think it's not possible to travel fast in this piece of land? I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that. But what I think, you know, if you look at the physics, we understand, right?

1:59:45Yeah. Every possibility for faster than light travel really relies on something that doesn't exist, right? So, so, you know, the cool thing is Einstein's field equations. You can actually play with them. The equations are right there. You can add things to the, you know, right or left -hand side that allow you to get something like the accubray drive. That was a metric that I'll show you. Like, oh, it's a warped bubble. It's a warping of space time that moves through space time faster than the speed of light, right? Because nothing can move across space time faster than the speed of light. But space time itself can move faster than the speed of light.

2:00:24But 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, It's something called 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 it's a nice fiction, but really right now, we live in this weird moment in history of the great acceleration where like the technology we use now is completely different from the technology we used 10 years ago is remarkably different from the technology from 100 years ago. But I remember playing Assassin's Creed, where everybody's like, what is it?

2:01:07It's 1200 and everybody's like, stab, stab, stab. And I was like, yes, it's a great game. And then I got Assassin's Creed 2. And it was 300 years later. And everybody's like, stab, stab, stab. And it was like 300 years. And the technology hadn't changed. And that was actually true for most of human history. You used your great grandfather's tools because there was no need to have any other new tools. And you probably did his job. So, you know, we could be fooled into thinking like, oh, you know, technology is just gonna go on forever. We're always gonna find new advances as opposed to sometimes things just flatten out for a long time.

2:01:41So 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 Eric Weissine often talks about we under invest in theoretical physics research. Basically, we're trying too hard for traditional chemical propulsion on rockets versus trying to hack physics, sort of warp drives and so on. Because it's really hard to do space travel. And it seems like in the long arc of human history if we survive, the way to really travel, cross long distances, is going to be some new, totally new thing.

2:02:30Right. Right. So it's not going to be an engineering problem. It's going to be a physics problem. A fundamental physics problem. A fundamental physics problem. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that imprincible, but I think there's been, you know, I mean, there's a lot of ideas out there. People, you know, string theory, people have been playing with string theory now for 40 years. It's not like people haven't been, not like there hasn't been a lot of effort. And again, I'm not gonna predict. I think it's entirely possible that we have, there's incredible boundaries of physics that have yet to be poked through.

2:03:00In which case then, all bets are off, right? Once you get sort of, interstellar, fast interstellar travel, whoa, who knows what can happen. But I tend to be drawn to science fiction stories that take the speed of light seriously. Like what kind of civilization can you build? Where it takes 50 years to get to where you're going, and a 50 years back. So I don't know, I mean, yeah, there's no way I'm going to say that we won't get warp drives. But as of right now, it's all fictional. 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 time and maybe as dark as to say, but the value of an individual human life versus the value of life from the perspective of generations.

2:03:50So you can have something like a generational shift that travels for hundreds of thousands of years. And you're not sad that you'll never see the destination because you have the value for the prolonged survival of humanity versus your own individual life. It's a wild ethical question, isn't it? One of the book I've told you about Aurora. It was such a sort of inversion of the usual. because 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 life is particular to their planets.

2:04:31So they turn around and they come back. And then when they land, the main character goes, but there's still people who are arguing for more generation ships and she goes and she punches the guy out, because she spent her whole life in a tube. With this, I thought that was a really interesting inversion. You know, the interesting thing about, about we were talking about the space habitats. But if you really had a space habit, not some super cramped, crappy, usual version of a sentry ship, but if you had these like space habitats that were really like the O 'Neill cylinders, they're actually pretty nice places to live, put a thruster on those, you know?

2:05:02Like why keep them in the solar system? Maybe that's maybe space is full of like these sort of traveling space habitats that are in some sense a, you know, they're worlds in and of themselves. There's the show Silo, which raises the question of basically, If you're putting on a generational ship, what do you tell the inhabitants of that ship? You might want to lie to them. Yeah. You might want to tell them a story 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? I mean, that's a fascinating tactical question, the social question, the psychology question.

2:05:41You know, the generation ship too, and you know, I was talking about in the book, the of also the, you know, you talked about extending human lifetimes or, you know, the stasis, the cryostasis, which is a mainstay of science fiction, you know, that, you know, right, you can be put to, you can basically put in suspended animation and such. None of these things we know are possible. But you know, it's so interesting. 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 cryogenics.

2:06:09Yeah, where are we at with that? Yeah, I wonder what the state of the art is for complex organism community. How long can you freeze and then unfreeze? Maybe like with bacteria, you could do freeze and freeze. Oh, bacteria can last. This is the thing about pan spermia, right, Pect? How long can a bacteria survive in a rock that's been blasted? If there's a common impact across interstellar distances, that does seem to actually be possible. People have done those kind of calculations. It's not out of the realm of possibly, but a complex organism. Multi -cellular, multi -systemic or multi -systems, right?

2:06:43with organs and such. Also, what makes an organism? I mean, it could, you know, which part do you want to preserve? Because maybe for humans, it seems like, like what makes a personality, it feels like you want to preserve a set of memories. Like, if I woke up in a different body with the same memories, I pretty much, I would feel like I would be the same person. Altered carbon? Have you, that's a great series. I think it's on Netflix, you know? That's a really great series. That's exactly the idea of sleeves. Everybody's able to like, you know, you can re -sleeve in another body. And it raises exactly sort of this question.

2:07:20It's not the greatest cyberpunk, but it's pretty good. It's got some 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 raises a question because to me, that already passed the touring test as we traditionally have defined it. So if there's going to be an LLM that's able to copy you in terms of language extremely well, it's going to raise ethical and philosophical questions about what makes you you. Like, if there's a thing that can talk exactly like you, like, what is the thing that makes you you? Is it, is it, it's going to speak about your memories very effectively?

2:08:04This leads us to if we're going to get to the blind spot. I am of the opinion, heretical in some camps, that the brain is not the minimal structure for consciousness. It's the whole body. It's embodied in many actions in some sense. It's communities, actually. So, yeah, so I don't, I mean, I could be wrong. But this is what this whole work that I did with Marcelo Glazer and Evan Thompson, the philosophy of science, which is interesting because it leads to this question about, oh, maybe we should just download ourselves into computers. That's another story that one tells. I'm super skeptical about those, but is that one of the narratives about interstellar travel is just like, and that anybody we meet is it gonna be a machine anyway?

2:08:47Whether it's like, whether it's downloaded bodies or it's just gonna 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 goes to, or the machines take over in, you know, Kylia, 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 that might leave our technical signatures But what would they look like when we show up? Are they gonna have arms and legs? Are they going to be recognizable at all? Are they gonna be carbon -based?

2:09:20Yeah, so great question And this question gets to the heart of thinking about Life right about what life is and this is the physical part of that there's also sort of the informational part of it. But let's just talk about the physical part of it, which is, you know, life, anything that we're going to call life is probably going to work on Darwinian evolution. That's the nice thing about Darwinian evolution. Just like we know the laws of physics are general, the laws of Darwinian evolution are kind of this logic, this basic logic, that, you know, anything we'd reasonably call life probably has to operate under these kinds of principles.

2:09:56And so, you know, evolution is about solving problems that, you know, to survive that the environment presents. And the environment is always going to present these problems in physical and chemical terms so that you'd expect, you expect a kind of balance between what we call convergence, evolutionary convergence and evolutionary contingency. So, you know, if you the idea of some kind of jointed stick, right? Legs make 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.

2:10:42That's about movement. Yeah, so that's one problem that has to be solved. One problem that has to be solved is I got to get to food, right? Another problem is I got to get away from predators, right? You've seen wings. We've seen wings, the line that went through dinosaurs to birds, involved wings, insects involved wings, mammals involved 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 can expect certain classes of solutions to the basic problems that life is going to be presented with stay alive, reproduce.

2:11:18But one of the weird things about like with the UFO things is that you always we see like, oh, they all look like humans. They're just like basically humans with triangular heads. And that's where we get to contingency. So we've been talking about its convergence. So you expect that evolution will converge on wings multiple times when presented with the problems that wings can solve. But contingency is accidents, right? That you've got something that's evolving a certain kind of wing, a leathery wing, right? And then the climate changes and they all die out end of story or asteroid, at total accident, asteroid hits.

2:11:54And so contingency accidents play also a huge role in evolution. And one of the things that 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 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 E. coli. You take a bunch of E. coli, you let them evolve for a while, you take a bunch of them out, freeze them, let one, you let that population continue to evolve, the other ones frozen, now start it over again with the frozen.

2:12:31And 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 hard result, but in those experiments, what you find is that accidents really do matter. So the idea, and this is important. And so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks. How many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with 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? Where is most of the cognition competition going on?

2:13:10Yeah. Yeah. You could see that in organisms like I actually had I don't know How the brain evolved 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 Distributed cognition there is obviously you social animals like termites etc And that's an example of distributed cognition. The organism is the whole colony. This is one thing that's been really interesting in the state of the study when we cut to for aliens, is that when we've come to recognize that human intelligence, it's not actually, it's been district, the kinds of things that go into intelligence are distributed all across the biosphere.

2:13:54Lots of different examples of things show various pieces of what we have. Jason Wright will describe today 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 see. But 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 places across many other line lineages across the earth. So it could be, they could be very, very different with something like, yeah, maybe the hive mind idea or bacterial colonies that actually manage to come to their own version of high cognition.

2:14:33Well, I wonder if there's if we stretch out time across tens, 20 billion years, whether there's a Darwinian evolution stops working at some point in terms of the biology or the chemistry of the organisms and it switches to ideas. Yeah. For example, it's much more rapidly you're operating maybe I guess it's a kind of Darwinian evolution on the space of memes or whatever it says. as a technology seems to operate on, and yeah, 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 organisms that's able to be a nice platform for ideas to compete.

2:15:17And then it kind of stops evolving there and then it's ideas that take off. Right, right, because yeah, cultural like to true, it's amazing that cultural evolution totally disconnects from the Darwinian process. But I'd be careful to say that like a planet is working hard to do this, because you know, it's really important to be looking at us. Like what we think of is ideas and culture and you know, it's quite possible we're gonna make it another 200 years and this is gone, right? Because it actually wasn't a very good idea long -term. I mean, we just don't know. Also, maybe the idea generation organism is actually the thing that destroys.

2:15:50Not the biosphere because it got to, 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 integrated into a mature bio -slash technosphere. And of course, evolution is not working for anything. Well, here's actually an interesting thing, right? So people are very much, you know, evolutionary biologists will get very, their hair will stand on it. 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, Yeah, then all bets are off and there is goals.

2:16:30There is teleology. There is a, now suddenly, 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, where 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. And then there's another cluster as a different set of direction. There's all kinds of religions that are competing.

2:17:06There's different ideologies that are competing. And we need to zoom out across, if we survive across thousands of years, it will seem directionless. It will seem like a pin boss. 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 -acreate 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, non -linear way, but it was still, right?

2:17:45There was 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 the civilizations, through all the technosignatures 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, then the general says they always do. Military, industrial comp, like that movie. We block that movie.

2:18:21Where, what kind of rock is, what kind of, and do we bring rockers? Right. Well, I think you know, so this is also, this is a general question also leads to many messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I am definitely of the opinion of like you should be very careful, you know. I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to have your head below the grass. The people who advocate, like, oh yeah, we should be sending powerful messages that are easily detectable into interstellar space. I'm like, why? Because we just don't know. I'm not gonna say they are warlike. I'm not gonna say they're not warlike.

2:18:54I have no idea. 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, who speaks for Earth, which I think was a great book, somebody wrote. So, you know, I definitely, we should be cautious, I would say, because we just have zero information. And the idea, you know, you just have this idea of all of their advance, they've managed to survive. So of course they're gonna be wearing Togas, you know, and be singing Kumbaya. But I just wouldn't, I just wouldn't assume that. It's also possible though that like their cognitive structure is so different that we're not even in living in the same universe in a certain way.

2:19:31I 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've 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 and they managed to cross the language barrier.

2:20:01Yeah, so but that's both sides have an interest in communicating, which you kind of suppose that an advance civilization would have a curiosity. Because like, how do you become advanced without a kind of curiosity about the mysterious about the other? But also, if they're long lived, they may just be like, we're not even interested. Like we've done this, we're like, you know, 10 billion years, sorry, say 10 million years ago, we were really interested in this in communicating with you, you know, younger and young and 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?

2:20:46You don't want to be like, don't know, can't say anything, because that's not fun. But you also have to sort of systematically go after your own biases, right? So one of the things I loved about arrival too was, you know, Carl Sagan always had this I tell you like, we'll teach him math. We'll teach him our math, then they'll teach us their math, and then we'll be telling each other knock -knock jokes and swapping cures for cancer. And in the movie, they send a Carl Sagan guy in and a linguist, and the Carl Sagan guy fails immediately, and it's the linguist who understands that language is actually embodied.

2:21:15Language 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 how utterly different the cognitive structures of a different species should be. So somehow we have to figure out how to think about it, but be so careful of our biases, or figure out like a systematic way to break through our biases and not just tell something makes 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.

2:21:49I wouldn't even know about it if it was 100 million years ago. How could we even begin to answer this question? Got a look. Got a look. Got to figure out ways to look. So, I mean, I don't put it, it's not high on my list of, you know, things that I think are probable, but it's certainly, it needs to be explored, you know, and unless you look, you never know. So, looking on the moon, looking at where would we find if aliens had passed through the solar system any time 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.

2:22:23The moon's a good place. Certain kinds of orbits, you know, maybe they parked a probe in an orbit that was stable, so you got to figure out which orbits actually you could put something there and it'll last for a billion years. So those are the kind of questions. I don't, like I said, I don't, it's not high on my list of thinking this could happen, but it could happen. I certainly can't, unless you look, you don't know. What about speaking of biases? What about if aliens visiting Earth is the elephant in the room, meaning like the potential of aliens say, seating life on Earth? You mean like in that directed pan spermia?

2:22:56Directed pan spermia? Yeah. Or seating some aspect of the evolution. Like 2001. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a great story, but you know always with Occam's razor, whatever with science. If I can answer that question without that extra very detailed hypothesis, then I should. And the idea that evolution is a natural process, that's why I would go for first. That just seems, it's so much easier to do it that way than adding, because it's kind of a duo -sex machina thing of like, oh, then the aliens came down and they solved that problem that you're trying to solve by just coming down and putting their finger on the scales.

2:23:36So to you, the origin of life 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 think, because you know, all you're doing is kicking the can down the road, right? The alien, 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, what was their A -biogenesis 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.

2:24:09And then if I was an alien, what would I do? You know, I've gotten it just to learn about the on contact to tribes in the Amazon. At least they went to the Amazon, you get to understand how they function and how the humans in the Amazon are in contact with the civilized world, how they interact with the on contact to tribes. First of all, the on -contact drives are very violent towards the outside world. But everybody else tried to stay away from them. They tried to kind of protect them, don't talk about them, don't talk about their location and all this kind of stuff. I've begun to internalize and understand that perspective of why you're doing that.

2:24:47If I was an alien civilization, I'd probably be doing a similar kind of thing. Of course, there's always the teenager of the troll who's going to start messing with this though, or the scientist. Yeah, yeah, right. And so it's not from our perspective, yes. And if you're in the Truman show, like Occam's razor, but like also the Occam's razor from the perspective of the ill -insublization, we have to have the humility 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, the first chapter assume that alien civilizations are common, which I'm not sure about it that most of them may be dead.

2:25:31Or they're not, yeah, it's still, you know, like, 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 biases we're bringing or the assumptions we're bringing in from, you know, from the sort of causal chain that comes out of that. I would first want to try and do this without, like, you know, for looking at the origin of life or the evolution of life on Earth. I'd want to do it just on its own without asking for this other layer. Because it requires a bunch of these other assumptions, which also have their own sort of breaking of causal chains.

2:26:07Because 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? Because it's just like, you know, we're very much, we have a very particular kind of cognitive structure, a cognitive, you know, and we're very governed by, even if you went and talked to, this is an interesting thing to think about, you know, if I could suddenly magically appear a hundred thousand years ago and talk to a hunter -gatherer about their worldview and their motivations, you know, I might find something that's like no resemblance to things that I think are sort of, oh, that's what naturally humans do.

2:26:44Well, let me ask you this question. Let's just get to do the thought of something. Yeah, yeah. If we create a time machine that allows us to travel back and to talk to them, or we discover maybe a primitive alien civilization on a nearby star system, what would we do? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, so 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 our capitalist perspective, what are we to gain?

2:27:19Yeah, right. That's interaction. Right, right, right. You look at the way the missionaries, you know, missionaries had these interactions because they thought converting them to whatever religion they were, you know, was the most important. That's what the gain was. So from our perspective, I mean, we'd have to sort that out. I think given, you know, for doing this 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 people in this room. Yeah. But there is, I wonder who the dominant forces are in the world because I think there's a lot of people the military.

2:27:55Yeah. 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 capital of the school will see like how the benefit of the cost here and how can I make money off of this. There's opportunity here. There's gold in them hills. And I wonder, and I think the scientists is just not going to unlike the movies. We're not going to get much say. They're going to put them. 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.

2:28:35In our engagement. Yeah, yeah, probably. So using that trivial bias logic, it just feels like aliens would need to be engaging in a very obvious way. Yeah, yeah. So she brings up that old direct Fermi paradox for me. 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 there's any data that we have that links UFOs and UAPs to non -human technology, I just think they're the standards, they just none of what is claimed to be the data lives up to the standards of evidence. So let's just take a moment on that idea of standards of evidence because I've made a big deal about this both in the book and elsewhere whenever I talk about this.

2:29:26So what people have to understand about science is we are really scientists. We are really mean to each other. We are brutal to each other because we have this thing that we call standards of evidence and it's the idea of like you have a piece of evidence that you want to link to a claim and under what conditions can you say, oh look, I've got evidence of this claim x, y, and c. And in science, we are so mean to each other about whether or not that piece of evidence lives up to the standards that we have. And we spent 400 years determining what those standards are. And that is why cell phones work, right?

2:30:02If you didn't have super rigorous standards about what you think, oh, this little antenna, I've invented a new kind of antenna that I can slip into the cell phone and I can show you that it works. If you didn't have these standards, every cell phone would be a brick. And when it comes to UFOs and U .S. Peace, the evidence you have and the claim that though this shows that you know we are being visited by non -human 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 techno signature on an alien planet.

2:30:44we're going to get shredded as we expect to be beaten up. And the UAP, UFO community should expect the same thing. 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, hmm, I wonder if there's something there. But unfortunately with this topic, there's so much excitement around it. There's a lot of people that are basically trying to make money off of it.

2:31:24There's hoaxes, all this kind of stuff. So 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've talked about sort of, if we wanted to really search for UFOs on Earth. Right. And maybe detect things like weird physics. What kind of instruments would we be using? Yeah, so in the book I talked about the idea, this is really stupid, but you know, you want to look up, you want to look down, and you want to look all around. I think that's brilliant. I mean, it's simple, not stupid. It's like literally. Right. So you want to do ground -based detectors that upward looking ground -based textures of the kind we're already building for meteors, right?

2:32:06for 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 pile, you know, all we have lots of people in the sky, there should be detectors on the planes, or at least, you know, some kind of alert system that if some pile says, oh, look, I'm seeing something, I don't understand. Boom, presses the red button. And that triggers the ground -based and space -based data collectors. And then the data collectors themselves, this is something that people really don't understand and it's so important. In order to actually do science with anything, the data you have, you have to understand where it came from, like down to the, you know, the nth degree.

2:32:45You have to know how that camera behaves in a bunch of different wavelengths. You have to characterize that. You have to know what the software does, what the limits of the software are possible. You have to know what happened to the camera. Has it that refurbished recently in every spectral wavelength in all of its data collection and processing, you have to know all of those steps and having them all characterized. Because especially if you wanna 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.

2:33:19So we have to have characterized detectors looking up down and maybe on claims themselves. We need a rational search strategy. So let's say you want to lay out these ground -based detectors. Where do you put them? There's only so much money in the world. So do you want to put them near places where you've seen a lot of things beforehand or do you want to have them try and do a sparse coverage of the entire country? And then you need the data analysis. You're going to have so much data, so many false positives, or 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.

2:33:53And all of these things were used to doing and other scientific enterprises. And without that, if we don't do that, we're gonna be having the same damn argument about these things for the next 100 years. But if I ask you, I give you a trillion dollars and ask you to allocate to one place, looking out, setting, or looking at Earth, what should you allocate to? Oh God, looking out, looking out. Because that's the bet, you know, as I always like to say, here's my codification of this. If you said, hey Adam, I'd like to find some Nebraska's And I said, oh good, let's go to the Himalayas. You know, you'd be like, why am I going there?

2:34:29I'm like, well, you know, maybe there's some Himalayas, you know, some Nebraska's 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? Because that's we have that technology now, as opposed to the, you know, the bucket of assumptions that you have to come up with in order to say, like, oh, they're here right now. You know, they just happen to be here right now. And also, the very important thing, I called this the high beam argument. You know, to deal with the UFO stuff, you have to deal with all of, you have to answer these weird irrational things that are happening like, okay, there's an advanced civilization that is visiting Earth regularly.

2:35:05They don't wanna be detected. They've got super powerful technology, but they really suck it using it because they keep seeing them. We keep seeing them, but then they disappear, right? I mean, explain to me what rational world that works under. It's like, you know, so there's that whole sort of argument I mean, you've got to explain like why if they want to stay hidden, are they so bad at it? So, you know, that's why I take that level of difficulty and then I put it on top of, where should I look? I should look at the, you know, I should look at where they, where they're from. That makes me want to look at, do the telescopic stuff.

2:35:41Yeah, I think the more likely explanation is either the sensors are not working correctly or it's This is a secret military technology being tested. Absolutely. I mean, if you had to, I listen, I, that's what again, I think UAP, you know, the, absolutely UAP should be studied scientifically. But if I had to make a bet and it's just a bet, I would say this is, you know, this is pure state adversary stuff. When I did, I did a, a New York Times op -ed 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 and E -Int, electronic intelligence communities, and what they were saying about the New York Times articles and the various videos.

2:36:25And really none of them were talking about UFOs. They were all talking about peer state. That's why I learned the word peer state adversaries. How even simple drone technologies, you can, and you purposely wanna do this. You want to fake signals into the electronics of their adversary, so they crank it up. So then you can just soak up all the electromagnetic radiation and know exactly what those advanced radars can do. That said, I'm not saying that what this is. If I wasn't the head of an alien civilization, and I chose to minimize the amount of contact I'm doing, I would try to figure out what would these humans, what would these aliens like to see?

2:37:08That's why the big heads in the humanoid form. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of like how would 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 ants. 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 shity at doing the robot ants.

2:37:42But no, I do sort of, I just wanted to make the case for this. This is the plot actually of a great science fiction book called Ion by Greg Bair. And the idea was like these sort of, you know, this is actually where my first, I got, I became sort of a more than agnostic anti -medie because the idea is that yes, or aliens come, they, you know, they sort of make their arrival. And really their point is to get rid of us. 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 arrive at the, this was during the Soviet Union, they arrive at the US, they arrive in China.

2:38:17And they're kind of faking us out so that we never can organize ourselves against. So it was really, they did exactly kind of what you're talking about, but for nefarious purposes. Okay. Let me ask the pot head question. Another yet another pot head. The whole conversation. Oh, sorry. Bugs before breakfast. It's, it's signs that a bothead question is back and forth. Okay, what if aliens take a form that's unlike what we kind of traditionally envision in analyzing physical objects? What if they take the form of say ideas? What if real bothead is consciousness itself, like the subjective experience is an alien being.

2:39:01Maybe ideas is an easier one to visualize because we can think of ideas as entities, traveling from human to human. When I made the claim 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 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. If I give you a star and give you tell you the mass and composition, You can basically pretty much use the laws of physics to tell exactly what's going to happen to that star over its entire lifetime.

2:39:37Maybe not the little tiny details, but overall, it's going to be a white dwarf, it's going to be black hole, and a 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 what it means is, and that's a part of 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 end result? Like, you know, there's, you know, that's why I love science fiction so much.

2:40:11It does, at some point does life reach a point where it climbs into the laws of physics itself? It becomes the laws of physics. Or, you know, these, these sort of lie at the extreme limits of thinking about what, what we mean by reality, what we mean by, you know, experience. But I'm not sure what we can do with them scientifically, but they're 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? Some people might say about what happened before the Big Bang, some big physics questions about the universe.

2:40:53I 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 what? Why is it the biggest question in your, why is it number one in your top five? I've evolved in this, right? I started off as a theoretical physicist. I went into computational astrophysics and magneto hydrodynamics of star formation, but I always see I was a philosophy minor. I always had the 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 for physics is what is life?

2:41:25What 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 nontraditional, 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 and Bing -Bang -Bohm, and suddenly appears. There's something that really is gonna 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 what is life, especially from by viewing it from the inside, because it's really about the verb to be, right?

2:42:07Really, what is the most pressing philosophical question beyond science is the verb to be? What is being, right? This is what Stephen Hawking said when he talked about 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 at the sacred spirituality every one of the talk about my first book was about science and and human spirituality 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 more 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 I 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 write about in the blind spot Why science cannot ignore human experience?

2:43:07sort of trying to pull the fire into the process of science. And it's a kind of critique of materialism. Can you explain the main thesis of this book? Yeah, so the idea of the blind spot is that there is this thing that is central to science. So the blind, we're using the blind spot as a metaphor, right? So the eye has an optic nerve and the optic nerve is what allows vision to happen. So you can't have vision without about 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.

2:43:45There 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, get into exactly what I mean, what it is. But it's not really science. It is a set of ideas that got glued onto science. It's a metaphysics that got glued on science. And so what is that thing that is what is the blind spot? It's experience. It is Presence and I by experience that people have to be very careful because I'm not talking about being an observer. It's the you know There's lots of words for it. There's direct experience. There is presence being The life world within the philosophy called phenomenology.

2:44:23There'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 way to say this, that is the pre -condition for the possibility of science. And the whole nature of science, the way it has evolved, is that it purposely pushed that out. It pushed that out so it could make progress. And that's fine for a certain class of problems. But when we try to answer, when we try to 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.

2:45:04And that if we don't learn how to take, understand that that is always the background, that experience is always the background, then we just end up with these paradoxes and prop these yoga that require this intellectual yoga to get out of. I think you give a bunch of examples of that, like looking at temperatures and number, there's 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 call it. So what is the blind spot? We use the term, it's a constellation. It's not just materialism.

2:45:33It'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 and the donkey, they were sort of pinned on and to tell us that this is what What science says, so what do I say? One is reductionism, that you are nothing but your nerve cells, which are nothing but the chemistry, which is nothing but all the way down to quarks. 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.

2:46:07That's what science, you know, bequeathes 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 epiphenomena. Consciousness. I tend not to use the word consciousness, because I think it leads us in the wrong direction. We should focus on experience, because it's a verb kind of an way, or it's verb, it's verb -like.

2:46:43So 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 actually say that that from a perspective of detrimental society that there's a crisis of meaning, and then 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 is scientific triumphalism. And then on the other side is rejecting science completely, both on the left and the right.

2:47:20I think the postmodernist and the left anti -establishment people on the right. And then just pseudo science that kind of does this in between thing. 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, And science wants to tell us that we're insignificant, we're not important, we're just biological machines. And so we're basically an insignificant part of the universe. And 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.

2:47:56We're always the observers, we're at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. Quantum mechanics, it really comes in. It comes in, you know, the measurement problem just puts us front and center. We've spent 100, some people have spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem. So on the one hand, we're insignificant and on the other hand, we're central. So which one is it, right? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience. This inability, we can't, it's, we can't do science without already being present in the world.

2:48:27We can't reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal, it's a real lot of it is about, we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we're substituting. That's one of the things that we, there's two philosophers we really like, who are heroes. One is a hersural, who is a mathematician, who invented phenomenology, and the other is Whitehead, who is one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. And hersural came up with this idea, the surreptitious substitution. Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience, that that's more important than.

2:49:03So let me just do before I go to those three responses. Let's just do the power of temperature because I think people can help them understand what we mean. Think about degree Celsius. We kind of have in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degree Celsius, they're out there. The molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience, right? We started off with science by we had the experience, the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot. I feel cold. You feel hot. You feel cold. Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michelle Bitbolve philosopher calls the structural invariance, the things that like we could both kind of do agree on.

2:49:51So, we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradated little cylinder that's got mercury in it, and that hot things will be higher on that graded cylinder, cold things will be lower, and we can both figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that. And then we have thermometry. Yay, we have a way of having a structural invariant of this very personal experience of hot or cold. And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera. And then we end up as at the bottom, you know, at the end of that with this idea of like every day wake up and I check my phone And I'm like, oh, it's gonna be you know 60 degrees out great And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold that thermodynamics the whole formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from You know it required that bodily experience.

2:50:45That also, it's 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 degree Celsius. But then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that's called the amnesia of experience. So that's what we mean by the, you know, how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, 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 wise this?

2:51:20What are the responses to trying to get this back in? And where does this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that only the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths, right? Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn't even exist, right? And anything else that's not part of it, part that can be formalized in that way, is an epiphenomen. It's not real. So scientific triumphalism is this response to the weirdness of, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely.

2:51:59So there's no other truth. Art, music, human spirituality, it's all actually reducible just a neural correlates. So that's one way that it's been dealt with. The other way is this sort of right. You've got on the postmodern, the left, academic left, you get this thing like, science is just a game. It's just a game from the powerful come up with. Which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that's another way to push science away or respond to it. The denial, science denial that happens, that's also another way of not understanding the balance that science is trying, that we need to establish with experience.

2:52:42And then there's just pseudoscience, which wants to say, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudospiritual way or that doesn't have the rigor of science. So, you know, all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning. And we don't really have an accurate, we don't have a good way of doing it yet. And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.

2:53:19And by the way, we should mention that at least the first two responses that kind of feed each other. There's just to observe the scientific community, those who gravitate a little bit towards the scientific triumphalism, there's an arrogance that builds in the human soul. It has to do with the PhDs, it has to do with sitting on an academic throne, all of those things, and the human nature with the egos and so on, it builds. Of course, that nobody likes arrogance. And so those that reject science, the arrogance is fuel for the reject science. I absolutely agree. It just goes back and it's just divide that build.

2:54:01Yeah, no, that was a problem like when you saw, so like I said, 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 politics, right? But about, you know, for the entire history of the species, we've had this experience of, for a better lack of a better word, the sacredness. I'm not connecting this God or anything. I'm just saying this experience of like the more. And then, you know, with the new atheist movement, you got people saying that like, anybody who feels that is an idiot, you know, they just can't handle the hardcore science.

2:54:34When in fact their views of the world are so denuded of it's they can't even see the role that experience plays in how they came up with their formal systems, you know, and experience fundamentally is weird, you know, mysterious. It's like 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 standard model of cosmology, that they're idiots, that's not going to 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 fundamental experience is not just an illusion that emerges from the set of quirks, that there could be something about the conscious experience of the world that is like at the core of reality.

2:55:19Yeah, but I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't because there's panpsychism, right? Which one's the same as that? Right, so that's all the way there. Yeah, panpsychism is like, that's literally one of the laws of physics. Right, right. It's conscious. 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 is to take either of those positions is already to project out into that third person view.

2:55:48And that third person view, we wanna really emphasize, is a fiction. It's a useful fiction when you're doing science. If I wanna do like, the Newtonian physics of billured balls on a pool table, great. I don't wanna have to think about experience at all. But 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'm gonna argue that experience always involves all of us. All of us, experience always originates out of a community. That, you know, you're always telling those stories from the perspective of already existing, of already being in experience.

2:56:30So whatever account we wanna give is of the world is gonna have to take that as experience, as being irreducible and the irreducible starting point. So ultimately, like we don't have an answer. Like that's when people are like, well, what are you suggesting as your alternative? It's like, look, that's the good work of the next science to come. Well, our job was to point out the problem with this. But what we would argue with this, and we're thinking about the next book, is this is really gonna 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.

2:57:07It always starts from this field of experience or in phenomenology the word is the life world that you're embedded in. You can't unembed yourself from it. So how do you do? So one of the things that Whitehead said was, 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 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 all the other things, it's not just red, there's no qualia, there's no pure redness.

2:57:41Everything that's happening in the experiential part is just an epiphenomenon, it's just, you know, brain states, whatever. You said, you can't do that, they're just, they're both real, they're both accounts, they both need to be integrated. And so that required, I think, a really a different conception of what we mean by nature. 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's what we have to figure out, right? And so actually, you know, a great place to think about this is quantum mechanics, right?

2:58:13Because one of the things we're arguing is like, look, in the chapter that I wrote on, because I wrote this with Evan Thompson, who's a wonderful philosopher and Marcelo Glazer, who's a theoretical physicist, when I was writing the chapter on the origin of the blind spot, like, you know, sort of what, about 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.

2:58:45But by the time you got to the beginning of the 20th century, science itself was telling you like, eh eh. And no place does this appear more than in quantum mechanics, right? quantum mechanics slams you with the idea that the measurement problem, you know. The most important thing about quantum mechanics is you have a dynamical equation, the Schrodinger 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 Lagrange or Hamiltonians.

2:59:19But then this other thing happens, where it's like, oh, by the way, as soon as you look at it, as soon as the measurement is made, I have a whole other set of rules for you. You know, that's the born, what we call the born rule. And it 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 interpretations of the quantum mechanics. Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many worlds interpretation.

2:59:50Literally 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.

3:00:25So that's not a thing you're trying to get rid of. That's the thing you're trying to integrate at the center of the thing. In quantum mechanics, it becomes super obvious, but maybe the same kind of thing should be incorporated in every layer of study of nature. Absolutely. That's exactly it. So one of the things that's really interesting to me, so I have a project, I'm part of a big project that Chris Fuchs and Jacques Spanier 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.

3:01:03And it's always about, do you have an agent who makes an action on the world, and then the information they get from that action and through the experiment, that's the action in the world, updates their priors, updates their, you know, they're Bayesian, that's why it's called Cubism, quantum Bayesianism, updates how the information have 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 we have a grant from the Templeton Foundation to look at semantic information and the role of semantic information in living systems like cells.

3:01:40So, you know, we have Shannon Information, which is a probability distribution that tells you, you know, basically how much surprise there is in a message. Semantic information focuses on meaning, right? Focus is on, and in a very simple way, just like, what is, how much of the information that the agent, you know, the critter, is getting from the world actually has, 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 chemical gradient to get more food kind of has the same feel the same sort of architecture as what's going on in quantum mechanics.

3:02:26So I think what you said is exactly it. How do we bring this sort of recognition that there's always us, the agent, or life, the agent, interacting with the world and drawing 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 basianism that creates a theory, like a Nobel Prize winning theory, sort of like hardcore real theories that put the agent at the center.

3:03:06Yes, 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, and there's this platonic ideal that they are, they exist eternally on their own. It's kind of quasi -religious, right? It's sort of like somehow, 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?

3:03:37That's always us and the world. And what we're now finding about is this kind of co -creation, this interaction 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 epiphenomena that it pushes the agent out and makes it seems 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 and a physics theory, like how is it possible it just like breaks the whole thing open?

3:04:24So there's this whole effort of, you know, unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics of like coming up with the theory of everything. What if these are like the tip of the iceberg? What if the agent thing is really important? So, you know, listen, that would be kind of my dream. I'm not gonna be the one to do it because I'm not smart enough to do it. But, you know, Marcelo and I have for a while have been sort of critical of where foundational physics has been for a while with String Theory. I've spent my whole life listening to talks about String Theory real soon, you know? And it's gotten ever more disconnected from data observations.

3:05:09There were people talking for a while that it's post empirical. And I always wanted to write a paper or an article that was like physicists have been smoking their own stash. There's this way we've gotten used to like, you have to outweird the other person like my theory is 38 dimensions. My theory is 22 dimensions, but it's got, psychedelic squirrels in it. And so there's been a problem, there's a problem. 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 headline on scientific American stories. So there clearly another direction has to be found.

3:05:44And maybe it has nothing to do with this. But I suspect that because so many times the agent or the having to deal with the view from the inside or the role of agency, like when it comes to time, thinking that you can replace the block universe with the actual experience of time. Clocks don't tell time. We use clocks to tell time. So maybe that even like the fundamental nature of time can't be viewed from the outside. That there's a new physics theory that is gonna come from. That comes from this a gentle, informational, computational view. I don't know, but that's kind of what I think it would be fertile ground to explore.

3:06:29Yeah, 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 Horseral talks about the surreptitious substitution, we've taken Einstein's beautiful, powerful, formal system for viewing time. And we substituted that for the actual experience of time, right? So the block universe where like next Tuesday is already written down, you know, It's in the block universe, the four dimensional universe, all events are already there, which is very potent for making certain kinds of predictions within the scientific framework.

3:07:10But it is not lived time. This was pointed out to Einstein, and he eventually recognized it. Very famous meeting between Henri Berkson, who was the most famous philosopher of like the 20th, 20th century, and Einstein, where Einstein was giving a talk on relativity and Berkson, and 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 were duration for us is full. It's sort of stretched out. It's got a little bit of the past, a little bit of the future, a little bit of the present.

3:07:49Music 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 different from the representation of time that you have with the formal mathematics. The way we would look at this is that the problem with the surreptitious substitution, the problem with the blind spot, is it says, oh no, no, the formal system is time. But really, the only place time appears is with us, right? Where are we? So having a theory that actually could start with us, and then stretch out into the universe, rather than imposing this imaginary third person view back on us, could that's a route towards a different way of approaching the whole problem?

3:08:37I just wonder, who's the observer? Defying what the agent does in any kind of frame is difficult. It's difficult, right? But that's the good work of the science ahead of us, right? So what happened with this idea of the structural invariance I was talking about? So, you know, we start with experience, which is irreducible. There's no atoms of experience, right? It's a whole. And we go through the whole process, which is a communal process, by the way. There's a philosopher Robert Kreese who talks about the workshop that's starting in like the 1700s, 1600s. We developed this communal space to work in.

3:09:09Sometimes 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.

3:09:46Like 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, well, I'm gonna put, I'm gonna jam experience back in and you know, have 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 the physics model of the world? What I would say is that free will is a given. And that's the thing about experience, right? So one of the things that Whitehead said, I really love this quote, he says it's not the job of either science or philosophy to account for the concrete.

3:10:22It's the job to account for the abstract. The concrete, what's happening between us right now, is just given. It's just presented to us every day, it's presented to me. If you want an explanation fine, but the explanation actually doesn't add anything to it. So that free will in some sense is the nature of being an agent. to be an agent, agency and autonomy are sort of the two things that are, 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 arising in the world, or the way it and the world sort of co -erise?

3:11:05But the idea, the reason why we argue about free will often is because we already have this blind spot view that the world is deterministic because of our equations, which themselves, we treat the equations as if they're more real than experience. You know, and the equations are a paler, you know, they don't corral experience. They are a thinner representation, as we like to say, don't confuse the map for the terrain. What's happening between us right now, and 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.

3:11:41What if the experience is an illusion? How do we know what if the agency that we experience is an illusion? An illusion looking from where? Because that already requires to take that stance is you've already pushed yourself into that third -person view. And so what we're saying is that's 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 I think exist in God's living room in spite, you know, that are independent of me and the community of living things on part of. So you're pushing it elsewhere. This, just like there's a stack of turtles is probably, if this experience, the human experience is an illusion, maybe there's an observer for whom it's not an illusion, so you always have to find an observer somewhere.

3:12:29Yeah, right. And that's where you know, fundamentally the blinds, but the, especially the scientific triumphalist part is following a religious impulse. It's wanting the God's eye view. I know it's really interesting and when we think about this and the way this gets talked about, especially publicly, there's a line of philosophical inquiry that this language gets couched in. It is actually a pretty, it's only one version of philosophy. It is pretty much what we call the analytic tradition. But there's even in Europe or in the Western tradition, for Western, what we'll call Western philosophy, there's phenomenology.

3:13:06There's their hersural, an itiger, and Merluponti, 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 over, 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 net has not been part of this discussion about you'll never good luck finding a YouTube video where someone, you know, a famous scientist is talking about science from a phenomenological point of view, even though it's a huge branch of philosophy.

3:13:44And 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 direct, trying to directly probe attention and experience. They asked questions in ways that the West never really did. Phenomenology kind of started it, but there's philosophers like Nagarjuna and Vasubhondu, and they're like the Plato and the Aristotle of those philosophies.

3:14:27And they were really focused on experience. In the West, I think maybe because we had the Judeo -Christian tradition where we already had this kind of God who was going to be the frame on which you could always point to that frame, the traditions that came from the classical philosophies of Indian Asia, they started always with it. They wanted to know about experience. Their whole philosophies and their logic and 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 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 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 as 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 center -fade questions.

3:15:39Yeah, I think, but I think we can do it. I think there's aspects of it. I mean, as long as you're never trying to like, this is what experience is, like, I think that's kind of the where we're, you know, you're never going to have a causal account of experience, because it's just given. But you can do lots about, and that's what the good work is, is to, how do I approach this? How do I approach this in a way that's rigorous that I can do experiments with also? But so for example, I was just reading this beautiful paper that was talking about, you know, this is what we're counting with our semantic information to causal closure.

3:16:09Love this idea, right? The idea that, so we've talked about auto -poesis a while back, right? The idea that living systems are, they are self -creating and self -maintaining. So the membrane, cell membrane is a great example of this, right? the cell membrane, you can't have a cell without a cell membrane. The cell membrane lets stuff through, keeps other stuff out, right? But the cell membrane is part of the processes and it's a product of the processes that the cell membrane needs, right? In some sense, the cell membrane cell membrane creates itself. So there's this strange, it's always with life.

3:16:45There's always the strange loop. And so somehow figuring out how to jump into that strange loop is, you know, the science that's ahead of us. And so this idea of causal closure, accounting for how the, you know, we talk about like a downward causation, right? So reductionism says everything only depends on the micro state, everything just depends on the atoms, right? That's it. If you know, if you know the Lagrangian for the standard model, you're done, you know, of course, in principle, you need God's computer, but fine, you know, in principle, it can be done. Clause closure, and there's, I was just reading this great paper that sort of argues for this.

3:17:21There'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 talked about closure to efficient cause. that living systems, you know, are organizationally closed, are causally closed, so that they don't depend anymore on the micro -state.

3:17:59And he made, he had a proof, which is very contentious. Nobody knows if it's, you know, some argue it's true, some argue it's not. But he said that because of this, living systems are not church -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 algorithms. Now, again, people fight back and forth about whether or not his proof was, you know, his valid or not. 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.

3:18:37You 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 triumphal. And so we were just like, wait you know, waiting for the fight. And then the review from science came out and it was like totally pro, you know, they was very positive. We're like, oh my God, you know? And then a review came out in nature physics and it was totally positive. And then a review came out in the Wall Street Journal because we kind of criticized, not capitalism, but we criticized, so are all industrial economies for that they were sort of had been touched by the blindspot, socialism communism.

3:19:12It doesn't matter. These extractive, you know, it sort of had that sort of view that the world is just reducible to resources. The Wall Street Journal gave us a great review. So I feel like there's actually out there, there is some, among working scientists in particular, there is some dissatisfaction with this triumphalist view. And a recognition that we need to shift something in order to like jump past these hurdles that we've been arguing about forever. And we're not, 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 age.

3:19:48Like everyone is doing it and it's like, yeah, yeah, there's the experience. And then there's the third person perspective on the world. And so to, man, science from applying scientific wiggle 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, I think, it's not just first person, it's first and second, Because science went so, like one idea is that the idea that science gives us this objective third person view. That's one way of talking about objectivity. There's a whole other way.

3:20:25Is 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 when we talk about agents, agency and individuality are flexible. So there's a great paper, speak of Santa Fe by David Crackauer, where they looked at sort of information theoretic measures of individuality. 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.

3:20:57But I'm, so I'm an individual, yay, but actually I'm part of a society. Like, and I couldn't be me without the entire community of, say, language users. I wouldn't even be able to frame any questions. And 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 triumphal of this science view is once like Boltzmann brains. You're just a brain floating in the space. You know? Yeah, there's a fascinating degree to which agencies fluid.

3:21:36But like you are an individual, but you and I talking is a kind of individual. Yeah. And then the person listening to this right now is also an individual. Right. I mean, that's a weird thing. That's a weird thing, right? Because there's like, there's a broadcast nature too. This is my information theoretic. 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 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.

3:22:15And so this idea that how do we engage with the idea that organization, which is often I can be cast in information theoretic terms or computational terms even, is sort of it's not really quite physical, right? It's embodied in physical, you know, in the physical, it has to instantiate in the physical, but it also has this other realm of Design, you know, and some not designed like intelligent design, but there's a you know organization itself 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 God and organism versus machine So I showed you a couple of LEGO robots.

3:23:04Very cool. Is it possible for machines to have agency? I would not discount that possibility. I think there's no reason I would say that it's impossible that machines could, whatever manifests that strange loop that we're talking about, that auto -poesis. I don't think there's a reason to say it can't happen in a silicon. I think whatever it would be very different from us, like the idea that it would be like, oh, it would be just like us, but now it's instantiated. I think it might have very different kind of experiential nature. I don't think what we have now, like the LLMs are really there, but yeah, I'm not gonna say that it's not possible.

3:23:49I wonder how far I can get with imitation, which is essentially what LLMs are doing, so imitating humans. And I wouldn't discount either the possibility that through imitation you can achieve. You call conscious in this or agency or the ability to have experience. I think for most us humans that think, oh, that's just fake, that's copying. But there's some degree to which us, we humans are just copying each other. We just are really good imitation machines coming from babies who were born in this world than we're just learning to imitate each other and through the imitation and the tension in the disagreements in the imitations.

3:24:27We gain personality, perspective, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think so. 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, the E4 theory of cognition. Embodiment, inaction, embedding, and there's another one. Extension. But so the idea is that you actually have to be in a body, which is itself part of an environment that is the physical nature of it and of the extension in with other living systems as well is essential. So that's why I think the LLMs are not going to, it's not just imitation, it's going to require, this goes to the brain and the fat thing.

3:25:15I did an article about brain and the fat, which was really Evans, I was reporting on Evans, where they did the brain in the vet argument, but they said, look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the vet is actually to have a brain in a body. And it could be a robot body, you know, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't, you know, you really need to be embedded in a world. At least that's the E4 idea. 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.

3:25:45by way of extra cranial processes and structures. They're very much in vogue. For e -cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations, this is a paper, but reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the 4E paradigm with a view to assessing the strengths and weaknesses that's fascinating. I mean, yeah, the branches of what is cognition extends far and it could go real far. Right, there's a great story about an interaction between Jonas Salk, who was very much a reductionist, you know, the great biologist, and Gregory Bateson, who was a cyberneticist, and Bateson always loved to poke people.

3:26:25And he said to Salk, he said, you know, where's your mind? And, you know, Salk went up here and Bateson said, no, no, no, out here. And what he really meant was this extended idea. It's not just within your cranium to be, to be, to have experience,

3:26:42you know, is a thing you do, right? It's a, it 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 attractive to me, and you don't see, again, if we're really gonna do science with them, we're gonna have to like, have these ideas crash up against data, crash up against, we can't just armchair it, or a couch quarterbacking it. But I think there's a lot of possibility here. It's a very radically different way of looking 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?

3:27:27So make you sad? No, actually, it doesn't make me sad. So, okay, so 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 really value what that practice has given me about the nature of experience. And one of the things that taught me is like, you know, I don't really matter that very much. 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.

3:28:02But you know, it's going to go, I don't know, 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? I'm not an advocate for an afterlife, but just that like, 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? I'm like 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, 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 7 a .m.

3:28:41until 9 p .m. obviously with breaks. And you'll really get a much deeper understanding of like what my own experience is. What is it really like? It forces you to learn how to stabilize your attention. Because you know attention is kind of like this thing. It's usually just like, oh, over there, oh, my foot hurts, oh, I gotta do my taxes. Oh, what's that guy over there? Why is he wearing those stupid shoes? And with a contemplative practice, you learn how to stabilize it. And once you stabilize it, you can now begin to sort of explore the phenomenal nature of it. So what I think I've learned from that is like, kind of whatever.

3:29:11You know, I'm not, I'm not really kind of real to begin with. The Adam Frank port, the identity, the thing. And the part of me that is real is, you know, everything's coming and going. It's all coming and going. Well, how can I ever not come and go when the entire world is just, you know, Buddhism has this idea of codependent arising. Nothing exists. Nothing has self nature. nothing exists by itself. It's an endless, infinitely connected web. But still, there's a deliciousness to the individual experience. You get attached to it and it ends and it's good while last and it sucks that it ends. Like you can be like, ah, well, everything comes and goes, but like I was eating ice cream yesterday.

3:29:54They found this awesome low carbony screen called Delights here in Austin. And it ends. And I was like, and I was staring at the empty container and it was, that's a beautiful man. I love that. You could say like, yeah, well, that's how it all is. But can I say that that's what I've learned from from, because I love your idea of the deliciousness of it. You know, but what I think happens with Contemplar practice when it deepens is that it's not just, you're not just saying, right? This is why I do co -on 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 co -ons.

3:30:33And every co -on, if you've ever had Gaudel Escher -Bach, he's got a whole chapter on co -ons. They're kind of non -logical problems that you have to work on. One of my favorite ones was stop the sound of the distant temple bell. You're like, what? Every time my teacher gives a term, I'm like, what are you talking about? This is the whole Zen thing of like up is down, but down is up. You must understand this. So, you know, your job with these columns 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.

3:31:06So 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 I did a column 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, I've learned the language of them. So I could never tell you, if I told you the answer, I could give you a call and tell you the answer, you'd be like, what? It's not the words. So your experience of like, yeah, the cup is empty. With a contemplative practice as it deepens over years, there really does take years.

3:31:37Just like anything in math, it took me years to understand Lagrangians. 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 I'll just joy. And it's not connected to anything. Right, that's what I've kind of gotten from practice. It's just like, yeah, you know, that passage, that infinite passage of moment to moment, that is truly the way things are. And it's okay.

3:32:08Like 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, maybe it's the genetics, maybe it's the biochemistry of my brain, but I generally have that joy about experience, just a morphous joy. But it seems like, again, maybe it's my Eastern European roots, but there's always like a melancholy. There's also sitting next to the joy. And I think it always feels like they're intricately linked. So the melancholy is about, maybe about the finiteness of experience and the joy is just about the beauty of experience.

3:32:44and 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 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 like, well, 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 logistic practical nature of sitting there from 70M to 9PM? I'm like, what the hell are you doing, bro?

3:33:10What's powerful? What's fascinating to you? What have you learned from just the experience of staring at a wall? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you're not really, I mean, you're staring, you're facing a wall. And what you're doing is 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 and I start counting breaths. And for the first half hours, it's 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 sashina, two -day sashine.

3:33:38I swear to God, I had Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album track through. from the beginning to the end with the pauses, back in when they were LPs, with the frickin' nice. Cause my mind was just like, I need to do something. So it literally played the whole album in order. That's pretty cool actually. Yeah, it was pretty amazing to see. Cause you really do, you see the dynamics of your mind, but what happens is, and this took me a while, I used to hate sitting, I do it, but after a while, the mind gets exhausted. Like that part of the mind, the upper level, the roof brain chatter, It's just like there's nothing else to do.

3:34:12And then you get bored. And I now I realize 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, it becomes a very physical process where you're really just following the breath. You're kind of riding the breath. And it gets very quiet. And within that quietness, there's a path. You know, because obviously there's been Buddhism's always like, you know, you know, not about thinking, but there's a huge literature. So these guys are always about don't think I've written all this stuff, but they're guide posts.

3:34:46They'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 now when I walk out I'm gonna go get the Uber and every mind's gonna be all over the place But with sitting first you concentrate the mind so that there's no more scatter anymore. The thoughts are still happening but you're just not there happening up there. You're not even paying attention to them. And then as time goes on, you unify the mind, which is this very powerful thing, where kind of the self drops away, and there's just this presence, it's kind of like a raw presence.

3:35:15And that's often where the joy upwells from. But you sit with whatever, maybe you're gonna sit and you're gonna have, like, you know, maybe, you're gonna go through like an hour of being bummed out about your mom who died or something. You know, you're just gonna sit with whatever comes up, you're gonna make that that's why the sitting part you're making the commitment I'm gonna sit here with whatever comes up. I will not be moved and then what you come away with it actually over time It actually changes kind of who you are like I'm still the asshole. I was from New Jersey growing up But I just have more space now for things, you know Yeah, once Jersey was Jersey.

3:35:50Well, I love the ad brings Bruce brings these just blasting your head Yeah, that was so 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 gonna give this answer, which is so corny. It's love. And I'm not messing around because really actually what happens here, so within Buddhism, there's the idea of the Bodhisattva principle. You're here to help. You're just here to help, right? Compassion, like that's a really essential part of this path, of the Dharma path. And when I first started, I was like, I don't care about compassion.

3:36:22I'm here for knowledge, right? I started contemplative practice because of the usual thing I was suffering. I had the reason everybody comes to things like this. You know, life was hard. I'd gone through stuff. But I also wanted knowledge. I wanted to understand the foundational nature of reality. So it was like compassion or whatever. But then I found out that you can't get that. You can't get though. You can't go without compassion. Somehow in this process, you realize that it really is about helping all sentient beings. That's the way they print. Just being here to help. So I know that sounds cornball, but especially for a guy from Jersey, which is like like, you know, the main thing is to get over.

3:36:59Like your job is to get over. But that's really what I found. It's actually kind of, and that's what that joy, that joy, some of that joy is just, it's like this, one of the things I have experienced, when I have like really, you know, there's a kind of experience I'll have in contemplative practice which will carry out into the world, which is just this gratitude for the fact that the world is just, the world gives you everything. And there's a certain way, right? Just the blue sky and the breath, the world is just giving you itself completely unhindered. It holds nothing back. And yeah, that's kind of the experience.

3:37:28And 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 way and all the beings who are suffering, everybody's suffering, everybody's suffering. You know, your worst political opponent, they're suffering, you know? And our job is just to try and drop our biases and our stories and see this fundamental level at which life is occurring. And hopefully there's many alien civilizations out there going through the same journey and you had a suffering towards love. Yeah, that would, you know, that may be a universal thing about what it means to be alive.

3:38:00I hope so. I hope so too. You know, they're coming to you to us. Especially if they're type three civilization. That's right. And they got really big guns. Well, this was a truly mind blowing fascinating, just awesome conversation Adam. Thank you for everything you do and thank you for talking. 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 Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever would be. Our feebleest contemplations of the cosmos stir us.

3:38:37There's a tingling in the spine, a catching the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. Please. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.