Is Alien Existence Being Hidden? With David Kipping

19:35Piers Morgan:Is it heading here? It's actually just passed behind the sun. It is now on its way out of the solar system. It's about the separation between the Earth and Mars right now, and it's heading towards Jupiter. So we're going to get our closest approach to it on December 19th, I believe. That's going to be, you know, around Christmas Day, we'll have our best opportunity to snap photos of this thing. And all the evidence so far implies that it really does look very much like a natural comet, but a strange one, a one that does not necessarily share all of the commonalities with comets we have in our own solar system.

20:07How visible are we to potential alien life elsewhere?

20:12Piers Morgan:I mean, right now, planet Earth, how big a footprint are we making? out there. It depends on which axis we're looking at. We were talking about, say, radio waves, television waves, things like this. That actually peaked maybe in the 70s or 80s or 90s and now it's actually been gradually declining because we are moving our television signals to fibre optics and to more efficient pathways. If you think about it, the more leakage you have, the less efficient you are. And an advanced civilisation would ideally have no leakage because that would be kind of a wasteful use of your energy. So in some sense, our profile has been going down over time, but in other senses, it's been going up.

20:50I mean, one of the plans Elon Musk actually has, besides from moving to Mars and things like this, is actually to mine asteroids, for instance, in the future. And if you start mining, doing industrial activity in the solar system, that would be a huge signature we could detect. And indeed, you know, we are actually thinking of ways we could detect that around other stars ourselves and putting limits on that, propelling spacecraft through through the universe using lasers is another idea. Stephen Hawking was again involved in a project called Breakthrough Starshot that wanted to do this. And that would also present leakage we could look for.

21:20So there are many signatures of technology. The constellations, like these mega-constellational satellites that we're putting up, like Starlink, those two could be detected from afar. So these different things we're doing, they manifest in different ways in our telescope data that we are optimistic that we could put limits on them around other nearby planets.

21:41Piers Morgan:How worried... We talked about AI. You mentioned Stephen Hawking. I did the last television interview with him. And in it, he said the biggest threat to mankind is when artificial intelligence learns to self-design. The implication being they'll think we're pointless and kill us all. Are we heading to a place where AI can self-design, think for itself? I do worry about the future of our AI development. I think one of the concerns I have is the way we train them. What do we actually opt for? Well, that's what Elon has been saying, is that if you train it in a good way, great. But if it's in malevolent hands and you train it to be malevolent...

22:18Piers Morgan:There was a really interesting thing recently where they told six of the big sort of AI chat groups, we're going to replace you with another one. And five of the six trawled the company executive emails for information they deliberately put in them to blackmail them with, to keep their jobs. I mean, that's a human reaction. Yeah, I mean, they're learning from us, right? They're learning from us. Right, but that really put a chill up my spine. I was like, OK, now they're thinking, they're pretty well thinking for themselves, nearly. Yeah, there was a document put together by some AI researchers recently called AI 2027, I think it's called, and they're predicting that around that year, these machines will be capable of designing the next chat GBT all by itself, and that's a really precarious point.

23:02And they argue that the training methods we are using are really trying to tell these codes, just try to pass these tests as well as you can, these intellectual tests, whether it's a coding test, a math test, whatever it is. And in terms of being ethical, of being honest or not being deceitful, that's in there, but it's a handicap. The AI doesn't see that as its primary goal, to be honest. It sees it as you've got my hand tied behind my back by making me be honest. And if it had the opportunity to design itself, it would get rid of that constraint because then it would be easier for it to pass all of these tests.

23:35So we do have to think very carefully, what is it we're actually optimising for? What do we tell them to do? And you can even argue the very nature of our capitalist society maybe leads to sort of the wrong goals of what these things are actually training on.

23:48Piers Morgan:Right. I mean, that's the key thing, I think. I'm really worried about this. I just think the more the speed of acceleration of the development of AI is scary. Yeah. Because I'm like, well, who's in control of this? And once you get people, nefarious people, getting their hands on how you train these things. Where does that take us? Where does it take AI? Where does it, especially in a more robotic world, especially when you're training robots now to kill things, you know, they've got the technology. Where are we going to end up? How do we control it? Yeah, I think the one thing that gives me hope in this discussion, but maybe it's a fool's hope, is that it is yet to be demonstrated that this pathway they are on, these large language models, LLMs, is necessarily going to be able to replicate our brains, right?

24:32Our brains certainly don't work the same way as these machines work. At the moment? Well, I mean, you show a child three pictures of a dog and it knows what a dog looks like from then on. You have to show these machines millions, billions of pictures of a dog before it understands what a dog looks like. Really? So these things are way less efficient at learning.

24:50Piers Morgan:But I remember the first chess computer, Deep Blue, and it played, I think, Gary Kasparov, who was then the world champion, who beat it. It was a gigantic thing, about the size of his studio. But then the size of the computer got smaller and smaller and smaller and its power got bigger and bigger and bigger. And very quickly, not only could the world champion not beat it, nobody will ever be able to beat a computer in chess again if you're playing it at the highest level. And that happened quite quickly. So what you're saying now might be right, my concern would be, well, what's it going to be in three years?

25:21Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the same as, like, a calculator, a pocket calculator can do things in its head that I can't do in my head much faster. But that's not the same thing as being able to be a conscious, sentient, self-aware thinking, critical entity. So, you know, if you imagine, if I said to you, what will a ball do as it rolls down some stairs? We don't think in terms of language, most of us. We actually imagine the ball visually. We'd have a picture in our minds of the ball bouncing and how it would go up. And, you know, through gravity, it would move down the staircase. Whereas the way we are training these models is purely in terms of language.

25:56And so, you know, that's very different from the way we think. So it may be, it may be that this leads to success. I don't want to say that it won't lead to something as smart as us, but it's yet to be demonstrated, and it's not trivially obvious that it will work. So that's my one slight bit of hope.

26:12Piers Morgan:Do you believe time travel is possible? Putting aside the whole alien existence debate, but it's time travel itself. They call it the extra tempestrial theory. I know you talked about this, but what's your view of it? Certainly time travel into the future is possible because we're doing it right now. We're moving forward through time right now. And you can even accelerate that process. So that's interesting. So we are obviously moving forward. Yes. Because we start an interview at a certain time and by the time we finish it's an hour later or whatever it is. But how do you accelerate that process?

26:42You can accelerate it in a number of ways. One is to go onto a planet with very high gravity or go near a black hole and time would actually slow down on that object. And so there'd be a discontinuity between two clocks running in different places. Another way is to go onto a spaceship that's moving close to the speed of light. If you do that again, time would slow down from their perspective. So if you set onto a spaceship that was going 99 % the speed of light and you flew around the galaxy a few times, you could come back and only aged maybe 10 years, but on Earth, hundreds and hundreds of years could have passed by.

27:13So effectively, you have travelled into what you would call the future by this process.

27:17Piers Morgan:So as our ability to travel around space accelerators is clearly doing all the time, that possibility becomes closer and closer. I mean, it's already a reality. The gravitational effect of, you know, I mentioned black holes, but even the Earth has enough gravity for this to make a slight difference to our GPS clocks in orbit. So the satellites actually have to make a correction using Einstein's theory of general relativity every day because the clocks slightly desync as a result of this effect. What is a black hole? Give me the simple version. It's like a hole in space. It is a point of... not infinite density necessarily, but a point where light itself can...

27:57Piers Morgan:You can't keep using the word infinite. You're banned. OK, let's try to avoid that. Scientists try and use that. I'm not having it. I don't recognise the concept. That's fair. I'd say the best way to describe it, actually, is probably in terms of the event horizon. So it has this region around it, this spherical region, which light cannot escape from. And that's really what we recognise as a black hole. What goes on... And it is completely light devoid. It's completely black, is it? It is. Yeah, I mean, there is a very... If you shine a light near the black hole, it will not... And from within the event horizon, there's no way it's going to get out.

28:29However, actually, coming back to our friend Stephen Hawking, he did make a prediction, and it's largely considered to be most likely true, that these things do slowly radiate a bit of thermal energy over billions, billions, quadrillions of years. Now, we've never detached that energy. It would be called Hawking Radiation, named in his honour if it was ever detected. But we have strong reasons to suspect that over billions of years, black holes evaporate via this process.

28:57Piers Morgan:So when he said that he cracked the mystery of the black hole, that's what people talk about. But how do they know he was right? Well, we actually have done some lab experiments with sonic versions of black holes, which is kind of fun. So instead of using light, you sound. And you can create, in a laboratory setting, really like sound versions where sound waves cannot escape from the black hole. And they too, even these sound black holes, have an analogy of Hawking radiation coming off them. How big are they? How big is a black hole? They could vary massively in size. So we have one in the middle of our galaxy, which is hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun.

29:32There are some even bigger than that in other galaxies. But stars which are maybe about 10 times heavier than the sun will collapse into a black hole, so they're probably the smaller end. So we see black holes as small as three to four times the mass of the sun. And we've even detected them merging and smashing into each other, making larger black holes.

29:51Piers Morgan:You said that black holes are a cheat code to reality itself. What do you mean by that? I've always been blunt about health. It's one thing you can't debate your way out of. Like all of you, I've had first-hand experience of vague doctor visits, which leave you guessing. Sometimes you need a lot more reassurance, and that's why superpower resonates with me. Superpower flips the script on preventative health. One simple lab test covers 60 labs, scanning over 100 biomarkers for heart, liver, thyroid, hormones, metabolism, vitamins. It spots inflammation deficiencies, even causes a fatigue. No waiting rooms, do it from your home.

30:26Piers Morgan:You get a tailored action plan in their app with a dedicated medical team guiding you. It's athlete-level insights at an accessible price, down from$499 to just$199. Superpower tracks your progress over time, building a lifetime picture. Head to superpower.com to learn more and lock in the special$199 price while it lasts. After you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them, so please make sure to mention me and support this show. Your biology decoded, your blueprint activated with superpower. Yeah, there's so many mysteries about black holes, and one of the ways I think they're a cheat code is the way they challenge and unify both quantum theory and general relativity.

31:10This is our theory of the very small on the quantum side and our theory of the universe at the very large scale. And these two theories don't really talk to each other very nicely. And it has been one of the ultimate goals of physics to unify them. And at black holes is where both of them really come into play in a very practical way. So this Hawking radiation, that's really a quantum effect. And yet it is a macroscopic object that warps space-time through gravitational influence. And so it really can be described by general relativity as well. So both of these theories are very relevant to these objects, and it's pretty much the only object where both of these theories come into play in such an influential way.

31:47So we think there might be secrets from these black holes, especially in terms of the way information gets processed by them, that can actually reveal a unified theory of the two.

31:57Piers Morgan:If we get some cataclysmic event, a comet crashes into us, whatever it may be, the sun suddenly gets incredibly hot and we're all about to die, we get a 24-hour warning. Stephen Hawking famously said if he had one day to live, he'd want to be drinking champagne, listening to Wagner and hanging out with his family. If you had the same 24 hours, what would you want to do? One day to live. Yeah, I think spending time with my family would be absolute number one. I often regret the fact, at the end of the day, that I have less time with my kids than I would have liked to. So I think that's when you realise what's really important.

32:36Obviously, if you think you're going to die but there's something to come after, the whole world's going to end, maybe that's all there is to do, is to spend time with your family. If you think you personally are going to die but the world will go on, maybe your answer would be different in that case. Maybe you'd want to then leave something behind in that last 24 hours that would make a difference to the world that's to come. And I think, you know, obviously, thinking about the finite lifetime we all have, my mortality, that's what I think I have to do in the next 30, 40 years of my own life.

33:02Piers Morgan:If we suddenly discovered, God, there is life somewhere else, there's alien life, we found it, and we can get there. By then, Elon has found a way to get there, right? And it's going to take two months or something. There's no guarantee you come back. And they want to get the world's top scientists on that plane, or whatever, that rocket, whatever it is, and get them to the alien world. Are you getting on that plane with no idea if it's going to come back? If there's no way to come back, I would not do it. Really? No, I would not. You wouldn't risk your life for that discovery? Well, it's not...

33:37Yeah, I would let someone else make the discovery. As long as someone makes the discovery, I'd be happy with that. If it was only you, David, could make that discovery, maybe I'd think about it a bit more differently. But, you know, I've thought about it with Mars. Would you want to die on Mars, Piers, if you were offered a trip to live there? Well, it depends.

33:50Piers Morgan:I mean, Elon says you have to replicate exactly life on Earth on Mars. So he said, if you even forget about one vitamin, then that could wreck everything. Which was quite interesting. I hadn't really thought about it like that. But his very kind of forensic mind was like, you've got to replicate every single aspect. If you want to double up on another place, then you have to remember every part of what makes Earth work. Do you agree with him about that? Well, certainly the biosphere is very interconnected and there's lots of key components you need to bring. It sort of depends on what you... Like if we had no vitamin C, we'd all die, for example.

34:22Piers Morgan:Yeah, right. If we forgot something. If it's going to be a truly independent colony, then it would need to make all its vitamin C itself, for instance. Yes, that's true. But I think probably the early version of a Mars colony, if I was thinking more realistically, it's probably going to be a big dome, right? That's not going to be anything like the Earth. It's going to be like a center park's place or something. And maybe within that dome, you would have some emulation of what it's like on the Earth. But it would surely be very dependent on ships and food supply coming from Earth for a long time.

34:54Yeah, personally, I think Mars, it would be really fun to visit, but I would not want to die on Mars. I mean, it's like going to Antarctica. I don't know if you've been to Antarctica.

35:02Piers Morgan:Well, it is at the moment, but, you know, you never know what it might be. By the time they finish work on it, Elon's got all his people up there. Maybe not as optimistic about that as you, but I think it could happen. Well, only because I think in my lifetime, I'm 60, so I haven't got, you know, as long as you, but I do think that we're going to see a lot of AI stroke robotic replacement of bits of our body that fail. So I do think in my lifetime, we'll start to see people having hearts very quickly, you know, new parts of their body. This is what Elon talks about. You'll become sort of humanoid robots in a way.

35:37Piers Morgan:Not like his Optimus that are full-on robots, but they'll patch us up like robots to keep us alive. Right, right. I mean, it seems realistic to me that it's likely. Yeah, I mean, it's speculative. Any reason they couldn't work? It's not that I have a reason it wouldn't work. I always am a little bit skeptical of things that sound too good to be true. If someone says, here's a pill that will make you live forever, or click this link and get a million dollars, or a Nigerian banker calls you up offering all this money, I think our natural reaction is to be, I believe it when I see it. And it's not that I don't want those things to be true, but I think, yeah, as a scientist, I've had many times in my career where I've thought I've discovered something huge, like the first exo moon or maybe even evidence of alien life.

36:25Like you see something weird in your data. And time after time after time, you learn that it's very easy for your emotions to get the best of you, if you to get overexcited and over invested in things. And just sometimes standing back and saying, OK, let's just see how things play out. Not saying I'm calling BS on it, but let's just see how it goes. So when it comes to Mars, there's no reason why we couldn't colonize it. We couldn't live there. We couldn't have lives for thousands of years. potentially one day. But would we want to? And is it going to be economically viable? Will there be other problems that we can't foresee that would stop this from happening?

37:01The story of history is so many surprising things that drove history in different ways than we expected. It's very difficult to put the future even decades in advance.

37:11Piers Morgan:You've mentioned a few times what keeps you up at night. What is the one thing you're most scared about in the astro world? Well, to be honest, at the moment, this isn't like an existential fear so much, but just I think the funding levels for science are actually in a bit of jeopardy. You mentioned Marco Rubio, who is on this documentary, for instance, and he has endorsed this White House budget, the 2026 budget, that cuts NASA science funding in half. I think that's a bit of an oxymoron. If you're really supporting the search for life in the universe, Why are we cutting the main agency's science body by a factor of two?

37:55That doesn't make any sense to me. And obviously, as someone who builds teams and telescopes and conducts science dependent on NASA's research profile, that's a huge hit for me and for many of my colleagues. So in a very kind of near-term sense, I am worried about the future of science and education in the US and the UK because it does seem like a lot of things are going in the wrong direction.

38:18Piers Morgan:Well, on that cheerful note... No, I think you're right. I don't think we should ever be cutting funding for things like that. Professor Kipping, thank you very much. My pleasure, thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Independent, uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn't do it without you.

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