Why Are We Obsessed With Aliens? (With Becky Ferreira)

32:01Why aren't we getting? So he also kind of articulates an early Fermi paradox as well. It's only when I think we get into the 20th century and there's even more granular detail that you start to have that be the formative idea. That's why we call it the fermi paradox and not the we will one but it's it's definitely this the same conversation and and i think both both are really valid like i i can see the argument each way which is why it's so compelling right yeah and it seems uh the the arguments for why the fermi paradox i think everybody knows but the the essential uh paradox is if there's if the universe is so vast and infinite like and full of life then why are we seeing it like where are the aliens the the arguments for why and you get into all the the the theories you kind of you touch on all of them have gotten pretty pretty sophisticated right like like the dark forest one can you explain that one and and when that emerged yeah yeah well i mean i'm not sure actually when that one emerged i think that might be kind of innate because it's called the dark forest one now after the the famous series the three body uh problem series what i can't remember the name of the whole trilogy but But anyway, point being, it's the idea that you don't want to make a, you don't want to communicate.

33:14You don't want to send messages out, right? Because what if they're hostile? You just don't know. So you kind of keep, you got, if you're smart, you keep, you lay low and that's why you don't have aliens kind of contacting everyone else. They're just, they're doing a game theory approach of why, why do this? There's also like so many variations of that. I think the best answer for me is just, it's a really big universe. and we've seen that earth is very special now as an odds game i still think it would be much more surprising if there were no aliens than if there are that would be so weird however like when i think when you when you know you get the kind of sagan view of the universe as well in the 60s and 70s where they were where the public communication is better about how big this universe actually is and it's accelerating all you know it does make sense that uh you may just be kind of ships in the night in terms of time, like a civilization can flourish and it's just the wrong period of time or whatever.

34:12So I just, I do think the idea of like that I go to the book as well in the Fermi kind of section and the solutions to the Fermi paradox, the rare earth idea seems the most compelling to me. It's not that there's no other ones, but we are very lucky about the special set of circumstances that led to life and complex life on earth and it just may be really really rare something else that i got from the book is that like after the scientific revolution aliens became it's very much like the medium is the message like aliens are also stories about media and i think obviously the example that everybody loves is the War of the Worlds radio play by Orson Welles that people thought was real and caused panic in the streets.

35:08There's a great This American Life episode about it. I forget where it was in South America, but it wasn't just that once that Orson Welles did it. The play has been redone in other places in the world, and it has always caused a panic, which I thought was interesting. That's funny. But you gave an example that I haven't heard of before called The Great Hoax, which I thought was very uh uh apropos can you talk about the great hoax it's I think so essential for even understand it's it's got all the elements you would think of a good hoax today uh new media there's a penny press coming out and it was okay so I'll situate the scene it was in the 1830s in New York and um uh like the penny press had just been invented and that was you know as the name implies you could buy an issue for one cent and before that like Like, these papers were like six, seven cents, and they were kind of for the elite.

36:02And then Penny Press just made it possible for everybody to read everything. So as you can imagine, like a lot of these papers were printing stuff in the way that they had the incentive structures that you would get in social media today. Yeah, right. It's more like an internet dynamic. It's like increased access and increased quantity of things to read. And competition between the different platforms. And so they would all be kind of competing to have the most sensational story. You also have new technologies and science. So you're starting to see the dawn of like the mega telescope. And one person, the most famous astronomer probably in the world at this time was John Herschel, the son of William Herschel, this astronomical legacy.

36:42He had built a telescope in South America that was getting a lot of, it was one of the big first Southern telescopes, right? So that was in the mix there. and people were beginning to see details of the moon and that would lead eventually to seeing details of Mars later in the century, which, you know, Percival Lovell, that's a whole other thing. So that's all kind of in the mix. And then you have, you know, a fabulous with a grievance, which is always a familiar thing. This guy, Richard Adams-Lock, who was a writer for the New York Sun, one of the most famous penny presses at the time, he kind of got ticked off about like these scientific reports that would occasionally like they'd look at something on the moon and be like we think we see a house you know and he was just like this is dumb i'm gonna i'm gonna write a big piece out john herschel has actually seen oh man bats and cities and like oh and like and they and but the thing is they couched it like it looked like it was from john herschel and he had no idea this was going on um and they say it's like an excerpt that the sun acquired from the Edinburgh Journal of Science or something like that.

37:48Like they make it seem legit. And so there's a lot of people, you know, including me when I first came to the story, was like, oh, this is a story about a credulous public. And to some extent it is, but it's also like, it was made to be misinformation, right? And anyway, it just went like skyrocketed. People loved this story. And the circulation of the New York sun went through the moon, to coin a phrase. But like, it was just like so successful. And, you know, in the years afterwards, obviously, Herschel was like, yeah, I didn't see a bunch of man bats on the moon, though. And he was like tickled at first, but then he spent the rest of his life literally in the position of being like refuting this story over and over again.

38:30And so it's very familiar to like the times we live in now. And it has kind of all of those perfect little elements of like new media, new science technology, someone with a grievance and just just a public that is so hungry for the alien story. Right. Like that. It just I think I think it's an early test or two of just like alien stories have always been blockbusters. There was blockbusters before that, but it was like a test case of like this is a this is good content. content yeah yeah my favorite tidbit about that story is that edgar allen poe got involved right he was like he tried to sue because he was like no i had this story about doing a a hoax and he he had like uh not his it's called the balloon something in the uh hands fall and the magic balloon or something like that he's some story that he wrote that was like trying to do a similar thing so it's like not even one person is yeah so i think he like i don't think he ever was successful but he like made a made a gripe about it yeah very very good we we know this because like we're in media and we see how people write about science we see a lot of people who do a poor job we see a lot of reporting on aliens that is really bad and you obviously know this right it's like you know that it's a hot commodity uh in your beat where a lot of stuff is like you have like one of your great skills is that you take these subjects that are really esoteric and you you you make it clear to people why they are interesting and why they should matter and the alien part of the beat is uh kind of like salacious and i just wondered like knowing knowing this like knowing that it's a very tabloidy subject how does that inform how you write about about about this stuff yeah it's hard because and i don't think i have a perfect track writer piece.

40:19I don't, I think social media has made it so much. There's so many more stories that come out. Like it's difficult because, you know, a lot of scientists will pump up their results, even in the study. And it's hard to, you know, if they say in their study, something's a possible biosignature, I'm going to put that in the, you know, lead of the story, but then there's going to be usually a lot of pushback from other scientists being like, does this, you know what I mean? So I think it's really, really tough, honestly. And I think for my part, I just try to like stay in my lane. I will go like, I will adjudicate peer research review when it's really salacious.

40:55I will try to get as many comments from relevant experts in the field as I can. That's just my way of doing it. When people come with more salacious stories, like, you know, I get emails all the time being like, you know, there was an interdimensional being in my, in my living room. And I think they're really interesting. And I like respond to a lot of them being like, that's interesting, but like, I can't adjudicate that information. That's not my skill sense. There's people that can do that, but I just don't know how to say that was an interdimensional being. I don't know what to do with that.

41:22So I think what's fascinating, and I think honestly, a lot of readers want this, is just being like, well, what is the bar for a biosignature? And they're surprised when it's like, scientists totally disagree about that. Yeah. So I think inviting people in, making it clear scientists are debating this and that is okay. Like that's what is supposed to happen. You're supposed to see a lot of crazy debate in the public sphere over it. Now, I think a lot of scientists would say like some of these stories, there's too much media attention on them. But it's like, I think, you know, something, a great example would be, I think the phosphine story.

41:58There was phosphine detected a possible biomarker on Venus. There's a lot of, you know, geological explanations for it, but it's a bit, it's an interesting thing to see. And if you look up Phosphine Venus in Google News or whatever, you'll just see the debate playing out over the last five years. And I think that's what we have to get used to is this team says this and this team, and you're just going to have to get used to ambiguous results. And that's not how we are trained, the way the pop culture has trained us. It's like, no, there's going to be an alien right there and it will be very unambiguous.

42:29But I think that's, at least if you're interested in how scientists are approaching it, it's going to be tantalizing. And I think especially just the last thing I'll say was with these exoplanet kind of discoveries, it's like how, say you really did find something that was like so unequivocally a bios, it would be so hard to explain geologically, but it's just like some planet that's 500 light years away. What are you going to do with that information? A lot of the time, we're not going to then get a contact moment, even if there was intelligent life capable of communicating that would take a thousand years for a two-way conversation.

43:05So I think people need to realize this is a multi-generational project, always has been, we're building on our ancestors. And so that's just not going to be something we'll see in our lifetimes most likely, right? So it's not the answer people want and it's not even the answer I want, but it's the answer. Yeah. I think from my perspective, and this is something that we have done a few times, is that the story is not necessarily the content of a specific claim or a specific study. It's the fact that such a salacious, provocative information was published in a reliable journal or is talked about in a congressional hearing or released information from the Pentagon.

43:58And I think that has, in my opinion, been the story since 2017 with the Pentagon UFO videos. The videos themselves are interesting, but I think what is more interesting is how different organizations, including government bodies, are handling this. this yeah and going back to our discussion about like how different eras how their stories about aliens what they reflect about that moment in time i think the pentagon ufo videos are like the the core key text of our moment about aliens and i'm wondering if you have any thoughts about like those images the discussion around them uh the hearings around them the media coverage like what do you think they say about like our, our current moment in culture?

44:53That's such a, I'd be interested in your take on it too. They were really a moment for me where I started taking everything like that a lot more seriously. Not that I never, I, it's clear that people have had strange experiences and I trust their, you know, recollections of all that, right? Whatever. Like that, I can't say it's aliens, but I'm not going to call people liars when they say they've had weird experiences. That, that is those are so concrete and the fact that you can as a couple of those videos um uh have uh have the pilots reacting as well and i think you know a navy pilot who's seen like tens of thousands of flight hours if they're surprised by something and the way that you know these things look is just it is so everyone should want to know what that is so i think i think it was a great deal of validation for the community, the ufological community, which I don't think should ever be thought of as a monolith.

45:48Obviously, it's very kaleidoscopic, but it was like this footage is so incontrovertible in terms of like, it's something so strange. Now, is it alien? I don't know, but it's something so strange and unexplainable. And it's like these pilots are just astonished. And so that was like when I first actually started to really cook into that world little bit more. Mostly just because, again, that's evidence that I can actually point to and be like, that's weird. You know what I mean? And I think it also really did change. It was a sign of the change of posture that the government is trying to do. I don't think always successfully, but NASA has tried to have these independent UAP reports where they're really asking for sightings and asking for this kind of thing from the public and trying to foster this sense of transparency and openly saying like nobody should be stigmatized, which is, you know, that was a huge thing in the past.

46:42Of course, if you reported these things, you could risk like your career by, you know, people saying you're some fringe lunatic who believes in, you know, Martians or whatever. And the recognition of the failure of the past strategies with the U.S. government and towards this topic. And so I think that's going to be all really interesting. And I hope that they continue to release them. I don't think that I think the damage is kind of done there. Yeah. but it's a start. I think it's better than continuing to have this attitude of like, we don't release anything and we don't take it seriously. And there's no aliens and blah, blah, blah.

47:15Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But what's your take Emmanuel? Yeah. Thank you for asking. Cause I was really setting myself up to give my own take. The, I think it's, it's a perfect, like Rosetta stone for, for our, our moment in culture, because at its core, the situation is that we have more information than ever, right? Like we have the instruments on these aircraft to give us more detail, like higher resolution, more fidelity of information about what used to be like a rumor in the local tavern about like flying saucers, right? Like we have, it's grainy, but it's like highly scientific instruments recording a UFO, unidentified flying object.

48:09That's what it is. No matter what your opinion of it is, it's like that is what we're seeing. Maybe it's not technically a flying object because it's some sort of error in the instrumentation, right? Or like an optical illusion or whatever, right? But it's like we're seeing a thing that we don't understand. And despite or even because of having more information, it feels like we know less, right? And that's something that is true across culture right now. So there's that aspect of it. And then there's also the aspect of, as you've said, a lot of this stress in institutions and government specifically, and sometimes for good reason.

48:50So it's like we have many years of the government waving off anyone who's even bringing up the subject. and now it kind of flipped and I feel like there's almost too much entertaining in government of these stories right like there's too many hands and like there's too many people coming through and there's too many wild things being said in places that used to be reserved for like very serious discussion and then finally obviously like it's a huge culture of grift and on the margin there's just like a ton of grifters you know what I mean and it's like sometimes those grifters make it into very, very serious positions of power.

49:32You know what I mean? So it's like, so I think regardless of what you think about the content of the videos, I think the way that they're working their way through our culture really is emblematic of where we're at. I think that's so funny, the point that you made too about the overindulgence. I think that's so true as well. And that really muddies the waters even more, you know? Yeah, like the first time that there was a hearing, right, about one of these videos, you're like, oh my god, we're really living through a moment. And then the fourth time, you're like, who is this guy? Why are they letting this guy talk?

50:06And show it then. I agree with everybody. Show it. Don't hint around it. Don't dance around it. It's just weird. Yeah. But back to the more serious science of it, you go through near the end of the book through a bunch of upcoming really amazing sci-fi sounding missions that could teach us something about alien life. Do you have a favorite? Do you have one that you think is very promising? Yeah, I do. And I want to really represent it because it's in danger. The Mars sample return mission, which is a very troubled mission. It's had a lot of trouble. It's supposed to be the pickup mission for what Perseverance is now, Perseverance is drilling these little samples and caching the ones that are very exceptional, including one that just, I think, in September, it was in September, was recognized to have a potential biosignature in it.

51:07So it's like, literally, it's finding the kind of evidence you want, but it doesn't have the instrumentation, obviously, as a tiny rover to determine a geological or a biological cause for what it found. So the idea was you'd have another mission, come pick these up and bring them back. Because of the Trump administration's cuts to NASA, this is a really imperiled, one of the most imperiled missions. It's not like it's a perfect, it's had real management problems and stuff like that. It's a beleaguered mission, but it should, that's the best chance we have is to really get something in our laboratories to look and make the distinction.

51:44There's obviously, there's lots of things on Earth that scientists have in labs that they can't make the distinction whether it's you know an ancient earth sample whether it's life or not so it's not necessarily gonna be a slam dunk but i think i'm most interested in that one because that's the most near-term delivery i can think of we have really exciting missions going to europa and to uh to titan but i don't think that's gonna another one of them is probably gonna be able to give us a sample that is like unambiguously life right the europa one's not gonna land and the Dragonfly 1 going to Titan, it's not really equipped to do that.

52:20So I think just if I wanted to bet on life being discovered in my lifetime, alien life being discovered, that the Mars sample return is the best bet. And so I really hope it comes back. And I think if NASA doesn't do it, then it's possible the Chinese space program will do something similar. So maybe it'll be another decade on or something that someone does it. But I think that's just... The fact that it's just sitting there on Mars right now drives me insane. Like all these examples, like we got to see if that's life or not. And even though it would just be a dead microbe if it was, that's everything, right?

52:58Then you can suddenly have this data point is entered where if life can emerge, it apparently does. Even in microbial form, that's like, you know, then you know that it must be common, right? So, yeah. That's, by the way, that's another thing that's very emblematic of the time and a very Trumpian thing where like, he'll campaign, he'll say like, if I get an office, I'll just show you the aliens, you know what I mean? I'm just gonna like open the doors and like show you the crashed spaceships and stuff. And then he gets an office and he like kills the most promising program that might actually tell us something about alien life.

53:30That's such a good point. Yeah, exactly. Also, by the way, I'm disappointed. I thought you were gonna say, like, isn't there a theoretical mission to like drill into, to Europa? It's just so many decades out that that would even happen. If it were up to me, there should be an orbiter around every planet at all times. It's just... Yeah. So I don't care about... We should all be doing that as a collective society. Yeah, yeah. Because Europa is like what? It's like six miles? It's got a huge ocean. Yeah. Well, it's probably got really, really thick. Yeah, several, several miles deep. So Enceladus is also like a really...

54:06This is another layup. I don't know why we haven't done this. It actually squirts its water out all the time. It has plumes that geysers on itself pull that have already been sampled once, just not by a spacecraft that was able to see whether it was life or not. So just send one there and have it go through the plume with some astrobiological detection kit. And come on. It's just like that. So that's another one. But it surprises me that there's a couple concept missions for an Enceladus mission like that. But it's just a long way to Saturn. And a lot of these missions, they're just not big priorities.

54:43And it makes me sad. Because can you imagine? You get samples back from Mars, and there's dead aliens in there. There's samples back from Enceladus, and there's the live aliens in there. Like, it's just, you know. Or it would be interesting if not as well, you know? It's just, yeah. Our own solar system has so many interesting sites. Yeah, that's another thing. when I read the book and you see all of it in aggregate, because it's like, I see it over the years, I read your stories, but it's like, when you lay it all out there, I was like, oh, there's actually like a lot going on. There's a lot going on in the solar system more than I imagine.

55:17Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's a cool place. It is. In the book, you describe something that's called, quote, declaration of principles concerning activities following the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence, which you refer to as the plan. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, it's this group of researchers that collaborate around the world, sometimes under UN auspices, to kind of figure out what's the game plan for if we find different forms of life? What happens if we find microbial life on Mars? What happens if we get contacted by an alien beacon that's clearly unambiguous? How does the world respond to this?

55:59And so it has recommendations like the scientific community needs to be as transparent and open as possible. The results need to be coming out quickly, but they also need to be peer reviewed as quickly as possible. It's trying to do this balance act of, you know, we want to be getting that information out to the public so we're not getting accused of being secretive at the same time as like we want to be getting good information out of the public on something that's possibly very ambiguous. And it's a tough tightrope. um but you know uh it's it's the it's the game plan for now to try to coordinate how that would actually go down do you think that's a naive group of people are they going to be do you think like should we actually make contact is that being brushed aside and like the pentagon steps in and they do whatever they think they should do or yeah totally i don't think it's naive i think most of the people who even made that plan would say that's not, that's a sketch.

56:53There's like the people that are involved in this conversation, the researchers and experts and everything would love to have more public input on how to do, like, honestly, this is a topic where there's a lot of public forums and workshops and things that I encourage anyone to like look and seek out because they want to have public input. But it's also just like, you got to have some plan. I think most of them think it's really incomplete. I think most of them are desperate for subject matter and you know experts on things like how would this metabolize through social media you know how would this get siloed things like that and i think you know something like i'm not sure the military would necessarily like the way that you see in a rival or movies like that where or even contact the military always comes in and now it's a military project um i'm not i'm not even sure like i don't know how it would play out it depends so much on the nature of the thing and so i think it's it's it's funny it's it is naive it has to be naive by nature because it's trying to anticipate an unanticipatable event.

57:51But it's just like a way to, I think, try to start the conversation. So honestly, when you talk to researchers involved in trying to, you know, game out these post-detection scenarios, they are like, this is, you know, this is rudimentary. This is like, we don't, you know, they're happy to admit it's not even that way. But yeah, got to start somewhere. I think the existence of the group and the conversation itself is fascinating. And shout out to our mutual friend, Daniel Oberhaus, who wrote an entire book about how would we, in theory, communicate with aliens. Great book, yeah. Which is a good complimentary read to Becky's book.

58:32Let's do a lightning round at the end here. I'm going to ask you a few questions about aliens. I want to make clear that when I talk about aliens in this case, I'm not talking about like bacteria or, or signs of microbes on some rock. I'm talking about like little green men or something. Intelligent, nice. Yeah. Yeah. Civilization. Something like this, something we see in movies. Yeah. Do you think aliens have ever been to earth? I don't know, but I doubt it. Okay. Do you think there are or were aliens in our solar system? uh also don't know but doubt it do you think there are or were aliens in our galaxy oh sorry could i amend that answer i do actually uh i i hold out a unfounded belief that maybe mars had microbes and things like that maybe mars and venus would have microbes oh you said no microbes no microbes okay no microbes sorry sorry microbes we're talking little green men's I got the first rule of lightning round and it's out of my head.

59:36I'm sorry. I love microbes. I'm just a microbe person. Okay. So no, in that case, no, I doubt it. Yeah. Okay. I'll accept it if they had like really small cities, like microbial cities and microbial spaceships. Yeah. But you're saying no to that. No, I am. I'm saying no to that. Okay. What about in our galaxy? The Milky Way? Yes. Yes. I would be very surprised if there's no intelligent aliens in our galaxy. Yeah. Like, what about the next one over? What is it? Alpha Centauri? You think there's somebody over there? That's pretty close. I mean, I doubt it because we haven't heard anything. There's no signs of it.

1:00:09In our near 100 light year radius, I don't really think so. I think we would see signs, maybe. Do you think aliens know we're here? I don't know. I don't know that one. That's acceptable. I think it's interesting that you're not a hard no. No, yeah. I don't know if aliens know. Maybe they took a look and they're like, oh, cool. They're there. Well, it's possible that they could be doing the same thing as us and being like, I think if an alien was, you know, 600 light years away and maybe they don't have interstellar travel, but they have our technologies. If you look at Earth, you can tell it's inhabited, right?

1:00:48They see our signals in the same way. We're looking for other people's signals. We have techno signatures coming out. We have radio leakage. We have pollution in the skies. We have like a lot of things that signal that. that uh so if they're out there and they're looking at us i think then that's why i would preserve i would say i don't know but they might not they might be like cool you know not every not every species might might want contact you know yeah yeah and that's that's by the way when we would deploy this plan we just talked about is when we when we would recognize one of those signals yeah yeah and then final question do you think we'll ever make contact with aliens yeah i don't know i'm sorry to be so agnostic on it i just genuinely don't i just don't know uh i think you know that's the most fascinating question and like the fact that i love stories in pop culture about aliens that are really different because i just think obviously that is the most likely thing it's not going to be star trek universe where we're all anatomically the same like it's it's so i just i think it's really would be extraordinarily strange to have no complex intelligent life and even in our galaxy especially you i like that you phrase it and if it was now or ever like i think it's got to be but to have the ability to actually do it to contact and the interests i just don't maybe humans are unique in that way maybe a lot of aliens are just like why why would i be interested like there's other intelligent species on our planet and they're not interested in in searching for aliens you know what i mean like i'll actually that's a good point i meant to ask you i forgot to write this down but do you have a favorite depiction of aliens and and media it could be book movie whatever like do you have a favorite depiction of aliens yeah i i love my favorite is uh a story of your life by ted chang which is the book that arrivals based on and if you haven't read it it's short it's a novella so it's but it's just great it's fantastic i also really like nope uh the the jordan peele movie um so those would be my top two i think have you read a memory called empire no i haven't what's that yeah a memory called empire archetti martin she is a historian and it's a very good book it's like far far future like where we're a spacefaring humanity uh and my favorite my favorite like version of aliens in media is when we contact them they're already like to me it makes sense that if we were to contact aliens they wouldn't be a singular uh culture or species like humanity, right?

1:03:35They would already be a confederation of multiple species. So it's like one of those. It's like they meet the aliens, but it's actually a more layered culture and multi-species culture by the time we meet them. Half-Life 2 also, a video game, has a similar concept. Very cool. I'll check those out for sure. Definitely recommend the book to everybody listening. I think we'll leave that there, Becky. thank you so much uh i am legally obligated to read this outro by uh our our friend joseph cox which says uh as a reminder for for media as a journalist founded and supported by subscribers if you wish to subscribe to for for media and directly support our work please go to for for media.co you'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast you'll also get to listen to subscribers only version uh the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week.

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