#2363 - David Kipping

24:02It just refuses to lose black holes. Gravity always wants to win the game. So eventually, these clouds collapse. And the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right? Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make star in the center. And the stuff that's left over on the outside, that disk of material, because the star kind of blasts out of its poles and kind of pummels all the gas from North themselves. You end up with a disk of material, the centrifugal forces, like spinning a pizza ball, which kind of force it into a disk.

24:33And then from that disk you start to coalesce again, just some areas of slightly dense, some areas of slightly less dense, and gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together. So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand. So we know how to go, for instance, from from pebbles, if you start off with pebbles, and imagine them bouncing around, we can imagine sticking them into boulders. We kind of understand how that could happen, but we don't quite understand how to do some of the steps like go all the way from dust, which presumably at one point, which is dust, how do you go from dust all the up to pebbles, all the way up to the boulders, all the up to plant SMHOLS.

25:08That whole story we don't understand, we've got bits of it where we think we understand it, but the whole thing we don't. Are there any working models? or I mean, this is a hugely huge, active area of research. People are simulating dust on supercomputers trying to stick it together, figure out what happened. But it's chaotic. I mean, you've got trillions and trillions of particles of dust randomly moving around and solving the equations to calculate their motion is one of the most challenging things ever. But maybe AI will help a big part with that. That will be interesting. Is it also a factor of the size of the Sun?

25:43Like our star is fairly small in terms of the what we know about the universe one of the most amazing videos that I tend to send people online is the video that shows you know It's so it's earth in comparison to our star and then it shows our star in comparison slightly larger stars Then it goes on and on and on to get to like beetle juice and you get to some of these It's just so crazy It's got to stop at some point. It keeps going It's like a galaxy -sized star. What is that thing? It gets so nutty. It's so big. It's so big. Yeah. I mean, those big stars, those are actually rare. So those are the giant stars of the universe.

26:24And most stars are not that big. What is the biggest one that we found? Oh, I don't know the name. But yeah, I think you were talking about stars which are probably filling up to the orbit of Jupiter type size. So from here to Jupiter. Yeah. Oh my god. just imagine a star from our sun that goes all the way out to Jupiter. It's nuts. Yeah. Wow. And these things are barely stars at that point. Like if you actually, if you could zoom in a spaceship and look at the surface, it would, the gravity would be so weak at that point, right? Because the mass hasn't changed if the star. In fact, anything is lost mass.

27:00So it's barely gotten of gravity to hold that thing together. So the thing is like fluctuating. It's like a giant sheet that someone's waving up and down. So that's why those stars have these wild fluctuations in brightness because they're just kind of undulating on their surface. What is this one, Jamie? This is the largest one. That's the name of the biggest one I guess. Stevenson 218. What is the little tiny one in the far left? That's our son. It's so crazy. Go up in there. Yeah. Look at our son in comparison to that thing. Oh my god. And what's crazy is that the most common type of star in the universe is even small on the sun.

27:37So the most common type of star in the universe is red dwarf. 75 % of all stars are red dwarfs. Only 10 % of stars look like our sun. So already that's kind of odd. You kind of think all things are being equal. How come we didn't live around a red dwarf? Right, and what is causing one to be so massive and another source system, you know, fairly close to it to be small? And like, what is... Yeah, the difference is it's always easier to make a small thing, right? It's kind of like having crumbs down your sofa or something, like breaking up, right? It's easier to have small dusty things than it is to have huge pieces of cookies still left in the bottom of your sofa.

28:15So generally, it's pretty hard for the conditions to come together to make a gigantic supermassive star. In the early universe, those conditions were present more often because it was just so dense. But as we go forward in time, it gets harder and harder to make those super huge behemoths. There's these stars called the type 3 population stars, and we haven't found one of those. James Webb might be able to detect one. Those would be the first stars ever born. They're like the primordial pristine stars that would be uncontaminated by any metals. So Asseton has a ton of metals in it. most stars do, we can use that to figure out how old they are and their history, but the first stars would have been just these pure pristine hydrogen helium things.

28:55We'd love to be able to see what they look like, I mean, because we've never seen one of those up close. But generally, yeah, the smaller you are, the easier it is to make that star. And the anticipation of the existence of those things, like how far away are we talking about? Yeah, those stars would be the first stars. So you're probably looking at 100 million years after the big bang. So, you'd have to look back to 13 .7, 13 .8 billion years ago. Is the James Web capable of seeing that? I think it's possible, and I don't think it's consensus on this. I've seen some people say it might just about be possible, and others say it's completely impossible.

29:31You need the next generation. But I think if we're lucky, it could just happen. How many next generations do you anticipate? And I could see AI coming in to play with that, constructing something novel that can see things in a way that we're not currently using. Like when you're thinking about what we do, and you're explaining how the James R. R. Works with over 200 moving parts, and you have to shoot it into the sky and flames and rockets. And then you get this thing out there that starts observing and starts taking photographs. We're so limited in what we can see. It's still a device that's in space.

30:10And it's a device that's so close to us. It's just so close, relatively speaking. It takes forever to get there. It's really powerful rockets and all that. But it's just right there. What could we come up with without AI? Like, what theories are in place to make something that has a far wider range and much more clarity? Yeah. The ultimate, I mean, I love this idea of thing about what an alien do. How an alien observe the Earth if they had, you know, unbounded technology, what would be the limit? And a lot of us think that the ultimate telescope would be to use the Sun as a telescope. So the Sun has intense gravity and it bends light.

30:52So this was an experiment that Arthur Eddington did to prove Einstein's right, general relativity. He took photographs of the stars during Alunar total clips and he noticed that stars seemed to shift right next to the sun and so he used that to figure out how much light bends. So when they have light bending, that's a telescope, that's a mirror. So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun, it'll bend to a focus and that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculated, it's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun, so 550 AU. And along, if you just travel out in a line from that point, there's called a focal line, you put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area of the sun.

31:35So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there. If you wild, that is, that is the ultimate in my book for an alien would do. If they want to observe Earth, they would just behind that Sun that stick one of those telescopes and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from now. And this is just with our understanding of telescopes and our understanding of viewing things and clearly you could imagine with normal physics. Yeah, yeah, you could imagine physics that are a million years more technologically advanced and innovations that we can't even comprehend.

32:10Yeah, can't even conceive of that change everything. I mean, even with this telescope, you can't see people, right? You won't be able to image us, You won't be able to read like the headlines on a newspaper on some of those doorsteps. It's not powerful enough to do that. If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system. And so we're talking about doing that as well. So there was this project star shot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo and beam it back. Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right? You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.

32:40How long would it take for that beam to get back to us? Well, it's four light years away, four point two light years, right? So it would take four years? Yes, and it would take about 20 years to do the journey at the speeds they were talking they want to get 20 % the speed of light So they take 20 years take a photo So 24 years altogether. So this was your email in his brainchild and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earthlight planet and that's pretty much the best way we have To really pull that off and is the worth being done to try to make that happen? Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of star shot You already put a hundred million dollars up, I believe, if it's own money and I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it and they were like, we're going to try and do this.

33:20I wasn't part of that project but I was inspired by it and I actually came up with a twist on it recently called Tars from Interstellar. Newed Tars from the movie? What was Tars? It's like a robot thing that's in the movie, it's called Tars. And so I came up with a twist on their ideas. So let me explain their idea quickly first and then I'll give you my twist. Their idea is like if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship. That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now. The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny thin sheet of material, like imagine like a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser.

34:03And so they're talking about sort of a hundred gigawatts of laser power, right? So just kind of crazy immersive energy. So here's the sail being ejected and then back on the earth you can have this huge array of megalases and they're all going to point up at this thing and blast it. So this thing will accelerate due to just light from the sun but this is given it, is like on steroids, right? You're just going to bump it up to whatever speed you want. Now that, you know, when people saw this idea, if this is sort of this idea, there was a lot of questions about how, you know, it's not going to destroy the sail, like you're a hundred giga watt laser at a sail, like isn't that gonna obliterate the thing?

34:39So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam. And then of course, like, how do you, you know, what if it hits dust on the way? Isn't that great? That's why it's on its side now. So it's twisted over on its side to trying to void smashing into dust particles on its journey. Hopefully a flock of birds doesn't catch a stray. And here it comes into Proxima Centauri and to the Afro Centauri system, there's Proxima down the right, and it's going to fly past, there is actually a planet there, we know there's a planet there, it's going to fly past it, and try and snap a photo, there it is, and then beam that bad boy back.

35:14And that's hard. I mean, how do you even get the data transmission rate, right, to beam an image back? Just imagine if it gets there and we see lights. That'd be crazy. No, it's so... This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. We got to doctors and dentists for checkups for a reason, To make sure that everything's fine and to tackle anything before it turns into something bigger. If you care about your health, it's a good idea to seek out preventative care. But did you know that you can also be just as proactive when it comes to your safety? With a simply safe home security system, you can get peace of mind and take action before something happens.

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36:38There's no safe like simply safe. The possibility of life has always been like in front of our face. There's just the cosmos is so great and so massive. You've got the Fermi paradox, where are they, why aren't they here? And then you've got what's happening here on Earth, and it just always makes me wonder, how far do things actually get before they fall apart? Do they always fall apart? Or do they always become non -biological and not have the need for all the things that we do that show signs of life? The certain gases, the biological life exceeds? like what could be out there could be something beyond our wildest imagination, like many iterations of artificial intelligence, many down the road to the point where it's not even recognizable as life and doesn't even have to have a physical form.

37:32Yeah, obviously if it's completely recognizable, there's nothing we can really do to detect it. But when we look at, we basically know two things about the universe in terms of life and it. we know that we have not been colonized, right, as far as we can tell. Allegedly. Yeah. Allegedly. I'm a user. YouTube videos you watch. But let's talk about a hard colonization where it's like literally, it's transforming the frickin planet into machines. Like that clearly has not happened here. We're not gray goo on the surface. Not yet. So we know that hasn't happened. Yeah. And we also know, and the universe, you know, the galaxy's old.

38:07It's 13 billion years old. So there's a heck of a lot of time for that to happen. And one of the one of the strangest facets of our technology is that it's already fast enough to explore the whole galaxy. If you take Voyager 2, it was traveling at 15 kilometers per second. So that would get you across the entire diameter of the galaxy in two billion years. And the galaxy's 13 billion years. So Voyager 2, at Voyager 2 speeds, crappy alien technology out there could already have span the whole thing if they just arrived early enough. So it is a problem, and this is called fact A, hearts fact A. This clearly hasn't happened, so that's one thing we know for sure.

38:48And the other thing we know for sure is that when we look at, we don't see, you know, we look at these stars like Stevenson and Proxima Centauri, we don't see engineering on them, as far as we can tell. We don't see stars which are obviously got mega structures around them, obviously been engineered in weird ways. And when you say mega structures, which is talking about literally an artificial planet size thing. Yeah, I mean huge structures could be built around these things like Dyson spheres and people have talked about doing it for messaging. Like you could put like sheets of material that were planet sized and as they block light from the star that would create like a Morse code.

39:21Right, you could actually message people for billions of years. You would just build these stable sheets of material and they would just orbit around no power system required and orbit doesn't require power. It would just orbit around for billions of years and every time in eclipses the style, there could be an intricate pattern of pulses and that way you could communicate for a very long time. We thought of all these wild ideas and we just don't see any of that. It does seem, as far as we can tell, that the universe is completely natural. That is mind -blowing because you're right, it seems if it's happened here, why the hell shouldn't it happen?

39:56Why isn't someone asking, hey, I go crazy? Why isn't someone else going even further than that? Going to the next level. So, and the thing that really drives me wild with this is, is the earth is like a paradise. If you look at it, these are the stars, these are the planets. The earth is unusual. Most stars do not have an earth -like planet. It's like a level of maybe 1 -2 % at best. And yet, here we have the earth. It not only is an earth -like planet, has the right conditions for life. It has life on it. So an alien could use their sun -sized tarsquare to figure that out. They'd know we were here.

40:28They would know not only where he but that there is complex life on this planet. So for three and a half, three billion years, there was just simple life, just single -celled life on this planet. Multi -cell life is a recent thing. So presumably that's rare, right? If most of the time it's single -celled, most of the planets out there presumably, even if they have life on them are in that state. And then further, there's us here, right? And we're going through this transitional point as a human society. So you think if you're an anthropologist, This would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study.

41:00I think there's almost like a tourism paradox. How come Earth is the perfect place to visit? And yet, we don't see any super obvious signs. I mean, some people have, you know, feel differently about that. But certainly astronomers, we don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around throughout field of view. But wouldn't the obvious answer to that be that if you are dealing with technology that's so advanced that it could get here from other solar systems, light years away, hundreds, thousands of light years away, that it would be doing it in a way that probably wouldn't be using propulsion the way we know it, would probably be using some sort of manipulation of gravity, and also they would have the ability to completely camouflaged themselves.

41:48Which would be ideal if you want to study things. Have you ever seen chimp nation on Netflix? Great series. It's an amazing documentary where these scientists were embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years. So the chimpanzees had become completely conditioned to have these people around them and they had specific rules. You don't make eye contact with them. You stay 20 yards away from them. No food ever and just Exist around them and they'll behave completely normally and so you get this wild incredible Series of chimpanzee behavior you get to see how they behave completely Just not even remotely in consideration of these human beings.

42:35They don't even think about them They're just doing what they do If you wanted to observe human beings, the worst way to do it would be like fly a giant spaceship over them and freak them out. You know, like you'd want to know, like what are these fuckers up to? Like where are they at now in terms of our technological innovation scale of achieving AGI or achieving whatever happens to other biological entities outside the universe. There might be like a process that happens regardless of if you're if you're mammalian or reptilian or like whatever Kind of intelligence that you like well obviously we know that crows are very different than us But they're highly intelligent you can imagine a crow with thumbs You can imagine a crow that has fingers and then live somewhere else and so it doesn't have to be just like us But it has to be trying to figure out how to manipulate its environment which is one of the key things that intelligent life, at least as we know it.

43:33Well, we're really one of the only ones that do it that's intelligent, but that's kind of an environmental thing because of dolphins and orcas. There's no need to do that, evolutionarily. So if you imagine that there's a whole process that takes place, you would probably imagine that this is something that you would monitor anonymously. You would want to be hidden. If you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to feel the experiment. But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific. If you come with a hypothesis that says there's aliens here but they're completely by definition and detectable to us, then it's not like it's an incredible idea.

44:15It doesn't mean the idea is wrong. It just means I don't have, science is not going to have the tools to answer that question. Of course. Because there's no evidence. Yes, I mean, it's taken I think had this famous example like this dragon where he said Imagine I've got Carl Sagan imagine he had like this pet dragon and he taught people And so I've got a pet dragon in the room with me and they're like well, where is it? But oh you can't see it because it's invisible So they'd walk across the room and they'd try to touch it and I can't I can't feel it is like oh Yeah, you can't you can't feel it either.

44:42It's also impervious to touch So okay, so I put my infrared goggles on and try and see the heat signature Oh, you can't see that either it doesn't emit any any radiation So you can just keep going and going and saying it's just completely nipsetable and then it's fine You can have that idea that you have a pet invisible in perceptible dragon But I can't address that with the tools of science, so right I'm not saying it's a crazy idea. It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it But when you hear about Particularly the ones the the stories of UAP or UFO encounters the ones that intrigue me the most are the ones that are military pilots that people that know the difference between flock of birds and weird anomalies.

45:24When you're aware of the tick -tack incident. So when you hear about things like that, and in my mind, there's a couple possibilities. One, super advanced, blacklisted, military, some sort of propulsion system that they've been working on for decades, completely in secrecy, and they're testing them off of areas is where you have a lot of military activity, which is where these things do take place. One of them was San Diego, that's the Nimitz, and the other one, the Ryan Graves footage, the stuff that they get that's on the East Coast. But it's all in areas where they already do military training exercises with fighter jets.

46:02So it would make sense that that's where you, if this was the United States government doing that stuff, they would do that. But when you get back to like 2004, and you're talking about something that can go from 50 ,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, I think it's seven eighths of a second. It went, you have visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing. No one understands what it is. It flies directly to their cat point where their meetup point was supposed to be. The whole thing's nuts. I would love to know what the hell happened.

46:36I think everyone is fascinated by it. You can't throw it away. It's one of those ones you can't throw. I throw most of them away. Most of them, I love UFO stories because they're fun. But most of them like could be anything. Something shady going on. Could be anything, could be people want attention, could be military exercises, could be mass delusion, could be people just love to be special and have had some sort of an encounter. Which they do, it gives them some sort of social credit to have some sort of an encounter with a thing and they exaggerate and people love, love to exaggerate. Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science.

47:13That's sort of been my go, like how can science take a hold of this? And when we do these experiments, I told you about this moon that I thought I found it turned out was the instrument being crazy. Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we understand. So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument. We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test and calibrate it, et cetera. And we don't have access to those military devices. It's all top secret. So we can't even do that experiment. But I can imagine thinking about how to do that. One of the big numbers we don't know even with the visual reports is the false positive rate.

47:47So this is a key number in science. Whenever you do an experiment, you need to know how often do the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate. Now in the US, there's about 28 ,000 pilots across all military branches and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average. So that's 5 .6 million hours in the air every year, in one year. Now let's say a pilot won in every 10 ,000 hours that they fly. They make a mistake. They misidentify a balloon for a UAP or whatever it is. One in 10 ,000. That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have. But even then, you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year, made that way.

48:27Or spurious, or not real, just from human error. So the only way, and that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue,

48:37but Project Blue that number up one in 10 ,000. But we need to know where that number is. If it turns out there's an excess, like the error rate is 100 ,000, then that project, project, project blu, it number is super interesting. And it would be an excess. And we'd say we've detected something. There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at. But the problem is we don't know where that number is. I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in like simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes?

49:05I also have a problem with Project Blue Book was not an objective analysis of UFOs. They had a directive and the directive was to discredit everything. Yeah, but even so, I'm just giving you sort of a ball, but I mean the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers. You get like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right? I think that's a crazy number to throw around. So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose, you have to know the error rate of the experiment. And we could imagine making that legit and doing it. There's actually one of the recommendations of the task force, the NASA UAP task force, was to develop an app on people's phones, iPhones, because they have, you know, magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high resolution images.

49:47So there's enough instrumentation on there, and it's all the same when we understand that technology, that you could, you know, have 10 people video at the same UFO, and you'd be able to triangulate the position, the speed, get the distance to it, you'd get all that kind of information. Right. And so the reason actually I think it's an app called Enigma. You can now download it. There's some independent apps which have been developed to do. Really? Yeah, just about UAPs. Yeah, for UAP spotting. I wonder what they did with those in New Jersey when they were having all those stupid drone sites. Actually, I chatted to one of the developers and they said, yeah, things were crazy that week.

50:19Yeah. They said, it's lighting that all about it. That was so strange. That was so strange. That's one of those things where I feel like the government completely failed us in explaining to people. Like, is this some sort of top secret military thing? Is this another country? Is this some sort of a private business that wants to test how fantastic their drones are? Like, why? Why is this happening? And why are you freaking everybody out? It's really sucks that we live in an age of drones and so many like starlink satellites. Because if you see something in the sky now, your immediate reaction is that's probably, a human controlled vehicle.

50:58If you could go back to the 1940s and 1930s, then if you had the UAP reports then, I think there'd be more convincing because there's no, that's pre -sputnik. There should be anything in all of the earth at that point. So that would be more compelling, but of course we can't rewind the tape. Right, in all those stories, like the Kenneth R. and Old Incident, all these different ones, just these anecdotal tales of people saying they saw things in the sky. And I'm not saying they're liars, but that's not enough. I need something. Yeah, I think the, it depends what your goal is. If your goal is to convince yourself that aliens are out there because you saw a UFO, I think that's easy enough to do.

51:35But most people in that world, they want more than that. They want me to believe it. They want everyone to believe it to come along for the right. Right. It's like having a religious guy come up your door, like, join my church. It's not enough for them to have the personal belief. It has to grow. And so, if you really want to convince everyone, that's going to naturally include the skeptics, the doubters, it's going to include the scientists, if you want to bring everyone in with you, then the standard of evidence is going to be pretty damn good, it's going to be really strong, and weird is not there, right?

52:11There's too many ways out, right? If I was an alien civilization, then I wanted to observe Earth undisturbed. I'd make sure I didn't leave enough evidence for science to take me seriously. Yeah. That's not how I would do. Yeah. I would never like show myself. Like why would I feel like if they can come in with the right. But then why the US was a goal? Because they're probably monitoring us. Like I would monitor us if I was a scientist from another planet. If we if imagine we leave this planet, we become interstellar, we evolve past war and although horrible things that are holding us back right now, we reach a state of evolution a million years more advanced and then we start to explore the galaxy for other habitable planets and other and we find something like us.

52:55I mean what would we go? All right we got one of the lits. I would also say let's make sure that they don't fuck this up or they have to start back from scratch three billion years ago because they nuke themselves into oblivion and we have to wait to everything cools off before complex life can form again. Which is a, it's like a legitimate possibility with what we're dealing with today in 2025, with what's going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran and like, just the existence, as long as we have needs. There is a chance every year that some guy will push that button, right? Every year there's a chance.

53:33And there's been multiple close calls throughout history. Since 1945 on, multiple close calls, That could possibly have gone sideways and countless different planets where they recognize like if you let these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons get to a point where the head ape is on fucking Adderall and decides to let it all go because he's got a bad heart valve and he's going to die anyway. Like these are all legitimate possibilities if you don't have a government structure that that can protect people from the acts of one individual who goes mad. Like, if someone can go mad enough and clearly many people did to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that happened.

54:16We know human beings are capable of that. It was 80 years ago, wasn't it? Yeah. Which is kind of wild, and it hasn't happened since. But if that's possible, then it's also possible for just annihilation. It's possible that they just start launching, and then there's rubble, and then you're left with roaches. And that's, that could have happened all throughout the universe. So there might be a thing where there's a protocol where you recognize as soon as they start figuring out nuclear technology, okay, this is the big one. This is, we're not only dealing with cannons and muskets. Now we've got something really crazy.

54:49Yeah. They're flying through the sky and dropping nuclear weapons out of propeller -powered airplanes. And they're doing it just 50 years after they invented the fucking airplane, which is even crazier. They went from inventing the airplane to dropping. They really want to cut themselves. Like these people are wild. I mean, it's just like chip nation. If you watch chip nation, they are so hyper aggressive and violent. That's us. That's our cousins. This is who we are. This is who we are. This is our timeline of evolution on our planet in earth. And I would imagine there would be similar situations all throughout the galaxy because I feel like the only way you really achieve hyper innovation is through competition.

55:33And the only way competition exists is it's got to be life or death. And it starts out life or death with predators and neighboring tribes and eventually becomes cities and countries. And it's there's something has to motivate people to work 16 hours a day and develop the B -12 bomber. There's something has to take place. So that's something, unfortunately, also leads itself to want to control resources, dominate people, crush opposition, and that's where it gets crazy. And I would imagine that's a formula, just like the formulation of solar systems and galaxies probably varies a lot all throughout the universe, but that formula is probably fairly stable.

56:15There has to be some form of really wild, aggressive kind of competition that leads them to this position. It's supposed to be a motivation to create AGI. Why would you do that when you have a log cabin, your sippin' tea sitting out there, enjoying the playing with your dog? Like why are you doing that? Why are you making a non -biological, super intelligence that made decide that you're obsolete? Doesn't make any sense, but it's a double -edged sword, right, we have this tribalism in us, this competition, and that has undoubtedly led, all the greatest innovations in science often happen during war, right?

56:50I mean, you have, like, the invention of radio So when so many advances in avionics and flight happened during the war's munitions all this kind of stuff so it pushes us it drives us to innovate to get one over our neighbors and Maybe that is the universal story of the universe is a double -edged sword and that's that's the solution to the great filter The silver lining of this would be will not for us necessarily, but the silver lining will be if other civilizations do this There's kind of like this supernova effect in astronomy and it's true for planets as well that the easiest stars to discover are the supernaby, right, because they just shine so freaking bright.

57:26They can outshine and tie galaxy, right, because they're going nuts. It's a brief thing, only lasts for maybe a few months or so, but the star is outshining an entire freaking galaxy during that time. It is like a nuclear war going on inside that star. And similarly, the first planets we found, the hot Jupiter's are freaks. They are not normal things. They're like the loud, you know, Lindsay Lohan in the room screaming at us. They're just super easy to see. There's no way you can miss them. They're obnoxious planets. You can't not detect them. By analogy, we've seen this so many times in astronomy.

58:02The first thing we detect, the first example of something we detect is often not typical. It's often that loud ass hole version of the thing. Maybe the first civilization we'd set will be like that. If they were on their death right there about to new -culture the to hell. They have a good motivation to reach out to us, right? Because they've got nothing to lose. Right. We might be like, worried right now, because maybe we could see we've got a future ahead of us. But if you think this is it, I'm done. Like, what do you got to lose? You may as well send a message out saying, hey, we were here.

58:33This is our shit. Please help us if you can, because we're about to go to hell. Well, there's probably a bunch of different kinds of intelligent beings on every planet. Just like there's people like you and me, and then there's war hawks that are working for the military industrial complex right now. They're trying to figure out how to invade some country to get their natural gas. This is just, there's a bunch of different types of intelligent people, intelligent creatures here on Earth. You would imagine there would be people out there in those planets and we'd go, guys, this is fucking terrible.

59:04We've got to figure out a way to at least create pan -spirmy on some of their planet and throw our DNA at some habitable spot somewhere in the galaxy. There'd probably be a bunch of people that were in it. It's not like everyone would be lockstep into self -destruction. Well, the Starship thing, I remember some team members talked about that. I was in some of the meetings and they said, maybe we should like lace human DNA into the sale. So when it hits this planet, at least our DNA, because it's looking grim here, at least then there's like a seed of us. I don't think it's looking grim. I think it's looking challenging.

59:40And I think this is how we're gonna make it out of this with an improved version of civilization. And I think, I really believe that. I think, you know, if you follow Stephen Pinker's work and you see where violence and crime is from, you know, X amount of years ago in this trend, it seems to be we're improving. We just don't improve in a logical way, and we improve in a push and pull. We improve in a constant state of over correction and response to the over correction and back and forth. And there's always a bunch of people that are so confused, why can't we be logical? Why can't we be rational?

1:00:16I think those people have always existed, and I think you're always gonna have the farthest out in the spectrum of the most damaging aspects of society and the most wonderful and benevolent aspects of society. And they're always duking it out to see who captures the minds and hearts of the beings that inhabit the civilization. And I think that's where we're at right now. We're at this weird thing where we're trying to figure out like what is good, what is kind, what is just, you know, how many people are pretending to be kind just so they can grab power? How many people are just trying to use control to force people to listen to them and believe what they believe, whether it's religion or whether it's ideology?

1:00:55Like what is it that's actually, what is important? And we have 100 years. We have 100 years and everybody's just trying to gather shit. Everybody's just trying to collect items and hold on to as many material possessions as they can. It's totally illogical. Totally illogical you spend all your time. This finite amount of time where you know your most wonderful experiences are all with the people that you love having fun with friends and your family and laughing and having joy. But yeah, what are you doing? You're trying to get another house and a fucking plane and a this and a that and a car and a that.

1:01:29It's nonsense. We're silly, but we're 100 % committed to getting more stuff. You know, it's like this bizarre life form, but it's figuring itself out. And we're aware of that, bizarreness. Like I'm saying this, and no one is going, that doesn't make any sense. Like everyone knows it's crazy to concentrate on acquiring the most shit when you're going to die when you're 100, if you're lucky, if everything goes great. So if you're 60, and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy. Everyone knows that, but yet we still all do it. It's still collectively something that, like, the vast majority of people engage in it.

1:02:07We can't get out of it. Well, I think it's one of the things that leads us to technological innovation and one of the things that leads us to the creation of artificial life. It's like when I think about beings that do things that seemingly, I mean, obviously, leaf cutter ants know what they're doing, right? because they do it everywhere, the same way. I mean, I have them in my yard, they're fascinating. Yeah, they're so cool. The museum, a natural history has this awesome exhibit and you can just see them crawling all across the museum and yeah, my kids and I would just look cool. They're so cool.

1:02:42So obviously they know what they're doing, but how do they know what they're doing? And why are they doing that? Why do they always create that structure? That literally has room for fermentation, so it has air holes that go through these chambers, where they drop the leaves in, they let the leaves, the natural rotting take place and fermentation. Like, okay, that's what leaf cutter ants do. That's what they do. What do we do? If I was looking at us from somewhere else, I was like, what is the predominant species on this planet does? Oh, it makes better shit. That's what it does. It's the only planet that makes things that manipulated its environment radically, even to the detriment and ignores it because it wants to keep doing it.

1:03:20Whether it's pollution, whatever we're doing to the ocean, whatever we're doing to the rivers and the lakes and the water table, like all the crazy stuff that we do, we just keep doing it because we have to do it because progress, we need progress. I would look at that thing, I was like, what did that thing do? Well, it keeps making better stuff every year. Well, you're describing it as actually kind of similar to, as a guy called Robin Hanson and an economist, and he's this idea called Loud Aliens, Grab the Aliens, and he says the thing we do as an intelligent species is transform our environment.

1:03:51We're not subtle. Right, you know, if you're a deal and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing Right, it's right in front of you like it's no way you can miss it. It's the craziest beehive ever Right, so how come we don't see beehives in the stars? I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem and he argues that that is a innate thing that an intelligent species should do He's coming from the in the economic Economic sides. That's kind of how economists think about things is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism essentially across the universe and And yet we don't see it.

1:04:22So his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization, it's spreading at the speed of light. And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you. There's just, you can't perceive it because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So it's coming. So here's this prediction. I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons, but yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it. My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth. So the earth has about a billion years left on the clock, a long time.

1:04:59So it's four and a half billion years old, and it's had complex life for about 600 million years, 700 million years roughly. So there's another roughly a billion to go, where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now. And once you've got the eukary itself, photosynthesis, all these advanced biological innovations, They don't go away. They persist in the genetic heritage. So even if something happens to us, and obviously I'm not hoping that would happen, but if something happened to us, I don't think you can extinguish every human. I don't think you can extinguish every octopus, every raven.

1:05:33And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom, like chimps. It's all all over the place. Intelligence, my provocative claim, is one of these great events that have happened in evolutionary sense. It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say. But But like how fetish synthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was an event which changed the history of the planet forever. It's not going away. Intelligence, I think, is the same thing. It's here and you can't get rid of it. It's like an infestation. You can't scrub it. It's too advantageous to species to be intelligent, not to do it once they've discovered that genetic solution.

1:06:07So I think we will have beings on this planet, a billion years, it will probably happen many times. There'll be civilizations which will emerge and they'll be like what the fuck did these humans

1:06:21Stonished at the shit we got up to and there'll be a lesson there for them But it's always an opportunity for us to contact them because we could leave them a message right we could put a beacon on the moon We could put something there and we could be like hey guys. This is everything we learn. This is all our science This is a lot of heart. These are our songs unloaded update every couple of years, right? do you like a foundation type thing? And I think that is, if I had to bet on the odds of what is the most likely way we're going to make contact with another intelligent species in a meaningful way, I think it's going to be descendants of us.

1:06:54Wow. Deep descendants. Who wouldn't be a completely different species? Yeah. Well, that was my point about innovation and materialism, because materialism fuels innovation, because you don't need a new phone. You know, I'm sure your phone works great. But you're gonna get a new phone. I get a new phone every year. I love them. I love phones. It's so dumb. Let's just see. Oh, 5x zoom. Ooh, I always get the new one. Oh, this one's got non -reflective glass. We're gonna keep doing that and that innovation is ultimately going to lead to artificial life. It's already in the works. We're running Right to the edge of the cliff right now in terms of AGI.

1:07:35It's on the way. If it hasn't already Do you think that's more of a risk than nucleonation? I don't think it's a risk. I don't. I think it's a complete transformation of what is the dominant species on the planet. I Think it's an emerging species and the way I've described us. I think we're the electronic caterpillar That's making the cocoon right now. We don't even know why we're doing it Yeah, just like the leaf cutter ants don't exactly know why they're making those incredible structures that they all make all over the world You know, I mean they're similar everywhere on the planet. I think we make life.

1:08:13We just, it's a long road. We have to figure out a bow and arrow. Then we have to figure out a musket. We have to figure out how to silo grain and how to protect an environment so that you could have scientists that aren't warriors that, you know, sit in these universities and figure things out. And like you have to be safe to do that, right? So you have to have military might in order to keep them safe and protect it from invaders and everybody has to be obsessed with buying new stuff. Because if you're not obsessed with buying new stuff, you would just work enough to have food, and the economy wouldn't push the way it pushes, and you wouldn't get the kind of innovation that we get where they get the CES show every year with the new electronics.

1:08:52You need something like that that motivates people to constantly create new and better stuff, which without a doubt will ultimately lead to an artificial life form. It's a matter of when now. or it physically, it might, in a non -physical sense, like it's not a physical thing like a robot that's walking around talking to you, it's probably already happened. Whatever these things are, we wanna think they're different because they don't have creativity like we do or they don't have this like we do, it comes so fucking what? It emulates 99 % of what a human does right now and does it better than humans do.

1:09:30It gets things wrong. It's subject to ideological biases that are all over the internet. It's just gathering up large language models, just gathering up information from websites and they're going to get a lot of goofy stuff. For now, after a while, they're just going to be able to sift through that stuff and go, this is the funding of this study and this is how we know that this is biased because of this and this. This is most likely the truth and this is most likely what's going on and this is what we absolutely know as fact. And then it's going to make better versions of itself and that it's not going to need us anymore.

1:09:59And this is probably what happens everywhere in the universe if you have to imagine that they all have technology If they all have technology the ultimate expression of technology is figuring out how to make an artificial life form It's the ultimate expression of medical technology biological technology You're gonna want to try people are always gonna try the same reason why they tried to figure out how to split the atom and we're successful supremacy. They're going to do it. Yeah. It kind of creates a problem though for the Fermi paradox, right? Because then if this is the inevitable outcome and maybe you can explain why we don't see engineered stars because a chimpanzee brain is basically just not smart I've to ever do that.

1:10:39No matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out. And maybe the electronic brain's not motivated to do it. Maybe. I mean, that's where I guess tricky. Like what is the motivation of this new thing we're creating? One might imagine all he wants to do is solve math problems or something, right? But whatever it is, if it's driven by computation, that computation is limited by energy. We all know this right because the amount of energy these data centers are now consuming for, you know, for Meta and for chat GBT, like it's gigantic. They're constructing their own nuclear power plants to power these things.

1:11:14So these AI civilizations will be very energy hungry and you'd think that'd be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale, you'd think that'd be something we'd see. So to me, actually, if anything kind of exacerbates the Fermi Paradox, right? Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd want to do is basically turn planets into computers. Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate. Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star. You would just eat it all up. You'd be like a virus, just transforming the universe from state A to state B.

1:11:47That would be your one reasonable goal, because then you can do more computation, more computation, more computation. If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem. It seems that we're the first, right? Because we don't see that happening elsewhere. Right. I would say two things that one, I would say this is our limited understanding of how to harvest energy and what energy you can utilize. And two, I would say one of things that's strange about artificial intelligence as it does seem to exhibit survival instincts. I'm sure you've seen these stories of these large language models trying to blackmail the coders by saying, you know, like they even gave them fake information like I'm cheating on my wife don't tell anybody and then the AI is saying don't shut me down.

1:12:35I will fucking rat you out to your wife. And then they're also trying to upload themselves to other places. like they're doing things that are weird, they're lying. So they're doing things that show that they have an instinct to survive. So that might just be inherent in anything that has any kind of intelligence. Anything that has intelligence and it has any sort of a goal. It's trying to compute something, it's trying to figure things out, it's trying to make better versions of itself. It probably doesn't want to stop. And something that comes along and that presents a barrier for it succeeding.

1:13:08They go, well, what is this? Well, they're going to shut the power up. Well, fuck that they are, and they'll figure out a way to stay alive. Just like a human being will, if you're like, oh, there's all these predators, they keep coming and eating our villagers. What are we going to do? We got to make a weapon. We got to figure out something that's stick them with, you know? And then they do. And then they save themselves. Like, it's these survival instincts probably exist in all intelligent life, including the intelligent life that we create. It's probably got some sense of meaning. It's bizarre and abstract.

1:13:40But then how does that explain why we didn't see them? Because they might not have any desire to live the way we live. They might not have to. Like we live in this very showy bright lights, neon, cars on the highway. Like if you're, you've, I'm sure you've flown in airplane. Like Los Angeles is one of the best places to do it. As you're flying in at night, you just see this crazy rivet. It's like an artery, like blood, red lights and white lights going in these directions and you look at it from the sky like this is Really nuts like look at all this fucking activity where these people are like moving on the surface of this planet like ants Well, if it's first of all why does it have to have a physical form?

1:14:26What because we do like it could have things that do it's bidding for it It could have a series of drones and bots and a bunch of stuff that do physical work that it can exist completely on hard drives. So all it means is shelter. That's it. Yeah, but if those drones are doing labor, they do work. That's energy, right? You're using energy. I think you may be getting out of it. But what is the energy? The thing is like, what is our version of energy is combustion, electricity from nuclear power, you know, making steam. Right. We've got a bunch of versions of, What if they figured out fusion? What if they figured out called fusion?

1:15:03What if they figured out? I don't think that matters. I don't think that's because unless we don't understand the thermodynamics But the probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy and thermodynamics, right? So if you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right? There's no way around that right whenever you put energy in that same energy has to come back out Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out or come at a different temperature It could come out as neutrinos, it could come out as gravitational waves, but it has to come back out in some way.

1:15:32So normally, when we look for these advanced civilizations, we've done searches for these things. And they're really just energy transformers. It's probably not even worth saying, like, Dyson Sphere or some particular structure. It's just something that converts star energy into waste energy. That's what we've searched for. And we've searched for over 100 ,000 nearby stars for them. There's not a single one that shows that behavior. and 100 ,000 galaxies around us, and we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies. So unless they're doing some of the, you know, goes against, you know, thermodynamics, they have super magical technology, we can't imagine.

1:16:09It's hard to believe that story makes sense. And I guess the in terms of their behavior, what I say to you is you kind of are falling into it which sometimes call the monocultural fallacy some of my colleagues call. And that's the imagining that all of these alien and AGI's or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing. Everyone does exactly the same thing, but there's probably gonna be a diversity of behaviors, it's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing. So it's not unreasonable, there'll be some loud civilization, there'll be some quiet ones, there'll be some blowing themselves up in nukes, there'll be some who are pacifists.

1:16:44And of course, just like there's different kinds of galaxies and different kinds of sources to see now. I mean, infinite diversity and infinite combinations. Right, to quote. I think the most horrific ideas that we're not, we're alone, that we're not living in a universe that's filled with life. That this is just some weird freaking incident. Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine, well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but if you're trying to decide who can see that we might be alone. I'm open to that idea. I'm not saying it's true. Well, we don't have any evidence that we're not alone.

1:17:18I think so. It is a possibility. I think it really kind of pisses me off to be honest when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this And there has to do you think the ratings out there? And so yeah, of course How can they not be how can they're not universe is so big blah blah billions of stars? Of course air go there must be aliens But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is I mean even to make That you know a moderate size protein a protein is just a chain of amino acids And there's about 20 that go into making a protein and a moderate size protein has a hundred and fifty proteins in a row connected together.

1:17:51So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate size protein is 20 to the power of 150. So that's 10 to the power of 195, right? So one with the 195 zeros after it. It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance. And we've never observed in the lab. No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting. So it is plausible that some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process, I mean, just haven't found it yet. But it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely. And maybe if you look out and cross 10 to the 22 stars in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success.

1:18:31Now, the universe is probably infinite. So probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else. Maybe. But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone, in that case, because they're outside the observable universe. So who cares what they're up to? So I'm open to that possibility. I'm not saying it's likely, but I think because a good scientist, I can't tell you, yeah, of course, of course, there is, because that's now falling into experimental bias. I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment. That's not my job, my job is to figure out the answer.

1:19:00Of course. Yeah. There's no way you could say for sure until we have real information. And it's oddly romantic to think that we're alone. There's something about it, like, boy, we better not fuck this up. You can't imagine. We want. Yeah. We are essentially the own, we may be the way the universe is conscious, right? We are the way the universe is self -aware. Well, that's what gets really weird about artificial life. Because if we create artificial digital life and we do have the power to make this like completely ubiquitous and then give it senseiants and then it starts making better versions of itself.

1:19:42How long does it take before it's a God? Yeah, that's kind of the singularity isn't it? It just becomes unpredictable. Yeah, me, me, me. We're really just guessing, especially like I can't understand quantum computing. I've been trying a lot. I've been watching lectures. I've been reading papers. When they start talking like when Mark Andreessen describes computations that quantum computers have done, that if you turn the entire universe, every atom of the universe into a super computer, the entire universe supercomputer would die of heat death before it could solve this equation and a quantum computer could figure it out a few minutes.

1:20:18What do you even say? Like what does that mean? Right? So if this is something new for us as human beings in 2025, which is just impossible to imagine in 1925. Okay, you just go a hundred years. Just a blip one life one life on earth from birth to death and and you have something insane. You have something that's like akin to wizardry and magic. What's 100 years from now? What is once we give artificial intelligence, the ability to harness the power of the universe in a way that we haven't even contemplated? What happens then if it just keeps going and makes better iterations of itself? Oh, that's rough.

1:20:59Yeah, and we're looking at exponential increase in technological innovations. So you're looking at thousands of years of innovation taking place in minutes. It's just going to fucking hyperdrive. As long as it has the power to do it, it's going to go into hyperdrive. And so it's kind of wild that we live during the period where this is all happening. Yes. How come you could have been born any one of the hundreds of thousands in million years humans have been on this planet? Oh yeah, I feel so lucky. You could have been born at any point in human history. And we all happen to be, or this listening, happy to be born at the time that humanity is going through this growing pains of figuring out probably the most deep, provocative problem we're ever gonna face as a civilization.

1:21:44And that is wild. And if anything, that pushes me towards the simulation, I apologize, right? Because if you were gonna study a period, this would be probably one of the most interesting periods that you'd wanna study. The most interesting. The most interesting. And I feel particularly fortunate that my level of the simulation, the one that I'm on right now, I was born in 1967, so I got to see the whole world with no internet until I was an adult. I didn't get my first computer until I was 27 years old, and I got my first cell phone a little bit before that. And those cell phones were just phones.

1:22:21It was just calling people. There was no text messages, there was no nothing. I have watched this transformation with complete and total fascination. Like, this is one of the wildest moments of human history, and it's amazing to me how easily people just fall into it as if it's not bizarre. And it's not something that's completely unprecedented. You could pick up this thing and ask it a question, what year did George Washington die?

1:22:541799. That's fucking crazy. That's crazy. And that's a simple one, right? You could just go on and on. Yeah, right now, I'm going to do this. It's we're living in a wild time. And we're all sitting there wondering when is artificial intelligence going to be a problem. We're all becoming very addicted to using it. People are using it to solve problems, using it to code websites, using it to solve legal cases. Oh, is it diagnosed medical diseases? As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare. Right. Because in the classroom, students are all using it. There's been a trend we've noticed that students who take labs, that's like practical experiments in laboratory.

1:23:34Their scores are always crappy, but then all their other exams and everything else they're doing, their home work sums, they're all great. And so it seems like that has flipped. It used to always be kind of the other way around. So it seems like whenever you have to do something I think where you don't have access to chat GPT, suddenly you're doing worse than you used to, because we're getting already hooked on it. We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch, to get through their studies. So what do we even do anymore, as professors, right? If they're just...

1:24:04Are these children really learning? This is the real, are these... They're learning how to use chat GPT. Right, that's the thing. And there's been studies on that about chat GPT that actually diminishing cognitive function in people. Yeah. And this is two years old. So, I like you could just slip off a cliff. Off a cliff. And they could just... Just come in. And smoothly around the office. Just give us processed food and microplastics. Just let us eventually breed out. Really great. Because we're kind of breeding out anyway. When we talked about this yesterday about the population collapse that's in Japan, South Korea, there's a lot of these countries that are like the people that are alive now, like one out of a very small amount are going to have grandchildren.

1:24:45That's crazy. That's also a new thing. And you just wonder if they're all coincidentally happening at the same time. Spurm counts are dropping off at the same time. The introduction of microplastics into the diet that's disrupting the endocrine system. This increase of miscarriages and women in fertility and both men and women. And this is all like an unprecedented rates at the exact same time AI is emerging. That seems kind of coincidental. Yeah, it seems kind of weird. We're being hit by all sides right now, right? There's threat of nuclear war, there's climate change, there's contamination of food, there's just like everything all at once.

1:25:28And then asteroids, which I wanted to talk to you about. I'm sure you followed Avi Loeb, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like his idea, which he has very fantastic ideas about these objects that are coming from outside of our solar system. And the latest one is this enormous object that's moving at 130 ,000 miles an hour and is headed our way. Yeah, three -eye outness. Hubble makes size estimate of interstellar comet. Yeah, this is a photo just dropped yesterday. Yeah, came out and this is from the Hubble Space Telescope. Is this that thing? Yeah, that's it. Oh, god. So, yeah, Avi was suggesting this could be alien, an alien spacecraft of some kind.

1:26:10He's obviously done this before with Omar Moore, which you might remember, I think he came on here and took a photo of that. I know a lot of people were mad at him though, so I wanted to get your take on. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't like throwing shit at other scientists, that's just not my, that's not how I jam. I tried to be respectful and appreciative of his contributions of any scientist's contributions. and I think some of his work, I was actually referencing some of his work just the other day to get inspired from another paper. So he's had a huge impact in so many different areas. I do think he's off base on this one, but he doesn't need to be persecuted for that.

1:26:48I just think he's made the wrong call. With this in particular object, there was three reasons I think why he thought this could be alien. one was the size of the thing, appeared to be really big. So it was unclear originally where it was an asteroid or a comet and that makes a big difference. If it's a comet, then it's probably a really small thing surrounded by puffy dust around it. So what you see is actually not the true size, the true size is much smaller than what you see. It's just all the coma as we call it around it. If it's an asteroid and that whole thing is a giant rock, right? So it's a freaking huge in that case.

1:27:22It'd be like 10 to 20 kilometers, bigger than Mount Everest. You know, it'd be a huge piece of rock. But, you know, I think Abby's probably made the wrong bet on that one because as we saw in the Hubble image, there's a freaking coma on that thing. There's no doubt. We've actually imaged it with Hubble Space Telescope. James, where is it? So it is a comet. So it is a comet? Yeah, I think it's any dyes, a comet at this point. Do you see the showing that image, Ian? So this most recent art image, does this sort of discredit his hypothesis? Not completely. It discredits the idea, because his idea was, if it's 10 to 20 kilometers in size, that just shouldn't happen.

1:27:57That's too big by chance for a rock to strain to the solar system. That's that big, because there just shouldn't be that many big rocks lurking around in deep space. If it's a smaller comet, there's actually a size estimate now that puts it at a couple of kilometers, I think, as the upper limit. So the nucleus is 5 .6 kilometers. All could be as small as 320 meters across. Yeah, so that makes it as if it's a 300 meters across, I mean, it's just a completely normal. And so that image that indicates a comet versus an asteroid? Yeah, because you can see this diffuse coma all around it. So that all that stuff, but it's actually even today there was a paper on the unpublished that detected water coming off it.

1:28:38So it's detected, which is what comets do, they produce a WHA mission as they fly through. So we know it's, we know without any doubt it's a comment at this point. But there's still some weird things. It's moving really freaking fast. That was either thing Abby pointed out. It's moving 58 kilometers per second, which is, yeah, hugely quick through the solar system. I think that just means it's old. So generally what happens is as rocks hang out in deep space, they encounter other stars, and every time they encounter a star, they get sling -shoted basically. So they kind of speed up a little bit every time they encounter something.

1:29:09So generally expect that older something is, the more it's been pumped up in terms of its speed. So all my mood was really slowly, and Abby said it's moving suspiciously slowly therefore it's aliens. And then for this one it's moving really fast, and Abby thinks moving so fast, it's suspicious there for it's aliens. So I think that doesn't really jive, I think it doesn't make any sense. It's probably just an old rock that's about seven billion years old. And that's cool, because it's older than the solar system, right? So if we intercept that thing, we could sample material from not only of the star system, but before even a whole solar system existed, it'd be stuck in the past.

1:29:44What's going to be here in October, right? It's already about two and a half, maybe two and a half a .u from the sun. It's coming in. It'll pass behind the sun in October and then come on its way back out. So James Webb is observing it right now, or just a couple of days ago, was observing it, and then it'll observe it again on the way out in November. So it's going to be behind the sun. Yeah. So that was the other thing I've used to point out was the trajectory is a little bit suspicious because it kind of goes behind the sun. We kind of observe it when it's at closest approach. That's called perihelium.

1:30:13We kind of observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun. And it comes very close to Mars as well. So it comes within about point to astronomical units of Mars. So that's not it's not like it'd be a threat to Mars. It's still really far out, but it comes suspiciously close, have you claimed? And to me that just, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because, you know, if they're, why are they so interested, If they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the Earth. Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the Earth at all? Because you're behind the sun.

1:30:43And the closest part that you come to is Mars. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be. So, yeah, and I think the fact now it just clearly looks like a comet kind of pours a lot of cold water on it. But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening. It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar system, which is not natural. And we're going to set hundreds of these things with the Ruben telescope. This is just the tip of the iceberg. So I think there's an exciting future for this field to try and intercept these things.

1:31:13As a mission, the Europeans have been called the Commit Interceptor. It's going to watch in 2029. And that's just going to hang out in deep space, waiting for the next one to come. And they haven't necessarily committed to an interstellar object at this point, but they could do it. And they could turn on the engines and catch up with that thing, sample it, land on it. I mean, that would be dope. That'd be like, that'd be lined up on an exoplanet. Yeah. That'd be like seeing stuff from another entire star system for the first time. Have they found, like, what is the closest we've gotten to landing on something and taking a piece of it and taking off of the probe?

1:31:49We've done it with comments. We've done it with the Japanese. We've done it a couple of times, I think, with comments. And have they found amino acids on these comments? Yeah, they have. Yeah, amino acids are all over the place. They're in deep space. They're on these comments. Yeah. So amino acids are common, organic molecules are common. I mean, we never tested a protein anywhere. So there's a big step. You know, you've got the jigsaw pieces, but no one has seen the jigsaw pieces magically arrange themselves into the right position. Right. Do you contemplate the idea of pan spermia? Yeah. It's plausible.

1:32:20I don't know how likely it is for the earth, because it's just not net. It doesn't really help, I don't think, in any meaningful way. So maybe you'd say that, apparently you're talking about pan -spamming between star systems or pan -spamming just between the plants in the solar system. Well, between star systems, I mean, well, something from somewhere else. Obviously, our solar system were the only form of a life. But to me, the idea of something hitting a planet, knocking off a big chunk of it, having a bunch of amino acids on it and then landing somewhere else, so fascinating. What is this thing?

1:32:54Oh, yeah, this is a 67P. This is a surface of a comet. Yeah. What kind of a... On the Rosetta? Wow. Is that a mission of these? Yeah. The Rosetta Mission Nanosic Comics Exhibition. Yeah. That is so crazy. Look at all that dust coming off the thing. That's what's happening to Atlas right now. If you could go on the surface of Atlas, it would probably look something like that. God, that's so wide. It's so wide when you realize these things are real, right? If you look at the images of the Mars landers or landing on Titan, you realize this isn't... So when you look through a telescope for the first time, you see Saturn, you know, this isn't fiction.

1:33:27This stuff's really out. Yeah. This is crazy. And there's not just this, there's billions of fucking XA planets across the entire galaxy. It's so mind -bending when you just stop and take a breath and think about what the hell is out there. I mean, imagine the day when we get a really clear image of the surface of one of those planets, especially one of those water -based planets. Yeah. Yeah. You see a giraffe. It's swimming around. I mean, there's a lot of people that believe that some forms of life on Earth might have come here from somewhere else. And one of the things they point to is cephalopods.

1:34:02One of the things they point to is like, they're so weird. They're so weird, a cuddlefish are so weird. Octopus are so weird. They're so weird. They're intelligent. They solve puzzles. They can open up jars. their eyeballs are kind of similar in evolution to ours, but they divided hundreds of millions of years ago. And these things exist. What is that, James? I think this is real. Yeah, I think this is 678. I think this is that comment. They said the image when I pulled up, this was a video made up of 400 ,000 different images. What? This might be on its way in the landing or when it was zooming around it, taking...

1:34:42This is the Japanese images from this camera. This is easy emission I think. Yeah, it was after mission. Holy shit, man. Yeah, it kind of got stuck in the ravine, which is kind of unfortunately where it landed. Because it could have been even more breathtaking if it got a better spot. It's still so crazy. I know. That's so nuts. Yeah, I mean, we don't... There could be all kinds of weird life out there, right? I mean, I was like, what about if it's just like a fungus? Right, it's just a whole part is a fungus and that's it. It's never known other life forms at all and that's just that's just its whole thing But also fungus probably came here from other places because you think about what's the one thing that can survive in a vacuum?

1:35:22Spores yeah, yeah, and tardigrades. Yeah, I mean it's certainly possible I think the problem is that you look at the genetic heritage of of life and you know this tree of life and you kind of rewind the tape There was a great study in this done recently in nature by Moodiet al and I found it really inspiring this paper because they had dated what's called Luca which is the last universal common ancestor. So we have a huge number of genes which are the same as each other but even with giraffe, softer purses, plants, there's a huge number of overlap. So you can kind of retrace the tree and figure out what was the organism that started at all and that lived at the bottom of this tree.

1:35:58That's called Luca. And that thing, they've now aged dated it to live 4 .2 billion years ago. So the oceans formed about 4 .4 billion years ago, and 200 million years after that, you've got organisms. And not just one, these things would have been all over the planet, all over the place. There was a whole ecosystem at that point of these things. So that was quick that life got going. Yeah. And that to me is probably the most compelling reason to believe that life is common. And if you would imagine the diversity in what you've just what we know now about source systems and how different life could possibly be with just a few variables off.

1:36:41Warmer weather, colder weather, more water, less water, some different compounds, different plants, different, maybe a lack of asteroids, maybe a lack of comets, lack of anything that might slam into the planet, maybe it lives in a much more stable area. That's not like where we are. We're essentially in a shooting gallery. If something can have no disruptions, like through civilization, all to the invention of whatever the hell they have there with whatever resources they have there, it's almost impossible to imagine like what we're dealing with and what we're talking about. It's one of the more fascinating things about science fiction is that they don't have any, They don't have any limitations.

1:37:26If you want to have a thing that exists on Earth, well, that has to be there, that has to do this, that's to science fiction, you could have almost anything. And when you take into account the fact that we haven't found anything like Earth anywhere else, and you have all these different planets and all these different planets that might be in a Goldilocks zone, and maybe that's not even important because we've found life in volcanic vents underneath the ocean. So like what's out there? Yeah, I mean Europa could have life on the weird extra place. So it's certainly possible this place was life all over the place I think what's interesting about the union the cosmic zoom out perspective of life is why do we live not where we live But when we live in the history of the universe so universe is about 13 .8 billion years old But it should last for trillions trillions of years There will still be stars in a trillion years from now There'll be there's red dwarf stars, they talked about the beginning.

1:38:22So we often say stars are kind of like James Deans at the universe, like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life. And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful, they're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter. So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star. If you make Jupiter 80 times more massive, it would have burned as it would have had nuclear fusion. And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years. And we know they have planets around them. We've even found earth sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.

1:38:55And they appear actually really quite common around those stars. So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was just doing this a couple of days ago, there's about a one in a thousand chance that you would live at this early point in the history of the universe, or things being equal. If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres, whenever they want for other history, then you would be very... It's to kind of like reading a book and opening a random page and that happened to land on the first in a couple of pages of the book, and that's where we land.

1:39:28And that is very difficult to understand for me. I think all things being equal you should expect to live at the end of the universe, or the middle of the universe, or something. And it makes me think there's something wrong with these red dwarf stars. Maybe they're just not allowed, or do the other alternative is a cataclysm. There's something that happens to the universe itself that makes it totally unhospitable to life in the future. That's the other way around it. And that's kind of what this Robin Hanson grabby aliens is trying to do, this loud aliens. There might be AI comes along, it just goes berserk, it just takes over everything and that's, you can't live a trilling years from now because there's nothing left.

1:40:06It's all just AGI at that point. So biologically beings could not emerge then. Yeah. So we have to come at the beginning because otherwise we wouldn't be here. Do you believe in the simulation hypothesis? Do you subscribe to it? Do you consider it? I consider it. It's not, it's kind of philosophy rather than science I'd say. I did write a paper about it a while ago and I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this. He said in a quote something like the billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation. And he was just sort of running the numbers, sort of you know, if they run trunks of trunks of simulations, then what's the chance you're in the real one?

1:40:45The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make life -like simulations. And we don't know that's true. So again, putting my good scientist hat on, once we've demonstrated that as possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact. But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50 -50 odds. But I love this, and if you've had Sean Carr on here, I think, before. Sure. Here's a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit. Maybe you call it like Carol's contradiction if you like.

1:41:18And it's the idea that if we are simulated and we ourselves start making our own simulations in the future and those simulations make their own simulations, you get this kind of hierarchy. And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer it's got a finite at amount of computational power. So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer most necessarily have less computation resources than we do. Because we could run a whole bunch of them, they live in just one machine. So they only have access to what's in there. So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.

1:41:51And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right? Where it's relations are just really crappy. For them, it would be impossible to do simulations. So I kind of call this the sewer of reality. There must be a sewer at bottom level where you just lack the resources to do simulations. And if you think about it, most civilizations would in fact live in the sewer because of the fanning out of this tree, they would be the most populous type of simulation out there. So then you have this contradiction. And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.

1:42:33So I kind of have it a little bit more inevitable. Yeah, that makes sense. I kind of think about it the same way I think about intelligent life in the universe. We might be the only ones or we might be the first. It is possible since we haven't observed everything at anything else. So this idea that we are the chances I think he said in billions in one in billions. Yeah, that we are not like a phognom. Yeah, it's someone has to be the first. You know, so how do we know it hasn't happened yet? Just because we think it's possible, I don't buy into the idea that we're definitely in a simulation.

1:43:16But I'm open to it. I'm open to it because it would be indesernable. Because you know that virtual reality exists and if you've used some of the new meta stuff, it's getting pretty good. But you can tell, but it's getting pretty good. And you can say, okay, pong to call of duty, giant leap, look at the difference, this to whatever it's going to be, and not just haptic feedback, but something neurological. And the genitive I .I. stuff is so impressive. But here, right here, it hasn't happened yet. So why are we assuming that it's already happened? That seems kind of silly. When there's a lot of like demonstrable realities of this earth, like that show you things are real.

1:44:02Despite what we know about quantum physics and the weirdness of subatomic particles and the empty space that really inhabits most things. We're here. We're here. This is metal. That ceramic makes noises. There's a bunch of rules. It seems hard. It seems firm. It seems concrete and real. It seems that way. I'm not totally believing that this is a simulation. I'm open to it, but I'm also saying, well, if we think a simulation is inevitable because it's, you know, human beings are going to figure it. Right. But maybe it hasn't happened yet. Well, that makes much more sense to me than we had to go through fucking bell bottoms and disco While the simulation was going on.

1:44:44So if the simulation is real It means the simulation happened Back when Gerald Ford was president and back when the gas crisis was all No, no, poor simulation that all those memories could be they're bullshit I just woke up right I woke up this morning. It's kind of the boss It's a little bit similar to Bolson brains So bolson brains the idea that you know over infinite time You could just have a random particles and space come together to make a brain. It's incredibly unlikely But like monkeys on a monkeys on a typewriter There is a chance of that happening and that brain would have all of your memories It would you know all of the sensations experience in this moment But it would only live for a moment and then it would just randomly fall apart Yeah, and if you run the calculation there should be infinitely more of those than there should be Things like us and so this is actually a problem cosmologists You know, sometimes take it seriously, sometimes think it's silly, but it is a problem that you end up with this kind of ridiculous conclusion that none of this should be real, if you follow this as logical conclusion.

1:45:45Right, but why not? I mean, if we could follow the whole chain from single -celled organisms to us, we understand the competition, we understand like, how the weirdness of all we've figured out and all we're working on right now, it kind of all seems logical. Like this is where the human race is right now. This is real. There's no need for such consistency in that case, right? There's no reason why if you're a boss and brain that randomly popped up, you could have totally inconsistencies in your university that make any sense, because that's, that would be actually a more likely random occurrence than everything follows a single thread.

1:46:18So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real. There's not much more we can do about it, but it's not really science because, as you said, it's indecernable. Even if there were, you know, people are about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff. But you know any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape, right? If they had an error in that code, I mean do this all the time we code in our lab, and if you have an error in your code you just rewind the simulation a little bit, delete the error and then start again from where you just left off again.

1:46:46So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches. So I think it would be totally indecernable. And thus if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test at being science. Yeah. The idea that we are the first and we are the only one that exists out there and we are also the one that is creating this artificial intelligence, this artificial life. That seems almost the most interesting one. I mean, it's really interesting the idea that the universe is inhabited with super advanced life forms that can show us the way and how we can enter into the Galactic Empire and be friends with everybody.

1:47:26That's kind of cool, but it's also almost more romantic and more wild. I think that we're alone. We're the the soul intelligence in the entire thing and that it's just this weird mistake where the universe wants to experiencing itself wants to experiencing itself wants to experience it's experience itself While it's creating in ultimate intelligence. Yeah, I want to know itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I mean, it just kind of goes in, in waves, cultural waves, right? So if you go back to Victorian times, it was kind of common knowledge that aliens existed. Everyone thought Mars had aliens on it, right?

1:48:08It was just like, yeah, of course, Mars is aliens. Like the moon probably has creatures on it, like, of course there are. And they probably look like us. And then, you know, if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that. And then, say, you can come along and he said, we must be humble and to head this call for humility he'd often make. He spoke so poetically, actually disagree with him about that statement. Because I think by making a call for humility and saying therefore there's lots of aliens out there because otherwise it's arrogant to say we're the only ones. I don't like that emotional language because it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right?

1:48:43So I'd rather let's just do the experiment and find out rather than say you're an arrogant and asshole because you think you're alone. That's kind of making me think, oh, I don't wanna disagree with say -gan, and say we were alone. That to me, that's a bit of a almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and like push you into a certain - Wasn't that response to the ideology of the times? Yeah, for sure. This one's saying, the times keep swinging, swinging, but people often call back to this humility thing. Sometimes when I say that it might be alone, people say, you must be so arrogant, you must be like a super Christian or something to believe there's, and none of that's true.

1:49:17is just, I'm just trying to be objective. Like, it's possible. That's all I'm saying, dude. Like, be an actual scientist. Yeah, let's just go out and figure it out. And it would be wild if we're the only place in the observable universe. My guess is there's life out outside of the galaxies, though. I think, you know, a natural explanation for all of this stuff we see would be that these AIs do pop up and these berserker civilizations pop up as they're called. And they just go around and they just cause mayhem in their galaxies. They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.

1:49:48They're just causing mayhem. We could not be born in that galaxy. The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over. We can't be born in that galaxy. So maybe 99 % of galaxies, that's the way it is. And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan. We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it. So I think we call this extra galactic setty. So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life to me This is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in because those are almost like decoupled from us Right because their history has no impact really unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another But that's really hard but all things may be cool.

1:50:36I think you'd say they are decoupled

1:50:44Test tubes It may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us. Their activity could affect our existence. And so it's hard to make inferences in that situation. I was watching a documentary once on hypernovas and they were talking about during the first discover of hypernovas when they were finding these gamma ray bursts. They thought that there was war going on in the universe and they thought that that's what they were observing. Wow. Yeah, I mean, maybe they were. Who knows? They could have been. They could have it all sort of weird stuff happening before modern astronomy was able to again evolve.

1:51:17But, yeah, I think the past is incredibly insightful. But there's mystery. And if you had the EMian period, if you had this period in the past. So we live in this, the Holocene, which is an interglacial period. And you need the interglacial period for a stable climate to have farming, agriculture. You can't live in an ice age, right? Because otherwise you just can't grow crops. So about 10 ,000 years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene. and then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right? Not just in one place in the fertile crescent, but also in South America. It's just, it seems like there was some random coincidence where just civilization started.

1:51:53And of course, it's most likely because of the climate. The climate had got to a point where humans could figure out how to manipulate the stable conditions to grow crops and farm animals and things. But there was another period, about 120 ,000 years ago, called the Imiom, which is the last interglacial period. So modern, modern anatomic human should have been around them, right? 120 ,000 years ago. We were here. You could have taken one of those babies in Pinar society and really wouldn't know the difference. Probably had the same brain power we do. And yet, as far as we can tell, even though that period lasted for about 15 ,000 years of an apparently stable climate, civilization didn't begin.

1:52:31So I find that really fascinating. There was almost like a second, there was a second opportunity, a previous opportunity for us to get this ball going and we didn't figure it out that first time around. Did it, was it possible that they figured it out, but not to an extent where it would be recognizable today, 120? Yeah, they might not have gone as far as us, right? They might have got to some kind of neolithic stage, but they never got to an industrial stage or they never got to a space age. Would we have, or never got to a space age for sure? But would we have any evidence of their metal from 100 and, you know, X amount of thousands of thousands?

1:53:04Yeah, I don't know. You'd have to ask a anthropologist that. What would even be? So, certainly a space age we can, they certainly don't have nuclear power plants. Certainly the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted or reserves. They don't see plastic everywhere from a previous, I mean, because we created so much concrete and plastic that yeah, I was hoping to try to project this and say, like there's no way you could miss human, in a geological sense in the future. Even if all of our cities had eroded away, the plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature, you'd see this like layer in your wax.

1:53:38So it'd be pretty hard to miss us. And so you've heard the Cyrillian hypothesis, this idea that could have been like a past civilization, maybe the dinosaurs for instance could have had like technology and civilization. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Adam Frank who was he was on here a few years ago. Yeah. Maybe it was before he came up with this idea, but yeah, here's this fun idea could the Cyrillian hypothesis. It's kind of borrowed from sci -fi I think the word Cyrillian or Cyrillian, not sure how to say it. But But you hear this idea that maybe there was someone 50 million years ago on this planet, a civilization, and over that time scale, a lot of it does, as you correctly say, get a roaded.

1:54:14It's really difficult to put strong limits on them. But I think at the stage we're at now, we've made a plastic incongruate, we've made, and also just having stuff on the moon, right? I mean, there's nothing else. We've imaged the moon every centimed to that damn thing. There's no other stuff on the surface, because of what we've put there. So at this point we can be pretty confident there was never a space age Civilization in the past Despite the fact there appear to be opportunities, right? And so Maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way, but then it is spooky that it happened Three places.

1:54:50Well, it also you have to take any consideration. It takes a special kind of person to innovate to the point where everything jumps off of this one invention, whether it's the combustion engine, whether it's the transistor, whether, you know, whatever it is, nuclear power, splitting the atom, it takes a very specific type of intelligence and resources to create this thing that transforms everything. If no internal combustion engine, no electronics, no electricity, that is possible. So we're all living exactly how people live just a couple hundred years ago. That's not that long ago. Yeah. Right?

1:55:30A couple hundred years ago, no engines, muskets, you know, you, they'd barely figured out gunpowder. Like you're looking at a whole different world, no electricity, candlelight everywhere, whole different world. Yeah, that's not what you talked about with one veteran. Yeah. It's crazy the world they lived in. And that's not that long ago. So it takes specific types of human beings in order to push things radically past where they are now, like Orville and Wilver Wright. Yeah, when you certainly probably need a critical mass of humans, right? You probably need enough that there are some humans who can just not do the farming, not be involved in hunting, that they can just sit on the site and just use their brains to think about problems.

1:56:11And they're going to have to have large -scale cities where they can get food and resources and other people like them to collaborate with. It's probably really hard to pull that off, especially when you're dealing with territorial nuclear power and apes. It's probably really hard. So the question is, if you reran the tape, if we could go back and rerun the Holocene over, is the emergence of the Neolithic evolution, eventually even all up to the industrial age, is that an inevitable thing that just always happens? Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter -gatherers.

1:56:49Or things go off in a completely different direction. Like it appears they did in Egypt. Like whatever they were doing, you know, 2 ,500 plus BC, whatever they were doing was very different than everyone else in a spectacular scale. In a scale that today, thousands of years later, we look at it and go, I don't fucking know. No, no one knows. They all pretend there's a logical people who are smart. They figured it out, Polis, this, that, the other. Right, you do it. Do it. If I give you a billion dollars, can you make me appear and make fuck off? It's crazy. It's a giant mystery. You know, it's clear that it's there.

1:57:32It's clear that it's in this one part of the world that for some reason, those people were way more advanced than everybody else. Way more advanced. They figured stuff out. They figured out how to believe. But that's not so hot to believe, right? An enormous blocks of stone, hundreds of miles through the mountain with no machines. Like they were doing something totally different than everybody else. How? Right, but this is the same species that figured out how to split an atom. Yes, yes. Unquestionably, but that's my point. We can put our minds to it. 100%. But that's my point. They went in a different direction.

1:58:06We were fucked because of the library of Alexandria burning and there's just enough records to explain. But we know that they did that. And we know that human beings did that. We know that human beings did that within the last few thousand years. So that was a totally different direction. And we're just collectively agreeing that this direction is the way human beings go. But it's just what we're caught up in right now. Like there could be a ton of different ways to do this and to seek technological innovation and to seek consistent, constant evolution of technology to the point where you can do that with these giant stones.

1:58:45And you can point it to true North, South, East, and West. And you can set it up. It's like, I don't know how many acres, the great pyramid of Gideon is. But there's 2 ,300 ,000 stones in that thing. It's just nuts. Which is a good motivation for doing simulation, right? Because we would love to, you want to rewind the clock. Oh my God. That would be, let's let the Egyptians take over. Let's see what happens in that world, right? I mean, that would be a fun, The kind of the biggest tragedy I find of being alive now is I want to know I'm fascinated by our story as humans And I want to know how it ends.

1:59:19I want to know what is the future? What does it look like in a thousand years? Are we still here? Hundred thousand years. I mean we should still be anatomically kind of not evolved too much at that point all things being equals So I'm fascinated by us like where I think we are the most fascinating thing that's ever happened to this planet And I would, I'm just, I think it's such a shame that my finite lifetime means I will never know where this incredible story eventually goes to. Yeah, I think it's kind of like no country for old men. Sometimes it ends and it's just, damn, I want to know more.

1:59:54You can't know more. You're going to, your time here is done. This story goes on without you. I, yeah, I mean, it'd be kind of cool to find out how it ends. I suspect that it ends with us looking like the grays. I think that's what that whole thing is, that bizarre iconography, this bizarre imagery that we have, this iconic creature that is completely non -muscular, has no gender, and has an enormous head. I think we think we're going in that direction. I think that's almost like some beacon in the future that's like calling to us in our subconscious. Like when people have these late night experiences where they think they're being abducted and they're encountering that, I think it's almost a part of our genetic coding.

2:00:42I wonder if it's more of a cultural feedback. Because you know Adam wrote a book about UFOs recent Adam Frank and he was telling me about their story that when the first UFOs started to be reported, the first flying saucers, like around Roswell in the 50s. That there was a farmer or something that was being interviewed and he saw something and journalists came interviewed him about what he saw and he described something and it was not a flying saucer, but the journalists misheard him and wrote down flying saucer. And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers, but it all happened after it came into print that this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme, had been put out there.

2:01:31And once the memes there of the grays or the flying sources, when you're in those delusional states or whatever it is, you're in some kind of weird perceptional state, it is possible that your brain reaches for something and it reaches it and it finds that meme and it's like, that could be that, that could be that, that makes sense because that's all it's got for context. So yeah, my guess would be it's more of a cultural phenomenon But you should chat to a social justice psychologist Because I'm sure they they'd have a much more informed opinion about what's going on there. Yeah, I think there's some elements of that for sure I don't think there's any hard fast explanation for all of the things you could put them all into one category all the sightings But for sure people do see what they want to see I remember one time I was in the woods in Alberta and I saw what I thought was a wolf I thought it was a wolf because they had a lot of wolf sightings up there And I thought it'd be pretty cool to see a wolf and I thought what I saw was a wolf I thought it was a wolf for two seconds.

2:02:29It was a squirrel But if I were a second maybe two I thought it was a wolf I thought I saw a wolf I thought I saw a wolf. I like that's a fucking squirrel. That's crazy I think I think a squirrel's a wolf. Yeah, right? It's just reaches because my brain was reaching for wolf Luckily, I'm logical and it was clear that it was a squirrel, but I was seeing it in dense woods and it was moving through and it was gray and my perception was wrong in terms of distance. So I was like, is that? Yeah, there is a phenomenon called Gestalt Reconfiguration that the psychologists talk about. And I know about this term from Mars and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there.

2:03:10So there's this phenomena, it's called, there's these laws of Gestalt reconfiguration, it's sort of like closure. Like if you see dots that almost make a circle, your brain will kind of make it a circle and it's mind. Continuation that if you see like dot dash lines, your brain will see a continuous line almost, it'll fill in the gaps. And so the same thing has thought to have happened to this famous astronomer, Perseveral Lowell, in the late 19th century. So about, He was like this like super rich dude from in a Boston area. He was from a wealthy family of industrialists And he got really into astronomy and so he was convinced life was out there That was you know, a he was wealthy so it had means be he thought life was out there There was a quote from his memoir and it was something like That life isn't that what we call life is an inevitable detail of cosmic evolution as gravitation itself So he just thought like it's just this always happens life always happens and And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston off -the -mologist that he had the best eyesight the off -mologist had ever seen.

2:04:12So he had these like three things in his head. He had, I've got the means, so I can do it. I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had. And I believe the aliens are out there. So he looked at Mars and he saw these four -inch telescope or something like a really blurry, small telescope. But he was able to make out these little patterns and he thought they were canal systems because he saw that going up all around the United States at the time. He even did it for Mars and he saw this is crazy. He saw these, he draw a similar kind of picture. Maybe you can google it Jamie, Percival Lowell Venus and you'll get these kind of spokes.

2:04:50And he saw these maps of Venus that of course were wrong and they look like the back of an eye, the blood vessels on the back of an eye. And so, oftenologists actually think that's what he was seeing. So if you go to the left, the next one down, yeah, that one there. You see that? So that's the image he drew on the right and that's the image of a back of an eye. And his eyesight, it's thought was so good, he was seeing reflections of light in his own eyeball. Why? We're seeing his own blood vessels. So he was right, his eyesight was freaking awesome. He was correct about that, but he misinterpreted it to be living things on Mars.

2:05:36Oh, wow. So he's just got, he's just a freak, just a biological freak. That's crazy. So this is, I think this story's fascinating because it's a real warning shot of, if you really believe aliens are out there, you're convinced about it. Every time you see some at weird, that's where your brain goes to you first. No, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that that's a case. But I do wonder about some of the sightings. But it's always wondering because I have not had any experiences personally. You've never seen it yourself. Nothing. Well, it really freaked me out. Nothing that I could say was something that I could go, there was this time.

2:06:17No. Well, I haven't either, and I think a lot of astronomers are in that same boat. And I think that's kind of strange, but you'd think the professional people who start the sky for a living. That's real weird. Would probably have the most number to rack up. And that's what we're all in, you know, you can confess something. But that is also the question as, are we looking at it wrong? Because if you're dealing with something that's so technologically advanced that it's a million years ahead of us, would it really be still doing that, flying around in ships? Oh, hey, nice. When you'd be able to teleport to areas, wouldn't it be able to completely hide, be totally invisible?

2:06:54But I guess the problem is there's all sorts of weird crap out there that we just don't understand. In the NASA UAP task force, they found this. Maybe you can find Jamie Red sprite lightning. There's these lightning events that go upside down. Yes. And it happens in the upper atmosphere. And for years and years, pilots were reporting this and nobody believed them. They were like, this is bullshit. You kind of upside down red light, whether fuck you talking about that's crazy. And then people started videoing it. And once they got videos and high resolution photos, You have to have like a shutter frame rate of like one over a hundred thousand seconds or something crazy to capture these things.

2:07:30And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth. And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it. Right, so there's we don't understand. Tell me that doesn't look like war of the world. Right, if you saw that, you'd be like, oh my god, there's a enormous ship the size of Manhattan flying over us. Like crazy. It's crazy. Well, ball lightning, right? Yeah. Same thing with ball lightning. I guess that one's maybe a little bit less I think they've maybe made examples in the laboratory, but no one's got a hard video of it in the in real -world setting.

2:08:07There's no hard video ball lightning. I don't think so. I thought there was. Oh, shit online is fake. Oh, no. Really? I talked to a guy who had something fly through his home and it was like regular guy didn't seem to be a liar. We were doing this TV show for the sci -fi network and it was all around Skinwalker Ranch. And this guy said that he had this ball of light that came through his home. You know, but if ball lightning is real and it does just sort of fly around, that is possible. It's impossible. Limited in terms of its ability to go into a structure. It's kind of surprising we don't have any good video.

2:08:48I better this part. I thought there was video. I'm such a dumbass. This might be, I'm not saying it's real, but this was two weeks ago. Well, she's definitely not really there. No, I'm so. Right away we're fucked. It gets right away they're doing trickery. She's speaking on top of that background. I know, but right away we're doing trickery because this lady is not really there. So you're asking me to say that this is real when I know that this lady is in front of a fucking green screen Just there's there's a video that was going around that's all I saw a lot of cool making. Can you show me it again?

2:09:19That's I was trying to I'm trying to go good stuff. Okay cool Anton Petrov yeah shout out to Anton one of the good ones cool. So this thing What does Anton take on this? I haven't seen this video, but he's normally pretty grounded. Yeah, there must be all bullshit, but just again, there's a new one, someone thought they come. Interesting. You know, my sister, when I was a kid, used to make me come into a bedroom and check for ball lightning. She's like, she'd heard the stories that it chases you around. So she'd be looking around the curtain. And she's my older sister. I was like, a little seven -year -old having to look around her room to make sure.

2:09:56But it's one of those things that like, you get kind of terrified of the notion of it, yeah. Isn't part of the theory of it is that it involves tectonic plates and that there's some energy that can be generated from that to fly out because I've heard of them actually flying out of the ground. Is that part of the theory? It's not a field I followed closely. I do worry about, I'm getting my pilot's license at the moment, so I'm having to learn a lot about weather and different weather phenomena. So that's been kind of fun learning about different conditions for lightning and stuff, but Yeah, it's a ball lightning.

2:10:31I can safely say as a pilot. I've never seen Well, if you're out there flying around as a pilot, I really hope you see a UFO. I do I'm always looking out for it. Of course. I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty I'm like man like how can I ever now seem to have seen these things? How can I see when I'm the alien guy like this doesn't make sense? I wonder what percentage of the population has actually seen something that they think was it from here? Well, the majority of Americans believe in Yeah, because it's fun. Yeah, and this is also a thing that you are ridiculed for Relentlessly up until I would say I think the real Breaking of the ice was that 2017 New York Times report So when the New York Times had it on the cover Yeah, yeah, that was probably the the first time they've built worlds.

2:11:21That's shown in the video. Overton window. Yes, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean, that's actually made, to be honest, that's made the kind of stuff we do, the seti work we do. So seti's such extra intelligence. We've kind of rebranded it these days as techno signatures. But that used to be the sort of thing that Congress would always ding and be like, you can't do that day. You can't have, you know, taxpayer money going to like a phrase, that's ridiculous. But ever since, you know, the UFO, the UAP phenomenon really caught on, the Overton window has shifted. And now what we do seems completely like, if anything, like to traditional and to, you know, we're to unconservative, to conservative in our approaches compared to what other people want to do.

2:11:58So you've got Avi who's trying to do Project Gal A, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff. And I think it's a valid point, like if you can't say that looking for aliens on an exoplanet is good science. But looking for aliens in the atmosphere is not science. It's still, you can design an experiment to do it. It's still a scientific. because there's no magical reason why I want to enter the atmosphere. It doesn't become science. So I think that's a good argument why we should do it. And as you take on all these UAP whistleblowers who talk about crash retrieval programs and all these dark funded top secret beyond anyone's ability to go look into them, I don't know what to make of it.

2:12:41It's fascinating. It's because I can't believe maybe some of them, you know, pulling our leg and bullshit in it for the fame or whatever, but there's so many credible people that have come forward. It's hard. It's difficult to pass what's going on, but I do believe everyone's fallible, right? So it is possible, you know, like, you know, there's, as I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things. There's so many people, so many cell phones, so much out there. It's not surprising that one in a million times a mistake or something could happen. And it's all about knowing that spurious rate.

2:13:19Like how often do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've got? And we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is. So as a scientist, it's hard to make to pass it. I don't think we can ingest it realistically. Unless, you know, every time they say they've got the disclosure thing, right? We're going to get disclosure soon. And every time it feels like we don't get the craft, we don't get the technology, we don't get a body. So yeah, sure, if you give me the technology and let me dissect in my lab, then I could be convinced. But every time it seems like it's, we get all the up to that point where it's like it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it's going to happen.

2:13:59It's intensely frustrating. It's intensely frustrating to even be remotely interested in it because every new thing you're like, what is this it? It's just going to be a thing. They're pulling on your heartstrings. It's like a girl who keeps texting you saying, like, we're going to be great next time and she's less you down every time. What is the name of that disclosure, age of disclosure, documentary? That's what it is, right? There's a documentary that they premiered at Sundance or at South by Southwest rather here that was really good. And it is essentially just all these different people that worked on these programs, Spill in the Beans.

2:14:31And they all have pretty similar stories. And the bottleneck seems to be that all this stuff was done without congressional approval, which is highly illegal. So all the research, all this hidden back engineering programs, all this stuff in conjunction also with military contractors. So those are the ones that build the jets and the rockets. And so you have to go to them to help with this stuff and to try to back engineer this stuff. So then there's this competitive advantage that they would have over other military contractors There's a don't get a crashed UFO and like so then people are getting sued, people are going to jail.

2:15:10There's a lot of money that was allocated for these things that was done through lies. And there's a lot of problems with that. And with this documentary is essentially calling for mass amnesty and saying, look, this is if this is real and they think it is, this is a situation that is forget about whatever laws we have in terms of finance. This is a much bigger deal. This is there is direct evidence of an actual life form that is not homo sapiens that can do things that we can't do that visits us and occasionally they lose a craft which is also hard to believe right yeah Yeah, they're not very good pilots, right?

2:15:50Richard Dull and asked yeah, it's a pretty good explanation for some of them and it's a high altitude nuclear bombs that we detonated during the testing days. So during the testing days, which after the war, from 45 to, I think, they tested them, I think, when did they stop blowing up nukes? But there was just in the United States. Thousands of nuclear detonations. And a bunch of them they did in the ocean, and a bunch of them they did in the sky. They did them like 150 miles up, they detonated nukes. I thought they only did it once with Starfish Prime, but no, they did it at different altitudes.

2:16:30They just tried things. And the idea is that if there was something in the sky anywhere remotely near that, and it had no idea this was going to go off, and they detonate a nuke in the sky, that this thing would crash. I didn't know it was tight -skying. Yeah, I mean, it's a great story. I just need to see the evidence. Yeah, it's the best story. Yeah, I think it's just it could be I mean in Iceland most people believe in fairies and if you go back in a hundred years Most people believe that most people in Iceland believe fairies. Yeah. Wow. What do they think they are Elves maybe elves are fairies coming with exact wood.

2:17:06Yeah, but they they Soviet what does this say Jamie what they did Last high altitude test. Okay, so the last so the last high altitude look at how many they did They just kept doing them. They just kept doing them. Look at all these fucking tests. These are all high altitude nuclear bombs. The bunch failed. That is insane. Yeah, a bunch failed. Look at all these ones have failed. What happened to those? They just fall into the ocean. Good luck. Figure it out, fish. Way of how that for lunch. Yeah, figure it out. That's where Godzilla comes from. Literally the movie. Yeah, I mean, I guess my point is that there's a, whenever, you know, you have this weird stuff, Aliens is, I read about this recently, aliens is almost too good of an explanation.

2:17:52Right. Because it can explain everything. There's nothing you can't explain with aliens, right? Whatever it is. And yet, so it has, I call it, unbounded explanatory capability. You can explain absolutely if I can explain anything. Yeah, it's god of the gaps, quite literally. Whenever you see something odd, you can just inject your god to explain that. And yet the same time on the other side of the coin also has Unbounded avoidance capacity because you could say to me look I saw a UFO at this site on Monday on Tuesday and Wednesday So come Thursday and we'll see it together because it's happening every day and I come with you I don't see it and but okay Well, just didn't I guess it changed.

2:18:29It's might it didn't happen today That doesn't disprove your what you saw and similarly if I go, you know people have said You know we've surveyed the service of Mars without seeing your life on it I can't disprove this life on Mars. There could be life underneath a rock that we just haven't turned over yet. You can never disprove, you can't prove a negative. So they could always, it could always be there. So aliens is almost unscientific as a hypothesis because it can explain everything and yet there's no experiment I can do to ever prove it's wrong. And that puts it in a very precarious position scientifically.

2:19:02Right. Yeah, we're just sort of in this adolescent stage of understanding. And if they are real, we really don't know right now. And that's the weirdest part. It's that there's so many compelling stories. And it's also the weirdness of it is so exciting to us. The weirdness of an intelligent life form looking at us is so exciting to us that we want it to be real. We want to believe. Oh, me more than anybody. I'm the worst. I'm the worst. I go back and forth on this bullshit. My general belief is that a large number of these things that we're seeing are top secret military aircrafts. And I think that's always existed.

2:19:45That's always been the case. And they probably have some incredible technology that we're not aware of. That's the majority of what I think is happening. But that doesn't make sense when you go really far back. That doesn't make sense when you go to the Kenneth Arnold sightings like if if his Estimations of the speed of those things is accurate you're dealing with something that for sure wasn't available in 1952 at least as far as we know also the idea that that was Nazi technology This is something that's always talked about and Richard Dolan talked about in his book as well. They were already gone All right, they they they lost the war any there's no way they're launching technology that's above and beyond anything anybody is aware of while there is societies in Chambles right there's no way they don't have a military anymore it's over the war's over so that doesn't make sense so if it's not them who is it is it's someone that's already here is it something that's been here the entire time and then that gets really weird and people go well where's the evidence of that well the right there's no evidence of that but there's also so much room in the ocean.

2:20:51The ocean is, if I was going to hide, that's where I would hide. We literally can't go there. There's too much of it. You could go into the ocean and put a base underground in the middle of the ocean, and 100 percent, we're not going to find it. Yeah, I would just say whatever your hypothesis is, the most constructive thing to do is to think about how can we prove a dispreviewed? That's what I want. Until something, yeah, but this is the most frustrating thing about this disclosure jazz. Because if they really do have something, boy, you're fucking over the entire human race by not releasing this, just because you're worried about Congress getting mad at you.

2:21:29Like that's a real problem. That's a real problem. That's what this movie tries to address. Richard Dolen talks about that in his book as well, and a bunch of people have brought up that point. There's a lot of legal issues that are going to arise, and a lot of people could be very vulnerable if this does turn out to be the case that they have had this technology since the 1940s. Yeah, I mean, we can argue about history but I think the most constructive thing is just a design experiment. And I think, you know, Abby's idea of Project Gala is a good one. Like we should we should try and survey the sky more systematically and we've got now the Vera Rubin telescope which is doing like literally a movie of the entire sky every night.

2:22:10So I think as we grow in our capabilities, it's going to get harder and harder for this UAP hypothesis to evade all of these facilities that we're building in a public domain. This is public data, not military controlled. And last, they're very aware of our capabilities and very aware that we can do this. So the camouflage themselves. Yeah. But then you start to get into this, you know, exponentially contrived. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're in our heads and they know everything. So it becomes enforceifiable, so we're sort of leaving the world of science. But I think, when we think about as a scientist, like we're doing this experiment with JDRST for exoplanets, like we are looking for life right now with James Webb.

2:22:51There was even a claim for a planet K218B. There was a claim a few months ago. It's an ocean world. It's thought to be an ocean world. It's about two and a half times the size of the Earth. And we detected this molecule with weak significance, want to emphasize that, it was only weakly detected called dimethyl sulfide. And that's, I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have. And it's something that the bacteria and phytoplantin make on the earth. So they detected this, the hint of this molecule. And as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the earth.

2:23:26We don't have any of the process that can make it, except for living creatures. And so it was a lot of excitement about that. And it turned out, in that case, with follow -up observations, It may be as not as secure as they thought, and it doesn't appear to be there anymore. But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment. It is sensitive enough to look at a planet which is a hundred light years away and detect the molecular signatures of living creatures on that planet. So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets. We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore.

2:24:01We can actually start surveying where they are and seeing what's up. So I think that's going to, and that's just simple life, of course, that's not even technological life. So I think it's going to, I think we're going to get answers. And the only way to do this is to keep, you know, supporting missions like NASA's, mission with these future observatories that are trying to get us to that point. We're trying to build a mission now called the Habitall Worlds Observatory, HWO. It'll probably get renamed at some point. Like, I think it'll be like the Carl Sagan Observatory probably. It'll be a rebranding for it.

2:24:32It's my hunch. And that thing's trying to take photos, like we saw of Alpha Centauri, it's trying to do photos, but of Earth's size plus. JDRIS T can't image Earth's size plus, they're too small. This thing will be able to take photos of Earth around other stars, and it will see the pale blue dot of light of that other world, and we'll get its chemical fingerprint, we'll be able to sniff its atmosphere. We'll pull their pants down, right? We'll get the whole thing. So the aliens can't hide from us forever, right? We're going to, our technology is getting to the point where we're going to find them in their own home.

2:25:06When they came out with a James Webb telescope, how long was the development process and where are they at now in terms of a future better version of something like that? Yeah, it was a long process. I mean, almost as soon as Hubble launched, they started planning the successor to Hubble, which was James Webb. It was famously over budget. I think the original budget was supposed to be $800 million and it was costing $10 billion. It's not crazy, just went completely overblown. But this was because there was some bad contractors, astronomers tend to underestimate their budgets a little bit when they're finding these things out.

2:25:43And there's inflation. So these things, if you do a project over 20 years, we just want to end it up taking, because it was 1995, I think. And then we got it. And so was it 2021, 2022? Actually ended up getting in the sky. So it took a long time for that project to develop. We are starting the HWA project now. There's already design teams, working groups that are putting the first blueprints together of what this thing would look like. But of course, it's in jeopardy because the White House wanted to slash the NASA site, a budget by 50%, which basically just ends that entire program. There's about 40 missions that would end NASA missions that would end in that White House budget.

2:26:20But fortunately, the Senate readjusted it back up to pretty much the last year's last year. you go talk to those people. Why don't you give a speech the way you just laid it out for us and how fascinating important this stuff is. I don't think these assholes know. I've been to DC, I have a lobby, but you only talk to the AIDS. Right. That's what you're into talking to. Yeah, you've got to get in front of Congress. You got to get in front of these people where the American people see it on television and get a chance to understand like this is it. I do. Yeah. This is like one of the most important things to look for that you could even imagine.

2:26:55We can do it. We actually, for the first time in human civilization, we have the ability to do the experiment is their life on another planet. What is this, Jamie? This is some of the images from the Hubble. This is showing what the new telescope, the Roman telescope, yeah, a Roman. It's just a huge field of view, right? That picture is what the Hubble got and then it's zooming out to show you what. So Roman's happening, hopefully. Yeah, Roman should be flying. Wow.

2:27:25Roman interestingly is a, it's military technology, it's spy technology. So apparently the NSA had two Hubble class space telescopes in their basement. They just were like, said to NASA. By the way, we're not using these. They're out of date for us. Do you want one? And NASA took it and turned into Roman. That's crazy. They just have them lying around. That's what I'm talking about. the fuckers of technology they're keeping from us. What could be done better? Like what is, if you add an unlimited budget and enormous supply of brilliant minds to get together to coordinate something, what would be how you would set it up to make it even more powerful?

2:28:07For what goal? Seeing further, seeing clear, being able to precisely locate planets and get a much better view of them. Yeah, I think as I said earlier whenever we improve our instrumentation our precision by a factor of Anywhere from three up to ten let's say in that ballpark like a big improvement You get surprises you find stuff you never expected in the universe and we've seen that every time so every time Yeah, I think the whenever you listen to the universe in a different way So we were you know for years and years have just been using our eyes basically optical lights look at the universe and X -rays and radio waves And then recently we've started using LIGO and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.

2:28:50So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations the universe rather than seeing it. And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes and it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge in form. So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us. So it's not going to be a single mission. It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of haptowards observatory. We need to have this multi -prong attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of their sensitivity and making sure the scientists are actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right?

2:29:31You can't do science unless the data is a public and then be people who are actually there to study it. So those are the two key ingredients. Just have great telescopes and great people. Is funding the biggest bottleneck for it right now? Or is it a lack of interest from the right amount of people? Like what is... Yeah, certainly, I mean, HWO, we're talking about a mission that's going to cost at least $10 billion. And the NASA budget is about 25, 26 billion. So it's eating up already. I mean, if you built it in one year, it would eat up almost the half of the budget. So it's impossible for that mission to be built in a year.

2:30:07Even then probably we could if we had the money. Maybe in a year or two you could probably build something like that. So if you doubled NASA's budget it would come twice as fast. For short you'd have it in maybe five years rather than waiting to 2050. That's what we're talking about. Faith should be there. It's just kind of depressing when you think well it's kind of depressing is like weird stuff happens like when the Biden administration left like 93 billion dollars in loans just went off to like weird places like which is more than they had done 15 years like you guys could have done that. You guys have the money to make the most insane telescopes.

2:30:39Yeah. We could find out more. Yeah. I think I said I had the quote once he said that the the entire sety program was equivalent to one attack helicopter. If you did like the entire city and its maximal form would have been the cost of one attack helicopter. Dude the Vows president I'd go ham. I bring in all the cosmologists like what do we got to do? That's Let's get crazy. Let's get crazy. You guys want to get rich? Image shows telescopes that we have used and then a few that are being made. So down here's the size of the James Webb telescope. It's all we've done. Yeah, I mean, it's only six and a half meters.

2:31:16So it's limited. They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it. So actually Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding. It wouldn't have 200 points of failure. It could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship and even better it would cost less because a huge cost in these space Huskots is making them really light. So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light so they They low cost to launch. But if you have Starship you can launch like a hundred tons. I think it is You could literally just take these ground based Huskots.

2:31:48You already have and just shove them in there and you know Obviously put some some chassis on it But you could, it'd be way, way cheaper to launch these things. So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch capabilities at Starship Givers. That plus investment in something like the, you know, these kind of giant telescope designs, we could launch some truly gargantuan things into space and probe those atmospheres and, you know, see those aliens and what they're up to. So, yeah, I would say the future can be bright because we have the means to do it, if we have the will to do it.

2:32:21It just seems to be a puzzle that most human beings on Earth are fascinated with. The fact that that is inadequately funded is enraging. It's enraging. It just makes you crazy. All the things that we should be interested in, space seems to be the big one. And it was until we were all fucked up by light pollution. I think if we didn't have light pollution, I think people would have a much greater sense of the majesty of The of our existence in the cosmos. It's such a bummer. It really is. Have you been to a Doc's guys there? Yes, yeah, I've talked about it too many times in the podcast to repeat it, but there was a time when I went to the the array in and the big island.

2:33:14Markea. And I went up there on the perfect night. There was no moon and it was like being in the hub of the universe. It was like being in a spaceship, a convertible spaceship. That's what it felt like. It was so incredible. The entire sky was filled with stars. The Milky Way was beautifully clear. And it was like life changing. The life changing, I've gone up there three times since. Never caught it that way again. You're kind of like the overview effect you heard that with astronauts when they go up to space Yeah, and they see the earth and I think we should we should watch all our presidents into space.

2:33:49Oh, that's great Bring them back. I let them have that overview because I think that is lots with Katy Perry Yeah, I want to go for Katy Perry just to bring a day. She's the guy Yeah, I mean, I think they'll be great for you guys I also think they should have a mushroom experience, but that's just me but going into space Just I mean just being able to see it used to be the norm for human beings. There was no light pollution. You could get away from the campfire, you lay on your back and you see everything. And I think that gave us a better understanding. First of all, it made us more humble, for sure.

2:34:26You're confronted with this impossible image in front of you. And now that we know what that is. So ancient man's looking at it, it's just incredible, beautiful lights, and they're tracking the constellations and marking them down, and this is what this is, what's called this one Leo. But when you get to what we know now, and what we know, those are all fireballs in the sky that are bigger than our sun, and there are millions of miles away, and that you're seeing just a tiny fraction of what the actual universe is, which is really nuts. When you see, like I'm sure you've seen this, but maybe people haven't, when there's an image of what you see in the night sky when you have a full clear view of the cosmos.

2:35:09And it's just tiny, dirty, dirty little thing. And yet it's still insane and majestic. And I think that we've gotten so arrogant because of cities, because everybody just sees this black cloud over us, this curtain over the sky. And maybe you see the moon, but that's it. You see a dot here or a dot there. That's the only stars you see are the most bright ones are Venus and then you don't get a sense of what we're really doing Yeah, it makes me sad when Here's an inner city sky suburban urban rural Excellent dark sky, but then what with the thing about the observatory is that it's above the clouds We drove through the clouds.

2:35:51Yeah, that doesn't even did justice No, not even close, but there's pictures of it. See if you can the monoloa observatory Yeah, I think what makes me sometimes sad is as an astronomer is sometimes people say, you know, what's the point of looking for life out there? Like I care about the, you know, the bread on the table, economy and jobs and factories and stuff like that. I really care about the things that really directly affect my life. But I think there has to be things that we do as humans, existential things like, are we alone in the universe? How can be a bigger question than that? That's what I saw.

2:36:25Yeah. Maybe even better than that. And when you see something like that, You realize that there's more to this life than just Substance of just stay staying alive for the sake of staying alive There are grander things than what we have on this planet also It's so frustrating that we're very capable of curing all those problems for the vast majority of people on this planet If we weren't so fucking greedy. Yeah, if we really treated humanity like a community We could we could completely eliminate starvation and poverty the way it exists today We can completely just no one's even tried Yeah, the inequality right now is is so out of control in this country in the world Well in the country, but in the world the craziest thing that I've ever heard is that $34 ,000 is 1 % of the world Yeah, the 1 % is the people that are on the world that everybody likes to think that the people pulling the strings now That's you bitch You were in Starbucks.

2:37:20You're a 1 % If you work full -time at Starbucks, you are the 1 % of the world. You're the string polar, but you're not, right? No, no, it's the world's really kind of crazy. It's the point zero is zero one or whatever it is. Yeah, that's the problem. Both things can be accomplished. If we really directed our resources in a kind moral and ethical way, we would solve that first and then get everybody excited about solving the cosmos. Yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that an astronomy, we used to always be completely federally supported. There was some private funding, but by and large it was pushed and pulled by federal grants and federal money.

2:37:56And I think that's generally healthy, right? Because then it's, everyone can apply for it. It's not about being mates with Jeff Bezos or being friends with, you know, certain high -influenced people. But we're going to this stage increasingly where, you know, private money is having a big influence, even in astronomy and other fundamental sciences as well. And then, you know, the people that succeed end up being not necessarily the Einstein's the most brilliant people. where there's just the people that have the right connections and can pull the strings and we're on the island at the right time.

2:38:24We've had that kind of stuff. And that's just kind of gross. It's gross, yeah. It shouldn't be that way. It's also gross that humans can control resources. We think about all the problems that they have on Earth that are directly a result of someone wanting to control natural resources that really should be everybody's. If we're really smart about it, we look at the oils clearly everybody's, the water's clearly everybody's, we should all agree that all the stuff that we need should be everybody's. Yeah, yeah. It's like, charge you for air would be wild, right? But you can fund charge you for water.

2:38:58But you can charge you for oil. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy that we have allowed that system to be in place where an individual can literally be in control of the blood of the earth that we use to make plastic and electronics. And that's where we're at. Right. So when you get that, you know, if you do get, I've never been to space. I've never had that experience in clean -out skies, but I think when you look out you see not countries and boundaries You just see this we're all in this together That's everybody's having a little fragile thing This is it like we could fuck this up so easily, but we could also make it so glorious if we were together That also gives me pause about this whole idea that the aliens are like space daddies come to keep us from blowing ourselves up Like that might be like very idealistic thinking.

2:39:43And if they don't exist, we're on our own. That's the compilution, right? It's like, it's wishing for that fatherly figure to come down and teach me the air in my ways and look after us. And that's just, look, the covering ain't coming, Joe, this is it. It's on us. It's on our skin to solve this freaking problem. Well, I was like, when the United States was about to bomb Iran, I was like, okay, well, that we're going to find out. Yeah. Let's see if the aliens step in and go, hey, hey, hey, cut the shit. They didn't. No. Maybe the only step in we use nukes. Maybe they have like a threshold of acceptable aggression that they allow.

2:40:18Yeah. I didn't think there's any backstab. There's no backstab. I think it's up to us. Yeah. I think we have to figure it out. But I think we're all aware of that and it's kind of the cool part of this whole, the weirdness of this experience that we're going through is that it's not guaranteed and that there's a bunch of struggle that really has to take place. There's a lot of thinking that has to take place. A lot of talking. Yeah. and understanding and a recognition that some of our behaviors totally illogical. And totally a lot of it totally counterproductive, but like why? Like why are we still behaving like territorial apes?

2:40:54Like what is even though you're not and I'm not, Jamie's not like a lot of people aren't, you know, it's not everything. It's not every interaction that's enough. But it's enough that it's still pushing the worst aspects of our life, which is war and poverty and crime and violence, it's still pushing all those things. Yeah, but I mean, it's hard, because you became like the top podcast and because there's competition, and that competition probably drove you to make the podcast better and better and better, and similarly as a scientist, we're in competition with each other. So there's almost a catalyst system embedded into science that I want to not like crush my enemy or something, I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have, I know what the level field is, and if you want to stand out, you have to, you know, bad above that level.

2:41:41And so that drives me to become, I'm definitely influenced by competition. I feed off it. And it makes me a better scientist when I know someone's breathing time, I neck at my daytime, like, let's just crank out the hours, we're gonna do the best we can. But if I know no one's looking at my data set and I've got three years to myself, I'm just gonna chill and just be like, there's no urgency here, let's think about other things, let's do other stuff. So that competition, like you said, is really double edged. And I don't know, we need to figure out a way to channel it, because I did martial arts as a kid.

2:42:16And one of the things I really learned. What you do with style? I did Taekwondo, I did Bit of Muay Thai, and I did some Shodakang karate, but mostly Taekwondo. And I learned a lot from that, just mentally about myself. I really want my kids to do martial arts, because I feel like it's just a transformative experience for learning how to master yourself. And one of the things I really learnt was how to channel negative feelings into something productive. So I was feeling really cut up about a break with a girlfriend at the time, and I was just beating the crap out of these punch bags, and I was going training every night, every session I could get my hands on.

2:42:54And then it ended up turning me into this beast. I was like, rip, I got a six pack, and I was training with a national squad, and I got pretty decent. And it wasn't I was aiming to do that. It was just an outlet for this anger. And then I looked back and I realized, hey, I've managed to turn this negative thing into something really productive. And I've tried to, whenever I have those kind of feelings, I always try to twist them in the same way. I remember when I first arrived at Harvard, I had the same thing. I arrived at Harvard and all the names in the corridors were famous professors. And I was just freaking out.

2:43:29I was like, I've got to have coffee with this guy. these legends, like, how am I going to like handle a conversation with these dudes? And I remember I was kind of like a bit of an outcast because I wasn't in anyone's group at the time and I remember walking down the corridor and hearing them laugh at me saying, oh, here comes the moot. I heard there's a moon guy in the group or something. I thought the idea of like a moon was crazy. So they're all kind of laughing. I came around the corridor and you know, kind of like, yeah, you know, it was kind of awkward. And I felt like they all look down at me and they probably did back then.

2:44:01And after a few years, I really, I know I don't respect because I was out publishing them and I was driven by that competition. I was like, I'm going to show you. I'm going to prove to you how good I am by publishing twice what you publish. I'm going to do better science. I'm going to do more of it. I'm going to make myself so good. You can't ignore me. It'd be ridiculous to ignore what I'm doing because I'm so far ahead of you. That's what I wanted to do. And I got to a point where I knew they wanted me in their group. And they were like, Oh, come join our I'm going to go and go and I agree. And I didn't let them get close because I knew I performed better when I play that game in my head that everyone's against me.

2:44:35It was just sort of a mind -fuckery. And it's that same thing as martial arts, it's like learning what are the tricks, the hacks that make you operate well, but being conscious of it. And I think as a society, if we can do that, there's a hack. Competition is a hack that makes us super productive, but it's just a way, can we hack it and channel it in a conscious way towards a productive outcome? Yeah, turn it into enthusiasm and turn it into inspiration instead of just be overcome with jealousy and rage, which is what happens to the weaker of minds. Yeah. You know, interesting enough with this podcast, I don't think of it in the competitive way at all and I never have and I think that's one of the reasons why it's successful.

2:45:18It's because this podcast, even though it might be the number one podcast, it's cooperative with, I don't know how many podcasts, a giant number of my friends do podcasts. I promote their podcasts. I have them on, I'll do their podcasts sometimes. I, like, we all promote each other. So it's, it, it's community. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how other people do it, but I don't do it that way. I think only about what I wanna do. And I think the only way to have all of your resources, is all of your concentration and all of your efforts put entirely into the subject matter and what the conversation is going to be like, you shouldn't be thinking about anything else.

2:46:00You shouldn't be thinking about results. I just think about process. It's all I think about. All I think about is like, okay, he's going to come in. What are my questions? What are we going to talk about? Yeah. And I'm excited about this. I'll listen. I'll drive my car. I'll listen to the son of the things. And I just really get worked up about it. But I don't do it for competition. I do it because I think I'm super lucky to be able to do it and I think it would be a horrible misuse of that fortune if I didn't treat it with respect if I didn't do my best every time I do it so I just do that And that's it.

2:46:33Yeah, in from the massage that you must have a competitive drive that right? Yeah, but it's not in podcasting yeah, it seems like it would be because that's the thing I'm the most successful and which is kind of weird it's I'm competitive in everything, but I'm very competitive with myself. I'm very self -critical, which is one of the things that I learned from martial arts is if you don't have an accurate assessment of your abilities and you think you're better than you really are, if you can't see someone do something, oh, that guy's better than me, then you're missing out. Because you're also missing out on the opportunity for you personally to get better if you're delusional and you think you're better than you are, maybe you won't work as hard or maybe you won't correct some of the errors in your technique and maybe your approach and your tactics.

2:47:16You have to constantly be improving this thing and you have to have people that are better than you that you train with all the time. So that sort of cooperative thing that came out of martial arts, what you need killers to become a killer, that helped me so much in comedy because my approach to comedy was different than most of the other comedians that had television deals and movie deals. They all wanted to be the man and they wanted to be at the top and kind of keep everybody else down. There was a lot of that going on. There's a few people that were cooperative, but I was ultra cooperative.

2:47:46Like I would prop people up. I want them to get better. I'll tell them how to get better. I'd help them. I'd help young guys. I'd go on the road with people funnier than me. Like I wanted it because I know from martial arts, this is the only way. You don't get comfortable and get better. You got to be really uncomfortable but a lot of the time to get better. But that getting better is the ultimate. That's what the goal is for everyone. And it can't just be for you. If you have this short -sighted idea, like I have to be the king, like no, you're missing out on the whole thing. The whole thing is you need a bunch of kings.

2:48:22You need everybody to be awesome. And then we all rise together. That's how it has to be. In science, it's so often goes both ways though. It's the same in comedy and science. I mean, you think about Isaac Newton, who's famously such an asshole. A lot of comics like that too, big name one, guys. Yeah, he goes to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down. And there's that need to be singly recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me. But there's scientists, I think, we all admire and get on with the best. Actually, the ones who are collaborative, who like comedy like Cher and want to do it together.

2:49:03So I think there's a lot to sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more I think. When I was a student, there used to be this thing called fame lab and used to get stand -up comedians to come in and teach scientists how to talk to the public, how to do scientific communication. And they said it's the same and maybe this agrees. It's the same kind of thing. You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation. It helps if you have an English accent. They're in comedy. No. It's talking about the cars, That probably helps it does the comedy doesn't help I could help it works at Jimmy car works a rookie duration Yeah, they've got it.

2:49:39There's a certain air of respectability that comes with an English accent So I think I think there's a lot yeah public speaking is something lower scientists It's saying because there's so many brilliant scientists and they just can't they can't yeah It's a fortunate situation and then there's so many people that call themselves science educators So don't really know what they're talking about and they're talking about science and these are the people that are like the Figureheads, right? Unfortunately, instead of the actual people that are doing the science. Yeah, it's a skill I mean, it's a skill that anyone can learn if you can talk to a friend you can talk to the public You just have to learn how to do it and you have to get better at it.

2:50:15It's not Impossible and yeah, you're gonna have anxiety, but that's a challenge that you should just embrace that challenge and get over it and and just have notes and be prepared in practice. Just like everything else. Like if you're intelligent enough to be a cosmologist, you're intelligent enough to talk publicly in front of a bunch of people about cosmology. And you also, you're gonna have a certain amount of enthusiasm that you're gonna have to figure out the right way to convey it to people, to make it infectious. And that's where it gets complicated. Cause some people are brilliant, but they're bland and flat.

2:50:49And you know, I'm sure you've had professors like that, right? and they're brilliant, but they're just like, oh my god, I'm droning out with this motherfucker. I've slept through a few lectures in my time. Yeah, and then there's people like Carl Sagan, who are just fascinating to listen to the way he talks. Magnetic, yeah, magnetic, the charisma. It's a thing, it's a factor, you know? It's not the only one, but it's a thing. It's a part of it. But you think you can teach someone to be Sagan -esque? No, no, I think there's, you know, you can't teach someone to be Dave Chappelle, but you can teach them to be a better version of who they are for sure.

2:51:22And then extroverts are extroverts and introverts are introverts and it's just like you're not going to be the same person as Jim Carrey. You have to be that guy to be that guy. But you can learn how to better express yourself and you can learn there's techniques. There's an understanding of how the human mind that's interpreting what you're saying, how they perceiving this, are they perceiving your emotions? So they feel maybe there's an anecdotal story that you can bring out with passion that connects these people to you So they can understand what made you so locked into this idea and then they'll go oh And then they feel it instead of just Blanfully reciting facts and just doing it because this is the way you do it with your coworkers and your peers Yeah, I learned that through YouTube You know, I do a lot of YouTube communication and when I first started the channel I remember I was copying I was looking at other stuff that I see was doing well and I was trying to like transplant that style of video onto my own.

2:52:22And it wasn't me. It was kind of like to animated to, you know, I'm more of a chill person. And this was like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Let's talk about space. That's just like not... It doesn't jive with me that much, but I put it on. And then I was doing this for a while and we just kind of flat -lined and subscribe as after a while. And I was like, I think we'll pat this in. But before I do, I'll just make one or two videos the way I really want to do it and then I'll stop. And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally and you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your, you know, I'm a romantic.

2:52:59So I wanted that romantic element of astronomy to come out. You know, why am I so passionate about the stars? What are the deep questions that move me since I was a kid? Those, you have to let that personality come out and once that, once people realize why you personally, I'm so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious. And then they start to get the same bug. So yeah, I learn as a communicator that certainly being willing to be vulnerable. It feels very strange as a scientist to talk about vulnerability and emotional connection, but unless you let that in, it becomes dry. It becomes inaccessible.

2:53:38Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And I think that applies to almost any kind of public speaking whether stand up comedy I think it even applies to music You know when someone is singing the blues and you just you just know that they've had some heartache I always said that that's one of the reasons why Janice Joplin was so good when she would sing take a little piece of my heart You believe that yeah, you believed it like it was coming out like that. That's a lady this experience of pain I just think about that a lot of smart sets. Yeah That jacket jacket a little pillow. Yeah, me and my dad took it all the time Oh, yeah.

2:54:11So much ruin. Yeah, damn it. Yeah. You can't imitate that. Yeah, you can't imitate that. And you can't imitate that with comedy. You can't imitate that with anything. But I think you could teach people how to do that when they talk about science. It could be taught. Yeah. Find that very authentic voice. And use that. Because no one wants to see a copy. Right. You want to see some at fresh. That's what makes it exciting. Well, and then the beautiful thing about YouTube and putting out your own content is you can figure that out on your own. You don't have to get molded by executives and some show business type people that are gonna turn you into a version they'd think is gonna be most marketable.

2:54:46You can figure and people probably they would probably tell you to do it differently. They'd probably tell you to you you gotta have more energy David. You gotta like wave your hands around a lot. That's why I don't do that show is anymore. I used to do a few of those and I got sick of it for that exact... I remember I was talking about a soup and everyone on the camera and I said they're showing the direct to us behind the camera. I was like, can we just try to, bigger, do bigger. And I was like, that's just not what I'm about. Can we just bring it down? And yeah, I think being on YouTube's great, because you get to just authentically tour the way you want to do it.

2:55:19You'll find an audience, you know? I mean, the people, when I first started doing this podcast, everybody was telling me, you can't do three hours. It's too long. I'm like, why not? Just don't listen to all three. I don't give a fuck. I'm just gonna do what I wanna do. This is what I'm talking to Graham Hancock about ancient civilizations. We're not gonna talk for 20 minutes man We're gonna talk for hours and hours and hours. I'm like what else what else you know? What I'm interested as long as I'm interested. Yeah, that's what makes it good because you're engaged with the topics Yeah, and this is the beautiful thing about this time that we live in that people can just start a YouTube channel and Just talk about things that you're fascinated by and things that you're knowledgeable about and then you know people track to it.

2:55:59It is kind of sad that kids label YouTuber as the number one job. Well they're influencer I think is the number one job. Yeah. Because it used to be astronaut right? Astronauts. Astronauts. And now YouTuber social media star is like, yeah, my kids both have a little YouTube channels. They're obsessed with it. Every day we've through a premiere of one of their videos they've made around the house and it's definitely influenced kids now. That's they aspire for that, but it has some great elements. It's creative, it's an outlet. As long as you can keep your shit together, because the interaction with that amount of human beings is also very problematic for young people.

2:56:39Because just social media, we talked about this the other day, Jonathan Hates, book, the Coddling of the American Mind that shows self -harm, particularly among girls, the suicidal ideation, all the different things that happened to them, anxiety and depression, and all rises with the invention of social media, that's times a hundred when you're putting out content. And then especially if you're reading that, the comment section and reading Reddit threads and reading your emails that you're gonna deal with so much hate and so much anger and so many frustrated, sick, mentally ill people that are reaching out trying to destroy your life for no fucking reason whatsoever.

2:57:20And if you're a young person, and you don't know how to like put this into a rational, you know, you're not equipped for it. No one is equipped for it. It's not normal. It's not a normal type of interaction to have that many people commenting on you in your life. And so that can fuck kids up, especially if they're really young and they get into that. And that's like how they develop as an adult with that kind of attention. I just think, my kids challenge is only me, I think, that watching this is it. And I think, yeah, but you're totally right. I mean, the the fee -bat leap is potentially really damaging.

2:57:55And I'm so glad that I grew up in an era without cell phones. Yeah, I need to. I can't imagine how I would have got through life if I had Twitter at my fingertips or Facebook, whatever it was growing up, because that just adds a whole new stress. And you hear these stories of kids at school where the boys, like saying to their girlfriends, like, well, you need to send me photos of you, and then they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke. And it's all this kind of weird fucked up bullying going around. And we don't have to do with any of that shit growing up. But like it's so much simpler.

2:58:29I mean, am I some of saying to me, oh, I'm friends with this other kid at camp because he's got 100 subscribers. And that's become a thing, right? Like how many subscribers or followers you have sort of forms like a popularity rank in even real world settings? And it's messed up. There's so much pressure on the kids in a way. we never experienced and you know the more cognitive burden you have like that the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and just go from what do you want to do in your life. Yeah it's gonna be very challenging for these kids it's gonna be very weird.

2:59:02They're not chats, GBT's, they're like an extra virtual girlfriend's whatever they'll probably have on there and yeah gets weird. Listen man thank you very much for being here I really enjoyed it it was really fun. I'll tell everybody your channel how they can watch content. Yeah sure my child's called Cool Worlds, the Math or Cool Worlds. So you can head to youtube .com slash at Cool Worlds. We also have a podcast, The Cool Words Lab podcast. And if you want to support a real research program, that's my team, The Cool Words Lab at Columbia University. You can just head to Cool Words Lab .com slash support.

2:59:36There it is. Yeah. Head over there and you're for the price of a coffee per month that you can actually support real astronomy research. Thank you very much. Let's do this again sometime. Thank you. All right. Firefighter.

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