In this week's episode, the boys discuss the dangers of contact with alien life, and whether or not we should be worried about it. Plus, a discussion about vaccines and chocolate and the dark side of the moon landing.
00:02:55.240Well, except, of course, Bill Gates now knows everything you think.
00:02:58.900Well, I mean, if we want to reach stage three civilizations, microchips in our heads controlled by overlords is step one.
00:03:09.620I mean, your former fellow Montana resident, Mr. Kaczynski, who, of course, lived outside Lincoln, Montana, would not be happy about this at all.
00:03:24.640I mean, this is exactly his nightmare coming true.
00:03:27.600And the only solution would be for him to send parcel bombs to random caretakers.
00:04:27.320I've seen a lot of his interviews and videos.
00:04:30.000And he seems like a, you know, enlightening and also generally kind of fun guy as well.
00:04:37.300I do consume a lot of popular science books, but I haven't read one of his.
00:04:42.020But he basically said, he gave a warning, which is that, well, he showed optimism and a warning, which is that we likely will meet intelligent life out there of some kind.
00:04:56.400But actually, we should be careful what we wish for.
00:05:01.200So you can go on this and then I have a couple of different things I want to talk about.
00:05:06.960Fermi's paradox and then stages of civilization.
00:05:12.100Well, first of all, if the life was, there's no, if he's saying this is going to happen within our lifetimes or whatever, which is what I inferred from the article.
00:05:24.260Then it won't be us that is reaching this.
00:05:27.500I mean, our intelligence is declining and we haven't gone in.
00:05:30.080We haven't we've we've we're not seriously sending people into space or even contemplating trying to find intelligent life anymore.
00:05:36.600We've become decadent and focused, therefore, on harm avoidance and on equality and things on Earth.
00:05:42.080So it would have to be for the civilization to find us.
00:05:45.320They would have to be not only would they have to be much, much more intelligent than us, which is extremely dangerous because they might see us as dispensable and not worth bothering about.
00:05:57.220And that was the parallel he gave was when Cortez found the king of the count, found the Aztecs and the Aztecs.
00:06:04.280OK, I mean, they were in the ruins of a more advanced civilization, but they weren't a particularly advanced civilization themselves.
00:06:10.420And as far as he was concerned, they were just rubbish.
00:06:13.280And he was perfectly content to just the king of the Aztecs was quite friendly to him.
00:06:19.120He simply displaced him, took over, tore down their shrines, spread all kinds of diseases they weren't used to and killed them.
00:06:26.220So it didn't go well because there was a substantial difference in civilization and therefore they looked they looked down on them.
00:06:33.460So I would think that that's going to be tenfold more if we're talking about a species that's capable of of inter solar system travel.
00:06:44.080Well, I mean, but have you considered the fact that we invented feminism and they're going to need that?
00:06:50.500So we you know, they would come with advanced interstellar technology.
00:06:54.580They're going to need they will come with feminism.
00:07:15.740I mean, maybe they would have an IQ, an average IQ of one hundred and twenty or one hundred and thirty.
00:07:20.800Maybe if we had the technology at our disposal that we had in the 60s or now and we had the same IQ that we had when we began the Industrial Revolution,
00:07:31.100then if that happened, then maybe we would be doing things like going to Venus and where you couldn't land on Venus.
00:07:37.000It's too viscous. But, you know, it's just going there or all this.
00:08:49.980We were we were perfectly happy to do that.
00:08:51.820We were happy to just treat them as a sort of not a subspecies, but as a sort of sub as a lesser kind of human.
00:08:59.240And these were people that were genetically closely related to us, that were genetically similar to us, relatively speaking, as part of a religion which preached that we're all equal in the eyes of God or whatever.
00:09:12.960I mean, it's later in the 1950s that the Archbishop of Canterbury in England stated when he came back from Africa that all are equal in the love of God, but not in the eyes of God.
00:09:22.960And he said that with reference to these Africans.
00:09:25.860So that would be if they were in that phase of civilization, they would be high in group oriented values, high in ethnocentrism, high in cold rational logic and classification and all this stuff.
00:09:39.020And so they'd be perfectly happy to enslave us as or at least to exploit us and take us over and take charge of us as we did to people with that kind of IQ difference.
00:09:56.680One of the things that predicts being nice to people and being kind to people and bonding with people is genetic similarity.
00:10:02.680So in that sense, we shouldn't compare our relationship to them, to the Victorian white man's relationship with black people.
00:10:11.280It's more comparable to our relationship like dolphins or something.
00:10:15.700I mean, yeah, I mean, when we go to bees, we don't have any trouble basically taking them out of their natural habitat, putting them into giant boxes and then harvesting their honey.
00:10:29.880No one has any moral qualms with that outside of the post-extreme.
00:10:34.400I was just guessing on that IQ difference that would be necessary.
00:10:41.040It might be more and it might just be different.
00:10:43.780I mean, okay, here are some – because I want to add something about the intelligence.
00:10:49.180I actually don't – obviously, intelligence is an indispensable quality of this, but I don't think it's actually sufficient for this kind of adventure.
00:10:58.460But let me just mention a couple of things.
00:11:02.320And this is basically Fermi's paradox, which is – can be summed up in the line, where are they?
00:11:08.560So there are 100 billion galaxies that we can – at least estimated – that we can see out there.
00:11:17.040But we're separated from them through such distances that into some of them, it would actually take millions of years to get there, even if we were traveling at close to the speed of light.
00:11:30.980So now, might there be some other form of travel that we haven't quite grasped, you know, a kind of dune-like folding space or something like that?
00:11:46.060Maybe, but that is obviously beyond us.
00:11:49.520But there are – in the Milky Way, there are basically 500 billion stars.
00:11:55.160So the Milky Way itself, our own galaxy, is huge.
00:12:00.440And then the estimate from scientists – and so obviously take all of this with a grain of salt, but this kind of gets us, you know, in the ballpark.
00:12:10.620The estimate is that there are 100 million planets – excuse me, there are 100 million stars that could have planets that are – resemble, say, our solar system that could thus –
00:12:27.320Now, if only a tiny percentage of these did actually develop through this miracle of life generating on a planet, then there should be people out there.
00:12:43.180And they've had enough time to evolve and to conceivably begin a colonization project.
00:12:50.580So it does – Fermi's Paradox is a kind of, where are they?
00:13:08.620But the potential solution to Fermi's Paradox is that – well, there's two solutions.
00:13:14.620One is that these different space-going civilizations will never meet because they will all go through the cycle of civilization, of the rise and fall of civilization, always.
00:13:31.240Even if they get a species that's intelligent enough to have civilization, it won't have civilization for more than fleeting periods of time, followed by long periods of dark age and then fleeting period of time where it might be possible to do something like that or even get close to it.
00:13:49.160And so they will therefore never come into contact because they will just – you'd have to have two – for them to come into contact realistically in anything other than a destructive way, you'd have to have two civilizations that were in exactly the same sort of place at the same time.
00:14:07.560The second solution to Fermi's Paradox is simply that it is impossible to ever – the evolutionary forces necessary to achieve that kind of high-level intelligence.
00:14:21.840Intelligence is never able to go far enough to engage in that kind of interstellar travel because civilization always collapses before we become that intelligent.
00:14:33.040When we're in the phase where we might be intelligent enough to do something like that, that we haven't – that's when our breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution takes place.
00:14:42.500And therefore, by the time we have the sort of technology that might allow us to do things like that, we've become decadent and we've stopped bothering and we start to go – we start to go backwards.
00:14:51.280And then I think the third thing which might be relevant is simply that the nature of intelligence precludes this ever happening.
00:14:58.600Because the level of intelligence that would seemingly be required to do that would be so massive and it seems that intelligence is maladaptive when it becomes too high because what you invest – you take away energy from other things.
00:15:17.320And so people that have super high intelligence – I mean, again, I refer you back to your fellow Montanatan Ted Kuczynski.
00:15:24.800This was a person who had an IQ of 170, something like that.
00:15:29.640He was super, super duper intelligent.
00:17:53.440That's not even opposed to what I was trying to say.
00:17:56.260But what I was saying is the Bronze Age collapse is one of the most mysterious events.
00:18:04.660And it does seem to lead to a kind of collapse of complex society's thesis in which societies get to a point where the intelligence is not high enough to maintain them.
00:18:17.840That in some ways the technology that they're developing is leading them into a certain – leading to certain demands that the people aren't successful enough to accomplish.
00:18:30.440So with the Bronze Age collapse, you had the collapse of all of these magnificent empires.
00:18:35.960You had the rapid decline in literacy, rapid decline of history writing so that we can actually know what is happening.
00:18:45.300And all of this happened over the course of about a generation.
00:20:23.940And then towards the end of that dark age, people have no idea how they built these tall buildings, and they believe that giants built them.
00:20:32.480And you get that again and again throughout history, this belief that giants built – this belief in giants, because the people become so stupid that they don't comprehend how these things are built until later, when they rediscover their history and they work out what went on.
00:21:01.980And presumably the previous collapse, whatever it was, Egypt, 4000 BC, whatever, every thousand years or so you seem to get some kind of collapse, would be similar.
00:21:13.780And you get these giants again and again, even in the Bible, and there there seems to be a – that was written towards the end of the Bronze Age, sorry, around that time of that collapse.
00:21:25.340And you seem to get this reference, this, like, mythology, whereby when humans were put on Earth after the fall, there were these people there called the Watchers, the Nephilim, and they were giants, and they were gods.
00:21:38.560They had sex with men, or with women, and all this.
00:21:42.800So you've got this idea of this older civilization, which is believed to be giants.
00:21:47.080I wonder if that's a reference to the pyramids.
00:21:49.160I mean, they're not understanding how they got about.
00:21:54.620But as I say, I think that it's – the Fermi's paradox can be solved by the rise and fall of civilizations.
00:22:02.000We have this belief – scientists have this belief that we can just progress forever because they don't understand how – necessarily how these civilizations –
00:22:13.160Isn't what's holding us back – because, I mean, so there's Fermi's paradox, which is about them, which is why aren't there other species of some kind?
00:22:23.100I mean, maybe even non-carbon-based life forms in the sense that we can't fully understand who they are.
00:22:30.480There's also another solution to Fermi's paradox is that they're already here, and we don't know about it, or they visit us in previous times, et cetera.
00:22:40.220But then there's also the question about us, and I think intelligence is obviously an essential component of rising to a stage where you're not just controlling energy on this planet, but you're actually harnessing the energy of our star, that is the sun.
00:22:59.760And this is the Kardashev stages, which I was just reading about.
00:23:05.380He was actually a Soviet scientist who was exploring this.
00:23:08.280But there is this question about us, and why can't we do it?
00:23:13.540I think there are some kind of built-in natural aspects that will create cycles.
00:23:20.880You can think about what – climate change, a complex society being impossible to maintain at some point because intelligence doesn't catch up.
00:23:31.260A general – the general population intelligence doesn't catch up to the kind of IQ that is needed to maintain a civilization.
00:23:42.040But there might be other factors just in the sense of political factors and moral factors.
00:23:48.880The United States did have a kind of autumn period, which is a good way of putting it, where we were harvesting all of these things.
00:23:57.380And there were politicians like JFK talking about a new frontier, the space program.
00:24:03.140Even if you want to view this as kind of competition with the Soviets or vainglory or whatever, it at least was – political leaders were pushing us in those directions.
00:24:15.460It seems to be now that – I mean, there's first off a push towards private enterprise and space.
00:24:27.420Elon Musk is more famously involved in this.
00:24:30.280But there just – there seems to be these political and moral dimensions which hold us back from completing a stage one civilization that is harnessing all of the power of the earth, and that would include nuclear power.
00:24:47.920Yeah, I think that what did it was that we became too individualist.
00:24:51.760And I think there were two – so you've got to think about – people don't think about the history of the space race, all the men that were killed, all the men that were killed in an attempt to get to – in accidents and things like this.
00:25:03.700And the risk that it would go wrong and people would die.
00:25:11.320Well, one reason, as you say, spiteful emergence or mutation in general, which is a mutation away from being highly group-oriented, which means that we're more individualist at a genetic level.
00:25:21.760And the second is that because of the better conditions, collapse in religiousness, because of low stress, religiousness promotes group orientation.
00:25:31.660And a third is that these individualist genetic people spread their maladaptive ideas throughout society, whatever the reasons.
00:25:39.340Eventually, you get to a tipping point, and I think that happened in about 1963, where you tip over into being a highly individualistic society.
00:25:49.200It's not the first time this has happened.
00:25:50.360I mean, you had something like this, perhaps, around about the fall of Rome, in which, indeed, Gnosticism was very similar to modern-day multiculturalism in a lot of ways.
00:26:01.360And so then there's this focus on individualizing against the good of the group.
00:26:05.600And that's what – it seems to be inevitable that that happens.
00:26:09.040In other words, that hadn't happened yet.
00:26:11.640Or it was just – it was happening, but it hadn't fully happened yet by the time we managed to get into space, which was – what was that?
00:26:17.220That was the 50s in the Soviet Union, and then get to the moon in 69, and then go to the moon again a few times in the early 70s.
00:26:28.520Yeah, I mean, there's this man, his last name is Zubrin.
00:26:32.680He's actually a Jewish emigre who makes very compelling arguments for the conquest of Mars.
00:26:39.960He makes compelling arguments for harnessing other power sources beyond fossil fuels and so on that have geopolitical implications.
00:26:50.880Obviously, nuclear power is sitting out there as something that people are irrationally afraid of, which also that irrational fear leads to this dependence upon the Middle East and – well, I mean, again, America produces a lot of fossil fuel.
00:27:10.340But still, a focus on the Middle East as this place that we need to care about, a place of huge wealth as well.
00:27:21.100And there just doesn't seem to be any political will.
00:27:24.760And I know this is a small thing, but there was a tweet not too long ago from Bernie Sanders.
00:27:32.900And I have some sympathy towards Bernie Sanders.
00:27:34.900I think a lot of what he says is very decent.
00:27:39.780But it was this tweet against Elon Musk of basically, well, space travel is all fine and good, but we've got to take care of these problems down here on Earth.
00:27:49.240There was a famous song during the space age of Whitey on the moon, which is like, we're down here being oppressed and all you bastards are flying into outer space.
00:28:02.320There just seems to be this resentment that – and again, I understand the resentment on some level, but it's resentment, which will endlessly hold us back.
00:28:13.420So it's not just a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of psychology.
00:28:18.420But that psychology is – well, it's partly a matter of intelligence in the sense that as intelligence goes down, you trust people less and you become more resentful and nasty and selfish.
00:28:29.160So it could partly be the actual matter of declining intelligence.
00:28:32.180But secondly, yes, it's not just intelligence.
00:28:33.960It's the crumbling genome, which means greater individualism, which means less trust, which means less cooperation, which means more of these focusing on these individualizing values of equality, runaway individualism and general madness.
00:28:45.580And there's another factor which we should forget as well, which is what you have with the space race was the most intelligent minds of the time getting together in a meritocracy, basically, and coming up with these brilliant ideas and putting them into action and doing them.
00:29:01.740Whereas what you get – and that was in a period where we had it under our highly group-oriented system that you had that held sway until, I don't know, 1850 or something.
00:29:10.620You didn't promote the best under that system.
00:29:14.320You had the religion and you promoted the people on almost a religious basis.
00:29:20.020So the aristocracy was upheld by the religiosity and people would get positions in society not because they were the best but because they were nobles or something like that.
00:29:32.020You have a period of meritocracy where you believe in truth and you promote people because they're the best.
00:29:37.980And now we have a new religion, individualism.
00:29:40.600And so even if we were intelligent enough to be able to come up with these things, which I doubt, we no longer encourage genius.
00:29:48.960We suppress it because of individualism trumping it.
00:29:51.780And we don't promote the best anymore.
00:29:53.980We've gone back to a system of promoting the aristocracy, but it's the new inverted aristocracy of women and black people and homosexuals.
00:30:01.740And so even if we were intelligent enough, which we're probably not, still we've got that problem as well, which is that we're not even trying to be the best anymore.
00:30:11.900I mean, you see it even in all areas of life, even in commercials on TV.
00:30:16.740They've stopped trying to persuade people to buy things.
00:30:20.800I mean, how are you persuading people because they want to score woke brownie points?
00:30:25.840How are you persuading women to buy a product if you're getting a load of fat, ugly women in their pants and saying, oh, they use this soap?
00:30:34.760Well, they're going to think, I'm not a fat, ugly woman.
00:30:36.800People want to be associated with success and beauty.
00:30:39.940And so I think that it's all of these things come together.
00:30:44.080And the period in which you might have a combination of the necessary intelligence and the necessary group orientation and the necessary martial values to do things like this and possibly reach another civilization is such a narrow window that in the expanse of space,
00:31:04.380the possibility that you're going to get far enough to meet another remotely advanced species, you know, maybe animals or something, but a similarly advanced species is just vanishing.
00:31:22.380I mean, again, there are answers to it, but these answers are, they make too much sense in a way.
00:31:30.020They're obvious, but they're also seemingly impossible.
00:31:34.820I mean, one of the answers is eugenics in the sense that we have passed through a singularity in the sense of just natural selection of the environment holding sway.
00:31:47.620And things that used to hold in natural selection have actually been reversed.
00:31:55.040Up until the Industrial Revolution, the most intelligent, the most successful were outbreeding the least successful and the aristocrats were outbreeding the peasants and they were doing it by a lot.
00:32:07.680I think this is my little pet theory that this was the origin of the Prima Nocta myth in the sense that the aristocrat was always, he's breeding even with your own wife.
00:32:22.320But Prima Nocta never actually occurred throughout history, but it was, that myth was always there.
00:32:28.000It gave us operas like The Marriage of Figaro, so it was worth something.
00:32:31.540But we've, we've gotten, we've gotten to a point where really the reverse is the case.
00:32:37.160The most intelligent are not breeding successfully.
00:32:40.400The least intelligent, the more likely to be on welfare, the more likely to not be self-sufficient or productive are outbreeding the productive.
00:32:53.020Yeah, but we were, we were, we were conscious of it in Rome and we were conscious of it in Greece.
00:32:58.760I mean, they write about it at the time.
00:33:00.360I, I, I, I know, but still, like, it, can't it be different this time?
00:33:06.640I mean, it, it, when you're conscious of something, that is how you solve that problem.
00:33:11.840But A, the eugenics program is absolutely necessary.
00:33:18.120But B, we might need to have a new type of religious paradigm that doesn't emerge from a, you know, scattered, wandering people after the Bronze Age collapse.
00:33:32.920That, and that might need to focus on the sun in the sense that to get to a second stage of civilization, it will be in some ways harnessing the power of the sun without destroying it.
00:33:44.540And thus, a new kind of solar religion would be the one that would help us get there.
00:33:53.360Because I, I think that unless we are reaching stage two or state or, you know, a galactic civilization, unless we are the them in the sense that we are the ones traveling beyond our sphere, then what are we even doing down here?
00:34:12.180You know, you know, we're, we're, we're literally down here to help people avoid harm or just live their content yet ultimately meaningless lives just rumbling around in the mud.
00:34:27.900I mean, unless we're advancing, then what are we doing?
00:34:32.980But that's, that's why, that's why they, so many people have this melee of, of late civilization because they've just given up and there's no point.
00:34:41.660And that's how a lot of people, the aristocracy anyway, in late Rome would have felt.
00:34:46.440And so they would, they would engage themselves with these silly mystery cults and things like this, a sort of surrogate activities.
00:34:54.820But ultimately there was, there was no point.
00:34:57.900Um, and we, we create this evolutionary mismatch and then we, well, it was actually Ted Kaczynski.
00:35:02.040I mean, mad and vicious as he was, he did make a number of, I hate to say it, but he did make a number of good points, which is that you create, you create an evolutionary mismatch and you give people antidepressants to solve the evolutionary mismatch, which you've created.
00:35:56.660And I think maybe what we need to do is conquer this planet so that we, you know, in the sense that we've allowed this planet not to be on, in, under our control for too long.
00:36:10.140And we've created this unhappiness and this kind of, you know, medicine that cures the poison in the sense of, you know, here, let me give you antidepressants for the problem that I've just solved.
00:36:20.120I mean, this is the, the Caducean, in a nutshell, um, we haven't been in control, uh, for a long time, actually of our own planet.
00:36:31.060And, you know, maybe we do need to kind of get away and go to a redoubt and reform.
00:36:37.520But at the end of the day, we're going to have to force all of these people to our will in order to advance our mission on this planet, um, which is interstellar travel.
00:36:49.080Sorry, as usual, I'm being bombastic, but I usually get there around the 30 minute mark.
00:36:55.180Well, you've taken 40 minutes, all right.
00:36:58.200It's the, all that chocolate, slow down your metabolism.
00:37:02.220Um, but, but, but, um, yes, I, I think that is, you need to have a mission.
00:37:07.720And, uh, I'm normally that mission is to just get enough food.
00:37:12.000And once you've got, once you've got what that's the most, I'd get sex.
00:37:15.080And those are the most basic missions.
00:37:17.140And if you don't, if you, if, as long as you've got those, then you can see how melee hits in.
00:37:22.820And it doesn't hit it if you feel you're on the up.
00:37:25.360And that's what we felt for a very long time.