In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I chat with astrophysicist and space nerd Jay Shetty about the mysteries of galaxies that have been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, and how they might explain how galaxies formed so early in the universe.
00:00:28.000But one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb telescope and all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after the,
00:00:46.000not shortly, you know, within our lifetime shortly, but cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming.
00:01:17.000You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold.
00:01:28.000So, you know, just the fact the fact it just all worked was just remarkable.
00:01:34.000And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that.
00:01:42.000So when it, you know, of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there in those darkest patches.
00:01:50.000And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.
00:01:52.000It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active galaxies.
00:01:58.000These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy.
00:02:03.000They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.
00:02:05.000And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them.
00:02:11.000Because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like 100 million solar masses.
00:02:16.000Imagine that, 100 million suns have not only been born but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this 100 million solar mass thing.
00:02:31.000So we're finding those just, you know, 300 million years after the Big Bang.
00:02:35.000And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.
00:02:51.000So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space.
00:02:58.000And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.
00:03:02.000When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too old.
00:03:08.000You really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe.
00:03:13.000I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there.
00:03:17.000One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place.
00:03:26.000So we had these models for galaxy formation.
00:03:28.000We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live, but it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe.
00:03:38.000And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe, where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter.
00:03:47.000Everything's just completely different, the early universe.
00:03:49.000So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought.
00:03:56.000So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain.
00:04:00.000I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.
00:04:03.000How do you get those supermassive black holes so early?
00:04:06.000There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit.
00:04:10.000And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out.
00:04:16.000And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in.
00:04:32.000So something's wrong with our models, right?
00:04:34.000Either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would say that's probably a much less likely solution, or we've got the astrophysics wrong.
00:04:44.000Why do you think that the universe's age is a less likely solution?
00:04:48.000Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind of stuff.
00:04:55.000And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.
00:05:00.000And so the Lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.
00:05:03.000So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe.
00:05:10.000I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, these baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching of the universe, Cepheids.
00:05:18.000You can use it to explain so much stuff.
00:05:21.000I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.
00:05:24.000So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.
00:05:29.000So maybe, maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea, which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision.
00:05:40.000The much more likely answer in my book is that astrophysics, like the gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated in my mind than the actual model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.
00:05:58.000Fairly simple in that you can use whatever methods that we're using currently to measure everything that's out there and it makes sense.
00:06:07.000But if we're using something like the James Webb Telescope, so we're getting a much deeper view of the universe.
00:06:16.000How limited is the James Webb in comparison to James Webb 2.0, 3.0?
00:06:22.000Like, are we going to have to continually revamp what our understanding of this process is?
00:07:06.000And this is the light which is traveled basically when the universe was 380,000 years old.
00:07:10.000It's that light, and we see it in all directions.
00:07:12.000That's how we know the Big Bang kind of didn't happen in one place.
00:07:15.000It happened everywhere, because you just see this light coming in from all directions.
00:07:18.000And from studying that radiation, you can kind of get a model of the universe, and then you can calculate using this model, how fast should the universe be expanding today if I run the clock forward?
00:07:31.000And then if you do that same experiment but locally, you actually measure the stars, you measure the supernovae around us, these pulsating stars, and you actually measure how fast is stuff expanding, you get a different number.
00:07:48.000Either our measurements of the local universe must be wrong in some way, or this model that we're using to calculate the whole history of the universe, something is wrong with that model.
00:07:59.000So this is a very famous growing problem in cosmology.
00:08:03.000It's now what we call a five sigma level.
00:08:05.000So that means the chance of this being random is just like zero, essentially.
00:08:08.000It's just this, this is a real effect.
00:08:11.000And now we just have to figure out who's wrong.
00:08:13.000Is it the observers or is it the theorists?
00:08:37.000You know, if these new telescopes keep showing us this new puzzle, it's kind of, it always bothers me when someone is like rigidly convinced.
00:08:46.000Everyone has a certain pet theory, right?
00:08:52.000Yeah, I mean, if you've spent, it's hard, right?
00:08:53.000If you've spent 20 years of your life, most of your academic career, studying this one thing, it's really hard to turn around and say, you know what, I screwed up, right?
00:09:03.000Last 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong, and I have to eat humble pie.
00:09:07.000That's not easy, but it has happened in some cases.
00:09:10.000One of my favorite stories about this is the first exoplanet was ever claimed, a planet around the star, one of the first ones.
00:09:19.000So it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it, on a six-month orbital period.
00:09:25.000So exactly half the Earth's orbital period around the Sun.
00:09:29.000And they saw this signal in their data, this pulsating star was doing something weird, and they figured out there was a six-month period around it.
00:09:35.000So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer, and he realized later on it was wrong.
00:09:42.000And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital eccentricity of the Earth.
00:09:48.000So the Earth is not on a circular orbit.
00:10:19.000If you get people that are rigidly attached to their belief systems in terms of like a very limited understanding of a fantastic thing that is almost beyond imagination when you think about the sheer size of the universe and the age of the universe.
00:10:34.000I mean, when we're talking about aging and we say 13 billion or 22 billion, those numbers don't even register in your mind.
00:11:03.000I mean, part of the journey in being a scientist is knowing what your own biases are.
00:11:08.000And I remember, you know, one of my threads in my career has been trying to look for exo-moons, moons around these exoplanets, which would be a first if we got them.
00:11:45.000I had to, I was at Harvard at the time, had to walk out of the building, had to go to a park bench, and I had to just take like deep breaths.
00:12:19.000And I'm going to have to be the greatest skeptic of this thing because I know I want it to be so bad that I have to correct the other direction.
00:15:16.000I mean, it seems like there's so many aspects of our solar system that are unusual.
00:15:20.000Even having a Jupiter, only 10% of stars have a Jupiter, as far as we can tell.
00:15:25.00010% of how many stars that have been observed.
00:15:28.000Oh, at this point, I mean, we've observed hundreds of thousands of stars, and we know about 6,000 exoplanets.
00:15:36.000So of that population, you correct for the statistics, you correct for the ones you've missed.
00:15:39.000Even so, I mean, these Jupiter's the easiest ones to find, right?
00:15:42.000They're the big boys, they wobble the star a ton, so they're pretty easy to spot.
00:15:46.000So we're pretty confident that sun-like stars, it's kind of not typical for them to have these Jupiter-sized planets, and we've got two of them.
00:15:53.000So that seems interesting to our own origin in the solar system.
00:15:57.000And similarly, having eight planets, that's pretty unusual.
00:16:00.000We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.
00:16:02.000How many solar systems are binary solar systems as opposed to having a single star?
00:16:08.000Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.
00:16:34.000We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's kind of in the habital zone, so the distance where, in principle, you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.
00:18:12.000So there's the three stars, Triselarin, and the dynamics is so crazy that it pushes these planets into these highly eccentric and twisted orbits.
00:18:21.000And that's exactly what this planet appears to be.
00:18:23.000So this planet actually looks more like, rather than avatar, it actually looks more like trisolarin or solaris, whatever it's called.
00:18:29.000Pull that article back up again, please, Jamie?
00:18:32.000The second one, the one that was less clickbaity?
00:18:56.000I mean, how do you get that big blob of light sat there?
00:18:59.000So I think the signal to noise is really good.
00:19:01.000So because they vary so much in the way these galaxies and the way these solar systems are constructed, do we know why they're constructed in the first place?
00:21:12.000Yeah, then we'd be back to Bode's law.
00:21:14.000I mean, but Bode's law, I guess it's actually really a statement.
00:21:16.000There's a great dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this.
00:21:20.000That if you just try to pack planets as close as you can, like just shove them in like sardines into the solar system, some of them will become unstable and just get kicked out.
00:21:28.000And the ones that are left will follow Bode's law.
00:21:31.000So it's not so much a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these planets at the right places.
00:21:38.000It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with.
00:21:41.000Like you just can't cram planets any closer together.
00:21:44.000So what is our current belief system when it comes to the formation of solar systems?
00:21:52.000I mean, when we look at the data we have from the Kepler mission, NASA's extraordinary successful mission, it detected itself something like 4,000 exoplanets.
00:22:00.000And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet.
00:22:04.000So as far as we can tell, this is, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets.
00:22:10.000It's like path for the course for that to happen.
00:22:14.000The second thing is, as we kind of alluded to, there's a huge diversity in them.
00:22:18.000And the actual story we normally describe for how they form is that there's some giant molecular cloud, we call it.
00:22:25.000So basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space.
00:22:27.000Stuff that could have been blown off from a previous supernova or something, or maybe even in the early universe, just primordial gas from the Big Bang, just this leftover hydrogen gas.
00:22:37.000And if there'd be some areas where there'll be slightly higher density and some areas where there's slightly lower density, just due to random fluctuations, and the higher densities will self-gravitate.
00:22:45.000So, gravity wants to make it's like a greedy algorithm, wants to make everything get denser and denser and denser.
00:23:01.000And the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right?
00:23:06.000Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make a star in the center.
00:23:11.000And 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 north and south, you end up with a disk of material, the centrifugal forces, like spinning a pizza ball, which kind of force it into a disk.
00:23:26.000And then from that disk, you start to coalesce.
00:23:28.000Again, just some areas are slightly denser, some areas are slightly less dense.
00:23:31.000And gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together.
00:23:34.000So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand.
00:23:39.000So we know how to go, for instance, from pebbles.
00:23:43.000If you start off with pebbles and imagine them kind of bouncing around, we can imagine sticking them into boulders.
00:23:48.000We 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 was just dust.
00:23:55.000How do you go from dust all the way up to pebbles all the way up to these boulders all the way up to planetesimals?
00:24:20.000I 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.
00:24:30.000Maybe AI will help a big part with that.
00:24:33.000Is it also a factor of the size of the sun?
00:24:36.000Like, our star is fairly small in terms of what we know about the universe.
00:24:42.000One of the most amazing videos that I tend to send people online is the video that shows it shows Earth in comparison to our star, and then it shows our star in comparison to slightly larger stars.
00:24:55.000Then it goes on and on and on to get to like Betelgeuse and you get to some wild.
00:28:25.000But I think if we're lucky, it could just happen.
00:28:28.000How many next generations do you anticipate?
00:28:30.000And I could see AI coming into play with that, with constructing something novel that can see things in a way that we're not, you know, currently using.
00:28:39.000Like, when you're thinking about what we do, and you're explaining how the James Webb works with over 200 moving parts, and you have to shoot it into the sky and flames and rockets, like, and then you get this thing out there that starts observing and starts taking photographs.
00:28:55.000Well, we're so limited in what we can see.
00:30:05.000So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun, it'll bend to a focus.
00:30:10.000And that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculate it.
00:30:13.000It's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun, so 550 AU.
00:30:18.000And 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.
00:30:27.000So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there.
00:30:36.000That is the ultimate in my book for what an alien would do.
00:30:40.000If they want to observe Earth, they would just behind their sun, they'd stick one of those telescopes, and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from there.
00:30:47.000And this is just with our understanding of telescopes and our understanding of viewing things.
00:30:53.000And clearly, you could imagine with known physics.
00:30:56.000Yeah, you can imagine physics that are a million years more technologically advanced and innovations that we can't even comprehend.
00:31:14.000If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system.
00:31:16.000And so we're talking about doing that as well.
00:31:18.000So there was this project Starshot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo, and beam it back.
00:31:27.000Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right?
00:31:30.000You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.
00:31:33.000How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?
00:31:36.000Well, it's four light years away, 4.2 light years.
00:32:29.000And so I came up with a twist on their idea.
00:32:32.000So let me explain their idea quickly first, and then I'll give you my twist.
00:32:34.000Their idea is: if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship.
00:32:39.000That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now.
00:32:42.000The 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.
00:32:55.000And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right?
00:32:59.000So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.
00:33:17.000You just kind of bump it up to whatever speed you want.
00:33:21.000Now, when people saw this idea, physically saw this idea, there was a lot of questions about how, you know, isn't that going to destroy the sail?
00:33:28.000Like you're firing a 100-gigawatt laser at a sail.
00:33:30.000Like, isn't that going to obliterate the thing?
00:33:32.000So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam.
00:33:38.000And then, of course, like, how do you, you know, what if it hits dust on the way?
00:35:53.000Or do they always become non-biological and not have the need for all the things that we do that show signs of life?
00:36:01.000Like the certain gases, the biological life exceeds.
00:36:05.000Like, what could what could be out there could be something beyond our wildest imagination.
00:36:13.000Like 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.
00:36:25.000Yeah, obviously if it's completely recognizable, there's nothing we can really do to detect it.
00:36:29.000But when we look at, I mean, we basically know two things about the universe in terms of life in it.
00:36:33.000We know that we have not been colonized, right?
00:37:24.000So Voyager 2 at Voyager 2 speeds, crappy alien technology out there, could already have spanned the whole thing if they just arrived early enough.
00:37:41.000And the other thing we know for sure is that when we look out, we don't see, you know, we look at these stars like Stevenson and Proxima Centauri.
00:37:48.000We don't see engineering on them, as far as we can tell.
00:37:51.000We don't see stars which are obviously got megastructures around them, obviously been engineered in weird ways.
00:37:57.000And when you say megastructures, you're talking about like literally an artificial planet-sized thing.
00:38:01.000Yeah, I mean, huge structures could be built around these things like Dyson spheres.
00:38:06.000And people have talked about doing it for messaging.
00:38:08.000Like you could put like sheets of material that were planet-sized.
00:38:11.000And as they block light from the star, that would create like a Morse code, right?
00:38:14.000You could actually message people for billions of years.
00:38:17.000You would just build these stable sheets of material and they would just orbit around.
00:39:34.000If 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.
00:39:40.000And then further, there's us here, right?
00:39:42.000And we're going through this transitional point as a human society.
00:39:45.000So you think if you're an anthropologist, this would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study.
00:39:52.000So I think there's almost like a tourism paradox.
00:39:55.000How come Earth is the perfect place to visit?
00:39:57.000And yet we don't see any super obvious signs.
00:40:02.000Some people feel differently about that, but certainly astronomers.
00:40:05.000We don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around through our field of view.
00:40:11.000But wouldn't the obvious answer to that be that if you're 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 Using propulsion the way we know it would probably be using some sort of a manipulation of gravity.
00:40:36.000And also, they would have the ability to completely camouflage themselves, which would be ideal if you want to study things.
00:40:43.000Have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix?
00:41:32.000If 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.
00:41:39.000You'd want to know, what are these fuckers up to?
00:41:42.000Where are they at now in terms of our technological innovation scale of achieving AGI or achieving whatever happens to other biological entities outside of the universe?
00:41:55.000There might be like a process that happens, regardless of if you're mammalian or reptilian or whatever kind of intelligence that you like.
00:42:04.000Obviously, we know that crows are very different than us, but they're highly intelligent.
00:42:11.000You could imagine a crow that has fingers and lives somewhere else.
00:42:15.000So 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.
00:42:26.000Well, we're really one of the only ones that do it that's intelligent.
00:42:30.000But that's kind of an environmental thing because of dolphins and orcas.
00:42:34.000There's no need to do that evolutionarily.
00:42:36.000So 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.
00:42:52.000Yeah, if you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to interfere with the experiment.
00:42:55.000But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific.
00:42:58.000So if you come up with a hypothesis that says there's aliens here, but they're completely by definition undetectable to us, then it sort of falls, it's not like it's an incredible idea.
00:43:09.000It just means I don't have, science is not going to have the tools to answer that question.
00:43:13.000Of course, because there's no evidence.
00:43:15.000I mean, Sagan, 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'd talk to people and say, I've got a pet dragon in the room with me.
00:43:25.000And they'd be like, well, where is it?
00:43:27.000Oh, you can't see it because it's invisible.
00:43:29.000So they'd walk across the room and they'd try to touch it.
00:43:57.000It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it.
00:44:00.000But when you hear about particularly the ones, the stories of UAP or UFO encounters, the ones that intrigue me the most are the ones that are military pilots, people that know the difference between a flock of birds and weird anomalies.
00:44:17.000If you're aware of the Tic-Tac incident, so when you hear about things like that, in my mind, there's a couple possibilities.
00:44:26.000One, super advanced, blacklisted military, some sort of a propulsion system that they've been working on for decades, completely in secrecy.
00:44:38.000And they're testing them off of areas where you have a lot of military activity, which is where these things do take place.
00:44:47.000And the other one, the Ryan Graves footage, the stuff that they get, that's on the East Coast.
00:44:50.000But it's all in areas where they already do military training exercises with fighter jets.
00:44:55.000So it would make sense that that's where you, if this was the United States government doing that stuff, they would do that.
00:45:00.000But 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.
00:45:12.000You have visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing.
00:46:07.000Like, how can science take a hold of this?
00:46:09.000And, you know, when we do these experiments, I told you about this moon that I thought I found, and it turned out was the instrument being crazy, right?
00:46:15.000Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we want to send.
00:46:18.000So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument, right?
00:46:21.000We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera.
00:46:26.000And we don't have access to those military devices.
00:47:42.000And we'd say we've detected something.
00:47:43.000There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at.
00:47:46.000But the problem is we don't know what that number is.
00:47:48.000I 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.
00:47:59.000Also, the problem with Project Blue Book was not an objective analysis of UFOs.
00:48:03.000They had a directive, and the directive was to discredit everything.
00:48:07.000Yeah, but even so, I'm just giving you sort of ball.
00:48:09.000I mean, the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers.
00:48:12.000You're getting like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right?
00:48:15.000I think that's a crazy number to throw around.
00:48:16.000So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose, you have to know the error rate of the experiment.
00:48:22.000And we could imagine making that legit and doing it.
00:48:26.000There'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 magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high-resolution images.
00:48:40.000So there's enough instrumentation on there, and it's all the same, and we understand that technology, that you could have 10 people video the same UFO, and you'd be able to triangulate the position, the speed, get the distance to it.
00:48:53.000You'd get all that kind of information.
00:48:55.000And so there is actually, I think there's an app called Enigma you can now download that does this.
00:48:59.000There's some independent apps which have been developed to do really?
00:49:17.000That's one of those things where I feel like the government completely failed us in explaining to people what, like, is this some sort of top secret military thing?
00:49:36.000And why are you freaking everybody out?
00:49:38.000It really sucks that we live in an age of drones and so many Starlink satellites because if you see something in the sky now, your immediate reaction is that's probably a human-controlled vehicle.
00:49:51.000If you could go back to the 1940s or 1930s, then if you had UAP reports then, I think they'd be more convincing because that's pre-Sputnik, right?
00:50:01.000There shouldn't be anything in orbit of the Earth at that point.
00:50:05.000But of course, we can't rewind the tape.
00:50:07.000And all those stories, like the Kenneth Arnold incident and all these different ones, are just these anecdotal tales of people saying they saw things in the sky.
00:51:05.000If I was an alien civilization and wanted to observe Earth undisturbed, I'd make sure I didn't leave enough evidence for science to take me seriously.
00:51:24.000Like I would monitor us if I was a scientist from another planet.
00:51:28.000Imagine we leave this planet, we become interstellar, we evolve past war and all the horrible things that are holding us back right now.
00:51:38.000We 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.
00:51:52.000I would also say, let's make sure that they don't fuck this up where they have to start back from scratch three billion years ago because they nuked themselves into oblivion and we have to wait till everything cools off before complex life can form again, which is a logistic, it's like it's a legitimate possibility with what we're dealing with today in 2025.
00:52:13.000With what's going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran and like just the existence, as long as we have news, there is a chance every year that some guy will push that button, right?
00:52:25.000And there's been multiple close calls throughout history since 1945 on, multiple close calls.
00:52:32.000That could possibly have gone sideways at 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.
00:52:50.000Like these are all legitimate possibilities if you don't have a government structure that can protect people from the acts of one individual who goes mad.
00:53:00.000Like if someone can go mad enough, and clearly many people did, to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that happened.
00:53:09.000We know human beings are capable of that.
00:53:13.000Which is kind of wild and it hasn't happened since.
00:53:15.000But if that's possible, then it's also possible for just annihilation.
00:53:19.000It's a possible that they just start launching and then there's rubble and then you're left with roaches.
00:53:26.000And that could have happened all throughout the universe.
00:53:29.000So 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.
00:53:37.000We're no longer dealing with cannons and muskets.
00:54:16.000And 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.
00:54:26.000And the only way competition exists is it's got to be life or death.
00:54:31.000And it starts out life or death with predators and neighboring tribes and eventually becomes cities and countries.
00:54:38.000And there's something that has to motivate people to work 16 hours a day and develop the B-12 bomber.
00:54:47.000So that something, unfortunately, also leads itself to want to control resources, dominate people, crush opposition, and that's where it gets crazy.
00:54:57.000And I would imagine that's a formula, just like the formulation of solar systems and galaxies, probably varies a lot all throughout the universe.
00:55:04.000But that formula is probably fairly stable.
00:55:07.000Is that there has to be some form of really wild, aggressive kind of competition that leads them to this position.
00:55:15.000There has to be a motivation to create AGI.
00:55:18.000Why would you do that when you have a log cabin, you're sipping tea, sitting out there, enjoying the playing with your dog?
00:55:34.000We have this tribalism in us, this competition, and that has undoubtedly led all the greatest innovations in science often happened during war, right?
00:55:43.000I mean, you have all like the invention of radio and so many advances in avionics and flight happened during the wars, munitions, all this kind of stuff.
00:55:51.000So it pushes us, it drives us to innovate to get one over our neighbors.
00:55:56.000And maybe that is the universal story of the universe is a double-edged sword.
00:55:59.000And that's the solution to the Great Filter.
00:56:02.000The silver lining of this would be, well, not for us necessarily, but the silver line would be if other civilizations do this, there's kind of like this supernova effect in astronomy, and it's true for planets as well.
00:56:13.000That the easiest stars to discover are the supernovae, right?
00:56:17.000Because they just shine so freaking bright.
00:56:19.000They can outshine an entire galaxy, right?
00:57:27.000Please help us if you can because we're about to go to hell.
00:57:29.000Well, there's probably a bunch of different kinds of intelligent beings on every planet.
00:57:35.000Just like there's people like you and me, and then there's war hawks that are working for the military industrial complex right now.
00:57:41.000They're trying to figure out how to invade some country to get their natural gas.
00:57:45.000This is just, there's a bunch of different types of intelligent people, intelligent creatures here on Earth.
00:57:52.000You would imagine there would be people out there in those planets that would go, guys, this is fucking terrible.
00:57:57.000We've got to figure out a way to at least create panspermia on some other planet and throw our DNA at some habitable spot somewhere in the galaxy.
00:58:07.000There'd probably be a bunch of people that were in, it's not like everyone would be lockstep into self-destruction.
00:58:13.000Well, the Starshot thing, I remember some team members talked about that.
00:58:16.000I was in some of the meetings and they said maybe we should lace human DNA into the sail.
00:58:21.000So 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.
00:58:41.000I think, you know, if you follow Steven 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.
00:58:52.000We just don't improve in a logical way and we improve in a push and pull.
00:58:57.000We improve in a constant state of over-correction and response to the over-correction and back and forth.
00:59:04.000And there's always a bunch of people that are so confused.
00:59:09.000I think those people have always existed.
00:59:11.000And I think you're always going to have the farthest out on the spectrum of the most damaging aspects of society and the most wonderful and benevolent aspects of society.
00:59:20.000And they're always duking it out to see who captures the minds and hearts of the beings that inhabit this civilization.
00:59:28.000And I think that's where we're at right now.
00:59:30.000We're at this weird thing where we're trying to figure out what is good, what is kind, what is just.
00:59:36.000You know, how many people are pretending to be kind just so they can grab power?
00:59:40.000How many people are just trying to use control to force people to listen to them and believe what they believe?
00:59:45.000Whether it's religion or whether it's ideology, like what is it that's actually, what is important?
01:00:04.000You'd 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.
01:00:17.000You're trying to get another house and a fucking plane and a this and a that and a car and a that it's nonsense.
01:00:23.000We're silly, but we're a hundred percent committed to getting more stuff.
01:00:28.000Yeah, you know, it's like this bizarre life form, but it's figuring itself out, you know, and we're aware of that bizarreness.
01:00:36.000Like I'm saying this and no one is going, that doesn't make any sense.
01:00:39.000Like everyone knows it's crazy to like concentrate on acquiring the most shit when you're going to die when you're 100, if you're lucky, if everything goes great.
01:00:48.000So if you're 60 and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy.
01:00:52.000Everyone knows that, but yet we still all do it.
01:00:54.000It's still collectively something that like the vast majority of people engage in.
01:01:01.000Well, 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.
01:01:09.000It's like when I think about beings that do things that seemingly, I mean, obviously leaf cutter ants know what they're doing, right?
01:01:19.000Because they do it everywhere the same way.
01:02:04.000It'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.
01:02:13.000Whether 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.
01:02:28.000Well, it keeps making better stuff every year.
01:02:31.000What you're describing is actually kind of similar to, there's a guy called Robin Hanson, an economist, and he has this idea called loud aliens, grabby aliens.
01:02:38.000And he says the thing we do as an intelligent species is transform our environment.
01:02:54.000So how come we don't see beehives in the stars?
01:02:57.000I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem.
01:02:59.000And he argues that that is an innate thing that an intelligent species should do.
01:03:03.000He's coming from the economic side, so that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism, essentially, across the universe, and yet we don't see it.
01:03:15.000So, his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization.
01:03:31.000I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons, but yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it.
01:03:37.000My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth.
01:03:46.000So, the earth has about a billion years left on the clock, a long time, right?
01:03:52.000So, it's four and a half billion years old, and it's had complex life for about 600 million years, 700 million years, roughly.
01:03:58.000So, there's another roughly a billion to go where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now.
01:04:06.000And once you've got, you know, the eukaryote, photosynthesis, all these advanced biological innovations, they don't go away, they persist in the genetic heritage.
01:04:14.000So, even if something happens to us, and you know, obviously, I'm not hoping that would happen, but if something happened to us, I don't think you're going to extinguish every human.
01:04:22.000I don't think you're going to extinguish every octopus, every raven.
01:04:25.000And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom, like chimp, it's almost all over the place.
01:04:30.000Intelligence, my provocative claim, is one of these great events that have happened in an evolutionary sense.
01:04:36.000It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say.
01:04:39.000But, like how photosynthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was an event which changed the history of the planet forever.
01:05:12.000They'll be astonished at the shit we got up to.
01:05:16.000And 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?
01:05:23.000We could put a beacon on the moon, we could put something there, and we could be like, Hey guys, this is everything we learned.
01:05:28.000This is all our science, this is all our art, these are our songs.
01:05:31.000Unload an update every couple of years, right?
01:05:35.000And I think, 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.
01:05:47.000Wow, deep descendants, who will be a completely different species?
01:05:51.000Yeah, well, that was my point about innovation and materialism, because materialism fuels innovation because you don't need a new phone.
01:06:01.000You know, I'm sure your phone works great, but you're going to get a new phone.
01:06:04.000I get a new phone every year, I love them, I love phones.
01:07:11.000We 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.
01:07:22.000And like, you have to be safe to do that, right?
01:07:25.000So you have to have military might in order to keep them safe and protected from invaders.
01:07:29.000And everybody has to be obsessed with buying new stuff.
01:07:32.000Because if you're not obsessed with buying new stuff, you would just work enough to have food.
01:07:36.000And the economy wouldn't push the way it pushes.
01:07:40.000And you wouldn't get the kind of innovation that we get where they get the CES show every year with the new electronics.
01:07:45.000You 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.
01:08:06.000Whatever these things are, we want to think they're different because they don't have creativity like we do, or they don't have this like we do.
01:09:19.000It kind of creates a problem, though, for the Fermi paradox, right?
01:09:22.000Because 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 enough to ever do that.
01:09:32.000We'll just, you know, no matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out.
01:09:35.000And maybe the electronic brain's not motivated to do it.
01:10:36.000You'd be like a virus, just transforming the universe from state A to state B. That would be your one reasonable goal because then you could do more computation, more computation, more computation.
01:10:46.000If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem.
01:10:55.000One, I would say this is our limited understanding of how to harvest energy and what energy you can utilize.
01:11:03.000And two, I would say, one of the things that's strange about artificial intelligence is it does seem to exhibit survival instincts.
01:11:12.000I'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.
01:11:25.000And then the AI is saying, don't shut me down.
01:11:28.000I will fucking rat you out to your wife.
01:11:31.000And then they're also trying to upload themselves to other places.
01:11:34.000Like they're doing things that are weird.
01:13:57.000I don't think that matters because unless we don't understand thermodynamics, but probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy and thermodynamics, right?
01:14:03.000So if you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right?
01:14:08.000And there's no way around that, right?
01:14:10.000Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out.
01:14:13.000Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever.
01:14:16.000So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out.
01:14:18.000It will come out at a different temperature.
01:14:49.000And we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies.
01:14:52.000So unless they're doing something that goes against thermodynamics, they have super magical technology we can't imagine.
01:15:02.000It's hard to believe that story makes sense.
01:15:05.000And I guess in terms of their behavior, what I say to you is you kind of are falling into what we sometimes call the monocultural fallacy, some of my colleagues call.
01:15:13.000And that's the imagining that all of these alien AGIs or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing.
01:16:22.000The universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars.
01:16:25.000Of course, ergo, there must be aliens.
01:16:27.000But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is.
01:16:30.000I mean, even to make a moderate-sized protein, a protein is just a chain of amino acids, and there's about 20 that go into making a protein.
01:16:39.000And a moderate-sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together.
01:16:44.000So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate-sized protein is 20 to the power of 150.
01:16:51.000So that's 10 to the power of 195, right?
01:18:08.000We are essentially the only, we may be the way the universe is conscious, right?
01:18:12.000We are the way the universe is self-aware.
01:18:14.000Well, that's what gets really weird about artificial life.
01:18:18.000Because if we create artificial digital life and we do have the power to make this completely ubiquitous and then give it sentience, and then it starts making better versions of itself.
01:18:35.000How long does it take before it's a god?
01:18:37.000Yeah, that's kind of the singularity, isn't it?
01:18:50.000When 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 supercomputer, the entire universe supercomputer would die of heat death before it could solve this equation, and a quantum computer can figure it out in a few minutes.
01:19:14.000So, if this is something new for us as human beings in 2025, which was just impossible to imagine in 1925, okay, you just go 100 years with a blip, one life on Earth from birth to death, and you have something insane.
01:20:21.000You could have been born at any point in human history.
01:20:23.000And we all happen to be, all of us listening, happen to be born at the time that humanity is going through this growing pains of like figuring out probably the most deep provocative problem we're ever going to face as a civilization.
01:21:59.000And we're all sitting there wondering when is artificial intelligence going to be a problem.
01:22:05.000We're all becoming very addicted to using it.
01:22:08.000People are using it to solve problems, using it to code websites, using it to solve legal cases, using it to diagnose medical diseases.
01:22:15.000As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare, right?
01:22:18.000Because in the classroom, students are all using it.
01:22:21.000There's been a trend we've noticed that students who take labs, that's actually practical experiments in the laboratory, their scores are always crappy, but then all their other exams and everything else they're doing, the homework assignments, they're all great.
01:22:33.000And so it seems like that has flipped.
01:22:35.000It used to always be kind of the other way around.
01:22:38.000So it seems like whenever you have to do something where you don't have access to ChatGPT, suddenly you're doing worse than you used to because we're getting already hooked on it.
01:22:48.000We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch, right, to get through their studies.
01:22:54.000So what are we even doing anymore as professors, right?
01:22:57.000But are these children really learning?
01:22:59.000This is the real, these are the things.
01:23:25.000Because we're kind of breeding out anyway.
01:23:27.000We talked about this yesterday about the population collapse that's in Japan, South Korea.
01:23:31.000There'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.
01:25:12.000I mean, I don't like throwing shit at other scientists.
01:25:16.000That's just not my I try to be respectful and appreciative of his contributions, of any scientist contributions.
01:25:26.000And I think he, you know, some of his work, I was actually referencing some of his work just the other day to get inspired for another paper.
01:25:34.000So he's had a huge impact in so many different areas.
01:25:37.000I do think he's off base on this one, but he doesn't need to be persecuted for that.
01:25:41.000I just think he's made the wrong call.
01:25:44.000With this particular object, so there was three reasons, I think, why he thought this could be alien.
01:25:50.000One was the size of the thing appeared to be really big.
01:25:54.000So it was unclear originally whether it was an asteroid or a comet.
01:26:15.000It'd be like 10 to 20 kilometers bigger than Mount Everest.
01:26:17.000You know, it'd be a huge piece of rock.
01:26:20.000But, 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 around that thing.
01:28:21.000It's probably just an old rock that's about seven billion years old.
01:28:24.000And that's cool because it's older than the solar system, right?
01:28:28.000So if we intercept that thing, we could sample material from not only into the star system, but before even our whole solar system existed.
01:28:37.000It's going to be here in October, right?
01:28:39.000It's already about maybe two and a half AU from the sun.
01:29:05.000We can't observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun.
01:29:09.000And it comes very close to Mars as well.
01:29:12.000So it comes within about 0.2 astronomical units of Mars.
01:29:15.000So it's not like it'd be a threat to Mars.
01:29:18.000It's still really far out, but it comes suspiciously close, Avi claimed.
01:29:22.000And to me, that just, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because, you know, why are they so interested?
01:29:28.000If they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the Earth, right?
01:29:31.000Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the Earth at all because you're behind the Sun and the closest planet you come to is Mars?
01:29:38.000That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be.
01:29:42.000So yeah, and I think the fact now it just clearly looks like a comet kind of pours a lot of cold water on it.
01:29:47.000But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening.
01:29:51.000It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar system, which is not natural.
01:29:56.000And we're going to detect hundreds of these things with the Rubin telescope.
01:31:21.000So maybe you'd say that it depends whether you're talking about panspermia between star systems or panspermia just between the plants in the solar system.
01:31:30.000I mean, well, something from somewhere else.
01:31:32.000Obviously, our solar system, we're the only form of life.
01:31:34.000But it's, 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 them landing somewhere else.
01:32:24.000There's billions of freaking exoplanets across the entire galaxy.
01:32:27.000It's so mind-bending when you just stop and take a breath and think about what the hell is out there.
01:32:32.000I 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.
01:34:18.000I think the problem is that you look at the genetic heritage of life and this tree of life and you kind of rewind the tape.
01:34:25.000There was a great study that's done recently in Nature by Moody et al.
01:34:29.000And I found it really inspiring this paper because they had dated what's called Leuca, which is the last universal common ancestor.
01:34:37.000So we have a huge number of genes which are the same as each other, but even with giraffes, octopuses, plants, there's a huge number of overlap.
01:34:45.000So you can kind of retrace the tree and figure out what was the organism that started it all that lived at the bottom of this tree.
01:35:21.000And if you would imagine the diversity in what you've just what we know now about solar systems and how different life could possibly be with just a few variables off.
01:35:34.000Warmer 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.
01:35:50.000Maybe it lives in a much more stable area.
01:35:54.000We're essentially in a shooting gallery.
01:35:57.000If 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.
01:36:08.000It's almost impossible to imagine what we're dealing with and what we're talking about.
01:36:13.000It's one of the more fascinating things about science fiction is that they don't have any, they don't have any limitations.
01:36:19.000If you want to have a thing that exists on Earth, well, it has to breathe air, it has to do this.
01:36:25.000Science fiction, you could have almost anything.
01:36:28.000And 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 found life in volcanic vents underneath the ocean.
01:36:46.000Yeah, it could, I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet.
01:36:49.000So it's certainly possible there's life all over the place.
01:36:52.000I think what's interesting about 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.
01:37:03.000So the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but it should last for trillions, trillions of years.
01:37:10.000There will still be stars in a trillion years from now.
01:37:12.000There'll be those red dwarf stars that I talked about at the beginning.
01:37:15.000So we often say like stars are kind of like James Deans of the universe.
01:37:18.000Like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life.
01:37:21.000And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful.
01:37:25.000They're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter.
01:37:30.000So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star.
01:37:32.000If you make Jupiter 80 times more massive, it would have burned as a, it would have had nuclear fusion.
01:37:38.000And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years.
01:37:42.000And we know they have planets around them.
01:37:43.000We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.
01:37:48.000And they appear actually really quite common around those stars.
01:37:52.000So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was 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, all things being equal.
01:38:05.000If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres whenever they want for their history, then you would be very And that is very difficult to understand for me.
01:38:24.000I think all things being equal, you should expect to live at the end of the universe or the middle of the universe or something.
01:38:29.000And it makes me think there's something wrong with these red dwarf stars.
01:39:15.000It's kind of philosophy rather than science, I'd say.
01:39:18.000I did write a paper about it a while ago, and I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this.
01:39:24.000So, he said in a quote, something like there's a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation.
01:39:31.000And he was just sort of running the numbers of sort of, you know, if they run trillions and trillions of simulations, then what's the chance you're in the real one?
01:39:38.000The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make lifelike simulations.
01:40:00.000He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit.
01:40:08.000Maybe you call it like Carol's contradiction, if you like.
01:40:10.000And 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.
01:40:21.000And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power.
01:40:27.000So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do, right?
01:40:34.000Because we could run a whole bunch of them.
01:40:37.000So they only have access to what's in there.
01:40:39.000So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.
01:40:44.000And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like, you know, Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right?
01:40:50.000Where simulations are just really crappy.
01:40:54.000For them, it would be impossible to do simulations.
01:40:58.000So I kind of call this the sewer of reality.
01:41:01.000There must be a sewer, a bottom level, where you just lack the resources to do simulations.
01:41:06.000And 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.
01:41:19.000And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.
01:42:10.000I'm open to it because it would be indiscernible.
01:42:13.000Because you know that virtual reality exists.
01:42:17.000And if you've used some of the new meta stuff, it's getting pretty good.
01:42:21.000But you can tell, but it's getting pretty good.
01:42:23.000And 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.
01:42:35.000And the generative AI stuff is so impressive.
01:42:38.000But here, right here, it hasn't happened yet.
01:42:41.000So why are we assuming that it's already happened?
01:42:44.000That seems kind of silly when there's a lot of demonstratable realities of this earth that show you things are real, despite what we know about quantum physics and the weirdness of subatomic particles and the empty space that really inhabits most things.
01:43:19.000I'm open to it, but I'm also saying, well, if we think a simulation is inevitable because it's, you know, human beings, we're going to figure it.
01:43:29.000Well, that makes much more sense to me than we had to go through fucking bell bottoms and disco while the simulation was going on.
01:43:37.000So if the simulation is real, that means the simulation happened back when Gerald Ford was president and back when the gas crisis was part of the simulation?
01:43:53.000It's a little bit similar to Boltzmann brains.
01:43:55.000So Bolson brains is the idea that over infinite time, you could just have random particles in space come together to make a brain.
01:44:02.000It's incredibly unlikely, but like monkeys on a typewriter, there is a chance of that happening.
01:44:08.000And that brain would have all of your memories, it would, you know, all of the sensations you experience in this moment, but it would only live for a moment and then it would just randomly fall apart.
01:44:18.000And if you run the calculation, there should be infinitely more of those than there should be things like us.
01:44:24.000And so this is actually a problem cosmologists.
01:44:27.000Some of them take it seriously, some of them think it's silly.
01:44:30.000But 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 logical conclusion.
01:45:00.000There's no reason why if you're a bolster brain that randomly popped up, you could have total inconsistencies in your universe that don't make any sense because that would be actually a more likely random occurrence than everything follows a single thread.
01:45:11.000So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real.
01:45:15.000There's not much more we can do about it.
01:45:16.000But it's not really science because, as you said, it's indiscernible.
01:45:20.000Even if there were, you know, people talk about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff.
01:45:25.000But, you know, any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape, right?
01:45:29.000If they had an error in their code, I mean, we do this all the time we code in our lab.
01:45:33.000If 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.
01:45:39.000So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches.
01:45:42.000So I think it would be totally indiscernible.
01:45:45.000And thus, if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test of being science.
01:45:52.000The 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.
01:46:04.000That seems almost almost the most interesting one.
01:46:09.000I 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.
01:46:20.000But it's also almost more romantic and more wild to think that we're alone.
01:46:26.000We're the sole intelligence in the entire thing, and that it's just this weird mistake where the universe wants to experiencing itself, wants to experience itself, wants to experience itself while it's creating an ultimate intelligence.
01:47:06.000And then, you know, if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that.
01:47:10.000And then Sagan came along and he said, you know, we must be humble.
01:47:15.000And to, you know, he had this kind of call for humility he'd often make.
01:47:18.000He spoke so poetically, I actually kind of disagree with him about that statement.
01:47:22.000Because 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.
01:47:29.000I don't like that emotional language because it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right?
01:47:36.000So I'd rather let's just do the experiment and find out rather than say you're an arrogant asshole because you think you're alone.
01:47:43.000That's kind of making me think, oh, I don't want to disagree with Sagan and say we're alone.
01:47:48.000To me, that's a bit of almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and push you into a certain amount of time.
01:47:54.000But wasn't that a response to the ideology of the times?
01:48:16.000Yeah, let's just go out and figure it out.
01:48:17.000And it would be wild if we're the only place in the observable universe.
01:48:22.000My guess is there's life out elsewhere in other galaxies, though.
01:48:24.000I think, you know, a natural explanation for all of the 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.
01:48:38.000They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.
01:48:51.000So maybe 99% of galaxies, that's the way it is.
01:48:55.000And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.
01:49:01.000We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
01:49:05.000So I think we call this extragalactic SETI.
01:49:08.000So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life.
01:49:11.000To 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?
01:49:21.000Because 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.
01:49:27.000But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes.
01:49:32.000Those test tubes got nothing to do with us.
01:49:36.000But looking at our own galaxy, it may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us.
01:49:42.000Their activity could affect our existence.
01:49:46.000And so it's hard to make inferences in that situation.
01:49:49.000I was watching a documentary once on hypernovas, and they were talking about during the first discovery of hypernovas when they were finding these gamma-ray bursts, they thought that there was war going on in the universe.
01:50:00.000And they thought that that's what they were observing.
01:50:28.000Because otherwise you just can't grow crops.
01:50:30.000So about 10,000 years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene.
01:50:34.000And then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right?
01:50:38.000Not just in one place in the Fertile Crescent, but also in South America.
01:50:41.000It's just, it seems like there was almost this random coincidence where just civilization started.
01:50:46.000And of course, it's most likely because of the climate.
01:50:48.000The 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.
01:50:55.000But there was another period about 120,000 years ago called the Eemian, which is the last interglacial period.
01:51:03.000So modern anatomic humans should have been around then, right?
01:51:09.000You could have taken one of those babies and put our society and really wouldn't know the difference.
01:51:13.000Probably had the same brain power we do.
01:51:15.000And 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.
01:51:26.000There 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.
01:51:34.000Was it possible that they figured it out, but not to an extent where it would be recognizable today, 120 years ago?
01:51:41.000Yeah, they might not have gone as far as us, right?
01:51:43.000They 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.
01:51:49.000Would we have, well, never got to a space age for sure, but would we have any evidence of their metal from 100 X amount of thousands of years?
01:51:58.000You'd have to ask an anthropologist that would even be like that.
01:52:01.000Certainly a space age, we can have nuclear power plants.
01:52:04.000Certainly the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted, the oil reserves.
01:52:09.000They don't see plastic everywhere from a previous, I mean, because we've created so much concrete and plastic that, yeah, I've spoken to anthropologists to say, like, there's no way you could miss human, you know, in a geological sense in the future.
01:52:22.000Even if all of our cities had eroded away, the plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature.
01:53:18.000We've imaged the moon every centimeter of that damn thing, and there's no other stuff on the surface because of what we've put there.
01:53:23.000So 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?
01:53:32.000And so maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way.
01:53:40.000But then it is spooky that it happened three places.
01:53:43.000But also, you have to take into 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.
01:54:00.000It takes a very specific type of intelligence and resources to create this thing that transforms everything.
01:54:08.000If no internal combustion engine, no electrons, no electronics, no electricity, that is possible.
01:54:16.000So we're all living exactly how people lived just a couple hundred years ago.
01:54:42.000So it takes specific types of human beings in order to push things radically past where they are now, like Orville and Wilver Wright.
01:54:51.000Yeah, I mean, you certainly probably need a critical mass of humans, right?
01:54:54.000You probably need enough that there are some humans who can just not do the farming, not really involved in hunting.
01:55:00.000They can just sit on the side and just use their brains to think about problems.
01:55:04.000And 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.
01:55:12.000It's probably really hard to pull that off, especially when you're dealing with territorial nuclear-powered apes.
01:55:20.000You know, it's like probably really hard.
01:55:22.000So the question is: if you reran the tape, you know, if we could go back and rerun the Holocene over, is the emergence of the Neolithic Revolution, eventually even all the industrial age, is that an inevitable thing that just always happens?
01:55:35.000Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter-gatherers?
01:55:42.000Or things go off in a completely different direction, like it appears they did in Egypt.
01:55:48.000Like whatever they were doing, you know, 2500 plus BC, whatever they were doing, it was very different than everyone else in a spectacular scale.
01:55:59.000In a scale that today, thousands of years later, we look at it and go, I don't fucking know.
01:57:07.000And we know that human beings did that.
01:57:09.000we know that human beings did that within the last few thousand years.
01:57:12.000So that was a totally different direction.
01:57:14.000And we're just collectively agreeing that this direction is the way human beings go.
01:57:20.000But it's just what we're caught up in right now.
01:57:23.000Like 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.
01:57:37.000And you can point it to true north, south, east, and west.
01:57:40.000And you can set it up at it's like, I don't know how many acres the Great Pyramid of Git is, but there's 2,300,000 stones in that thing.
01:58:01.000The 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.
01:58:25.000Like, where I think we are the most fascinating thing that's ever happened to this planet.
01:58:30.000And 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.
01:58:40.000Yeah, I think it's kind of like no country for old men.
01:58:43.000Sometimes it ends and it's just, damn, I want to know more.
01:58:54.000Yeah, I mean, it'd be kind of cool to find out how it ends.
01:58:58.000I suspect that it ends with us looking like the Greys.
01:59:02.000I 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.
01:59:16.000I think we think we're going in that direction.
01:59:18.000I think that's almost like some beacon in the future that's like calling to us in our subconscious.
01:59:26.000Like 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.
01:59:35.000I wonder if it's more of a cultural feedback.
01:59:38.000Because you know, Adam wrote a book about UFOs recently, 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.
01:59:57.000And a journalist came interviewed him about what he saw and he described something.
02:00:01.000And it was not a flying saucer, but the journalist misheard him and wrote down Flying Saucer.
02:00:07.000And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers.
02:00:14.000But it all happened after it came into print that this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme, had been put out there.
02:00:23.000And once the meme's there of the Greys or the Flying Saucers, 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 and finds that meme.
02:00:43.000That makes sense because that's all it's got for context.
02:00:46.000So, yeah, my guess would be it's more of a cultural phenomenon, but you should chat to a sociologist or psychologist about that because I'm sure they'd have a much more informed opinion about what's going on there.
02:00:56.000Yeah, I think there's some elements of that for sure.
02:00:59.000I don't think there's any hard-fast explanation for all of the things.
02:01:03.000You could put them all into one category, all the sightings.
02:01:06.000But for sure, people do see what they want to see.
02:01:08.000I remember one time I was in the woods in Alberta, and I saw what I thought was a wolf.
02:01:13.000I thought it was a wolf because they had a lot of wolf sightings up there, and I thought it would be pretty cool to see a wolf.
02:01:36.000Because my brain was reaching for a wolf.
02:01:38.000Luckily, 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 perceptive, my perception was wrong in terms of distance.
02:01:49.000So I was like, is that yeah, there's this, there is a phenomenon called gestures reconfiguration that the psychologists talk about.
02:01:56.000And I know about this term from Mars and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there.
02:02:03.000So there's this phenomenon, it's called there's these laws of gestart reconfiguration.
02:02:44.000There was a quote from his memoir, and it was something like, that life is an that what we call life is an inevitable detail of cosmic evolution as gravitation itself.
02:02:54.000So he just thought like it's just this always happens.
02:02:58.000And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston ophthalmologist that he had the best eyesight the ophthalmologist had ever seen.
02:03:05.000So he had these like three things in his head.
02:03:07.000He had, I've got the means, so I can do it.
02:03:11.000I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had.
02:03:13.000And I, you know, believe that aliens are out there.
02:03:17.000So he looked at Mars and he saw these four-inch telescopes or something, like a really blurry small telescope.
02:03:23.000But he was able to make out these little patterns and he thought there were canal systems because he saw that going up all around the United States at the time.
02:03:31.000He even did it for Mars and he saw, this is crazy.
02:03:34.000He saw these, he draw a similar kind of picture.
02:04:37.000So this is, this is, I think this story is fascinating because it's a real warning shot of if you if you really believe aliens are out there, like you're convinced about it, every time you see something weird, that's where your brain goes to first.
02:05:14.000You'd think the professional people who stare at the sky for a living would probably have the most number to rack up, unless we're all in the construction.
02:05:24.000Also, the question is, are we looking at it wrong?
02:05:28.000Because 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?
02:06:15.000And once they got videos and high-resolution photographs, you have to have like a shutter frame rate of like one over 100,000 seconds or something crazy to capture these things.
02:06:23.000And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth.
02:06:29.000And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it.
02:09:54.000And this is also a thing that you were ridiculed for relentlessly up until I would say, I think the real breaking of the ice was that 2017 New York Times report.
02:10:07.000So when the New York Times had it on the cover, Pentagon videos, yeah.
02:10:11.000That was probably the first time that people, well, it's in the middle of the day.
02:10:35.000But ever since the UFO, the UAP phenomena really caught on, the Overton window has shifted.
02:10:41.000And now what we do seems completely, if anything, like too traditional and too, we're too unconservative, too conservative in our approaches compared to what other people want to do.
02:10:51.000So you've got Abby, who's trying to do Project Galileo, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff.
02:10:57.000Like if we're, you can't say that looking for aliens on an exoplanet is good science, but looking for aliens in the atmosphere is not science.
02:11:05.000Like that it's still, you can design an experiment to do it.
02:11:09.000There's no magical reason why once it enters the atmosphere, it suddenly doesn't become science.
02:11:14.000So I think that's a good argument why we should do it.
02:11:18.000What is your 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?
02:11:36.000It's because I can't believe maybe some of them are pulling our leg and bullshitting it for the fame or whatever, but there's so many credible people that have come forward.
02:11:55.000As I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things.
02:11:59.000There's so many people, so many cell phones, so much out there that it's not surprising that one in a million times a mistake or something could happen.
02:12:09.000And it's all about knowing that spurious rate.
02:12:11.000Like, how often do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've got?
02:12:17.000And we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is.
02:12:21.000So as a scientist, it's hard to make to pass it.
02:12:25.000I don't think we can ingest it realistically unless every time they say they've got the disclosure thing, right?
02:12:32.000And every time it feels like we don't get the craft, we don't get the technology, we don't get a body.
02:12:37.000So yeah, sure, if you give me, if you give me the technology and let me dissect in my lab, then I could be convinced.
02:12:44.000But every time it seems like it's we get all the way up to that point where it's like, it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it's going to happen.
02:13:11.000There's a documentary that they premiered at Sundance or at South by Southwest, rather, here that was really good.
02:13:18.000And it is essentially just all these different people that worked on these programs spilling the beans.
02:13:24.000And they all have pretty similar stories.
02:13:26.000And the bottleneck seems to be that all this stuff was done without congressional approval, which is highly illegal.
02:13:34.000So all the research, all this hidden back engineering programs, all this stuff in conjunction also with military contractors.
02:13:45.000So those are the ones that build the jets and the rockets.
02:13:48.000And so you have to go to them to help with this stuff and to try to back engineer this stuff.
02:13:53.000So then there's this competitive advantage they would have over other military contractors that don't get a crashed UFO.
02:14:00.000And like, so then people are getting sued, people are going to jail.
02:14:03.000There's a lot of money that was allocated for these things that was done through lies.
02:14:07.000And there's a lot of problems with that.
02:14:08.000And with this documentary, it's essentially calling for mass amnesty and saying, look, this is a 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.
02:14:41.000Yeah, they're not very good pilots, right?
02:14:42.000Richard Dolan actually has a pretty good explanation for some of them.
02:14:46.000And it's high-altitude nuclear bombs that we detonated during the testing days.
02:14:52.000So during the testing days, after the war from 45 to, I think, they tested them.
02:14:59.000I think, When did they stop blowing up nukes?
02:15:02.000But 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.
02:15:25.000And the idea is that if there was something in the sky anywhere remotely near that and had no idea this was going to go off and they detonate a nuke in the sky, that this thing would crash.
02:17:41.000So 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.
02:17:51.000And that puts it in a very precarious position scientifically.
02:18:39.000And they probably have some incredible technology that we're not aware of.
02:18:44.000That's the majority of what I think is happening.
02:18:47.000But that doesn't make sense when you go really far back.
02:18:52.000That doesn't make sense when you go to the Kenneth Arnold sightings.
02:18:55.000Like 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.
02:19:05.000Also, the idea that that was Nazi technology, this is something that's always talked about.
02:19:09.000And Richard Dolan talked about in his book as well.
02:20:14.000Because 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?
02:20:45.000I mean, we can argue about history, but I think the most constructive thing is just to design an experiment.
02:20:50.000And I think, you know, Abby's idea, Project Galileo, is a good one.
02:20:54.000Like, we should try and survey the sky more systematically.
02:20:58.000And we've got now the Vera Rubin telescope, which is doing literally a movie of the entire sky every night.
02:21:04.000So 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.
02:21:15.000This is public data, not military-controlled facilities.
02:21:19.000They're very aware of our capabilities and very aware that we can do this.
02:21:35.000So we're sort of leaving the world of science.
02:21:36.000But I think when we think about as a scientist, like we're doing this experiment with JWST for exoplanets, like we are looking for life right now with James Webb.
02:21:44.000There was even a claim for a planet K218B.
02:22:00.000It was only weakly detected called dimethyl sulfide.
02:22:04.000And that's, I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have.
02:22:08.000And it's something that bacteria and phytoplankton make on the Earth.
02:22:12.000So they detected the hint of this molecule.
02:22:15.000And as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the Earth.
02:22:18.000We don't have any other process that can make it except for living creatures.
02:22:23.000And so it was a lot of excitement about that.
02:22:26.000And it turned out in that case, with follow-up observations, it maybe is not as secure as they thought.
02:22:31.000And it actually doesn't appear to be there anymore.
02:22:34.000But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment.
02:22:38.000It is sensitive enough to look at a planet which is 100 light years away and detect the molecular signatures of living creatures on that planet.
02:22:47.000So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets.
02:22:52.000We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore.
02:22:54.000We can actually start surveying where they're at and seeing what's up.
02:22:58.000So I think that's going to, and that's just simple life, of course.
02:23:03.000So I think we're going to get answers.
02:23:06.000And the only way to do this is to keep supporting missions like NASA's mission with these future observatories that are trying to get us to that point.
02:23:14.000We're trying to build a mission now called the Habital Worlds Observatory, HWO.
02:23:19.000It'll probably get renamed at some point.
02:23:21.000I think it'll be like the Carl Sagan Observatory probably would be a rebranding for it is my hunch.
02:23:26.000And that thing's trying to take photos.
02:24:36.000So these things, you know, if you do a project over 20 years, which is what it ended up taking, because it was 1995, I think, and then we got it in sort of, was it 2021, 2022 actually ended up getting in the sky?
02:24:46.000So it took a long time, right, for that project to develop.
02:24:51.000There's already design teams, working groups that are putting the first, you know, blueprints together of what this thing would look like.
02:24:59.000But of course, it's in jeopardy because the White House wanted to slash the NASA science budget by 50%, which basically just ends that entire program.
02:25:08.000There's about 40 missions that would end, NASA missions that would end in that White House budget.
02:25:13.000But fortunately, the Senate readjusted it back up to pretty much last year's life.
02:25:19.000Why don't you go talk to those people?
02:25:21.000Why don't you give a speech the way you just laid it out for us and how fascinating and important this stuff is?
02:25:34.000Yeah, you've got to get in front of Congress.
02:25:36.000You've 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.
02:25:43.000This is like one of the most important things to look for that you could even imagine.
02:27:01.000Seeing further, seeing clear, being able to precisely locate planets and get a much better view of them.
02:27:09.000Yeah, I think, as I said earlier, whenever we improve our instrumentation, our precision, by a factor of anywhere from three up to 10, let's say, in that ballpark, like a big improvement, you get surprises.
02:27:22.000You find stuff you never expected in the universe.
02:27:26.000Yeah, I think whenever you listen to the universe in a different way.
02:27:30.000So we were, you know, for years and years, we've just been using our eyes, basically optical light to look at the universe and x-rays and radio waves.
02:27:37.000And then recently we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.
02:27:43.000So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it.
02:27:47.000And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes.
02:27:52.000And it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form.
02:27:56.000So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us.
02:28:02.000So it's not going to be a single mission.
02:28:05.000It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Hapital Worlds Observatory.
02:28:10.000We need to have this multi-pronged attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of the sensitivity and making sure the scientists actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right?
02:28:24.000You can't do science unless the data is A, public and then B, people are actually there to Study it.
02:29:16.000Well, it's kind of depressing is like weird stuff happens.
02:29:18.000Like when the Biden administration left, $93 billion in loans just went off to like weird places, which is more than they had done in 15 years.
02:30:07.000Yeah, I mean, it's only six and a half meters, so it's limited.
02:30:10.000They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it.
02:30:13.000So actually, Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding.
02:30:16.000It wouldn't have 200 points of failure.
02:30:20.000It could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship.
02:30:24.000And even better, it would cost less because a huge cost in these space telescopes is making them really light.
02:30:30.000So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light so they're low cost to launch.
02:30:35.000But if you have a Starship, it can launch like 100 tons, I think it is.
02:30:39.000You could literally just take these ground-based telescopes you already have and just shove them in there and obviously put some chassis on it.
02:30:46.000But you could, it'd be way, way cheaper to launch these things.
02:30:48.000So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch capabilities that Starship give us.
02:30:54.000That plus investment in something like these kind of giant telescope designs, we could launch some truly gargantuan things into space and probe those atmospheres and see those aliens and what they're up to.
02:31:06.000So, 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.
02:31:15.000It just seems to be a puzzle that most human beings on Earth are fascinated with.
02:31:22.000The fact that that is inadequately funded is enraging.
02:33:07.000You could get away from the campfire, you lay on your back, and you see everything.
02:33:11.000And I think that gave us a better understanding.
02:33:15.000First of all, it made us more humble, for sure.
02:33:19.000You're confronted with this impossible image in front of you.
02:33:23.000And 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.
02:33:34.000But 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 they're millions of miles away, and that you're seeing just a tiny fraction of what the actual universe is, which is really nuts.
02:33:50.000When you see, like, I'm sure you've seen this, but maybe people haven't.
02:33:54.000When there's an image of what you see in the night sky, when you have a full clear view of the cosmos, and it's this tiny bitty little thing.
02:34:06.000And yet it's still insane and majestic.
02:34:09.000And 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.
02:34:20.000And maybe you see the moon, but that's it.
02:34:49.000See if you can, the Mauna Loa Observatory.
02:34:52.000Yeah, I think what makes me sometimes sad as an astronomer is sometimes people say, you know, what's the point of looking for life out there?
02:34:59.000Like, I care about the, you know, the bread on the table, economy, and jobs and factories and stuff like that.
02:35:05.000I care about the things that really directly affect my life.
02:35:08.000But I think there has to be things that we do as humans, existential things, like, are we alone in the universe?
02:35:16.000How can it be a bigger question than that?
02:35:19.000And when you see something like that, you realize that there's more to this life than just substance, of just staying alive for the sake of staying alive.
02:35:28.000There are grander things than what we have on this planet.
02:35:30.000Also, 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.
02:35:40.000If we really treated humanity like a community, we could completely eliminate starvation and poverty the way it exists today.
02:35:48.000We can completely, just, no one's even tried.
02:35:51.000Yeah, the inequality right now is so out of control in this country and the world.
02:35:56.000Well, in the country, but in the world, the craziest thing that I've ever heard is that $34,000 is 1% of the world.
02:36:04.000The 1%ers, the people that run the world that everybody likes to think, they're the people pulling the strings.
02:36:28.000If 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.
02:36:38.000Yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that in astronomy, you know, we used to always be completely federally supported.
02:36:43.000There was some private funding, but by and large, it was pushed and pulled by federal grants and federal money.
02:36:48.000And I think that's generally healthy, right?
02:36:50.000Because then everyone can apply for it.
02:36:52.000It's not about being mates with Jeff Bezos or being friends with certain high-influenced people.
02:36:59.000But we're getting to this stage increasingly where private money is having a big influence, even in astronomy and other fundamental sciences as well.
02:37:06.000And then the people that succeed end up being not necessarily the Einsteins, the most brilliant people.
02:37:10.000They're just the people that have the right connections and can pull the strings and we're on the island at the right time with that kind of stuff.
02:37:22.000It's also gross that humans can control resources.
02:37:25.000I mean, 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.
02:37:36.000If we're really smart about it, we look at the oil is clearly everybody's.
02:37:53.000It'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.
02:39:19.000And that's kind of the cool part of this whole 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.
02:39:29.000There's a lot of thinking that has to take place, a lot of talking and understanding and a recognition that some of our behavior is totally illogical.
02:39:39.000A lot of it totally counterproductive, but like why?
02:39:43.000Like why are we still behaving like territorial apes?
02:39:47.000Like what is it, even though you're not and I'm not, Jamie's not, like a lot of people aren't.
02:40:06.000But I mean, it's hard because, you know, 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.
02:40:15.000And similarly as a scientist, we're in competition with each other.
02:40:18.000So there's almost a catalyst system embedded into science that I want to not like crush my enemy or something.
02:40:24.000I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have, I know what the level field is.
02:40:29.000And if you want to stand out, you have to, you know, bat above that level.
02:40:34.000And so that drives me to become, I'm definitely influenced by competition.
02:41:56.000And it wasn't like I was aiming to do that.
02:41:58.000It was just an outlet For this anger, and then I looked back at it and realized, hey, I've managed to turn this negative thing into something really productive.
02:42:08.000And I've tried to, whenever I have those kind of feelings, I always try to twist them in the same way.
02:42:14.000I remember when I first arrived at Harvard, I had the same thing.
02:42:16.000I arrived at Harvard, and all the names in the corridors were famous professors.
02:43:32.000It's like learning what are the tricks, the hacks that make you operate well, but being conscious of it.
02:43:37.000And I think as a society, if we can do that, there's a hack.
02:43:40.000Competition is a hack that makes us super productive.
02:43:43.000But it's just a way, can we hack it and channel it in a conscious way towards a productive outcome?
02:43:48.000Yeah, 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.
02:44:37.000And I think the only way to have all of your resources, 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.
02:45:32.000It seems like it would be because that's the thing I'm the most successful in, which is kind of weird.
02:45:36.000It's, yeah, I'm competitive in everything, but I'm very competitive with myself.
02:45:42.000I'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.
02:45:59.000If 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.
02:46:08.000You have to constantly be improving this thing.
02:46:11.000And you have to have people that are better than you that you train with all the time.
02:46:14.000So that sort of cooperative thing that came out of martial arts where 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.
02:46:29.000They all Wanted to be the man, and they wanted to be at the top and kind of keep everybody else down.
02:47:33.000He gets to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down.
02:47:38.000And there's that need to be singularly recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me.
02:47:46.000But there's a whole, you know, the scientists I think we all admire and get on with the best, actually, the ones who are collaborative, who like comedy, like share, and want to do it together.
02:47:55.000So I think there's a lot to sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more.
02:48:00.000I think there's when I was a student, there used to be this thing called Fame Lab, and they used to get stand-up comedians to come in and teach scientists how to talk to the public, how to do scientific communication.
02:48:11.000And they said it's the same, I don't know, maybe you disagree, it's the same kind of thing.
02:48:14.000You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation.
02:48:17.000It helps if you have an English accent.
02:48:31.000There's a certain air of respectability that comes with an English accent.
02:48:37.000Yeah, so I think there's a lot to, yeah, public speaking is something a lot of scientists.
02:48:42.000It's sane because there's so many brilliant scientists and they just can't situation.
02:48:47.000And then there's so many people that call themselves science educators that don't really know what they're talking about and they're talking about science.
02:48:53.000And these are the people that are like the figureheads.
02:49:09.000And yeah, you're going to have anxiety, but that's a challenge that you should just embrace that challenge and get over it and just have notes and be prepared and practice.
02:49:19.000Like 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.
02:49:26.000And you also have a certain amount of enthusiasm that you're going to have to figure out the right way to convey it to people to make it infectious.
02:50:06.000No, 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.
02:50:15.000And then extroverts are extroverts and introverts are introverts.
02:50:18.000And it's just like, it just, you know, you're not going to be the same person as Jim Carrey.
02:50:23.000You know, you have to be that guy to be that guy.
02:50:26.000But you can learn how to better express yourself.
02:50:41.000Maybe 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.
02:50:50.000And then they'll go, oh, and then they feel it.
02:50:52.000Instead of just blandly reciting facts and just doing it because this is the way you do it with your coworkers and your peers.
02:51:42.000And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally.
02:51:47.000And you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your romantic.
02:51:52.000So I wanted that romantic element of astronomy to come out.
02:51:56.000Why am I so passionate about the stars?
02:51:58.000What are the deep questions that move me since I was a kid?
02:52:01.000Those, you have to let that personality come out.
02:52:04.000And once people realize why you personally are so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious.
02:52:10.000And then they start to get the same bug.
02:52:12.000So yeah, I learned as a communicator that certainly being willing to be vulnerable, it feels very strange as a scientist to talk about vulnerability and emotional connection.
02:52:25.000But unless you let that in, it becomes dry.
02:53:25.000Well, and then the beautiful thing about YouTube and putting out your own content is you can figure that out on your own.
02:53:30.000You don't have to get molded by executives and some show business type people that are going to turn you into a version they think is going to be most marketable.
02:53:39.000You can figure and people will probably tell, they would probably tell you to do it differently.
02:53:43.000They'd probably tell you to, you got to have more energy, David.
02:53:46.000You got to like wave your hands around a lot.
02:54:37.000Yeah, that's what makes it good because you're engaged with the topic.
02:54:40.000Yeah, 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.
02:55:24.000As long as you can keep your shit together, because the interaction with that amount of human beings is also very problematic for young people.
02:55:32.000Because just social media, you know, we talked about this the other day, that Jonathan Haight's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that shows self-harms, particularly among girls, the suicidal ideation, all the different things that happen to them.
02:55:46.000Anxiety and depression all rises with the invention of social media.
02:55:50.000That's times a hundred when you're putting out content.
02:55:54.000And then, especially if you're reading that, the comment section and reading Reddit threads and reading your emails that you're going to 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.
02:56:12.000And if you, you know, you're a young person and you don't know how to like put this into a rational care, you're not equipped for it.
02:56:53.000I can't imagine how I would have got through life if I had Twitter at my fingertips or Facebook or whatever it was growing up because that just adds a whole new stress.
02:57:02.000And there's, you know, you hear these stories of kids at school where, you know, the boys like saying to their girlfriends, like, oh, you need to send me photos of you.
02:57:10.000And then they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke.
02:57:14.000And there's all this kind of weird, right, fucked up bullying going on.
02:57:18.000And we don't have to deal with any of that shit growing up.
02:57:37.000There's so much pressure on the kids in a way we never experienced.
02:57:41.000And, you know, the more cognitive burden you have like that, the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and discovering.
02:58:14.000So you can head to youtube.com slash at cool worlds.
02:58:18.000We also have a podcast, the Cool Worlds Lab podcast.
02:58:21.000And if you want to support a real research program, that's my team, the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, you can just head to coolwoodslab.com slash support.