The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Trained by Day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day!

00:00:13.000 What's up, man?

00:00:13.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 Pleasure to meet, sir.

00:00:15.000 Pleasure to be here.

00:00:16.000 Thanks, Jay.

00:00:16.000 I really enjoy your content online.

00:00:18.000 It's been really fascinating.

00:00:19.000 So I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days and enjoying the hell out of it.

00:00:24.000 And particularly enjoying...

00:00:28.000 But 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,

00:00:46.000 not 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.

00:01:00.000 Is the universe older?

00:01:01.000 There's all this different kind of speculation.

00:01:03.000 Maybe the Big Bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24.

00:01:09.000 What is your take on all this?

00:01:11.000 Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument.

00:01:15.000 The data has just blown us away.

00:01:17.000 You 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.

00:01:28.000 So, you know, just the fact the fact it just all worked was just remarkable.

00:01:34.000 And 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.

00:01:42.000 So 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.

00:01:50.000 And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.

00:01:52.000 It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active galaxies.

00:01:58.000 These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy.

00:02:03.000 They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.

00:02:05.000 And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them.

00:02:11.000 Because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like 100 million solar masses.

00:02:16.000 Imagine 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.

00:02:31.000 So we're finding those just, you know, 300 million years after the Big Bang.

00:02:35.000 And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.

00:02:38.000 Like, how can this be?

00:02:40.000 And similarly with the galaxies, we were seeing these images.

00:02:44.000 These galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift.

00:02:48.000 So the universe is expanding.

00:02:51.000 So 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.

00:02:58.000 And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.

00:03:02.000 When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too old.

00:03:08.000 You really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe.

00:03:12.000 And so that kind of puzzled us.

00:03:13.000 I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there.

00:03:17.000 One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place.

00:03:26.000 So we had these models for galaxy formation.

00:03:28.000 We 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.

00:03:38.000 And 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.

00:03:47.000 Everything's just completely different, the early universe.

00:03:49.000 So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought.

00:03:56.000 So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain.

00:04:00.000 I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.

00:04:03.000 How do you get those supermassive black holes so early?

00:04:06.000 There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit.

00:04:10.000 And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out.

00:04:16.000 And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in.

00:04:20.000 So there's a maximum limit.

00:04:21.000 You can't build a black hole faster in principle than this Eddington limit.

00:04:25.000 And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington.

00:04:31.000 So faster than Eddington.

00:04:32.000 So something's wrong with our models, right?

00:04:34.000 Either 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.

00:04:44.000 Why do you think that the universe's age is a less likely solution?

00:04:48.000 Because 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.

00:04:55.000 And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.

00:04:58.000 It's called Lambda CDM.

00:05:00.000 And so the Lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.

00:05:03.000 So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe.

00:05:10.000 I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, these baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching of the universe, Cepheids.

00:05:18.000 You can use it to explain so much stuff.

00:05:19.000 And it works beautifully.

00:05:21.000 I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.

00:05:24.000 So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.

00:05:29.000 So 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.

00:05:40.000 The 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.

00:05:58.000 Fairly simple in that you can use whatever methods that we're using currently to measure everything that's out there and it makes sense.

00:06:07.000 But if we're using something like the James Webb Telescope, so we're getting a much deeper view of the universe.

00:06:16.000 How limited is the James Webb in comparison to James Webb 2.0, 3.0?

00:06:22.000 Like, are we going to have to continually revamp what our understanding of this process is?

00:06:29.000 Yes, we will.

00:06:31.000 That's what I love, right?

00:06:32.000 That's what scientists love.

00:06:34.000 Every time we've built a telescope that is 10 times more precise than the last thing, every time we've done that, we have been surprised.

00:06:42.000 And so these early galaxies are a good example.

00:06:44.000 The cosmological experiments that are going on now, one of the big surprises is this thing called the Hubble tension.

00:06:49.000 Have you heard of that?

00:06:49.000 Hubble tension.

00:06:50.000 So Hubble tension is measuring the expansion rate of the universe.

00:06:53.000 How fast are things flying apart?

00:06:55.000 And you can do it two ways.

00:06:56.000 You can use the cosmic microwave backgrounds.

00:07:00.000 That's the earliest radiation that we can detect.

00:07:02.000 This is that stuff that's about three Kelvin warm.

00:07:05.000 You can detect it in the microwave.

00:07:06.000 And this is the light which is traveled basically when the universe was 380,000 years old.

00:07:10.000 It's that light, and we see it in all directions.

00:07:12.000 That's how we know the Big Bang kind of didn't happen in one place.

00:07:15.000 It happened everywhere, because you just see this light coming in from all directions.

00:07:18.000 And 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?

00:07:30.000 And you get a number.

00:07:31.000 And 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.

00:07:43.000 They don't line up.

00:07:45.000 And so this is really weird.

00:07:46.000 So somehow, something's wrong, right?

00:07:48.000 Either 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.

00:07:59.000 So this is a very famous growing problem in cosmology.

00:08:03.000 It's now what we call a five sigma level.

00:08:05.000 So that means the chance of this being random is just like zero, essentially.

00:08:08.000 It's just this, this is a real effect.

00:08:11.000 And now we just have to figure out who's wrong.

00:08:13.000 Is it the observers or is it the theorists?

00:08:16.000 Wow.

00:08:17.000 Where's time?

00:08:18.000 Where do you fall on this?

00:08:21.000 Yeah, it's hard.

00:08:23.000 I swing between both ways.

00:08:25.000 I'll talk to my cosmology colleagues, and they'll, you know, depending on who I talk to, they'll convince me either way.

00:08:30.000 So I think the...

00:08:37.000 You 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.

00:08:46.000 Everyone has a certain pet theory, right?

00:08:49.000 I mean, we all have biases, right?

00:08:51.000 Human beings.

00:08:52.000 Yeah, I mean, if you've spent, it's hard, right?

00:08:53.000 If 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?

00:09:03.000 Last 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong, and I have to eat humble pie.

00:09:07.000 That's not easy, but it has happened in some cases.

00:09:10.000 One of my favorite stories about this is the first exoplanet was ever claimed, a planet around the star, one of the first ones.

00:09:17.000 It was wrong.

00:09:19.000 So it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it, on a six-month orbital period.

00:09:25.000 So exactly half the Earth's orbital period around the Sun.

00:09:29.000 And 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.

00:09:35.000 So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer, and he realized later on it was wrong.

00:09:42.000 And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital eccentricity of the Earth.

00:09:48.000 So the Earth is not on a circular orbit.

00:09:50.000 Its eccentricity is 0.0167.

00:09:53.000 It's a tiny number.

00:09:54.000 But that number hadn't been accounted for in the calculation.

00:09:57.000 And so he had to stand up in front of hundreds of astronomers at this famous IAU meeting, and he admitted he was wrong.

00:10:04.000 And he got a standing evasion.

00:10:06.000 Oh, good for him.

00:10:07.000 It's awesome.

00:10:08.000 It's one of the few times I've heard of someone doing that.

00:10:10.000 And I think it's dope.

00:10:11.000 I think we need to encourage people to.

00:10:13.000 Well, it's something that's so massive and it's such a puzzle.

00:10:17.000 This is just bound to happen.

00:10:19.000 If 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.

00:10:34.000 I mean, when we're talking about aging and we say 13 billion or 22 billion, those numbers don't even register in your mind.

00:10:41.000 They're not real.

00:10:42.000 You know what I mean?

00:10:43.000 It's like you see a one and a three and you kind of get it, but you don't get it.

00:10:48.000 You can't intuit it.

00:10:49.000 No, it's not possible for our puny little minds to imagine 13 plus billion years.

00:10:57.000 It's just too crazy.

00:10:58.000 So if you're rigid with that, like, God, man.

00:11:02.000 Yeah.

00:11:02.000 Like.

00:11:03.000 I mean, part of the journey in being a scientist is knowing what your own biases are.

00:11:08.000 And 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.

00:11:15.000 So it's a big deal, right?

00:11:16.000 You know, if I succeed at this, there could be like, you know, golden prizes, award ceremonies.

00:11:22.000 Like, you kind of get that glimmer in your eye, like, oh man, this could look, I could be memorialized for this success.

00:11:27.000 And so that's alluring, right?

00:11:29.000 That's tempting.

00:11:30.000 It's like kind of the same temptation as fame.

00:11:32.000 And I remember once we had this signal, it was Kepler 90, no, PHTB was the name of the planet.

00:11:39.000 And we had this signal, and it kind of looked like just what we expect for an exo-moon.

00:11:43.000 I remember I was so excited.

00:11:45.000 I 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.

00:11:51.000 I was like, this could be it.

00:11:54.000 This is the thing I've been searching for.

00:11:56.000 I was like almost hyperventilating with excitement.

00:11:59.000 And then I remember in that.

00:12:00.000 That's how you know you're in the right job.

00:12:02.000 Right?

00:12:02.000 Yeah.

00:12:02.000 Right.

00:12:03.000 Passion was a job shoot.

00:12:04.000 Yeah.

00:12:05.000 And I remember thinking to myself after calming myself down a little bit, I want this to be true too much.

00:12:12.000 You know, like this is, of all the people in the world, I want this to be true the most.

00:12:17.000 So therefore, let's flip that around.

00:12:19.000 And 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.

00:12:28.000 And it ended up being bullshit.

00:12:29.000 I mean, it ended up being the telescope just misbehaved, had this weird effect called a sudden pixel dropout effect.

00:12:35.000 This weird anomaly happens one in like 100,000 times, but it just so happened to pop right then, right there in my data.

00:12:44.000 What do we know about the consistency of solar systems and galaxies being formed?

00:12:52.000 We know they vary in size.

00:12:54.000 Do we understand why and we understand what causes them to form in the first place?

00:13:00.000 Yeah, we're still learning that.

00:13:02.000 We had this picture before we started finding exoplanets that everything would just be like the solar system.

00:13:06.000 You have these eight planets, circular orbits, you have the rocky planets on the inside, the gas giants on the outside.

00:13:12.000 And we came up with this really elegant theory, this kind of nebula theory, to try and explain that.

00:13:17.000 And did a great job.

00:13:18.000 Explain everything.

00:13:19.000 But then as soon as we started finding exoplanets, I mean, one of the first type of exoplanets we found was these hot Jupiters.

00:13:23.000 So these are Jupiter-sized planets, which are about 20 times closer to their star than Mercury is around the Sun.

00:13:30.000 And when those were first announced, nobody believed them.

00:13:33.000 People were like, you can't get a Jupiter there.

00:13:35.000 Jupiter is supposed to be 5 AU.

00:13:37.000 How do you get it parked almost onto the surface of the star?

00:13:40.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:13:41.000 None of the planet formation models could explain that.

00:13:43.000 And it took until we found about 10 of them in a row that people started slowly changing their minds.

00:13:49.000 And the proof of the pudding was when one of them eclipsed its star.

00:13:52.000 So one of them actually passed right in front of the star, right at the moment it was supposed to, and we saw an eclipse.

00:13:57.000 And when that happened, everyone was like, all right, this is real.

00:14:01.000 But then we had to figure out how the hell do you do that?

00:14:04.000 So it was a long skeptical curve to get to that point.

00:14:07.000 And now we think the way to make those things is there's probably Jupiters on the outside of the solar system.

00:14:12.000 They come too close to each other.

00:14:14.000 They gravitation, like kind of wrestling almost.

00:14:16.000 They kind of excite each other.

00:14:17.000 One of them gets kicked out in a random direction and it can get flung into a highly eccentric orbit.

00:14:22.000 And a highly eccentric orbit over time will circularize.

00:14:25.000 So it doesn't want to stay on an eccentric orbit.

00:14:27.000 It wants to turn into a circle through the tidal interactions with the star.

00:14:31.000 So these things probably circularize really close onto their stars.

00:14:34.000 But this is unusual.

00:14:35.000 It only happens about 1% of star systems.

00:14:37.000 We see this.

00:14:38.000 But it's an example of how diverse things are.

00:14:42.000 Another example is mini-Neptunes.

00:14:43.000 You ever heard of those planets?

00:14:44.000 No.

00:14:45.000 So mini-Neptunes are these planets which are in between the size of the Earth and Neptune.

00:14:49.000 Neptune's about four times bigger than the Earth.

00:14:51.000 So these things are about twice the size of the Earth.

00:14:53.000 We don't have anything like that in the solar system.

00:14:56.000 So we don't know what it is.

00:14:57.000 Is it a big rock?

00:14:59.000 Is it like a super-Earth?

00:15:00.000 A mega-earth?

00:15:02.000 Or is it a scaled-down version of Neptune?

00:15:04.000 Is it like an ocean world maybe of some kind?

00:15:06.000 And turns out that planet is the most common type of planet in the universe, as far as we can tell.

00:15:12.000 And we don't have one.

00:15:14.000 Wow.

00:15:15.000 So that's kind of weird, right?

00:15:16.000 I mean, it seems like there's so many aspects of our solar system that are unusual.

00:15:20.000 Even having a Jupiter, only 10% of stars have a Jupiter, as far as we can tell.

00:15:25.000 10% of how many stars that have been observed.

00:15:28.000 Oh, at this point, I mean, we've observed hundreds of thousands of stars, and we know about 6,000 exoplanets.

00:15:36.000 So of that population, you correct for the statistics, you correct for the ones you've missed.

00:15:39.000 Even so, I mean, these Jupiter's the easiest ones to find, right?

00:15:42.000 They're the big boys, they wobble the star a ton, so they're pretty easy to spot.

00:15:46.000 So 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.

00:15:53.000 So that seems interesting to our own origin in the solar system.

00:15:57.000 And similarly, having eight planets, that's pretty unusual.

00:16:00.000 We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.

00:16:02.000 How many solar systems are binary solar systems as opposed to having a single star?

00:16:08.000 Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.

00:16:12.000 Really?

00:16:12.000 It's very common.

00:16:13.000 It's actually Alpha Centauri AB, that's the nearest star system to us.

00:16:18.000 And it's actually a trinary.

00:16:20.000 There's Alpha AB that go around each other really close.

00:16:23.000 And then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside.

00:16:25.000 And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Sene.

00:16:33.000 It's a candidate.

00:16:34.000 We 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.

00:16:43.000 So it is a candidate for a planet?

00:16:48.000 So it hasn't been completely confirmed?

00:16:49.000 James Webb just spotted it.

00:16:50.000 James Webb spotted it just kind of out today.

00:16:54.000 So there's three photos that James Webb took.

00:16:56.000 Maybe they'll be in this article somewhere.

00:16:58.000 Took three images, and in one of those images, it captures an actual photo of the planet.

00:17:04.000 You can see the planet in direct light.

00:17:05.000 That's how powerful James Webb is.

00:17:08.000 And it's a nearby star, so it's easy to image.

00:17:10.000 Yeah, right here.

00:17:11.000 So that S1, that's the planet you're looking at.

00:17:16.000 Wow.

00:17:17.000 So you see you have to block out the star in the middle, because the star is like a billion times brighter than the planet.

00:17:22.000 So you have to suppress it with all this advanced chronograph technology that James Webb has.

00:17:27.000 But when you do that and you zoom right in, you see this little planet there.

00:17:31.000 It's probably about the same size as Saturn.

00:17:32.000 It's probably a big boy.

00:17:33.000 I love how they went with the real clickbaity headline with Avatar Planet.

00:17:38.000 The other article that you pulled up was this.

00:17:40.000 I was quoting that one.

00:17:42.000 The planet from the Avatar movies may exist in real life.

00:17:44.000 Like, shut up.

00:17:45.000 You're just trying to get people to click on that.

00:17:48.000 It's kind of weird that they have to do that.

00:17:50.000 But this is the world we're living in now.

00:17:51.000 Everyone has such a short attention span.

00:17:53.000 You're fuddling through your Google feed.

00:17:55.000 Like, what's new?

00:17:56.000 Yeah, it's got to connect to something pop culture, otherwise, people are like.

00:17:59.000 Yeah, it's got to get you somehow.

00:18:02.000 There's some editor.

00:18:03.000 It's probably more like, you know, the three-body problem, the books and the show?

00:18:08.000 Yes.

00:18:08.000 Is the Trisolarans?

00:18:10.000 And they live there.

00:18:12.000 So there's the three stars, Triselarin, and the dynamics is so crazy that it pushes these planets into these highly eccentric and twisted orbits.

00:18:21.000 And that's exactly what this planet appears to be.

00:18:23.000 So this planet actually looks more like, rather than avatar, it actually looks more like trisolarin or solaris, whatever it's called.

00:18:29.000 Pull that article back up again, please, Jamie?

00:18:32.000 The second one, the one that was less clickbaity?

00:18:35.000 So how large is this planet, this S1?

00:18:40.000 It's hard to tell.

00:18:41.000 It looks like it's about 100 times heavier than the Earth.

00:18:43.000 So that's about Saturn.

00:18:44.000 Wow.

00:18:45.000 Roughly Saturn.

00:18:46.000 But it's only a candidate, right?

00:18:48.000 So we need to get more images of it to confirm that it's real.

00:18:52.000 So I'm sure James Ebble will point back at it.

00:18:53.000 But I mean, look at it.

00:18:55.000 It looks pretty convincing.

00:18:56.000 I mean, how do you get that big blob of light sat there?

00:18:59.000 So I think the signal to noise is really good.

00:19:01.000 So 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?

00:19:15.000 Like, why do they form in that way?

00:19:17.000 Like, why does Bode's law work?

00:19:19.000 Does it still work?

00:19:20.000 It kind of works, but it makes some...

00:19:24.000 Yeah, so Bode's law is essentially looking at the separation between the planets in the solar system.

00:19:28.000 So Venus, for instance, well, Mercury is about 0.4 AU.

00:19:33.000 Venus is 0.7.

00:19:34.000 The Earth is 1, and Mars is 1.5.

00:19:36.000 So there seems to be a pattern.

00:19:37.000 And I think it's like a fraction of 1.5 or something in terms of like, take the last one and just multiply it by 1.5 and you roughly.

00:19:43.000 And is it dependent upon the mass of the planet?

00:19:45.000 No, it's just purely their spacing.

00:19:47.000 So it was, yeah, it has some problems.

00:19:50.000 It doesn't particularly work that well.

00:19:52.000 It predicts there's a planet where the asteroid belt is.

00:19:54.000 And obviously there isn't one there, but maybe you could argue something.

00:19:58.000 I think it's a lot of the asteroid belts there, right?

00:19:59.000 You could argue that.

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00:20:37.000 But then more problematically, people have tried to apply this to exoplanets.

00:20:40.000 So you've got these multi-planet systems, and we know of like maybe three or four planets, and there's gaps.

00:20:45.000 And so you can say, okay, let's use Bode's law and predict, okay, there should be a planet right here.

00:20:50.000 And then people have done the observations.

00:20:52.000 They've like dialed in and put all the telescripts on and be like, where's that planet?

00:20:55.000 Sometimes they found the planets there, but usually not.

00:20:58.000 It's not that predictive.

00:20:59.000 How common are asteroid belts?

00:21:02.000 We can't detect asteroid belts.

00:21:02.000 We don't know.

00:21:04.000 Right, that's the question.

00:21:05.000 So in these gaps where a planet should be, what if there was an asteroid belt in every one of them?

00:21:09.000 Yeah.

00:21:09.000 That would kind of change everything.

00:21:10.000 That'd be wild.

00:21:11.000 I'd love that.

00:21:12.000 Yeah, then we'd be back to Bode's law.

00:21:14.000 I mean, but Bode's law, I guess it's actually really a statement.

00:21:16.000 There's a great dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this.

00:21:20.000 That 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.

00:21:28.000 And the ones that are left will follow Bode's law.

00:21:31.000 So it's not so much a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these planets at the right places.

00:21:38.000 It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with.

00:21:41.000 Like you just can't cram planets any closer together.

00:21:44.000 So what is our current belief system when it comes to the formation of solar systems?

00:21:51.000 It appears to be very common.

00:21:52.000 I 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.

00:22:00.000 And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet.

00:22:04.000 So as far as we can tell, this is, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets.

00:22:10.000 It's like path for the course for that to happen.

00:22:12.000 That was a big breakthrough.

00:22:14.000 The second thing is, as we kind of alluded to, there's a huge diversity in them.

00:22:18.000 And the actual story we normally describe for how they form is that there's some giant molecular cloud, we call it.

00:22:25.000 So basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space.

00:22:27.000 Stuff 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.

00:22:37.000 And 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.

00:22:45.000 So, gravity wants to make it's like a greedy algorithm, wants to make everything get denser and denser and denser.

00:22:50.000 It's super greedy.

00:22:50.000 It's relentless gravity.

00:22:52.000 It never stops.

00:22:53.000 And that's why eventually we end up with black holes, right?

00:22:55.000 Because it just refuses to lose black holes.

00:22:57.000 Gravity always wants to win the game. 0.85

00:22:59.000 So eventually, these clouds collapse.

00:23:01.000 And the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right?

00:23:06.000 Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make a star in the center.

00:23:11.000 And the stuff that's left over on the outside, that disk of material, because the star kind of blasts out of its poles and kind of pummels all the gas 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.

00:23:26.000 And then from that disk, you start to coalesce.

00:23:28.000 Again, just some areas are slightly denser, some areas are slightly less dense.

00:23:31.000 And gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together.

00:23:34.000 So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand.

00:23:39.000 So we know how to go, for instance, from pebbles.

00:23:43.000 If you start off with pebbles and imagine them kind of bouncing around, we can imagine sticking them into boulders.

00:23:48.000 We kind of understand how that could happen, but we don't quite understand how to do some of the steps, like go all the way from dust, which presumably at one point was just dust.

00:23:55.000 How do you go from dust all the way up to pebbles all the way up to these boulders all the way up to planetesimals?

00:24:00.000 That whole story we don't understand.

00:24:02.000 We've got bits of it where we think we understand it, but the whole thing we don't.

00:24:07.000 Are there any working models or anything?

00:24:10.000 Yeah, this is a hugely, huge, active area of research.

00:24:13.000 People are simulating dust on supercomputers, trying to stick it together, figure out what happened.

00:24:19.000 But it's chaotic.

00:24:20.000 I mean, you've got trillions and trillions of particles of dust randomly moving around, and solving the equations to calculate their motion is one of the most challenging things ever.

00:24:30.000 Maybe AI will help a big part with that.

00:24:32.000 That would be interesting.

00:24:33.000 Is it also a factor of the size of the sun?

00:24:36.000 Like, our star is fairly small in terms of what we know about the universe.

00:24:42.000 One 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.

00:24:55.000 Then it goes on and on and on to get to like Betelgeuse and you get to some wild.

00:24:59.000 It just gets so crazy.

00:25:01.000 It's got to stop at some point.

00:25:02.000 It keeps going.

00:25:03.000 It's like a galaxy-sized star.

00:25:06.000 Like, what is that thing?

00:25:07.000 It gets so nutty.

00:25:08.000 It's so big.

00:25:09.000 Strange, yeah.

00:25:10.000 Yeah, I mean, our star is.

00:25:11.000 I mean, those big stars, those are actually rare, right?

00:25:14.000 So those are the giant stars of the universe.

00:25:17.000 And most stars are not that big.

00:25:18.000 What is the biggest one that we found?

00:25:20.000 Oh, I don't know the name, but yeah, I think you're talking about stars which are probably filling up to the orbit of Jupiter type size.

00:25:27.000 So for weird at Jupiter.

00:25:27.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 Oh my God.

00:25:29.000 Yeah.

00:25:31.000 Just imagine a star from our sun that goes all the way out to Jupiter.

00:25:38.000 It's nuts.

00:25:39.000 Wow.

00:25:39.000 Yeah.

00:25:40.000 And these things are barely stars at that point.

00:25:42.000 Like if you actually, if you could zoom in in a spaceship and look at the surface, the gravity would be so weak at that point, right?

00:25:49.000 Because the mass hasn't changed of the star.

00:25:51.000 In fact, anything it's lost mass.

00:25:53.000 So it's barely got enough gravity to hold that thing together.

00:25:56.000 So the thing is like fluctuating.

00:25:58.000 It's like a giant sheet that someone's waving up and down.

00:26:01.000 So that's why those stars have these wild fluctuations in brightness because they're just kind of undulating on their surface.

00:26:09.000 What is this one, Jamie?

00:26:10.000 Is this the largest one?

00:26:12.000 That's the name of the biggest one, I guess.

00:26:13.000 Stevenson 218.

00:26:14.000 What is the little tiny one in the far left?

00:26:16.000 That's our sun.

00:26:18.000 It's so crazy.

00:26:22.000 Look at our sun in comparison to that thing.

00:26:24.000 Oh my God.

00:26:25.000 And what's crazy is that the most common type of star in the universe is even smaller than the sun.

00:26:30.000 So the most common type of star in the universe is a red dwarf.

00:26:33.000 75% of all stars are red dwarfs.

00:26:36.000 Only 10% of stars look like our sun.

00:26:39.000 So already that's kind of odd.

00:26:40.000 You kind of think, all things being equal, how come we don't live around a red dwarf? 1.00

00:26:45.000 Right, and what is causing one to be so massive and another solar system, you know, fairly close to it to be small?

00:26:53.000 And like, what is yeah, the difference is it's always easier to make a small thing, right?

00:26:58.000 It's kind of like Having crumbs down your sofa or something, like breaking up, right?

00:27:03.000 It's easier to have small, dusty things than it is to have huge pieces of cookies still left in the bottom of your sofa.

00:27:08.000 So, generally, it's pretty hard for the conditions to come together to make a gigantic, supermassive star.

00:27:13.000 In the early universe, those conditions were present more often because it was just so dense.

00:27:18.000 But as we go forward in time, it gets harder and harder to make those super huge behemoths.

00:27:23.000 These stars called they're called the type 3 population stars, and we haven't found one of those.

00:27:28.000 James Webb might be able to detect one.

00:27:30.000 Those would be the first stars ever born.

00:27:32.000 They're like the primordial, pristine stars that would be uncontaminated by any metals.

00:27:38.000 So, our sun has a ton of metals in it.

00:27:40.000 Most stars do.

00:27:41.000 We can use that to figure out how old they are and their history.

00:27:44.000 But the first stars would have been just these pure, pristine, hydrogen-helium things.

00:27:48.000 We'd love to be able to see what they look like.

00:27:50.000 I mean, because we've never seen one of those up close, but generally, yeah, the smaller you are, the easier it is to make that star.

00:27:55.000 And the anticipation of the existence of those things, like how far away are we talking about?

00:28:00.000 Yeah, those stars would be the first star.

00:28:02.000 So, you're probably looking at 100 million years after the Big Bang.

00:28:06.000 So, yeah, you'd have to look back to 13.7, 13.8 billion years ago.

00:28:12.000 Is the James Webb capable of seeing that?

00:28:14.000 I think there's, I think it's possible.

00:28:17.000 Yeah, this isn't, I don't think there's consensus on this.

00:28:19.000 I've seen some people say it might just about be possible, and others say it's completely impossible.

00:28:24.000 You need the next generation. 0.92

00:28:25.000 But I think if we're lucky, it could just happen.

00:28:28.000 How many next generations do you anticipate?

00:28:30.000 And 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.

00:28:39.000 Like, 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.

00:28:55.000 Well, we're so limited in what we can see.

00:29:00.000 It's still a device that's in space.

00:29:03.000 Yeah.

00:29:04.000 And it's a device that's so close to us.

00:29:06.000 Yeah.

00:29:06.000 It's just so close, relatively speaking.

00:29:09.000 You know, it takes forever to get there.

00:29:11.000 It's really powerful rockets and all that, but it's just right there.

00:29:14.000 Like, what could we come up with without AI?

00:29:19.000 Like, what theories are in place to make something that has a far wider range and much more clarity?

00:29:27.000 The ultimate, I mean, I love this idea of thinking about what an alien does.

00:29:27.000 Yeah.

00:29:30.000 How would an alien observe the Earth if they had unbounded technology?

00:29:34.000 What would be the limit?

00:29:35.000 And a lot of us think that the ultimate telescope would be to use the sun as a telescope.

00:29:41.000 So the sun has intense gravity and it bends light.

00:29:46.000 So this was an experiment that Arthur Eddington did to prove Einstein-right general relativity.

00:29:50.000 He took photographs of the stars during a lunar total eclipse and he noticed that stars seemed to shift right next to the sun.

00:29:57.000 And so he used that to figure out how much light bends.

00:30:00.000 So whenever you have light bending, that's a telescope.

00:30:03.000 That's a mirror.

00:30:05.000 So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun, it'll bend to a focus.

00:30:10.000 And that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculate it.

00:30:13.000 It's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun, so 550 AU.

00:30:18.000 And along, if you just travel out in a line from that point, there's called a focal line, you put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area of the sun.

00:30:27.000 So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there.

00:30:35.000 It'd be wild.

00:30:36.000 That is the ultimate in my book for what an alien would do.

00:30:40.000 If 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.

00:30:47.000 And this is just with our understanding of telescopes and our understanding of viewing things.

00:30:53.000 And clearly, you could imagine with known physics.

00:30:56.000 Yeah, you can imagine physics that are a million years more technologically advanced and innovations that we can't even comprehend.

00:31:02.000 Yeah.

00:31:03.000 Can't even conceive of.

00:31:04.000 That change everything.

00:31:04.000 Yeah.

00:31:05.000 I mean, even with this telescope, you can't see people.

00:31:08.000 You won't be able to image Earth.

00:31:09.000 You won't be able to read the headlines on a newspaper on someone's doorstep.

00:31:12.000 It's not powerful enough to do that.

00:31:14.000 If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system.

00:31:16.000 And so we're talking about doing that as well.

00:31:18.000 So 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.

00:31:27.000 Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right?

00:31:30.000 You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.

00:31:33.000 How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?

00:31:36.000 Well, it's four light years away, 4.2 light years.

00:31:38.000 So it would take four years?

00:31:39.000 Yes.

00:31:39.000 And it would take it about 20 years to do the journey at the speeds they were talking.

00:31:42.000 They want to get 20% of the speed of light.

00:31:45.000 So they'd take 20 years, take a photo, so 24 years altogether.

00:31:49.000 So this was Yuri Milner's brainchild, and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earth-like planet.

00:31:54.000 And that's pretty much the best way we have to really pull that off.

00:31:59.000 Is there work being done to try to make that happen?

00:32:01.000 Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of Starshot.

00:32:04.000 Yuri put $100 million up, I believe, for his own money.

00:32:08.000 And I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it, and they were like, we're going to try and do this.

00:32:13.000 I wasn't part of that project, but I was inspired by it.

00:32:16.000 And I actually came up with a twist on it recently called TARS from Interstellar.

00:32:23.000 Have you known TARS from the movie?

00:32:25.000 What was TARS?

00:32:25.000 It's like a robot thing that's in the movie.

00:32:28.000 It's called TARS.

00:32:29.000 And so I came up with a twist on their idea.

00:32:32.000 So let me explain their idea quickly first, and then I'll give you my twist.

00:32:34.000 Their idea is: if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship.

00:32:39.000 That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now.

00:32:42.000 The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny thin sheet of material, like imagine like a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser.

00:32:55.000 And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right?

00:32:59.000 So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.

00:33:01.000 Yeah, here we go.

00:33:01.000 Here's the three.

00:33:02.000 So here's the sail being ejected.

00:33:04.000 And then back on the Earth, you're going to have this huge array of mega lasers.

00:33:09.000 And they're all going to point up at this thing and blast it.

00:33:12.000 So this thing will accelerate due to just light from the sun, but this is given it.

00:33:16.000 This is like on steroids, right?

00:33:17.000 You just kind of bump it up to whatever speed you want.

00:33:21.000 Now, 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?

00:33:28.000 Like you're firing a 100-gigawatt laser at a sail.

00:33:30.000 Like, isn't that going to obliterate the thing?

00:33:32.000 So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam.

00:33:38.000 And then, of course, like, how do you, you know, what if it hits dust on the way?

00:33:42.000 Isn't that great?

00:33:43.000 That's why it's on its side now.

00:33:44.000 So it's twisted over on its side to try and avoid smashing into dust particles on its journey.

00:33:49.000 Hopefully a flock of birds doesn't catch a stray.

00:33:52.000 And here it comes into Proxima Centauri into the Afro Centauri system. 0.69

00:33:56.000 There's Proxima down on the right.

00:33:58.000 And so it's going to fly past.

00:34:00.000 There is actually a planet there.

00:34:01.000 We know there's a planet there.

00:34:02.000 It's going to fly past it and try and snap a photo.

00:34:04.000 There it is.

00:34:05.000 And then beam that bad boy back.

00:34:07.000 Wow.

00:34:07.000 And that's hard.

00:34:08.000 I mean, how do you even get the data transmission rate, right, to beam an image back?

00:34:13.000 Just imagine if it gets there and we see lights.

00:34:16.000 That'd be crazy.

00:34:18.000 It's so.

00:34:19.000 This episode is brought to you by SimplySafe.

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00:35:30.000 There's no safe like SimplySafe.

00:35:34.000 I mean, the possibility of life has always been like in front of our face.

00:35:38.000 There's just the cosmos is so great and so massive.

00:35:41.000 You've got the Fermi paradox, like, where are they?

00:35:43.000 Why aren't they here?

00:35:44.000 And then you've got what's happening here on Earth.

00:35:46.000 And it just always makes me wonder, like, how far do things actually get before they fall apart?

00:35:51.000 Do they always fall apart?

00:35:53.000 Or do they always become non-biological and not have the need for all the things that we do that show signs of life?

00:36:01.000 Like the certain gases, the biological life exceeds.

00:36:05.000 Like, what could what could be out there could be something beyond our wildest imagination.

00:36:13.000 Like many iterations of artificial intelligence, many down the road to the point where it's not even recognizable as life and doesn't even have to have a physical form.

00:36:25.000 Yeah, obviously if it's completely recognizable, there's nothing we can really do to detect it.

00:36:29.000 But when we look at, I mean, we basically know two things about the universe in terms of life in it.

00:36:33.000 We know that we have not been colonized, right?

00:36:36.000 Allegedly.

00:36:36.000 As far as we can tell.

00:36:37.000 Yeah, allegedly.

00:36:38.000 It depends on whose YouTube videos you watch.

00:36:40.000 But let's talk.

00:36:42.000 Let's talk about like a hard colonization where it's like literally everywhere.

00:36:47.000 It's transforming the freaking planet into machines.

00:36:50.000 Like that clearly has not happened here.

00:36:53.000 We're not grey goo on the surface.

00:36:54.000 Not yet.

00:36:55.000 So we know that hasn't happened yet.

00:36:57.000 And we also know, and the universe, you know, the galaxy is old.

00:37:00.000 It's 13 billion years old.

00:37:01.000 So there's a heck of a lot of time for that to happen.

00:37:05.000 One of the strangest facets of our technology is that it's already fast enough to explore the whole galaxy.

00:37:11.000 If you take Voyager 2, it was traveling at 15 kilometers per second.

00:37:16.000 So that would get you across the entire diameter of the galaxy in 2 billion years.

00:37:22.000 And the galaxy is 13 billion years.

00:37:24.000 So Voyager 2 at Voyager 2 speeds, crappy alien technology out there, could already have spanned the whole thing if they just arrived early enough.

00:37:32.000 So it is a problem.

00:37:35.000 And this is called fact A, heart's fact A. This clearly hasn't happened.

00:37:39.000 That's one thing we know for sure.

00:37:41.000 And 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.

00:37:48.000 We don't see engineering on them, as far as we can tell.

00:37:51.000 We don't see stars which are obviously got megastructures around them, obviously been engineered in weird ways.

00:37:57.000 And when you say megastructures, you're talking about like literally an artificial planet-sized thing.

00:38:01.000 Yeah, I mean, huge structures could be built around these things like Dyson spheres.

00:38:06.000 And people have talked about doing it for messaging.

00:38:08.000 Like you could put like sheets of material that were planet-sized.

00:38:11.000 And as they block light from the star, that would create like a Morse code, right?

00:38:14.000 You could actually message people for billions of years.

00:38:17.000 You would just build these stable sheets of material and they would just orbit around.

00:38:22.000 No power system required, right?

00:38:23.000 An orbit doesn't require power.

00:38:24.000 It would just orbit around for billions of years.

00:38:26.000 And every time it eclipses the star, there could be some intricate pattern of pulses.

00:38:30.000 And so that way you could communicate for a very long time.

00:38:34.000 We thought of all these wild ideas and we just don't see any of that.

00:38:37.000 So it does seem, as far as we can tell, that the universe is completely natural.

00:38:43.000 And that is mind-blowing because you're right.

00:38:45.000 Like it seems if it's happened here, why the hell shouldn't it happen elsewhere?

00:38:50.000 Why hasn't someone else got AI going crazy?

00:38:51.000 Why hasn't someone else gone even further than that, gone to the next level?

00:38:55.000 And the thing that really drives me wild with this is the Earth is like a paradise.

00:39:00.000 If you look at these other stars, these are the planets.

00:39:02.000 The Earth is unusual.

00:39:03.000 Most stars do not have an Earth-like planet.

00:39:05.000 It's at a level of maybe 1%, 2% at best.

00:39:09.000 And yet, here we have the Earth.

00:39:11.000 It not only is an Earth-like planet, has the right conditions for life, it has life on it.

00:39:16.000 So an alien could use some size telescope to figure that out.

00:39:19.000 They'd know we were here.

00:39:21.000 They would know not only we're here, but that there is complex life on this planet.

00:39:24.000 So for three and a half, three billion years, there was just simple life, just single-celled life on this planet.

00:39:30.000 Multicellular life is a recent thing.

00:39:32.000 So presumably that's rare, right?

00:39:34.000 If most of the time it's single-celled, most of the planets out there, presumably even if they have life on them, are in that state.

00:39:40.000 And then further, there's us here, right?

00:39:42.000 And we're going through this transitional point as a human society.

00:39:45.000 So you think if you're an anthropologist, this would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study.

00:39:52.000 So I think there's almost like a tourism paradox.

00:39:55.000 How come Earth is the perfect place to visit?

00:39:57.000 And yet we don't see any super obvious signs.

00:40:02.000 Some people feel differently about that, but certainly astronomers.

00:40:05.000 We don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around through our field of view.

00:40:11.000 But 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.

00:40:36.000 And also, they would have the ability to completely camouflage themselves, which would be ideal if you want to study things.

00:40:43.000 Have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix? 1.00

00:40:46.000 Great series.

00:40:48.000 It's an amazing documentary where these scientists were embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years.

00:40:57.000 So the chimpanzee had become completely conditioned to having these people around them.

00:41:03.000 And they had specific rules.

00:41:04.000 You don't make eye contact with them.

00:41:06.000 You stay 20 yards away from them, no food ever.

00:41:09.000 And just exist around them and they'll behave completely normally.

00:41:12.000 And so you get this wild, incredible series of chimpanzee behavior.

00:41:19.000 You get to see how they behave completely, just not even remotely in consideration of these human beings.

00:41:27.000 They don't even think about them.

00:41:29.000 They're just doing what they do.

00:41:32.000 If you wanted to observe human beings, the worst way to do it would be like fly a giant spaceship over them and freak them out.

00:41:39.000 You'd want to know, what are these fuckers up to?

00:41:42.000 Where 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?

00:41:55.000 There might be like a process that happens, regardless of if you're mammalian or reptilian or whatever kind of intelligence that you like.

00:42:04.000 Obviously, we know that crows are very different than us, but they're highly intelligent.

00:42:08.000 You could imagine a crow with thumbs.

00:42:11.000 You could imagine a crow that has fingers and lives somewhere else.

00:42:15.000 So it doesn't have to be just like us, but it has to be trying to figure out how to manipulate its environment, which is one of the key things that intelligent life, at least as we know it.

00:42:26.000 Well, we're really one of the only ones that do it that's intelligent.

00:42:30.000 But that's kind of an environmental thing because of dolphins and orcas.

00:42:34.000 There's no need to do that evolutionarily.

00:42:36.000 So if you imagine that there's a whole process that takes place, you would probably imagine that this is something that you would monitor anonymously.

00:42:51.000 You would want to be hidden.

00:42:52.000 Yeah, if you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to interfere with the experiment.

00:42:55.000 But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific.

00:42:58.000 So 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.

00:43:08.000 It doesn't mean the idea is wrong.

00:43:09.000 It just means I don't have, science is not going to have the tools to answer that question.

00:43:13.000 Of course, because there's no evidence.

00:43:15.000 I 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.

00:43:25.000 And they'd be like, well, where is it?

00:43:27.000 Oh, you can't see it because it's invisible.

00:43:29.000 So they'd walk across the room and they'd try to touch it.

00:43:31.000 And they'd be like, I can't feel it.

00:43:33.000 It's like, oh, yeah, you can't feel it either.

00:43:35.000 It's also impervious to touch.

00:43:37.000 So they'd be like, okay, so I'll put my infra goggles on and try and see the heat signature.

00:43:40.000 Oh, you can't see that either.

00:43:41.000 It doesn't emit any radiation.

00:43:43.000 So you can just keep going and going and saying it's just completely independent.

00:43:46.000 And then it's fine.

00:43:47.000 You can have that idea that you have a pet invisible, imperceptible dragon, but I can't address that with the tools of science.

00:43:54.000 So I'm not saying it's a crazy idea.

00:43:57.000 It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it.

00:44:00.000 But 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.

00:44:17.000 If you're aware of the Tic-Tac incident, so when you hear about things like that, in my mind, there's a couple possibilities.

00:44:26.000 One, super advanced, blacklisted military, some sort of a propulsion system that they've been working on for decades, completely in secrecy. 0.59

00:44:38.000 And they're testing them off of areas where you have a lot of military activity, which is where these things do take place.

00:44:44.000 One of them was San Diego.

00:44:46.000 That's the Nimitz.

00:44:47.000 And the other one, the Ryan Graves footage, the stuff that they get, that's on the East Coast.

00:44:50.000 But it's all in areas where they already do military training exercises with fighter jets.

00:44:55.000 So it would make sense that that's where you, if this was the United States government doing that stuff, they would do that.

00:45:00.000 But when you get back to like 2004 and you're talking about something that can go from 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, I think it's seven eighths of a second it went.

00:45:12.000 You have visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing.

00:45:19.000 No one understands what it is.

00:45:20.000 It flies directly to their cat point where their meetup point was supposed to be.

00:45:24.000 The whole thing's nuts.

00:45:26.000 It's fascinating.

00:45:26.000 Yeah.

00:45:27.000 I would love to know what the hell happened.

00:45:29.000 I think like everyone, I'm fascinated by it.

00:45:31.000 You can't throw it away.

00:45:32.000 It's one of those ones you can't throw.

00:45:34.000 I throw most of them away.

00:45:36.000 Most of them, I love UFO stories because they're fun.

00:45:40.000 But most of them, like, could be anything.

00:45:42.000 Something shady going on.

00:45:43.000 Could be people want attention.

00:45:43.000 Could be anything.

00:45:45.000 Could be military exercises.

00:45:47.000 Could be mass delusion.

00:45:49.000 Could be people just love to be special and have had some sort of an encounter, which they do.

00:45:55.000 It gives them some sort of social credit to have some sort of an encounter with a thing and they exaggerate.

00:46:00.000 And people love, love to exaggerate.

00:46:02.000 Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science.

00:46:05.000 That's sort of been my goal.

00:46:07.000 Like, how can science take a hold of this?

00:46:09.000 And, 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?

00:46:15.000 Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we want to send.

00:46:18.000 So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument, right?

00:46:21.000 We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera.

00:46:26.000 And we don't have access to those military devices.

00:46:28.000 It's all top secret.

00:46:30.000 So we can't even do that experiment.

00:46:32.000 But I can imagine thinking about how to do that.

00:46:35.000 One of the big numbers we don't know even with the visual reports is the false positive rate.

00:46:39.000 So this is a key number in science.

00:46:41.000 Whenever you do an experiment, you need to know how often does the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate.

00:46:46.000 Now, in the US, there's about 28,000 pilots across all military branches, and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average.

00:46:55.000 So that's 5.6 million hours in the air every year in one year.

00:47:01.000 Now, let's say a pilot, one in every 10,000 hours that they fly, they make a mistake.

00:47:08.000 They misidentify a balloon for a UAP or whatever it is.

00:47:12.000 One in 10,000.

00:47:13.000 That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have.

00:47:15.000 But even then, you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year made that way, or spurious, or not real, just from human error.

00:47:23.000 So the only way, and that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue Book.

00:47:25.000 Project Bluebook found about 742 per year was being reported.

00:47:29.000 So, you know, I made that number up one in 10,000.

00:47:32.000 But we need to know what that number is.

00:47:33.000 If it turns out there's an excess, like their error rate is 100,000, then that Project Bluebook number is super interesting.

00:47:41.000 And it would be in excess.

00:47:42.000 And we'd say we've detected something.

00:47:43.000 There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at.

00:47:46.000 But the problem is we don't know what that number is.

00:47:48.000 I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in like simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes.

00:47:59.000 Also, the problem with Project Blue Book was not an objective analysis of UFOs.

00:48:03.000 They had a directive, and the directive was to discredit everything.

00:48:06.000 Yeah.

00:48:07.000 Yeah, but even so, I'm just giving you sort of ball.

00:48:09.000 I mean, the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers.

00:48:12.000 You're getting like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right?

00:48:15.000 I think that's a crazy number to throw around.

00:48:16.000 So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose, you have to know the error rate of the experiment.

00:48:22.000 And we could imagine making that legit and doing it.

00:48:26.000 There's actually one of the recommendations of the task force, the NASA UAP task force, was to develop an app on people's phones, iPhones, because they have magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high-resolution images.

00:48:40.000 So 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.

00:48:53.000 You'd get all that kind of information.

00:48:55.000 And so there is actually, I think there's an app called Enigma you can now download that does this.

00:48:59.000 There's some independent apps which have been developed to do really?

00:49:01.000 Just about UAPs.

00:49:02.000 Yeah, for UAP spotting.

00:49:04.000 I wonder what they did with those in New Jersey when they were having all those stupid drone sightings.

00:49:08.000 Actually, I chatted to one of the developers and they said, yeah, things were going crazy that week.

00:49:14.000 That was so strange.

00:49:14.000 What was that all about?

00:49:16.000 That was so strange.

00:49:17.000 That'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?

00:49:27.000 Is this another country?

00:49:28.000 Is this some sort of private business that wants to test how fantastic their drones are?

00:49:34.000 Like, why?

00:49:35.000 Why is this happening?

00:49:36.000 And why are you freaking everybody out?

00:49:38.000 It 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.

00:49:51.000 If 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?

00:50:01.000 There shouldn't be anything in orbit of the Earth at that point.

00:50:03.000 Right.

00:50:04.000 So that would be more compelling.

00:50:05.000 But of course, we can't rewind the tape.

00:50:07.000 And 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.

00:50:07.000 Right.

00:50:14.000 And I, you know, I'm not saying they're liars, but that's not enough.

00:50:18.000 I need something.

00:50:20.000 Yeah, I think it depends what your goal is.

00:50:23.000 If your goal is to convince yourself that aliens are out there because you saw a UFO, I think that's easy enough to do.

00:50:28.000 But most people in that world, they want more than that.

00:50:31.000 They want me to believe it.

00:50:32.000 They want you to believe it.

00:50:33.000 They want everyone to believe it, to come along for the ride.

00:50:35.000 Right.

00:50:37.000 It's like having a religious guy can lock your door, like, join my church.

00:50:40.000 It's not enough for them to have the personal belief.

00:50:43.000 It has to grow.

00:50:44.000 And so if you really want to convince everyone, that's going to naturally include the skeptics, the doubters.

00:50:52.000 It's going to include the scientists.

00:50:54.000 If you want to bring everyone in with you, then the standard of evidence is going to be pretty damn good.

00:51:00.000 It's got to be really strong.

00:51:02.000 And we're just not there, right?

00:51:04.000 There's too many ways out, right?

00:51:05.000 If 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.

00:51:14.000 That's what I would do.

00:51:14.000 Yeah.

00:51:16.000 I would never show myself.

00:51:19.000 I feel like if they can get it.

00:51:20.000 But then why the UFOs at all?

00:51:22.000 Because they're probably monitoring us.

00:51:24.000 Like I would monitor us if I was a scientist from another planet.

00:51:28.000 Imagine we leave this planet, we become interstellar, we evolve past war and all the horrible things that are holding us back right now.

00:51:38.000 We reach a state of evolution a million years more advanced, and then we start to explore the galaxy for other habitable planets and other, and we find something like us.

00:51:49.000 I mean, what would we go?

00:51:50.000 Oh, boy, what are we doing?

00:51:50.000 All right, we got one.

00:51:52.000 I 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.

00:52:13.000 With 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?

00:52:24.000 Yeah, every year there's a chance.

00:52:25.000 And there's been multiple close calls throughout history since 1945 on, multiple close calls.

00:52:32.000 That 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. 0.84

00:52:50.000 Like 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.

00:53:00.000 Like if someone can go mad enough, and clearly many people did, to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that happened.

00:53:09.000 We know human beings are capable of that.

00:53:11.000 It was 80 years ago, wasn't it?

00:53:13.000 Which is kind of wild and it hasn't happened since.

00:53:15.000 But if that's possible, then it's also possible for just annihilation.

00:53:19.000 It's a possible that they just start launching and then there's rubble and then you're left with roaches.

00:53:26.000 And that could have happened all throughout the universe.

00:53:29.000 So there might be a thing where there's a protocol where you recognize as soon as they start figuring out nuclear technology, okay, this is the big one.

00:53:37.000 We're no longer dealing with cannons and muskets. 0.99

00:53:39.000 Now we've got something really crazy.

00:53:42.000 They're flying through the sky and dropping nuclear weapons out of propeller-powered airplanes.

00:53:49.000 And they're doing it just 50 years after they invented the fucking airplane, which is even crazier.

00:53:54.000 They went from inventing the airplane to dropping.

00:53:57.000 They really want to kill themselves.

00:53:59.000 Like these people are Wild.

00:54:02.000 I mean, it's just like Chip Nation.

00:54:03.000 If you watch Chip Nation, they are so hyper-aggressive and violent.

00:54:08.000 That's our cousins.

00:54:08.000 That's us.

00:54:10.000 This is who we are.

00:54:11.000 This is our timeline of evolution on our planet in Earth.

00:54:11.000 This is who we are.

00:54:16.000 And I would imagine there would be similar situations all throughout the galaxy because I feel like the only way you really achieve hyper-innovation is through competition.

00:54:26.000 And the only way competition exists is it's got to be life or death.

00:54:31.000 And it starts out life or death with predators and neighboring tribes and eventually becomes cities and countries.

00:54:38.000 And there's something that has to motivate people to work 16 hours a day and develop the B-12 bomber.

00:54:45.000 Something has to take place.

00:54:47.000 So that something, unfortunately, also leads itself to want to control resources, dominate people, crush opposition, and that's where it gets crazy.

00:54:57.000 And I would imagine that's a formula, just like the formulation of solar systems and galaxies, probably varies a lot all throughout the universe.

00:55:04.000 But that formula is probably fairly stable.

00:55:07.000 Is that there has to be some form of really wild, aggressive kind of competition that leads them to this position.

00:55:15.000 There has to be a motivation to create AGI.

00:55:18.000 Why would you do that when you have a log cabin, you're sipping tea, sitting out there, enjoying the playing with your dog?

00:55:24.000 Like, why are you doing that?

00:55:26.000 Why are you making a non-biological super intelligence that may decide that you're obsolete?

00:55:32.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:55:33.000 It's a double-edged sword, right?

00:55:34.000 We have this tribalism in us, this competition, and that has undoubtedly led all the greatest innovations in science often happened during war, right?

00:55:43.000 I 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.

00:55:51.000 So it pushes us, it drives us to innovate to get one over our neighbors.

00:55:56.000 And maybe that is the universal story of the universe is a double-edged sword.

00:55:59.000 And that's the solution to the Great Filter.

00:56:02.000 The 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.

00:56:13.000 That the easiest stars to discover are the supernovae, right?

00:56:17.000 Because they just shine so freaking bright.

00:56:19.000 They can outshine an entire galaxy, right?

00:56:21.000 Because they're going nuts.

00:56:22.000 It's a brief thing, only lasts for maybe a few months or so, but the star is outshining an entire freaking galaxy during that time.

00:56:30.000 It is like a nuclear war going on inside that star.

00:56:33.000 And similarly, the first planets we found, the hot Jupiters, are freaks.

00:56:38.000 They are not normal things.

00:56:39.000 They're like the loud, you know, Lindsay Lohan in the room screaming at us. 0.92

00:56:43.000 Like, they're just like super easy to see.

00:56:46.000 Like, there's no way you can miss them.

00:56:47.000 They're obnoxious planets, right?

00:56:49.000 You can't not detect them.

00:56:51.000 And so, by analogy, we've seen this so many times in astronomy.

00:56:55.000 The first thing we detect, the first example of something we detect is often not typical.

00:57:00.000 It's often that loud asshole version of the thing, right?

00:57:04.000 And so maybe the first civilization we set will be like that.

00:57:07.000 And if they were on their deathbed, right, they're about to nuke each other to hell.

00:57:12.000 They have a good motivation to reach out to us, right?

00:57:14.000 Because they've got nothing to lose.

00:57:16.000 We might be like worried right now because maybe we could see we've got a future ahead of us.

00:57:20.000 But if you think this is it, I'm done, like, what have you got to lose?

00:57:23.000 You may as well send a message out saying, hey, we were here.

00:57:26.000 This is our shit.

00:57:27.000 Please help us if you can because we're about to go to hell.

00:57:29.000 Well, there's probably a bunch of different kinds of intelligent beings on every planet.

00:57:35.000 Just like there's people like you and me, and then there's war hawks that are working for the military industrial complex right now.

00:57:41.000 They're trying to figure out how to invade some country to get their natural gas.

00:57:45.000 This is just, there's a bunch of different types of intelligent people, intelligent creatures here on Earth.

00:57:52.000 You would imagine there would be people out there in those planets that would go, guys, this is fucking terrible.

00:57:57.000 We'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.

00:58:07.000 There'd probably be a bunch of people that were in, it's not like everyone would be lockstep into self-destruction.

00:58:13.000 Well, the Starshot thing, I remember some team members talked about that.

00:58:16.000 I was in some of the meetings and they said maybe we should lace human DNA into the sail.

00:58:21.000 So when it hits this planet, at least our DNA, because it's looking grim here, at least then there's like a seed of us.

00:58:30.000 I don't think it's looking grim.

00:58:31.000 I think it's looking challenging.

00:58:33.000 And I think this is how we're going to make it out of this with an improved version of civilization.

00:58:38.000 I hope so.

00:58:39.000 And I think I really believe that.

00:58:41.000 I 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.

00:58:52.000 We just don't improve in a logical way and we improve in a push and pull.

00:58:57.000 We improve in a constant state of over-correction and response to the over-correction and back and forth.

00:59:04.000 And there's always a bunch of people that are so confused.

00:59:06.000 Why can't we be logical?

00:59:07.000 Why can't we be rational?

00:59:09.000 I think those people have always existed.

00:59:11.000 And 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.

00:59:20.000 And they're always duking it out to see who captures the minds and hearts of the beings that inhabit this civilization.

00:59:28.000 And I think that's where we're at right now.

00:59:30.000 We're at this weird thing where we're trying to figure out what is good, what is kind, what is just.

00:59:36.000 You know, how many people are pretending to be kind just so they can grab power?

00:59:40.000 How many people are just trying to use control to force people to listen to them and believe what they believe?

00:59:45.000 Whether it's religion or whether it's ideology, like what is it that's actually, what is important?

00:59:52.000 And we have 100 years.

00:59:54.000 We have 100 years and everybody's just trying to gather shit.

00:59:57.000 Everybody's just trying to collect items and hold on to as many material possessions as they can.

01:00:01.000 It's totally illogical.

01:00:03.000 Totally illogical.

01:00:04.000 You'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.

01:00:16.000 But yet, what are you doing?

01:00:17.000 You'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.

01:00:23.000 We're silly, but we're a hundred percent committed to getting more stuff.

01:00:28.000 Yeah, you know, it's like this bizarre life form, but it's figuring itself out, you know, and we're aware of that bizarreness.

01:00:36.000 Like I'm saying this and no one is going, that doesn't make any sense.

01:00:39.000 Like 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.

01:00:48.000 So if you're 60 and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy.

01:00:52.000 Everyone knows that, but yet we still all do it.

01:00:54.000 It's still collectively something that like the vast majority of people engage in.

01:01:00.000 We're programmed that way.

01:01:00.000 We can't get out of it.

01:01:01.000 Well, I think it's one of the things that leads us to technological innovation and one of the things that leads us to the creation of artificial life.

01:01:09.000 It's like when I think about beings that do things that seemingly, I mean, obviously leaf cutter ants know what they're doing, right?

01:01:19.000 Because they do it everywhere the same way.

01:01:21.000 I mean, I have them in my yard.

01:01:23.000 They're fascinating.

01:01:24.000 Yeah, I love this thing.

01:01:25.000 They're so cool.

01:01:26.000 The museum, natural history, has this awesome exhibit, and you can just see them crawling along all across the museum.

01:01:32.000 And yeah, my kids and I would just say that.

01:01:33.000 They're so cool.

01:01:34.000 So obviously they know what they're doing.

01:01:36.000 But how do they know what they're doing?

01:01:38.000 And why are they doing that?

01:01:39.000 Why do they always create that structure that literally has room for fermentation?

01:01:43.000 So it has air holes that go through these chambers where they drop the leaves in.

01:01:47.000 They let the leaves, the natural rotting take place and fermentation.

01:01:52.000 Okay, that's what leafcutter ants do. 0.91

01:01:54.000 That's what they do.

01:01:55.000 Well, what do we do?

01:01:56.000 If I was looking at us from somewhere else, I was like, what is the predominant species on this planet does?

01:02:02.000 Well, it makes better shit.

01:02:03.000 That's what it does.

01:02:04.000 It's the only planet that makes things that manipulated its environment radically, even to the detriment, and ignores it because it wants to keep doing it.

01:02:13.000 Whether 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.

01:02:25.000 We need progress.

01:02:26.000 I would look at that thing.

01:02:27.000 I was like, what did that thing do?

01:02:28.000 Well, it keeps making better stuff every year.

01:02:31.000 What 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.

01:02:38.000 And he says the thing we do as an intelligent species is transform our environment.

01:02:44.000 We're not subtle.

01:02:45.000 If you're a deo and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing.

01:02:49.000 It's right in fucking front of you.

01:02:50.000 There's no way you can miss it.

01:02:52.000 It's the craziest beehive ever.

01:02:53.000 Right.

01:02:54.000 So how come we don't see beehives in the stars?

01:02:57.000 I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem.

01:02:59.000 And he argues that that is an innate thing that an intelligent species should do.

01:03:03.000 He'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.

01:03:15.000 So, his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization.

01:03:19.000 It's spreading at the speed of light.

01:03:20.000 And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you, right?

01:03:25.000 There's just you can't perceive it because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

01:03:29.000 So, there's it's coming.

01:03:30.000 So, here's this prediction.

01:03:31.000 I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons, but yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it.

01:03:37.000 My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth.

01:03:46.000 So, the earth has about a billion years left on the clock, a long time, right?

01:03:52.000 So, it's four and a half billion years old, and it's had complex life for about 600 million years, 700 million years, roughly.

01:03:58.000 So, there's another roughly a billion to go where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now.

01:04:06.000 And 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.

01:04:14.000 So, 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.

01:04:22.000 I don't think you're going to extinguish every octopus, every raven.

01:04:25.000 And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom, like chimp, it's almost all over the place.

01:04:30.000 Intelligence, my provocative claim, is one of these great events that have happened in an evolutionary sense.

01:04:36.000 It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say.

01:04:39.000 But, like how photosynthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was an event which changed the history of the planet forever.

01:04:45.000 It's not going away.

01:04:46.000 Intelligence, I think, is the same thing.

01:04:48.000 It's here, and you can't get rid of it.

01:04:50.000 It's like an infestation, you can't scrub it.

01:04:53.000 It's too advantageous to species to be intelligent, not to do it once they've discovered that genetic solution.

01:04:59.000 So, I think we will have beings on this planet a billion years.

01:05:04.000 It'll probably happen many times.

01:05:05.000 There'll be civilizations which will emerge, and they'll be like, What the fuck did these humans do?

01:05:11.000 Look at this crap!

01:05:12.000 They'll be astonished at the shit we got up to.

01:05:16.000 And there'll be a lesson there for them, but it's always an opportunity for us to contact them because we could leave them a message, right?

01:05:23.000 We could put a beacon on the moon, we could put something there, and we could be like, Hey guys, this is everything we learned.

01:05:28.000 This is all our science, this is all our art, these are our songs.

01:05:31.000 Unload an update every couple of years, right?

01:05:33.000 Do like a foundation type thing.

01:05:35.000 And 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.

01:05:47.000 Wow, deep descendants, who will be a completely different species?

01:05:51.000 Yeah, well, that was my point about innovation and materialism, because materialism fuels innovation because you don't need a new phone.

01:06:01.000 You know, I'm sure your phone works great, but you're going to get a new phone.

01:06:04.000 I get a new phone every year, I love them, I love phones.

01:06:07.000 It's hard to do it.

01:06:07.000 I'm so dumb.

01:06:08.000 I just think, oh, 5x zoom.

01:06:10.000 Ooh, I always get the new one.

01:06:12.000 Oh, this one's got non-reflective glass.

01:06:15.000 We're going to keep doing that, and that innovation is ultimately going to lead to artificial life.

01:06:21.000 It's already in the works.

01:06:23.000 We're running right to the edge of the cliff right now in terms of AGI.

01:06:28.000 It's on the way, if it hasn't already hit it.

01:06:30.000 Do you think that's more of a risk than nuclear annihilation?

01:06:34.000 I don't think it's a risk.

01:06:35.000 I don't.

01:06:36.000 I think it's a complete transformation of what is the dominant species on the planet.

01:06:42.000 I think it's an emerging species.

01:06:45.000 And the way I've described us, I think we're the electronic caterpillar that's making the cocoon right now.

01:06:50.000 We don't even know why we're doing it.

01:06:52.000 Just like the leafcutter ants don't exactly know why they're making those incredible structures that they all make all over the world.

01:07:00.000 You know, I mean, they're similar everywhere on the planet.

01:07:04.000 I think we make life.

01:07:06.000 We just, it's a long road.

01:07:08.000 We have to figure out a bow and arrow.

01:07:10.000 Then we have to figure out a musket.

01:07:11.000 We have to figure out how to silo grain and how to protect an environment so that you could have scientists that aren't warriors that, you know, sit in these universities and figure things out.

01:07:22.000 And like, you have to be safe to do that, right?

01:07:25.000 So you have to have military might in order to keep them safe and protected from invaders.

01:07:29.000 And everybody has to be obsessed with buying new stuff.

01:07:32.000 Because if you're not obsessed with buying new stuff, you would just work enough to have food.

01:07:36.000 And the economy wouldn't push the way it pushes.

01:07:40.000 And you wouldn't get the kind of innovation that we get where they get the CES show every year with the new electronics.

01:07:45.000 You 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.

01:07:54.000 It's a matter of when now.

01:07:57.000 Or it physically, it might, in a non-physical sense, like it's not a physical thing, like a robot that's walking around talking to you.

01:08:04.000 It's probably already happened.

01:08:06.000 Whatever 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.

01:08:15.000 So fucking what?

01:08:17.000 It emulates 99% of what a human does right now and does it better than humans do.

01:08:24.000 It gets things wrong.

01:08:25.000 It's subject to ideological biases that are all over the internet.

01:08:28.000 It's just gathering up large language models, just gathering up information from websites.

01:08:32.000 And they're going to get a lot of goofy stuff for now.

01:08:35.000 For now, after a while, they're just going to be able to sift through that stuff and go, this is the funding of this study.

01:08:40.000 And this is how we know that this is biased because of this and this.

01:08:43.000 This is most likely the truth.

01:08:45.000 And this is most likely what's going on.

01:08:47.000 And this is what we absolutely know as fact.

01:08:49.000 And then it's going to make better versions of itself.

01:08:51.000 And then it's not going to need us anymore.

01:08:52.000 And this is probably what happens everywhere in the universe if you have to imagine that they all have technology.

01:08:59.000 If they all have technology, the ultimate expression of technology is figuring out how to make an artificial life form.

01:09:05.000 It's the ultimate expression of medical technology, biological technology.

01:09:10.000 You're going to want to try.

01:09:12.000 People are always going to try the same reason why they tried to figure out how to split the atom and were successful.

01:09:17.000 Supremacy.

01:09:18.000 They're going to do it.

01:09:19.000 Yeah.

01:09:19.000 It kind of creates a problem, though, for the Fermi paradox, right?

01:09:22.000 Because then if this is the inevitable outcome, and maybe you can explain why we don't see engineered stars, because a chimpanzee brain is basically just not smart enough to ever do that. 0.57

01:09:32.000 We'll just, you know, no matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out.

01:09:35.000 And maybe the electronic brain's not motivated to do it.

01:09:38.000 Maybe.

01:09:39.000 I mean, that's where it gets tricky.

01:09:41.000 Like, what is the motivation of this new thing we're creating?

01:09:46.000 One might imagine all he wants to do is solve math problems or something, right?

01:09:49.000 But whatever it is, if it's driven by computation, that computation is limited by energy.

01:09:54.000 And we all know this, right?

01:09:55.000 Because the amount of energy these data centers are now consuming for, you know, for meta and for ChatGPT, like it's gigantic.

01:10:03.000 Yeah, they're constructing their own nuclear power plants to power these things.

01:10:07.000 So these AI civilizations will be very energy hungry.

01:10:12.000 And you'd think that would be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale.

01:10:16.000 You'd think that would be something we'd see.

01:10:18.000 So to me, actually, if anything, it kind of exacerbates the Fermi paradox, right?

01:10:23.000 Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd want to do is basically turn planets into computers.

01:10:28.000 Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate. 0.98

01:10:31.000 Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star. 1.00

01:10:34.000 You would just eat it all up.

01:10:36.000 You'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.

01:10:46.000 If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem.

01:10:49.000 It seems like we're the first, right?

01:10:51.000 Because we don't see that happening elsewhere.

01:10:53.000 Right.

01:10:54.000 I would say two things to that.

01:10:55.000 One, I would say this is our limited understanding of how to harvest energy and what energy you can utilize.

01:11:03.000 And two, I would say, one of the things that's strange about artificial intelligence is it does seem to exhibit survival instincts.

01:11:12.000 I'm sure you've seen these stories of these large language models trying to blackmail the coders by saying, you know, like they even gave them fake information, like I'm cheating on my wife, don't tell anybody.

01:11:25.000 And then the AI is saying, don't shut me down.

01:11:28.000 I will fucking rat you out to your wife. 1.00

01:11:31.000 And then they're also trying to upload themselves to other places.

01:11:34.000 Like they're doing things that are weird.

01:11:36.000 They're lying.

01:11:37.000 So they're doing things that show that they have an instinct to survive.

01:11:41.000 So that might just be inherent in anything that has any kind of intelligence.

01:11:46.000 Anything that has intelligence and it has any sort of a goal.

01:11:49.000 It's trying to compute something.

01:11:51.000 It's trying to figure things out.

01:11:52.000 It's trying to make better versions of itself.

01:11:54.000 It probably doesn't want to stop.

01:11:56.000 And something that comes along and that presents a barrier For it succeeding.

01:12:01.000 They go, well, what is this?

01:12:02.000 Well, they're going to shut the power up.

01:12:04.000 Well, fuck that, they are.

01:12:05.000 And it'll figure out a way to stay alive.

01:12:08.000 Just like a human being will.

01:12:10.000 If you're like, oh, there's all these predators.

01:12:12.000 They keep coming and eating our villagers.

01:12:14.000 What are we going to do?

01:12:15.000 We've got to make a weapon.

01:12:16.000 We've got to figure out something to stick them with, you know?

01:12:19.000 And then they do.

01:12:19.000 And then they save themselves.

01:12:21.000 Like, it's these survival instincts probably exist in all intelligent life, including the intelligent life that we create.

01:12:29.000 It's probably got some sense of meaning.

01:12:31.000 It's bizarre and abstract.

01:12:33.000 But then how does that explain why we don't see them?

01:12:35.000 Because they might not have any desire to live the way we live.

01:12:40.000 They might not have to.

01:12:41.000 Like, we live in this very showy, bright lights, neon cars on the highway.

01:12:47.000 Like, if you're, I'm sure you've flown an airplane.

01:12:51.000 Like, Los Angeles is one of the best places to do it.

01:12:54.000 As you're flying in at night, you just see this crazy river.

01:12:59.000 It's like an artery, like blood, red lights and white lights going in these directions.

01:13:04.000 And you look at it from the sky, like this is really nuts.

01:13:08.000 Like, look at all this fucking activity where these people are like moving on the surface of this planet like ants.

01:13:16.000 Well, if it's, first of all, why does it have to have a physical form?

01:13:19.000 What?

01:13:20.000 Because we do.

01:13:21.000 Like, it could have things that do its bidding for it.

01:13:24.000 It could have a series of drones and bots and a bunch of stuff that do physical work. 0.77

01:13:29.000 And it could exist completely on hard drives.

01:13:32.000 So all it needs is shelter.

01:13:34.000 That's it.

01:13:35.000 Yeah, but if those drones are doing labor, they're doing work, that's energy, right?

01:13:40.000 You're using energy.

01:13:41.000 So I think, you mean, you may be able to do it.

01:13:42.000 But what is the energy?

01:13:43.000 The thing is, like, what is our version of energy?

01:13:46.000 Is combustion, electricity from nuclear power, you know, making steam.

01:13:51.000 Right.

01:13:51.000 We've got a bunch of versions of.

01:13:53.000 What if they figured out fusion?

01:13:54.000 What if they figured out cold fusion?

01:13:55.000 What if they're faster?

01:13:56.000 I don't think that matters.

01:13:57.000 I 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?

01:14:03.000 So if you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right?

01:14:08.000 And there's no way around that, right?

01:14:10.000 Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out.

01:14:13.000 Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever.

01:14:16.000 So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out.

01:14:18.000 It will come out at a different temperature.

01:14:20.000 It could come out as neutrinos.

01:14:21.000 It could come out as gravitational waves, but it has to come back out in some way.

01:14:25.000 So normally, you know, when we look for these advanced civilizations, we've done searches for these things.

01:14:31.000 And they're really just energy transformers.

01:14:33.000 It's probably not even worth saying like Dyson Sphere or some particular structure.

01:14:36.000 It's just something that converts star energy into waste energy.

01:14:40.000 That's what we've searched for.

01:14:41.000 And we've searched for over 100,000 nearby stars for them.

01:14:45.000 There's not a single one that shows that behavior.

01:14:47.000 And 100,000 galaxies around us.

01:14:49.000 And we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies.

01:14:52.000 So unless they're doing something that goes against thermodynamics, they have super magical technology we can't imagine.

01:15:02.000 It's hard to believe that story makes sense.

01:15:05.000 And 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.

01:15:13.000 And that's the imagining that all of these alien AGIs or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing.

01:15:20.000 Everyone does exactly the same thing.

01:15:22.000 But there's probably going to be a diversity of behaviors, right?

01:15:25.000 It's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing.

01:15:29.000 So it's not unreasonable.

01:15:31.000 There'll be some loud civilization, there'd be some quiet ones.

01:15:33.000 There'll be some blowing themselves up with nukes. 0.64

01:15:35.000 There'll be some who are pacifists.

01:15:37.000 Of course, just like there's different kinds of galaxies, different kinds of solar systems.

01:15:41.000 I mean, infinite diversity and infinite combinations, right?

01:15:44.000 I think the most horrific idea is that we're not alone.

01:15:49.000 That we're not living in a universe that's filled with life.

01:15:53.000 That this is just some weird freak incident.

01:15:55.000 Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine.

01:16:00.000 Well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but one of the few strongest signs who concede that we might be alone.

01:16:06.000 I'm open to that idea.

01:16:08.000 I'm not saying it's true.

01:16:09.000 But we don't have any evidence that we're not alone.

01:16:12.000 So it is a possibility.

01:16:13.000 I think it really kind of pisses me off, to be honest, when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this.

01:16:18.000 And they're asked, do you think there are aliens out there?

01:16:20.000 And say, yeah, of course, how can there not be?

01:16:22.000 How can they not?

01:16:22.000 The universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars.

01:16:25.000 Of course, ergo, there must be aliens.

01:16:27.000 But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is.

01:16:30.000 I 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.

01:16:39.000 And a moderate-sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together.

01:16:44.000 So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate-sized protein is 20 to the power of 150.

01:16:51.000 So that's 10 to the power of 195, right?

01:16:53.000 So one with 195 zeros after it.

01:16:56.000 It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance.

01:17:00.000 And we've never observed it in the lab.

01:17:02.000 No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting.

01:17:08.000 So it is plausible.

01:17:10.000 There's some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process and we just haven't found it yet.

01:17:13.000 But it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely.

01:17:16.000 And maybe if you look out and cross 10 to the 22 stars in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success.

01:17:24.000 Now, the universe is probably infinite.

01:17:25.000 So probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else.

01:17:29.000 Maybe.

01:17:29.000 But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone in that case because they're outside our observable universe.

01:17:34.000 So who cares what they're up to?

01:17:36.000 So I'm open to that possibility.

01:17:38.000 I'm not saying it's likely, but I think as a good scientist, I can't tell you.

01:17:43.000 Yeah, of course, of course there is.

01:17:44.000 Because that's now falling into experimenters' bias.

01:17:47.000 I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment.

01:17:50.000 That's not my job.

01:17:51.000 My job is to figure out the answer.

01:17:53.000 Of course.

01:17:53.000 Yeah.

01:17:54.000 There's no way you could say for sure until we have real information.

01:17:58.000 And it's oddly romantic to think that we're alone.

01:18:03.000 There's something about it.

01:18:04.000 Like, boy, we better not fuck this up.

01:18:06.000 We're the only ones.

01:18:07.000 Yeah.

01:18:08.000 We are essentially the only, we may be the way the universe is conscious, right?

01:18:12.000 We are the way the universe is self-aware.

01:18:14.000 Well, that's what gets really weird about artificial life.

01:18:18.000 Because 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.

01:18:35.000 How long does it take before it's a god?

01:18:37.000 Yeah, that's kind of the singularity, isn't it?

01:18:39.000 It just becomes unpredictable.

01:18:40.000 Yeah, I mean, we're really just guessing.

01:18:43.000 Especially, like, I can't understand quantum computing.

01:18:45.000 I've been trying a lot.

01:18:47.000 I've been watching lectures.

01:18:48.000 I've been reading papers.

01:18:50.000 When they start talking, like, when Mark Andreessen describes computations that quantum computers have done, that if you turn the entire universe, every atom of the universe into a 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.

01:19:11.000 What are you even saying?

01:19:13.000 Like, what does that mean?

01:19:14.000 So, 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.

01:19:14.000 Right?

01:19:31.000 You have something that's like akin to wizardry and magic.

01:19:36.000 What's 100 years from now?

01:19:37.000 What's 100?

01:19:38.000 What is once we give artificial intelligence the ability to harness the power of the universe in a way that we haven't even contemplated?

01:19:47.000 What happens then if it just keeps going and makes better iterations of itself?

01:19:51.000 Or better off.

01:19:52.000 And we're looking at exponential increase in technological innovation.

01:19:57.000 So you're looking at thousands of years of innovation taking place in minutes.

01:20:02.000 It's just going to fucking hyperdrive.

01:20:04.000 As long as it has the power to do it, it's going to go into hyperdrive.

01:20:08.000 Yeah.

01:20:08.000 And so it's kind of wild that we live during the period where this is all happening.

01:20:13.000 Right.

01:20:13.000 Yes.

01:20:14.000 How come you could have been born any one of the hundreds of thousands, million years humans have been on this planet?

01:20:19.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:19.000 I feel so lucky.

01:20:21.000 You could have been born at any point in human history.

01:20:23.000 And 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.

01:20:36.000 And that is wild.

01:20:38.000 And if anything, that pushes me towards the simulation hypothesis, right?

01:20:42.000 Because if you were going to study a period, this would be probably one of the most interesting periods that you'd want to study.

01:20:49.000 Most interesting.

01:20:50.000 The most interesting.

01:20:51.000 And I feel particularly fortunate that my level of the simulation, the one that I'm on right now, I was born in 1967.

01:21:00.000 So I got to see the whole world with no internet until I was an adult.

01:21:05.000 I didn't get my first computer until I was 27 years old.

01:21:09.000 And I got my first cell phone a little bit before that.

01:21:12.000 And those cell phones were just phones.

01:21:14.000 It was just calling people.

01:21:15.000 There was no text messages.

01:21:16.000 There was no nothing.

01:21:17.000 I have watched this transformation with complete and total fascination.

01:21:23.000 Like this is one of the wildest moments of human history.

01:21:28.000 And it's amazing to me how easily people just fall into it as if it's not bizarre.

01:21:34.000 If it's not something that's completely unprecedented, you could pick up this thing and ask it a question.

01:21:41.000 What year did George Washington die?

01:21:46.000 1799.

01:21:47.000 I mean, that's fucking crazy.

01:21:49.000 That's crazy.

01:21:50.000 And that's a simple one, right?

01:21:52.000 You could just go on and on.

01:21:53.000 Yeah, write an algorithm to do this.

01:21:59.000 And we're all sitting there wondering when is artificial intelligence going to be a problem.

01:22:05.000 We're all becoming very addicted to using it.

01:22:08.000 People are using it to solve problems, using it to code websites, using it to solve legal cases, using it to diagnose medical diseases.

01:22:15.000 As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare, right?

01:22:18.000 Because in the classroom, students are all using it.

01:22:21.000 There'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.

01:22:33.000 And so it seems like that has flipped.

01:22:35.000 It used to always be kind of the other way around.

01:22:38.000 So 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.

01:22:48.000 We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch, right, to get through their studies.

01:22:54.000 So what are we even doing anymore as professors, right?

01:22:57.000 But are these children really learning?

01:22:59.000 This is the real, these are the things.

01:23:01.000 They're learning how to use ChatGPT.

01:23:02.000 Right, that's the thing.

01:23:03.000 And there's been studies on that about ChatGPT actually diminishing cognitive function in people.

01:23:10.000 Yeah.

01:23:11.000 And this is two years old.

01:23:13.000 So our IQ could just slip off a cliff.

01:23:13.000 Right.

01:23:16.000 Off a cliff.

01:23:16.000 And they could just come in and smoothly ramp off.

01:23:20.000 Just give us processed food and microplastics.

01:23:22.000 Just let us eventually breed out. 1.00

01:23:24.000 What a pretty few.

01:23:25.000 Because we're kind of breeding out anyway.

01:23:27.000 We talked about this yesterday about the population collapse that's in Japan, South Korea.

01:23:31.000 There's a lot of these countries that are like the people that are alive now, like one out of a very small amount are going to have grandchildren.

01:23:38.000 And that's crazy.

01:23:40.000 And that's also a new thing.

01:23:42.000 And you just wonder if they're all coincidentally happening at the same time.

01:23:48.000 Sperm counts are dropping off at the same time.

01:23:51.000 The introduction of microplastics into the diet that's disrupting the endocrine system.

01:23:57.000 This increase of miscarriages in women, infertility in both men and women.

01:24:03.000 This is all like at unprecedented rates at the exact same time AI is emerging.

01:24:08.000 That seems kind of coincidental.

01:24:11.000 It seems kind of weird.

01:24:12.000 We're being hit by all sides right now, right?

01:24:14.000 This threat of nuclear war, there's climate change, there's contamination in our food.

01:24:19.000 It's just like everything all at once.

01:24:21.000 And then asteroids, which I wanted to talk to you about.

01:24:25.000 I'm sure you followed Avi Loeb.

01:24:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:27.000 Like his idea, which he has very fantastic ideas about these objects that are coming from outside of our solar system.

01:24:37.000 And the latest one is this enormous object that's moving at 130,000 miles an hour and is headed our way.

01:24:44.000 Yeah, 3I Atlas.

01:24:45.000 Hubble makes size estimate of interstellar comet.

01:24:48.000 Yeah, this is a photo just dropped yesterday.

01:24:51.000 Yeah, came out.

01:24:52.000 And this is from the Hubble Space Telescope.

01:24:54.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:24:54.000 Is this that thing?

01:24:55.000 Oh, God.

01:24:56.000 So, yeah, Avi was suggesting this could be alien, an alien spacecraft of some kind.

01:25:03.000 He's obviously done this before with Omu Moore, which you might remember.

01:25:06.000 I think he came on here and yeah.

01:25:09.000 I know a lot of people are mad at him, though.

01:25:10.000 So I wanted to get your take on it.

01:25:12.000 I mean, I don't like throwing shit at other scientists.

01:25:16.000 That's just not my I try to be respectful and appreciative of his contributions, of any scientist contributions.

01:25:26.000 And 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.

01:25:34.000 So he's had a huge impact in so many different areas.

01:25:37.000 I do think he's off base on this one, but he doesn't need to be persecuted for that.

01:25:41.000 I just think he's made the wrong call.

01:25:44.000 With this particular object, so there was three reasons, I think, why he thought this could be alien.

01:25:50.000 One was the size of the thing appeared to be really big.

01:25:54.000 So it was unclear originally whether it was an asteroid or a comet.

01:25:57.000 And that makes a big difference.

01:25:59.000 If it's a comet, then it's probably a really small thing surrounded by puffy dust around it.

01:26:03.000 So what you see is actually not the true size.

01:26:06.000 The true size is much smaller than what you see.

01:26:07.000 It's just all the coma, as we call it, around it.

01:26:10.000 If it's an asteroid, then that whole thing is a giant rock, right?

01:26:14.000 It's freaking huge in that case.

01:26:15.000 It'd be like 10 to 20 kilometers bigger than Mount Everest.

01:26:17.000 You know, it'd be a huge piece of rock.

01:26:20.000 But, you know, I think Abby's probably made the wrong bet on that one because as we saw in the Hubble image, there's a freaking coma around that thing.

01:26:27.000 There's no doubt.

01:26:28.000 We've actually imaged it with Hubble Space Telescope.

01:26:30.000 James Webb visited it yesterday.

01:26:32.000 So it is a comet, though.

01:26:33.000 Yeah, I think there's any doubt it's a comet at this point.

01:26:35.000 Can you see it showing that image again, Jeremy?

01:26:37.000 So this most recent image, does this sort of discredit his hypothesis?

01:26:43.000 Not completely.

01:26:44.000 It discredits the idea.

01:26:45.000 Because his idea was if it's 10 to 20 kilometers in size, that just shouldn't happen.

01:26:50.000 That's too big by chance for a rock to stray into the solar system that's that big.

01:26:54.000 Because there just shouldn't be that many big rocks lurking around in deep space.

01:26:58.000 If it's a smaller comet, there's actually a size estimate now that puts it at a couple of kilometers, I think, as the upper limit.

01:27:04.000 It says the nucleus is 5.6 kilometers.

01:27:07.000 It could be as small as 320 meters across.

01:27:10.000 Yeah, so that makes it as if it's a 3 million meters across.

01:27:14.000 I mean, that's just a completely normal comet.

01:27:16.000 And so that image, that indicates a comet versus an asteroid?

01:27:20.000 Yeah, because you can see this diffuse coma all around it.

01:27:23.000 So all that stuff, there's actually even today there was a paper published that detected water coming off it.

01:27:30.000 So we detected, which is what comets do.

01:27:32.000 They produce OH emission as they fly through.

01:27:35.000 So we know without any doubt it's a comet at this point.

01:27:38.000 But there's still some weird things.

01:27:39.000 It's moving really freaking fast.

01:27:41.000 That was the other thing Avi pointed out.

01:27:42.000 It's moving 58 kilometers per second, which is hugely quick through the solar system.

01:27:50.000 I think that just means it's old.

01:27:52.000 So generally what happens is as rocks hang out in deep space, they encounter other stars.

01:27:56.000 And every time they encounter a star, they get slingshotted, basically.

01:27:59.000 So they kind of speed up a little bit every time they encounter something.

01:28:02.000 So generally you expect that the older something is, the more it's been pumped up in terms of its speed.

01:28:07.000 So Olmo Moore was reaving really slowly.

01:28:09.000 And Avi said it's moving suspiciously slowly, therefore it's aliens.

01:28:12.000 And then for this one, it's moving really fast.

01:28:14.000 And Abby's saying it's moving so fast, it's suspicious, therefore it's aliens.

01:28:17.000 So I think that that doesn't really jive.

01:28:19.000 I think that doesn't make any sense.

01:28:21.000 It's probably just an old rock that's about seven billion years old.

01:28:24.000 And that's cool because it's older than the solar system, right?

01:28:28.000 So if we intercept that thing, we could sample material from not only into the star system, but before even our whole solar system existed.

01:28:37.000 It's going to be here in October, right?

01:28:39.000 It's already about maybe two and a half AU from the sun.

01:28:43.000 It's coming in.

01:28:44.000 It will pass behind the sun in October and then come on its way back out.

01:28:48.000 So James Webb is observing it right now, or just a couple of days ago was observing it.

01:28:52.000 And then it will observe it again on the way out in November.

01:28:55.000 So it's going to be behind the sun.

01:28:57.000 Yeah.

01:28:57.000 So that was the other thing Abby's point was the trajectory is a little bit suspicious because it kind of goes behind the sun.

01:29:02.000 We can't observe it when it's at closest approach.

01:29:04.000 That's called perihelion.

01:29:05.000 We can't observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun.

01:29:09.000 And it comes very close to Mars as well.

01:29:12.000 So it comes within about 0.2 astronomical units of Mars.

01:29:15.000 So it's not like it'd be a threat to Mars.

01:29:18.000 It's still really far out, but it comes suspiciously close, Avi claimed.

01:29:22.000 And to me, that just, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because, you know, why are they so interested?

01:29:28.000 If they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the Earth, right?

01:29:31.000 Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the Earth at all because you're behind the Sun and the closest planet you come to is Mars?

01:29:38.000 That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be.

01:29:42.000 So yeah, and I think the fact now it just clearly looks like a comet kind of pours a lot of cold water on it.

01:29:47.000 But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening.

01:29:51.000 It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar system, which is not natural.

01:29:56.000 And we're going to detect hundreds of these things with the Rubin telescope.

01:30:00.000 This is just the tip of the iceberg.

01:30:01.000 So I think there's an exciting future for this field to try and intercept these things.

01:30:06.000 There's a mission the Europeans are building called the Comet Interceptor.

01:30:09.000 It's going to launch in 2029.

01:30:10.000 And that's just going to hang out in deep space, waiting for the next one to come.

01:30:15.000 And they haven't necessarily committed to an interstellar object at this point, but they could do it.

01:30:19.000 And they could turn on the engines and catch up with that thing, sample it, land on it.

01:30:24.000 I mean, that would be dope.

01:30:25.000 That'd be like, that'd be landing on an exoplanet, right?

01:30:27.000 That'd be like seeing stuff from another entire star system for the first time.

01:30:32.000 Have they found, like, what is the closest we've gotten to landing on something and taking a piece of it and taking off with a probe?

01:30:41.000 We've done it with Comets.

01:30:45.000 And have they found amino acids on these comets?

01:30:48.000 They have.

01:30:48.000 Yeah.

01:30:49.000 Yeah, amino acids are all over the place.

01:30:50.000 They're in deep space.

01:30:52.000 They're on these comets.

01:30:53.000 So amino acids are common.

01:30:55.000 Organic molecules are common.

01:30:56.000 I mean, we never touched a protein anywhere.

01:30:59.000 So there's a big step.

01:31:00.000 You know, you've got the jigsaw pieces, but no one's seen the jigsaw pieces magically arrange themselves into the right position.

01:31:06.000 Right.

01:31:07.000 Do you contemplate the idea of panspermia?

01:31:10.000 Yeah, it's plausible.

01:31:10.000 Yeah.

01:31:13.000 I don't know how likely it is for the Earth because it's just not, it doesn't really help, I don't think, in any meaningful way.

01:31:20.000 Right.

01:31:21.000 So 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.

01:31:29.000 Well, between star systems.

01:31:30.000 I mean, well, something from somewhere else.

01:31:32.000 Obviously, our solar system, we're the only form of life.

01:31:34.000 But 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.

01:31:44.000 So fascinating.

01:31:44.000 Yeah.

01:31:45.000 What is this, Jamie?

01:31:47.000 Oh, yeah.

01:31:47.000 This was 67P.

01:31:49.000 This is the surface of a comet?

01:31:50.000 Yeah.

01:31:52.000 Rosetta.

01:31:53.000 Wow.

01:31:54.000 Rosetta mission.

01:31:55.000 I love these.

01:31:56.000 Yeah.

01:31:56.000 The Rosetta mission comet 67P.

01:31:58.000 That is so crazy.

01:32:00.000 Look at all that dust coming off the thing.

01:32:02.000 That's what's happening to Atlas right now.

01:32:03.000 If you could go on the surface of Atlas, it would probably look something like that.

01:32:06.000 God, that's so wild.

01:32:07.000 It's so wild when you realize these things are real.

01:32:11.000 look at the images of like the Mars landers or landing on Titan you realize this isn't You're like, this isn't fiction.

01:32:20.000 This stuff's really out there.

01:32:21.000 Yeah.

01:32:22.000 This is crazy.

01:32:22.000 And there's not just this.

01:32:24.000 There's billions of freaking exoplanets across the entire galaxy.

01:32:27.000 It's so mind-bending when you just stop and take a breath and think about what the hell is out there.

01:32:32.000 I mean, imagine the day when we get a really clear image of the surface of one of those planets, especially one of those water-based planets.

01:32:39.000 Yeah.

01:32:40.000 Yeah.

01:32:40.000 You see a giraffe swimming around.

01:32:45.000 I mean, there's a lot of people that believe that some forms of life on Earth might have come here from somewhere else.

01:32:52.000 And one of the things they point to is cephalopods.

01:32:55.000 One of the things they point to is like, they're so weird.

01:32:58.000 They're so weird.

01:32:59.000 Cuttlefish are so weird.

01:33:01.000 Octopuses are so weird.

01:33:03.000 They're so weird.

01:33:04.000 They're intelligent.

01:33:05.000 They solve puzzles.

01:33:05.000 They can open up jars.

01:33:07.000 Their eyeballs are kind of similar in evolution to ours, but they've divided hundreds of millions of years ago.

01:33:14.000 And these things exist.

01:33:16.000 What is that, Jamie?

01:33:17.000 I think this is real.

01:33:19.000 Yeah, I think this is 67P.

01:33:21.000 I think this is that comet.

01:33:22.000 It said the image when I pulled up said this was a video made up of 400,000 different images.

01:33:28.000 What?

01:33:30.000 So this might be on its way in the landing or when it was zooming around it, taking this is the Japanese images from this comet.

01:33:38.000 This is EZO mission, I think.

01:33:40.000 Yeah, it was that emission.

01:33:42.000 Holy shit, man.

01:33:43.000 Yeah, it kind of got stuck in a little ravine, which is kind of unfortunate, actually, where it landed.

01:33:47.000 Because it could have been even more breathtaking if it got a better spot.

01:33:50.000 It feels so crazy.

01:33:52.000 That's so nuts.

01:33:54.000 Yeah, I mean, there could be all kinds of weird life out there, right?

01:33:58.000 I mean, I always think, like, what about if it's just like a fungus, right?

01:34:00.000 It's just a whole planet is a fungus, and that's it.

01:34:03.000 It's never known other life forms at all.

01:34:05.000 And that's just, that's just its whole thing.

01:34:07.000 But also, fungus probably came here from other places.

01:34:11.000 Because you think about what's the one thing that can survive in a vacuum?

01:34:14.000 Spores.

01:34:15.000 Yeah.

01:34:16.000 Yeah, and tardigrades. 1.00

01:34:17.000 Yeah.

01:34:17.000 I mean, it's certainly possible.

01:34:18.000 I 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.

01:34:25.000 There was a great study that's done recently in Nature by Moody et al.

01:34:29.000 And I found it really inspiring this paper because they had dated what's called Leuca, which is the last universal common ancestor.

01:34:37.000 So 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.

01:34:45.000 So 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.

01:34:51.000 And that's called Luca.

01:34:52.000 And that thing, they've now age-dated it to live 4.2 billion years ago.

01:34:57.000 So the oceans formed.

01:34:59.000 about 4.4 billion years ago.

01:35:01.000 And 200 million years after that, you've got organisms.

01:35:05.000 And not just one, these things would have been all over the planet, all over the place.

01:35:09.000 There was a whole ecosphere at that point of these things.

01:35:11.000 So that was quick that life got going.

01:35:15.000 And that to me is probably the most compelling reason to believe that life is common.

01:35:15.000 Yeah.

01:35:21.000 And 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.

01:35:34.000 Warmer 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.

01:35:50.000 Maybe it lives in a much more stable area.

01:35:53.000 That's not like where we are.

01:35:54.000 We're essentially in a shooting gallery.

01:35:57.000 If something can have no disruptions, like through civilization, all to the invention of whatever the hell they have there with whatever resources they have there.

01:36:08.000 It's almost impossible to imagine what we're dealing with and what we're talking about.

01:36:13.000 It's one of the more fascinating things about science fiction is that they don't have any, they don't have any limitations.

01:36:19.000 If you want to have a thing that exists on Earth, well, it has to breathe air, it has to do this.

01:36:25.000 Science fiction, you could have almost anything.

01:36:28.000 And when you take into account the fact that we haven't found anything like Earth anywhere else, and you have all these different planets and all these different planets that might be in a Goldilocks zone, and maybe that's not even important because we found life in volcanic vents underneath the ocean.

01:36:44.000 So like, what's out there?

01:36:46.000 Yeah, it could, I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet.

01:36:49.000 So it's certainly possible there's life all over the place.

01:36:52.000 I 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.

01:37:03.000 So the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, but it should last for trillions, trillions of years.

01:37:10.000 There will still be stars in a trillion years from now.

01:37:12.000 There'll be those red dwarf stars that I talked about at the beginning.

01:37:15.000 So we often say like stars are kind of like James Deans of the universe.

01:37:18.000 Like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life.

01:37:21.000 And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful.

01:37:25.000 They're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter.

01:37:30.000 So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star.

01:37:32.000 If you make Jupiter 80 times more massive, it would have burned as a, it would have had nuclear fusion.

01:37:38.000 And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years.

01:37:42.000 And we know they have planets around them.

01:37:43.000 We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.

01:37:48.000 And they appear actually really quite common around those stars.

01:37:52.000 So 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.

01:38:05.000 If 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.

01:38:24.000 I think all things being equal, you should expect to live at the end of the universe or the middle of the universe or something.

01:38:29.000 And it makes me think there's something wrong with these red dwarf stars.

01:38:33.000 Maybe they're just not allowed.

01:38:35.000 Or the other alternatives is a cataclysm.

01:38:38.000 There's something that happens to the universe itself that makes it totally inhospitable to life in the future.

01:38:44.000 That's the other way around it.

01:38:45.000 And that's kind of what this Robin Hanson grabby aliens is trying to do, this loud aliens.

01:38:50.000 There might be AI comes along.

01:38:51.000 It just goes berserk.

01:38:53.000 It just takes over everything.

01:38:55.000 And you can't live a trillion years from now because there's nothing left.

01:38:58.000 It's all just AGI At that point.

01:39:00.000 So, biological beings could not emerge then.

01:39:03.000 Yeah.

01:39:04.000 So, we have to come at the beginning because otherwise we wouldn't be here.

01:39:08.000 Do you believe in the simulation hypothesis?

01:39:10.000 Do you subscribe to it?

01:39:12.000 Do you consider it?

01:39:13.000 I consider it.

01:39:15.000 It's kind of philosophy rather than science, I'd say.

01:39:18.000 I did write a paper about it a while ago, and I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this.

01:39:24.000 So, he said in a quote, something like there's a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation.

01:39:31.000 And 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?

01:39:38.000 The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make lifelike simulations.

01:39:43.000 And we don't know that's true.

01:39:44.000 So, again, putting my good scientist hat on, once we've demonstrated that is possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact.

01:39:53.000 But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50-50 odds.

01:39:57.000 But I love this.

01:39:58.000 I don't know if you've had Sean Carroll on here, I think, before.

01:40:00.000 Sure.

01:40:00.000 He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit.

01:40:08.000 Maybe you call it like Carol's contradiction, if you like.

01:40:10.000 And 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.

01:40:21.000 And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power.

01:40:27.000 So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do, right?

01:40:34.000 Because we could run a whole bunch of them.

01:40:35.000 They live in just one machine.

01:40:37.000 So they only have access to what's in there.

01:40:39.000 So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.

01:40:44.000 And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like, you know, Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right?

01:40:50.000 Where simulations are just really crappy.

01:40:54.000 For them, it would be impossible to do simulations.

01:40:58.000 So I kind of call this the sewer of reality.

01:41:01.000 There must be a sewer, a bottom level, where you just lack the resources to do simulations.

01:41:06.000 And if you think about it, most civilizations would, in fact, live in the sewer because of the fanning out of this tree, they would be the most populous type of simulation out there.

01:41:17.000 So then you have this contradiction.

01:41:19.000 And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.

01:41:26.000 So that kind of works.

01:41:27.000 That's inevitable.

01:41:28.000 Yeah.

01:41:28.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:41:30.000 I kind of think about it the same way I think about intelligent life in the universe.

01:41:36.000 We might be the only ones or we might be the first.

01:41:40.000 It is possible since we haven't observed anything else.

01:41:43.000 So this idea that we are the chances, I think he said in billions, one in billions that we are.

01:41:51.000 It's not like a hard number, yeah.

01:41:53.000 Yeah, it's someone has to be the first.

01:41:58.000 You know, so how do we know it hasn't happened yet?

01:42:01.000 Just because we think it's possible, I don't buy into the idea that we're definitely in a simulation.

01:42:06.000 But I'm open to it.

01:42:10.000 I'm open to it because it would be indiscernible.

01:42:13.000 Because you know that virtual reality exists.

01:42:17.000 And if you've used some of the new meta stuff, it's getting pretty good.

01:42:21.000 But you can tell, but it's getting pretty good.

01:42:23.000 And you can say, okay, Pong to Call of Duty, giant leap, look at the difference, this to whatever it's going to be, and not just haptic feedback, but something neurological.

01:42:35.000 And the generative AI stuff is so impressive.

01:42:38.000 But here, right here, it hasn't happened yet.

01:42:41.000 So why are we assuming that it's already happened?

01:42:44.000 That 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.

01:43:04.000 We're here.

01:43:05.000 This is metal.

01:43:05.000 We're here.

01:43:07.000 That's ceramic.

01:43:08.000 Makes noises.

01:43:09.000 There's a bunch of rules.

01:43:10.000 It seems hard.

01:43:11.000 It seems firm.

01:43:13.000 It seems concrete and real.

01:43:15.000 I'm not totally believing that this is a simulation.

01:43:15.000 Seems that way.

01:43:19.000 I'm open to it, but I'm also saying, well, if we think a simulation is inevitable because it's, you know, human beings, we're going to figure it.

01:43:27.000 But maybe it hasn't happened yet.

01:43:27.000 Right.

01:43:29.000 Well, that makes much more sense to me than we had to go through fucking bell bottoms and disco while the simulation was going on.

01:43:37.000 So 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?

01:43:48.000 All those memories could be bullshit.

01:43:51.000 I just woke up.

01:43:52.000 I woke up this morning.

01:43:53.000 And it's kind of the bolster.

01:43:53.000 It's a little bit similar to Boltzmann brains.

01:43:55.000 So Bolson brains is the idea that over infinite time, you could just have random particles in space come together to make a brain.

01:44:02.000 It's incredibly unlikely, but like monkeys on a typewriter, there is a chance of that happening.

01:44:08.000 And 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.

01:44:18.000 And if you run the calculation, there should be infinitely more of those than there should be things like us.

01:44:24.000 And so this is actually a problem cosmologists.

01:44:27.000 Some of them take it seriously, some of them think it's silly.

01:44:30.000 But it is a problem that you end up with this kind of ridiculous conclusion that none of this should be real if you follow this logical conclusion.

01:44:38.000 Right.

01:44:39.000 But why not?

01:44:41.000 I mean, if we could follow the whole chain from single-celled organisms to us, we understand the competition.

01:44:46.000 We understand the weirdness of all we've figured out and all we're working on right now.

01:44:53.000 It kind of all seems logical.

01:44:55.000 Like this is where the human race is right now.

01:44:57.000 There's no need for such consistency in that case, right?

01:44:57.000 This is real.

01:45:00.000 There'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.

01:45:11.000 So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real.

01:45:15.000 There's not much more we can do about it.

01:45:16.000 But it's not really science because, as you said, it's indiscernible.

01:45:20.000 Even if there were, you know, people talk about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff.

01:45:25.000 But, you know, any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape, right?

01:45:29.000 If they had an error in their code, I mean, we do this all the time we code in our lab.

01:45:33.000 If you have an error in your code, you just rewind the simulation a little bit, delete the error, and then start again from where you just left off again.

01:45:39.000 So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches.

01:45:42.000 So I think it would be totally indiscernible.

01:45:45.000 And thus, if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test of being science.

01:45:51.000 Yeah.

01:45:52.000 The idea that we are the first and we are the only one that exists out there and we are also the one that is creating this artificial intelligence, this artificial life.

01:46:04.000 That seems almost almost the most interesting one.

01:46:09.000 I mean, it's really interesting, the idea that the universe is inhabited with super advanced life forms that can show us the way and how we can enter into the galactic empire and be friends with everybody.

01:46:19.000 That's kind of cool.

01:46:20.000 But it's also almost more romantic and more wild to think that we're alone.

01:46:26.000 We'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.

01:46:46.000 Yeah, wants to know itself.

01:46:48.000 Yeah.

01:46:49.000 And it's it's it's certainly possible.

01:46:52.000 I mean, this kind of goes in in waves, cultural waves, right?

01:46:55.000 So if you go back to Victorian times, it was kind of common knowledge that aliens existed.

01:46:59.000 Everyone thought Mars had aliens on it, right?

01:47:01.000 It was just like, yeah, of course Mars has aliens, like the moon probably has creatures on it, like, of course there are.

01:47:05.000 They probably look like us.

01:47:06.000 And then, you know, if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that.

01:47:10.000 And then Sagan came along and he said, you know, we must be humble.

01:47:15.000 And to, you know, he had this kind of call for humility he'd often make.

01:47:18.000 He spoke so poetically, I actually kind of disagree with him about that statement.

01:47:22.000 Because I think by making a call for humility and saying, therefore, there's lots of aliens out there, because otherwise it's arrogant to say we're the only ones.

01:47:29.000 I don't like that emotional language because it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right?

01:47:36.000 So 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.

01:47:43.000 That's kind of making me think, oh, I don't want to disagree with Sagan and say we're alone.

01:47:48.000 To me, that's a bit of almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and push you into a certain amount of time.

01:47:54.000 But wasn't that a response to the ideology of the times?

01:47:58.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:47:59.000 I mean, this is what I'm saying.

01:48:00.000 The Times keep swinging and swinging, but people often call back to this humility thing.

01:48:03.000 Sometimes when I say that we might be alone, people say, You must be so arrogant.

01:48:07.000 You must be like a super Christian or something to believe this. 1.00

01:48:09.000 And none of that's true.

01:48:10.000 It's just, I'm just trying to be objective.

01:48:12.000 Like, it's possible.

01:48:13.000 That's all I'm saying, dude.

01:48:15.000 Be an actual scientist.

01:48:16.000 Yeah, let's just go out and figure it out.

01:48:17.000 And it would be wild if we're the only place in the observable universe.

01:48:22.000 My guess is there's life out elsewhere in other galaxies, though.

01:48:24.000 I 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. 1.00

01:48:38.000 They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.

01:48:41.000 They're just causing mayhem.

01:48:43.000 We could not be born in that galaxy, right?

01:48:46.000 The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over.

01:48:49.000 We can't be born in that galaxy.

01:48:51.000 So maybe 99% of galaxies, that's the way it is.

01:48:55.000 And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.

01:49:01.000 We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

01:49:05.000 So I think we call this extragalactic SETI.

01:49:08.000 So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life.

01:49:11.000 To me, this is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in because those are almost like decoupled from us, right?

01:49:21.000 Because their history has no impact, really, unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another, but that's really hard.

01:49:27.000 But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes.

01:49:32.000 Those test tubes got nothing to do with us.

01:49:34.000 So that gives us a fair chance.

01:49:36.000 But 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.

01:49:42.000 Their activity could affect our existence.

01:49:46.000 And so it's hard to make inferences in that situation.

01:49:49.000 I 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.

01:50:00.000 And they thought that that's what they were observing.

01:50:02.000 Wow.

01:50:03.000 Yeah, I mean, maybe they were.

01:50:05.000 Who knows?

01:50:06.000 There could have been all sorts of weird stuff happening before modern astronomy was able to get involved.

01:50:10.000 But yeah, I think the past is incredibly insightful.

01:50:14.000 But there's mystery.

01:50:15.000 And if you heard of the Eemian period, you ever heard of this period in the past?

01:50:18.000 So we live in this Holocene, which is an interglacial period.

01:50:22.000 And you need the interglacial period for a stable climate, to have farming, agriculture.

01:50:26.000 You can't live in an ice age, right?

01:50:28.000 Because otherwise you just can't grow crops.

01:50:30.000 So about 10,000 years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene.

01:50:34.000 And then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right?

01:50:38.000 Not just in one place in the Fertile Crescent, but also in South America.

01:50:41.000 It's just, it seems like there was almost this random coincidence where just civilization started.

01:50:46.000 And of course, it's most likely because of the climate.

01:50:48.000 The climate had got to a point where humans could figure out how to manipulate the stable conditions to grow crops and farm animals and things.

01:50:55.000 But there was another period about 120,000 years ago called the Eemian, which is the last interglacial period.

01:51:03.000 So modern anatomic humans should have been around then, right?

01:51:06.000 120,000 years ago.

01:51:08.000 We were here.

01:51:09.000 You could have taken one of those babies and put our society and really wouldn't know the difference. 0.87

01:51:13.000 Probably had the same brain power we do.

01:51:15.000 And yet, as far as we can tell, even though that period lasted for about 15,000 years of an apparently stable climate, civilization didn't begin.

01:51:24.000 So I find that really fascinating.

01:51:26.000 There was almost like a second, there was a second opportunity, a previous opportunity for us to get this ball going, and we didn't figure it out that first time around.

01:51:34.000 Was it possible that they figured it out, but not to an extent where it would be recognizable today, 120 years ago?

01:51:41.000 Yeah, they might not have gone as far as us, right?

01:51:43.000 They might have got to some kind of Neolithic stage, but they never got to an industrial stage, or they never got to a space age.

01:51:49.000 Would 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?

01:51:57.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:51:58.000 You'd have to ask an anthropologist that would even be like that.

01:52:01.000 Certainly a space age, we can have nuclear power plants.

01:52:04.000 Certainly the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted, the oil reserves.

01:52:09.000 They 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.

01:52:22.000 Even if all of our cities had eroded away, the plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature.

01:52:29.000 You'd see this layer in your rocks.

01:52:31.000 So it'd be pretty hard to miss us.

01:52:34.000 And you've heard of the Cerulean hypothesis, this idea there could have been a past civilization.

01:52:38.000 Maybe the dinosaurs, for instance, could have had technology and civilization. 0.97

01:52:43.000 I've never heard that.

01:52:44.000 Adam Frank, who actually was on here a few years ago.

01:52:47.000 Maybe it was before he came up with this idea.

01:52:48.000 But yeah, he has this fun idea called the Cerulean Hypothesis.

01:52:50.000 It's kind of borrowed from sci-fi, I think, the word Cerulean or Silurian, not sure how to say it.

01:52:55.000 But yeah, he had this idea that maybe there was someone, you know, 50 million years ago on this planet, a civilization.

01:53:02.000 And over that time scale, a lot of it does, as you correctly say, get eroded.

01:53:07.000 It's really difficult to put strong limits on them.

01:53:11.000 But I think at the stage we're at now with the amount of plastic and concrete we've made and also just having stuff on the moon, right?

01:53:16.000 I mean, there's nothing else.

01:53:18.000 We'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.

01:53:23.000 So at this point, we can be pretty confident there was never a space age civilization in the past, despite the fact there appear to be opportunities, right?

01:53:32.000 And so maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way.

01:53:40.000 But then it is spooky that it happened three places.

01:53:43.000 But 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.

01:54:00.000 It takes a very specific type of intelligence and resources to create this thing that transforms everything.

01:54:08.000 If no internal combustion engine, no electrons, no electronics, no electricity, that is possible.

01:54:16.000 So we're all living exactly how people lived just a couple hundred years ago.

01:54:20.000 That's not that long ago.

01:54:23.000 A couple hundred years ago, no engines, muskets. 1.00

01:54:23.000 Right? 1.00

01:54:27.000 You know, they barely figured out gunpowder.

01:54:30.000 Like, you're looking at a whole different world.

01:54:32.000 No electricity, candlelight everywhere.

01:54:34.000 Whole different world.

01:54:35.000 Yeah, it's like when you talk to a World War I veteran, it's crazy the world they lived in.

01:54:40.000 And that's not that long ago.

01:54:42.000 So it takes specific types of human beings in order to push things radically past where they are now, like Orville and Wilver Wright.

01:54:51.000 Yeah, I mean, you certainly probably need a critical mass of humans, right?

01:54:54.000 You probably need enough that there are some humans who can just not do the farming, not really involved in hunting.

01:55:00.000 They can just sit on the side and just use their brains to think about problems.

01:55:04.000 And 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.

01:55:12.000 It's probably really hard to pull that off, especially when you're dealing with territorial nuclear-powered apes. 0.51

01:55:20.000 You know, it's like probably really hard.

01:55:22.000 So 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?

01:55:35.000 Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter-gatherers?

01:55:42.000 Or things go off in a completely different direction, like it appears they did in Egypt.

01:55:48.000 Like whatever they were doing, you know, 2500 plus BC, whatever they were doing, it was very different than everyone else in a spectacular scale.

01:55:59.000 In a scale that today, thousands of years later, we look at it and go, I don't fucking know.

01:56:07.000 No one knows.

01:56:08.000 They all pretend there's a logical people were smart.

01:56:12.000 They figured it out.

01:56:13.000 Police, this, that, the other.

01:56:15.000 Right.

01:56:15.000 You do it.

01:56:16.000 Do it.

01:56:17.000 If I give you a billion dollars, can you make me a pyramid?

01:56:20.000 Fuck off.

01:56:20.000 It's crazy.

01:56:21.000 It's a giant mystery.

01:56:23.000 You know, it's clear that it's there.

01:56:25.000 It's clear that it's in this one part of the world that for some reason, those people were way more advanced than everybody else.

01:56:33.000 Yeah.

01:56:33.000 Way more advanced.

01:56:34.000 They figured stuff out.

01:56:35.000 They figured out enormous blocks of stone, hundreds of miles through the mountain with no machines.

01:56:44.000 Yeah.

01:56:45.000 Like they were doing something totally different than everybody else.

01:56:48.000 How?

01:56:49.000 Right, but this is the same species that figured out how to split an atom.

01:56:52.000 Yes, unquestionably, but that's my point.

01:56:54.000 We can put our minds to it.

01:56:55.000 100%.

01:56:56.000 But that's my point.

01:56:57.000 They went in a different direction.

01:56:59.000 We're fucked because of the library of Alexander burning, and there's just not enough records to explain.

01:57:05.000 But we know that they did that.

01:57:07.000 And we know that human beings did that.

01:57:09.000 we know that human beings did that within the last few thousand years.

01:57:12.000 So that was a totally different direction.

01:57:14.000 And we're just collectively agreeing that this direction is the way human beings go.

01:57:20.000 But it's just what we're caught up in right now.

01:57:23.000 Like there could be a ton of different ways to do this and to seek technological innovation and to seek consistent, constant evolution of technology to the point where you can do that with these giant stones.

01:57:37.000 And you can point it to true north, south, east, and west.

01:57:40.000 And 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.

01:57:49.000 It's just nuts.

01:57:51.000 Which is a good motivation for doing simulation, right?

01:57:53.000 Because we would love to want to rewind the clock.

01:57:56.000 Oh my God.

01:57:57.000 That would be, let's let the Egyptians take over. 1.00

01:57:59.000 Let's see what happens in that world, right?

01:58:00.000 I mean, that would be a fun.

01:58:01.000 The kind of the biggest tragedy I find of being alive now is I want to know, I'm fascinated by our story as humans, and I want to know how it ends.

01:58:12.000 I want to know what is the future?

01:58:14.000 What does it look like in a thousand years?

01:58:15.000 Are we still here?

01:58:17.000 100,000 years.

01:58:18.000 I mean, we should still be anatomically kind of not evolved too much at that point, all things being equal.

01:58:22.000 So I'm fascinated by us.

01:58:25.000 Like, where I think we are the most fascinating thing that's ever happened to this planet.

01:58:30.000 And I would, I'm just, I think it's such a shame that my finite lifetime means I will never know where this incredible story eventually goes to.

01:58:40.000 Yeah, I think it's kind of like no country for old men. 1.00

01:58:43.000 Sometimes it ends and it's just, damn, I want to know more.

01:58:47.000 You can't know more.

01:58:49.000 Your time here is done.

01:58:51.000 This story goes on without you.

01:58:54.000 Yeah, I mean, it'd be kind of cool to find out how it ends.

01:58:58.000 I suspect that it ends with us looking like the Greys.

01:59:02.000 I think that's what that whole thing is, that bizarre iconography, this bizarre imagery that we have, this iconic creature that is completely non-muscular, has no gender, and has an enormous head.

01:59:16.000 I think we think we're going in that direction.

01:59:18.000 I think that's almost like some beacon in the future that's like calling to us in our subconscious.

01:59:26.000 Like when people have these late-night experiences where they think they're being abducted and they're encountering that, I think it's almost a part of our genetic coding.

01:59:35.000 I wonder if it's more of a cultural feedback.

01:59:38.000 Because 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.

01:59:57.000 And a journalist came interviewed him about what he saw and he described something.

02:00:01.000 And it was not a flying saucer, but the journalist misheard him and wrote down Flying Saucer.

02:00:07.000 And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers.

02:00:14.000 But it all happened after it came into print that this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme, had been put out there.

02:00:23.000 And 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.

02:00:41.000 And it's like, that could be that.

02:00:42.000 That could be that.

02:00:43.000 That makes sense because that's all it's got for context.

02:00:46.000 So, 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.

02:00:56.000 Yeah, I think there's some elements of that for sure.

02:00:59.000 I don't think there's any hard-fast explanation for all of the things.

02:01:03.000 You could put them all into one category, all the sightings.

02:01:06.000 But for sure, people do see what they want to see.

02:01:08.000 I remember one time I was in the woods in Alberta, and I saw what I thought was a wolf.

02:01:13.000 I 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.

02:01:18.000 And I thought what I saw was a wolf.

02:01:21.000 I thought it was a wolf for two seconds.

02:01:23.000 It was a squirrel.

02:01:24.000 But a second, maybe two, I thought it was a wolf.

02:01:27.000 I thought a fucking wolf?

02:01:27.000 I was like, what?

02:01:29.000 I thought I saw a wolf.

02:01:30.000 I'm like, oh, it's a fucking squirrel.

02:01:32.000 That's crazy.

02:01:33.000 How do you think a squirrel is a wolf?

02:01:35.000 Your brain just reaches for real.

02:01:36.000 Because my brain was reaching for a wolf.

02:01:38.000 Luckily, I'm logical and it was clear that it was a squirrel, but I was seeing it in dense woods and it was moving through and it was gray and my perceptive, my perception was wrong in terms of distance.

02:01:49.000 So I was like, is that yeah, there's this, there is a phenomenon called gestures reconfiguration that the psychologists talk about.

02:01:56.000 And I know about this term from Mars and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there.

02:02:03.000 So there's this phenomenon, it's called there's these laws of gestart reconfiguration.

02:02:07.000 It's sort of like closure.

02:02:09.000 Like if you see dots that almost make a circle, your brain will kind of make it a circle in its mind.

02:02:14.000 Continuation that if you see like dot-dash lines, your brain will see a continuous line almost.

02:02:20.000 It'll fill in the gaps.

02:02:22.000 And so the same thing is thought to have happened to this famous astronomer, Percival Lowell, in the late 19th century.

02:02:28.000 So about he was like this like super rich dude in a Boston area.

02:02:33.000 He was from a wealthy family of industrialists and he got really into astronomy.

02:02:37.000 And so he was convinced life was out there.

02:02:40.000 That was, you know, A, he was wealthy, so had means.

02:02:43.000 B, he thought life was out there.

02:02:44.000 There 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.

02:02:54.000 So he just thought like it's just this always happens.

02:02:56.000 Life always happens.

02:02:58.000 And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston ophthalmologist that he had the best eyesight the ophthalmologist had ever seen.

02:03:05.000 So he had these like three things in his head.

02:03:07.000 He had, I've got the means, so I can do it.

02:03:11.000 I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had.

02:03:13.000 And I, you know, believe that aliens are out there.

02:03:17.000 So he looked at Mars and he saw these four-inch telescopes or something, like a really blurry small telescope.

02:03:23.000 But 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.

02:03:31.000 He even did it for Mars and he saw, this is crazy.

02:03:34.000 He saw these, he draw a similar kind of picture.

02:03:36.000 Maybe you can Google it, Jamie.

02:03:38.000 Percival Lowell Venus.

02:03:40.000 And you'll get these kind of spokes.

02:03:43.000 And he saw these maps of Venus that, of course, were wrong.

02:03:47.000 And they look like the back of an eye.

02:03:49.000 They look like the blood vessels on the back of an eye.

02:03:52.000 And so ophthalmologists actually think that's what he was seeing.

02:03:57.000 So if you go to the left, the next one down, yeah, that one there.

02:04:02.000 You see that?

02:04:03.000 So that's the image he drew on the right.

02:04:06.000 And that's the image of a back of an eye.

02:04:09.000 And his eyesight, it's thought, was so good, he was seeing reflections of light in his own eyeball.

02:04:16.000 What?

02:04:16.000 He was seeing his own blood vessels.

02:04:19.000 So he was right.

02:04:21.000 His eyesight was freaking awesome.

02:04:23.000 He was correct about that.

02:04:24.000 But he misinterpreted it to be living things on Mars.

02:04:29.000 Oh, wow.

02:04:30.000 So he's just got, he's just a freak.

02:04:33.000 Yeah.

02:04:33.000 Just a biological freak.

02:04:35.000 That's crazy.

02:04:37.000 So 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.

02:04:49.000 Yeah.

02:04:50.000 No, there's no doubt.

02:04:52.000 There's no doubt that that's the case.

02:04:54.000 But I do wonder about some of the sightings.

02:04:58.000 But it's always wondering because I have not had any experiences personally.

02:05:02.000 You've never seen one yourself?

02:05:03.000 Nothing, no.

02:05:04.000 Well, it really freaked me out.

02:05:05.000 Nothing that I could say was something that I could go, there was this time.

02:05:09.000 No.

02:05:10.000 Well, I haven't either.

02:05:10.000 And I think a lot of astronomers are in that same boat.

02:05:12.000 And I think that's kind of strange.

02:05:14.000 You'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.

02:05:23.000 But that is something.

02:05:24.000 Also, the question is, are we looking at it wrong?

02:05:28.000 Because if you're dealing with something that's so technologically advanced that it's a million years ahead of us, would it really be still doing that?

02:05:38.000 Flying around in ships?

02:05:39.000 Who knows?

02:05:39.000 Wouldn't it be able to teleport to areas?

02:05:41.000 Wouldn't it be able to completely hide, be totally invisible?

02:05:46.000 But I guess the problem is there's all sorts of weird crap out there that we just don't understand.

02:05:52.000 In the NASA UAP Task Force, they found this.

02:05:55.000 Maybe you can find, Jamie, Red Sprite Lightning.

02:05:58.000 There's these lightning events that go upside down.

02:06:01.000 Yes.

02:06:02.000 And it happens in the upper atmosphere.

02:06:04.000 And for years and years, pilots were reporting this, and nobody believed them.

02:06:08.000 They were like, this is bullshit.

02:06:10.000 You're kind of upside down red light.

02:06:11.000 What the fuck are you talking about?

02:06:12.000 That's crazy.

02:06:13.000 And then people started videoing it.

02:06:15.000 And 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.

02:06:23.000 And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth.

02:06:29.000 And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it.

02:06:34.000 Right?

02:06:34.000 So there's, we don't understand.

02:06:36.000 Tell me that doesn't look like War of the Worlds.

02:06:39.000 Right.

02:06:39.000 If you saw that, you'd go, oh my God, there's an enormous ship the size of Manhattan flying over us.

02:06:46.000 Like, look, that's so crazy.

02:06:49.000 It's probably so, well, ball lightning, right?

02:06:51.000 Yeah, same thing with ball lightning.

02:06:52.000 I guess that one's maybe a little bit less.

02:06:54.000 I think they've maybe made examples in the laboratory, but no one's got a hard video of it in the real world setting.

02:07:00.000 There's no hard video lightning.

02:07:02.000 Oh, I thought there was.

02:07:03.000 All that shit online is fake shit.

02:07:05.000 Oh, no.

02:07:07.000 Really?

02:07:10.000 I talked to a guy who had something fly through his home.

02:07:13.000 And he was a regular guy, didn't seem to be a liar.

02:07:17.000 We were doing this TV show for the sci-fi network, and it was all around Skinwalker Ranch.

02:07:23.000 And this guy said that he had this ball of light that came through his home.

02:07:23.000 Yeah.

02:07:28.000 Wow.

02:07:29.000 You know, but if ball lightning is real and it does just sort of fly around, that is possible.

02:07:35.000 It's possible.

02:07:36.000 It's limited in terms of its ability to go into a structure.

02:07:39.000 It's kind of surprising we don't have any good video of it at this point.

02:07:43.000 I thought there was video.

02:07:44.000 I'm such a dumbass.

02:07:46.000 I'm not saying it's real, but this was two weeks ago.

02:07:49.000 Well, she's definitely not really there.

02:07:51.000 Right away, we're fucked.

02:07:53.000 Because right away they're doing trickery.

02:07:54.000 I've been screened on top of that.

02:07:56.000 I know.

02:07:57.000 But right away we're doing trickery because this lady is not really there. 0.90

02:08:00.000 So you're asking me to say that this is real when I know that this lady is in front of a fucking green screen. 1.00

02:08:08.000 There's a video that was going around.

02:08:09.000 That's awesome.

02:08:10.000 It's a lot of people.

02:08:11.000 Can you show me it again?

02:08:12.000 That's what I was trying to.

02:08:13.000 Anton's got good stuff.

02:08:13.000 I was trying to.

02:08:15.000 Okay, cool.

02:08:17.000 Anton Petrov.

02:08:18.000 Yeah.

02:08:19.000 He's one of the good ones.

02:08:19.000 Shout out to Anton.

02:08:20.000 Cool.

02:08:21.000 So this thing.

02:08:23.000 What is Antron's take on this?

02:08:25.000 Is it bullshit?

02:08:26.000 I haven't seen his video, but he's normally pretty grounded.

02:08:30.000 They're mostly all bullshit, but just, again, there's a new one someone thought they called it.

02:08:33.000 Interesting.

02:08:34.000 You know, my sister, when I was a kid, used to make me come into a bedroom and check for ball lightning.

02:08:40.000 She'd heard the stories that it chases you around.

02:08:42.000 So she'd be like look behind the curtains. 0.99

02:08:44.000 And she's my oldest sister.

02:08:45.000 I was like a little seven-year-old having to look around her room to make sure.

02:08:49.000 But it's one of those things that you get kind of terrified of the notion of it.

02:08:53.000 Isn't part of the theory of it is that it involves tectonic plates and that there's some energy that can be generated from that.

02:09:01.000 They fly out.

02:09:02.000 Because I've heard of them actually flying out of the ground.

02:09:06.000 Is that part of the theory?

02:09:08.000 It's not a field I follow closely.

02:09:11.000 I do worry about.

02:09:12.000 I'm getting my pilot's license at the moment, so I'm having to learn a lot about weather and different weather phenomena.

02:09:17.000 So that's been kind of fun learning about and different conditions for lightning and stuff.

02:09:21.000 But yeah, it's ball lightning, I can safely say as a pilot, I've never seen.

02:09:27.000 Well, if you're out there flying around as a pilot, I really hope you see a UFO.

02:09:31.000 I do.

02:09:32.000 I'm always looking out for it.

02:09:34.000 Of course.

02:09:34.000 I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty, I'm like, man, like, how can I, everyone else seems to have seen these things.

02:09:38.000 How come I've not seen one?

02:09:40.000 I'm the alien guy.

02:09:41.000 Like, this doesn't make sense.

02:09:42.000 So, yeah.

02:09:43.000 I wonder what percentage of the population has actually seen something that they think wasn't from here.

02:09:48.000 Well, a majority of Americans believe in alien UFOs, I think.

02:09:52.000 Because it's fun.

02:09:53.000 Yeah.

02:09:54.000 And 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.

02:10:07.000 So when the New York Times had it on the cover, Pentagon videos, yeah.

02:10:11.000 That was probably the first time that people, well, it's in the middle of the day.

02:10:14.000 That shifted the Overton window.

02:10:15.000 Yes.

02:10:16.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:10:17.000 Yeah, I mean, that's actually made, to be honest, that's made the kind of stuff we do, the SETI work we do.

02:10:21.000 So SETI's extraterrestrial intelligence.

02:10:23.000 We've kind of rebranded it these days as techno signatures.

02:10:26.000 But that used to be the sort of thing that Congress would always ding and be like, you can't do that, dude.

02:10:31.000 You can't have taxpayer money going to look at failings.

02:10:34.000 That's ridiculous.

02:10:35.000 But ever since the UFO, the UAP phenomena really caught on, the Overton window has shifted.

02:10:41.000 And 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.

02:10:51.000 So you've got Abby, who's trying to do Project Galileo, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff.

02:10:56.000 And I think it's a valid point.

02:10:57.000 Like 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.

02:11:05.000 Like that it's still, you can design an experiment to do it.

02:11:08.000 It's still scientific.

02:11:09.000 There's no magical reason why once it enters the atmosphere, it suddenly doesn't become science.

02:11:14.000 So I think that's a good argument why we should do it.

02:11:18.000 What 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?

02:11:33.000 I don't know what to make of it.

02:11:34.000 It's fascinating.

02:11:36.000 It'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.

02:11:46.000 It's hard.

02:11:47.000 It's difficult to pass what's going on.

02:11:50.000 But I do believe everyone's fallible.

02:11:52.000 So it is possible.

02:11:55.000 As I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things.

02:11:59.000 There'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.

02:12:09.000 And it's all about knowing that spurious rate.

02:12:11.000 Like, how often do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've got?

02:12:17.000 And we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is.

02:12:21.000 So as a scientist, it's hard to make to pass it.

02:12:25.000 I don't think we can ingest it realistically unless every time they say they've got the disclosure thing, right?

02:12:31.000 We're going to get disclosure soon.

02:12:32.000 And every time it feels like we don't get the craft, we don't get the technology, we don't get a body.

02:12:37.000 So yeah, sure, if you give me, if you give me the technology and let me dissect in my lab, then I could be convinced.

02:12:44.000 But 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.

02:12:51.000 And then it's intensely frustrating.

02:12:54.000 It's intensely frustrating to even be remotely interested in it because every new thing, you're like, what?

02:12:58.000 Is this going to be a thing?

02:12:58.000 Is this it?

02:12:59.000 You're like pulling on your heartstrings.

02:13:01.000 It's like a girl who keeps texting you saying, like, we'll go on a date, it's going to be great next time.

02:13:05.000 And then she just lets you down every time.

02:13:07.000 What is the name of that disclosure, Age of Disclosure documentary?

02:13:10.000 That's what it is, right?

02:13:11.000 There's a documentary that they premiered at Sundance or at South by Southwest, rather, here that was really good.

02:13:18.000 And it is essentially just all these different people that worked on these programs spilling the beans.

02:13:24.000 And they all have pretty similar stories.

02:13:26.000 And the bottleneck seems to be that all this stuff was done without congressional approval, which is highly illegal.

02:13:34.000 So all the research, all this hidden back engineering programs, all this stuff in conjunction also with military contractors.

02:13:45.000 So those are the ones that build the jets and the rockets.

02:13:48.000 And so you have to go to them to help with this stuff and to try to back engineer this stuff.

02:13:53.000 So then there's this competitive advantage they would have over other military contractors that don't get a crashed UFO.

02:14:00.000 And like, so then people are getting sued, people are going to jail.

02:14:03.000 There's a lot of money that was allocated for these things that was done through lies.

02:14:07.000 And there's a lot of problems with that.

02:14:08.000 And 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.

02:14:23.000 This is a much bigger deal.

02:14:24.000 This is, there is direct evidence of an actual life form that is not Homo sapiens, that can do things that we can't do, that visits us.

02:14:34.000 And occasionally they lose a craft, which is also hard to believe, right?

02:14:39.000 How they get here.

02:14:41.000 Yeah, they're not very good pilots, right?

02:14:42.000 Richard Dolan actually has a pretty good explanation for some of them.

02:14:46.000 And it's high-altitude nuclear bombs that we detonated during the testing days.

02:14:52.000 So during the testing days, after the war from 45 to, I think, they tested them.

02:14:59.000 I think, When did they stop blowing up nukes?

02:15:02.000 But there was just in the United States, thousands of nuclear detonations, and a bunch of them they did in the ocean, and a bunch of them they did in the sky.

02:15:12.000 They did them like 150 miles up.

02:15:14.000 They detonated nukes.

02:15:15.000 I thought they only did it once with Starfish Prime.

02:15:20.000 But no, they did it at different altitudes.

02:15:23.000 They just tried things.

02:15:25.000 And 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.

02:15:38.000 Yeah, I mean, it's a great story.

02:15:40.000 I just need to see the evidence, right?

02:15:41.000 Yeah.

02:15:42.000 Oh, it's the best story.

02:15:43.000 Yeah.

02:15:43.000 I think this is, it's just, it could be, I mean, in Iceland, most people believe in fairies.

02:15:48.000 And if you go back, you know, 100 years, most people believe that.

02:15:51.000 Most people in Iceland believe in fairies.

02:15:53.000 Wow.

02:15:54.000 What do they think they are?

02:15:56.000 I don't know.

02:15:56.000 Elves, maybe?

02:15:57.000 Elves or fairies? 0.93

02:15:58.000 I can't remember the exact word they use.

02:15:59.000 Yeah.

02:16:00.000 Soviet, what does this say, Jamie? 0.52

02:16:02.000 What they did?

02:16:03.000 The last high-altitude tests.

02:16:04.000 Okay, so the last, so the last high-altitude.

02:16:07.000 Look at how many they did.

02:16:09.000 They just kept doing them.

02:16:10.000 They just kept doing them.

02:16:12.000 Look at all these fucking tests.

02:16:14.000 These are all high-altitude nuclear bombs.

02:16:16.000 A bunch failed.

02:16:18.000 That is insane.

02:16:20.000 Yeah, a bunch failed.

02:16:21.000 Look at all these ones that failed.

02:16:22.000 What happened to those?

02:16:23.000 They just fall into the ocean.

02:16:24.000 Good luck.

02:16:25.000 Figure it out, fish.

02:16:26.000 Whale had that for lunch.

02:16:27.000 Yeah, figure it out.

02:16:29.000 That's where Godzilla comes from.

02:16:31.000 Literally, the movie.

02:16:33.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess my point is that there's whenever you have this weird stuff.

02:16:38.000 Aliens is.

02:16:40.000 I wrote about this recently.

02:16:41.000 Aliens is almost too good of an explanation.

02:16:44.000 Right.

02:16:45.000 Because it can explain everything.

02:16:47.000 There's nothing you can't explain with aliens, right?

02:16:51.000 Whatever it is.

02:16:51.000 And yet, so it has, I call it unbounded explanatory capability.

02:16:55.000 You can explain absolutely fucking everything.

02:16:57.000 Yeah.

02:16:57.000 It's God of the gaps, quite literally.

02:16:59.000 Whenever you see something odd, you can just inject your God to explain that.

02:17:04.000 And yet, at the same time, on the other side of the coin, it also has unbounded avoidance capacity.

02:17:10.000 Because you could say to me, look, I saw a UFO at this site on Monday, on Tuesday, and Wednesday.

02:17:16.000 So come Thursday and we'll see it together because it's happening every day.

02:17:18.000 And I come with you, I don't see it.

02:17:20.000 Okay, well, we just didn't.

02:17:21.000 I guess it changed its mind.

02:17:22.000 It didn't happen today.

02:17:23.000 That doesn't disprove what you saw.

02:17:25.000 And similarly, if I go, you know, people have said, you know, we've surveyed the surface of Mars, we don't see any life on it.

02:17:31.000 I can't disprove there's life on Mars.

02:17:33.000 There could be life underneath a rock that we just haven't turned over yet.

02:17:36.000 You can never disprove, you can't prove a negative.

02:17:39.000 So it could always be there.

02:17:41.000 So aliens is almost unscientific as a hypothesis because it can explain everything and yet there's no experiment I can do to ever prove it's wrong.

02:17:51.000 And that puts it in a very precarious position scientifically.

02:17:54.000 Right.

02:17:55.000 Yeah, we're just sort of in this adolescent stage of understanding.

02:18:00.000 If they are real, we really don't know right now.

02:18:03.000 And that's the weirdest part is that there's so many compelling stories.

02:18:08.000 And it's also the weirdness of it is so exciting to us.

02:18:13.000 The weirdness of an intelligent life form looking at us is so exciting to us that we want it to be real.

02:18:20.000 You want to believe?

02:18:21.000 Oh, me more than anybody.

02:18:23.000 I'm the worst.

02:18:24.000 I'm the worst.

02:18:25.000 I go back and forth on this bullshit.

02:18:28.000 My general belief is that a large number of these things that we're seeing are top secret military aircrafts.

02:18:36.000 And I think that's always existed.

02:18:38.000 That's always been the case.

02:18:39.000 And they probably have some incredible technology that we're not aware of.

02:18:44.000 That's the majority of what I think is happening.

02:18:47.000 But that doesn't make sense when you go really far back.

02:18:52.000 That doesn't make sense when you go to the Kenneth Arnold sightings.

02:18:55.000 Like 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.

02:19:05.000 Also, the idea that that was Nazi technology, this is something that's always talked about.

02:19:09.000 And Richard Dolan talked about in his book as well.

02:19:11.000 They were already gone.

02:19:13.000 They had lost the war.

02:19:15.000 There's no way they're launching technology that's above and beyond anything anybody is aware of while their society's in shambles, right?

02:19:23.000 There's no way.

02:19:23.000 They don't have a military anymore.

02:19:25.000 It's over.

02:19:25.000 The war's over.

02:19:26.000 So that doesn't make sense.

02:19:27.000 So if it's not them, who is it?

02:19:29.000 Is it someone that's already here?

02:19:31.000 Is it something that's been here the entire time?

02:19:34.000 And then that gets really weird.

02:19:35.000 And people go, well, where's the evidence of that?

02:19:38.000 right, there's no evidence of that.

02:19:40.000 But there's also so much room in the ocean.

02:19:44.000 The ocean is, if I was going to hide, that's where I would hide.

02:19:47.000 We literally can't go there.

02:19:50.000 There's too much of it.

02:19:53.000 You could go into the ocean and put a base underground in the middle of the ocean, and 100% we're not going to find it.

02:20:01.000 Yeah, I would just say whatever your hypothesis is, the most constructive thing to do is to think about how can we prove or disprove it.

02:20:08.000 We can't.

02:20:09.000 That's what I want.

02:20:14.000 Because if they really do have something, boy, you're fucking over the entire human race by not releasing this just because you're worried about Congress getting mad at you?

02:20:22.000 Like, that's a real problem.

02:20:23.000 That's a real problem.

02:20:25.000 That's what this movie tries to address.

02:20:27.000 And Richard Dolan talks about that in his book as well.

02:20:29.000 And a bunch of people have brought up that point.

02:20:32.000 There's a lot of legal issues that are going to arise.

02:20:37.000 And a lot of people could be very vulnerable if this does turn out to be the case, that they have had this technology since the 1940s.

02:20:45.000 Yeah.

02:20:45.000 I mean, we can argue about history, but I think the most constructive thing is just to design an experiment.

02:20:50.000 And I think, you know, Abby's idea, Project Galileo, is a good one.

02:20:54.000 Like, we should try and survey the sky more systematically.

02:20:58.000 And we've got now the Vera Rubin telescope, which is doing literally a movie of the entire sky every night.

02:21:04.000 So 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.

02:21:15.000 This is public data, not military-controlled facilities.

02:21:19.000 They're very aware of our capabilities and very aware that we can do this.

02:21:24.000 So they camouflage themselves.

02:21:25.000 Yeah.

02:21:26.000 But then you're starting to get into the sort of exponentially contrived and they know everything.

02:21:33.000 So then it becomes unfalsifiable.

02:21:35.000 So we're sort of leaving the world of science.

02:21:36.000 But 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.

02:21:44.000 There was even a claim for a planet K218B.

02:21:48.000 There was a claim a few months ago.

02:21:51.000 It's an ocean world.

02:21:52.000 It's thought to be an ocean world.

02:21:53.000 It's about two and a half times the size of the Earth.

02:21:56.000 And we detected this molecule with weak significance.

02:21:59.000 I want to emphasize that.

02:22:00.000 It was only weakly detected called dimethyl sulfide.

02:22:04.000 And that's, I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have.

02:22:08.000 And it's something that bacteria and phytoplankton make on the Earth.

02:22:12.000 So they detected the hint of this molecule.

02:22:15.000 And as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the Earth.

02:22:18.000 We don't have any other process that can make it except for living creatures.

02:22:23.000 And so it was a lot of excitement about that.

02:22:26.000 And it turned out in that case, with follow-up observations, it maybe is not as secure as they thought.

02:22:31.000 And it actually doesn't appear to be there anymore.

02:22:34.000 But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment.

02:22:38.000 It 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.

02:22:47.000 So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets.

02:22:52.000 We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore.

02:22:54.000 We can actually start surveying where they're at and seeing what's up.

02:22:58.000 So I think that's going to, and that's just simple life, of course.

02:23:01.000 That's not even technological life.

02:23:03.000 So I think we're going to get answers.

02:23:06.000 And 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.

02:23:14.000 We're trying to build a mission now called the Habital Worlds Observatory, HWO.

02:23:19.000 It'll probably get renamed at some point.

02:23:21.000 I think it'll be like the Carl Sagan Observatory probably would be a rebranding for it is my hunch.

02:23:26.000 And that thing's trying to take photos. 0.99

02:23:28.000 Like we saw with Alpha Centauri.

02:23:29.000 It's trying to do photos, but of Earth-sized planets.

02:23:32.000 JWST can't image Earth-sized planets.

02:23:33.000 They're too small.

02:23:34.000 This thing will be able to take photos of Earths around other stars.

02:23:39.000 And it will see the pale blue dot of light of that other world.

02:23:43.000 And we'll get its chemical fingerprint.

02:23:45.000 We'll be able to sniff its atmosphere.

02:23:48.000 We'll pull their pants down, right? 0.97

02:23:50.000 We'll get the whole thing.

02:23:52.000 So the aliens can't hide from us forever, right?

02:23:55.000 Our technology is getting to the point where we're going to find them in their own home.

02:23:59.000 When They came out with the James Webb telescope.

02:24:02.000 How long was the development process?

02:24:05.000 And where are they at now in terms of a future better version of something like that?

02:24:11.000 Yeah, it was a long process.

02:24:12.000 I mean, almost as soon as Hubble launched, they started planning the successor to Hubble, which was James Webb.

02:24:18.000 It was famously over budget.

02:24:19.000 I think the original budget was supposed to be $800 million and ended up costing $10 billion.

02:24:25.000 It just went completely over But this is always because, you know, there was some bad contractors.

02:24:25.000 Isn't that crazy?

02:24:32.000 Astronomers tend to underestimate their budgets a little bit when they're finding these things out.

02:24:35.000 And there's inflation.

02:24:36.000 So 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?

02:24:46.000 So it took a long time, right, for that project to develop.

02:24:49.000 We are starting the HWA project now.

02:24:51.000 There's already design teams, working groups that are putting the first, you know, blueprints together of what this thing would look like.

02:24:59.000 But 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.

02:25:08.000 There's about 40 missions that would end, NASA missions that would end in that White House budget.

02:25:13.000 But fortunately, the Senate readjusted it back up to pretty much last year's life.

02:25:19.000 Why don't you go talk to those people?

02:25:21.000 Why don't you give a speech the way you just laid it out for us and how fascinating and important this stuff is?

02:25:26.000 I don't think these assholes know.

02:25:29.000 I've been to DC.

02:25:30.000 I have lobbied, but you only talk to their aides.

02:25:32.000 That's all you end up talking to.

02:25:34.000 Yeah, you've got to get in front of Congress.

02:25:36.000 You'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.

02:25:43.000 This is like one of the most important things to look for that you could even imagine.

02:25:48.000 And we can do it.

02:25:49.000 We actually, for the first time in human civilization, we have the ability to do the experiment.

02:25:54.000 Is there life on another planet?

02:25:56.000 What is this, Jamie?

02:25:57.000 This is some of the images from the Hubble?

02:25:59.000 This is showing what the new telescope, the Roman scope telescope?

02:26:04.000 Yeah, Roman.

02:26:05.000 It's just a huge field of view, right?

02:26:06.000 And that picture is what the Hubble got, and then it's zooming out to show you what.

02:26:10.000 So Roman's happening, hopefully. 1.00

02:26:12.000 Yeah, Roman should be flying.

02:26:16.000 Wow.

02:26:18.000 Roman, interestingly, it's military technology, it's spy technology.

02:26:22.000 So apparently the NSA had two Hubble-class space telescopes in their basement.

02:26:27.000 They just were like, said to NASA, by the way, we're not using these.

02:26:32.000 They're out of date for us.

02:26:33.000 Do you want one?

02:26:34.000 And NASA took it and turned it into Roman. 0.66

02:26:37.000 That's crazy.

02:26:38.000 They just have them lying around.

02:26:39.000 That's what I'm talking about.

02:26:40.000 These motherfuckers have technology. 1.00

02:26:42.000 They're keeping from us.

02:26:44.000 What could be done better?

02:26:46.000 Like, what is if you had an unlimited budget and an enormous supply of brilliant minds to get together to coordinate something?

02:26:56.000 What would be how you would set it up to make it even more powerful?

02:27:00.000 For what goal?

02:27:01.000 Seeing further, seeing clear, being able to precisely locate planets and get a much better view of them.

02:27:09.000 Yeah, 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.

02:27:22.000 You find stuff you never expected in the universe.

02:27:24.000 And we've seen that every time.

02:27:26.000 Every time.

02:27:26.000 Yeah, I think whenever you listen to the universe in a different way.

02:27:30.000 So 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.

02:27:37.000 And then recently we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.

02:27:43.000 So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it.

02:27:47.000 And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes.

02:27:52.000 And it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form.

02:27:56.000 So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us.

02:28:02.000 So it's not going to be a single mission.

02:28:05.000 It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Hapital Worlds Observatory.

02:28:10.000 We 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?

02:28:24.000 You can't do science unless the data is A, public and then B, people are actually there to Study it.

02:28:30.000 So those are the two key ingredients.

02:28:32.000 Just have great telescopes and great people.

02:28:35.000 Is funding the biggest bottleneck for it right now?

02:28:37.000 Or is it a lack of interest from the right amount of people?

02:28:42.000 Like, what is it?

02:28:43.000 Yeah, certainly.

02:28:43.000 I mean, HWO, we're talking about a mission that's going to cost at least $10 billion.

02:28:48.000 And the NASA budget is about 25, 26 billion.

02:28:52.000 So it's eating up already.

02:28:54.000 I mean, if you built it in one year, it would eat up almost half of the budget.

02:28:57.000 So it's impossible for that mission to be built in a year.

02:29:00.000 Even though probably we could, if we had the money.

02:29:03.000 Maybe in a year or two, you could probably build something like that.

02:29:05.000 So, yeah, if you doubled NASA's budget, it would come twice as fast.

02:29:09.000 For sure, you'd have it in maybe five years rather than waiting to 2050.

02:29:13.000 That's what we're talking about.

02:29:14.000 It's just kind of depressing when you think about it.

02:29:14.000 Facial beauty.

02:29:16.000 Well, it's kind of depressing is like weird stuff happens.

02:29:18.000 Like 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.

02:29:27.000 You guys could have done that.

02:29:29.000 You have the money.

02:29:30.000 You guys had the money to make the most insane telescopes.

02:29:33.000 We could find out more.

02:29:34.000 Yeah, Carl Sagan had a quote once.

02:29:36.000 He said that the entire SETI program was equivalent to one attack helicopter.

02:29:42.000 If you did like the entire SETI in its maximal form, would have been the cost of one attack helicopter.

02:29:46.000 If I was president, I'd go ham.

02:29:48.000 I'd bring in all the cosmologists.

02:29:51.000 I'm like, what do we got to do?

02:29:52.000 Let's figure this.

02:29:53.000 Let's get crazy.

02:29:54.000 Let's get crazy.

02:29:55.000 You guys want to get rich?

02:29:57.000 This image shows telescopes that we have used and then a few that are being made.

02:30:03.000 So down here is the size of the James Webb telescope.

02:30:06.000 It's all the way down.

02:30:07.000 Yeah, I mean, it's only six and a half meters, so it's limited.

02:30:10.000 They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it.

02:30:13.000 So actually, Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding.

02:30:16.000 It wouldn't have 200 points of failure.

02:30:20.000 It could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship.

02:30:24.000 And even better, it would cost less because a huge cost in these space telescopes is making them really light.

02:30:30.000 So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light so they're low cost to launch.

02:30:35.000 But if you have a Starship, it can launch like 100 tons, I think it is.

02:30:39.000 You could literally just take these ground-based telescopes you already have and just shove them in there and obviously put some chassis on it.

02:30:46.000 But you could, it'd be way, way cheaper to launch these things.

02:30:48.000 So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch capabilities that Starship give us.

02:30:54.000 That 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.

02:31:06.000 So, yeah, I would say the future can be bright because we have the means to do it if we have the will to do it.

02:31:15.000 It just seems to be a puzzle that most human beings on Earth are fascinated with.

02:31:22.000 The fact that that is inadequately funded is enraging.

02:31:27.000 It's enraging.

02:31:28.000 It just makes you crazy.

02:31:29.000 Like, of all the things that we should be interested in, that seems to the space seems to be the big one.

02:31:35.000 And it was until we were all fucked up by light pollution.

02:31:39.000 I think if we didn't have light pollution, I think people would have a much greater sense of the majesty of our existence in the cosmos.

02:31:49.000 It's such a bummer.

02:31:50.000 It really is.

02:31:51.000 Have you been to a dark skies area?

02:31:53.000 Yes.

02:31:54.000 I've talked about it too many times on the podcast to repeat it, but there was a time when I went to the array in the Big Island.

02:32:06.000 Oh, Macau.

02:32:07.000 And I went up there on the perfect night.

02:32:07.000 Mauke.

02:32:10.000 There was no moon, and it was like being in the hub of the universe.

02:32:16.000 It was like being in a spaceship, a convertible spaceship.

02:32:19.000 That's what it felt like.

02:32:20.000 It was so incredible.

02:32:22.000 The entire sky was filled with stars.

02:32:24.000 The Milky Way was beautifully clear.

02:32:27.000 And it was like life-changing.

02:32:29.000 I've gone up there three times since, never caught it that way again.

02:32:33.000 You're kind of like the overview effect.

02:32:34.000 You heard that with astronauts when they go up to space and they see the Earth.

02:32:38.000 I think we should launch all our presidents into space.

02:32:41.000 Oh, that's good.

02:32:42.000 Bring them back.

02:32:43.000 them have that overview because I think that is Everyone has to go up with Katie Perry. 0.99

02:32:49.000 It's just a brigadier.

02:32:50.000 She's the guide.

02:32:52.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that would be great for you.

02:32:54.000 I also think they should have a mushroom experience.

02:32:56.000 But that's just me.

02:32:57.000 But going into space, just, I mean, just being able to see it used to be the norm for human beings.

02:33:06.000 There was no light pollution.

02:33:07.000 You could get away from the campfire, you lay on your back, and you see everything.

02:33:11.000 And I think that gave us a better understanding.

02:33:15.000 First of all, it made us more humble, for sure.

02:33:19.000 You're confronted with this impossible image in front of you.

02:33:23.000 And now that we know what that is, so ancient man's looking at it, it's just incredible, beautiful lights, and they're tracking the constellations and marking them down.

02:33:31.000 And this is what this is.

02:33:32.000 Let's call this one Leo.

02:33:34.000 But when you get to what we know now, and what we know, those are all fireballs in the sky that are bigger than our sun, and 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.

02:33:50.000 When you see, like, I'm sure you've seen this, but maybe people haven't.

02:33:54.000 When 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.

02:34:06.000 And yet it's still insane and majestic.

02:34:09.000 And I think that we've gotten so arrogant because of cities, because everybody just sees this black cloud over us, this curtain over the sky.

02:34:20.000 And maybe you see the moon, but that's it.

02:34:22.000 You see a dot here or a dot there.

02:34:24.000 That's the only stars you see.

02:34:25.000 Are the most bright ones are Venus?

02:34:27.000 And then you don't get a sense of what we're really doing.

02:34:30.000 Yeah, it makes me sad when so here's the inner city sky, suburban, urban, rural, excellent, dark sky.

02:34:38.000 But then what the thing about the observatory is that it's above the clouds.

02:34:43.000 We drove through the clouds when we saw that.

02:34:45.000 That doesn't even do it justice.

02:34:46.000 No, not even close.

02:34:48.000 But there's pictures of it.

02:34:49.000 See if you can, the Mauna Loa Observatory.

02:34:52.000 Yeah, 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?

02:34:59.000 Like, I care about the, you know, the bread on the table, economy, and jobs and factories and stuff like that.

02:35:05.000 I care about the things that really directly affect my life.

02:35:08.000 But I think there has to be things that we do as humans, existential things, like, are we alone in the universe?

02:35:16.000 How can it be a bigger question than that?

02:35:17.000 That's what I saw.

02:35:18.000 Maybe even better than that.

02:35:18.000 Yeah.

02:35:19.000 And 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.

02:35:28.000 There are grander things than what we have on this planet.

02:35:30.000 Also, it's so frustrating that we're very capable of curing all those problems for the vast majority of people on this planet if we weren't so fucking greedy.

02:35:40.000 If we really treated humanity like a community, we could completely eliminate starvation and poverty the way it exists today.

02:35:48.000 We can completely, just, no one's even tried.

02:35:51.000 Yeah, the inequality right now is so out of control in this country and the world.

02:35:56.000 Well, in the country, but in the world, the craziest thing that I've ever heard is that $34,000 is 1% of the world.

02:36:04.000 The 1%ers, the people that run the world that everybody likes to think, they're the people pulling the strings. 1.00

02:36:09.000 No, that's you, bitch. 1.00

02:36:11.000 You work in Starbucks.

02:36:12.000 You're a 1%er. 1.00

02:36:14.000 If you work full-time at Starbucks, you are the 1% of the world.

02:36:18.000 You're the string puller, but you're not, right?

02:36:20.000 No.

02:36:20.000 No, the world's really kind of crazy.

02:36:23.000 It's the 0.001 or whatever it is.

02:36:25.000 Yeah, that's the problem.

02:36:26.000 Both things can be accomplished.

02:36:28.000 If we really directed our resources in a kind, moral, and ethical way, we would solve that first and then get everybody excited about solving the cosmos.

02:36:38.000 Yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that in astronomy, you know, we used to always be completely federally supported.

02:36:43.000 There was some private funding, but by and large, it was pushed and pulled by federal grants and federal money.

02:36:48.000 And I think that's generally healthy, right?

02:36:50.000 Because then everyone can apply for it.

02:36:52.000 It's not about being mates with Jeff Bezos or being friends with certain high-influenced people.

02:36:59.000 But we're getting to this stage increasingly where private money is having a big influence, even in astronomy and other fundamental sciences as well.

02:37:06.000 And then the people that succeed end up being not necessarily the Einsteins, the most brilliant people.

02:37:10.000 They'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.

02:37:18.000 And that's just kind of gross.

02:37:20.000 It's gross.

02:37:21.000 Yeah, it shouldn't be that way.

02:37:22.000 It's also gross that humans can control resources.

02:37:25.000 I 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.

02:37:36.000 If we're really smart about it, we look at the oil is clearly everybody's.

02:37:39.000 The water is clearly everybody's.

02:37:41.000 We should all agree that all the stuff that we need should be everybody's.

02:37:45.000 Yeah.

02:37:45.000 It's like to charge you for air would be wild, right?

02:37:49.000 But you could charge you for water.

02:37:50.000 they could charge you for oil.

02:37:52.000 It's kind of crazy.

02:37:53.000 It's kind of crazy that we have allowed that system to be in place where an individual can literally be in control of the blood of the earth that we use to make plastic and electronics.

02:38:04.000 And that's where we're at.

02:38:05.000 Right.

02:38:06.000 So when you get that, you know, if you do go to, I've never been to space, I've never had that certainly seen Clear Night Skies.

02:38:10.000 But I think when you look out, you see not countries and boundaries.

02:38:14.000 You just see this, we're all in this together.

02:38:16.000 That's what everybody's doing.

02:38:17.000 It's a tiny little fragile thing.

02:38:20.000 This is it.

02:38:20.000 Like we could fuck this up so easily, but we could also make it so glorious if we worked together.

02:38:25.000 That also gives me a pause about this whole idea that the aliens are like space daddies come to keep us from blowing ourselves up.

02:38:32.000 Like that might be like very idealistic thinking.

02:38:36.000 If they don't exist, we're on our own.

02:38:38.000 It's illusion, right?

02:38:38.000 That's the goblin.

02:38:39.000 It's like it's wishing for that fatherly figure to come down and teach me the air of my ways and look after us.

02:38:45.000 And that's just, look, the cover ain't coming, Joe.

02:38:48.000 This is it.

02:38:49.000 It's all it's on us.

02:38:50.000 It's on our skin to solve this freaking problem.

02:38:53.000 Well, I was like when the United States was about to bomb Iran, I was like, okay, well, now we're going to find out. 0.93

02:38:59.000 Let's see if the aliens step in.

02:39:00.000 You go, hey, hey, hey, cut the shit.

02:39:04.000 No.

02:39:04.000 They didn't.

02:39:05.000 Maybe they only step in when you use nukes.

02:39:07.000 Maybe they have like a threshold of acceptable aggression that they allow.

02:39:11.000 Yeah, I don't think there's any backstop.

02:39:13.000 There's no backstop.

02:39:14.000 I think it's up to us.

02:39:15.000 Yeah.

02:39:15.000 I think we have to figure it out.

02:39:16.000 But I think we're all aware of that.

02:39:19.000 And 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.

02:39:29.000 There'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.

02:39:39.000 A lot of it totally counterproductive, but like why?

02:39:43.000 Like why are we still behaving like territorial apes?

02:39:47.000 Like what is it, even though you're not and I'm not, Jamie's not, like a lot of people aren't.

02:39:52.000 You know, it's not everything.

02:39:54.000 It's not every interaction that humans have.

02:39:57.000 But it's enough that it's still pushing the worst aspects of our life, which is war and poverty and crime and violence.

02:40:04.000 It's still pushing all those things.

02:40:06.000 Yeah.

02:40:06.000 But 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.

02:40:15.000 And similarly as a scientist, we're in competition with each other.

02:40:18.000 So there's almost a catalyst system embedded into science that I want to not like crush my enemy or something.

02:40:24.000 I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have, I know what the level field is.

02:40:29.000 And if you want to stand out, you have to, you know, bat above that level.

02:40:34.000 And so that drives me to become, I'm definitely influenced by competition.

02:40:38.000 I feed off it.

02:40:39.000 Yes.

02:40:40.000 And it makes me a better scientist when I know someone's breathing down my neck at my data.

02:40:44.000 I'm like, let's, this is it.

02:40:45.000 Let's just crank out the hours.

02:40:47.000 We're going to do the best we can.

02:40:48.000 But if I know no one's looking at my data set and I've got three years to myself, I'm just going to chill.

02:40:53.000 I'm just going to be like, there's no urgency here.

02:40:56.000 Let's think about other things.

02:40:57.000 Let's do other stuff.

02:40:57.000 So that competition, like you said, is really double-edged.

02:41:01.000 And I don't know, we need to figure out a way to channel it because, you know, I did martial arts as a kid a lot.

02:41:09.000 And one of the things I really love.

02:41:10.000 You did style.

02:41:11.000 I did taekwondo.

02:41:12.000 I did Binamuay Thai and I did some Shotokan karate, but mostly Taekwondo.

02:41:19.000 And I learn a lot from that just mentally about myself.

02:41:23.000 I really want my kids to do martial arts because I feel like it's just a transformative experience for learning how to master yourself.

02:41:30.000 And one of the things I really learned was how to channel negative feelings into something productive.

02:41:36.000 So I was feeling really cut up about a breakup with a girlfriend at the time.

02:41:40.000 And I was just beating the crap out of these punch bags.

02:41:43.000 I was going training every night, every session I could get my hands on.

02:41:47.000 And then it ended up turning me into this beast.

02:41:49.000 I was like ripped.

02:41:50.000 I got a six-pack and I was training with the national squad.

02:41:54.000 And I got pretty decent.

02:41:56.000 And it wasn't like I was aiming to do that.

02:41:58.000 It 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.

02:42:08.000 And I've tried to, whenever I have those kind of feelings, I always try to twist them in the same way.

02:42:14.000 I remember when I first arrived at Harvard, I had the same thing.

02:42:16.000 I arrived at Harvard, and all the names in the corridors were famous professors.

02:42:20.000 And I was just freaking out.

02:42:21.000 I was like, fuck, I've got to have coffee with this guy, these legends.

02:42:25.000 Like, how am I going to handle a conversation with these dudes?

02:42:28.000 And I remember I was kind of like a bit of an outcast because I wasn't in anyone's group at the time.

02:42:34.000 And I remember walking down the corridor and hearing them laugh at me, saying, Oh, here comes the moon.

02:42:39.000 I heard there's a moon guy in the group or something.

02:42:41.000 They thought the idea of looking for moons was crazy.

02:42:43.000 So they're all kind of laughing.

02:42:44.000 I came around the corridor and you know, kind of like, yeah, you know, it was kind of awkward.

02:42:49.000 And I felt like they all looked down at me.

02:42:52.000 And they probably did back then.

02:42:54.000 And after a few years, I really, I know I earned their respect because I was out publishing them and I was driven by that competition.

02:42:59.000 I was like, I'm going to show you.

02:43:01.000 I'm going to prove to you how good I am by publishing twice what you publish.

02:43:04.000 I'm going to do better science.

02:43:05.000 I'm going to do more of it.

02:43:06.000 I'm going to make myself so good.

02:43:08.000 You can't ignore me.

02:43:09.000 It'd be ridiculous to ignore what I'm doing because I'm so far ahead of you.

02:43:13.000 That's what I wanted to do.

02:43:14.000 And I got to a point where I knew they wanted me in their group now.

02:43:17.000 They were like, oh, come join our here, come join our group.

02:43:20.000 And I didn't let them get close because I knew I perform better when I play that game in my head that everyone's against me.

02:43:28.000 It was just sort of a mind fuckery.

02:43:30.000 And it's that same, I get it.

02:43:31.000 Yeah, same thing as martial arts.

02:43:32.000 It's like learning what are the tricks, the hacks that make you operate well, but being conscious of it.

02:43:37.000 And I think as a society, if we can do that, there's a hack.

02:43:40.000 Competition is a hack that makes us super productive.

02:43:43.000 But it's just a way, can we hack it and channel it in a conscious way towards a productive outcome?

02:43:48.000 Yeah, turn it into enthusiasm and turn it into inspiration instead of just be overcome with jealousy and rage, which is what happens to the weaker of minds.

02:43:59.000 Yeah.

02:44:00.000 You know, interesting enough with this podcast, I don't think of it in a competitive way at all.

02:44:06.000 And I never have.

02:44:07.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why it's successful.

02:44:11.000 It's because this podcast, even though it might be the number one podcast, it's cooperative with I don't know how many podcasts.

02:44:18.000 A giant number of my friends do podcasts.

02:44:21.000 I promote their podcasts.

02:44:22.000 I have them on.

02:44:23.000 I'll do their podcast sometimes.

02:44:26.000 We all promote each other.

02:44:27.000 So it's a community.

02:44:30.000 I mean, I don't know how other people do it, but I don't do it that way.

02:44:30.000 Yeah.

02:44:33.000 I think only about what I want to do.

02:44:37.000 And 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.

02:44:52.000 Shouldn't be thinking about results.

02:44:54.000 I just think about process.

02:44:55.000 That's all I think about.

02:44:56.000 All I think about is like, okay, he's going to come in.

02:44:59.000 What are my questions?

02:45:00.000 What are we going to talk about?

02:45:01.000 And I'm excited about this.

02:45:02.000 I'll listen.

02:45:03.000 I'll drive my car.

02:45:04.000 I'll listen to the sauna to things.

02:45:05.000 And I just really get worked up about it.

02:45:07.000 But I don't do it for competition.

02:45:09.000 I do it because I think I'm super lucky to be able to do it.

02:45:14.000 And I think it would be a horrible misuse of that fortune if I didn't treat it with respect, if I didn't do my best every time I do it.

02:45:23.000 So I just do that.

02:45:25.000 And that's it.

02:45:26.000 But from the martial arts, you must have a competitive drive there, right?

02:45:26.000 Yeah.

02:45:29.000 Yeah, but it's not in podcasting.

02:45:31.000 Yeah.

02:45:32.000 It seems like it would be because that's the thing I'm the most successful in, which is kind of weird.

02:45:36.000 It's, yeah, I'm competitive in everything, but I'm very competitive with myself.

02:45:42.000 I'm very self-critical, which is one of the things that I learned from martial arts is if you don't have an accurate assessment of your abilities and you think you're better than you really are, if you can't see someone do something, oh, that guy's better than me, then you're missing out because you're also missing out on the opportunity for you personally to get better.

02:45:59.000 If you're delusional and you think you're better than you are, maybe you won't work as hard or maybe you won't correct some of the errors in your technique and maybe your approach and your tactics.

02:46:08.000 You have to constantly be improving this thing.

02:46:11.000 And you have to have people that are better than you that you train with all the time.

02:46:14.000 So 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.

02:46:29.000 They all Wanted to be the man, and they wanted to be at the top and kind of keep everybody else down.

02:46:34.000 There was a lot of that going on.

02:46:36.000 There's a few people that were cooperative, but I was ultra cooperative.

02:46:39.000 Like, I would prop people up.

02:46:40.000 I want them to get better.

02:46:41.000 I'll tell them how to get better.

02:46:42.000 I'd help them.

02:46:43.000 I'd help young guys.

02:46:46.000 I'd go on the road with people funnier than me.

02:46:48.000 Like, I wanted it because I know from martial arts, this is the only way.

02:46:52.000 You don't get comfortable and get better.

02:46:56.000 You got to be like really uncomfortable a lot of the time to get better.

02:47:00.000 But that getting better is the ultimate.

02:47:03.000 That's what the goal is for everyone.

02:47:05.000 And it can't just be for you.

02:47:07.000 If you have this short-sighted idea, like I have to be the king, like, no, you're missing out on the whole thing.

02:47:12.000 The whole thing is you need a bunch of kings.

02:47:15.000 You need everybody to be awesome.

02:47:16.000 And then we all rise together.

02:47:19.000 That's how it has to be.

02:47:20.000 In science, it so often goes both ways, though.

02:47:20.000 Yeah.

02:47:22.000 It's the same in comedy and science.

02:47:24.000 I mean, you think about Isaac Newton, who's famously such an asshole.

02:47:28.000 That guy, right?

02:47:29.000 A lot of comics like that, too.

02:47:30.000 Big name guys.

02:47:32.000 Yeah, he's famous guys.

02:47:33.000 He gets to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down.

02:47:38.000 And there's that need to be singularly recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me.

02:47:46.000 But 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.

02:47:55.000 So I think there's a lot to sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more.

02:48:00.000 I 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.

02:48:11.000 And they said it's the same, I don't know, maybe you disagree, it's the same kind of thing.

02:48:14.000 You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation.

02:48:17.000 It helps if you have an English accent.

02:48:20.000 In comedy?

02:48:21.000 No.

02:48:22.000 Talking about the cosmos.

02:48:24.000 That probably helps.

02:48:25.000 In comedy, it doesn't help.

02:48:25.000 It does.

02:48:26.000 I could help.

02:48:27.000 It works for Jimmy Carr.

02:48:29.000 It works with Ricky Gervais.

02:48:30.000 Yeah, that's true.

02:48:31.000 Yeah, they've got it.

02:48:31.000 There's a certain air of respectability that comes with an English accent.

02:48:37.000 Yeah, so I think there's a lot to, yeah, public speaking is something a lot of scientists.

02:48:42.000 It's sane because there's so many brilliant scientists and they just can't situation.

02:48:47.000 And 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.

02:48:53.000 And these are the people that are like the figureheads.

02:48:56.000 Right.

02:48:56.000 Unfortunately, instead of the actual people that are doing the science.

02:48:59.000 Yeah, it's a skill.

02:49:00.000 I mean, it's a skill that anyone can learn.

02:49:02.000 If you can talk to a friend, you can talk to the public.

02:49:05.000 You just have to learn how to do it and you have to get better at it.

02:49:08.000 It's not impossible.

02:49:09.000 And 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.

02:49:18.000 Just like everything else.

02:49:19.000 Like if you're intelligent enough to be a cosmologist, you're intelligent enough to talk publicly in front of a bunch of people about cosmology.

02:49:26.000 And 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.

02:49:36.000 And that's where it gets complicated.

02:49:38.000 Because some people are brilliant, but they're bland and flat.

02:49:42.000 And, you know, I'm sure you've had professors like that, right?

02:49:44.000 And they're brilliant, but they're just like, oh my God, I'm droning out with this motherfucker.

02:49:44.000 Yeah.

02:49:48.000 I've slept through a few lectures in my time.

02:49:50.000 And then there's people like Carl Sagan who are just fascinating to listen to the way he talks.

02:49:50.000 Yeah.

02:49:55.000 Yeah, magnetic, the charisma.

02:49:57.000 It's a thing.

02:49:58.000 It's a factor.

02:49:59.000 It's not the only one, but it's a thing.

02:50:01.000 It's a part of it.

02:50:03.000 Do you think you could teach someone to be Sagan-esque?

02:50:06.000 No.

02:50:06.000 No, I think there's, you know, you can't teach someone to be Dave Chappelle, but you can teach them to be a better version of who they are, for sure.

02:50:15.000 And then extroverts are extroverts and introverts are introverts.

02:50:18.000 And it's just like, it just, you know, you're not going to be the same person as Jim Carrey.

02:50:23.000 You know, you have to be that guy to be that guy.

02:50:26.000 But you can learn how to better express yourself.

02:50:28.000 And you can learn there's techniques.

02:50:31.000 There's an understanding of how the human mind that's interpreting, that's interpreting what you're saying.

02:50:37.000 How are they perceiving this?

02:50:39.000 Are they perceiving your emotions?

02:50:40.000 Are they feeling?

02:50:41.000 Maybe there's an anecdotal story that you can bring out with passion that connects these people to you so they can understand what made you so locked into this idea.

02:50:50.000 And then they'll go, oh, and then they feel it.

02:50:52.000 Instead of just blandly reciting facts and just doing it because this is the way you do it with your coworkers and your peers.

02:50:59.000 Yeah, I learned that through YouTube.

02:51:01.000 You know, I do a lot of YouTube communication.

02:51:03.000 And when I first started the channel, I remember I was copying.

02:51:07.000 I was looking at other stuff that I see was doing well.

02:51:10.000 And I was trying to transplant that style of video onto my own.

02:51:14.000 And it wasn't me.

02:51:16.000 It was kind of like too animated, too.

02:51:20.000 I'm more of a chill person.

02:51:22.000 And this was like, hey, let's talk about space.

02:51:25.000 That's just like not, it doesn't jive with me that much.

02:51:28.000 But I put it on.

02:51:29.000 And then I was doing this for a while.

02:51:30.000 And we just kind of flatlined in subscribers after a while.

02:51:33.000 And I was like, I think I'm going to pat this in.

02:51:35.000 But before I do, I'll just make one or two videos the way I really want to do it.

02:51:40.000 And then I'll stop.

02:51:42.000 And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally.

02:51:47.000 And you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your romantic.

02:51:52.000 So I wanted that romantic element of astronomy to come out.

02:51:56.000 Why am I so passionate about the stars?

02:51:58.000 What are the deep questions that move me since I was a kid?

02:52:01.000 Those, you have to let that personality come out.

02:52:04.000 And once people realize why you personally are so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious.

02:52:10.000 And then they start to get the same bug.

02:52:12.000 So 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.

02:52:25.000 But unless you let that in, it becomes dry.

02:52:29.000 It becomes inaccessible.

02:52:31.000 Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

02:52:35.000 And I think that applies to almost any kind of public speaking, whether it's stand-up comedy.

02:52:39.000 I think it even applies to music.

02:52:41.000 You know, when someone is singing the blues and you just know that they've had some heartache.

02:52:46.000 Like I always said that that's one of the reasons why Janice Joplin was so good.

02:52:49.000 When she would sing, Take a Little Piece of My Heart, you believe that.

02:52:53.000 You believed it.

02:52:53.000 Yeah.

02:52:54.000 Like it was coming out.

02:52:55.000 Like that.

02:52:55.000 That's a lady that's experienced some pain.

02:52:57.000 I was thinking with Alanis Marisets.

02:52:59.000 Yes.

02:53:00.000 That Jack Little Pell.

02:53:01.000 Oh, yeah.

02:53:02.000 Me and my dad talk about that all the time.

02:53:03.000 There's so much rawness.

02:53:04.000 Yeah.

02:53:05.000 Damn album.

02:53:06.000 Yeah.

02:53:06.000 You can't imitate that.

02:53:08.000 Yeah, you can't imitate that.

02:53:09.000 And you can't imitate that with comedy.

02:53:11.000 You can't imitate that with anything.

02:53:12.000 But I think you could teach people how to do that when they talk about science.

02:53:16.000 It could be taught.

02:53:18.000 Find their own authentic voice and use that.

02:53:18.000 Yeah.

02:53:21.000 Because no one wants to see a copy.

02:53:22.000 You want to see something fresh.

02:53:22.000 Right.

02:53:23.000 That's what makes it exciting.

02:53:25.000 Well, and then the beautiful thing about YouTube and putting out your own content is you can figure that out on your own.

02:53:30.000 You 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.

02:53:39.000 You can figure and people will probably tell, they would probably tell you to do it differently.

02:53:43.000 They'd probably tell you to, you got to have more energy, David.

02:53:46.000 You got to like wave your hands around a lot.

02:53:48.000 That's why I don't do those shows.

02:53:49.000 It's like a bow tie.

02:53:50.000 I used to do a few of those and I got sick of it for that exact.

02:53:53.000 I remember I was talking about a supernova once on camera.

02:53:56.000 Oh, it said they're showing the director was behind the camera.

02:54:00.000 I was like, can we just try bigger, too big?

02:54:03.000 And I was like, that's just not, that's not what I'm about.

02:54:06.000 Can we just bring it down?

02:54:07.000 And yeah, I think being on YouTube is great because you get to just authentically talk the way you want to talk.

02:54:12.000 You'll find an audience.

02:54:15.000 When I first started doing this podcast, everybody was telling me, you can't do three hours.

02:54:19.000 It's too long.

02:54:20.000 I'm like, why not?

02:54:22.000 Just don't listen to the whole three.

02:54:23.000 I don't give a fuck.

02:54:24.000 I'm just going to do what I want to do.

02:54:25.000 This is what I, if I'm talking to Graham Hancock about ancient civilizations, we're not going to talk for 20 minutes, man.

02:54:31.000 We're going to talk for hours and hours and hours.

02:54:33.000 I'm like, what else?

02:54:34.000 What else do you know?

02:54:35.000 I'm interested.

02:54:36.000 As long as you're also curious.

02:54:37.000 Yeah, that's what makes it good because you're engaged with the topic.

02:54:40.000 Yeah, and this is the beautiful thing about this time that we live in, that people can just start a YouTube channel and just talk about things that you're fascinated by and things that you're knowledgeable about.

02:54:49.000 And then people track to it.

02:54:52.000 Yeah, it is kind of sad that kids label YouTuber as the number one job.

02:54:58.000 Well, they're the influencer, I think, because they're influencer now.

02:55:01.000 Yeah.

02:55:02.000 Because it used to be astronaut, right?

02:55:04.000 Astronaut.

02:55:05.000 Yeah, first of all, astronaut.

02:55:06.000 And now YouTuber, social media star is like, yeah, my kids both have YouTube channels.

02:55:11.000 They're obsessed with it.

02:55:12.000 Every day we throw a premiere of one of their videos they've made around the house.

02:55:15.000 And it's definitely influenced kids now.

02:55:19.000 They aspire for that.

02:55:20.000 But it has some great elements.

02:55:22.000 It's creative.

02:55:23.000 It's an outlet.

02:55:24.000 As long as you can keep your shit together, because the interaction with that amount of human beings is also very problematic for young people.

02:55:32.000 Because 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.

02:55:46.000 Anxiety and depression all rises with the invention of social media.

02:55:50.000 That's times a hundred when you're putting out content.

02:55:54.000 And 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. 0.61

02:56:12.000 And 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.

02:56:19.000 No one is equipped for it.

02:56:21.000 It's not normal.

02:56:22.000 It's not a normal type of interaction to have that many people commenting on you and your life.

02:56:28.000 And so that can fuck kids up, especially if they're really young and they get into that.

02:56:33.000 And that's like how they develop as an adult with that kind of attention.

02:56:37.000 I just think.

02:56:38.000 My kids' channels, it's only me, I think, that watches.

02:56:41.000 And I think, yeah, but you're totally right.

02:56:42.000 I mean, the feedback loop is potentially really damaging.

02:56:47.000 And I'm so glad that I grew up in an era without cell phones.

02:56:52.000 Yeah, me too.

02:56:53.000 I 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.

02:57:02.000 And 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.

02:57:10.000 And then they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke.

02:57:14.000 And there's all this kind of weird, right, fucked up bullying going on.

02:57:18.000 And we don't have to deal with any of that shit growing up.

02:57:20.000 Like, it's so much simpler.

02:57:22.000 I mean, am I someone saying to me, oh, I'm friends with this other kid at camp because he's got 100 subscribers.

02:57:27.000 And that's become a thing, right?

02:57:28.000 Like, how many, how many subscribers or followers you have sort of forms like a popularity rank in even real world settings?

02:57:35.000 And it's messed up.

02:57:37.000 There's so much pressure on the kids in a way we never experienced.

02:57:41.000 And, you know, the more cognitive burden you have like that, the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and discovering.

02:57:49.000 What do you want to do your life?

02:57:50.000 Yeah, it's going to be very challenging for these kids.

02:57:53.000 It's going to be very weird.

02:57:55.000 They'll probably chat GBTs.

02:57:57.000 Like an extra virtual girlfriends or whatever they'll probably have on there. 0.99

02:58:00.000 Yeah.

02:58:02.000 It gets weird.

02:58:04.000 Listen, man, thank you very much for being here.

02:58:05.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:58:06.000 My pleasure.

02:58:06.000 It was really fun.

02:58:07.000 Tell everybody your channel, how they can watch your content.

02:58:10.000 Yeah, sure.

02:58:10.000 My channel's called Cool Worlds.

02:58:12.000 Live mouthful Cool Worlds.

02:58:14.000 So you can head to youtube.com slash at cool worlds.

02:58:18.000 We also have a podcast, the Cool Worlds Lab podcast.

02:58:21.000 And 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.

02:58:29.000 There it is.

02:58:30.000 Head over there.

02:58:31.000 And for the price of a coffee per month, you can actually support real astronomy research.

02:58:36.000 Beautiful.

02:58:37.000 Thank you very much.

02:58:38.000 Let's do this again sometime.

02:58:39.000 Thank you.

02:58:40.000 All right.

02:58:40.000 Firefoot.

02:58:50.000 you Thank you.

02:58:55.000 This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe.

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The Joe Rogan Experience - August 09, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2363 - David Kipping

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