The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 463. Heaven, the Matrix, Dark Matter, and Aliens ｜ Dr. David Kipping

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:09.700 I'm talking today with Dr. David Kipping, a scientist, an associate professor of astronomy and director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia, recently tenured.

00:01:20.020 He's published already over 100 peer-reviewed articles, research articles, and is an active communicator regarding scientific matters on YouTube.

00:01:30.860 Cool Worlds, YouTube channel.

00:01:32.960 What did we talk about?

00:01:34.340 We talked about, well, the position of man and woman in the universe.

00:01:39.740 Are we alone?

00:01:40.440 We talked about the means by which the exoplanets that could harbor alien life have been discovered and assessed and what those planets look like.

00:01:53.820 We talked about the potential progression of civilizations at different technological levels and how that might be detected in the cosmological space.

00:02:04.620 We talked about Dyson spheres and the utilization of the energy that a sun produces for moving the technological enterprise forward.

00:02:15.020 We talked about the Big Bang and some of the challenges that have been posed to the axioms and theories of modern cosmology in the light of the development of the James Watt telescope.

00:02:26.660 And we talked about the pursuit of astrophysics as a career, and so join us.

00:02:36.360 All right, well, let's start with the big question, I suppose.

00:02:39.260 I know that you study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and so I suppose the big question that goes along with that is, are we alone in the universe?

00:02:50.140 That's a question that so many scientists have very assertive answers to.

00:02:54.960 They feel very confident they know what they answer to, and typically the response is, well, of course, there must be.

00:03:00.740 There's sort of two ways of answering that, whether you're talking about simple life, microbial life, or whether you're going all the way to intelligent civilizations comparable to our own or even far more sophisticated.

00:03:10.220 But on both fronts, the most intellectually honest answer that I can offer you is, I don't know.

00:03:16.620 And I think we have to be comfortable owning that possibility at the moment, that if you're going to say, I don't know, you have to concede that it may be possible that we are alone, but it's also quite possible that we're not.

00:03:29.200 Our job as scientists is not to pre-guess what the answer is, but rather to do the experiment, collect the data, and then to analyze it and determine the most likely outcome.

00:03:38.540 But I do have a lot of trepidation about how overly zealous and confident some of my colleagues are on this topic, because I'm just so aware of the danger of experimenters' bias.

00:03:49.040 Which, of course, in psychology is a very common issue as well with many experiments that have been done.

00:03:53.300 Where you think you know what the answer to an experiment is, you can consciously or subconsciously influence the outcome of how you conduct that experiment, how you interpret it.

00:04:02.140 So, I just say, let's try to be forcibly agnostic.

00:04:05.200 I hope the answer is yes.

00:04:06.560 I hope there's someone out there.

00:04:07.980 But I think it does us a disservice to our objectivity when we say, of course, there must be.

00:04:13.520 Well, it seems to me that part of the problem is that all the answers to the question seem preposterous, right?

00:04:21.140 Yes, there's life elsewhere.

00:04:22.600 Okay, well, then the first question perhaps that comes up there is where?

00:04:27.980 And if there isn't, well, that seems completely preposterous, because it seems so utterly unlikely, given the vast magnitude of the universe, that we would somehow be alone.

00:04:43.200 And the meaning of that seems so incomprehensible that I can understand why scientists particularly would be loathe to accept that.

00:04:53.400 It implies a very peculiar kind of uniqueness to Earth.

00:04:58.200 And then I suppose the third problem is, well, are there other civilizations?

00:05:03.780 Well, the only species that's ever managed a civilization even on Earth is human beings.

00:05:08.480 And that's only really occurred in the last few hundred thousand years.

00:05:11.840 So even in a place where we know there's life, the probability of an advanced technological civilization that can sustain itself seems, well, it's happened once.

00:05:24.880 Once isn't very many times.

00:05:26.700 I know that human civilization has emerged in different places, but really only after the last ice age and only in a few places that communicated very rapidly.

00:05:36.780 So further thoughts on any of that?

00:05:39.040 Yeah, I mean, you kind of remind me of Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote about this, that there's two possibilities, and both of them are equally terrifying, that either we are alone or surrounded.

00:05:47.820 And I think you're right on the money in terms of the cognitive dissonance that both of those seem to imply.

00:05:55.520 I think there are ways out.

00:05:57.400 If the universe is teeming with microbial simple life, then I think we could probably be okay with that scenario in terms of compatibility with observations.

00:06:07.000 We look out at these exoplanets, and as impressive as our instrumentation is with especially the James Webb Space Telescope, even that facility is not capable of detecting biosignatures life on another planet, unless we're extremely fortuitous with the types of signatures that they present.

00:06:23.520 So it's very unlikely that even JWST would be able to detect biosignatures.

00:06:27.700 We're probably looking at the next generation of telescopes to make that experiment.

00:06:30.440 So therefore, the fact that nobody has made a headline yet saying microbes discovered on Proxima Centauri B or choose your favorite exoplanet is not surprising.

00:06:40.820 So we can perhaps be comfortable with the idea that the universe is compatible with being full of simple life.

00:06:47.080 But then that raises the question, that means therefore the simple life does not go on very often to at least form galactic empires.

00:06:54.740 Something like you see in Star Wars or Star Trek, where you have these federations spanning the galaxy.

00:07:00.980 Right. Well, I read a mathematical analysis years ago in Scientific American from a scientist who had been arguing strenuously against the existence of advanced civilizations.

00:07:10.580 Because he calculated that even spacefaring civilization that had reasonably but not absurdly fast interstellar craft could populate an entire galaxy over the span of something approximating a million or a couple of million years.

00:07:27.360 And given that the universe is 14 billion years old, perhaps, that's 14,000 such time spans, and yet, well, where the hell are the aliens?

00:07:39.140 And so, you know, that was an interesting argument as far as I was concerned.

00:07:43.860 I'd never seen it sort of formulated like that from a kind of quasi-arithmetic perspective.

00:07:48.380 So, that's known as Hart's Fact A.

00:07:52.080 So, there's this idea of the Fermi Paradox that I'm sure you've heard of, many of your viewers have probably heard of, this idea of, you know, if everybody's out there, why don't we see them?

00:07:59.820 We should see evidence for them.

00:08:00.980 But kind of the stronger version of Fermi Paradox is not so much about radio signals or ships flying through space, but it really is the aspect of colonization.

00:08:09.000 That if there really is a galactic empire that has some will to span themselves across multiple planets, which, remember, is essentially what we're trying to do.

00:08:19.100 I mean, Elon Musk often talks about this.

00:08:20.600 He says that he feels almost an obligation to try and continue the flame of consciousness, as he describes it.

00:08:25.920 And that's why he wants to go multi-planetary, to go to Mars and to build a colony there.

00:08:30.400 It's perfectly natural that any species that's interested in self-perpetuation would see the obvious benefits of trying to expand to other colonies, to other planets, and eventually even to other stars.

00:08:43.300 Because, let's face it, even if you're all in the solar system, it can only take a nearby supernovae or gamma-ray burst to completely extinguish all life in this solar system.

00:08:51.980 So, there's an obvious need that I think it's hard to argue why, at least at a common rate, you'd expect a survival instinct to encourage civilizations to want to do this.

00:09:02.940 And yet, there is the problem, because as far as we can tell, that has not happened.

00:09:07.360 We do not see stars which have been engineered.

00:09:10.160 We do not see galactic-spanning empires or Dyson spheres littering the sky.

00:09:14.520 So, it appears, as far as we can tell, that if there are others out there, they're certainly not at a rate where they dominate the galaxy.

00:09:22.860 If they are, they're very rare, and maybe they're around one or two, a handful of stars, a sprinkling of stars, if you like.

00:09:28.840 But they certainly don't dominate.

00:09:30.300 And that's perplexing, because you would think a survival instinct would be to go out and get as many as you could.

00:09:35.180 Well, it's also perplexing in that if such civilizations are possible, and they've done it at all, then why aren't they everywhere?

00:09:47.400 I mean, is it just the fact that by some strange fluke of time and space that we're either the first ones to even vaguely attempt this?

00:09:56.660 Or that it's somehow set up so that this is equally improbable, that no advanced civilization that exists has managed to get to that point?

00:10:09.500 It just doesn't seem that—especially given that we seem, in some ways, as you pointed out, to be on the verge of that.

00:10:15.160 Yeah, it's very perplexing.

00:10:17.020 Mysteries everywhere.

00:10:17.820 One of the strangest things, I think one of the things we have a lot of resistance to, is the idea of any kind of suggestion that we might be special.

00:10:25.400 I think astronomers and cosmologists have a real aversion to that idea, and it's kind of built into this idea called the cosmological principle.

00:10:32.980 So when we look out around the universe, this patch of the universe is not any different from any other patch of the universe.

00:10:39.060 That's kind of foundational to how we understand the nature around us.

00:10:43.360 And so it is a problem, then.

00:10:44.980 It would seem incongruous to this principle if we admit that perhaps we are the first, or we are the only one.

00:10:51.920 Or maybe the Earth is the only planet in the whole galaxy which is capable, maybe not of microbial life, but getting all the way to this point.

00:10:58.980 And yet at the same time, so this is called the Copernican principle sometimes as well, the mediocrity principle.

00:11:03.440 But what flies in the face of that argument, and I hear that argument all the time by many optimists, let's say, for life in the universe.

00:11:11.520 What flies in the face of that is what's known as the weak anthropic principle.

00:11:14.840 And this is an idea that Brandon Carter wrote about in the 1970s, and he was thinking about cosmology as well.

00:11:20.940 And it's things like the fine tuning of constants of the universe, the speed of light, the mass of the electron.

00:11:25.920 These all seem to also be kind of finely tuned such that life is possible in this universe.

00:11:31.860 And if you change any of those numbers, then we really shouldn't be here to talk about it.

00:11:35.840 But of course, an obvious answer to that is that maybe there are many, many universes out there, and it just so happens that we live in the one which is tuned just right for life.

00:11:44.900 Because of course, it couldn't be any other way.

00:11:47.060 How we can't live elsewhere.

00:11:49.600 So this really goes down to why the planet might be special.

00:11:52.680 I've never, okay, a couple of things there.

00:11:54.500 I've never really understood the tuning argument, because it seems to me that if you're a Darwinian, you've already taken care of that problem.

00:12:02.580 It isn't so much that the universe is tuned, it's that we're adapted to the constants that are in place.

00:12:08.480 Now, I suppose you could argue that without those particular constants, our form of life wouldn't be possible.

00:12:14.160 But I don't think that actually shifts the problem with the argument.

00:12:17.180 So because we have our form of life, and we can't conceptualize, or at least not very accurately, what any other form of life might take.

00:12:28.640 Now, I know that people have made the case that there's something particularly special about carbon,

00:12:34.000 insofar as it's because of its ability to combine in ways that make very complex molecules probable and even likely.

00:12:43.040 But I still, the fine-tuning argument always seems to me to put the cart before the horse.

00:12:49.180 It's like, well, you adapt to the constants that present themselves.

00:12:52.840 So, of course, it appears in retrospect that everything's been finely tuned.

00:12:57.040 And I don't see that, like, I'm inclined towards, what would you say, deistic belief in some fundamental way.

00:13:03.220 But I don't think the fine-tuning argument is a very good argument for the existence of the specialness, let's say, of the human psyche.

00:13:10.580 So, I don't know, maybe I've just got that wrong.

00:13:13.380 Yeah, I think if I can just respond to that, I think there's an interesting aspect is the, it almost gets into the philosophical a little bit, is the experience of the observer themselves.

00:13:24.560 So we are, you know, a primate, and we have our brains in our head, and we have these two eyes.

00:13:29.220 And we, our version of experience is really defined by the bodies we inhabit and the planet we live on.

00:13:35.700 It may very well be that there is plenty of, quote-unquote, intelligent life, however you want to call that, out there that is just so radically different that its experience is not really comparable to our own.

00:13:45.440 So you could imagine a fungus that lives on a planet, and it totally inhabits it, and it's basically a giant neural network that's on that planet.

00:13:53.220 And its version of experience would be completely atypical to that of ours.

00:13:57.460 And so when we use this argument of, you know, well, with the weak anthropic principle, we experience this sort of version of events, and thus everything has to be sort of attuned, such that that's the case, there may be parallel paths.

00:14:08.380 And so when we talk about this rare earth, and we talk about weak anthropic principle, it's really a funnel to this particular type of experience that we enjoy.

00:14:16.960 And it's perfectly possible there are completely alternates, but then that's not perhaps so satisfying, because if there is a planet covered in fungus, we're not going to have a communication with that thing.

00:14:25.220 So it doesn't really scratch the itch.

00:14:27.680 I think when we talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we really do hope, maybe naively, to actually engage in a conversation or communication or an interaction of some meaningful sense, where we can understand one another's minds.

00:14:40.920 And that, in my opinion, is probably too aspirational.

00:14:43.700 I don't think that's very likely to occur.

00:14:45.160 Well, again, you look at the earthly situation, because you would assume that that's the simplest place to look for first.

00:14:56.120 And we can communicate to some degree with mammals that are psychophysiologically similar to us.

00:15:03.400 I suppose the biggest gap we've managed to bridge might be with octopi, right?

00:15:08.960 Because I've seen, and I don't know how accurate these accounts are, but I've seen some documentary evidence, let's say, of people establishing something akin to at least a relationship of curiosity with octopi.

00:15:22.160 And they're very exploratory.

00:15:23.480 And they have the kind of tentacles that are sufficiently close to hands that you could imagine a kind of parallel mucking about with things, intelligence that characterizes octopi, because they can manipulate so well.

00:15:38.840 But that's about it on Earth.

00:15:43.040 And that includes cetaceans.

00:15:44.600 I mean, we've been trying to communicate with whales and dolphins and porpoises and so forth for 60 years, really, with some degree of.

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00:17:27.380 Intensity, and it isn't obvious that that's gone very far.

00:17:35.100 Whales are sufficiently different from us so that even if we could talk, it's not clear what we would talk about.

00:17:40.760 That was what E.O. Wilson's arguments about ants, I think.

00:17:44.280 If we could talk to ants, we'd have nothing to say to each other.

00:17:47.540 Because they, yeah, well, the funding, that's, you know, that's a consequence of that psychophysiological embedding that you described.

00:17:54.340 We don't really understand, I think, when we think of our consciousness as like a free-floating entity, how grounded in our hands, for example, our consciousness really is.

00:18:05.160 Yeah, I agree.

00:18:05.840 And even between different cultures of humanity, it can sometimes be extremely difficult to have conversations and understand one another's mindset.

00:18:13.180 So I totally agree.

00:18:14.720 It puts me in...

00:18:15.940 Even with your wife.

00:18:17.440 Sometimes that does happen as well.

00:18:19.480 So I think it's perfectly possible that a...

00:18:23.340 I'm willing to let go of this idea of the fatherly figure.

00:18:27.340 It's almost like a stand-in for a god.

00:18:29.340 You know, the fatherly figure alien comes down and teaches us the error of our ways, provides all this advanced technology, and shepherds us to becoming more sophisticated and mature.

00:18:39.340 I think that's a complete fiction.

00:18:40.820 I think if there is other life out there, it's likely vastly more different than we can possibly imagine.

00:18:46.820 But that doesn't make it scientifically not interesting.

00:18:49.680 It's still extremely...

00:18:50.840 Perhaps even more scientifically interesting to investigate it, because we already know about this experience.

00:18:54.660 So I think learning about these other possible forms of life could be extremely rewarding.

00:19:00.220 But I really don't have a bet in the game as to whether that's even possible.

00:19:04.300 As I said before, I do try to remain forcibly agnostic that I'm actually okay with the idea of just lots of empty worlds out there.

00:19:09.980 Yeah, you mentioned the mediocrity principle, essentially, and that earlier, if I got that right.

00:19:16.020 And that seems to me to be a reasonable variant of Occam's razor, right?

00:19:20.460 There's no reason to assume a priori that this corner of the universe is any different from the rest of the universe than you would assume any given handful of sand differs from all the sand on a given beach.

00:19:35.140 And so, but having said that, and I do think that's a good scientific starting point, we are definitely stuck with the problem that here we are, and we are conscious, and we seem to be rather unique in that regard.

00:19:48.960 And so that does challenge that assumption of...

00:19:53.180 What did you describe it as?

00:19:54.920 I think it was the assumption of mediocrity.

00:19:56.140 Mediocrity.

00:19:56.660 Yeah, or Copernican principle.

00:19:58.060 That scientists start with.

00:19:59.500 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:00.000 So I think an obvious counterexample to the mediocrity principle, and I often say this when I teach my students about this idea, is a case where it breaks down, is in the solar system, thinking about, say, oxygen atmospheres.

00:20:11.520 So before we had studied any of the planets in the solar system, we would live on a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and say, hey, you know, we must assume that everywhere is typical, and we cannot assume we are special, and therefore oxygen atmospheres must be very, very common on all of the other planets in the solar system.

00:20:29.540 And then lo and behold, not a single moon or planet in the solar system, out of, you know, over a hundred of those things, has an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

00:20:37.080 Now, it's not all liquid water, or, you know, plate technology, you can go on, there's a list of things.

00:20:40.840 And so it's not maybe surprising that that is the case, because, of course, we could not live on Pluto if it lacks an oxygen atmosphere.

00:20:47.880 We have to necessarily live on the rare instantiation where oxygen is, because that's a prerequisite, at least for mammalian life.

00:20:54.980 So I think this mediocrity principle, it's okay to use it in cases where your existence is not predicated upon that statement.

00:21:05.460 So if I was to say, the solar system has a Neptune, as far as we know, Neptune has no bearing whatsoever on the probability of life developing on the Earth.

00:21:14.960 So by the Copernican principle, many of the solar systems should have Neptunes.

00:21:19.800 And you would be right.

00:21:20.740 In fact, Neptunes are the most common type of planet in the universe, and Jupiters too are very common.

00:21:25.000 So it'd be perfectly reasonable to apply it in those instances.

00:21:28.320 It'd be very dangerous to apply it to, say, our large moon, because our large moon may, may not, we're still trying to figure this out, have some influences to the development of life on this planet.

00:21:37.200 Similarly, oxygen certainly does, liquid water certainly does.

00:21:39.820 So we can't take those properties, I would say, and generalize them, because we're only here because those things are here.

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00:22:50.800 Yeah, yeah, so I guess the question there is, how many of the prerequisites for the complex life that has emerged on Earth are the function of features that are just as uncommon in some sense as life?

00:23:05.420 And that is a very interesting exception to that rule of homogeneity, let's say, because it is, even from a statistical, from a very basic statistical perspective, it is odd, given that principle, that the Earth would be the only planet that has oxygen on it.

00:23:24.000 I know that's also a function of life.

00:23:25.680 So, that's a very difficult puzzle to work through intellectually, because I can certainly understand why the presumption of homogeneity is a useful presumption.

00:23:37.920 It works in many cases, and why it would not work in the case of Earth is a great mystery.

00:23:42.700 Hey, I've got a question for you that I've always wondered about.

00:23:45.120 You know, I see people looking for life on Mars, analyzing rocks from Mars, for example, or meteorites.

00:23:51.300 And I think this, to me, thinking biologically, this just seems utterly preposterous to me, because I don't think life is the sort of thing, like on a given planet, where it would be somewhere hidden and hard to find.

00:24:07.460 I mean, if you look at Earth, I don't know how far down we've gone into the Earth's core to continue to check for microorganisms,

00:24:15.060 but I read, not so long ago, that there's more biomass in the Earth's crust than there is on the surface.

00:24:21.840 I mean, life seems to be one of those things that, if it's anywhere, it's everywhere.

00:24:28.280 Yeah, yeah.

00:24:28.880 And so, I mean, is the argument that Mars underwent a cataclysm at some point, hypothetically, that was so overwhelming that it destroyed all life,

00:24:38.620 but maybe there's some signs of it sequestered somewhere?

00:24:41.300 Like, what's the rationale for the search?

00:24:43.100 Yeah, I think that's exactly one very plausible scenario.

00:24:46.680 We certainly do know that Mars has undergone significant changes.

00:24:49.940 We see evidence of liquid water once flowing on the surface in the past.

00:24:54.260 There's many geological features that we see that strongly indicate, almost unambiguously, that liquid water must have been there at significant levels.

00:25:01.480 It's just unclear for how long.

00:25:02.780 So it may have been like flash floods that just kind of appeared briefly, or it may have been a sustained body of water.

00:25:07.700 This obviously is not the case any longer.

00:25:10.680 And thus, we can surmise from this that something has happened to Mars over time.

00:25:14.660 It's probably lost its magnetic field over time.

00:25:17.360 That has probably decayed.

00:25:18.460 That has led to the sputtering of the atmosphere.

00:25:20.760 It's probably lost its atmosphere over time.

00:25:22.460 It has a much thinner atmosphere than it once did.

00:25:24.200 And so I think we can imagine, you know, this is almost like kind of looking ahead to the Earth's future.

00:25:29.960 When we make projections about the biosphere of our own planet, most of those projections actually predict that the biosphere will gradually decline.

00:25:36.520 Actually, probably it's already slowly in decline at this point.

00:25:39.620 The sun is gradually warming up and producing more luminosity.

00:25:42.980 That is putting greater, greater pressure, if you like, on the Earth's biosphere until we hit this point where it becomes harder and harder for life to keep up with the amount of insulation we're receiving.

00:25:52.380 And so most of these predictions predict that after about a billion years into the future, Earth's biosphere will essentially collapse.

00:25:58.200 And the only things left will be living in extreme conditions, such as very cold caves that have been protected from that intense scorching heat.

00:26:06.480 You might have some subterranean life, as you allude to, deep in the mantle or deep in the crust.

00:26:11.280 And so we can imagine pockets of life surviving that are the relics of a once rich biosphere.

00:26:17.660 And that's possible.

00:26:18.820 It still raises the problem why we don't see fossils.

00:26:20.680 I mean, we don't see any evidence for fossils on the surface.

00:26:23.580 So whatever was on Mars, if you are an optimist that it had life, it certainly was nothing like the kind of extent that we had here on the Earth.

00:26:32.160 And having said that, it is another possibility is that life could transfer between them.

00:26:37.000 So it's also, this is the idea of panspermia.

00:26:38.700 Where perhaps there is life on the Earth, which is being knocked off on asteroids, it's clinging on, maybe a tardigrade is like clinging on to a little asteroid or something.

00:26:47.640 And it can actually survive the vacuum of space, these things.

00:26:50.460 We don't know if it could survive an impact.

00:26:52.160 Like mushroom spores.

00:26:53.520 Right, yes.

00:26:54.300 They could just propagate across the solar system.

00:26:56.720 Mars would be one of the places that, I mean, it's surely the most hospitable place after the Earth.

00:27:00.640 And so you would imagine if anywhere is going to be a place where extremophiles, which are highly adapted for extreme conditions here on the Earth, they might have a chance of surviving in some of the remnant pockets of habitability left on Mars at this point.

00:27:15.300 Right, okay, okay.

00:27:16.260 So that's the rationale.

00:27:17.660 Now, have you also been interested in the issue of, this is a strange kind of science fiction-like issue, I've seen descriptions in the pop scientific culture online, I suppose, of the notion of different civilizational types.

00:27:38.100 So is that a notion that you've toyed with to any degree?

00:27:43.740 Yeah, this is probably the Kardashev scaling you're thinking of.

00:27:47.040 So this was a Nikolai Kardashev, who was a Russian Soviet Union physicist, I think in the 60s or 70s.

00:27:53.720 And he wanted to try and come up with a way of classifying different potential civilizations out there.

00:27:59.300 And he argued that the most reasonable way to do this, and many people would disagree with him, I think, but he argued the most reasonable way would be energy, energy usage.

00:28:07.400 And so he calculated that a Type 1 civilization, as he defined it, would be one that uses all of the irradiation that hits the planet.

00:28:16.300 So, you know, imagine you cover the whole Earth in solar panels, and they're 100% efficient solar panels, and the energy you collect equals the energy you use.

00:28:24.740 So that would be a Type 1 civilization. 0.99

00:28:26.560 Now, in practice, you couldn't do it with solar panels, of course, you had nowhere to live, so you'd probably have structures in space to make this really work.

00:28:33.220 But it's the energy usage which really matters.

00:28:35.260 It's going to a Type 2, it's the energy of a star, and a Type 3, it's the energy of an entire galaxy.

00:28:40.760 So there is interest.

00:28:42.240 I think the reason why we like this is that if it's purely in terms of energy, we think we have a pretty good grasp on thermodynamics,

00:28:49.000 and we think it's fairly immutable that any civilization must operate within the rules of thermodynamics.

00:28:54.180 And so this places some fairly firm observational limits on how often this happens.

00:28:58.480 If there really were civilizations out there that were harvesting all the energy from their star, using it for work,

00:29:05.140 so imagine like your laptop running, it produces still waste heat, and if you actually collected all the waste heat that it radiates,

00:29:11.980 it would be equal to the amount of power that goes in.

00:29:14.580 It has to be an energy balance, conservation of energy, one of the laws of thermodynamics.

00:29:17.760 So we can look at these across the sky and see if there are stars which are essentially invisible in visible light,

00:29:25.760 because all that radiation is being absorbed, but radiating in the kind of waste heat band passes,

00:29:30.940 which would be like infrared heat signatures.

00:29:33.300 And we've been looking for those.

00:29:34.380 Actually, a few weeks ago there was a couple of candidates, seven candidates that were announced by a group.

00:29:39.500 They were scanning the sky looking for objects which had these anomalous infrared excesses.

00:29:44.320 They're very interesting.

00:29:46.180 However, another group soon after showed that three of these seven candidates happened to co-align with known radio sources,

00:29:54.480 which they surmised were most likely background galaxies or things very far away that were covered in dust.

00:30:00.720 We know that galaxies do often get covered in dust, and that can produce a similar type of signature to that which they see.

00:30:07.320 And so they argued that three of the seven are definitely false positives.

00:30:09.880 And in fact, when you run the numbers, it's perfectly possible the other four are too, just we haven't seen the galaxies yet.

00:30:16.580 But the density of these objects, given the number of stars they looked at, looked consistent with them all being false positives.

00:30:22.260 So we don't have any compelling evidence for those objects, but it is nice that it's an observational test we can do.

00:30:28.380 One of my colleagues, Jason Wright, led a survey out of Penn State where they surveyed 100,000 nearby galaxies

00:30:34.760 to see if the entire galaxy had been converted this way.

00:30:38.480 And so this is looking for what we call the Kardashev Type 3 civilizations. 0.50

00:30:42.000 And they found that basically there was no strong candidates.

00:30:45.020 And so this is, you know, really intriguing.

00:30:47.380 Like, we look around and we don't see nearby galaxies after 100,000 of them do not appear.

00:30:54.200 It's very rare that they appear to have been converted in this way.

00:30:57.060 And similarly for many stars, about 100,000 nearby stars have been surveyed similar to this.

00:31:01.360 So it's very curious.

00:31:03.120 It means that if civilizations do develop, they probably don't ever reach this Kardashev Type 2 or Type 3.

00:31:09.500 Maybe they go to the virtual world.

00:31:11.040 You know, maybe the idea of just developing with physical structures to add infinitum doesn't make sense.

00:31:18.460 And eventually we all, you know, go into the metaverse, whatever it is,

00:31:22.240 and just decide to live in a virtual world rather than the physical world.

00:31:25.220 Yes, well, in some ways that would be a more straightforward thing to do, obviously,

00:31:30.700 because we're already doing that and it's definitely less resource intense.

00:31:36.020 So, yeah.

00:31:37.620 So what got you interested in your line of research?

00:31:43.420 And you have about 100 papers.

00:31:45.980 So why don't you outline first the full range of your research,

00:31:50.060 or at least the bulk of your research,

00:31:51.580 so that we can flesh out all the domains that we might discuss.

00:31:54.100 And then I'd like to know, you know, what it was that sparked your interest in what you're pursuing.

00:32:00.580 Yeah, thank you.

00:32:01.340 So I work on many different things.

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00:33:11.900 My main area of research is exoplanets.

00:33:15.860 So these are planets orbiting at the stars, which we've been talking about thus far.

00:33:19.220 And, you know, that has always been a fascinating topic to me just because it was fairly new.

00:33:24.600 Only in the last 30 years have we been able to make this reach of being able to actually detect these things for the first time.

00:33:30.620 However, in doing, you know, for me, when you look for exoplanets,

00:33:34.080 certainly when I started looking for exoplanets,

00:33:36.560 I would be immediately interested in the possibility of life and intelligent life as we've been talking about.

00:33:41.620 And many of my colleagues would kind of giggle and laugh about that.

00:33:44.200 It still carries what we call the giggle factor, the field of SETI,

00:33:48.200 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, S-E-T-I, SETI.

00:33:50.840 And still many of my colleagues kind of dismiss that as kind of a frivolous activity.

00:33:56.040 But for me, it's always been obvious that if we're going to look for stars, which could have planets,

00:34:01.060 and then we're going to look for planets that could have, you know, Earth-like conditions,

00:34:05.460 then surely the end point of this entire intellectual exercise is to ask the question whether they have life on them.

00:34:11.160 I don't understand what we're doing if we're not going to eventually shoot at that question.

00:34:14.260 So I was never shy of addressing that.

00:34:17.180 And so a lot of my research has broadened out into questions of astrobiology,

00:34:21.400 techno-signatures, which is kind of a modern rebranding of SETI,

00:34:24.640 ways to look for technology in the universe, such as the Dyson spheres that we've spoken about.

00:34:29.700 And increasingly, I've been interested in statistics and the application of statistics

00:34:33.360 to these types of problems, where, as we've already pointed out, you're very data-starved.

00:34:38.660 We don't have a catalogue of habitats out there, at least known habitats.

00:34:43.620 We don't have a catalogue of civilisations discovered thus far.

00:34:46.580 So we are trying to make inferences about our uniqueness,

00:34:50.000 which to me is one of the most interesting and fundamental questions we can ask,

00:34:54.040 is how special or common are we out there in the universe?

00:34:57.540 And we are trying to make inferences based off very little data, a paucity of data.

00:35:01.960 And to me, that's always just been intellectually very stimulating,

00:35:04.500 to try and work on that fringe of where you know so little,

00:35:08.540 but there's actually still some information there.

00:35:11.080 There is still something there.

00:35:12.360 There's information about the timing of when life developed on the Earth.

00:35:16.760 There's information about the future of our planet.

00:35:18.860 We know that from the evolution of the sun.

00:35:21.220 There's information about the fact we don't see galactic empires.

00:35:24.120 And so my job is to try to sort of piece this puzzle together

00:35:27.140 and not give necessarily a definitive answer,

00:35:29.660 but at least limit the options down to what is the landscape of what's possible.

00:35:34.500 Okay, so you mentioned that it's been about 30 years

00:35:37.080 that we've had the technological capacity to even detect exoplanets.

00:35:41.020 And so do you want to talk a little bit about what that technology consists of

00:35:45.520 when we started to discover these planets?

00:35:47.980 And then also, how in the world do you, in fact, discover them?

00:35:52.100 Yeah, it's a long enterprise we've been trying to do.

00:35:54.660 Ever since 1855, there's actually the first paper published

00:35:58.260 trying to make the first claim of an exoplanet.

00:36:01.220 It's a lovely story of Captain William S. Jacob.

00:36:03.500 He was at Madras Observatory in India.

00:36:06.020 And he was trying to use a technique back then called astrometry,

00:36:09.380 which is essentially, we still tried to do it,

00:36:11.080 but it's looking at wobbling stars.

00:36:12.640 That's what we mean by astrometry stars

00:36:13.920 and measuring their positions very carefully.

00:36:16.440 He was inspired by the detection of many binary star systems this way,

00:36:19.800 especially by Friedrich Bessel, a German astronomer.

00:36:22.460 However, this method never really bore fruit

00:36:24.460 until really only the last few years

00:36:27.500 that we've been able to make reliably detections using this method.

00:36:29.980 So the first method which gave us success was pulsar timing,

00:36:33.880 which was kind of ignored.

00:36:35.580 This happened in the early 1990s.

00:36:37.600 I think 1990 was the first ever claim of this method.

00:36:40.860 It was largely ignored because pulsars are so strange.

00:36:43.920 They are neutron stars.

00:36:45.680 So these are stars which aren't quite massive enough

00:36:47.680 to collapse into a black hole when they die,

00:36:49.920 but not too far off.

00:36:51.180 So they're kind of the predecessor.

00:36:53.000 If you actually spooned a bit more mass onto them,

00:36:55.440 you could probably tip them over the edge

00:36:56.940 into becoming a black hole.

00:36:57.940 And these things produce these very powerful magnetic jets

00:37:01.420 out of their north and south pole.

00:37:03.300 And as they spin, it's like a lighthouse spinning

00:37:05.500 and they spin extremely fast,

00:37:06.840 like as fast as a blender, basically,

00:37:08.440 like once per millisecond they can spin.

00:37:10.840 And we can use these as clocks,

00:37:12.620 like a cosmic clock of the universe.

00:37:15.280 And so if there's a planet orbiting it,

00:37:16.800 it disturbs that clock gravitationally

00:37:18.920 and we can detect its presence indirectly.

00:37:21.240 So the first planets were found that way.

00:37:23.120 However, no Nobel Prize was given to that.

00:37:25.500 You might think since that was the first ever discovery,

00:37:27.740 it's Alexander Walshcan at Penn State,

00:37:29.840 a very incredible discovery.

00:37:31.740 It was largely ignored and still is often overlooked

00:37:34.100 in the scientific community.

00:37:35.520 And it wasn't until we discovered planets around

00:37:37.420 quote-unquote normal stars,

00:37:39.100 which really means stars similar to our sun,

00:37:41.020 which are not neutron stars.

00:37:43.040 These are stars in their main part of their life,

00:37:46.180 their main sequence lifetime, as we would say.

00:37:48.640 And the discovery there was through,

00:37:50.340 again, a wobbling method,

00:37:51.440 but through a speed wobbling method

00:37:53.480 rather than a position method.

00:37:55.040 So if a planet is tugging on a star and making it move,

00:37:57.860 yes, its position changes,

00:37:59.240 but also its speed relative to what is changing.

00:38:02.140 So when it's coming towards us,

00:38:03.700 it'll be in blue shifted.

00:38:05.220 When it's coming away from us,

00:38:06.300 red shifted is the classic analogy.

00:38:08.200 It's an ambulance going past you on the sidewalk.

00:38:10.540 Its siren will kind of appear higher pitch

00:38:12.580 as it's driving towards you

00:38:13.960 and sound lower pitch as it's moving away.

00:38:16.200 And we can use that same change in pitch

00:38:18.240 to discover exoplanets.

00:38:19.580 So in 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Kellos

00:38:22.860 made the first discovery of 51 Pegasi b,

00:38:25.620 the first real bonafide exoplanet around a normal star.

00:38:29.240 And that was actually where the Nobel Prize

00:38:30.840 was awarded to, I think, two or three years ago.

00:38:33.320 But still, I think, reasonably,

00:38:35.240 many colleagues in the pulsar world have been saying,

00:38:38.000 like, hold on, like, what about us?

00:38:39.960 Like, we were five years before you.

00:38:41.620 And we, you know, why are we ignoring these planets?

00:38:45.260 Why does the existence of a planet,

00:38:47.940 why does that alter the shift of the light?

00:38:50.600 I don't, I'm missing something.

00:38:52.040 Yes, it's a gravitational effect.

00:38:53.900 So the planet, really, we often think of the planet orbiting a star

00:38:58.680 and the star just kind of sits there inertly, static.

00:39:02.080 But that's not true.

00:39:03.280 Really, it's not that the Earth orbits the sun.

00:39:05.980 The Earth and the sun orbit one another.

00:39:08.200 And so the sun is therefore moving in inertial space,

00:39:12.460 sometimes a little bit towards us in response to the Earth's gravitational field.

00:39:16.620 So it's this influence that we can look for.

00:39:20.140 Right.

00:39:20.640 They both rotate around their center of mass, don't they?

00:39:23.520 The center of the mass of the system?

00:39:24.760 Correct.

00:39:24.940 Is that how that works?

00:39:25.720 Yeah, it's obviously against...

00:39:26.440 But the center of the mass of the sun and Earth is so weighted towards the sun

00:39:31.320 that the center of the mass is still inside the sun, if I remember correctly.

00:39:35.280 Yeah, or far, far inside the sun.

00:39:36.560 Even for Jupiter, it's far inside the sun.

00:39:38.020 And in fact, the speed difference as caused by the Earth

00:39:42.120 is the sun moving by about eight centimeters every second.

00:39:46.160 That's the speed.

00:39:46.860 So that's literally less than, I think, the speed that a snail will crawl.

00:39:51.260 And that is the speed that we are able to detect at this level.

00:39:56.240 We are getting to the point where we can now detect centimeters level

00:39:58.640 per second speed changes in stars.

00:40:00.820 So it's a remarkable feat.

00:40:02.620 That's for sure.

00:40:03.660 That's for sure.

00:40:04.360 So you can detect movement of stars, distant stars,

00:40:08.880 that are literally moving at a snail's pace

00:40:10.860 because of the effects of their planets.

00:40:13.360 That is really something.

00:40:14.740 Well, I guess light is a very accurate measurement tool.

00:40:17.540 Yeah.

00:40:17.960 But I have to say, even when these planets were discovered in 1995,

00:40:20.820 the Nobel Prize was only awarded recently.

00:40:23.280 For probably a decade or so, people didn't even believe those planets.

00:40:26.780 And there was still a lot of skepticism about them.

00:40:28.600 And it was only when we started to discover what we called transits

00:40:32.020 that largely everyone got on board and said,

00:40:35.020 okay, these planets are real.

00:40:36.920 There was a lot of concern that these changes in light that we were seeing

00:40:40.600 might not be due to a planet,

00:40:42.180 but instead could be due to something happening on the surface of the star.

00:40:45.340 So maybe there's a weird sun spot or star spot.

00:40:47.820 Maybe there's a strange flaring activity or pulsation

00:40:50.280 that is mimicking this signature.

00:40:52.540 Since it is an indirect method, it was always possible that was the case.

00:40:55.820 So there were still skeptics.

00:40:57.060 And it wasn't until we started seeing planets eclipse in front of their star,

00:41:01.200 and we call those transits,

00:41:02.560 and they happened coincidentally with when the wobbling method predicted

00:41:06.440 they should happen, that everyone kind of said,

00:41:08.400 okay, this is wrapped up.

00:41:09.440 Like, there can be no question now that these are real planets.

00:41:12.980 And when did that happen?

00:41:14.600 That was around 2000.

00:41:15.900 So it was Dave Charbonneau and Henry independently discovered two,

00:41:22.020 it was the same system actually,

00:41:23.180 but independently measured two transits of the same planet.

00:41:25.820 And that was around 2000.

00:41:27.340 And ever since then, the whole field has been largely focused on this.

00:41:30.640 We now have over 5,000 exoplanets discovered primarily using that method.

00:41:35.380 So it's been far the most successful technique.

00:41:37.660 Okay, now you mentioned earlier that the most common form of exoplanet is Neptune-like.

00:41:44.420 So would you describe for us what a Neptune-like planet is precisely?

00:41:49.840 And then also, what proportion of the discovered planets have been Neptune-like

00:41:54.560 and why that's the most common planet?

00:41:56.840 Yeah, well, let me even correct myself a little bit and say it's actually even like a mini-Neptune

00:42:00.660 is the most common type of planet.

00:42:02.660 So it appears that, you know, the Earth is,

00:42:05.000 well, let's just say the Earth is the size of the Earth,

00:42:07.120 and a Neptune is four times that size.

00:42:09.380 And in between that, around two to three Earth radii,

00:42:12.640 we find many, many, many exoplanets.

00:42:14.660 So we call these mini-Neptunes.

00:42:16.300 But honestly, that might be a misnomer.

00:42:18.320 We're not really sure what they are.

00:42:19.560 Maybe many of them are just mega-Earths or super-Earths rather than mini-Neptunes.

00:42:24.200 So a big question in the field is actually trying to figure out what these things are.

00:42:27.840 They may even be a completely different type of object, like an ocean world.

00:42:31.180 We call those Hyacian worlds, and that's been hypothesized as well.

00:42:34.420 So there could be big balls of water in space.

00:42:36.960 So we're still trying to figure out what these are.

00:42:39.080 We do know that they're extremely common.

00:42:41.180 And it kind of raises the question, actually, because they are so common,

00:42:44.700 why doesn't the solar system have one?

00:42:46.880 That is kind of an oddity.

00:42:48.720 In fact, there are many qualities of the solar system

00:42:50.760 which betray the trends that we see in exoplanets.

00:42:54.660 So, for example, a Jupiter seems, you know, fairly,

00:42:58.460 and you might expect it to be a common outcome

00:43:00.780 because we have basically two Jupiters in the solar system

00:43:03.220 with Saturn and Jupiter being the same size as each other.

00:43:06.440 But when you look out at exoplanets, they're quite rare.

00:43:08.760 Only 10% of stars have Jupiter-like planets around them.

00:43:12.820 So this immediately is interesting.

00:43:14.300 When we look at the solar system in different ways and different dimensions,

00:43:18.120 it does appear that it has lots of unusual properties.

00:43:21.240 We also see many exoplanets which are highly eccentric.

00:43:24.040 They're almost like comets going around their star.

00:43:26.300 Then they're on these greatly elliptical orbits.

00:43:28.960 We see many hot Jupiters.

00:43:30.360 These are Jupiter-sized planets which are very, very close to the star.

00:43:33.380 And we also see lots of compact multis, as we call them.

00:43:37.220 A compact multi is essentially six or seven small rocky planets or sub-Neptunes

00:43:41.860 which are very, very close to the star in nice, compact, circular orbits,

00:43:46.820 but all kind of squeezed in within, say, the orbit of Mercury around the Sun.

00:43:51.660 So we see many of these types of systems as well.

00:43:53.920 So you can have almost like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids version of the solar system.

00:43:58.680 And that appears to be a common outcome.

00:44:00.520 So we're still really making a headwind of like, what do we do with all these systems?

00:44:04.920 How do we understand the uniqueness of the solar system?

00:44:07.700 And clearly there's lots of strange things going on with what we see out there.

00:44:11.820 We'll see you next time.

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00:45:16.500 So one of the findings appears to be that solar systems of the type that we inhabit aren't particularly what?

00:45:30.700 The solar system is not particularly emblematic of the typical solar system that has been discovered.

00:45:35.720 So that's another bit of evidence for some kind of odd exceptionalism.

00:45:39.720 Yeah, we're not the template.

00:45:40.940 I mean, even just the sun is not the template.

00:45:42.800 Only 10% of stars look like the sun, and of those, very few are as quiet as our sun.

00:45:48.220 Our sun is actually remarkably stable, doesn't flare too often, doesn't have many sunspots.

00:45:52.860 Most other suns we look at are far more active than our sun, so that's interesting.

00:45:56.900 As I said, we have a Jupiter.

00:45:58.220 We have two Jupiters.

00:45:59.700 That appears to be unusual.

00:46:01.240 We have this rich dynamical system of eight planets.

00:46:04.180 As far as we can tell, I think the record holder is of seven planets around one system that we've ever discovered.

00:46:08.980 So there are many aspects about the solar system which could be quite special.

00:46:14.800 But I wouldn't go as far as to say it's completely unique, because, of course, our instrumentation is finite.

00:46:20.220 We cannot detect exact clones of, say, Mars.

00:46:23.660 Mars is just too small.

00:46:24.820 It would be invisible to our current technologies.

00:46:27.580 So as we're getting better and better, we are able to get more insight into the true uniqueness of the solar system.

00:46:33.020 But it's certainly not a typical outcome.

00:46:35.520 I think we could say that with some confidence at this point.

00:46:37.580 Okay, okay.

00:46:39.240 Now, you mentioned a couple of things I wanted to return to.

00:46:42.600 The idea, to begin with, that there was something suspicious or even frivolous, let's say, about the search for life on exoplanets.

00:46:51.760 And I was wondering what your opinion on this matter is.

00:46:56.780 You talked about the projection that science fiction-oriented people, let's say, might have of something approximating a religious belief in a sky alien who descends to the earth to save us.

00:47:12.100 And that was an unbelievably common trope in the 1970s.

00:47:15.420 I mean, I read a lot of science fiction in the 1970s, and that was extraordinarily—in fact, the grok that Musk's AI is named after is a remnant of that kind of thinking, right?

00:47:29.700 Because grok was the mode of apprehension used by, I think, Valentine Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein's book.

00:47:38.460 And it was basically a sky savior who was humanoid that came from—

00:47:42.860 I didn't know that.

00:47:43.460 Mars to—oh, yes, that's very—see, well, that's why I wanted to bring this up, because there is a religious impulse that's lurking behind the technological enterprise that's associated, let's say, with the fantasizing about life and other planets.

00:48:00.600 I mean, you see this pop up everywhere.

00:48:02.080 So, for example, the Superman, the DC Comics character Superman is another good example of that, right, because Superman has sky parents, and he's essentially a technological god who ends up on Earth.

00:48:17.280 And you see the same thing replicated with, well, the Marvel Universe in many ways with Thor and Loki.

00:48:23.080 I know they're drawing from Norse mythology, obviously, there, but the idea still lurks there.

00:48:28.460 And I'm wondering if it's that subversion, like a juvenile subversion of the religious instinct that drives these fantasies of extraplanetary salvation at the hands of aliens, or perhaps destruction, for that matter.

00:48:45.020 So, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about whether that might be part of the reason why such concern was regarded for such a long time as less than serious or even frivolous.

00:48:56.720 Yeah, there's a rich history of theology intermixing with a search for alien life.

00:49:02.860 If you even go back to the first speculations about alien life, this, I think you're talking about Cassini, he believed there was life on the moon.

00:49:10.280 And so, they were imagining kind of angels flying around, and there's these depictions of, you know, with wings flying around in these caves.

00:49:17.220 So, they kind of imagined these angelic beings living on the moon, and that's why we should one day try and visit there.

00:49:21.960 Similarly, when you look about speculations about life on Mars, Percival Lowell was an astronomer, kind of really an amateur astronomer, kind of was an industrialist first in the 19th century, and then sort of committed to getting into astronomy and purchase the Lowell Observatory in Arizona as a huge donation from his wealth.

00:49:40.160 But he was passionate about the idea of looking for life on Mars, and he really believed, as many do at the time, that they would be fairly human-like.

00:49:48.120 And so, many of the depictions were even not just human-like, but even expecting them to speak English and interact with radio technology and things like this.

00:49:55.820 Well, it would be English.

00:49:56.700 Yes, it's very much like that Star Trek trope of everyone just happens to look just like us.

00:50:01.880 And there was really no, almost imagination.

00:50:06.480 It's kind of strange to get your head around.

00:50:08.040 Why did they, it's puzzling to me, why was there an assumption that all these beings would look just like human beings?

00:50:15.600 Well, I think it is an intermingling of the theological with the material, let's say.

00:50:22.380 I mean, obviously, there is an overlap between the idea of heaven and the idea of space.

00:50:29.260 And heaven has been imagined as populated by beings forever.

00:50:35.100 And that's a mystery.

00:50:36.980 That's a very deep mystery in and of itself.

00:50:39.880 It seems relatively obvious to me that the heaven of the mythological imagination is not the same heaven as the material heaven that's above us.

00:50:50.140 And I suppose part of the evidence for that would be that the material heaven that's above us doesn't seem to be populated by devils, let's say, angels or gods.

00:50:59.860 But there is that strange strain of human metaphysical speculation that does posit a parallel universe of a sort or multiple parallel universes where alien beings exist.

00:51:15.120 And, you know, there's some very strange things about that, too.

00:51:17.600 And one of the strangest things I know of is the fact that if you give human subjects DMT, which is the fundamental psychoactive chemical component of ayahuasca, people reliably report being shot out of their bodies and encountering alien beings.

00:51:37.260 And that's so common that the main person who did this research, who was a very down-to-earth psychophysiologist, I think got so discombobulated by the consistency of these reports and the insistence by the people who had the experience that that was real, that he ceased investigating the DMT phenomena.

00:52:01.620 So, I don't know what to make of all that, obviously, and I don't think anyone else does, too.

00:52:06.920 But it is interesting to see the overlap between the imagination that projects deities into a mythological heaven and the actual domain of heaven above us.

00:52:18.580 Yeah, I think there's a lot we can learn from theologians interacting with them.

00:52:24.320 I've been to SETI conferences and theologians are actually now starting to participate in those meetings.

00:52:28.780 And there's a lot to learn about.

00:52:32.360 It's almost like a search not only for life out there, but a search for who we are.

00:52:37.160 What we look for says a lot about who we are, rather than, I mean, if we're looking for species which are engaging in nuclear war, because that produces such a loud signature, that is almost more of a reflection of our own inner fears than it is of a serious discussion of what an advanced civilization would do.

00:52:57.440 And so, I think this connection has always been there.

00:52:59.480 Well, you saw this in the latest mythological extravaganza, sort of planet-wide mythological extravaganza, which was the explosion of the Marvel Universe.

00:53:10.000 I mean, the Chitauri, who come from outer space, they're basically apocalyptic end-of-time demons, right? 1.00

00:53:18.420 But it is conflated with actual space in a very interesting manner.

00:53:23.660 And so, and it does say something very deep about our fears about, well, the end of the world, end of salvation, and of the notion that both the end of the world and salvation will come from, what would you say, come from above, come from below, come from outside, something like that.

00:53:42.260 Yeah, I do, this doomist mentality certainly has been with us for a long time in SETI.

00:53:48.020 Obviously, when SETI seriously got going in the 60s and 70s, the spectra of the Cold War was looming over, and it was really baked into the origins of SETI, was thinking about the fear of destruction and annihilation.

00:54:02.220 And I think there's a certain sense of that these days as well that has been re-raising its head for various reasons.

00:54:07.420 And I've often said, you know, even if you're a pessimist about intelligent life in the universe now, right, there might be nobody out in the galaxy right now.

00:54:18.320 You'd have to be much more of a pessimist to believe that it never, ever happens in the billions, even trillions of years future that our galaxy still has ahead of it.

00:54:28.120 And so if we are serious about making it our goal to have contact with another intelligent civilization, we should perhaps concede that it might not be a two-way conversation, but we can have a one-way conversation into the future.

00:54:41.820 That we could leave a relic, we could leave a monument, as our ancestors did with the pyramids and many of the monuments, Stonehenge.

00:54:50.020 They left us messages from the past that transcend their own existence.

00:54:54.500 And if we are feeling maybe pessimistic that we will never expand to this galactic empire, there is still hope of being remembered.

00:55:04.360 If that's all we, you know, maybe there's, I think that's a fundamental component of our human desires is to not be forgotten, to have some thread of our strain of existence not be completely futile and gets remembered by the galaxy.

00:55:17.340 Then I think we should seriously commit to building a monument, maybe on the moon.

00:55:23.380 The moon's an obvious place to do it because it's unaffected by weather or geological activity.

00:55:28.860 It could last for billions and billions of years.

00:55:31.460 We could build something or a spacecraft that goes out with messages that just has a tomb of information about who we are, what we believed in, our arts, our sciences.

00:55:41.720 And I think that would be a really beautiful endeavor to try and unify people beyond what we believe in or maybe don't believe in.

00:55:49.880 And also to have, honestly, some hope that the universe will not forget us.

00:55:54.920 And maybe it's a small thread of a chance that anyone will ever discover it, but it's better than just giving up on the idea of detection altogether.

00:56:01.780 I think that's probably our most likely window of getting detection.

00:56:05.320 I think I read a science fiction story when I was about 13 of some advanced human civilization turning the moon into a gigantic Coca-Cola ad, like a billboard.

00:56:19.260 So we could do that.

00:56:20.420 But I don't think that's exactly what you're thinking about.

00:56:23.160 Not quite that.

00:56:24.800 No, not quite that.

00:56:26.380 That would be, well, that seems to be something that would be approximately the form of sacrilege.

00:56:31.180 Which, well, definitely, definitely, it wouldn't cost that much to spray paint the surface, let's say.

00:56:37.620 So, hey, I'm kind of curious, you referred to something else, too.

00:56:41.140 You talked about Dyson spheres, and I know a little bit about Dyson, and he was quite the character, to put it mildly.

00:56:49.660 A lot of the great physicists are, you know, you tend to think of great physicists, if you don't know much about them, as very, very serious.

00:56:59.200 And they're like ordinary people, except extremely brilliant and very serious.

00:57:03.860 But if you look into the lives of great physicists, they're, well, to call them odd is barely scraping the surface.

00:57:11.140 They can be colorful.

00:57:11.820 And so, and odd in the best way.

00:57:13.460 Yeah.

00:57:13.640 Yeah.

00:57:14.220 Well, that's for sure.

00:57:15.720 So, and Dyson was definitely one of those characters.

00:57:18.400 And so, do you want to talk about the Dyson sphere and let everybody know what it is?

00:57:22.480 Yeah.

00:57:22.980 In case they want to build one?

00:57:24.140 Sure, yeah.

00:57:24.500 Dyson had many wonderful ideas.

00:57:27.720 I've built upon a few of his ideas myself in my own research.

00:57:31.260 But the Dyson sphere's idea was kind of the manifestation of this Kardashev Type 2 civilization. 0.99

00:57:37.380 How would one harvest all of the energy from a star and use it to do something useful with it?

00:57:43.220 And so, the Dyson sphere is essentially trying to construct some giant shell around a star.

00:57:49.840 Now, a lot of people imagine a solid structure, that it would be, you know, a solid sphere, a spheroid put around a star.

00:57:57.280 But that's actually not what Dyson had in mind, because he immediately realized that was not stable.

00:58:01.520 For instance, if you take a solid sphere and you give it just the slightest nudge from the outside, it would fall into the star.

00:58:07.480 So, it's metastable immediately.

00:58:09.460 Unless it's perfectly balanced, one slight particle of dust would nudge it into the star, basically.

00:58:14.740 It also has extreme strains in terms of the tensile strength that would be required,

00:58:19.620 that basically no material could possibly hold this thing together.

00:58:22.200 So, there's immediate problems to something, that naive version of a Dyson sphere.

00:58:28.060 And so, maybe a better way to think about it is a Dyson swarm, or, you know, a collection of small objects,

00:58:33.220 which almost form like a quasi-shell, but they're not physically connected.

00:58:37.240 And so, they all orbit around the star, and in fact, they'd have actually different orbital periods,

00:58:41.840 depending on where they're located, at which hemisphere, and what latitude they are in this shell.

00:58:46.900 And so, this object would be essentially trying to collect all the energy from the star and use it for what we don't know.

00:58:54.720 You know, one might imagine extreme computation.

00:58:57.340 I mean, an interesting question is, what does a super-advanced civilization even do with all of this energy?

00:59:03.660 Maybe they just solve math problems until, you know, because there's always,

00:59:06.800 there's an infinite number of math problems to solve, and maybe that's what they're using all the energy for.

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01:00:21.820 My brother-in-law, Jim Keller, is a very famous and able designer of computer chips,

01:00:33.520 perhaps foremost in the world on that front.

01:00:37.260 And he and I have had some very interesting conversations in that regard.

01:00:40.900 And one of the things that he's rather comically pointed out to me in the last 10 years

01:00:45.360 is that the Earth's crust happens to be made up of elements that are very similar

01:00:50.800 to precisely what you need to build a computer chip.

01:00:53.900 And so he could envision in his wilder fantasies, which can be quite wild,

01:00:59.740 that all of the Earth's crust is transformed into computer chips.

01:01:05.240 And with all of the computational technology that that would entail.

01:01:09.780 And you can certainly imagine a technological civilization going in that direction,

01:01:14.120 because in some ways, that's clearly the direction that we're going.

01:01:18.240 Like, there seems to be no upper bound.

01:01:21.500 It's a weird thing, too.

01:01:22.480 You know, I was thinking about time in this regard.

01:01:24.440 You know, we think that the time that we inhabit is finite.

01:01:28.300 But time is very fractional.

01:01:32.100 And computers can obviously do many trillions of calculations in a given second.

01:01:37.500 And if you keep adding computers, then that's more computations per second.

01:01:41.960 And it doesn't seem...

01:01:42.960 The upper limit to that's obviously defined by something like energy and material availability.

01:01:48.000 And that's all.

01:01:49.140 Not to the fractionation of time.

01:01:52.860 And so you could imagine the civilization...

01:01:54.300 Well, you can't, because we have no idea what would happen with...

01:01:58.380 We can't even keep track of our computational power now.

01:02:01.860 Can't imagine what a civilization would be like that had something approximating unbounded

01:02:06.980 computational power at its fingertips.

01:02:09.360 Yeah, I mean, there's always a bound.

01:02:10.740 There must be some bound, even if that bound is unimaginably high compared to our own capabilities

01:02:15.940 by just the amount of physical matter there is in the system.

01:02:18.900 So a Dyson sphere actually isn't just the crust of the Earth.

01:02:21.720 It would actually be comparable to the entire mass of Jupiter being deconstructed.

01:02:26.680 And even though Jupiter is not mostly silicon, which is what you want for building ships,

01:02:32.500 you can imagine using fusion to combine it into the elements that you need.

01:02:36.120 So this is obviously extremely advanced.

01:02:37.840 We're talking about to have the capabilities of doing something like this.

01:02:41.640 But yeah, the real limits of computation are essentially how much mass and energy is there

01:02:47.220 in the entire galaxy.

01:02:48.300 And so, you know, Neil Blomkamp, he's the director who made the District 9 movies.

01:02:55.460 He gave a wonderful TED Talk that I found very influential.

01:02:58.580 You can probably find it online about what he thinks the most likely form of life is.

01:03:02.700 And he talks about the idea of basically computation spreading across the universe and the universe

01:03:07.800 waking up at this instant.

01:03:10.720 So as soon as you have these ships, which can start moving, it doesn't have to be very fast,

01:03:14.700 as we said earlier, like probably comparable to even the speed of our current spacecraft

01:03:18.740 is sufficient to colonize the entire galaxy in a much smaller fraction in its own lifetime,

01:03:24.580 like 100 or 50 times less than its current age.

01:03:27.440 You could actually spread out.

01:03:29.340 And just imagine like a 3D printer with an AI on it, and it just lands on a planet,

01:03:33.760 and it just starts going around converting all of the matter it interacts with with more versions

01:03:38.420 of itself, almost like a virus.

01:03:40.780 And essentially, it's going around converting the entire galaxy. 0.95

01:03:44.160 All dumb matter becomes smart matter. 0.69

01:03:46.700 And that's its primary goal.

01:03:48.200 It's not really obvious what it would do with all this computation, as I said.

01:03:54.820 Well, you know what we do?

01:03:56.580 Well, what we do with it, weirdly enough.

01:04:00.020 So, you know, you might ask, what is driving the demand for advanced computational devices now?

01:04:07.740 Because most people have enough power in their laptop, so they can pretty...

01:04:12.560 The laptop, in many ways, exceeds their ability to use it already.

01:04:16.340 Now, that's not true in every regard.

01:04:18.720 But then, so then you might say, well, what's driving the demand for enhanced computation?

01:04:23.700 And the answer to that, at least part of the answer to that, is the desire to ever more

01:04:28.820 accurately simulate realities such that games can be played with those simulations.

01:04:36.540 And like, that sounds trivial in a way, that you'd use computation to play games.

01:04:41.120 But that's only trivial if you think games are trivial, and they're not trivial.

01:04:44.760 They're forms of...

01:04:48.060 Look, there's a very deep biological idea in relationship to thought, that the reason

01:04:53.540 that we think is so that our thoughts can die instead of us, right?

01:04:58.060 And so, material evolution is a very slow process, and the price you pay to evolve materially

01:05:05.000 is that your material form dies if you are sufficiently in error.

01:05:08.780 But if you virtualize that so that your thoughts are now avatars of yourself, you can have your 0.61

01:05:16.760 foolish avatars expire, and you can continue. 0.55

01:05:20.060 And so, it's a very useful way of experimenting. 0.94

01:05:22.380 It's certainly what children are doing, for example, when they're playing games.

01:05:25.400 And we don't know the limits to that.

01:05:27.280 And I don't think it's mere fluke that a tremendous amount of the market for high-end computational

01:05:32.820 devices is the market to drive simulation so that we can play fictional games.

01:05:38.260 And so, maybe advanced civilizations do, in fact, take off into the fictional game space

01:05:42.900 because it's, in some ways, an infinite domain of potential experimentation.

01:05:49.280 Now, you know, that's way beyond the limits of my capacity to imagine in some fundamental

01:05:54.080 sense.

01:05:54.480 But that's the trend at the moment among human users.

01:05:58.780 And so, it's not an unreasonable extrapolation.

01:06:03.040 It would resolve the Fermi paradox.

01:06:04.900 I mean, it's a natural answer that everybody just eventually transcends the physical world

01:06:09.620 and disappears into the virtual one.

01:06:11.360 This would naturally explain why we're just saying anything.

01:06:13.580 You know, we were speaking of Dyson earlier.

01:06:15.380 Freeman Dyson had another interesting point about this idea of the virtual world.

01:06:19.340 He was so far ahead of his time.

01:06:20.560 He was thinking about, you know, simulation theory way before people were trending about

01:06:25.280 it with Elon Musk's statements and things like this.

01:06:27.940 And he had a really interesting idea.

01:06:29.660 He asked, you know, how could you live forever, truly live forever?

01:06:33.420 And he suggested that in a simulation, you could do this.

01:06:36.900 So, if you imagine you go far, far into the future, it's thought that the universe will

01:06:40.740 eventually arrive at this, what we call the heat death, where entropy takes over and essentially

01:06:45.600 all the stars burn out.

01:06:47.760 And there's very, very little energy left in the universe intrinsically until there's

01:06:51.260 actually almost nothing.

01:06:52.720 And so, he imagined that you could simulate yourselves, but you could adjust the speed

01:06:57.040 of the simulation so that one day for you, one full day, actually takes in the real world

01:07:02.940 maybe a thousand years to simulate.

01:07:05.260 So, you're essentially moving, you know, almost in slow motion in your simulation.

01:07:09.460 And then once, you know, you've used up the energy that's available, then you slow it

01:07:13.060 down ever more and ever more and ever more.

01:07:15.300 And as long as you keep slowing it down, you can actually live forever.

01:07:20.560 It's a strange idea.

01:07:21.620 So, it's called Dyson's Eternal Intelligence.

01:07:24.000 And even though the universe asymptotically approaches zero energy, you can just equally

01:07:29.140 asymptotically slow down your simulation such that you live forever.

01:07:33.320 So, it's kind of like Zeno's paradox of like the arrow never quite catching up with the

01:07:37.120 runner.

01:07:37.780 And so, it's kind of a beautiful genius idea that he had that there is a potential of living

01:07:43.440 forever.

01:07:43.780 Didn't Dyson also suggest that at some level information was conserved?

01:07:51.540 I mean, I know he went way the hell out into the metaphysical realms in his writings.

01:07:56.520 And I read a fair bit of Dyson, I don't know, a long time ago, so I could barely remember it.

01:08:01.320 But he had some concept that was essentially theological where, what, all the information that

01:08:09.280 constituted the universe was somehow conserved?

01:08:11.620 That was part of, wasn't that part of singularity theory?

01:08:14.520 I'm reaching way the hell back in my memory.

01:08:16.460 I don't know about Dyson's writing to this, but it's certainly the idea of information conservation

01:08:20.800 is actually thought to be almost an axiom of quantum mechanics.

01:08:24.340 So, it really is thought that in quantum mechanics.

01:08:26.380 Right.

01:08:26.400 Oh, this was definitely Dyson.

01:08:27.880 Yeah.

01:08:28.440 This kind of gets into the idea of what we call the black hole information paradox.

01:08:32.380 When information falls in, it's seemingly destroyed.

01:08:35.400 And this violates this curious feature that we think quantum mechanics demands that everything

01:08:40.060 should be really not so much information conserved, but reversible.

01:08:43.140 If I, you know, burn a book and all the particles of ash fall around onto the ground and into

01:08:48.280 the air, in principle, I should be able to recollect up all those particles, put them

01:08:52.680 back together, and reconstruct the pages and the words on those pages.

01:08:57.240 And black holes seemingly violate that.

01:08:59.760 So, that has been a puzzle.

01:09:01.020 So, let, okay, okay, so let me ask you about that.

01:09:03.920 Because, so let's take that particular example where you burn the, okay, now imagine that you

01:09:09.320 burn the book thoroughly enough so the ashes have been reduced to something approximately

01:09:15.920 molecular size or maybe even atomic size.

01:09:19.180 Now, you want to reverse that.

01:09:21.220 Doesn't the fact that there's quantum uncertainty at the level of the atom imply that true reversibility

01:09:29.340 is impossible because the information is blurred at the quantum level?

01:09:34.680 It's certainly in practice completely, you know, impossible to do this.

01:09:39.520 There's no way that in the real world you could ever manifest this.

01:09:43.300 I think the fundamental best way to think about it, with these analogies, maybe not quite

01:09:48.080 right, is the idea of a reversibility.

01:09:50.800 So, when you look at the equations of quantum mechanics, like the Schrodinger equation or something,

01:09:55.340 or the wave function equations, they really don't have a care about which direction time goes

01:10:02.220 in.

01:10:02.440 So, you should be able to point it in either direction and end up.

01:10:05.380 So, if I know an initial state, I should be able to propagate it forward to a final state.

01:10:09.180 And yes, there's uncertainty.

01:10:10.380 So, the wave function can expand and the probability space can change, but I should always be able

01:10:14.980 to, you know, do that in both directions.

01:10:17.600 And so, the fundamental problem of the wave function with a black hole is that it seems to

01:10:21.480 basically reach an endpoint where it's just terminated and it cuts off this reversibility aspect.

01:10:29.140 So, this has been a big problem and people have been wondering about it.

01:10:31.660 And I think most people who work on this believe that somehow the information must get out of

01:10:38.020 the black hole.

01:10:38.720 We're still trying to put the one possible candidate is probably through Hawking radiation.

01:10:42.860 So, this radiation which happens, as Stephen Hawking predicted, on the outskirts of these

01:10:47.360 black holes, it's a very pitiful amount of radiation.

01:10:49.520 But perhaps that is carrying away some information about what fell into the black hole.

01:10:54.800 And thus, if you did fall into a black hole, in principle, you could be reconstructed from

01:10:58.920 this Hawking radiation.

01:11:00.460 So, that's the current hope because otherwise we have to seriously rethink quantum mechanics.

01:11:07.220 How does the...

01:11:08.520 So, that Hawking radiation, if I remember correctly, it emerges at the event horizon, right?

01:11:14.500 Right at the event horizon?

01:11:15.380 Yes.

01:11:16.320 And so, some particle, an antiparticle falls in and a particle flies off.

01:11:21.360 It's something like that emerging out of...

01:11:24.340 Those are virtual particles.

01:11:25.980 How in the world are they supposed to propagate information?

01:11:28.920 That's a good question.

01:11:29.520 I mean, the problem with this is that in order to propagate information about what's inside

01:11:33.460 the black hole, that requires essentially an entanglement, what we call a quantum entanglement,

01:11:38.100 with states inside.

01:11:39.820 So, somehow, this particle, which has just been created on the event horizon, it probably

01:11:44.460 had, let's say, an antiparticle pair, which was created just inside the event horizon.

01:11:48.660 Now, because they're created as a pair, they should be entangled with each other.

01:11:52.620 An entanglement, unlike people, is strictly monogamous.

01:11:56.400 There's no way you can have an entanglement that can suddenly become re-entangled with something

01:12:01.580 else at the same time as being entangled to this particle.

01:12:03.900 So, once it's entangled with each other, these two particles, it somehow now has to be

01:12:07.840 entangled to something else.

01:12:09.320 This is where physicists are really getting stuck.

01:12:12.260 And we're just, we're really struggling with this problem right now.

01:12:15.100 Right.

01:12:15.540 I see.

01:12:16.020 I see.

01:12:16.400 So, does that imply that the antimatter particle that falls into the black hole is affected

01:12:22.720 by what's in there in such a way that the entangled particle that's escaped contains

01:12:29.120 that information?

01:12:30.720 That's the idea, if I got that about right?

01:12:33.080 I think people are wrestling with tweaking the rules of entanglement.

01:12:37.520 To try and somehow allow for an entanglement to be maintained with whatever fell inside

01:12:42.840 the black hole.

01:12:43.660 And that perhaps the stuff that falls in can, in a way, be thought of as the antiparticle

01:12:49.780 of the Hawking radiation which came out.

01:12:52.020 And that we are, and there may be two aspects of the same thing rather than discrete processes.

01:12:57.100 So, I have to say, this is not my field of expertise, but I find it a totally fascinating

01:13:01.140 topic.

01:13:01.520 And I've made videos about it in the past, but it is really-

01:13:04.840 So, that means that not only does the black hole evaporate because of the Hawking radiation

01:13:12.160 in principle, but the information from the black hole escapes as well.

01:13:15.820 That's okay.

01:13:16.480 That's wild.

01:13:17.120 I didn't know that.

01:13:17.880 That's very interesting.

01:13:18.780 So, what's on the horizon for your field, do you think?

01:13:25.020 One of the things I wanted to ask you, for example, is that I know this isn't your air

01:13:29.480 specialty, but any light you could shed on it would be appreciated.

01:13:34.460 I've heard that the new telescopes, which can see farther into space than anything we've

01:13:41.420 managed before, and farther back into time, therefore, have put some wobbles in the, what

01:13:48.540 was almost universal acceptance of the theory of the Big Bang.

01:13:51.740 And so, can you clue us in a little bit about at least what's going on in astrophysics with

01:13:56.720 regards to that debate?

01:13:59.060 So, we have this telescope that was launched two years ago, the James Webb Space Telescope.

01:14:02.860 It's the most powerful instrument we have right now for peering back into the far reaches

01:14:07.440 of the universe, and thus, therefore, into the past.

01:14:10.120 Because, of course, something that's very far away from us, it takes a long time for

01:14:13.680 that light to travel.

01:14:15.160 And so, essentially, the light we are seeing from some of these objects is over 13 billion

01:14:19.440 years old.

01:14:20.640 And thus, we are seeing the universe in its first few hundred million years.

01:14:24.540 When we're looking at the universe at this very ancient primordial phase, we are surprised

01:14:30.800 to see rich structures like fairly mature-looking galaxies.

01:14:36.120 There's still nothing as mature as what we have, like the Milky Way, but surprisingly mature,

01:14:41.040 given the epoch we are looking at in our data.

01:14:43.300 And suddenly, for large black holes as well, we are seeing black holes more massive than

01:14:47.560 we would expect in the center of some of those galaxies.

01:14:51.220 So, the puzzle has been, how do you build this stuff fast enough?

01:14:55.560 Obviously, you could argue that maybe you need to totally rip up the textbook and say,

01:15:02.040 you know, all of our cosmological models are wrong, including the Big Bang, and we need

01:15:05.660 to change everything.

01:15:06.880 I don't think most astronomers are quite ready to rip up the textbook.

01:15:10.460 I think there are other ways to explain what we are seeing without going quite so drastically.

01:15:15.380 Speaking with my colleagues about this, we had a wonderful colloquium, and I was speaking

01:15:19.860 to some of my colleagues about making sense of this, and there was one of the interesting

01:15:25.520 things I took away from that was the models of star formation that we apply are calibrated

01:15:31.280 to the local universe, and they may not be actually applicable to this earliest epoch.

01:15:35.820 So, when we see these galaxies, these ancient galaxies, we are basically saying there are too

01:15:40.620 many stars.

01:15:41.200 It built stars and too much stuff faster than it should have done.

01:15:45.380 Based off the rates at which we think stars can form.

01:15:48.340 But really, the rates at which we think stars can form is calibrated to what we see around

01:15:53.320 us now, which is not necessarily representative of the conditions.

01:15:57.420 Well, certainly cannot be representative of the conditions of the early universe.

01:16:00.980 And in fact, when they've gone back and revised those models and they've updated them to account

01:16:06.340 for the much stronger star formation and more intense densities that they naturally have

01:16:10.780 in these early epochs, it actually does predict these galaxies in a large, most of the galaxies

01:16:15.280 we see.

01:16:16.320 So, in fact, we could have predicted many of these galaxies had we just been maybe a little

01:16:21.660 bit more thoughtful about what we put into the physics of those models in the first place.

01:16:26.760 But it did make, of course, a spectacular headline to claim that the Big Bang model was wrong.

01:16:31.540 I don't want to totally dismiss it, but there are still challenges, but I don't think it's

01:16:34.900 quite as dramatic as has been portrayed.

01:16:36.720 I see.

01:16:37.680 I see.

01:16:38.120 So, part of the problem there, too, was the extension of that principle of homogeneity

01:16:43.520 or uniformity in the temporal domain when it wasn't appropriate, as you said, if the conditions,

01:16:50.620 well, the conditions are obviously different soon after the Big Bang, clearly.

01:16:55.800 And so then the question would be, well, how consequential are those differences?

01:17:00.460 And your argument is the magnitude of those differences was conservatively underestimated.

01:17:06.640 And that's cast some of the theory into disrepute, but that doesn't mean that, at least in your

01:17:12.160 estimation, that the baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater.

01:17:14.940 Yeah, I think if you throw out all of, you know, the Big Bang model, which really, when 0.81

01:17:18.460 we say the Big Bang model, we don't really just mean the Big Bang.

01:17:20.420 What we call is Lambda CDM, which means Lambda is dark energy.

01:17:24.480 CDM stands for cold dark matter.

01:17:26.300 And this, you can think of Lambda CDM as essentially the standard model of astronomy.

01:17:31.500 In the same way that there's a standard model of particle physics that includes the basic

01:17:34.940 fundamental particles, we have a standard model of astronomy and cosmology.

01:17:38.720 And so this model has been extraordinarily successful, as indeed has the standard model in particle

01:17:44.160 physics.

01:17:44.560 It explains such a wide span of observations that were you to throw it out, it would be

01:17:51.660 extremely difficult to understand how it could coincidentally explain such a vast array of

01:17:58.060 diverse phenomena so exquisitely.

01:18:00.220 So I think we're not, you know, astronomers do like it, physicists like it when we get to

01:18:05.960 rip things up.

01:18:06.920 But given the extraordinary success of the model and this, you know, one interesting puzzle,

01:18:12.000 I don't think we're quite ready to throw in the towel at the first punch.

01:18:15.760 You know, we're willing to fight back a little bit.

01:18:18.020 I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, possibly.

01:18:21.140 I might be wrong about this, who, no, it was Carl Sagan, who said that extraordinary claims

01:18:28.340 require extraordinary evidence.

01:18:30.600 And so the, well, the proper response to that is that you always modify your theory no more

01:18:37.340 dramatically than is minimally necessary, right?

01:18:40.480 That's, that's the, it's just, otherwise, that's true even psychologically, you know.

01:18:47.540 If you don't, every time you're upset with your wife, you don't think that now divorce is in the

01:18:51.700 offings, right?

01:18:52.380 That's just not the solution to the problem.

01:18:54.680 So, okay, so maybe we could close with this, if you don't mind.

01:18:57.360 And it's, and this is a very complex question for a closing question, but so be it.

01:19:04.000 I don't understand at all the theories that purport to include dark matter and dark energy.

01:19:14.060 And they've always seemed to me, and this I'm sure is a reflection of my ignorance,

01:19:19.000 as post hoc rationalizations for the failure of a theory.

01:19:23.400 Sort of like the cosmological constant, but, but like I said, I'm, I'm nowhere near informed

01:19:30.240 enough to make that judgment.

01:19:31.580 But can you explain, you talked a little bit about the standard cosmic, cosmological theory.

01:19:36.520 Can you explain how the notions of dark matter and dark energy have been incorporated into

01:19:40.980 that and why?

01:19:42.660 And you have like five minutes.

01:19:44.580 Just kidding.

01:19:45.200 Take your time.

01:19:45.960 Yeah, it's a huge topic.

01:19:47.140 And it's, it's something I totally understand.

01:19:48.960 There's a lot of skepticism about the reality of dark matter and dark energy, because it

01:19:55.840 is so porous.

01:19:59.660 It's so, it's so, you know, immaterial that of course, it's hard to accept it.

01:20:04.660 If you can't hold it in your hand and you can't see it, how do we know this thing is

01:20:08.360 really there?

01:20:08.980 It is quite frankly, an invention to explain some of the observations that we see.

01:20:14.320 But, you know, physics is not opposed to doing that.

01:20:17.560 And we've done that for a long time.

01:20:18.720 We've invented many extra terms.

01:20:20.980 We, you know, we've invented extra terms.

01:20:22.460 We have Newtonian understanding of gravity.

01:20:25.020 And Einstein looked at the orbit of Mercury and said, that doesn't fit in.

01:20:28.880 It doesn't agree with Newtonian physics.

01:20:30.680 We need to add some extra stuff to make this work.

01:20:34.240 And so we, you know, physics has always been iterative and we've always added more complexity

01:20:38.580 to our model.

01:20:39.460 So in that sense, we shouldn't be opposed to it fundamentally because of what it's doing.

01:20:44.820 Um, the evidence for dark matter is, is, is, is quite strong and diverse at this point.

01:20:51.080 Um, but I don't think we have completely concluded that it is absolutely real.

01:20:55.280 And there is still many interesting clues that there could be alternatives to dark matter,

01:21:01.060 such as actually modifying again what Einstein did another level and, and changing things

01:21:05.860 because it's modified theories of gravity.

01:21:08.040 So that's possible.

01:21:09.960 Uh, the evidence for dark matter, the classic piece of evidence that we first collected was

01:21:14.140 Vera Rubin.

01:21:15.560 She was an astronomer in the, in the seventies, I believe.

01:21:18.140 And she noted that many galaxies appear to be rotating so fast that by the centrifugal

01:21:23.660 force, they should fly apart.

01:21:24.980 If you add up how much mass they have with the stars, the stuff you can see, they're spinning

01:21:29.800 so fast, there's just no way they should really be bound.

01:21:32.420 They should be spewing out into space.

01:21:34.480 So she, you know, she argued there could be some extra additional matter there that simply

01:21:40.080 we cannot see.

01:21:41.200 And I kind of like this idea personally, because why should we, why should we arrogantly assume

01:21:47.380 that we can see everything?

01:21:48.480 That's always kind of bothered me.

01:21:49.700 Like the assumption that everything we see should, we, everything that we can see with our

01:21:53.880 invisible eyes is, is the entire state of the universe.

01:21:57.080 That always seems to be a very naive perspective to have.

01:21:59.380 If just because you can't see it, therefore it doesn't exist.

01:22:01.220 Well, therefore you wouldn't have air, right?

01:22:02.880 You wouldn't believe in the presence of air, all kinds of things, if you operated under

01:22:06.060 this mentality.

01:22:07.060 So this, this neatly explains the galaxies.

01:22:09.960 And also, you know, we've many of the evidences now, for example, another example is weak lensing.

01:22:13.880 So when we look at very distant, bright sources like galaxies, like James Webb is looking at,

01:22:18.980 and we look at their light, it should travel in a straight line, of course, but we notice

01:22:22.700 that it doesn't.

01:22:23.340 And these galaxies appear slightly warped and distorted.

01:22:26.240 Like looking, if you go to a fun house and you have these curved mirrors, they get distorted

01:22:30.600 into strange shapes.

01:22:32.200 And we see this, we call this weak lensing.

01:22:34.120 It's a very mild effect to these galaxies, but it is detectable.

01:22:37.400 And so we know there must be some invisible fluff between us and these distant galaxies

01:22:42.220 that is somehow distorting their images consistently.

01:22:45.800 And in fact, you can notice in one patch of the sky, all the galaxies are twisted in the

01:22:49.000 same way.

01:22:49.500 And then it gradually changes to a slightly different perturbation.

01:22:52.580 And so you can even map out the density of this dark matter, if you believe it is dark

01:22:57.800 matter, between.

01:22:58.600 So this explanation neatly explains many things.

01:23:02.040 Another example is tidal streams.

01:23:04.260 So when you look at the outskirts of the galaxy, you see these clusters of stars, which should

01:23:10.880 be kind of all bound together as one ball.

01:23:13.860 But instead, they're kind of being spaghettified, spaghettification, like when you fall into a 0.95

01:23:17.760 black hole through the intense gravity, so we can use the amount of spaghettification 0.98

01:23:21.960 we see of these clusters to measure the strength of gravity that they are feeling.

01:23:26.840 And that spaghettification factor also matches the predictions of dark matter. 0.71

01:23:30.780 So there's just three examples, but we have many, many examples now of...

01:23:35.660 I think you guys should have hired a poet to come up with a better word than spaghettification. 0.59

01:23:41.240 Yeah, we normally call them tidal streams, but spaghettification always kind of catches...

01:23:45.920 For some reason, it got into the public consciousness.

01:23:49.320 And so that's the way I use that term.

01:23:51.420 But I agree, it's not perhaps the easiest term to wrap your head around.

01:23:55.400 Well, I suppose it's no worse, really, than the Big Bang as a poetic representation.

01:24:03.420 Well, it is a joke, but I mean, it is a joke.

01:24:06.360 It is, and it's actually quite funny to call it the Big Bang.

01:24:09.560 But, you know, it's definitely engineer nerd humor funny.

01:24:13.480 Yeah, yeah. I mean, we give these things terrible names. That's true.

01:24:17.800 And dark energy?

01:24:19.200 Yeah, dark energy is much more mysterious.

01:24:21.060 We have far less evidence for this than dark matter,

01:24:23.880 at least far less diversity of evidence for it.

01:24:26.880 For dark matter, we have many, many independent sources of information

01:24:29.920 that suggest the same kind of thing.

01:24:32.300 We would still like to detect the particle,

01:24:34.800 and maybe we'll one day do this,

01:24:36.740 but probably not, to be honest.

01:24:39.020 Most of our detectors seem to keep falling short.

01:24:41.380 And whatever dark matter is,

01:24:42.740 it's probably just way beyond our energy reaches right now.

01:24:45.780 Dark energy, we only really have one driving force of evidence for it,

01:24:50.400 and that's the expansion of the universe.

01:24:52.220 So when we look at the universe, we know it's expanding, of course.

01:24:54.420 We can see things moving away from us.

01:24:55.980 That's what Edwin Hubble discovered in the 1930s, I believe.

01:25:00.580 But now it's even worse than that,

01:25:03.200 because we see the...

01:25:04.400 It was actually a Nobel Prize given for this,

01:25:06.200 because we see that the universe is not only expanding,

01:25:08.460 but it's accelerating in that expansion.

01:25:11.100 So that's just very puzzling.

01:25:12.820 Well, that's a mystery, all right.

01:25:14.000 So this is the cosmological constant that Einstein had in his equations,

01:25:18.960 and he put it in there to try and keep...

01:25:20.880 He knew that gravity should collapse the universe down,

01:25:23.980 so he added in a term to keep it static.

01:25:26.900 And now we...

01:25:27.960 He called it his biggest mistake when he put it in.

01:25:30.240 He really regretted this fictional term.

01:25:32.780 But now we actually think that not only is that cosmological constant

01:25:36.000 really genuinely there,

01:25:37.460 but it's even higher than what he imagined it to be.

01:25:40.360 It's not only keeping the universe stable,

01:25:42.960 it's actually causing it to fly apart ever faster.

01:25:47.240 Well, the fact that it's accelerating,

01:25:49.540 that really is incomprehensible.

01:25:52.300 You can see why that would call for the hypothesis

01:25:55.120 of an entirely new kind of energy,

01:25:58.280 because that's just preposterous.

01:26:00.500 It's preposterous.

01:26:01.660 The acceleration.

01:26:02.780 It's preposterous, yeah.

01:26:03.140 We have no way to understand it.

01:26:04.320 One idea is that it could be due to quantum fluctuations,

01:26:07.440 vacuum fluctuations.

01:26:08.500 If you look at an empty space,

01:26:09.940 you see particles popping in and out of existence

01:26:12.440 due to quantum uncertainty,

01:26:14.080 and that happens all the time.

01:26:15.380 But it's kind of one of the biggest embarrassments in physics

01:26:18.180 that when you calculate the rate of dark energy that predicts,

01:26:22.320 you know, the universe wouldn't even really be here,

01:26:24.060 quite frankly, if that rate was maintained.

01:26:25.720 So somehow this theory must be wrong at some level.

01:26:28.800 This energy must be being leaked out in other places.

01:26:31.920 Yet when we look at dark energy,

01:26:33.760 it's clearly far, far less.

01:26:35.020 So we don't even have a real good causal explanation.

01:26:37.420 It's really kind of an embarrassment,

01:26:39.220 quite frankly, at this point,

01:26:40.080 to understand what's going on.

01:26:40.900 So why is there...

01:26:42.000 I hate to delve into this,

01:26:44.140 but I'm going to anyways,

01:26:45.040 because I'd like to know.

01:26:47.600 These particles and antiparticles

01:26:49.960 that hypothetically pop up in the vacuum of space,

01:26:52.820 why is that not energy neutral?

01:26:55.220 Why does that produce an excess,

01:26:57.320 this hypothetical excess of energy

01:26:58.960 that's calculated by the quantum investigators

01:27:02.020 that you described?

01:27:03.880 Because my understanding was that

01:27:05.260 these particles pop up and then disappear,

01:27:08.220 and that's an energy neutral phenomenon.

01:27:11.680 It's not because they produce a photon.

01:27:13.800 Obviously, that's wrong.

01:27:14.320 Yeah, so if I produce an electron and a positron,

01:27:16.500 so positron's the anti-electron,

01:27:18.320 they pop into existence.

01:27:19.560 And then when they recombine,

01:27:21.460 that produces a photon.

01:27:23.580 So that photon is now,

01:27:25.440 is this vacuum energy.

01:27:27.500 And that is now,

01:27:29.220 you know, there's nothing to annihilate a photon.

01:27:31.100 You can't annihilate a photon.

01:27:32.160 So it's just free to go through the universe.

01:27:34.880 So this is the vacuum.

01:27:35.540 Where does it come from, that photon?

01:27:36.860 It's essentially borrowed energy.

01:27:39.280 It's what it is, yeah.

01:27:40.520 Yeah, so it's extremely strange

01:27:42.280 implication of quantum mechanics.

01:27:44.420 And if it bothers you,

01:27:46.180 it should bother you.

01:27:47.180 And Niels Bohr famously said

01:27:48.200 that anyone who's not disturbed

01:27:49.300 by the consequences of quantum theory

01:27:51.340 has not understood it

01:27:52.280 because it's so baffling.

01:27:53.940 Well, it sounds a lot like,

01:27:55.280 it sounds a lot like

01:27:56.540 let there be light to me.

01:27:58.660 You know, that's a,

01:27:59.640 seriously, that's a very strange thing.

01:28:01.420 The universe shines intrinsically.

01:28:03.220 Yeah, right, right, right, right.

01:28:05.000 Isn't that something?

01:28:05.760 Okay, well, that's a good place to end,

01:28:07.640 I would say.

01:28:08.340 You know, that's a nice poetic ending,

01:28:10.160 much more so than spaghettification

01:28:11.840 or the Big Bang, let's say.

01:28:13.960 So, all right.

01:28:14.580 So thank you very much

01:28:15.940 for walking us through that.

01:28:17.240 That was fascinating.

01:28:18.220 It's nice to talk to

01:28:19.280 a so-called hard scientist,

01:28:21.580 although I think you astrophysicists

01:28:23.300 and physicists are

01:28:24.460 the strangest of hard scientists

01:28:26.120 by a large margin.

01:28:27.100 So, there's plenty of metaphysics

01:28:29.400 in physics and that's quite fun

01:28:30.880 and so much appreciated.

01:28:33.460 For everybody watching and listening,

01:28:35.500 thank you very much

01:28:36.420 for your time and attention.

01:28:37.320 I'm going to continue

01:28:38.080 this discussion

01:28:39.180 with Dr. David Kipping

01:28:40.420 on the Daily Wire side of things

01:28:42.720 and I think we'll delve there

01:28:44.200 a little bit more

01:28:45.100 into the psychological.

01:28:45.920 I'd like to find out

01:28:47.100 how Dr. Kipping

01:28:48.480 came to his interest

01:28:50.340 in astrophysics

01:28:51.140 and how his career developed

01:28:52.500 and so it's always interesting

01:28:54.240 to me as a psychologist

01:28:55.240 to find out

01:28:55.940 how people's calling,

01:28:59.140 the calling that made them

01:29:00.120 who they are,

01:29:00.720 made itself manifest.

01:29:01.860 So, that's what we'll talk about

01:29:03.180 on the Daily Wire side.

01:29:04.260 So, consider joining us there

01:29:05.820 and to the film crew here

01:29:07.820 in Toronto today,

01:29:09.380 thank you very much.

01:29:10.480 And to the film crew there,

01:29:11.580 you're in New York City

01:29:12.460 near Columbia

01:29:13.960 and yeah,

01:29:15.260 thank you to them as well

01:29:16.220 and good talking to you, sir.

01:29:19.080 Thank you for having me, John.

01:29:19.980 Real pleasure.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 11, 2024

463. Heaven, the Matrix, Dark Matter, and Aliens ｜ Dr. David Kipping

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