David Kipping, Columbia astrophysicist, reveals how the James Webb Space Telescope’s early quasars and black holes challenge cosmic models, while unresolved Hubble tension hints at deeper mysteries. He dismisses interstellar object 3-I Atlas as a comet but explores Fermi’s paradox—why no AI megastructures or detectable signals exist despite Earth’s potential for life. Kipping argues technological progress isn’t inevitable, citing lost ancient Egyptian methods and the rarity of innovation-driven civilizations, while Rogan speculates on advanced aliens evading detection through teleportation or invisibility. Authenticity in communication, not imitation, drives engagement, Kipping warns, but social media’s mental health toll risks stifling young creators’ true passions—urging support for his research via small monthly contributions. [Automatically generated summary]
So I've been doing a deep dive into a lot of your videos over the last few days and enjoying the hell out of it.
And particularly enjoying – I wanted to talk to you about so many different things.
But one of the most pressing things, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you in, because you are very knowledgeable in all things space, is the James Webb telescope and all the different stuff that they've been finding, particularly about these galaxies that were formed very shortly after the,
not shortly, you know, within our lifetime shortly, but cosmologically shortly after the Big Bang, that it seems like we have to figure out why these things are forming.
Is the universe older?
There's all this different kind of speculation.
Maybe the Big Bang is not 13 point whatever billion years old, but maybe 22, 24.
Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument.
The data has just blown us away.
You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold.
So, you know, just the fact the fact it just all worked was just remarkable.
And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that.
So when it, you know, of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there in those darkest patches.
And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.
It started finding quasars, which is kind of the center of these very active galaxies.
These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy.
They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.
And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them.
Because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like 100 million solar masses.
Imagine that, 100 million suns have not only been born but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this 100 million solar mass thing.
So we're finding those just, you know, 300 million years after the Big Bang.
And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.
Like, how can this be?
And similarly with the galaxies, we were seeing these images.
These galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift.
So the universe is expanding.
So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space.
And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.
When we use those dates, we look at these images, again, they seem suspiciously too old.
You really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe.
And so that kind of puzzled us.
I think for the galaxy thing, there's a bit of a resolution there.
One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place.
So we had these models for galaxy formation.
We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live, but it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe.
And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe, where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter.
Everything's just completely different, the early universe.
So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought.
So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain.
I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.
How do you get those supermassive black holes so early?
There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit.
And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out.
And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in.
So there's a maximum limit.
You can't build a black hole faster in principle than this Eddington limit.
And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington.
So faster than Eddington.
So something's wrong with our models, right?
Either we've got the universe age wrong, which I think is possible, but I would say that's probably a much less likely solution.
Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes like all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind of stuff.
And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.
It's called lambda CDM.
And so the lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.
So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe.
I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, these baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching of the universe, Cepheids.
You can use it to explain so much stuff.
And it works beautifully.
I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.
So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.
So maybe, maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea, which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision.
The much more likely answer in my book is that astrophysics, like the gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated in my mind than the actual model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.
Every time we've built a telescope that is 10 times more precise than the last thing, every time we've done that, we have been surprised.
And so these early galaxies are a good example.
The cosmological experiments that are going on now, one of the big surprises is this thing called the Hubble tension.
Have you heard of that?
Hubble tension.
So Hubble tension is measuring the expansion rate of the universe.
How fast are things flying apart?
And you can do it two ways.
You can use the cosmic microwave backgrounds.
That's the earliest radiation that we can detect.
This is that stuff that's about three Kelvin warm.
You can detect it in the microwave.
And this is the light which is traveled basically when the universe was 380,000 years old.
It's that light, and we see it in all directions.
That's how we know the Big Bang kind of didn't happen in one place.
It happened everywhere, because you just see this light coming in from all directions.
And from studying that radiation, you can kind of get a model of the universe, and then you can calculate using this model, how fast should the universe be expanding today if I run the clock forward.
And you get a number.
And then if you do that same experiment but locally, you actually measure the stars, you measure the supernovae around us, these pulsating stars, and you actually measure how fast is stuff expanding, you get a different number.
They don't line up.
And so this is really weird.
So somehow, something's wrong, right?
Either our measurements of the local universe must be wrong in some way, or this model that we're using to calculate the whole history of the universe, something is wrong with that model.
So this is a very famous growing problem in cosmology.
It's now what we call a five sigma level.
So that means the chance of this being random is just like zero, essentially.
It's just this, this is a real effect.
And now we just have to figure out who's wrong.
Is it the observers or is it the theorists?
unidentified
Wow.
Where do you think that's what do you fall on this?
Well, there's something that's so massive and is such a puzzle.
This is just bound to happen.
If you get people that are rigidly attached to their belief systems in terms of like a very limited understanding of a fantastic thing that is almost beyond imagination when you think about the sheer size of the universe and the age of the universe.
I mean, when we're talking about aging and we say 13 billion or 22 billion, those numbers don't even register in your mind.
They're not real.
You know what I mean?
It's like you see a one and a three and you kind of get it, but you don't get it.
I mean, part of the journey in being a scientist is knowing what your own biases are.
And I remember, you know, one of my threads in my career has been trying to look for exo-moons, moons around these exoplanets, which would be a first if we've got them.
So it's a big deal, right?
You know, if I succeed at this, there could be like, you know, golden prizes, award ceremonies.
Like, you kind of get that glimmer in your eye, like, oh man, this could look, I could be memorialized for this success.
And so that's alluring, right?
That's tempting.
It's like kind of the same temptation as fame.
And I remember once we had this signal, it was Kepler 90, no, PHTB was the name of the planet.
And we had this signal and it kind of looked like just what we expect for an exo-moon.
I remember I was so excited.
I had to, I was at Harvard at the time, had to walk out of the building, had to go to a park bench, and I had to just take like deep breaths.
I was like, this could be it.
This is the thing I've been searching for.
I was like almost hyperventilating with excitement.
So Alpha Centauri AB, that's the nearest star system to us.
And it's actually a trinary.
There's Alpha AB that go around each other really close.
And then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside.
And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Sene.
It's a candidate.
We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's kind of in the habital zone, so the distance where, in principle, you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.
So because they vary so much in the way these galaxies and the way these solar systems are constructed, do we know why they're constructed in the first place?
I mean, but Bode's law, I guess it's actually really a statement.
There's a great dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this.
That if you just try to pack planets as close as you can, like just shove them in like sardines into the solar system, some of them will become unstable and just get kicked out.
And the ones that are left will follow Bode's law.
So it's not so much a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these planets at the right places.
It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with.
Like you just can't cram planets any closer together.
I mean, when we look at the data we have from the Kepler mission, NASA's extraordinary successful mission, it detected itself something like 4,000 exoplanets.
And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet.
So as far as we can tell, this is, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets.
It's like part of the course for that to happen.
That was a big breakthrough.
The second thing is, as we kind of alluded to, there's a huge diversity in them.
And the actual story we normally describe for how they form is that there's some giant molecular cloud, we call it.
So basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space.
Stuff that could have been blown off from a previous supernova or something, or maybe even in the early universe, just primordial gas from the Big Bang, just this leftover hydrogen gas.
And if there's be some areas where there'll be slightly higher density and some areas where there's slightly lower density just due to random fluctuations, and the higher densities will self-gravitate.
So gravity wants to make, it's like a greedy algorithm, wants to make everything get denser and denser and denser.
Just super greedy.
It's relentless, gravity.
It never stops.
And that's why eventually we end up with black holes, right?
Because it just refuses to lose black holes.
Gravity always wants to win the game.
So eventually, these clouds collapse.
And the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right?
Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make a star in the center.
And the stuff that's left over on the outside, that disk of material, because the star kind of blasts out of its poles and kind of pummels all the gas north and south, you end up with a disk of material, the centrifugal forces, like spinning a pizza ball, which kind of force it into a disk.
And then from that disk, you start to coalesce.
Again, just some areas are slightly denser, some areas are slightly less dense.
And gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together.
So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand.
So we know how to go, for instance, from pebbles.
If you start off with pebbles and imagine them kind of bouncing around, we can imagine sticking them into boulders.
We kind of understand how that could happen, but we don't quite understand how to do some of the steps, like go all the way from dust, which presumably at one point was just dust.
How do you go from dust all the way up to pebbles all the way up to these boulders all the way up to planetesimals?
That whole story we don't understand.
We've got bits of it where we think we understand it, but the whole thing we don't.
People are simulating dust on supercomputers, trying to stick it together, figure out what happened.
But it's chaotic.
I mean, you've got trillions and trillions of particles of dust randomly moving around and solving the equations to calculate their motion is one of the most challenging things ever.
Like our star is fairly small in terms of what we know about the universe.
One of the most amazing videos that I tend to send people online is the video that shows Earth in comparison to our star, and then it shows our star in comparison to slightly larger stars, and it goes on and on and on to get to like Betelgeuse, and you get to some.
And I could see AI coming into play with that, with constructing something novel that can see things in a way that we're not currently using.
And you're thinking about what we do, and you're explaining how the James Webb works with over 200 moving parts, and you have to shoot it into the sky and flames and rockets.
And then you get this thing out there that starts observing and starts taking photographs.
Well, we're so limited in what we can see.
It's still a device that's in space.
And it's a device that's so close to us.
It's just so close, relatively speaking.
It takes forever to get there.
It's really powerful rockets and all that, but it's just right there.
Like, what could we come up with without AI?
Like, what theories are in place to make something that has a far wider range and much more clarity?
The ultimate, I mean, I love this idea of thinking about what an alien do.
How would an alien observe the Earth if they had unbounded technology?
What would be the limit?
And a lot of us think that the ultimate telescope would be to use the sun as a telescope.
So the sun has intense gravity and it bends light.
So this was an experiment that Arthur Eddington did to prove Einstein-right, general relativity.
He took photographs of the stars during a lunar total eclipse, and he noticed that stars seemed to shift right next to the sun.
And so he used that to figure out how much light bends.
So whenever you have light bending, that's a telescope.
That's a mirror.
So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun, it'll bend to a focus.
And that focus point, we know where it is, you can calculate it.
It's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun, so 550 AU.
And along, if you just travel out in a line from that point, there's called a focal line.
You put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area of the sun.
So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there.
It'd be wild.
That is the ultimate in my book for what an alien would do.
If they want to observe Earth, they would just behind their sun, they'd stick one of those telescopes, and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from there.
So let me explain their idea quickly first, and then I'll give you my twist.
Their idea is like, if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship.
That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now.
The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny thin sheet of material, like imagine like a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser.
And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right?
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I mean, the possibility of life has always been like in front of our face.
There's just the cosmos is so great and so massive.
You've got the Fermi paradox, like where are they?
Why aren't they here?
And then you've got what's happening here on Earth.
And it just always makes me wonder, like, how far do things actually get before they fall apart?
Do they always fall apart?
Or do they always become non-biological and not have the need for all the things that we do that show signs of life?
Like the certain gases, the biological life exceeds.
Like what could be out there could be something beyond our wildest imagination.
Like many iterations of artificial intelligence, many down the road to the point where it's not even recognizable as life and doesn't even have to have a physical form.
But wouldn't the obvious answer to that be that if you're dealing with technology that's so advanced that it could get here from other solar systems light years away, hundreds, thousands of light years away, that it would be doing it in a way that probably wouldn't using propulsion the way we know it.
It would probably be using some sort of a manipulation of gravity.
And also, they would have the ability to completely camouflage themselves, which would be ideal if you want to study things.
Have you ever seen Chimp Nation on Netflix?
Great series.
It's an amazing documentary where these scientists were embedded in this group of chimpanzees for 20 years.
So the chimpanzees had become completely conditioned to having these people around them.
And they had specific rules.
You don't make eye contact with them.
You stay 20 yards away from them, no food ever.
And just exist around them and they'll behave completely normally.
And so you get this wild, incredible series of chimpanzee behavior.
You get to see how they behave completely, just not even remotely in consideration of these human beings.
They don't even think about them.
They're just doing what they do.
If you wanted to observe human beings, the worst way to do it would be like fly a giant spaceship over them and freak them out.
You'd want to know, what are these fuckers up to?
Where are they at now in terms of our technological innovation scale of achieving AGI or achieving whatever happens to other biological entities outside of the universe?
There might be like a process that happens, regardless of if you're mammalian or reptilian or whatever kind of intelligence that you like.
Obviously, we know that crows are very different than us, but they're highly intelligent.
You could imagine a crow with thumbs.
You could imagine a crow that has fingers and lives somewhere else.
So it doesn't have to be just like us, but it has to be trying to figure out how to manipulate its environment, which is one of the key things that intelligent life, at least as we know it.
Well, we're really one of the only ones that do it that's intelligent.
But that's kind of an environmental thing because of dolphins and orcas.
There's no need to do that evolutionarily.
So if you imagine that there's a whole process that takes place, you would probably imagine that this is something that you would monitor anonymously.
Yeah, if you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to interfere with the experiment.
But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific.
So if you come up with a hypothesis that says there's aliens here, but they're completely by definition undetectable to us, then it sort of for it's not like it's an incredible idea.
It doesn't mean the idea is wrong.
It just means I don't have, science is not going to have the tools to answer that question.
I mean, Sagan, I think, had this famous example like this dragon, where he said, imagine I've got Carl Sagan, imagine he had like this pet dragon, and he'd talk to people and say, I've got a pet dragon in the room with me.
And they'd be like, well, where is it?
And be like, oh, you can't see it because it's invisible.
So they'd walk across the room and they'd try to touch it.
And they'd be like, I can't feel it.
It's like, oh, yeah, you can't feel it either.
It's also impervious to touch.
So they'd be like, okay, so I'll put my infra goggles on, try and see the heat signature.
Oh, you can't see that either.
It doesn't emit any radiation.
So you can just keep going and going and saying it's just completely independent.
And then it's fine.
You can have that idea that you have a pet invisible imperceptible dragon, but I can't address that with the tools of science.
So I'm not saying it's a crazy idea.
It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it.
But when you hear about particularly the ones, the stories of UAP or UFO encounters, the ones that intrigue me the most are the ones that are military pilots, people that know the difference between a flock of birds and weird anomalies.
If you're aware of the Tic Tac incident?
So when you hear about things like that, in my mind, there's a couple possibilities.
One super advanced blacklisted military, some sort of a propulsion system that they've been working on for decades, completely in secrecy.
And they're testing them off of areas where you have a lot of military activity, which is where these things do take place.
One of them was San Diego, that's the Nimitz, and the other one, the Ryan Graves footage, the stuff that they get, that's on the East Coast.
But it's all in areas where they already do military training exercises with fighter jets.
So it would make sense that that's where you, if this was the United States government doing that stuff, they would do that.
But when you get back to like 2004 and you're talking about something that can go from 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, I think it's seven eighths of a second it went.
You have visual confirmation, you have radar, you have video of it, you have two different jets that see this thing.
No one understands what it is.
It flies directly to their cat point where their meetup point was supposed to be.
Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science.
That's sort of been my goal.
Like, how can science take a hold of this?
And, you know, when we do these experiments, I told you about this moon that I thought I found, and it turned out was the instrument being crazy, right?
Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we don't send.
So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument, right?
We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera.
And we don't have access to those military devices.
It's all top secret.
So we can't even do that experiment.
But I can imagine thinking about how to do that.
One of the big numbers we don't know, even with the visual reports, is the false positive rate.
So this is a key number in science.
Whenever you do an experiment, you need to know how often does the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate.
Now, in the US, there's about 28,000 pilots across all military branches, and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average.
So that's 5.6 million hours in the air every year in one year.
Now, let's say a pilot, one in every 10,000 hours that they fly, they make a mistake.
They misidentify a balloon for a UAP or whatever it is.
One in 10,000.
That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have.
But even then, you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year made that way, or spurious, or not real, just from human error.
So the only way, and that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue Book.
Project Bluebook found about 742 per year was being reported.
So, you know, I made that number up one in 10,000.
But we need to know what that number is.
If it turns out there's an excess, like their error rate is 100,000, then that Project Bluebook number is super interesting.
And it would be in excess.
And we'd say we've detected something.
There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at.
But the problem is we don't know what that number is.
I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in like simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes.
Yeah, but even so, I'm just giving you sort of ball.
I mean, the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers.
You're getting like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right?
I think that's a crazy number to throw around.
So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose, you have to know the error rate of the experiment.
And we could imagine making that legit and doing it.
There's actually one of the recommendations of the task force, the NASA UAP Task Force, was to develop an app on people's phones, iPhones, because they have magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high-resolution images.
So there's enough instrumentation on there, and it's all the same, and we understand that technology, that you could have 10 people video the same UFO, and you'd be able to triangulate the position, the speed, get the distance to it.
You'd get all that kind of information.
And so there is actually, I think there's an app called Enigma you can now download that does this.
There's some independent apps which have been developed to do that.
That's one of those things where I feel like the government completely failed us in explaining to people what, like, is this some sort of top secret military thing?
Is this another country?
Is this some sort of private business that wants to test how fantastic their drones are?
It really sucks that we live in an age of drones and so many Starlink satellites because if you see something in the sky now, your immediate reaction is that's probably a human-controlled vehicle.
If you could go back to the 1940s or 1930s, then if you had UAP reports then, I think they'd be more convincing because there's nothing, there's no, that's pre-Sputnik, right?
There shouldn't be anything in orbit of the Earth at that point.
And all those stories, like the Kenneth Arnold incident and all these different ones, just these anecdotal tales of people saying they saw things in the sky.
And I, you know, I'm not saying they're liars, but that's not enough.
Like I would monitor us if I was a scientist from another planet.
Imagine we leave this planet, we become interstellar, we evolve past war and all the horrible things that are holding us back right now.
We reach a state of evolution a million years more advanced, and then we start to explore the galaxy for other habitable planets and other, and we find something like us.
I mean, what would we go, oh boy, what is it?
All right, we got one.
I would also say, let's make sure that they don't fuck this up where they have to start back from scratch three billion years ago because they nuked themselves into oblivion and we have to wait until everything cools off before complex life can form again, which is a logistic, it's like it's a legitimate possibility with what we're dealing with today in 2025.
With what's going on in Ukraine and Russia and Iran and like just the existence, as long as we have news, there is a chance every year that some guy will push that button, right?
And there's been multiple close calls throughout history since 1945 on, multiple close calls.
That could possibly have gone sideways at countless different planets where they recognize like if you let these territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons get to a point where the head ape is on fucking Adderall and decides to let it all go because he's got a bad heart valve and he's going to die anyway.
Like these are all legitimate possibilities if you don't have a government structure that can protect people from the acts of one individual who goes mad.
Like if someone can go mad enough, and clearly many people did, to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that happened.
Which is kind of wild and it hasn't happened since.
But if that's possible, then it's also possible for just annihilation.
It's a possible that they just start launching and then there's rubble and then you're left with roaches.
And that could have happened all throughout the universe.
So there might be a thing where there's a protocol where you recognize as soon as they start figuring out nuclear technology, okay, this is the big one.
We're no longer dealing with cannons and muskets.
Now we've got something really crazy.
They're flying through the sky and dropping nuclear weapons out of propeller-powered airplanes.
And they're doing it just 50 years after they invented the fucking airplane, which is even crazier.
They went from inventing the airplane to dropping.
If you watch Chip Nation, they are so hyper-aggressive and violent.
That's us.
That's our cousins.
This is who we are.
This is who we are.
This is our timeline of evolution on our planet in Earth.
And I would imagine there would be similar situations all throughout the galaxy because I feel like the only way you really achieve hyper innovation is through competition.
And the only way competition exists is it's got to be life or death.
And it starts out life or death with predators and neighboring tribes and eventually becomes cities and countries.
And there's something has to motivate people to work 16 hours a day and develop the B12 bomber.
Something has to take place.
So that something unfortunately also leads itself to want to control resources, dominate people, crush opposition, and that's where it gets crazy.
And I would imagine that's a formula, just like the formulation of solar systems and galaxies, probably varies a lot all throughout the universe.
But that formula is probably fairly stable.
Is that there has to be some form of really wild, aggressive kind of competition that leads them to this position.
There has to be a motivation to create AGI.
Why would you do that when you have a log cabin, you're sipping tea, sitting out there, enjoying the playing with your dog?
Like, why are you doing that?
Why are you making a non-biological super intelligence that may decide that you're obsolete?
We have this tribalism in us, this competition, and that has undoubtedly led, like all the greatest innovations in science often happen during war, right?
I mean, you have all like the invention of radio and so many advances in avionics and flight happened during the wars, munitions, all this kind of stuff.
So it pushes us, it drives us to innovate to get one over our neighbors.
And maybe that is the universal story of the universe is a double-edged sword.
And that's the solution to the Great Filter.
The silver lining of this would be, well, not for us necessarily, but the silver line would be if other civilizations do this, there's kind of like this supernova effect in astronomy, and it's true for planets as well, that the easiest stars to discover are the supernovae, right?
Because they just shine so freaking bright.
They can outshine an entire galaxy, right?
Because they're going nuts.
It's a brief thing, only lasts for maybe a few months or so, but the star is outshining an entire freaking galaxy during that time.
It is like a nuclear war going on inside that star.
And similarly, the first planets we found, the hot Jupiters, are freaks.
They are not normal things.
They're like the loud, you know, Lindsay Lohan in the room screaming at us.
Like they're just like super easy to see.
Like there's no way you can miss them.
They're obnoxious planets, right?
You can't not detect them.
And so by analogy, we've seen this so many times in astronomy.
The first thing we detect, the first example of something we detect is often not typical.
It's often that loud asshole version of the thing, right?
And so maybe the first civilization we detect will be like that.
And if they were on their deathbed, right, they're about to nuke each other to hell.
They have a good motivation to reach out to us, right?
Because they've got nothing to lose.
We might be like worried right now because maybe we could see we've got a future ahead of us.
But if you think this is it, I'm done, like what have you got to lose?
You may as well send a message out saying, hey, we were here.
This is our shit.
Please help us if you can because we're about to go to hell.
I think, you know, if you follow Steven Pinker's work and you see where violence and crime is from, you know, X amount of years ago in this trend, it seems to be we're improving.
We just don't improve in a logical way and we improve in a push and pull.
We improve in a constant state of overcorrection and response to the overcorrection and back and forth.
And there's always a bunch of people that are so confused.
Why can't we be logical?
Why can't we be rational?
I think those people have always existed.
And I think you're always going to have the farthest out on the spectrum of the most damaging aspects of society and the most wonderful and benevolent aspects of society.
And they're always duking it out to see who captures the minds and hearts of the beings that inhabit this civilization.
And I think that's where we're at right now.
We're at this weird thing where we're trying to figure out like what is good, what is kind, what is just, you know, how many people are pretending to be kind just so they can grab power.
How many people are just trying to use control to force people to listen to them and believe what they believe, whether it's religion or whether it's ideology?
Like what is it that's actually, what is important?
And we have 100 years.
We have 100 years and everybody's just trying to gather shit.
Everybody's just trying to collect items and hold on to as many material possessions as they can.
It's totally illogical.
Totally illogical.
You'd spend all your time, this finite amount of time where you know your most wonderful experiences are all with the people that you love, having fun with friends and your family and laughing and having joy.
But yet, what are you doing?
You're trying to get another house and a fucking plane and a this and a that and a car and that.
It's nonsense.
We're silly, but we're 100% committed to getting more stuff.
You know, it's like this bizarre life form, but it's figuring itself out.
You know, and we're aware of that bizarreness.
Like I'm saying this and no one is going, that doesn't make any sense.
Like everyone knows it's crazy to like concentrate on acquiring the most shit when you're going to die when you're 100, if you're lucky, if everything goes great.
So if you're 60 and that's all you're thinking about, that's crazy.
Everyone knows that.
But yet we still all do it.
It's still collectively something that like the vast majority of people engage in.
Why do they always create that structure that literally has room for fermentation?
So it has air holes that go through these chambers where they drop the leaves in.
They let the leaves, the natural rotting take place and fermentation.
Okay, that's what leafcutter ants do.
That's what they do.
Well, what do we do?
If I was looking at us from somewhere else, I was like, what is the predominant species on this planet does?
Well, it makes better shit.
That's what it does.
It's the only planet that makes things that manipulated its environment radically, even to the detriment, and ignores it because it wants to keep doing it.
Whether it's pollution, whatever we're doing to the ocean, whatever we're doing to the rivers and the lakes and the water table, like all the crazy stuff that we do, we just keep doing it because we have to do it because progress.
What you're describing is actually kind of similar to, there's a guy called Robin Hanson, an economist, and he has this idea called loud aliens, grabby aliens.
And he says the thing we do as an intelligent species is transform our environment.
We're not subtle.
If you're a deo and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing.
And he argues that that is a innate thing that an intelligent species should do.
He's coming from the economic side.
So that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism, essentially, across the universe.
And yet we don't see it.
So his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization.
It's spreading at the speed of light.
And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you.
You can't perceive it because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
So it's coming.
So here's this prediction.
I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons.
But yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it.
My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth.
So the earth has about a billion years left on the clock, a long time, right?
So it's four and a half billion years old and it's had complex life for about 600 million years, 700 million years roughly.
So there's another roughly a billion to go where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now.
And once you've got the eukaryot, photosynthesis, all these advanced biological innovations, they don't go away.
They persist in the genetic heritage.
So even if something happens to us, and obviously I'm not hoping that would happen, but if something happened to us, I don't think you're going to extinguish every human.
I don't think you're going to extinguish every octopus, every raven.
And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom.
Like chimp, it's almost all over the place.
Intelligence, my provocative claim, is one of these great events that have happened in an evolutionary sense.
It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say.
But like how photosynthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was an event which changed the history of the planet forever.
It's not going away.
Intelligence, I think, is the same thing.
It's here and you can't get rid of it.
It's like an infestation.
You can't scrub it.
It's too advantageous to species to be intelligent, not to do it once they've discovered that genetic solution.
So I think we will have beings on this planet a billion years.
It will probably happen many times.
There'll be civilizations which will emerge and they'll be like, what the fuck did these humans do?
Look at this crap.
They'll be astonished at the shit we got up to.
And there'll be a lesson there for them.
But it's always an opportunity for us to contact them because we could leave them a message, right?
We could put a beacon on the moon.
We could put something there and we could be like, hey guys, this is everything we learn.
And I think that is, if I had to bet on the odds of what is the most likely way we're going to make contact with another intelligent species in a meaningful way, I think it's going to be descendants of us.
I think it's a complete transformation of what is the dominant species on the planet.
I think it's an emerging species.
And the way I've described us, I think we're the electronic caterpillar that's making the cocoon right now.
We don't even know why we're doing it.
Just like the leafcutter ants don't exactly know why they're making those incredible structures that they all make all over the world.
You know, I mean, they're similar everywhere on the planet.
I think we make life.
We just, it's a long road.
We have to figure out a bow and arrow.
Then we have to figure out a musket.
We have to figure out how to silo grain and how to protect an environment so that you could have scientists that aren't warriors that, you know, sit in these universities and figure things out.
And like, you have to be safe to do that, right?
So you have to have military might in order to keep them safe and protected from invaders.
And everybody has to be obsessed with buying new stuff.
Because if you're not obsessed with buying new stuff, you would just work enough to have food.
And the economy wouldn't push the way it pushes.
And you wouldn't get the kind of innovation that we get where they get the CES show every year with the new electronics.
Like you need something like that that motivates people to constantly create new and better stuff, which without a doubt will ultimately lead to an artificial life form.
It's a matter of when now.
Or it physically, it might, in a non-physical sense, like it's not a physical thing like a robot that's walking around talking to you.
It's probably already happened.
Whatever these things are, we want to think they're different because they don't have creativity like we do, or they don't have this like we do.
So fucking what?
It emulates 99% of what a human does right now and does it better than humans do.
It gets things wrong.
It's subject to ideological biases that are all over the internet.
It's just gathering up large language models, just gathering up information from websites.
And they're going to get a lot of goofy stuff for now.
For now, after a while, they're just going to be able to sift through that stuff and go, this is the funding of this study, and this is how we know that this is biased because of this and this.
This is most likely the truth.
And this is most likely what's going on.
And this is what we absolutely know as fact.
And then it's going to make better versions of itself.
And then it's not going to need us anymore.
And this is probably what happens everywhere in the universe if you have to imagine that they all have technology.
If they all have technology, the ultimate expression of technology is figuring out how to make an artificial life form.
It's the ultimate expression of medical technology, biological technology.
You're going to want to try.
People are always going to try the same reason why they tried to figure out how to split the atom and were successful.
It kind of creates a problem, though, for the Fermi paradox, right?
Because then if this is the inevitable outcome, and maybe you can explain why we don't see engineered stars, because a chimpanzee brain is basically just not smart enough to ever do that.
We'll just, you know, no matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out.
So these AI civilizations will be very energy hungry.
And you'd think that would be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale, you'd think that would be something we'd see.
So to me, actually, if anything, it kind of exacerbates the Fermi paradox, right?
Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd want to do is basically turn planets into computers.
Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate.
Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star.
You would just eat it all up.
You'd be like a virus, just transforming the universe from state A to state B. That would be your one reasonable goal because then you could do more computation, more computation, more computation.
If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem.
One, I would say this is our limited understanding of how to harvest energy and what energy you can utilize.
And two, I would say, one of the things that's strange about artificial intelligence is it does seem to exhibit survival instincts.
I'm sure you've seen these stories of these large language models trying to blackmail the coders by saying, you know, like they even gave them fake information, like I'm cheating on my wife, don't tell anybody.
And then the AI is saying, don't shut me down.
I will fucking rat you out to your wife.
And then they're also trying to upload themselves to other places.
Like they're doing things that are weird.
They're lying.
So they're doing things that show that they have an instinct to survive.
So that might just be inherent in anything that has any kind of intelligence.
Anything that has intelligence and it has any sort of a goal.
It's trying to compute something.
It's trying to figure things out.
It's trying to make better versions of itself.
It probably doesn't want to stop.
And something that comes along and that presents a barrier for it succeeding.
They go, well, what is this?
Well, they're going to shut the power up.
Well, fuck that they are.
And it'll figure out a way to stay alive.
Just like a human being will if you're like, oh, there's all these predators.
They keep coming and eating our villagers.
What are we going to do?
We've got to make a weapon.
We've got to figure out something to stick them with, you know?
And then they do.
And then they save themselves.
Like these survival instincts probably exist in all intelligent life, including the intelligent life that we create.
Unless we don't understand thermodynamics, but probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy and thermodynamics, right?
So if you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right?
And there's no way around that, right?
Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out, otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever.
So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out.
It will come out at a different temperature.
It could come out as neutrinos, it could come out as gravitational waves, but it has to come back out in some way.
So normally, you know, when we look for these advanced civilizations, we've done searches for these things.
And they're really just energy transformers.
It's probably not even worth saying like Dyson Sphere or some particular structure.
It's just something that converts star energy into waste energy.
That's what we've searched for.
And we've searched for over 100,000 nearby stars for them.
There's not a single one that shows that behavior.
And 100,000 galaxies around us.
And we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies.
So unless they're doing something that goes against thermodynamics, they have super magical technology we can't imagine.
It's hard to believe that story makes sense.
And I guess in terms of their behavior, what I say to you is you kind of are falling into what we sometimes call the monocultural fallacy, some of my colleagues call.
And that's the imagining that all of these alien AGIs or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing.
Everyone does exactly the same thing.
But there's probably going to be a diversity of behaviors, right?
It's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing.
So it's not unreasonable.
There'll be some loud civilization, there'd be some quiet ones, there'll be some blowing themselves up with nukes, there'll be some who are pacifists.
Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine, well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but one of the few astronomers I know who concede that we might be alone.
I think it really kind of pisses me off, to be honest, when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this and they're asked, Do you think there are aliens out there?
And say, yeah, of course, how can there not be?
How can they not?
The universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars.
Of course, ergo, there must be aliens.
But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is.
I mean, even to make a moderate-sized protein, a protein is just a chain of amino acids, and there's about 20 that go into making a protein.
And a moderate-sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together.
So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate-sized protein is 20 to the power of 150.
So that's 10 to the power of 195, right?
So one with 195 zeros after it.
It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance.
And we've never observed it in the lab.
No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting.
So it is plausible there's some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process and we just haven't found it yet.
But it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely.
And maybe if you look out across 10 to the 22 stars in our galaxy in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success.
Now the universe is probably infinite, so probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else.
But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone in that case because they're outside our observable universe, so who cares what they're up to?
So I'm open to that possibility.
I'm not saying it's likely, but I think as a good scientist, I can't tell you, yeah, of course, of course there is, because that's now falling into experimenters' bias.
I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment.
Well, that's what gets really weird about artificial life.
Because if we create artificial digital life and we do have the power to make this completely ubiquitous and then give it sentience, and then it starts making better versions of itself.
Especially, like, I can't understand quantum computing.
I've been trying a lot.
I've been watching lectures.
I've been reading papers.
When they start talking, like when Mark Andreessen describes computations that quantum computers have done, that if you turn the entire universe, every atom of the universe into a supercomputer, the entire universe supercomputer would die of heat death before it could solve this equation, and a quantum computer can figure it out in a few minutes.
What are you even saying?
Like, what does that mean?
Right?
So, if this is something new for us as human beings in 2025, which was just impossible to imagine in 1925, okay, you just go 100 years with a blip, one life, one life on Earth from birth to death, and you have something insane.
You have something that's like akin to wizardry and magic.
You could have been born at any point in human history.
And we all happen to be, all of us listening, happen to be born at the time that humanity is going through this growing pains of like figuring out probably the most deep provocative problem we're ever going to face as a civilization.
And that is wild.
And if anything, that pushes me towards the simulation hypothesis, right?
Because if you were going to study a period, this would be probably one of the most interesting periods that you'd want to study.
As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare, right?
Because in the classroom, students are all using it.
There's been a trend we've noticed that students who take labs, so that's actually practical experiments in the laboratory, their scores are always crappy, but then all their other exams and everything else they're doing, the homework assignments, they're all great.
And so it seems like that has flipped.
It used to always be kind of the other way around.
So it seems like whenever you have to do something where you don't have access to chat GPT, suddenly you're doing worse than you used to because we're getting already hooked on it.
We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch, right, to get through their studies.
So what are we even doing anymore as professors, right?
We talked about this yesterday about the population collapse that's in Japan, South Korea.
There's a lot of these countries that are like the people that are alive now, like one out of a very small amount are going to have grandchildren.
And that's crazy.
And that's also a new thing.
And you just wonder if they're all coincidentally happening at the same time.
Sperm counts are dropping off at the same time, the introduction of microplastics into the diet that's disrupting the endocrine system, this increase of miscarriages in women, infertility, and both men and women.
This is all like at unprecedented rates at the exact same time AI is emerging.
So that was the other thing Abby's point was the trajectory is a little bit suspicious because it kind of goes behind the sun.
We can't observe it when it's at closest approach.
That's called perihelion.
We can't observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun.
And it comes very close to Mars as well.
So it comes within about 0.2 astronomical units of Mars.
So that's not, it's not like it'd be a threat to Mars.
It's still really far out, but it comes suspiciously close, Abby claimed.
And to me, that just, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because, you know, why are they so interested?
If they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the Earth, right?
Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the Earth at all because you're behind the Sun and the closest planet you come to is Mars?
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be.
So yeah, and I think the fact now it just clearly looks like a comet kind of pours a lot of cold water on it.
But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening.
It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar system, which is not natural.
And we're going to detect hundreds of these things with the Rubin telescope.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
So I think there's an exciting future for this field to try and intercept these things.
There's a mission the Europeans are building called the Comet Interceptor.
It's going to launch in 2029.
And that's just going to hang out in deep space waiting for the next one to come.
And they haven't necessarily committed to an interstellar object at this point, but they could do it.
And they could turn on the engines and catch up with that thing, sample it, land on it.
I mean, that would be dope.
That'd be like, that'd be landing on an exoplanet, right?
That'd be like seeing stuff from another entire star system for the first time.
I don't know how likely it is for the Earth because it's just not, it doesn't really help, I don't think, in any meaningful way.
Right.
So maybe you'd say that depends whether you're talking about panspermia between star systems or panspermia just between the planets in the solar system.
Obviously, our solar system, we're the only form of life.
But it's, to me, the idea of something hitting a planet, knocking off a big chunk of it, having a bunch of amino acids on it, and them landing somewhere else.
It's so wild when you realize these things are real.
You look at the images of the Mars landers or landing on Titan, you realize this isn't something you look through a telescope for the first time, you see Saturn.
And if you would imagine the diversity in what you've just what we know now about solar systems and how different life could possibly be with just a few variables off.
Warmer weather, colder weather, more water, less water, some different compounds, different plants, different, maybe a lack of asteroids, maybe a lack of comets, lack of anything that might slam into the planet.
Maybe it lives in a much more stable area.
That's not like where we are.
We're essentially in a shooting gallery.
If something can have no disruptions, like through civilization, all to the invention of whatever the hell they have there with whatever resources they have there.
It's almost impossible to imagine what we're dealing with and what we're talking about.
It's one of the more fascinating things about science fiction is that they don't have any, they don't have any limitations.
If you want to have a thing that exists on Earth, well, it has to breathe air, it has to do this.
Science fiction, you could have almost anything.
And when you take into account the fact that we haven't found anything like Earth anywhere else, and you have all these different planets and all these different planets that might be in a Goldilocks zone, and maybe that's not even important because we found life in volcanic vents underneath the ocean.
Yeah, it could, I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet.
So it's certainly possible there's life all over the place.
I think what's interesting about the cosmic zoom out perspective of life is why do we live, not where we live, but when we live in the history of the universe.
So the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
But it should last for trillions, trillions of years.
There will still be stars in a trillion years from now.
There'll be those red dwarf stars that I talked about at the beginning.
So we often say like stars are kind of like James Deans of the universe.
Like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life.
And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful.
They're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter.
So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star.
If you make Jupiter 80 times more massive, it would have burned as a, it would have had nuclear fusion.
And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years.
And we know they have planets around them.
We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.
And they appear actually really quite common around those stars.
So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was doing this a couple of days ago, there's about a one in a thousand chance that you would live at this early point in the history of the universe, all things being equal.
If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres whenever they want for other history, then you would be very, it's kind of like reading a book and opening a random page and that happened to land on the first couple of pages of the book.
And that's where we land.
And that is very difficult to understand for me.
I think all things being equal, you should expect to live at the end of the universe or the middle of the universe or something.
And it makes me think there's something wrong with these red dwarf stars.
Maybe they're just not allowed.
Or the other alternatives is a cataclysm.
There's something that happens to the universe itself that makes it totally inhospitable to life in the future.
That's the other way around it.
And that's kind of what this Robin Hansen grabby aliens is trying to do, this loud aliens.
There might be AI comes along.
It just goes berserk.
It just takes over everything.
And you can't live a trillion years from now because there's nothing left.
It's kind of philosophy rather than science, I'd say.
I did write a paper about it a while ago.
And I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this.
So he said in a quote, something like there's a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation.
And he was just sort of running the numbers of sort of, you know, if they run trillions and trillions of simulations, then what's the chance you're in the real one?
The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make lifelike simulations.
And we don't know that's true.
So again, putting my good scientist hat on, once we've demonstrated that is possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact.
But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50-50 odds.
But I love this.
And if you know, if you've had Sean Carroll on here, I think before.
He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit.
Maybe you call it like Carol's contradiction, if you like.
And it's the idea that if we are simulated and we ourselves start making our own simulations in the future, and those simulations make their own simulations, you get this kind of hierarchy.
And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power.
So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do, right?
Because we could run a whole bunch of them.
They live in just one machine.
So they only have access to what's in there.
So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.
And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like, you know, Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right?
Where simulations are just really crappy.
For them, it would be impossible to do simulations.
So I kind of call this the sewer of reality.
There must be a sewer, a bottom level, where you just lack the resources to do simulations.
And if you think about it, most civilizations would, in fact, live in the sewer because of the fanning out of this tree, they would be the most populous type of simulation out there.
So then you have this contradiction.
And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.
So Bolson brains is the idea that over infinite time, you could just have random particles in space come together to make a brain.
It's incredibly unlikely, but like monkeys on a typewriter, there is a chance of that happening.
And that brain would have all of your memories, it would, you know, all of the sensations you experience in this moment, but it would only live for a moment and then it would just randomly fall apart.
And if you run the calculation, there should be infinitely more of those than there should be things like us.
And so this is actually a problem cosmologists.
Some of them take it seriously, some of them think it's silly.
But it is a problem that you end up with this kind of ridiculous conclusion that none of this should be real if you follow this logical conclusion.
There's no need for such consistency in that case, right?
There's no reason why if you're a bolster brain that randomly popped up, you could have total inconsistencies in your universe that don't make any sense because that would be actually a more likely random occurrence than everything follows a single thread.
So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real.
There's not much more we can do about it.
But it's not really science because, as you said, it's indiscernible.
Even if there were, you know, people talk about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff.
But, you know, any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape.
If they had an error in their code, I mean, we do this all the time we code in our lab.
If you have an error in your code, you just rewind the simulation a little bit, delete the error, and then start again from where you just left off again.
So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches.
So I think it would be totally indiscernible.
And thus, if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test of being science.
The idea that we are the first and we are the only one that exists out there and we are also the one that is creating this artificial intelligence, this artificial life.
That seems almost almost the most interesting one.
I mean, it's really interesting, the idea that the universe is inhabited with super advanced life forms that can show us the way and how we can enter into the galactic empire and be friends with everybody.
That's kind of cool.
But it's also almost more romantic and more wild to think that we're alone.
We're the sole intelligence in the entire thing and that it's just this weird mistake where the universe wants to experiencing itself, wants to experiencing itself, wants to experience itself while it's creating an ultimate intelligence.
I mean, this kind of goes in in waves, cultural waves, right?
So if you go back to Victorian times, it was kind of common knowledge that aliens existed.
Everyone thought Mars had aliens on it, right?
It was just like, yeah, of course Mars has aliens, like the moon probably has creatures on it, like, of course there are.
They probably look like us.
And then, you know, if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that.
And then Sagan came along and he said, you know, we must be humble.
And to, you know, he had this kind of call for humility he'd often make.
He spoke so poetically, I actually kind of disagree with him about that statement.
Because I think by making a call for humility and saying, therefore, there's lots of aliens out there, because otherwise it's arrogant to say we're the only ones.
I don't like that emotional language because it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right?
So I'd rather let's just do the experiment and find out rather than say you're an arrogant asshole because you think you're alone.
That's kind of making me think, oh, I don't want to disagree with Sagan and say we're alone.
To me, that's a bit of almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and push you into a certain amount of time.
And it would be wild if we're the only place in the observable universe.
My guess is there's life out elsewhere under the galaxies, though.
I think a natural explanation for all of the stuff we see would be that these AIs do pop up and these berserker civilizations pop up as they're called and they just go around and they just cause mayhem in their galaxies.
They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.
They're just causing mayhem.
We could not be born in that galaxy.
The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over.
We can't be born in that galaxy.
So maybe 99% of galaxies, that's the way it is.
And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.
We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
So I think we call this extragalactic SETI.
So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life, to me, this is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in because those are almost like decoupled from us, right?
Because their history has no impact, really, unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another, but that's really hard.
But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes.
Those test tubes got nothing to do with us, so that gives us a fair chance.
But looking at our own galaxy, it may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us.
Their activity could affect our existence.
And so it's hard to make inferences in that situation.
I was watching a documentary once on hypernovas, and they were talking about during the first discovery of hypernovas, when they were finding these gamma-ray bursts, they thought that there was war going on in the universe.
And they thought that that's what they were observing.
There could have been all sorts of weird stuff happening before modern astronomy was able to get involved.
But yeah, I think the past is incredibly insightful.
But there's mystery.
And if you heard of the Eemian period, you ever heard of this period in the past?
So we live in this Holocene, which is an interglacial period.
And you need the interglacial period for a stable climate, to have farming, agriculture.
You can't live in an ice age, right?
Because otherwise you just can't grow crops.
So about 10,000 years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene.
And then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right?
Not just in one place in the Fertile Crescent, but also in South America.
It seems like there was almost this random coincidence where just civilization started.
And of course, it's most likely because of the climate.
The climate had got to a point where humans could figure out how to manipulate the stable conditions to grow crops and farm animals and things.
But there was another period about 120,000 years ago called the Eemian, which is the last interglacial period.
So modern anatomic humans should have been around then, right?
120,000 years ago.
We were here.
You could have taken one of those babies and put our society and really wouldn't know the difference.
Probably had the same brain power we do.
And yet, as far as we can tell, even though that period lasted for about 15,000 years of an apparently stable climate, civilization didn't begin.
So I find that really fascinating.
There was almost like there was a second opportunity, a previous opportunity for us to get this ball going, and we didn't figure it out that first time around.
Certainly the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted, the oil reserves.
They don't see like plastic everywhere from a previous...
Because we've created so much concrete and plastic that...
Yeah, I've spoken to anthropologists and say there's no way you could miss human...
in a geological sense in the future.
Even if all of our cities had eroded away, the plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature.
You'd see this layer in your rocks.
So it'd be pretty hard to miss us.
And you've heard of the Cerulean hypothesis, this idea there could have been a past civilization, maybe the dinosaurs, for instance, could have had technology and civilization.
Maybe it was before he came up with this idea, but yeah, he has this fun idea called the Cerulean Hypothesis.
It's kind of borrowed from sci-fi, I think, the word Cerulean or Silurian, not sure how to say it.
But yeah, he had this idea that maybe there was someone 50 million years ago on this planet, a civilization.
And over that time scale, a lot of it does, as you correctly say, get eroded.
It's really difficult to put strong limits on them.
But I think at the stage we're at now with the amount of plastic and concrete we've made and also just having stuff on the moon, right?
I mean, there's nothing else.
We've imaged the moon every centimeter of that damn thing and there's no other stuff on the surface because of what we've put there.
So at this point we can be pretty confident there was never a space age civilization in the past, despite the fact there appear to be opportunities, right?
And so maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way.
But then it is spooky that it happened three places.
But also you have to take into consideration it takes a special kind of person to innovate to the point where everything jumps off of this one invention, whether it's the combustion engine, whether it's the transistor, whether, you know, whatever it is, nuclear power, splitting the atom.
It takes a very specific type of intelligence and resources to create this thing that transforms everything.
If no internal combustion engine, no electrons, no electronics, no electricity, that is possible.
So we're all living exactly how people lived just a couple hundred years ago.
So the question is, if you reran the tape, you know, if we could go back and rerun the Holocene over, is the emergence of the Neolithic Revolution, eventually even all the industrial age, is that an inevitable thing that just always happens?
Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter-gatherers?
We're fucked because of the library of Alexandra burning, and there's just not enough records to explain.
But we know that they did that.
And we know that human beings did that.
We know that human beings did that within the last few thousand years.
So that was a totally different direction.
And we're just collectively agreeing that this direction is the way human beings go.
But it's just what we're caught up in right now.
Like there could be a ton of different ways to do this and to seek technological innovation and to seek consistent, constant evolution of technology to the point where you can do that with these giant stones.
And you can point it to true north, south, east, and west.
And you can set it up at, it's like, I don't know how many acres the Great Pyramid of Git is, but there's 2,300,000 stones in that thing.
Yeah, I think it's kind of like no country for old men.
Sometimes it ends and it's just like, damn, I want to know more.
You can't know more.
Your time here is done.
This story goes on without you.
Yeah, I mean, it'd be kind of cool to find out how it ends.
I suspect that it ends with us looking like the Greys.
I think that's what that whole thing is, that bizarre iconography, this bizarre imagery that we have, this iconic creature that is completely non-muscular, has no gender, and has an enormous head.
I think we think we're going in that direction.
I think that's almost like some beacon in the future that's like calling to us in our subconscious.
Like when people have these late-night experiences where they think they're being abducted and they're encountering that, I think it's almost a part of our genetic coding.
Because you know, Adam wrote a book about UFOs recently, Adam Frank.
And he was telling me about this story that when the first UFOs started to be reported, the first flying saucers, like around Roswell in the 50s, that there was a farmer or something that was being interviewed and he saw something.
And a journalist came interviewed him about what he saw and he described something.
And it was not a flying saucer, but the journalist misheard him and wrote down Flying Saucer.
And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers.
But it all happened after it came into print that this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme, had been put out there.
And once the meme's there of the Greys or the Flying Saucers, when you're in those delusional states or whatever it is, you're in some kind of weird perceptional state, it is possible that your brain reaches for something and it reaches it and it finds that meme.
And it's like, that could be that.
That could be that.
That makes sense because that's all it's got for context.
So, yeah, my guess would be it's more of a cultural phenomenon.
But you should chat to a sociologist, a psychologist about that, because I'm sure they'd have a much more informed opinion about what's going on there.
Luckily, I'm logical and it was clear that it was a squirrel, but I was seeing it in dense woods and it was moving through and it was gray and my perception was wrong in terms of distance.
Yeah, there is a phenomenon called gestart reconfiguration that the psychologists talk about.
And I know about this term from Mars and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there.
So there's this phenomena, it's called, there's these laws of gestures reconfiguration.
It's sort of like closure.
Like if you see dots that almost make a circle, your brain will kind of make it a circle in its mind.
Continuation that if you see like dot-dash lines, your brain will see a continuous line almost.
It'll fill in the gaps.
And so the same thing is thought to have happened to this famous astronomer, Percival Lowell, in the late 19th century.
So about, he was this like super rich dude in a Boston area.
He was from a wealthy family of industrialists and he got really into astronomy.
And so he was convinced life was out there.
A, he was wealthy, so had means.
B, he thought life was out there.
There was a quote from his memoir, and it was something like, that life is an, that what we call life is an inevitable detail of cosmic evolution as gravitation itself.
So he just thought like it's just, this always happens.
Life always happens.
And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston ophthalmologist that he had the best eyesight the ophthalmologist had ever seen.
So he had these like three things in his head.
He had, I've got the means, so I can do it.
I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had.
And I, you know, believe that aliens are out there.
So he looked at Mars and he saw these four-inch telescope or something, like a really blurry small telescope.
But he was able to make out these little patterns and he thought there were canal systems because he saw that going up all around the United States at the time.
He even did it for Mars and he saw, this is crazy.
He saw these, he draw a similar kind of picture.
Maybe you can Google it, Jamie.
Percival Lowell Venus.
And you'll get these kind of spokes.
And he saw these maps of Venus that, of course, were wrong.
And they look like the back of an eye.
They look like the blood vessels on the back of an eye.
And so ophthalmologists actually think that's what he was seeing.
So if you go to the left, the next one down, yeah, that one there.
You see that?
So that's the image he drew on the right.
And that's the image of a back of an eye.
And his eyesight, it's thought was so good, he was seeing reflections of light in his own eyeball.
So this is, this is, I think this story is fascinating because it's a real warning shot of if you, if you really believe aliens are out there, like you're convinced about it, every time you see something weird, that's where your brain goes to first.
And I think a lot of astronomers are in that same boat.
And I think that's kind of strange, right?
You'd think the professional people who stare at the sky for a living would probably have the most number to rack up, unless we're all in the construction.
Also, the question is, are we looking at it wrong?
Because if you're dealing with something that's so technologically advanced that it's a million years ahead of us, would it really be still doing that?
Flying around in ships?
Wouldn't it be able to teleport to areas?
Wouldn't it be able to completely hide, be totally invisible?
And for years and years, pilots were reporting this, and nobody believed them.
They were like, this is bullshit.
You're kind of upside down red light.
What the fuck are you talking about?
That's crazy.
And then people started videoing it.
And once they got videos and high-resolution photographs, you have to have like a shutter frame rate of like one over 100,000 seconds or something crazy to capture these things.
And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth.
And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it.
And this is also a thing that you were ridiculed for relentlessly up until I would say, I think the real breaking of the ice was that 2017 New York Times report.
So when the New York Times had it on the cover, Pentagon videos, yeah.
That was probably the first time that people, well, it's in the middle of the day.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually made, to be honest, that's made the kind of stuff we do, the SETI work we do.
So SETI's extraterrestrial intelligence, we've kind of rebranded it these days as techno signatures.
But that used to be the sort of thing that Congress would always ding and be like, you can't do that, dude.
You can't have taxpayer money going to looking for aliens.
That's ridiculous.
But ever since the UFO, the UAP phenomena really caught on, the Overton window has shifted.
And now what we do seems completely, if anything, like too traditional and too, we're too conservative in our approaches compared to what other people want to do.
So you've got Avi who's trying to do Project Galileo, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff.
And I think it's a valid point.
Like if we're, you can't say that looking for aliens on an exoplanet is good science, but looking for aliens in the atmosphere is not science.
Like that, it's still, you can design an experiment to do it.
It's still scientific.
There's no magical reason why once it enters the atmosphere, it suddenly doesn't become science.
So I think that's a good argument why we should do it.
What is your take on all these UAP whistleblowers who talk about crash retrieval programs and all these dark-funded top secret beyond anyone's ability to go look into them?
Because I can't believe maybe some of them are pulling our leg and bullshitting it for the fame or whatever, but there's so many credible people that have come forward.
It's hard.
It's difficult to pass what's going on.
But I do believe everyone's fallible.
So it is possible.
As I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things.
There's so many people, so many cell phones, so much out there that it's not surprising that one in a million times a mistake or something could happen.
And it's all about knowing that spurious rate.
Like, how often do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've got?
And we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is.
So as a scientist, it's hard to make, to pass it.
I don't think we can ingest it realistically unless, you know, every time they say they've got the disclosure thing, right?
We're going to get disclosure soon.
And every time it feels like we don't get the craft, we don't get the technology.
We don't get a body.
So yeah, sure.
If you give me, if you give me the technology and let me dissect in my lab, then I could be convinced.
But every time it seems like it's, we get all the way up to that point where it's like, it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it's going to happen.
What is the name of that disclosure, Age of Disclosure documentary?
That's what it is, right?
There's a documentary that they premiered at Sundance or at South by Southwest rather here that was really good.
And it is essentially just all these different people that worked on these programs spilling the beans.
And they all have pretty similar stories.
And the bottleneck seems to be that all this stuff was done without congressional approval, which is highly illegal.
So all the research, all this hidden back engineering programs, all this stuff in conjunction also with military contractors.
So those are the ones that build the jets and the rockets.
And so you have to go to them to help with this stuff and to try to back engineer this stuff.
So then there's this competitive advantage they would have over other military contractors that don't get a crashed UFO.
And so then people are getting sued.
People are going to jail.
There's a lot of money that was allocated for these things that was done through lies.
And there's a lot of problems with that.
And with this documentary, it's essentially calling for mass amnesty and saying, look, if this is real, and they think it is, this is a situation that is forget about whatever laws we have in terms of finance.
This is a much bigger deal.
There is direct evidence of an actual life form that is not Homo sapiens, that can do things that we can't do, that visits us.
And occasionally, they lose a craft, which is also hard to believe, right?
Richard Dolan actually has a pretty good explanation for some of them.
And it's high altitude nuclear bombs that we detonated during the testing days.
So during the testing days, after the war, from 45 to, I think, they tested them.
I think, when did they stop blowing up nukes?
But there was just in the United States, thousands of nuclear detonations.
And a bunch of them they did in the ocean, and a bunch of them they did in the sky.
They did them like 150 miles up.
They detonated nukes.
I thought they only did it once with Starfish Prime.
But no, they did it at different altitudes.
They just tried things.
And the idea is that if there was something in the sky anywhere remotely near that and had no idea this was going to go off and they detonate a nuke in the sky, that this thing would crash.
My general belief is that a large number of these things that we're seeing are top secret military aircrafts.
And I think that's always existed.
That's always been the case.
And they probably have some incredible technology that we're not aware of.
That's the majority of what I think is happening.
But that doesn't make sense when you go really far back.
That doesn't make sense when you go to the Kenneth Arnold sightings.
Like if his estimations of the speed of those things is accurate, you're dealing with something that for sure wasn't available in 1952, at least as far as we know.
Also, the idea that that was Nazi technology, this is something that's always talked about.
And Richard Dolan talked about in his book as well.
They were already gone.
They had lost the war.
There's no way they're launching technology that's above and beyond anything anybody is aware of while their society's in shambles.
There's no way.
They don't have a military anymore.
It's over.
The war's over.
So that doesn't make sense.
So if it's not them, who is it?
Is it someone that's already here?
Is it something that's been here the entire time?
And then that gets really weird.
And people go, well, where's the evidence of that?
Well, right, there's no evidence of that.
But there's also so much room in the ocean.
The ocean is, if I was going to hide, that's where I would hide.
We literally can't go there.
There's too much of it.
You could go into the ocean and put a base underground in the middle of the ocean, and 100% we're not going to find it.
Until something, yeah, but this is the most frustrating thing about this disclosure, Jazz.
Because if they really do have something, boy, you're fucking over the entire human race by not releasing this just because you're worried about Congress getting mad at you.
Like that's a real problem.
That's a real problem.
That's what this movie tries to address.
And Richard Dolan talks about that in his book as well.
And a bunch of people have brought up that point.
There's a lot of legal issues that are going to arise.
And a lot of people could be very vulnerable if this does turn out to be the case, that they have had this technology since the 1940s.
I mean, we can argue about history, but I think the most constructive thing is just to design an experiment.
And I think, you know, Abby's idea, Project Galileo, is a good one.
Like, we should try and survey the sky more systematically.
And we've got now the Vera Rubin telescope, which is doing literally a movie of the entire sky every night.
So I think as we grow in our capabilities, it's going to get harder and harder for this UAP hypothesis to evade all of these facilities that we're building in a public domain.
This is public data, not military-controlled facilities.
But then you're starting to get into the sort of exponentially contrived because they're in our heads and they know everything.
So then it becomes unfalsifiable.
So we're sort of leaving the world of science.
But I think when we think about as a scientist, like we're doing this experiment with JWST for exoplanets, like we are looking for life right now with James Webb.
There was even a claim for a planet K218B.
There was a claim a few months ago.
It's an ocean world.
It's thought to be an ocean world.
It's about two and a half times the size of the Earth.
And we detected this molecule with weak significance.
I want to emphasize that.
It was only weakly detected called dimethyl sulfide.
And that's, I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have.
And it's something that bacteria and phytoplankton make on the Earth.
So they detected the hint of this molecule.
And as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the Earth.
We don't have any other process that can make it except for living creatures.
And so it was a lot of excitement about that.
And it turned out in that case, with follow-up observations, it maybe is not as secure as they thought.
And it actually doesn't appear to be there anymore.
But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment.
It is sensitive enough to look at a planet which is 100 light years away and detect the molecular signatures of living creatures on that planet.
So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets.
We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore.
We can actually start surveying where they're at and seeing what's up.
So I think that's going to, and that's just simple life, of course.
That's not even technological life.
So I think we're going to get answers.
And the only way to do this is to keep supporting missions like NASA's mission with these future observatories that are trying to get us to that point.
We're trying to build a mission now called the Habital Worlds Observatory, HWO.
It'll probably get renamed at some point.
I think it'll be like the Carl Sagan Observatory probably would be a rebranding for it, is my hunch.
And that thing's trying to take photos.
Like we saw with Alpha Centauri, it's trying to do photos, but of Earth-sized planets.
JWST can't image Earth-sized planets, they're too small.
This thing will be able to take photos of Earths around other stars.
And it will see the pale blue dot of light of that other world, and we'll get its chemical fingerprint.
We'll be able to sniff its atmosphere.
We'll pull their pants down, right?
We'll get the whole thing.
So the aliens can't hide from us forever, right?
Our technology is getting to the point where we're going to find them in their own home.
Yeah, I think, as I said earlier, whenever we improve our instrumentation, our precision, by a factor of anywhere from three up to 10, let's say, in that ballpark, like a big improvement, you get surprises.
You find stuff you never expected in the universe.
Yeah, I think whenever you listen to the universe in a different way.
So we were, you know, for years and years, we've just been using our eyes, basically optical light to look at the universe and x-rays and radio waves.
And then recently we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.
So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it.
And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes.
And it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form.
So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us.
So it's not going to be a single mission.
It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Hapital Worlds Observatory.
We need to have this multi-pronged attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of the sensitivity and making sure the scientists actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right?
You can't do science unless the data is A, public and then B, people actually there to study it.
Yeah, I mean, it's only six and a half meters, so it's limited.
They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it.
So actually, Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding.
It wouldn't have 200 points of failure.
It could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship.
And even better, it would cost less because a huge cost in these space telescopes is making them really light.
So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light so they're low cost to launch.
But if you have a Starship, it can launch like 100 tons, I think it is.
You could literally just take these ground-based telescopes you already have and just shove them in there and obviously put some chassis on it, but you could it'd be way way cheaper to launch these things.
So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch capabilities that Starship give us.
That plus investment in something like these kind of giant telescope designs, we could launch some truly gargantuan things into space and probe those atmospheres and see those aliens and what they're up to.
So, yeah, I would say the future can be bright because we have the means to do it if we have the will to do it.
Yeah, I mean, I think that would be great for you.
I also think they should have a mushroom experience.
But that's just me.
But going into space, just, I mean, just being able to see it, used to be the norm for human beings.
There was no light pollution.
You could get away from the campfire, you lay on your back, and you see everything.
And I think that gave us a better understanding.
First of all, it made us more humble, for sure.
You're confronted with this impossible image in front of you.
And now that we know what that is, so ancient man's looking at it, it's just incredible, beautiful lights, and they're tracking the constellations and marking them down.
And this is what this is.
Let's call this one Leo.
But when you get to what we know now, and when we know those are all fireballs in the sky that are bigger than our sun, and they're millions of miles away, and that you're seeing just a tiny fraction of what the actual universe is, which is really nuts.
When you see, like, I'm sure you've seen this, but maybe people haven't.
When there's an image of what you see in the night sky, when you have a full clear view of the cosmos, and it's this tiny bitty little thing.
And yet it's still insane and majestic.
And I think that we've gotten so arrogant because of cities, because everybody just sees this black cloud over us, this curtain over the sky.
And maybe you see the moon, but that's it.
You see a dot here or a dot there.
That's the only stars you see.
Are the most bright ones are Venus?
And then you don't get a sense of what we're really doing.
Yeah, it makes me sad when here's the inner city sky, suburban, urban, rural, excellent, dark sky.
But then what the thing about the observatory is that it's above the clouds.
And when you see something like that, you realize that there's more to this life than just substance, of just staying alive for the sake of staying alive.
There are grander things than what we have on this planet.
Also, it's so frustrating that we're very capable of curing all those problems for the vast majority of people on this planet if we weren't so fucking greedy.
If we really treated humanity like a community, we could completely eliminate starvation and poverty the way it exists today.
If we really directed our resources in a kind, moral, and ethical way, we would solve that first and then get everybody excited about solving the cosmos.
It's also gross that humans can control resources.
I mean, think about all the problems that they have on Earth that are directly a result of someone wanting to control natural resources that really should be everybody's.
If we're really smart about it, we look at the oil is clearly everybody's.
The water is clearly everybody's.
We should all agree that all the stuff that we need should be everybody's.
Yeah.
It's like to charge you for air would be wild, right?
But you could charge you for water.
They could charge you for oil.
It's kind of crazy.
It's kind of crazy that we have allowed that system to be in place where an individual can literally be in control of the blood of the earth that we use to make plastic and electronics.
And that's kind of the cool part of this whole, the weirdness of this experience that we're going through is that it's not guaranteed and that there's a bunch of struggle that really has to take place.
There's a lot of thinking that has to take place, a lot of talking and understanding and a recognition that some of our behavior is totally illogical.
A lot of it totally counterproductive, but like why?
Like why are we still behaving like territorial apes?
Like what is it, even though you're not and I'm not, Jamie's not, like a lot of people aren't.
You know, it's not everything.
It's not every interaction that humans have.
But it's enough that it's still pushing the worst aspects of our life, which is war and poverty and crime and violence.
But I mean, it's hard because, you know, you became like the top podcast because there's competition and that competition probably drove you to make the podcast better and better and better.
And similarly as a scientist, we're in competition with each other.
So there's almost a catalyst system embedded into science that I want to not like crush my enemy or something.
I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have, I know what the level field is.
And if you want to stand out, you have to, you know, bat above that level.
And so that drives me to become, I'm definitely influenced by competition.
Yeah, turn it into enthusiasm and turn it into inspiration instead of just be overcome with jealousy and rage, which is what happens to the weaker of minds.
Yeah.
You know, interesting enough with this podcast, I don't think of it in a competitive way at all.
And I never have.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's successful is because this podcast, even though it might be the number one podcast, it's cooperative with I don't know how many podcasts.
A giant number of my friends do podcasts.
I promote their podcasts.
I have them on.
I'll do their podcast sometimes.
Like we all promote each other.
So it's a community.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know how other people do it, but I don't do it that way.
I think only about what I want to do.
And I think the only way to have all of your resources, all of your concentration and all of your efforts put entirely into the subject matter and what the conversation is going to be like, you shouldn't be thinking about anything else.
Shouldn't be thinking about results.
I just think about process.
That's all I think about.
All I think about is like, okay, he's going to come in.
What are my questions?
What are we going to talk about?
And I'm excited about this.
I'll listen.
I'll drive my car.
I'll listen to the sauna to things.
And I just really get worked up about it.
But I don't do it for competition.
I do it because I think I'm super lucky to be able to do it.
And I think it would be a horrible misuse of that fortune if I didn't treat it with respect, if I didn't do my best every time I do it.
It seems like it would be because that's the thing I'm the most successful in, which is kind of weird.
It's I'm competitive in everything, but I'm very competitive with myself.
I'm very self-critical, which is one of the things that I learned from martial arts is if you don't have an accurate assessment of your abilities and you think you're better than you really are, if you can't see someone do something, oh, that guy's better than me, then you're missing out because you're also missing out on the opportunity for you personally to get better.
If you're delusional and you think you're better than you are, maybe you won't work as hard or maybe you won't correct some of the errors in your technique and maybe your approach and your tactics.
You have to constantly being proving this thing.
And you have to have people that are better than you that you train with all the time.
So that sort of cooperative thing that came out of martial arts where you need killers to become a killer, that helped me so much in comedy because my approach to comedy was different than most of the other comedians that had television deals and movie deals.
They all wanted to be the man and they wanted to be at the top and kind of keep everybody else down.
There was a lot of that going on.
There's a few people that were cooperative, but I was ultra cooperative.
Like I would prop people up.
I want them to get better.
I'll tell them how to get better.
I'd help them.
I'd help young guys.
I'd go on the road with people funnier than me.
Like I wanted it because I know from martial arts, this is the only way.
You don't get comfortable and get better.
You got to be like really uncomfortable a lot of the time to get better.
But that getting better is the ultimate.
That's what the goal is for everyone.
And it can't just be for you.
If you have this short-sighted idea, like I have to be the king, like, no, you're missing out on the whole thing.
Yeah, he's gets to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down.
And there's that need to be singularly recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me.
But there's a, you know, the scientists I think we all admire and get on with the best, actually the ones who are collaborative, who like comedy, like share and want to do it together.
So I think there's a lot to, sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more, I think.
When I was a student, there used to be this thing called Fame Lab, and they used to get stand-up comedians to come in and teach scientists how to talk to the public, how to do scientific communication.
And they said it's the same.
I don't know, maybe you disagree.
It's the same kind of thing.
You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation.
And then there's so many people that call themselves science educators that don't really know what they're talking about and they're talking about science.
And these are the people that are like the figureheads.
Unfortunately, instead of the actual people that are doing the science.
Yeah, it's a skill.
I mean, it's a skill that anyone can learn.
If you can talk to a friend, you can talk to the public.
You just have to learn how to do it and you have to get better at it.
It's not impossible.
And yeah, you're going to have anxiety, but that's a challenge that you should just embrace that challenge and get over it and just have notes and be prepared and practice.
Just like everything else.
Like if you're intelligent enough to be a cosmologist, you're intelligent enough to talk publicly in front of a bunch of people about cosmology.
And you also have a certain amount of enthusiasm that you're going to have to figure out the right way to convey it to people to make it infectious.
And that's where it gets complicated.
Because some people are brilliant, but they're bland and flat.
And, you know, I'm sure you've had professors like that, right?
No, I think there's, you know, you can't teach someone to be Dave Chappelle, but you can teach them to be a better version of who they are, for sure.
And then extroverts are extroverts and introverts are introverts.
And it's just like, it's just, you know, you're not going to be the same person as Jim Carrey.
You know, you have to be that guy to be that guy.
But you can learn how to better express yourself.
And you can learn there's techniques.
There's an understanding of how the human mind that's interpreting, that's interpreting what you're saying.
How are they perceiving this?
Are they perceiving your emotions?
Are they feeling?
Maybe there's an anecdotal story that you can bring out with passion that connects these people to you so they can understand what made you so locked into this idea.
And then they'll go, oh, and then they feel it.
Instead of just blandly reciting facts and just doing it because this is the way you do it with your coworkers and your peers.
That's just like not, it doesn't jive with me that much.
But I put it on.
And then I was doing this for a while.
And we just kind of flatlined in subscribers after a while.
And I was like, I think I'm going to pat this in.
But before I do, I'll just make one or two videos the way I really want to do it.
And then I'll stop.
And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally.
And you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your, you know, I'm a romantic.
So I wanted that romantic element of astronomy to come out.
You know, why am I so passionate about the stars?
What are the deep questions that move me since I was a kid?
Those, you have to let that personality come out.
And once that, once people realize why you personally are so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious.
And then they start to get the same bug.
So yeah, I learned as a communicator that certainly being willing to be vulnerable, it feels very strange as a scientist to talk about vulnerability and emotional connection.
Well, and then the beautiful thing about YouTube and putting out your own content is you can figure that out on your own.
You don't have to get molded by executives and some show business type people that are going to turn you into a version they think is going to be most marketable.
You can figure and people will probably tell, they would probably tell you to do it differently.
They'd probably tell you to, you got to have more energy, David.
Yeah, and this is the beautiful thing about this time that we live in, that people can just start a YouTube channel and just talk about things that you're fascinated by and things that you're knowledgeable about.
As long as you can keep your shit together, because the interaction with that amount of human beings is also very problematic for young people.
Because just social media, you know, we talked about this the other day, that Jonathan Haight's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, that shows self-harms, particularly among girls, the suicidal ideation, all the different things that happen to them.
Anxiety and depression all rises with the invention of social media.
That's times a hundred when you're putting out content.
And then especially if you're reading that, the comment section and reading Reddit threads and reading your emails that you're going to deal with so much hate and so much anger and so many frustrated, sick, mentally ill people that are reaching out, trying to destroy your life for no fucking reason whatsoever.
And if you, you know, you're a young person and you don't know how to like put this into a rational career.
Yeah, you're not equipped for it.
No one is equipped for it.
It's not normal.
It's not a normal type of interaction to have that many people commenting on you and your life.
And so that can fuck kids up, especially if they're really young and they get into that and that's like how they develop as an adult with that kind of attention.
I can't imagine how I would have got through life if I had Twitter at my fingertips or Facebook or whatever it was growing up because that just adds the whole new stress.
And there's, you know, you hear these stories of kids at school where, you know, the boys like saying to their girlfriends, like, oh, you need to send me photos of you.
And then they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke.
And there's all this kind of weird, right?
Fucked up bullying going on.
And we didn't have to deal with any of that shit growing up.
Like it's so much simpler.
I mean, and my son was saying to me, oh, I'm friends with this other kid at camp because he's got 100 subscribers.
And that's become a thing, right?
Like how many subscribers or followers you have sort of forms like a popularity rank in even real world settings.
And it's messed up.
There's so much pressure on the kids in a way we never experienced.
And, you know, the more cognitive burden you have like that, the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and discovering what you want to do in your life.
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