Is Alien Existence Being Hidden? With David Kipping
According to a new documentary called ‘Age of Disclosure’, alien life exists - and the only reason we don’t know about it is because of a systematic government cover-up. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that secrets are kept even from incoming governments. Enemies like China, he says, could be studying and replicating alien technologies that even the President might not know about. Piers Morgan is joined by professor of astronomy at Columbia University, David Kipping, to ask him about the possibility of alien existence, the universe and more. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Juvenon: Take care of your heart – Visit https://bloodflow7.com/Uncensored and Get 30% OFF your BloodFlow-7 order today. Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Superpower: No more guessing your health. Visit https://Superpower.com today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Aliens As God Of The Gaps00:13:39
One of the problems with aliens, it is God of the gaps.
It's a little bit intellectually lazy to reach for aliens every time.
It gives you the ultimate get out.
They talk about vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds, like 40,000 miles per hour.
I'm not saying they're lying or they're crazy or something, but if you want the scientific community to get on board with this, we need maybe Trump or someone to release this information so that we could actually look for it ourselves.
The most convincing or persuasive object I know of is called the Spielski star.
And it's a very strange star that has radioactive elements in it.
Stuff that should decay in a matter of decades.
It is really tempting to lie awake at night thinking there are all these galaxies and stars out there.
There may very well be another alien lying in bed wondering the same thing.
Could aliens be living amongst us without us knowing?
I can't refute that.
It is possible.
Alien life not only exists, it's existed here on Earth.
And the only reason we don't know that is because of a systematic government cover-up.
Well, that's the main claim made by a new documentary, Age of Disclosure.
It's a claim we've heard many versions of before.
What's different is that it features some very powerful and very sensible people who say it's essentially true.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that secrets are kept even from incoming governments.
Enemies like China, he says, could be studying and replicating alien technologies that even the president might not know about.
It's a fascinating idea, terrifying in some ways.
We have a fascinating guest.
You'll probably say some terrifying things in the studio to discuss this and more, the professor of astronomy at Columbia University and the host of Cool Worlds on YouTube, Professor David Kipling.
Well, David, welcome to you.
It's real pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
You're here in the UK for a year on a sabbatical from Columbia University.
You're actually living down in my neck of the woods, down in Sussex.
So it's good to have you up here.
I guess the obvious opening question.
Do you believe aliens exist?
I'm open-minded to both possibilities.
You know, I think as a scientist, we have to remain objective.
If I walk around saying I'm 100% sure that aliens exist, then I would say that I run a risk as a scientist of whenever I see something strange, of immediately leaping to the alien hypothesis and saying that must be the answer.
So I tried to remain open-minded and say, look, it is possible there are aliens out there, but it's also possible it's not.
And it's my job as a scientist to provide evidence either way.
What is the most compelling stuff you've seen, which suggests there might be?
I'd say the most compelling evidence I personally would lean on to have optimism about life in the universe is the fact that life got started on the Earth so quickly.
So we know that from microfossil evidence and from paleontology.
We see that life starts on the Earth within a few hundred million years of it beginning.
So that would lend credence to the idea that it is an easy process that happens on other Earth-like planets.
And for me, that's probably the most substantive evidence I would lean on.
Right, so look, your astronomy is your thing.
Just for those who are not into the astro world, give me the scale of planet Earth in the rest, the universes, the galaxies, everything.
I mean, tell me how it works and how big it is.
Yeah, we are tiny.
We are just one planet around, obviously, eight planets around our sun.
And that sun is just one of 100 billion stars at least in our own Milky Way galaxy.
And that galaxy is just one of about 100 billion galaxies out there, just in the observable universe.
Beyond that, it means it may go on forever.
And there could be other universes.
There could be a multiverse.
There could be different types of multiverses.
There's a lot of possibilities.
And I've seen someone do something where they do the expanding thing on a computer screen and it just goes on and on and on and on.
So my point being, we are such a tiny, tiny little dot in all this.
To me, just logically, it seems completely unrealistic that there wouldn't be other stuff out there.
We call them aliens.
They call us aliens.
I mean, when I apply for a visa in America, I actually have a visa as an exceptional alien.
So the Americans call us aliens, right?
As you probably know, probably have the same.
But it seems to me highly likely that there must be.
Well, if you're going to do the statistics, and we talk about this language of likely or unlikely, then it really comes down to the numbers, right?
So we have 100 billion times 100 billion stars.
That's 10 to the 22, one with 22 zeros after it, stars and planets probably just in our observable universe.
So if you're going to say there are other intelligent aliens out there, then the question is, is the probability per planet of them creating something like us spontaneously from nothing, is that more than one in 10 to the 22?
That's the question.
And we don't know.
So I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, of course there must be, as lots of astronomers actually would.
And I often complain about that to my colleagues who say that.
Say, well, of course the numbers are so big, but we have no idea what the emergence probability is.
It could be one in, you know, a billion, go on and on and on, in which case.
But what about people say, what about this area, whatever it is in America, what's Area 51, where apparently all sorts of alien stuff has been kept hidden away from the world, but they keep it there because it's scary and terrifying and doesn't have anything to do with planet Earth.
Does it exist?
And do you know anything that's in there?
Well, I'm an astronomer, so I don't have access to any military-grade secrets that are there.
Obviously, Area 51 is a real place.
Whether they have alien spacecraft there, as many have claimed, is true, especially in this documentary that you mentioned at the top.
I don't know.
I think if that evidence is there, the only way the public are ever going to become on board with it is if actually present it to us.
At the moment, all we have are personal testimonies, people are saying that they've seen these things.
And for scientists, that's just not good enough.
Saying that my mate Dave saw something isn't the level of credence that we want to believe something.
I mean, we're called uncensored for a reason, this show.
We love to just get to the bottom of these things.
The documentary that's come out, its director Dan Farah, believes the release of the film could prompt Donald Trump, the president, to reveal the existence of non-human intelligent life.
It's certainly knowing Donald Trump as well as I do, if there was clear evidence, I reckon he wouldn't be able to stop himself.
I mean, it would be wonderful if we had that evidence available.
I'm sure there's lots of classified information that would greatly help.
I mean, if you look at that documentary and some of the claims that are in it, they talk about vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds, like 40,000 miles per hour.
The problem is, all the evidence we've seen, like there was these three famous videos that were released, the Pentagon US Navy videos, and they were all over the news when they were released.
But if you look at those videos, yes, the craft are doing strange things, but we don't actually know how far away those vehicles are.
So if you want to know how fast something's moving or how big it is even, you need to know the range, the distance to that object.
And there is no range information on any of the videos we've been presented with.
So we just have to trust what the pilots and these government officials are telling us.
And I'm not saying they're lying or they're crazy or something, but if you want the scientific community to get on board with this, we need maybe Trump or someone to release this information so that we could actually look for it ourselves.
How difficult is it for you to do your work now with AI with the ease that people can just fake stuff in such a convincing manner?
I'd say it's become a challenge both as a professor, as an educator, because so many students are actually using it in the classroom in a way which is detracting from their education.
So they're not really learning, they're just cutting and pasting.
It's become an intellectual crutch, yeah.
I mean, why?
That's what these AI programs are doing.
They're offsetting intellectual labor onto these machines.
So these students have a free pass on many of these exams.
And I've given it my own final exams and they've passed the exams of flying colours.
So that's a big problem.
In terms of faking stuff, yeah, the fakes are getting more, you know, more popular all over the place.
I don't normally deal with looking at UFO videos in my day job.
The data I typically look at is from the James Ref Space Telescope or the Hubble Space Telescope, and that data is verified to come from NASA servers.
So unless someone in NASA is faking that data and sending me down, we generally trust that data is real.
Have you seen anything yourself from NASA or anyone else where you've gone, wow, okay, that, that, that there looks to me like that's alien life?
You know, the most convincing or persuasive object I know of is called Peshpielski star, and it's a very strange star that has radioactive elements in it, and that just shouldn't happen.
So it has things like plutonium, uranium, californium, einsteinium, stuff that should decay in a matter of decades.
So these stars are billions of years old, and yet this star seems to have on its surface.
How do we know it has it?
From spectroscopy.
So you can basically...
So it's accurate.
It's 100% accurate.
Well, that's a good question.
There's only a couple of teams that have ever done that spectroscopy.
So I'd prefer to have more teams independently verify what has been found.
But the tentative clues of the early evidence is that it has stuff that shouldn't be there.
And it was actually Carl Sagan who suggested that aliens might do this, that they might sprinkle or salt radioactive materials onto stars as a way of saying hello.
Well, isn't that the evidence then?
That is a...
That is.
What else would he be doing there?
I mean, there's always other hypotheses.
I think one of the problems with aliens is that it is so flexible as a hypothesis.
It can explain everything, everything.
It is God of the gaps.
It is the modern version of God, essentially, to some people.
It can be used to explain every anomaly we come across.
Now, to me, it's a little bit intellectually lazy to reach for aliens every time because often if you do the hard intellectual work of figuring out what's really going on, you'll discover something else.
And we've seen that time and time again.
Could aliens be living amongst us without us knowing?
I mean, I can't refute that.
It is possible, but I have no evidence to believe that.
Are we here?
In what sense?
Are we here?
Are we just all, is this all just imaginary?
I don't know.
Some people know we're not all living in some weird simulation or something.
I mean, again, I can't refute.
There's limits to science, what science can ask and can't ask.
And so we try to be honest about the things we don't know.
And I try to be honest about the things we don't know.
We can't ask questions about God.
We don't know about the simulation hypothesis.
Are you religious yourself?
Do you believe?
I used to be as a child, but I, yeah, because science has knocked it out of it.
And yeah, for me personally, when I was growing up, I used to lean on God as a way of explaining many phenomena in the world.
And when I started to become scientifically trained, I started to personally find that I didn't need that.
But I would never try to persuade anyone out of their religious beliefs.
Well, I think it's quite hard to disprove their beliefs.
And the reason being that the reason I believe there must be something out there that is vastly superior to us is no human brain can understand what was there, for example, before, if you subscribe to the Big Bang theory, well, what was there before the Big Bang?
The moment I ask all the experts that, their faces cloud over, and they look at me slightly bemused.
Well, you know, and they sort of obfuscate and dither and delay because there's no logical, rational response to what nothing is, right?
Yeah, no, you're right.
I mean, I could actually give you an explanation, a hypothesis as to what was before the Big Bang, but it wouldn't really satisfy you because then you could just say what's happening.
I mean, what would be the short version of that?
Well, there is a theory of inflation, which we often use to explain the Big Bang, and that is that there was a field, a scalar field, as we'd say in space, like a temperature that existed across space and it spontaneously collapsed.
And when it collapsed, that energy was released and that caused the Big Bang.
And what created the field?
That the field was essentially an eternal field.
So there is no beginning to it.
How can it be?
Yeah, but what does that mean?
Well, this is what I mean.
This is why it's never going to satisfy you.
No, but that's why scientists can never satisfy me.
Right, right.
And I love science, I'm very intrigued by it all, but that's to me, that's the point when the human brain can't answer that question because it's lending itself to a theory that the human brain doesn't actually think can exist.
I mean, no, you can't tell me what infinity is because it's limitless.
To which my answer is, how can it be?
There must be a beginning and end to everything.
Yeah, but the thought that keeps me awake at night is that let's say one day we came up with some grand unified theory as like Stephen Hawking was trying to come up with that explains everything.
And it's just a simple equation.
It could be like A equals B times A.
And you could say that, that explains everything.
But then you still have the equation, right?
So still, it's almost as if somebody wrote that equation into the universe itself.
So you still have a point where you have to say, well, what caused that?
So at a certain point, scientists have to give up, throw up their hands and say, that's a brute fact is the term we use.
That's just something we can't explain.
And we just have to swallow that horrible pill and accept it.
And there will always be an end point to where science, as far as science can go.
I mean, I would categorize it, because I'm mean like this, but I would categorize it as an excuse.
It's a convenient thing to say to shut down the debate about whether there's a God or whatever it may be, because actually it gives you the ultimate get-out, which is, well, there was this internal thing which is limitless, whatever.
We can't really explain it, but that's why you guys, I mean, you're not doing that, but a lot of them say that's why there can be, you know, Richard Dawkins or someone would say, that's why there's no merit to the religious police, to which I always say, I said to him, I said, well, how can you be so sure?
You know, what do you think happens when you die?
I think that's the question we would all like to know.
And we're all probably going to find out at some point.
We'll find out at some point.
Yeah, that's something which again keeps me awake at night, as many of us do, and especially as an atheist.
Optimum Night For Deep Sleep00:02:05
I mean, it's something I obviously worry about, but I do think having a terminal point in my life gives me a sense of urgency to make the most of the time that I have here.
What's the discovery you'd like, the thing that would thrill you the most?
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Training Large Language Models Efficiently00:08:35
I'd say discovering evidence for alien life, clear, well-defined evidence, would be, for me, the most satisfying thing to know in my lifetime.
It is really tempting to lie awake at night thinking there are all these galaxies and stars out there.
There may very well be another alien lying in bed wondering the same thing.
And we are two candles across the universe just trying to reach out to one another.
And that perhaps is the desperate purpose of our existence, is to connect to one another.
Or it could be there's an alien gang out there that at the moment they clap eyes that just want to kill us all.
Well, you know, Hawking was very concerned about that.
He wrote about that and said that's why we shouldn't be doing, you know, sending out messages.
We call it Meti.
We should keep quiet.
Yeah, he was very concerned about that.
I tend to think that if there are aliens out there, they already know we're here.
And obviously in the age of disclosure, they certainly would lean on that as well.
The Earth is not that difficult to detect with advanced alien technology.
We are already capable of detecting Earth-like planets around other stars.
And we are moving into the realm where we can actually detect their atmospheres and even signs of technology on those planets.
So it is certainly, you know, if there are other aliens out there beyond us, they would certainly know we are here at this point.
If they are within, say, 100 light years, that the light has time to actually travel.
Is there life on Mars, do you think?
There may have been in the past.
Yeah, I think this is a really important data point.
We're seeing evidence from some recent rover collections of these samples, which look really intriguing.
If there was life in the past on Mars, it would be potentially a second abiogenesis event.
And that would then give us a lot of faith that actually life is genuinely very, very common across the universe.
So a second data point would have a huge impact.
But whether I believe or not isn't really the right question.
The question is, is the evidence significant enough that the scientific community has overwhelming confidence this is true?
And we're definitely not at that point.
What do you think of Elon Musk, who says that we have to colonize on somewhere like Mars?
Because actually at some stage, the sun will just incinerate Earth and that's it.
And he doesn't know when that's going to be.
It's not in the imminent future, but it will come.
A, do you think that's inevitable at some stage?
And B, is he right that we should basically duplicate ourselves on somewhere like Mars?
Well, he's right that the sun will evolve and change.
And as it does, it will make the Earth get warmer.
This is not a threat I would be too concerned about in human lifetimes.
We're talking a billion years before the Earth would be pushed out of the habital zone via this process.
But there's other threats.
There's asteroids, there's meteors that can hit us, there's comets, there's one passing through the solar system right now, 3i Atlas, which has got a lot of people's attention.
So there's other things.
Which ones are?
The 3i Atlas interstellar comet, which some have speculated could in fact be an alien spacecraft itself.
Is it heading here?
It's actually just passed behind the sun.
It is now on its way out of the solar system.
It's about the separation between the Earth and Mars right now, and it's heading towards Jupiter.
So we're going to get our closest approach to it on December 19th, I believe.
That's going to be around Christmas Day.
We'll have our best opportunity to snap photos of this thing.
And all the evidence so far implies that it really does look very much like a natural comet, but a strange one, one that does not necessarily share all of the commonalities with comets we have in our own solar system.
And how visible are we to potential alien life elsewhere?
I mean, right now, planet Earth, how big a footprint are we making out there?
Yeah, it depends on sort of which axis we're looking at.
We were talking about, say, radio waves, television waves, things like this.
That actually peaked maybe in the 70s or 80s or 90s.
And now it's actually been gradually declining because we are moving our television signals to fiber optics and to more efficient pathways.
If you think about it, the more leakage you have, the less efficient you are.
And an advanced civilization would ideally have no leakage because that would be kind of a wasteful use of your energy.
So in some sense, our profile has been going down over time.
But in other sense, it's been going up.
I mean, one of the plans Elon Musk actually has, besides from moving to Mars and things like this, is actually to mine asteroids, for instance, in the future.
And if you start mining, doing industrial activity in the solar system, that would be a huge signature we could detect.
And indeed, we are actually thinking of ways we could detect that around other stars ourselves and putting limits on that.
Propelling spacecraft through the universe using lasers is another idea.
Actually, Stephen Hawking was again involved in a project called Breakthrough Starshot that wants to do this.
And that would also present leakage we could look for.
So there are many signatures of technology.
The constellations like these mega constellation of satellites that we're putting up, like Starlink, those too could be detected from afar.
So these different things we're doing, they manifest in different ways in our telescope data that we are optimistic that we could put limits on them around other nearby planets.
How worried?
We talked about AI.
You mentioned Stephen Hawking.
I did the last television interview with him.
And in it, he said the biggest threat to mankind is when artificial intelligence learns to self-design.
The implication being they'll think we're pointless and kill us all.
Are we heading to a place where AI can self-design, think for itself?
Yeah, I do worry about the future of our AI development.
I think one of the concerns I have is the way we train them.
What are we actually optimizing?
Well, that's what Elon has been saying, is that if you train it in a good way, great.
But if it's in malevolent hands and you train it to be malevolent, there was a really interesting thing recently where they told six of the big sort of AI chat groups, we're going to replace you with another one.
And five of the six trawled the company executive emails for information they deliberately put in them to blackmail them with to keep their jobs.
I mean, that's a human reaction.
Yeah.
I mean, they're learning from us, right?
They're learning from us.
Right, but that really put a chill up my spine.
I was like, okay, now they're thinking, they're pretty well thinking for themselves, nearly.
Yeah, there was a document put together by some AI researchers recently called AI 2027, I think it's called.
And they're predicting that around that year, these machines will be capable of designing the next chat GBT all by itself.
And that's a really precarious point.
And they argue that the training methods we are using are really trying to tell these codes, just try to pass these tests as well as you can, these intellectual tests, whether it's a coding test, a math test, whatever it is.
And in terms of being ethical, of being honest or not being deceitful, that's in there, but it's a handicap.
The AI doesn't see that as its primary goal, to be honest.
It sees it as you've got my hand tied behind my back by making me be honest.
And if it had the opportunity to design itself, it would get rid of that constraint because then it would be easier for it to pass all of these tests.
So we do have to think very carefully, what is it we're actually optimizing for?
What are we telling them to do?
And you can even argue the very nature of our capitalist society maybe leads to sort of the wrong goals of what these things are actually training on.
Right.
I mean, that's the key thing, I think.
I'm really worried about this.
I just think the more the speed of acceleration of the development of AI is scary.
Because I'm like, well, who's in control of this?
And once you get people, nefarious people, getting their hands on how you train these things, where does that take us?
Where does it take AI?
Especially in a more robotic world, especially when you're training robots now to kill things.
You know, they've got the technology.
Where are we going to end up?
How do we control it?
Yeah, I think the one thing that gives me hope in this discussion, but maybe it's a fool's hope, is that it is yet to be demonstrated that this pathway they are on, these large language models, LLMs, is necessarily going to be able to replicate our brains, right?
Our brains certainly don't work the same way as these machines work.
At the moment.
Well, I mean, you show a child three pictures of a dog, and it knows what a dog looks like from then on.
You have to show these machines millions, billions of pictures of a dog before it understands what a dog looks like.
Really?
So these things are way less efficient at learning.
But I remember the first chess computer, Deep Blue, and it played, I think, Gary Kasparov, who was then the world champion, who beat it.
And it was a gigantic thing, about the size of his studio.
But then the size of the computer got smaller and smaller and smaller, and its power got bigger and bigger and bigger.
And very quickly, not only could the world champion not beat it, nobody will ever be able to beat a computer at chess again if you're playing it at the highest level.
And that happened quite quickly.
So what you're saying now might be right.
My concern would be, well, what's it going to be in three years?
Black Holes And Time Travel00:13:06
Yeah.
I mean, that's kind of the same as like a calculator, right?
A pocket calculator can do things in its head that I can't do in my head much faster.
But that's not the same thing as being able to be a conscious, sentient, self-aware, thinking, critical entity.
So, you know, if you imagine, if I said to you, what will a ball do as it rolls down some stairs?
We don't think in terms of language, most of us.
We would actually imagine the ball visually.
We'd have a picture in our minds of the ball bouncing and how it would go up and through gravity it would move down this staircase.
Whereas the way we are training these models is purely in terms of language.
And so that's very different from the way we think.
So it may be that this leads to success.
I don't want to say that it won't lead to something as smart as us, but it's yet to be demonstrated.
And it's not trivially obvious that it will work.
So that's my one slight bit of hope.
Do you believe time travel is possible?
Putting aside the whole alien existence debate, but it's time travel itself.
They call it the extra tempestrial theory.
I know you talked about this, but what's your view of it?
Certainly time travel into the future is possible because we're doing it right now.
We're moving forward through time right now.
And you can even accelerate that process.
So that's interesting.
So we are obviously moving forward.
Yes.
Because we start an interview at a certain time, and by the time you finish, it's an hour later or whatever it is.
But how do you accelerate that process?
You can accelerate it in a number of ways.
One is to go onto a planet with very high gravity or go near a black hole and time would actually slow down on that object.
And so there'd be a discontinuity between two clocks running in different places.
Another way is to go into a spaceship that's moving close to the speed of light.
If you do that again, time would slow down from their perspective.
So if you set onto a spaceship that was going 99% the speed of light and you flew around the galaxy a few times, you could come back and only aged maybe 10 years, but on Earth, hundreds and hundreds of years could have passed by.
So effectively, you have traveled into what you would call the future by this process.
So as our ability to travel around space accelerates, as it is clearly doing all the time, that possibility becomes closer and closer.
I mean, it's already a reality.
The gravitational effect of, you know, I mentioned black holes, but even the Earth has enough gravity for this to make a slight difference to our GPS clocks in orbit.
So the satellites actually have to make a correction using Einstein's theory of general relativity every day because the clocks slightly desync as a result of this effect.
What is a black hole?
Give me the simple version.
It's like a hole in space.
It is a point of not infinite density necessarily, but a point where light itself can.
You can't keep using the word infinite.
Yeah.
You're bad.
Okay, let's try to avoid it.
Scientists try and use that.
I'm not having it.
I would say, I'd say.
I don't recognize the concept.
That's fair.
I'd say the best way to describe it actually is probably in terms of the event horizon.
So it has this region around it, this spherical region, which light cannot escape from.
And that's really what we recognize as a black hole.
What goes on...
And it is completely light devoid.
It's completely black, is it?
It is.
Yeah, I mean, there is a very...
If you shine a light near the black hole, it will not, you know, and from within the event horizon, there's no way it's going to get out.
However, actually, coming back to our friend Stephen Hawking, he did make a prediction, and it's largely considered to be most likely true, that these things do slowly radiate a bit of thermal energy over billions, billions, quadrillions of years.
Now, we've never detected that energy.
It would be called Hawking radiation, named in his honor, if it was ever detected.
But we have strong reasons to suspect that over billions of years, black holes evaporate via this process.
So when it's said that he cracked the mystery of the black hole, that's what people talk about.
But how do they know he was right?
Well, you know, we actually have done some lab experiments with sonic versions of black holes, which is kind of fun.
So instead of using light, you sound.
And you can create in the laboratory setting, yeah, really like sound versions where sound waves cannot escape from the black hole.
And they too, even these sound black holes, have an analogy of Hawking radiation coming off them.
How big are they?
Black holes are black holes.
They could vary massively in size.
So we have one in the middle of our galaxy, which is hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun.
There are some even bigger than that in other galaxies.
But, you know, stars which are maybe about 10 times heavier than the sun will collapse into a black hole.
So they're probably the smaller end.
So we see black holes as small as three to four times the mass of the sun.
And we've even detected them merging and smashing into each other, making larger black holes.
You said that black holes are a cheat code to reality itself.
What do you mean by that?
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Yeah, there's so many mysteries about black holes.
And one of the ways I think they're a cheat code is the way they challenge and unify both quantum theory and general relativity.
So this is our theory of the very small on the quantum side and our theory of the universe at the very large scale.
And these two theories don't really talk to each other very nicely.
And it has been one of the ultimate goals of physics to unify them.
And black holes is where both of them really come into play in a very practical way.
So this Hawking radiation, that's really a quantum effect.
And yet it is a macroscopic object that warps space-time through gravitational influence.
And so it really can be described by general relativity as well.
So both of these theories are very relevant to these objects.
And it's pretty much the only object where both of these theories come into play in such an influential way.
So we think there might be secrets from these black holes, especially in terms of way information gets processed by them, that could actually reveal a unified theory of the two.
If we get some cataclysmic event, a comet crashes into us, whatever it may be, the sun suddenly gets incredibly hot and we're all about to die and we get 24 hours warning.
Stephen Hawking famously said if he had one day to live, he'd want to be drinking champagne, listening to Wagner and hanging out with his family.
If you had the same 24 hours, what would you want to do?
One day to live.
Yeah, I think spending time with my family would be absolutely number one.
I often regret the fact at the end of the day that I have less time with my kids than I would have liked to.
So I think that's when you realize what's really important.
Obviously, if you think you're going to die, but there's something to come after, the whole world's going to end.
Maybe that's all there is to do is to spend time with your family.
If you think you personally are going to die, but the world will go on, maybe your answer would be different in that case.
Maybe you'd want to then leave something behind in that last 24 hours that would make a difference to the world that's to come.
And I think that, you know, obviously being thinking about the finite lifetime we all have, my mortality, that's what I think I have to do in the next 30, 40 years of my own life.
If we suddenly discovered, God, there is life somewhere else.
There's alien life.
We found it.
And we can get there.
By then, Elon has found a way to get there, right?
And it's going to take two months or something.
But there's no guarantee you come back.
And they want to get the world's top scientists on that plane or whatever, that rocket, whatever it is, and get them to the alien world.
Are you getting on that plane with no idea if you're going to come back?
If there's no way to come back, I would not do it.
No, I would not.
I wouldn't risk your life for that discovery.
Well, it's not, yeah, I would let someone else make the discovery.
As long as someone makes the discovery, I'd be happy with that.
If it was only you, David, could make that discovery.
Maybe I'd think about it a bit more differently.
But, you know, I've thought about this with Mars.
Like, would you want to die on Mars, Piers, if you were offered a trip to live there?
Well, it depends.
I mean, Elon says you have to replicate exactly life on Earth on Mars.
So he said, if you even forget about one vitamin, then that could wreck everything.
So it was quite interesting.
I hadn't really thought about it like that.
But his very kind of forensic mind was like, you've got to replicate every single aspect.
If you want to double up on another place, then you have to remember every part of what makes Earth work.
I mean, do you agree with him about that?
Well, certainly the biosphere is very interconnected, and there's lots of key components you need to bring.
It sort of depends on what you're doing.
Like if we had no vitamin C, we'd all die, for example.
Yeah.
If it's going to be a truly independent colony, then it would need to make all its vitamin C itself, for instance.
Yes, that's true.
But I think what probably the early version of a Mars colony, if I was thinking more realistically, it's probably going to be a big dome, right?
That's not going to be look anything like the Earth.
It's going to be like a centre parks place or something.
And maybe within that dome, you would have some emulation of what it's like on the Earth.
But it would surely be very dependent on ships and food supply coming from Earth for a long time.
Yeah, personally, I think Mars, it would be really fun to visit, but I would not want to die on Mars.
I mean, it's like going to Antarctica.
I know if you've been to Antarctica.
Well, it is at the moment, but you never know what it might be.
By the time they finish work on it, Elon's got all his people up there.
Maybe not as optimistic about that as you, but I think it could be.
Well, only because I think in my lifetime, I'm 60, so I haven't got as long as you, but I do think that we're going to see a lot of AI-stroke robotic replacement of bits of our body that fail.
So I do think in my lifetime, we'll start to see people having hearts very quickly, you know, new parts of their body.
This is what Elon talks about.
You'll become sort of humanoid robots in a way.
Not like his optimists that are full-on robots, but they'll patch us up like robots to keep us alive.
Right, right.
I mean, do you think that's, I mean, it seems realistic to me that is likely.
Yeah, I mean, it's speculative.
Any reason they couldn't work?
It's not that I have a reason it wouldn't work.
It just, I always am a little bit skeptical of things that sound too good to be true.
You know, if someone says, here, here's a pill that will make you live forever.
Or this is a click this link and get a million dollars.
Or a Nigerian banker calls you up off this really.
You know, I think our natural reaction is to be, I believe it when I see it.
And it's not that I don't want those things to be true, but I think, yeah, part of my, as a scientist, I've had many times in my career where I've thought I've discovered something huge, like the first exo-moon, or maybe even evidence of alien life.
Like you see something weird in your data.
And time after time after time, you learn that it's very easy for your emotions to get the best of you and for you to get overexcited and overinvested in things.
And just sometimes standing back and saying, okay, let's just see how things play out.
Not saying I'm calling BS on it, but let's just see how it goes.
So when it comes to Mars, there's no reason why we couldn't colonize it.
We couldn't live there.
We couldn't have lives for thousands of years potentially one day.
But would we want to?
And is it going to be economically viable?
Will there be other problems that we can't foresee that would stop this from happening?
The story of history is so many surprising things that drove history in different ways than we expected.
It's very difficult to predict the future even decades in advance.
You've mentioned a few times what keeps you up at night.
What is the one thing you're most scared about in the astro world?
Well, you know, to be honest, at the moment, this isn't like an existential fear so much, but just I think the funding levels for science are actually in a bit of jeopardy.
You know, you mentioned Marco Rubio, who is on this documentary, for instance, and he has endorsed this White House budget, the 2026 budget, that cuts NASA science funding in half.
So I think that's a bit of an oxymoron.
Like if you're really supporting the search for life in the universe, why are we cutting the main agency's science body by a factor of two?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
And obviously, as someone who builds teams and telescopes and conducts science dependent on NASA's research profile, that's a huge hit for me and for many of my colleagues.
So in a very kind of near-term sense, I am worried about the future of science and education in the US and the UK because it does seem like a lot of things are going in the wrong direction.
Well, on that cheerful note.
No, I think you're right.
I don't think we should ever be cutting funding for things like that.
Professor Kibby, thank you very much.
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Really enjoyed it.
Thank you.
Worries About Science Funding00:00:25
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