You Don't Understand The Fermi Paradox
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 พ.ค. 2024
- Are we alone in the Universe? How can we approach this question with a real scientific perspective? What would life even look like if it existed somewhere? Answering all these questions and more with Dr Adam Frank.
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00:00 Intro
01:15 When did we start thinking of aliens
03:47 Misunderstanding of the Fermi Paradox
10:44 End state of alien civilisation
28:33 Are aliens here
32:14 How to properly explore UFOs
36:02 Accepting that we might be alone
39:42 Best way to search for technosignatures
47:54 Current obsessions
52:39 Final thoughts and more interviews
More interviews with Adam Frank:
👉 Asteroid habitats
• A Realistic Way to Mak...
👉 Why Haven't Aliens Settled Every Star In The Milky Way
• Why Haven't Aliens Set...
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I don't understand why people are so obsessed with one universal explanation to the paradox. I am almost certain if we are ever to discover the truth of why we don't hear anyone, it's gonna consist of multiple factors, such as for example, life is rare, PLUS we are early, PLUS few biospheres ever evolve to be advanced, PLUS some species collapsed before leaving their system, PLUS some species tend to keep to themselves etc and out of those very few which might have interstellar empire the chances of us not encountering them yet suddenly don't look so unrealistic
And more, like maybe these Goldilocks planets aren't, at all. There are aspects that Earth has, like a very large, very stable (moving out VERY slowly) moon which influences climate stability heavily. That is one of many. The question of habitability of these worlds we are looking at, for me, hasn't been settled, at all. It looks like we're screwed, as a species, from what I can see (the environment) and maybe that, or weapons destruction, or natural events happening more frequently ... The question is practically infinitely complex and our data points, from a statistical standpoint, do not exist, at all. These stupid five or ten parameter answers are likely ridiculous.
Sure, as long as you result in nobody explores the Universe. Also, we're doomed to fail to explore the Universe.
@@frasercain A surprisingly deterministic conclusion for a man of science.
This reminds me of that famous historic anecdote when a commission of respected scientists came out with a statement that it would take all scientific community millions of years of dedicated work to develop a way to soar through the skies like birds - ironically that statement was made just a week before the Wright brothers flight
I'd put some money on our simple incompetence to recognize what is actually alien since we haven't had more than VERY primitive detection tools for much more than a century and we've been able to examine a fraction of a percent of "local" space for only part of THAT time.
If there were hundreds of thousands of civilizations in the Milky Way, but they all got filtered down, as one gets through, then they can go on to settle the entire galaxy. So if all civilizations get filtered 100%, and we're a civilization, then we'll get filtered too. I prefer the possibility that we're alone to being doomed. :-)
Oi! Your mum doesn't understand the Fermi Paradox! 😘
No! Your mum doesn't understand the Fermi Paradox!
@@jakkll No, your mom doesn't understand the Fermi Paradox! 😂
@@oamunkres2884 does too!!! I'm telling Fraser!!
@@jakkll oh no 😔
Enjoy your shadow banning.
Personally, as much as humanity has accomplished, I honestly don’t think that we’ve scratched the surface yet.
It is sad to think that our species will probably live out a functional isolation. The Universe may be teeming with life that is so physically, temporally separated, that we will not only never meet, but we will also likely never be aware of any other's existence.
Pass the interstellar Prozac. The Fluoxetine paradox.
nope, we're the first to make it this far, or near to it.
Physics will find a way to go near light speed or beyond it. We don't really understand the limiter on speed either. We know its related to propagation of the higgs field but the LHC isn't quite powerful enough to give measurements needed. Things that do not interact with it, go the speed of light. There is no hard limit to going faster than c for massless particles. Causality is *thought* to be an issue, but this is a presumption not reality.
Yes, but it seems aliens only exist in the human imagination. That means the entire universe is ours. Shouldn't we be grateful for that?
@@bubbajones6907 Yeah, we are well on the way to messing that up, unfortunately.
@@craigwillms61 How so? Is that what the feminists say?
the little alien spaceship landing on your bookshelf at the beginning of the video was a cute addition
I saw that.
I'L. BE SERIOUSLY, ,DISSaPPOINTED , , to be informed,, HUMANS ARE THE ONLY sentient, entities in this universe
Grats to the guy who got everyone to check their Discord with the notification sound. 😂
I thought it was LinkedIn.
speak for yourself. I don't have discord sounds on.
@@connormoorerocks but you still checked it
"grats" damn that immediately brought me back to running dungeons in world of Warcraft in the 2010s
@@ktk44man ding
I love such substantive considerations, going beyond just guessing whether something is a UFO or not. There are hundreds of ideas about why we don't see anyone, why anyone is interested in us, why they don't reveal themselves. If we do not become aware of the possibilities, we will not know what to pay attention to during our search.
Fantastic discussion, thank you for bringing us this. I really enjoyed Dr Frank's common sense, yet still imaginative and excited exposition of the meaning of the Fermi Paradox. Great to hear someone who isn't all doom and gloom about it but open to a variety of different possibilities. Very interesting talk.
Fraser you are so fortunate to meet and have wonderful conversations with people like Dr. Frank. Wow ! Any student that is lucky enough to have him as a professor is truly fortunate.
Can the names of these paper please be listed. Or a link maybe.
Here's one that they were talking about:
The Oxygen Bottleneck for Technospheres;
Amedeo Balbi, Adam Frank - August 2023/
On the arXiv preprint site.
His points about how technological advancement may not increase exponentially and that galactic civilizations might be harder to create than some assume are things I’ve been muttering to myself while listening to pods of this topic.
Doesn’t settle anything but I liked hearing someone challenge these underlying assumptions.
Yes. Why do kids think that because we invented cell phones and rockets, that somehow Newton's and Einstein's Laws are suddenly malleable? Reaching relativistic speeds is impossible, and FTL is a total fantasy. People are gullible, not objective.
So many reasons that could interrupt exponential growth, let alone the fact that you'd need to build up enough population to make it worth moving to the next planet and star which just adds a constant lagging to the growth.
@nightpups5835 I would guess that if you could possibly ask every human on Earth, that completely understand the question, they would believe there are no other civilizations and Humams are the only civilization capable life.
You don't need exponential growth, linear growth would do the trick with the time scales that are involved.
Lets just admit it would be that aliens would not want to do it, for what ever reason, and don't trust their machines to do the job for them.
Forget technology. Without FTL, interstellar civilizations are functionally impossible, and undesirable anyway. It's just too far.
Spot on. Fed up with blurry videos but fully open to existence of alien life. Bring on the scientific method!
This just randomly popped up in my feed, but I'm glad it did cuz it was a really cool interview
Adam Frank is a terrific guest! More of him!
I think the more common misunderstanding of the Fermi paradox is that it's about making the positive claim that there _should be_ aliens, based on some assumptions. The "solution" to the paradox then becomes questioning those assumptions. Even excellent channels like The Science Asylum fell into this trap.
I think the paradox is better expressed as saying that: Based only on the science that we know today, it's possible that the sky could be lit up with evidence of thousands of ETIs, and we don't know why that is not the case. Like other paradoxes in science, it is just pointing to what _we don't know_ , and in the case of the Fermi paradox, it is likely a _huge set_ of things across biology, chemistry, physics, geology, engineering etc etc.
Well said!
We have had intelligent life capable of communication for 0.0000002% of the lifespan of our sun. There could be one sun with intelligent life in our galaxy, or 5000. But we could not detect our own signals if we were as close as Alpha Centauri. They could be out there, but, unless their signal is overwhelming, we can't detect it. We need to make telescopes with a net size of our orbit around the sun to "come online" with the others.
If there were a million civs like ours in the milky way, we probably wouldn't notice.
If there were dozens of vast, million-world interstellar empires in the milky way, we probably wouldn't notice.
In both cases they'd probably be too far away to detect their EM activities with our current telescopes.
Our current data pretty much only rules out ETs on the White House lawn. Nearly everything else remains possible / unknown due to insufficient data.
@@aaronhoffmeyer True but they don't need to be trying to communicate at the same time. There could be tech like self-replicating probes, megastructures, or just anything done on a large scale. We don't see anything right now, and that's an important data point.
@@aaronhoffmeyerit's a little further than that - we have several giga-watt power radar signals (mostly over the horizion radar) in areas of the spectrum the sun is quiet - but that only pushes the boundary out to a few thousand light years ...
Hearing this conversation makes me wish my field was more focused on science than feelings.
For me - the abiogenesis event is the thing we should be studying the hardest. If the first self-replicating molecule was just a random arrangements of amino-acids - then the probability of that happening by chance could EASILY be so spectacularly unlikely - that we must be alone. There are 26 amino acids - if you need a chain of 100 of them - by chance then you're looking at 26 to the power of 100 against...which means the odds are that we're alone. But if we can find hundreds of trillions of possible self-replicators - then we really can't be alone. Understanding that abiogenesis event seems to me to be the absolute key to knowing whether we're alone.
It only needs to happen once. Panspermia is very viable and what I think is likely. It just doesn't mean that life necessarily evolves much beyond that, nor does it mean that our planet might still be especially good for life due to high phosphorus.
I've had a count up and I only have 20 amino acids in me actually. But my eukaryotic cells contain more than just a few polymerised carbohydrates, lipids and proteins, I also have a highly complex set of nucleotides that have all the genetic information that make me me. About 3 billion of them - not counting, by the way, the mitochondria that my mum gave me. And the chances of all that lot coming together in an abiogenetic event, without a designer is nil. It would be less than nil if the mathematical branch of statistics allowed it actually. In fact even with a designer he (or she) better be really bloody clever of we'd all just be a bucket of gloop. There's no one else out there. Just us. It's fun for some people to talk about it but we're alone out here.
That's a reasonable line of thought. But my response is to think of the monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare thought experiment. I'm not convinced that it necessarily follows that given enough time the monkeys have to produce the works just by accident. For the reason being that monkeys aren't random output generators. They'd just mash the keyboard roughly in the centre and keys close together - they may never produce anything much at all. For a similar reason I don't think the conditions under which amino acids combine into self replicating molecules are necessarily random. Very specific conditions allow it to happen, but not unique conditions. It seems almost infinitely unlikely to me that there could only exist one place in the universe where conditions exist that direct amino acids into self replicating formations.
It's not 26 to the power of 100. It's far less than that, because the factor is reduced by the existence of every possible condition that helps the emergence of replicating formations.
@@techbio Well there's 3.7 million words in Shakespeare's complete works. I'll give you all the monkeys that there have ever been and every typewriter ever made. I'll give you 400 billion years. You'll be lucky to get "to be or not to be" never mind Juliet's balcony speech. There is not the fainest hope of getting the complete works. You wouldn't even get the Beano Annual. Molecules do not line themselves up to make life, well they do when they're already alive but even the best chemists can't make life in the lab. never mind under a rock. Take a dead cell, it's got all the components for life but no chemist has ever brought one back from oblivion. I'll give you all the lipids, I'll give you the polymerised amino acids (there's really only 20 by the way) and the proteins, I give you the ribose. I'll even give you the mitochondia and the tiny organic machines that keep the cells alive and trigger the RNA. I'll give you all the heavy elements up to Molybdenum, All you need to evolve under the rock of your choice is the neucleotide - two strands that form a double helix structure of DNA 3 billion pairings of four gentically coded pieces of information. I'll give you the same 400 billion years. Not a chance. It would make throwing a million 6s with a million dice look easy. In fact it almost makes the Monkey/Shakespear project look like a dead cert. I didn't happen once. Life formed another way.
It's called convergent evolution. The laws of physics will inevitably create molecules which follow an energy gradient line. This reduces the likelihood of some formations and increases the likelihood of others.
I have many criticisms against the idea that civilizations would create Dyson spheres. However another that just occurred to me is that any civilization that could build a Dyson sphere, could also also have mastered fusion, which could be used in a much more targeted and efficient way than trying to encircle your star with stuff.
The implicit assumption is made that control of population is never achieved, unless your dyson sphere is only for energy. Then I would ask why a small population would require so much energy.
The immediate problem that comes to mind for me regarding a Dyson Sphere would be station keeping of the sphere itself. It would be floating in space, entirely independent of the solar body.. Gravity would not be entirely equal on all interior surfaces of the sphere. Eventually one point of the sphere experiences more gravity than the rest, with an inevitable outcome.
@@alanjenkins1508 That hits on one of my other issues with the idea of building a Dyson sphere. If you haven't been able to control your population growth so that you need a Dyson sphere for room and energy generation, then a Dyson's sphere really isn't going to help you. You can't outrun exponential population growth.
Another issue, which also comes up with the idea of colonizing Mars to deal with an expanding population, is that it costs so much just to get a person off of earth, that it's a huge net negative to try to use colonization to solve a resource problem. You are better off trying to inhabit all of the surface of the earth and below ground, than to go to space.
In short, controlling population growth is the only solution, and it looks like that naturally takes care of itself over time. As people get more well off, they have fewer children.
I personally think the only thing that will closely resemble the Idea of such a sphere would be more a swarm of habitats, which would force people to arrange themselves in limited space and capacity oriented strategy would become the standard. Lifeforms with a kind of planetary origin would become something like the "plankton" of their solar system, only growing with the numbers of habitats, replacing the failed or recycled ones.
But to be honest It looks more likely to me that those things will only be achieved by AI's with it's limitless potential of growing till it's reaching the physical limits, to either be "ambitious" and "aware" of other solar systems to grab or find themselves to loose control over its units to just only degrade to an own kind of isolated artificial ecosystem of disconnected synthetic self-replicating lifeforms keeping the balance as it happens with every biosphere naturally, being like an ocean for itself, but an island to the ocean of the cosmos.
It is hard to imagine how something could reach or even keep the amount of political or social order, power and stability to pull anything like that, without either it having a central element with total control over all units (like a hivemind) or every kind of entity, collection of habitats or single agents being on their own in the anonymous quasi-anarchic swarm.
@@alanjenkins1508 There are actually a few answer to this. 1st. Would you need any form of population control if you had that sort of energy. At least in the close term. 2nd. It would be the populations that reproduce fastest that would gain dominance. 3rd. Even if you would have stagnant population growth, as long as you can do automation, there could be individuals that wanted to use a lot of energy for all kinds of reasons. Like running their own solar system sized particle collider just to probe the fabric of reality. These individuals are also the most likely to gain dominance, just as the population that promotes growth would.
That is the tricky bit about the whole Fermi Paradox. One can often find arguments against the arguments for an apparently empty universe.
Wonderfully insightful take on the Fermi paradox. And from one Adam to another... Kudos for being so Frank!
What a great channel! Thank you for presenting this. And yes, I immediately went to Audible and ordered the little book of aliens.
I saw one of your videos last week and you instantly became one of my favorite science TH-camrs. Great conversation!
Okay I usually wait until after I watch the video to make any comment but I'm a minute into the introduction and I loved that UFO flying around in the background! You always bring some new knowledge in your videos but I love the sense of humor here too!!
I absolutely love this discourse, and Dr. Adam Frank is amazingly articulate.
Fraser Cain, as always wonderful interview. I have always appreciated your calm demeanour and interview teqnique. Thank you.
the universe is so big that nobody can say we are alone. there is no possible way to even validate that we are alone.
More than that. The nearest stars are so far that we can't even say they aren't populated.
There's no way to validate we aren't alone, either. Not yet, anyway. That's the thing; right now, with the info we have, it's just as scientifically-rigorous to say we're alone as it is to say we're not. Any scientist who claims otherwise is being intellectually dishonest, for whatever reason. The only thing we can say that's true is that we don't know.
Well, if there were just one person in England, and just one other in New Zealand, and they had transportation no better than a canoe and didn't know where each other were in the world, or even how big the planet is, would they not be alone?
Both dying before they know of the existence of the other. That may be our situation.
@@RubbittTheBruise Well put. It's a perfect analogy, it really doesn't matter wether we're alone or not as the distances between each star system and galaxy are so massive that either way it doesn't matter, we're never going to find out and even if we do, we wouldn't be able to communicate or visit each other anyway. To make matters worse, the distances between galaxies is growing by the minute due to the expansion of the Universe, so with each passing day we're further away from finding out the truth. Even if we somehow found evidence for advanced civilizations, what would we do with that information? There is literally nothing to do, even if we sent out probes to visit a specific galaxy or star system, by the time we got there they probably would have already gone extinct. It's a fruitless endeavour and bound to lead to disappointment no matter what we find. Most people don't seem to understand the true vastness of space and how utterly hopeless it is to visit or communicate with distant star systems.
@@distantraveller9876 It's not quite perfect because those people could at least theoretically travel that distance in one lifetime, and there's no unfamiliar or inhospitable environment in between them. They could just plain walk most of the way.
You and dr adam frank have a great chemistry, love the interview
I get the sense that not only are those two on the same wavelength with each other, but also with me as well. Delightful !
Loved the UFO landing on your bookshelf 👌🏻 It was subtle but noticeable
It reminds me of the day I first went on a rocky beach to look for fossils, I spent hours looking and saw nothing.
The next day after a couple of hours searching again I found my first fossil, after that I was seeing them everywhere.
We just need to learn how to look.
Not gone to find fossils in years. I did go once or twice when I was a kid with my dad on this beach in Devon. He seemed to know what to look for, and we found loads. He used to be a geophysicist, so that's advantageous. They were in these specific types of stones I remember. Had to crack them open and they were in the middle of them.
I really appreciate your content always so on point and well expressed. ty
Yeah, Enrico Fermi really had nothing to do with the Fermi Paradox. His coworkers were talking about exo-civilations in the mess hall while he was eating alone. In the middle of their conversation he, by all accounts a bit of a weirdo and a loner, blurted out "Where is everyone?" and went back to his burger. This caused his coworkers to think up the paradox which was named agter him. He could of been talking about anything really.
Enrico Fermi
He was Italian, not Hispanic
@@ainternet239 Thank you for the correction. I have corrected my comment.
ah yes saying "where is everyone" in a discussion about exocivs clearly could have been about anything....@@AndrewJohnson-oy8oj
A plus is that he solved it in the same conversation, with an obvious solution we tend to ignore out of stubborness: interstellar distances are too high for travel or communication, end of story. No paradox at all.
It's really mind boggling to think about just how massive the Universe is! This could be the very reason of why we can never find other beings like ourselves out there. An example would be inhabitants of towns in the U.S. right next to each other but never finding each other or having contact with each other.
Great talk indeed, one of the most profound and impressive seen so far. Too bad it's just not physically possible to see them all at once. Please keep going!
Excellent interview with a great guest! Dr Frank's enthusiasm makes the whole conversation seem way too short. Would have easily listened to another hour and likely not even realized it.👏
Is Dr.Frank a streamer too? He speaks so well, the video & audio qualities are top notch.
Great discussion! Re: Alien Email, y'all made me think of the aliens sending us a .ZIP bomb to knock out our computers just for giggles.
Also don't forget that one limiting factor to any extraterrestrial life leaving their home world is how much mass does it have? If its gravity is too strong then the exit velocity could be unattainable.
Dont you just build a bigger rocket?
Well if it has an atmosphere to match then planes would also be way more efficient so you could use something like the Virgin attempt to launch rockets from aircraft.
You should have John Michael Godier on your show again. I would have loved his inputs on these questions.
If a god, besides God Dylan, would stop playing hide-and-seek, it would be a nifty trick.
John Michael Godier actually believes that there are likely aliens out there... Frasier doesn't . They wouldn't get along on the topic
Imagine if folks actually appreciated life for its rarity.
Unfortunately on earth, almost every lifeform kills to eat and it's likely to be the case elsewhere.
Life is not so rare... intelligence is
@@sauro8311 if you've got evidence of life elsewhere you really should release a paper.
@@entropybear5847
Even Fraser thinks intelligent space traveling is rare. But there is no evidence
@@entropybear5847 Microbial life in my opinion has to be common, it's complex and intelligent civilizations that are rare. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is what my instinct tells me.
The detection that I think woud be interesting was if we worked out that the Alcubiere drive was a thing that worked, could you pick up the wake from these devices utterly tearing up the geometry of gravity (in somewhat dramatic ways if these things really are going as fast as C [or even more, though I think there are *serious* problems with the idea of a warp drive faster than light, just the sheer mess it'd make of causality].).Like, could we look for it with something like LIGO
I really enjoy Fermi Paradox discussions/casts. The more we learn about life and earth's geological past, the more unique it looks.
The more I focus on my own foot, the more I conclude that it (viz, my foot) is uniquely my own! And that there is "nothing like it, out there".
🎉
About UFOs, dr. Adam Frank is spot freaking on.
I honestly would love to believe in all those stories, but... I don't know, I need confirmation. Not necessarily "extraordinary" evidence, but just simple evidence. That would be enough.
Can we take a moment to appreciate two fantastic science and astronomy educators having a great and edifying discussion and both rocking glorious full face-manes 😉
Bah, my beard can beat up BOTH of theirs with one braid tied behind my back....
this comment almost made me not watch
@@beepboopbleep3695 Y?
Nope, far too busy living a life.
My head cannon for why we aren’t bombarded by alien communication signals is that there are much more efficient interstellar communication methods than the wave form ‘no faster than light’ signals we use in modern communications. It would be like we’re trying to see every cloud as a smoke signal when it’s far more likely to be a natural creation than intelligent design and who uses smoke signals these days anyway? It’s not surprising that trying to filter out all the natural clouds from ones that may be created by intelligent design is very difficult. Then layer a wave form efficiency time window on top of that and it’s even less likely.
I hear this argument a lot and people apply it to travel as well, as if to suggest wormholes or light-speed travel are actually feasible with enough advancement. But I'm not convinced that we haven't reached close to the peak of what is possible as far as communication mediums or even travel
fantastic interview!
If the planets of the galaxy became habitable 6 billion years ago, because super novae made more than iron, then we've developed a technological society maybe 1 billion years after that. My favorite conclusion is there are many civilizations just now becoming technological!
What an absolutely fantastic conversation! Thanks Fraser, thanks Adam… 🫶👽🛸👾
The only way into the stars is if we first modify our bodies to last millennia. No way around it without a warp drive and even with it - you're unlikely to use it on Sol distance and just think how far Pluto is. You either use warp for absolutely everything (which means it should be extremely cheap) or you have to live millennia. So I agree with this part. The universe might be full of life and we just cannot reach each other. It was a very nice interview, thanks.
1g acceleration (9.8m/s2) would get you to other star systems in decades. That's a lot of energy, but if you can somehow get it from the interstellar material, then interstellar could become possible within human lifetimes. Or as Arthur C Clarke suggested, use periods of high acceleration, while the humans/animals are suspended in liquid. Or multi generation travel (which is how humans settled the world). So, a few additional theoretical options.
So far, human beings have trouble thinking about more than 20 years, like raising a kid, or having a career. Living for longer than 70-100 years might be counter-productive. Someone who could live for 1000 years, probably isn't going to risk their life on a voyage to another star. And if it involves fast acceleration and deceleration there might be impact problems that threaten the vessel.
@@sandal_thong8631 Humans ability to plan increase with their age until they hit dementia or disease. There is no reason to say that if we lived 1000 years, we won't be productive. Productivity is to a large extend a personality trait. Same like adventurism. People who are likely to risk their lives now, are likely to do it even if the could live 1000 years. And people who are good in planning now, are gonna be even better then. In fact, that's a much more serious counter-argument - if now the average age of the people in power in the US (and other developed countries) is 75, what will happen if we lived to 1000 - they will become literally irreplaceable. Which means if we are to live for so long, we'll have to figure a way to restore democracy. But that's another issue. The point is, it's literally the only way to travel the stars. Sure, you can hibernate and stuff, but people are social creatures and if all your friends and family would be dead by the time you return, the incentive to travel would be very little. People just won't do it. There is a Stephen Baxter book about such society (I think it's one of the Manifold books).
Science fiction has "warped" (pun intended) our collective expectations. Actually, there's no reason to believe the speed of light can ever be circumvented. Advanced civilizations simply can't or won't expend resources to explore distances they can't even communicate across in lifetime. We are effectively, if not actually alone in our part of the universe.
Humans will never conquer the space, but our robots and ai machines will, it just take time to evolve.
Maybe we need to extend the Fermi paradox some more? We can probably say that metallicity is important for the stars we care about because if they're metal poor they are unlikely to have the building blocks of life. Part of the Goldilocks zone our solar system lives in is also part of the distance away from the core where things are really dramatic and away from the rim where things are really metal poor.
7:26 Could we get a link to the paper? I'm intrigued now and wanna read it
I think a multi system civilization would basically be independent but with continuous one way communication. So you send all your info constantly and anything that is useful for the other group will help them but you will be getting info in return maybe you already figure it out but information is the most valuable thing to send
Even at the speed of light, communication delay in getting a response would effectively render colonised systems isolated.
No galactic empire would ever emerge unless faster than light communication and travel becomes possible.
@@custossecretus5737 they don't need a response is what I'm saying just send all tech and science continuously if you're 20 light years away you'd be always getting 20 yr old data but it would still be useful
Why go to the trouble of sending colonists to Alpha Centauri? What's in it for you?
Okay maybe you can justify Alpha Centauri based on romanticism and the (dubious) idea of preserving the species, but why would you then send colonists to dozens more stars even farther away? (let alone 200 billion stars.)
Seriously, why? What's the point? Why wouldn't you dedicate the resources and effort to something more useful closer to home?
Imho economics (due to distances) is what makes interstellar civs (especially big ones) undesirable in the first place.
@@bozo5632 That's a good point. The people staying home don't get much out of it, unless their grandchildren are going. But then it's more likely they will die in space or the new solar system than if they'd stayed at home. I guess you could have space-enthusiasts fund the project. And let's say there are 1-6 solar systems that we successfully send people to. In hundreds or thousands of years, why would their descendants risk going to a new solar system when ones with people in them are even more attractive?
Personally I don't find the idea of an alien invasion likely. If aliens have somehow traveled this far in the search for resources it is so much easier just to go to a planet that's not currently habited. You don't run the risk of losing any of your people to war if you don't have to, it seems weird that you would travel that distance have spent the resources/energy to travel that distance, to risk part of that in a war with a group of people you really don't know. Most of the our opinions are the opinions of bipedal apes (And I mean that in the most loving way possible), not a civilization that's grown to the point they can travel light years.
Yep. if they travelled 10,000 years in space. They find their Space Yacht way more comfortable and safe, than our dirt clod planet full of hostility and poisonous particles, diseases.
I've been to the future, boy are you in for a shock! :-) We went to Roswell as part of our US loop trip for a hoot. The first thing I asked at the desk is for them to point me to the live alien exhibit. Boy, was I disappointed. Their evidence is hilarious, too. Literally a guy holding up some aluminized plastic, a TINY sheet of it, exactly like you would find on, guess what, a balloon. We had fun though, just not thoroughly convinced yet.
Not only that but if you’re capable of travelling light years, you probably have sufficiently advanced enough technology to terraform planets much closer to the point of origin of your species. The only reason to travel further afield is to explore.
Imagine how many stars and planets an ET invasion fleet would have to pass up along the way before they got here, all with the same kinds of atoms as we have. Makes no sense.
I am sure we are not alone but I am sure it doesn't even matter (in way of intergalactic unity etc,...) because the distances are way too vast
Dr Frank is such a sage and expert scientist, but still such an easy going and funny dude. Seems a great human being.
This is gonna be a good one, I already feel it.
I hope we delivered.
@@frasercain sure did!
@@frasercain More than just delivered!!!! It was a lot of fun, and very thought-provoking.
Great discussion. More questions.
1. How far from a big Blazar, looking down the barrel of that gun or death ray, would we have to be for Earth to still hang onto its Atmosphere, and for us to be still able to do space walks?
2. If we witnessed Betelgeuse going Supernova would that prevent us from staying on the ISS or going back to the moon due to high levels of radiation, and for how long?
Love thinking about the insane physics of Neutron Stars; my fav stellar objects even above black holes!
3. Can you do a comparison between the Earth's crust and Earthquakes and Neutron Star's Crust and Neutro-quakes? LOL
On another subject
4. How long would it take to terra-form Mars by directing comets or some of Jupiter or Saturn's Rings to recreate Oceans there.
1. IDK but we're probably safe.
2. No worries, it's far away.
3. No useful comparison.
4. Too long to be worthwhile.
Since neutron stars are a favorite subject of yours, I presume that you have already read the science fiction novel "Dragon's Egg" by Robert L Forward. If you have not yet read it, I highly recommend the book!
As for Terra-forming Mars, as much as I want to see us become a multi-world species, I am opposed to prematurely colonizing the planet as a permanent home for humans. The first order of business should be to determined whether or not it is a dead world. That can be accomplished with minimal human presence. If Mars is indeed sterile, but for the microbial life we have undoubtedly introduced there, then I think humanity should take a longer-view to making it habitable after conducting a few decades, or even a couple centuries, of scientific studies*. In my opinion, truly Terra-forming Mars includes increasing its mass substantially to the point that Mars' gravity will retain water and atmosphere over geological time without the need to periodically "top up" the planetary tank, so to speak.
Unfortunately, most human societies don't seriously consider projects that stretch across millennial time spans. Bombarding Mars with so much mass would turn the planet molten, much as Earth once was. Such a project would have to be undertaken for epochs-distant progeny. Moving Venus to a higher orbit is a project of similar scale. If you find that notion intriguing, a bit of online searching will reveal scientific papers that discuss the engineering of just such audacious proposals.
* Much as the world has conducted in Antarctica without trying to establish self-sustaining colonies.
@willong1000 Thanks for the book recommendation.
I agree with you on Mars, about checking for life first, for that we need to go into the Martian cave systems.
Increasing the Mass of Mars feels like overkill. Mars had water in the past, for sometime, so that'll do for me. It would only be temporary of course, until our technological abilities have increase to the point of interstellar travel.
Moving Venus! Good one. However, got to be careful not to destabilise Earth's orbit! And I fear, turning the Earth into a binary system with Venus wouldn't work, due to Earth-Venus distance having to be too big, and both getting too close and far from Sun, as they orbit each other. A tighter binary would would be too tidal.
Interesting line of thinking. Not gone down these road before.
Fantastic interview
What a beautiful, energetic, interesting nerd-off, thank you so much
This was a very interesting conversation! Thanks so much for posting it. I'm going to subscribe.
I don't remember who said it, may have been on your channel, actually.
"If we're there only life anywhere, crude oil is the rarest substance in the universe."
Ooh, that's a good one.
The Deep Hot Biosphere is well worth the read..
Read "the deep hot biosphere".
Well at least that makes us feel a bit less dumb for fighting over it.
@@hedgehog3180I really I like this reason.
Dr. Frank is great. Fascinating topic and discussion, cheers. I don't think much of the Fermi paradox either tbh. 😄👏👏👏
Fun topic. Considering space/time, there may have been intelligent life in other areas of the universe who are at this time extinct. All the elements and events that had to happen for abiogenesis to occur is not a given. We still have not been able to produce it in a lab. As well as there were many mass extinction events that had to occur for humans to be able to evolve to this point as well as having a large satellite, etc, etc. A much more plausible case is we truly are alone at this time.
Excellent interview, loved it,great content as always Mr Cain
Glad you enjoyed it
@@frasercain Alien life is already visiting our planet according to the US military and sensors and the DNI John Ratcliffe
Cain is the Candy Cain 🍬 😋
"Relics"
One of if not of my favorite episodes.
Wow love foundation, it is a great series. maybe there is something like that out there!
Fantastic interview, Fraser! I saw a video recently that said Earth makes crabs. Like, if you let evolution run long enough things evolve into crabs. So, if life developed on Earth 2.0 I don't think it would be that odd to have earth-like forms develop. Crab-like, shark-like, tortoise-like, etc... Convergent evolution is a thing.
Exactly- niches to be filled- including a standing up 2 legged creature with less than optimum senses but with a large brain.
Convergent evolution is a thing with creatures possessing the same strengths and weaknesses of the same biochemistry. Otherwise... all bets are off.
Those videos show that Arthropods tend to evolve to crabs, not humans! Evolution is a varied environment is divergent, not convergent. A little knowledge is dangerous.
@@AndriasTravels The arthropods won't evolve into a 2 legged, 2 armed human like creature, but something else might.
@AndriasTravels If you look at animals through time similar shapes can occur over and over in different species. Like an Ichthyosaurus, and a dolphin.
On Earth 2.0, physics could lead to similar looking animals. Of course they could be differentiated upon closer inspection due to their different evolutionary histories.
Great conversation. Hope to see Dr Adam again soon with more answers about longevity of lunar lander.
I'll let you know when his new paper is out.
After you've seen a UFO like we did up in Moorhead in the fall of '79; same night the cop ran into something north of there, your concept of who we are kind of changes.
I want to see the "film" adaptation of the biography of the "Darwin" of the first sentience we meet.
If aliens have a kind of Prime Directive to not bother "the primitives, "then wouldn't they just hide and secretly study us? The Star Trek Insurrection movie had this theme.
Fantastic interview, Fraser! Thanks a bunch! 😃
But, you know what... I should probably write a book about all the issues with the Fermi Paradox... And they're so many!
Anyway... It's just an idea, but at the same time... I don't know.
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
'There are"
Also, could you please tell me the article name? at 7:26 thanks
Man, this is good!
if we're not alone, we might as well be. even if another planet already used the same communications protocols and spoke the same language and knew about our existence, carrying on a conversation would be nearly impossible w/ all but the closest systems w/in our galaxy. the vastness of space is indeed the great filter they speak of.
Be funny if there was one on Alpha Centauri. Pretty much need decades to have a conversation. almost a decade just to say hi back and forth.
@@DaddyHensei yes, we're in agreement. only the closest systems have any possible chance of communicating with us even if the unlikely circumstance i proposed.
Excellent conversation, fascinating takes. Thanks for sharing 🙏
I know it is early in the episode, but so far so great! 13:13
Titan sounds like such an interesting place to explore for potential life, I really would love to see an exploration before I kick the bucket
Really great interview. Thank you both!
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
This was a really cool episode. Hope you have him back again.
Thank you very much for this chat. I found it super informative and good quality entertainment!! ❤❤❤
Here are the factors we need to consider, in the proper order:
1. Timing - Whether or not we exist at the same time as another life species (we undoubtedly coexist with other life, but intelligence is a far more niche expectation, probably not).
2. Distance - Even if you knew this moment of another intelligent species, you'd have to cross the vast distance of space at the right time, likely to find their remnants.
3. Opportunity costs - Why would you leave your home planet, in a universe just waiting to kill you in so many ways? You wouldn't, especially if you were intelligent.
4. The comfort zone - Life doesn't just grow and expand into intelligence, then populate the cosmos. Life finds a 'comfort zone' and that's where it lives. Then the universe puts a stop to it, naturally.
5. Environment - The reason why we are bipedal species, advancing to intelligence, is because an open air land based environment will be a natural requisite for intelligence to arise. A fish isn't going to space without evolving into a bipedal, land faring species. Language is the key to intelligence, and so is comfort. Really hard to talk with complexity in water. Really hard to swing a hammer in water. Not gonna be chiseling out a wheel with tentacles. Not going to be writing down your progress or smelting metals under water.
6. We need to learn how to recognize science fiction, and work very hard to distinguish it from fact. (worm holes, black holes, FTL travel, kardeshev scale, ect, all fiction).
7. We have no reason to believe life would arise any different, anywhere else. Look at how species here adapt and present. We call them species because they evolved differences, when they are the same animal. Look how many times nature has produced crabs? Do you honestly think there are no crabs on other planets?
8. We are on a rock gravitationally bound to a heat lamp, traveling through space at 67 thousand miles an hour. If I drive my car from New York to California, middle of summer, how much life is going to be plastered to the front of my car by the time I get there? Our planet picks up the seeds of life as it travels through the universe. It didn't need to be 'planted via panspermia' or any other means. Our rock is catching all the space bugs, and all the mold and other life here is a product of that process over billions of years.
9. We are smart mold. We should find similar life in similar circumstances, if we were to actually find it. We are far more likely to encounter a species of intelligence that hasn't advanced at all, than we are to find an advanced intelligence.
10. We are the aliens. We are the AI. We are going to make the first contact. Not the other way around.
This comment deserves likes. I agree man. I even hate the idea of a "paradox' and so called time travel. Both being fiction.
Dr. Frank is always my favorite guest!
OK, one question never asked by anyone interested in this issue:
"how to think about stuff like this without being fooled by our own wishful thinking"
When studying astrophysics in grad school one learns about "confirmation bias" when examining data from research projects.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 - did anyone pay attention?
stick to the science
it takes YEARS of maturity and rethinking as you understand more about our situation. Many people espousing ideas at 20 years old, laugh at what they were saying when theyre 30 years old. It just takes time. Some never learn though, still spewing nonsense well into adulthood. LOL
@@doncarlodivargas5497Absolutely. When research is submitted for publication it is peer-reviewed by other APs. Peers are very good at spotting errors and omissions and *pointing them out.* It's embarrassing if your paper comes back unpublished. Also one's reputation can easily take a hit when this happens. This can have an effect on one's ability to be awarded research grants and even one's employment.
I can totally imagine an interstellar saga involving planets which take 100 years travel time. Assuming your travel speed is a fraction of c, communication will be much faster. Maybe just 5 years. That would be an awesome storyform.
It would be mathematically ridiculous for us to be alone
But fukking safer 😂
The fact that it’s so empty so far is truly terrifying
Whaddya mean "so far?" We've only been to the moon so far. We've never seriously looked for ET. We have no idea how empty or crowded the universe might be. Almost zero data.
I know, man. If we are totally alone in the universe, it's just so scary to me, for some reason. Imagine a universe that exists for trillions of years, and just one single time life emerged... Consciousness existed one time, super-briefly, and that was it. Then the universe churns on for trillions more years until the eventual heat death or whatever, and that was it. Just that one time, the universe was aware of itself, as Sagan or someone put it. It would be so comforting just to know that life does exist elsewhere in the universe. Even more satisfying would be to know that intelligent life is common, and it'll keep thriving until the very end, possibly even punching through the end of the universe into another one.
Even an empty swimming pool without water is creepy for me. I get it.
The universe is way, way bigger than you imagine. We’ve barely looked. And it’s like looking for a quark in a haystack the size of Earth.
The distances between objects in space is way greater than what the illusion the sky gives us!
Information, E.g. electromagnetic waves, would be so limited and spread by the time it reaches us, if it even does happen to coincide with Earth.
@@SuperYtc1 To your point.. People mostly don't realize what a monster our own sun is.. And it's relatively small, as these things go for a star. Consider that the Earth is 8 light minutes away from the sun. Galactic distances are measured in the hundreds of millions of light years and beyond. The scale is staggering to the point of human incomprehensibility. We humans lounge in the sun's warm glow from 93 million miles away.
Nice discussion. Adam is not totally alien to sci-fi even though it is seldom totally realistic (except for the expanse which is pretty realistic).
I love The Expanse series, but the biggest flaw in the entire premise is the interplanetary travel times render it completely impossible. Just run the calcs on an Earth-Venus shuttle run by the best optimized path at max. acceleration the drugs would enable the body to tolerate.
@@ticthak You are of course correct on the acceleration, but it would be a more tedious series if you have episode 1 action, episode 2-10 travel, episode 11 more action.
@@ticthak The Expanse left the timing intentionally vague because it would take weeks to get between different points of the Solar system at their speeds, but viewers would find this boring. That said, they do mention on many occasions that it takes weeks or sometimes months to get from point A to point B and that has an effect on the plot but you need to look for it because those are mostly hints.
@@mihan2d Having mentioned elapsed time DOESN'T tie continuity together properly, though (it's much better addressed in the books, but it still is apocryphal, because they don't have DRAMATIC life extension then, and the pacing of the video series suggests something on the 10-15 year timespan, and there's no reasonable way something like the system war would be that quick, a century is much more reasonable). As I said I love the series, but for the human/transhuman story lines. not the loose adherence to reasonable timespans.
I'll fault the hell out of "Fringe" on scientific grounds, too, but it's still my all-time favorite SF show.
@@ticthak Those aren't just mentions though, the show is structured in such a way that it isn't a stretch to imagine different sequences happening weeks one after another with most of the time sensitive sequences just happening when the ship/fleets are generally in the same vicinity so they can totally happen in a matter of hours (the horrible Ganymede sequence notwithstanding and the writers actually apologized for it). Also the Expanse takes about 4-5 years between the e1s1 and e6s6, it doesn't take decades for an interplanetary war to progress when average travel time between most important points of the system takes under a month (importantly also notice how in season 4 when events took place beyond the ring the point of conversation shifted from "it takes weeks" to "it takes months" and the colonists/expeditors on Ilus understood they are completely on their own because it took almost half a year for any kind of help to come from the Sol)
Great discussion!
Dr. Adam absolutely exudes scientist teacher energy
What would be really cool if we could visit other solar systems and discover dinosaurs
It would be even cooler if we could create a ring-world and populate it with genetically engineered dinosaurs. I'd love to create my own Dinosaur Park (complete with a hotel that has more space than 10 earths).
There is an interesting historical event that took place in 1974. For the first time humans sent a focused radio message into space.
The mind blowing part to me is, while it is, without a question, a message sent into space by an intelligent species.
However, if the alien species who detects the message had identical standards for what counts as a message form another intelligent species, the Arecibo Message would not meet those standers, and it would not be seen as a message from aliens.
It makes me wonder if we have already gotten an alien message and we didn't actually realize what it was.
I've been saying this EXACT thing for years! Nice to come across someone else asking this specific question!
Oh yeah by the way this guest has a book.
Also don’t forget about his book.
Friendly reminder that the guest has a book out about this very topic.
46:01 I've heard convincing arguments to the contrary; that we Should expect to see many similarities between different types of life.
So Fermi says that, and then Navy pilots say "but we're seeing these things almost every day, they were picked up on radar and we've measured them with our best instruments" corroborating what has been said by military personnel for close to 8 decades, to which scientists respond "the probability of that is close to zero." Now, how does that make sense?
DOYOU aCTUALLY CONSIDER, ,OUR ,COMPROMISED, , government/ P0LITICIANS,, TRUELY CREDIBLE.????? , , ,FOOL!!!
I think the answer is as obvious as the probabilities.
Definitely, there should be others.
Definitely, there are some far more evolved.
Definitely, we have been seeing something.
So, the obvious conclusion, is that they are here, they are all over. But they don't want us to know.
Funny how those measurements are never made available to the public but we're just supposed to blindly trust the US military at its word even though no one has independently confirmed these claims. Did you also fall for the WMDs in Iraq?
We could be surrounded by civilizations and not be able to just look up and see them sitting there. We need to look before saying there is no evidence.
There doesn't have to be dyson spheres everywhere if there are any alien civilizations at all.
Sky surveys have been conducted looking for excess infrared emissions ( i.e. waste heat) from megastructures, radio transmissions, etc.
@@douglaswilkinson5700 No they haven't
Yes they have. Here's one paper, but there are many others: arxiv.org/abs/2108.06597
@@frasercain From the paper you cited:
Two of the 4 sources are not well known in the literature, they are considered as potential hosts of Type III civilisations. These sources deserve further study and investigation.
Cool. :D
Like I said, that was just a quick literature search. There are a bunch more.
I really appreciate Cain's interview style and engagement of his guests. Well done. When I was young I was a big Star Trek fan. At the time I didn't understand the influence of Carl Sagan's thinking on Gene Roddenbery or the Star Trek universe. I think today Sagan's optimism of finding life in the universe is unwarranted. The conditions for life are far more rigorous than we imagined back in the 1950s and I think that means we need to be a bit pessimistic about finding life in our galaxy. In fact, I doubt it is worth the commitment of resources to its search.
Thanks a lot, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I agree with you, Sagan just didn't have enough information yet. I'm sure he'd have a more complex view about biosignatures if he was still alive.
@@frasercainI am not sure. Even in the 1980s and 90s Sagan was still only talking about liquid water as the condition for biological life on an exoplanet even though our knowledge had expanded considerably by then.
Would you like a word on the Fermi paradox from an old radio ham?
Consider the rapid evolution of our own telecommunications over the last 80 years or so: we've progressed from CW (dots and dashes of single frequency sine waves), to AM and FM, to PM (phase modulation) and QAM, and finally the various spread-spectrum techniques we now use. If you look for us from a great distance now, you will have great difficulty discerning our emissions from the white noise of the background. SETI has to be very clever about searching.
Thought a lot about the fermi paradox, and for me the most crushing problem is : how we can discuss it, when we only have the human sight on all ? We talk in ways that humans had experienced and even our wildest dreams are human based. Can we realy think of things that are non-human and how this ways influence thhe whole problem ?
"That's the beauty of science. It shows you how to change your mind."
Let us all adopt this position
There is little value in stubbornness for stubbornness sake.
One thing that kind of amuses me is that many people discussing this question assume that an advanced civilization could overcome the extremely daunting problem of traveling across many light-years, but would still be using communication technologies that we could detect. Given recent human history, it seems quite the opposite -- we have made magical advances in communication but haven't really gotten anywhere with ultra-fast space travel.
If there was another civilization exactly as advanced as us looking for life on our level, how close would they have to be for us to discover each other?
My bet for solution to the Fermi Paradox would be
A. We haven't really looked that hard
B. Civilizations are a lot rarer than we think
C. Interstellar travel is more impractical/unnecessary than we realize.