00:00:21.200 Hello and welcome to Topcast for an extra ordinary episode and by the title you can probably
00:00:27.840 guess what it's all about. So hence a slightly different setup, I'm going to different place
00:00:31.680 anyway but I thought the darkness just adds to the mood of what we're talking about.
00:00:36.240 I'm not using any notes, I'm not reading anything today, this is nothing to do really with the beginning
00:00:41.200 of infinity, I guess it touches on some small issues there associated with the beginning of infinity,
00:00:46.000 but this will just be me thinking out loud about a particular topic. Now because I'm in this
00:00:52.880 different place and because I'm not using any notes, I don't actually have to read anything on the
00:00:56.320 screen today and so I can probably do away with my glasses. Also I noticed that in this particular
00:01:00.960 setup things are reflecting off these glasses so I'm going to get rid of them. If this is disconcerting
00:01:05.120 to you because I know that sometimes seeing people who know where glasses without them can look
00:01:08.880 a bit strange you can just listen to the audio I suppose. Okay so I'm going to as I say just be
00:01:16.080 thinking out loud about this particular issue because it's been coming up on social media recently
00:01:20.720 and in various other forums that I sometimes participate in and of my own personal life people have
00:01:24.720 been asking me about it as well I'm on my view happens to be and so I'm going to take a meandering
00:01:29.360 walk around the different arguments that I'm aware of. I don't believe any of these arguments,
00:01:34.560 I don't think that any of them are things that are able to constrain our knowledge on this topic
00:01:42.160 particularly well but what I want to do is to present to you firstly the thing that everybody
00:01:47.520 knows about this topic and then to try and present some alternatives that sometimes people don't
00:01:52.800 tend to talk about but even these really interesting alternative perspectives on this idea
00:01:58.320 aren't things that I believe and even though whenever people ask me about them these other interesting
00:02:03.680 ideas these are the interesting theories which purportedly are solutions to this particular topic
00:02:08.240 aren't anything that I believe I just raise them with people because they're the interesting
00:02:13.360 counterpoints too what everyone thinks they already know about the topic. So what do people
00:02:18.480 already think they know about the topic? The topic being are we alone is there other life out there
00:02:26.240 in the universe and by we I suppose we mean technologically advanced or intelligent life like us
00:02:33.680 but perhaps you just want to interpret we as any form of life whatsoever. Now we'll discuss both
00:02:40.000 of those but let's begin with what everyone knows. What everyone knows is the universe is really
00:02:46.960 really big really big our galaxy alone contains 200 billion stars billion stars that's with the
00:02:54.000 B but some people say it could be as large as 400 billion stars it could be double that I don't
00:03:01.520 know but I know it's a big number and now galaxy of course is just one of very very many throughout
00:03:07.600 the universe there could be 200 billion galaxies within our observable universe and of course the
00:03:12.880 observable universe is just a part of a much greater hole in fact the greater hole could be spatially
00:03:18.720 infinite we don't know some people have said some people I mean some astronomers have claimed
00:03:24.720 something like two trillion galaxies in the observable universe I don't know I know it's a big number
00:03:30.320 everyone knows it's a big number everyone knows the universe is really really big what we also know
00:03:35.360 is that almost all of these stars in all of these galaxies have planets and many many of those
00:03:41.600 planets are going to be solid like the earth terrestrial planets and terrestrial planets are kind of
00:03:46.480 what we're looking for because that's where you might get complicated living things we don't know
00:03:50.560 there could be complicated living things flying through the clouds of Jupiter for all we know
00:03:54.400 there could be complicated living things swimming in the seas of Europa or the ocean of Europa
00:03:59.680 which is one of the moons of Jupiter which has this icy crust beneath which I think six kilometers
00:04:05.840 beneath this is the thickness of this ice beneath which there is supposedly an ocean of water
00:04:11.520 which could contain bacteria or it could contain fish or whales or who knows I doubt it but
00:04:19.600 we can talk about that as well what we also know and what scientists are coming to understand
00:04:25.040 really well is that our previous ideas of the conditions required in order to sustain life and
00:04:32.640 to allow to thrive are changing all the time the previously thought of as barriers to what
00:04:40.880 could possibly enable life to survive have been shattered over and again specifically by these
00:04:47.600 little critters called extremophiles and an extremophile is something that likes extreme conditions
00:04:55.040 and we used to think that well a good way to let's say sterilize something is to boil it in water
00:05:01.120 because nothing can survive in boiling water the DNA denatures itself it's not stable at really
00:05:06.960 high temperatures boiling your water is a really good way to make it safe at least to kill the
00:05:12.480 collar out to kill the nasty bacteria that might otherwise cause you sickness from drinking
00:05:17.360 in pure water you should boil your water if you are unsure about its quality but we've learned
00:05:23.360 over the last few decades there are actually R.K.a a certain kind of bacteria that is thermophilic
00:05:29.360 that will survive at 105 110 I think the highest number I've seen is 130 degrees Celsius
00:05:35.760 above the boiling point of water and this little critter will survive there are other kinds
00:05:42.000 of critters by critter I mean bacteria or okay or something simple like that which can survive at
00:05:48.160 even lower temperatures lower than the freezing point of water they will happily survive in ice
00:05:53.600 that is minus 15 degrees Celsius or something which we normally thought would cause the
00:05:58.560 cell which is a sphere full of water to explode or to shut up but now we know that these
00:06:06.000 kind of bacteria contain chemicals like antifreeze which actually protect them from such extreme
00:06:11.760 environments so there are these extreme environments in which life on earth can survive so
00:06:16.480 we used to think for example that the habitable zone the zone around a star where life would
00:06:23.120 be able to survive and thrive was quite narrow but now we think well if you can have bacteria
00:06:29.840 or R.K.a that are surviving well above the boiling point of water well then that might mean
00:06:34.480 that places that are well above the temperature of the earth could still sustain life and places
00:06:40.160 that are cold might still sustain life if you're interested in extreme of fire stuff look up
00:06:44.400 R.K.a or thermo files and sometimes complicated creatures relatively complicated creatures
00:06:50.720 seem to have this capacity to survive in really hostile environments as well you can look up
00:06:54.640 the water bear or the tardy grade I think it's called and this thing will happily survive
00:06:59.920 really high pressures high temperatures low temperatures high oxygen environments low oxygen
00:07:04.240 environments high salt low salt it's really robust so maybe there's life out there that is
00:07:09.920 able to survive in these kind of environments which means the places that we think that life could
00:07:14.400 survive out there in the universe around stars is much much greater so there is this
00:07:18.480 circumstance still a habitable zone the place around a star where a planet should be
00:07:24.720 such a temperature is not too hot not too cold but just right in order to support life now this
00:07:30.320 point I should of course interject because lots of people say we all are only talking about life
00:07:34.240 as we know it you're only talking about the kind of life that we're familiar with well no not
00:07:38.880 necessarily it could be completely different it might be a life based on silicon there's lots
00:07:42.800 of reasons chemically speaking that we think that silicon for example isn't a good substitute for
00:07:48.880 carbon it can't form these really long chains and rings although it has a valence of four it
00:07:54.320 seems like it's similar chemically speaking to silicon there's a lot of challenges to try and
00:07:59.360 create complicated structures out of silicon here on earth or you get his silicates in rocks which
00:08:04.880 are about the most complicated things silicon will produce you don't get being long strands big
00:08:09.360 long molecules like the DNA strand made out of silicon so it seems like carbon is the way in
00:08:14.560 which to encode information in complicated ways in order to produce the genetic information that
00:08:19.440 you need to pass on from one generation to the next carbon seems to be the thing the physical
00:08:25.280 way in which life might instantiate its own information nevertheless yes of course people can
00:08:31.840 object to say well again you're constrained by your own imagination maybe there are other ways
00:08:38.080 things you can't even imagine things we can't even detect and ah-ha well if it's something we
00:08:42.960 can't detect then we've left the realm of science for now so we can only talk about the kind of
00:08:49.360 life that would be detectable that's what scientists are interested in doing then it's in
00:08:53.600 fine again and by definition if something isn't detectable and if it's something we can't possibly
00:08:57.840 imagine then there's no point trying to search for something you can't imagine and you can't
00:09:02.800 detect anyway you know I like to entertain the idea that maybe there are civilizations made of
00:09:07.840 dark matter dark matter is the stuff that we have no way of detecting except through
00:09:12.480 its gravitational influence on other large things out there in space like entire galaxies which
00:09:18.080 rotate too fast for us to assume that all the matter there is actually luminous matter that
00:09:23.840 we can detect in other words see dark matter is something we cannot see we cannot see it but
00:09:29.920 we know that it's there however we don't know what it's made of but maybe maybe it can form
00:09:35.760 complicated structures maybe whatever this dark matter stuff is people can be formed out of it
00:09:40.960 hospitalizations might be here in this room surrounding us made of dark matter there might be
00:09:45.280 dark matter people we just have no way of seeing them no way of detecting them that's a scary
00:09:49.120 thought isn't it or is that a comforting thought to know that there are actually other people
00:09:52.320 there right beside you this is completely and utterly the realm of science fiction and I do not
00:09:58.320 believe it for a moment but I'm not saying it's impossible that's all but that's not saying much
00:10:03.360 saying that something is physically possible we just don't know how okay I've just changed my
00:10:08.240 audio levels because listing back to myself I sounded a little bit distorted so I've turned things
00:10:13.200 down a little bit hopefully this is a little bit more comforting to your ears let's see I was saying
00:10:19.200 that these are the things that people already know people already know the universe is huge it
00:10:25.440 contained hundreds of billions of galaxies in each of those hundreds of billions of galaxies
00:10:30.000 contains hundreds of billions of stars and those stars have planet to round them and many of them
00:10:35.600 are going to have conditions which are just right for the kind of life we find here on earth even
00:10:40.800 if that life is extreme a fire life and can only survive in hostile environments that means there's
00:10:46.160 a lot of places throughout all the galaxies in the universe to harbor life to have a place where
00:10:52.880 life can not only survive but thrive I'll just throw in one little additional fact there's
00:10:58.800 not only a habitable zone around stars namely the place where we think water would be not to
00:11:05.840 hot and boil away and not to cold and just freeze completely solid but we liquid we are basically
00:11:12.080 solutions of a kind you know we are chemicals dissolved in water as is every other animal and plant
00:11:18.240 and life form on earth we are things that use water as a solvent to transport around the nutrients
00:11:24.160 that we need inside of our bodies so we're looking for water out there or places at least that
00:11:30.640 water might be found and once you find the water maybe you find the life nearby within it somewhere
00:11:37.760 there's a caveat to all of this which is that there is also something called a galactic
00:11:43.120 habitable zone now if we cast our minds back to just after the big bang there was a very first
00:11:50.080 generation of stars and of necessity that first generation of stars must have been made out of
00:11:56.160 only hydrogen helium because that's pretty much all that was created during the big bang there was
00:12:00.560 hydrogen helium and trace amounts of lithium and maybe the smallest amounts of brilliant but
00:12:05.280 nothing else absolutely nothing else now given that that's the case given that that's the case
00:12:09.600 all you've got is basically hydrogen helium any stars that form will be made out of hydrogen
00:12:13.600 helium any planets to form around those stars would also be made out of hydrogen helium which
00:12:17.680 means you won't have the opportunity for complicated chemistry you won't have the opportunity
00:12:22.160 for a terrestrial planet or rocky planet like the earth and around these first generation of stars
00:12:27.280 so if you have metal pore stars metal pore regions in a galaxy by metal pore we mean astronomers
00:12:35.120 mean anything more heavy more dense more complicated higher up on the periodic table than helium
00:12:42.800 so lithium counts as a metal it is technically a metal in chemistry anyway but so to lithium
00:12:47.600 beryllium boron carbon nitrogen all of these things metals on non-metals to a chemist are metals
00:12:54.400 to an astronomer we just call them metals okay anything that is heavier than hydrogen helium
00:13:00.400 so if you have just hydrogen helium then you can't have complicated chemistry because
00:13:05.600 helium doesn't bond with anything at all it doesn't even bond with itself and hydrogen in such
00:13:10.240 condition can bond with itself but then you've got the most complicated thing that you've got
00:13:14.320 in the universe is a H2 molecule which isn't particularly interesting hydrogen can't bond with
00:13:19.200 helium that doesn't work chemically either so you need you need at least a second generation of
00:13:24.000 stars you need that first generation made of hydrogen helium to explode and to scatter their remnants
00:13:28.400 throughout the galaxy in reaching the interstellar medium such that you can then have a planet
00:13:32.800 that is rocky and then on the rocky planet you might get some complicated chemistry going
00:13:37.440 but this leads to the idea of a galactic habitable zone if you have a first generation of stars
00:13:42.480 stars that don't contain any metals anything more complicated than helium then you won't
00:13:48.560 have complicated chemistry but there are certain regions in the galaxy where it's metal poor it's
00:13:53.840 so metal poor in other words there's so much hydrogen helium and so little of anything else in
00:13:58.720 the periodic table that scientists think that you won't get terrestrial planets in those parts
00:14:03.760 of the galaxy and so you can map parts of the galaxy to find out using spectroscopy how much
00:14:09.040 metals are in certain parts and I think in many of these in many galaxies that we see out there
00:14:14.160 there could be a galactic habitable zone far away from the central bulge of this the I think
00:14:19.920 of a spiral galaxy but there are metal poor regions around in galaxies and there might be
00:14:27.840 metal poor entire galaxies as well so not all the galaxies might actually be capable after all
00:14:33.760 of creating or generating sustaining complex life the low intelligent mode but that said
00:14:40.960 we're going to ignore that complication for the fact for this particular argument this argument
00:14:46.240 that everybody knows this argument that the universe is so huge so implacably vast
00:14:51.680 that it has to be teeming with life it has to be there's just so many planets don't you
00:14:56.720 realize the number is astronomical it's literally astronomical how many planets are out there well
00:15:01.360 someone a famous astronomer on Twitter Ethan Seagull I think his name is he's got a number
00:15:08.720 lots of people have got numbers you are asking astronomer they'll give you a number about how
00:15:12.000 many planets are out there in the galaxy out there in the universe Ethan Seagull has
00:15:16.000 tended the power of 25 there okay so that's his number that's a huge number that's a huge number
00:15:22.240 and so now let's just do the thought experiment that everyone kind of does if even only one
00:15:26.960 percent or less than that a fraction of a percent of those planets out there had some bacteria
00:15:33.600 then you only did a fraction of a percent of those planets that have the bacteria to evolve
00:15:38.480 into complicated life forms and you will absolutely certainly have millions upon millions of
00:15:43.520 advanced civilizations out there somewhere you only did the tiniest percentage it's simple maths
00:15:48.160 to do 10 to the power of 25 planets a tiny fraction of those can involve life and a tiny fraction
00:15:53.520 of those will evolve into intelligent life and you still have a vast vast number of places
00:15:59.760 where intelligent civilizations will arise this is the argument that we all know but apparently
00:16:05.200 the first person to come up with this argument and to think of this argument are get to name
00:16:09.920 this argument and that was in rico fermi in rico fermi the physicist I've never understood why
00:16:17.680 it gets to be called named after him because I'm sure a lot of other people have thought
00:16:20.960 precisely the same thing but so the story goes fermi the physicist was sitting there at a coffee
00:16:27.360 table or lunch table or something with his colleagues and they're discussing exactly this they're
00:16:31.760 discussing this kind of question and fermi asks the classic question in response to all of the
00:16:38.560 facts that I've just laid out there although it would have been back in the day when fermi was
00:16:42.640 around talking about this so he wouldn't have known exactly what we know now in terms of number
00:16:48.240 of stars in the galaxy number of galaxies within the universe the proportion of stars that
00:16:54.320 contain planets I think it's almost all of them he didn't know all of these facts but he had
00:16:59.840 certainly an understanding certainly a reasonable understanding that the universe is vast
00:17:04.160 and because the universe is vast it's got to contain life there somewhere and some of that life
00:17:08.000 has to have evolved into intelligent life and so fermi asks where are they well where are they
00:17:15.600 where are all of these civilizations and that is where the interesting arguments come now
00:17:22.560 and lots of people at advanced arguments over the years and so I've just given you the argument that
00:17:26.720 everyone kind of knows that they should be out there somewhere now if you believe most science
00:17:31.120 fiction movies what they're doing is they're hiding they're hiding and if you're interested in
00:17:36.800 UFOs if you're one of these people who like Joe Rogan is extreme is just fascinated by the possibility
00:17:43.520 that there are these things like tic-tacs out there if you've been looking at that conspiracy theory
00:17:48.800 recently that the the the the the navy or the Air Force in America has cracked these things
00:17:55.520 called tic-tacs and these tic-tacs apparently show technology that is just incompatible with
00:18:02.160 anything we have right now and people are very very impressed by what they've seen because
00:18:08.240 these are Air Force pilots and this is the military actually admitting the American military
00:18:13.040 admitting that they they have something there that they cannot explain and I am with Neil
00:18:17.840 deGrasse Tyson on this that in a sense in a sense that's where the conversation stops until
00:18:23.920 you have far better evidence you need far better evidence it's a UFO perhaps but the
00:18:30.960 use stands for unidentified we don't know what it is but to leap from it's something we don't know
00:18:37.280 we don't know what it is it's unidentified two it's an alien that's crossed the galaxy using
00:18:42.240 technology that's far beyond ours and they've used warp drives and they've gone through wormholes
00:18:46.480 and who knows what is too much of a leap it's too much of a leap there all things being equal
00:18:54.000 something more simple is probably going to be the answer is is going to be a better explanation
00:19:00.400 is going to be a better explanation I'll give you one experimental military technology
00:19:06.800 which the US government absolutely does not want anyone to know anything about
00:19:10.480 and so even if their own pilots in the Navy who don't have the sufficient clearance to know
00:19:17.440 about this stuff discover it they're not going to admit to it but they don't want to appear to
00:19:21.760 be covering it up either so they're willing to publish something and to say yes we found this
00:19:25.600 thing and we can't explain it but they might very well be able to explain it so they don't want
00:19:28.880 to tell anyone so who knows who knows there could be secret military technology out there it
00:19:32.960 could simply be and here's a possibility it could be military technology that tricks other advanced
00:19:41.360 military technology so if you look at this video of this tick-tack of this UFO this flying
00:19:49.120 saucer type thing it's not a flying saucer or such but it's apparently alien technology
00:19:53.440 maybe it's something that's designed specifically to confuse
00:19:57.440 the muse upset the systems and the pilot of a Navy or an Air Force fighter jet maybe that's
00:20:07.040 specifically what it's for to distract them because that's a pretty good defense mechanism I
00:20:11.760 mean if the enemy Air Force has decided to invade you if you can hit a button and some sort of
00:20:18.800 technology dazzles their eyes and causes them to hallucinate and to think that they're seeing UFOs
00:20:23.680 that's pretty cool that would put them off trying to bomb you while they they run away from the
00:20:29.680 alien okay whatever the case I'm not really interested in pursuing the details of that particular
00:20:34.480 example just to say that are the aliens trying to hide from us it appears as though they don't
00:20:40.000 want to be seen in either case they're not doing very well by the way if it is the case they don't
00:20:44.800 want to be seen they keep on being they keep on being spotted by us primitive humans using our
00:20:50.880 simple cameras and always in poor resolution as well whatever the case they're not doing well
00:20:56.880 or they want to be seen they want to be captured on a film in which case they're not doing
00:21:01.040 particularly well because they're not just landing in Times Square or in Trafalgar Square or
00:21:06.400 Sydney Harbour or somewhere okay if they want to be seen and they could easily be seen if they
00:21:11.360 wanted to be seen if they wanted to hide and they have such advanced technology surely they
00:21:15.680 could hide better than what they have been hiding I really do not think that we've been visited
00:21:20.160 though so that's that's my card on the table I think that that what that thus far what people have
00:21:28.480 brought forward in saying that this is evidence of alien technology alien life is very very poor
00:21:36.320 okay it does not reach the threshold but I think could cause anyone to say oh yes absolutely that is
00:21:43.040 evidence of alien intelligence of some kind however we might still think we might still think that the
00:21:49.360 answer to Fermi's paradox Fermi's question where are they is that they are hiding now they
00:21:55.200 might be hiding because they're concerned they're concerned about being detected by other even
00:22:02.400 more advanced life forms which could be hostile which could be hostile and so aren't we stupid we
00:22:08.080 silly humans are sitting there transmitting our radio broadcast out there like a beacon allowing
00:22:12.960 everyone to know that we're here and we shouldn't be we should be hiding like the aliens are
00:22:17.280 hiding the aliens are hiding from each other because they know that not only is the universe a hostile
00:22:22.160 place and not really friendly with all of black holes and all of its supernovas going off and all
00:22:28.320 of the cosmic events that could cause the destruction of their civilization but there are other
00:22:33.040 alien civilizations out there that might take over their own civilization let's just do away with
00:22:37.760 this one really really quickly the argument here is precisely well it's a very similar argument
00:22:43.280 to the concern about robots taking over the world right that artificial intelligence is going to
00:22:47.920 get so advanced that it's going to turn this terminator type thing and it's going to want to wipe
00:22:52.560 us all out now I think in both cases the robot are going to take over the world they're going to
00:22:58.960 want to kill us all destroy us all find out that we're useless and we're in the way of their
00:23:03.280 advancing technology and their advancing knowledge and we are just slow useless humans that
00:23:07.760 need to be exterminated and the aliens who if only they could detect us would come down and
00:23:14.800 exterminate the surface of the planet because they would think that we're evil or they would
00:23:18.320 not take over our resources something like that I guess here is the beginning of infinity
00:23:25.200 style response to that the beginning of infinity style response to that which I would indoors
00:23:31.040 is that in both cases the robots that are going to take over and the aliens which are going to
00:23:37.680 take over the aliens by the way that have flown across the galaxy or across the universe using
00:23:43.440 technology far beyond our capabilities right now and the robots which are able to think so much
00:23:48.960 faster in both cases they've made a lot of progress they've made a huge amount of progress a
00:23:53.760 vast amount of progress at rates possibly faster than we are making our progress so they're
00:24:01.200 thinking better than us certainly on the topic of technology and in science now if we just stick
00:24:08.080 with the aliens for a moment how is it that they've been able to make such progress in science
00:24:12.480 and technology well there's only one way there's only one way to have a fully open society a
00:24:17.760 critical society a society that resembles ours only better in many ways it's certainly better
00:24:24.320 technologically which means it must be better mathematically and scientifically it must also be the
00:24:30.160 case that it's better politically because the progress that it's been able to make and sustain
00:24:35.920 over so many years possibly millions of years maybe billions of years unlike would be billions
00:24:41.360 but let's say millions of years this is a society that is super advanced maybe it's a
00:24:46.880 society that's only a thousand years ahead of us we can get back to that but I think it would have
00:24:51.360 to be millions of years ahead of us like out of your remarkable coincidence if it's within sort
00:24:55.360 of a thousand years either side of how it where our society is right now in terms of its technology
00:25:00.560 and knowledge more than likely if we detect an advanced civilization out there it's not going to
00:25:06.240 be at exactly the same point in evolution and technology and progress that we are at it won't be
00:25:13.120 a long time behind us because we'll have no means of detecting it if it's many you know centuries
00:25:18.560 behind us nothing needs to be actually one century or so behind us and we won't be able to
00:25:23.280 detect it because there won't be radio signals being put out by that particular society that particular
00:25:29.280 technology so more than likely it's going to be a million years ahead of us something like that and
00:25:33.520 then we'll be able to detect it or then they could visit us anyway if such a society is out there
00:25:39.280 if such an alien civilization is out there and they're coming to visit us they're not going to want
00:25:44.800 to exterminate us if they're making progress in science and technology and of necessity politics
00:25:51.680 politically in order to sustain an environment where they can make this rapid progress over time
00:26:00.080 that is stable without destroying themselves they will have advanced morality they won't be
00:26:06.880 looking to exterminate us they will be better at us in every domain mathematically
00:26:13.440 scientifically technologically and morally morally they'll be more advanced than what we are
00:26:19.600 they will understand compassion in a way that we can barely comprehend they are not going to start
00:26:24.800 exterminating species randomly we're already at the point where almost all of us understand
00:26:30.720 that all humans are equal that we are all the same it doesn't matter what your race background
00:26:36.640 ethnicity is so we've already made that progress now we're kind of making a kind of pro people
00:26:42.160 would say it's a kind of progress where we're taking into account our circle of concerns our
00:26:46.960 circle of compassion is expanding out beyond just humans into other animals and people are very
00:26:52.000 concerned about other animals this is what we're doing this is what we human beings as pathetic
00:26:57.200 ignorant human beings so far behind these advanced aliens this is the way we're going and that
00:27:01.680 is progress that really is progress increasing the amount of concern kindness and compassion
00:27:07.920 for others not being completely callous in the way in which we treat other life forms
00:27:13.040 so wouldn't advance alien civilization act just like the supposed conquistadors did in the past
00:27:20.800 would they be tribal in the way that humans used to be people often bring up the conquistadors
00:27:26.080 in this won't the aliens be just like that they will see us just like the conquistadors of Spain
00:27:30.960 saw the anchor of South America they will take them over they will either bring disease or wipe
00:27:36.560 them out deliberately through violence I think this is completely incorrect if we human beings
00:27:42.320 of the year 2021 were to find an inconsabilization somewhere hitherto undiscovered would we go in
00:27:48.720 and destroy them would that be what we do we do exactly the opposite by the way we already know
00:27:53.680 there are tribes the amazon and people are not more advanced people are not going in there
00:27:59.760 or if they did in so far as we do we go into help we try and bring them medicine we try and bring
00:28:04.320 them technology I think it's actually wrong when we take a step back and say let's not interfere
00:28:09.520 I think that's actually wrong because I think many of those people at times would if they could
00:28:15.280 have access to the kind of technology that we have they would if they could cure the diseases
00:28:20.240 that their children are suffering when their children get sick or start dying of cancer we should
00:28:24.560 want to help them none of us want to go in there and exterminate them with machine guns no one
00:28:29.200 has that but apparently that's what people think about super advanced aliens the super advanced
00:28:35.040 aliens aren't going to be super advanced in their morality they're going to be super backward in
00:28:39.200 their morality they're going to be acting like Genghis Khan or something so they've increased
00:28:44.640 their knowledge in every single domain possible except morality and I think this is a strict
00:28:50.640 contradiction I don't think such an alien life form could actually ever become technologically
00:28:55.840 advanced because the precondition for doing science is an open society it's being open to criticism
00:29:02.400 and understanding that everyone has their own ideas that everyone should be able to criticize
00:29:07.440 each other's ideas that another creature that's able to communicate another creature that is
00:29:12.400 intelligent might have an idea that would be useful and this is the only way you can advance
00:29:16.720 technologically and scientifically so therefore you need a morality that takes into account
00:29:21.440 what a person is and the value that a person can provide it doesn't matter if that person
00:29:27.280 thinks a little bit more slowly or that person can't remember quite as much as what you can
00:29:31.680 the person might nonetheless come up with an idea it doesn't matter who they are they can come up
00:29:35.680 with an idea that could improve your own ideas the aliens will understand that the aliens will
00:29:41.680 understand that in fact the others will understand that a lot better than us and I also you
00:29:45.360 can dispense with what's this the Star Trek idea that the prime maximal whatever it's called
00:29:50.240 I can't remember you know that the people in the Star Trek ship they were not to interfere don't
00:29:57.200 interfere with alien life that you come across and I just think that that wouldn't happen either
00:30:05.040 for the same reason that the problem of evil hasn't been solved in theology if you've got an all
00:30:10.880 powerful god and all knowing god then it makes no sense that he's also an all good god because
00:30:19.280 if it was all good and he was all knowing then he would know about the suffering that's going to
00:30:23.920 happen tomorrow but when the tsunami happens and kills 40,000 innocent infant children there is
00:30:32.240 no good to come of that there is no good to come of that the only good that could possibly come
00:30:36.480 of that is that people then create the knowledge of ensuring that never happens again but was it
00:30:41.120 worth it for those 40,000 children who have died wouldn't have been better if god had
00:30:45.280 come down and just made sure that they didn't get killed so no one in theology has ever managed to
00:30:52.800 properly solve this problem of evil that evil natural disasters happen that people have no control
00:30:59.920 over which cause untold amounts of suffering and that if god if god existed then god should
00:31:05.760 have done something to prevent that sort of catastrophe and this is why it causes some people to
00:31:10.720 go well that kind of god mustn't exist can't exist it's incompatible it's illogical it's strictly
00:31:16.080 illogical so too with the aliens then the super advanced aliens would have an ethic surely would
00:31:23.040 have an ethic that when they look down at the earth if they've seen the earth would see all of
00:31:28.320 the suffering that they could help to solve by bringing their knowledge if not their resources
00:31:34.800 certainly their knowledge to the human race to help us to help us to advance so that we can
00:31:41.120 cure disease to prevent earthquakes to stop hurricanes in their tracks to travel to other planets
00:31:49.040 to survive in intergalactic space who knows what but an alien civilization that's super super advanced
00:31:57.200 and who looked on and did nothing we have to be super evil but then we get back to the whole
00:32:04.080 problem of such a super evil alien wouldn't have been able to make the kind of rapid progress
00:32:09.600 needed to travel across the galaxy and it wouldn't have been able to sustain other such a long
00:32:15.280 period of time that kind of progress without destroying its own members in some way because
00:32:20.800 that's the only way that such an evil kind of idea of allowing people to die who otherwise
00:32:27.040 didn't need to or allowing people to suffer who otherwise didn't need to if only they had your
00:32:30.400 knowledge that kind of alien couldn't have existed and survived and thrived for so long so that's
00:32:37.040 that but still I'm still circling firmy's paradox and the things that many people kind of already
00:32:44.640 know these things about the fact that the universe is extremely large and therefore you know we
00:32:51.360 tend to the power of 25 planets even if only a small fraction of them could actually sustain life
00:32:56.240 and even if only a small fraction of those actually did go on to have life on them and even if
00:33:00.000 and only a small fraction of those went on to evolve intelligent life there should still be
00:33:04.320 countless numbers of civilizations out there where are they okay here's the other answer that I
00:33:12.880 find far more interesting than any of that and I'm going to credit a lecturer of mine a past
00:33:18.480 lecturer of mine Charlie Longweaver this is where page I've mentioned him before on my other
00:33:22.960 podcast I find him wonderfully prolific and diverse in his interest here's a sample of his
00:33:30.080 papers here and he's talked about he's written papers on the rapid biogenesis on earth which is an
00:33:36.400 interesting kind of constraint on what we know about how life evolved here on planet earth
00:33:42.800 and here on planet earth it seems as though as soon as the conditions were right life appeared
00:33:49.520 because when the earth first formed something like 4.5 to billion years ago it was a pretty hostile
00:33:56.960 place molten rock it had a reducing atmosphere in other words there was no oxygen anywhere just
00:34:03.840 completely sterile probably no liquid water stuff like that but it cooled down over time and once
00:34:09.520 it was cool enough to have liquid water pretty much the geological evidence seems to suggest
00:34:15.280 life appeared but what was that early life like well it was bacteria okay over kind now that
00:34:22.560 okay that that very simple bacteria is a thermophilic bacteria something makes sense when we talk
00:34:27.200 about thermophiles the the first life on earth would have formed as soon as the earth was cool enough
00:34:32.320 but still really hot still really hot okay so it would have been near boiling point and so these
00:34:36.960 very first life forms probably evolved in an environment where there was very hot liquid water
00:34:44.640 and no oxygen but managed to survive in that terribly hostile environment then what happened next
00:34:51.280 what happened next well the earth continued to cool but for approximately the next two billion years
00:34:59.120 something like that 1.9 billion years nothing happened nothing much of consequence happened
00:35:04.640 1.9 billion years the bacteria didn't evolve to anything complicated they remained bacteria
00:35:10.480 they remained single-celled organisms it was 600 million years ago 600 million years ago
00:35:17.760 that the first complicated life arose and evolved very simple multicellular life
00:35:25.200 we're not talking dinosaurs not talking humans we're not talking frogs we're talking microscopic
00:35:30.480 life for the most part so that was 600 million years ago for the first 1.9 two billion years of
00:35:38.480 life on earth there was bacteria so the bacteria didn't evolve into anything complicated so what
00:35:45.520 does this suggest it suggests that given the opportunity bacteria by and large don't evolve into
00:35:52.560 more complicated things they remain bacteria the reasons why the bacteria became more complicated
00:36:00.400 evolved into something that was multicellular rather than unicellular it's it's a topic of discussion
00:36:07.200 and an open question in science still no one knows no one knows and by the way once we get that
00:36:13.600 multicellular organism we still don't have an animal we don't have anything like a koala
00:36:21.520 or a dog or a bird or a fish anything like that no we have to wait even longer for that to appear
00:36:26.560 and and we went through phases of where the the the surface of the planet was covered in trial
00:36:31.520 bites the trial bites came and they went they disappeared again but they weren't particularly complicated
00:36:37.120 how long would we have to wait if we populated a planet with trial bites for them to evolve
00:36:42.720 into making radio telescopes okay so Charlie Lange with a you know wrote this paper
00:36:48.960 with tomorrow Davis I think another astronomer in Australia talking about this fact okay
00:36:54.880 the rapid biogenesis that happened on earth the rapid how quickly the bacteria appeared on the
00:37:02.880 earth can tell us something about life in the rest of the universe that perhaps it's the case
00:37:08.720 that as soon as the conditions are right somewhere as soon as a planet is reasonably cool as soon
00:37:13.680 as a planet has some water on its surface you'll get life you'll get life this is a promising
00:37:18.880 thing if you're interested in there being life out there in the universe this seems to suggest
00:37:22.880 and we've only got one data point of course the earth so it doesn't tell us much it's not really
00:37:26.640 science we've got one data point but you know it's the best we can do we've got a kind of a
00:37:30.720 problem in that we have on earth a situation where it appears as though life arose very quickly
00:37:38.960 as soon as the conditions were right so it doesn't seem like it's that hard for life to arise
00:37:43.040 but I've made this point in another podcast as well that we have an on the other hand on the
00:37:48.400 other hand there's a set of experiments called the milliuri experiments the milliuri experiments
00:37:53.760 are absolutely fascinating our first time in I think 1952 something like that going from memory
00:37:59.120 and milliuri they essentially the idea why she take a flask you put all the chemicals that
00:38:04.480 you think the early earth had all the inanimate chemicals carbon dioxide maybe some oxygen nitrogen
00:38:12.240 and you have this super monia water you put it all into a flask put a cap on the flask and then
00:38:18.640 you send some electricity through the flask and you shine some lights at an ultraviolet light and
00:38:22.880 you know shine replicate what the sun is like the electricity is supposed to replicate what the
00:38:27.040 lightning is does and then you leave it for a month a year and you see what's in the flask at
00:38:32.800 the end of that time milliuri of course had high hopes I think that maybe something would have
00:38:37.920 crawled out of the flask well not exactly but maybe they would have made bacteria what they made
00:38:42.880 were amino acids and this was very exciting at the time at the time everyone went well amino acids
00:38:47.760 that's pretty cool we started off with just these really simple molecules of you know maybe
00:38:53.520 some carbon dioxide and oxygen hydrogen water and nitrogen and what we get at the end of it is an
00:39:01.680 amino acid which is a building block of a protein which can go into becoming a nucleic acid which
00:39:07.760 can become DNA in that's life so it seems like we're on the road we're on the road maybe if we
00:39:13.280 left the flask a little bit longer we would get proteins we would get proteins and maybe left it a
00:39:17.680 little bit longer we could get nucleic acids and then we'd have a cell this was the story of course
00:39:23.520 making amino acids it does not really put us on the path of making complicated life or making
00:39:29.840 any life at all making amino acids it's kind of like walking along a road and seeing a pile of
00:39:36.320 bricks and expecting that the next thing that you will see along that road is it's an opera house
00:39:41.680 or a skyscraper now depending upon where you are perhaps yes you might indeed think that
00:39:45.760 but if you're seeing very simple bricks it might be an indication of perhaps a house coming up
00:39:51.920 but really you don't have anything to go on you're just extrapolating from what you think
00:39:56.960 is the necessary logical progression of these things but there is nothing in science which
00:40:03.840 suggests that once you've got amino acids you will definitely then get proteins that this is
00:40:08.640 necessarily what's going to happen and we've also found since the military experiments
00:40:13.600 that amino acids are really really common throughout the entire universe we can find them using
00:40:17.120 spectroscopy in clouds of nebula out there in the galaxy so amino acids are kind of they are
00:40:23.360 necessary building blocks yes they're a part of life so far as we can tell but we haven't found
00:40:28.960 complicated proteins and I don't think that even the repeats of military's experiments the modern
00:40:34.160 day analogs of these experiments where we have tried to replicate conditions such that they are
00:40:40.400 far more bio friendly than the original ones that Miller and Yuri did Miller and Yuri didn't
00:40:45.600 really know what the early earth was like now we have a better idea better understanding
00:40:50.880 and I don't think any of those have produced much fruit either so here we have two competing
00:40:55.760 ideas on the one hand the military experiments seem to suggest it's hard to make life out of
00:41:01.680 inanimate chemicals and on the other hand we have the line weaver type staff who says well
00:41:07.920 statistically speaking it looks as though life appeared on earth really really soon
00:41:14.560 and so maybe this gives us some clue as to how soon it would appear on other planets as well
00:41:19.520 so the line weaver one says life might be more common than what we think but the milliurae one
00:41:24.960 says life might not be that common at all because it appears too hard to make complicated
00:41:29.200 chemicals now I'm going to come back to line weaver later on but I'll just interject with another
00:41:34.640 name here and that's Peter Slazak I'll credit him with this argument and the argument goes like
00:41:41.920 this earlier on we were talking about the sheer number of planets in the universe an absolutely
00:41:49.120 astronomical number astronomical well I want to present you with a number that will completely
00:41:56.000 blow out of the water this astronomical number they'll make this astronomical number seem like a
00:42:02.320 pittance in comparison and here's the way we're going to do it we're going to consider evolution
00:42:08.800 evolution by natural selection now a little quick lesson on evolution there are things called
00:42:16.000 convergent features of evolution and a convergent feature of evolution is something that keeps
00:42:22.400 cropping up in life forms that evolve independently of one another let's consider the wing the wing
00:42:32.720 existed in insects longer it evolved and it has spread throughout the insect world lots of insects
00:42:40.240 have wings independently it evolved in dinosaurs there were winged dinosaurs and independently again
00:42:48.320 there were winged birds and also certain mammals have wings as well which evolved independently
00:42:56.080 of others so wings are things that just seem to keep appearing in life forms throughout the geologic
00:43:04.720 fossil record so lots of species have have had wings it's a useful feature evolutionist
00:43:11.440 found this is a solution there's a niche there or a niche in order for these winged creatures
00:43:17.520 to fill and survive and thrive wings are useful wings are a convergent feature of evolution
00:43:26.480 how often has intelligence arisen how often has intelligence arisen intelligence of the
00:43:33.760 humankind the creative kind the in David Deutsches words the ability to create explanations kind
00:43:41.040 the universal explainer kind well it seems as though here on earth it arose once it arose once
00:43:50.560 not independently in many different ways now it might be the case that they're co-existed with
00:43:55.600 homo sapiens other kinds of hominoids which are also intelligent but I want to suggest that all
00:44:02.080 of these intelligent hominoids if indeed there were multiples side by side and it seems as though
00:44:07.680 there were had a common ancestor there was a first universal explainer there was a first human
00:44:14.640 being type creature who was a creative thinker who was different to the ones that went before
00:44:21.600 there was a discrete change in the genetics in some way which took whatever the creature was
00:44:28.720 that didn't have this creative capacity to create generate explanations into one that could
00:44:35.200 whatever it was like slightly before that I don't know I'm conjecturing but I imagine there was a
00:44:40.560 common ancestor of these intelligent creative thinking species and we are the sole
00:44:48.560 descendant of that creature we are the sole descendant homo sapiens that exist today are the only
00:44:54.400 living extant representative of this particular species so there's one kind there's one kind
00:45:01.040 I think it's not like the wing it's not like the eye this creative brain appears to have only
00:45:10.320 appeared once it's not a convergent feature of evolution and in fact the experiment was done
00:45:16.560 the experiment was done and other people have observed this other people have observed this
00:45:21.440 but long we were talks about and various other people have talked about how well the experiment
00:45:26.160 the natural experiment was run here on earth by which I mean 200 million years ago I think
00:45:31.760 approximately the continents were separated so Europe Asia was quite separate to Africa
00:45:39.440 completely separate to Australia separate to North and South America so these are kind of like
00:45:45.360 experiments natural experiments let's populate them with living things and let's see what happens
00:45:50.480 well up there in Europe you have some badges evolving and squirrels and over in Asia you have some
00:45:59.760 lions and tigers and in North America you have some bears and in South America you have some
00:46:06.720 jaguars and other critters getting about Australia we have kangaroos only in one place Africa
00:46:15.040 did humans evolve did humans evolve and they evolved the capacity very quickly to well not very
00:46:23.600 quickly as we've talked about there you haven't studied societies but they evolved the capacity to
00:46:28.240 have complicated civilizations and that included the ability to study astronomy and to listen out
00:46:34.400 for radio signals from our space using radio telescopes so that kind of creative capacity to build
00:46:41.040 technology and so on and so forth evolved once in Africa so the thought experiment is left alone
00:46:48.800 how long would it take for the creatures in North and South America to evolve into this kind of
00:46:54.960 creature that could do such a thing leaving a bear alone for as long as you like a brown bear is
00:47:01.200 it going to start to build an engineering company is it going to start to write down nuclear
00:47:09.600 developments or poetry no what about in Australia when are the kangaroos going to involve
00:47:16.640 evolve some intelligence well they won't this is the fallacy of intelligent design evolution
00:47:24.960 or lemarchism evolution does not have sight it cannot see ahead to try and aim for a particular
00:47:32.480 thing and it doesn't appear given blind evolution which is what we actually have that there is
00:47:39.520 any sense in which intelligence is a real niche that it is a thing that creatures evolve towards
00:47:48.320 now we have it but we are just looking backwards from ourselves and we are looking back from
00:47:54.000 ourselves and going well clearly everything is evolved to us we're the pinnacle but line we've
00:47:58.480 a makes the point by the way this is called the encephalization quotient which is the size of
00:48:05.440 your brain relative to the rest of your body and we have a really big brain relative to the rest
00:48:10.000 of the side of their body and so we look back in the evolution that has led to us the line the
00:48:16.160 lineage that we follow and see that as we go backwards the brains get smaller and the bodies get
00:48:21.360 bigger and we are the pinnacle of that and so everything appears to have led to us one we've
00:48:27.040 a makes the very salient argument that well an African elephant could do the same but with their
00:48:33.200 trunk the nasalization quotient because from the African elephant's point of view looking
00:48:38.560 backwards trunks got ever shorter in the past in the fossil record and so it appears as though
00:48:45.040 evolution has been aiming for an ever longer trunk so to a giraffe ever longer necks everything
00:48:51.440 that exists now every extant species that exists right now can do the same thing can look back
00:48:56.800 and trace the evolutionary lineage that led to them at the pinnacle but that is just a
00:49:04.560 false way of looking at evolution evolution is blind it's not aiming for anything in particular
00:49:09.600 everything is kind of an accident that happens to fit in a particular environment and unlike the
00:49:15.440 wing so for example birds might very well look back and go well everything's been aiming towards
00:49:20.800 something that can fly that would be a stronger argument because at least then it can point to
00:49:25.760 other species that also fly why because that's converging petra evolution and lots of different
00:49:30.560 species lots of different classes of animals and creatures have the capacity to fly but none of
00:49:37.760 them except for us have the capacity to think in the way that we do so we shouldn't expect that
00:49:44.720 evolution leads to intelligent life that's the line we've a part of the argument now Peter
00:49:50.080 Slizak who's an academic at the University of New South Wales a philosopher more than a physicist he
00:49:55.360 had he had something to kind of add to this to really constraint and to really pull any hope that you
00:50:01.280 had that there might be intelligent life out there from under you and again I just want to emphasize
00:50:06.720 I don't believe any of these things I don't know what the truth is I just want to in this episode
00:50:12.080 present to you some of the novel interesting arguments that maybe you haven't heard before
00:50:17.040 and here's Slizak's argument and I love it to tell you the truth because it's a criticism don't
00:50:23.040 I believe it I just say it's a it's a criticism of that argument that I began the entire episode
00:50:28.800 with that argument about astronomical numbers 10 to the power of 25 planets 10 or a sorry a one
00:50:36.480 followed by 25 zeros that's a number of planets in the universe that's phenomenal
00:50:42.320 an astronomical number well here's the number that's going to blow that out of the water absolutely
00:50:46.240 blow that out of the water make that number appear as a pittance a tiny number like comparison
00:50:54.400 here's how we do it here's the thought experiment imagine that you're a human being and you're
00:51:00.000 looking back at all the steps in evolutionary terms that have led to the human being how many would
00:51:07.760 that be we all started all species that exist on earth now started from that first single
00:51:15.600 celled life form that bacterial or archaic very microscopic thing single celled that existed
00:51:24.480 billions of years ago and for which for billions of years didn't change by the way so far as we
00:51:29.440 can tell how many steps are there between evolutionary steps discrete evolutionary changes in the
00:51:36.640 DNA from that first bacteria single celled thing to human things you know this single celled thing
00:51:44.080 it's evolving from the single cell thing into the multicellular thing into some sort of
00:51:49.920 fish thing you've seen the pictures you know and then it becomes like a fish thing that's got
00:51:54.400 legs like some sort of amphibian the amphibian thing becomes like a reptile sort of thing in the
00:51:58.800 reptile becomes a rat and then the rat thing becomes like a monkey thing which becomes more
00:52:04.800 upright eventually get to a human this occurs over billions of years billions of years this
00:52:09.120 takes how many discrete steps is there millions thousands okay let's be really really really
00:52:19.440 conservative let's say and this is obviously fantasy talk but let's say there's only a hundred
00:52:24.240 let's say there's only a hundred such steps completely unrealistic there's way more than that
00:52:28.640 but for the purpose of my argument I want to make the number of smallest possible so I said I'm
00:52:32.320 going to generate a really big number here so I'm going to present you the smallest possible big
00:52:36.960 number let's say there's only a hundred now each of those steps that led to us that necessarily
00:52:43.680 led to us each of those steps that led to us that didn't have to lead to us but led to us
00:52:50.320 and necessarily was required in order to lead to us but we can get back to that what chance
00:52:56.080 there's any one of those steps have ever occurring it could have occurred or not you know the
00:53:00.560 the the lizard thing didn't have to turn into the rat thing well the fish didn't have to turn
00:53:06.000 into the the fish with legs that could survive in an atmosphere rather than in the ocean
00:53:14.480 maybe each of those steps has like a one in a million chance of happening maybe one on a thousand
00:53:20.080 chance of let's be conservative let's be really generous let's say any of those steps had a one
00:53:25.680 in ten chance of happening it's a pretty high probability now what we have is this situation let's
00:53:32.560 say we've got those hundred steps and each of those hundred steps has a one in ten chance of
00:53:38.160 occurring well that means that for any two of them in a row that would be one in ten times one
00:53:44.320 in ten chance of occurring a one in a one hundred chance of occurring for both of them similar
00:53:48.000 to happen consecutively just the right order to lead to a human being the only species that we
00:53:54.240 know of on the face of the planet that has the capacity for creative thought or leading to the
00:53:59.760 common ancestor that we had with other intelligent species that existed on the planet there was this
00:54:06.080 first universal explain this first creatively thinking human being let's say there's a hundred
00:54:13.280 steps each of those steps has a one in ten chance of occurring then what we have the mathematics
00:54:18.320 works out like this it's one in ten times one in ten times one in ten it's one in ten
00:54:24.240 times one in ten a hundred times or one in ten to the power of a hundred now you don't have
00:54:31.200 to know much math to know that this is one over ten to the power of a hundred one over one followed
00:54:39.680 by 101 zeros 101 zeros now we can see this number completely destroys that ten to the power of
00:54:51.040 twenty five so anyone is talking about the astronomically large number of planets that's out there
00:54:56.560 and the astronomically large number of places that life could be if we seeded every single one
00:55:03.600 of those planets every single one of them with bacteria like we were seeded with for one of
00:55:09.360 another word a few billion years ago here on earth and even if we made every single one of those
00:55:15.120 planets really friendly bio-friendly gave it the right conditions lots of oxygen lots of water
00:55:20.880 oceans wind lightning sun the just the right temperature the other thing made all the plants like
00:55:27.600 that there would be no chance if this sequence of events was unique if this sequence of events
00:55:34.400 was unique that it should be replicated out there anywhere at all now many people might say
00:55:39.840 and this is a reasonable criticism of this is that there could be various ways various
00:55:44.640 evolutionary paths that could lead to a human being that could look but again that raises the question
00:55:49.920 of convergent evolution if there were these multiple ways of arriving at intelligent creative thinking
00:55:58.400 people then we should have seen other examples of that arise independently here on earth
00:56:03.840 but again how long would we have to have waited in Australia for it to have evolved people
00:56:12.160 the most complicated creatures that existed here in Australia five million years ago
00:56:16.240 were kangaroos and some ombats possums if we left them isolated as an experiment for another
00:56:25.920 million ten million hundred million billion years does anyone expect that those creatures will evolve
00:56:33.920 into something creative intelligent and able to send radio signals and perhaps travel across the
00:56:40.000 galaxy there's no reason to think that there's no reason to think that because evolution doesn't
00:56:45.120 work that way that if the conditions are right those creatures will just remain the same
00:56:51.600 you need selection pressure for evolution to really to cause diversity and to take advantage of
00:56:57.200 variation and of course that that can happen around the universe but there's no reason to
00:57:02.080 presume that there is this intelligence niche and and what line we've of course this is the
00:57:08.400 planet of the apes hypothesis the planet of the apes hypothesis that when you take away the human
00:57:14.560 beings out of the situation that there is this niche left behind there's this place for animals
00:57:21.840 to evolve into because there's nothing filling that particular nation so the kangaroos will actually
00:57:27.040 evolve into people because in the planet of the apes the premise of the movie is the human beings
00:57:32.560 are wiped out for whatever reason and years later it is discovered by because at time travelers
00:57:39.760 I can't remember other human beings from the future or something anyway the the the the apes the
00:57:48.400 great apes the chimpanzees the orangatans they they evolve into people they become fully functioning
00:57:57.040 creative people that have technology and civilization just like human beings do in other words
00:58:02.400 there is an arrow to evolution that Darwinian blind evolution will take a great ape and turn it
00:58:10.080 into a person left long enough if left long enough this is just a misconception so misconception
00:58:16.400 about how evolution works and so line we've as point is and so is sleaze x point that an
00:58:23.440 answer to the fermi paradox is we're utterly alone that the mathematics on the one hand doesn't
00:58:31.120 make any sense there simply aren't enough planets the universe isn't big enough to ensure that
00:58:37.520 evolution is going to lead to complicated life forms because it only happened here on earth once
00:58:42.080 there have been countless millions of species 99.9% of which have gone completely extinct none of
00:58:48.320 which showed any sign of creative intelligence like us except for our common ancestor okay and those
00:58:55.920 other species that we evolved from so I'm really interested here in the common ancestor that was
00:59:01.360 the first species that was able to you know create explanations because that that first creative
00:59:10.800 explainer that first universal explainer whatever it was whatever species that was it makes perfect
00:59:16.320 sense to me that that first species would split into other species because they would have
00:59:21.920 been as we know tribal and they would have separated from one another moved around Africa into
00:59:28.480 separate places that moved up to Asia whatever they moved around they got away from one another
00:59:34.960 and they were separated for a sufficient amount of time such that they evolved into a separate
00:59:40.320 species this is the way speciation occurs okay all you need to do is to separate the tribes for long
00:59:45.360 enough and you will have different species and I imagine that really primitive people would have
00:59:50.240 done exactly that ending up with different species of humans and then eventually one of the species
00:59:56.800 humans comes along and the humans managed to win the race in survival for whatever reason
1:00:03.680 whatever the case whatever the case with the only ones left with the only
1:00:07.840 extant universal explainers the other ones that existed have long since gone extinct but again I'm
1:00:13.360 just emphasizing the point that I think all of those other species that were like us or had the
1:00:17.760 capacity to think like us to do art like us to do thinking like us create explanations like us
1:00:24.080 be creative like us they came from the same place they came from the same universal original
1:00:32.160 universal explainer so that's it they're they're the things that I wanted to say today about
1:00:37.920 that particular issue the argument that everyone already knows about the astronomically large
1:00:43.120 universe that we live in with the astronomically large number of planets that's in it to be counted
1:00:48.960 by this idea that the biologically large number of small probable small probability that there is
1:00:58.960 of any any any any sequence of events in evolutionary terms leading to a person is so exceedingly
1:01:08.560 small that biological number completely blows the astronomical one out of the water the biological
1:01:14.480 number is far bigger than the astronomical one we should say when you've got a really huge number
1:01:19.040 that number is not astronomical that's biological that's how unlikely that thing is to occur
1:01:24.880 or that's how amazingly vast that thing happens to be how big that number happens to be now do I
1:01:30.080 believe any of this again I think I'm saying in this for about the fourth time no I don't believe
1:01:34.080 any of it I don't believe that we are alone in the universe I just don't know I don't believe
1:01:40.400 the universe is teeming with life we just don't know I don't think that the aliens are terribly
1:01:47.600 hostile and are coming after us because I think that if they make progress in science then I'll
1:01:53.840 make progress across all the domains across everywhere of necessity knowledge is this unified whole
1:01:59.920 you can't hold one area of knowledge completely static making no progress whatsoever while all the
1:02:06.160 other kinds you make progressing okay that that makes no sense whatsoever and it's especially
1:02:11.200 true of morality because morality is kind of the the underpinnings the conditions in which a society
1:02:18.800 either flourishes or doesn't and if the morality isn't right and therefore the politics is
1:02:23.520 the right the civilization won't be right and you won't have this open ended stream of knowledge
1:02:30.240 creation possible you won't be possible you'll have censorship and violence you'll have an
1:02:37.440 uncaring disregard for other life forms both your neighbors and other species but that's not the
1:02:44.240 story here on earth we know already that people are converging they are converging on moral truth
1:02:51.280 in the same way we're converging on scientific truth and every other kind of truth so are there
1:02:56.320 aliens out there no one knows I don't believe any of this but I think it's very useful to having
1:03:02.000 your toolkit of discussion when you're because these discussions are interesting these discussions
1:03:06.960 can cause creativity in one's own mind about the possibilities but I think it's important to have
1:03:12.880 these in the toolkit it's not enough to just say well the government has got a conspiracy and
1:03:18.720 they're not telling us about the islands they're found I think that's I think that's ridiculous
1:03:21.760 but that's a topic for another time but the simple argument that the universe is just so vast
1:03:28.720 there must be aliens out there I think is there's got a good criticism a couple of good criticism
1:03:33.920 against it which themselves can be criticized I admit that fully and I haven't dealt with
1:03:39.600 the criticism that exists out there I've mentioned this book before on the podcast it's called
1:03:44.160 Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and absolutely brilliant book that goes into even more of the details
1:03:50.560 about what happened here on earth in order that complicated life including ourselves arose all
1:03:58.880 of the very strange happen chance occurrences that happened that make this story of well the
1:04:07.520 universe is just so vast there has to be a vast number of civilizations out there make that story
1:04:13.600 seem to be lacking in hope at times but there are counters to this okay there are all sorts of
1:04:18.720 counters that one might make mainly we don't know everything about how evolution works we
1:04:25.520 we know some of it we don't know everything so it very well maybe the case that there is a
1:04:30.800 mechanism whereby evolution leads to increasing complexity in ways that we don't quite understand
1:04:38.400 and there's a certain kind of complexity as this creative complexity where providence or something
1:04:44.720 else that we don't fully understand yet causes the laws of physics to be such that universal
1:04:52.240 explainers are a kind of structure in the universe that the universe is built for in a sense
1:05:00.240 I don't believe that either okay I don't believe any of this I keep on saying it it's just
1:05:04.880 different ways of approaching this interesting issue so I'll leave it there for now I'll have
1:05:12.080 another episode out soon but for now see you next time I do hope you enjoyed that discussion this
1:05:19.600 has just been me freeform completely ranting and talking about something that's of interest to me
1:05:25.040 and of interest to I know many people who follow me and many people who I talk to in real life
1:05:30.720 about this stuff as well so I thought I'd just put it into one nice little condensed form
1:05:35.280 so that it was here for posterity until next episode which should be out very soon as well
1:05:42.240 I'm looking out for that one see you bye-bye