Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseDaniel and Jorge talk about whether attempts to communicate with extra terrestrial civilizations are worth the risk.
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Presented by State Farm like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, hey or Hey?
How do you feel when you get an unexpected piece.
Of mail like a letter to my house? It's usually either good news or bad.
News exactly but you get a feeling about it before you open it, about whether it's good or bad.
Sure, Like, if it looks like a check, it's probably good news. If it covers from the IRS, probably not good news.
Yeah, and anything handwritten is probably also not bad news.
What if the IRS says you a handwritten note.
It's probably extra bad news.
Actually, well, it could be a fan from the IRS. You could have a fan letter, unless it's cut off from little pieces of magazine fonts.
I don't want anybody the IRS to be impressed by the creativity of my tax return.
I am more Hammad cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, where my mailbox is usually filled with people sending me their theories of the universe and letters from prisoners.
Is that true? You get letters from prison like physical letters.
I do. I get handwritten letters from prison from folks who have found our book in their prison library.
Wow, that's pretty interesting. That's pretty cool.
Yeah, a little window out into the universe.
I thought you were going to say they're from your friends in prison, although I guess now you have friends in prison.
There are my friends. Now. I actually used to teach in prison when I was at Berkeley. I used to go up and be a ta at San Quentin. They had a class there in mathematics for prisoners. So I go and help teach arithmetic to prisoners. Oh, that's pretty cool until the day I discovered that one of the prisoners there used to be a grad student working for my advisor, also at Berkeley.
No way, So you were you staw because they knew more than you, or it sort of scared you about your potential future.
I thought, Wow, there are more career paths from grad school than I realized.
Creative ones at that But welcome to our podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we try to unlock your mind and release you from the prison of our human ignorance. We want to set everybody's brains free, and we want to understand everything that's out there in the universe from the true nature of the fundamental elements of the universe our space and time fundamental or do they emerge from some crazy frothing quantum reality all the way up to the largest most dramatic structures in the universe to the very edges of the known universe and beyond. We aim to explain all of it to you.
Yeah, because it is a pretty amazing universe. It's vast and full of interesting and crazy mysteries. But we seem to be sort of maybe stuck and maybe sort of also prisoners in one little tiny corner of it, sort of blocked off by the huge walls of space around us that make it really hard for us to go visit other places.
It does sort of seem like we are in solitary confinement that we don't know if there are other intelligent beings out there in the galaxy also wondering about the same questions that we are probing the nature of matter, and wondering if they are also alone.
Yeah, we're like in a cosmological time out. Maybe we misbehave.
We've definitely been misbehaving, But I don't know if we deserve to be in isolation for thousands and thousands of years. It seems a bit extreme.
We can't play with the rest of the kids kid species in the universe.
Maybe we're just waiting for the day we get let out into the yard and we get to meet all the other prisoners.
MM, although it's not a bad prison metaphorically speaking. I mean, the Earth is pretty comfortable. It's like home confinement.
That's right. I got no complaints. I love the Earth, and we got a pretty good view out of our window. We can see really far into the universe, across billions and billions of light years, and are witnessing cataclysmic cosmic events that give us clues into the nature of reality. One thing we haven't seen yet, however, is evidence that there's somebody else out there. Yeah.
It kind of makes you wonder if there are other alien species sort of looking at the universe like we are, and maybe looking at the same events at the same time as we are, and asking the same questions we're asking about the universe.
I think it's even more interesting if there are alien astronomers looking at the same events but before we are, like some photons that have taken five hundred million years to get to Earth. Aliens might have seen photons from that same event one hundred million years ago. They might have been like working on this in writing papers and scooped us by one hundred million years.
We're saying the science we have right now is old news. Like it's based on stale data.
That's right, it's time to go out there and get some fresh results. But depending on where you are in the universe, you may see something a lot sooner than somebody else. So it could be that there's something amazing that happened in the universe and the light from it is still getting here, but it's already hit alien astronomers and they have received this incredible insight from this one of a kind cosmic event.
Right, But I guess in a relative universe there's such a thing as sort of instantaniniti right, Like, maybe they saw it before we did, but by the time they tell us they saw it, we have already seen this discovery.
That's true. Photons from the event will arrive here before their paper on it arrives here, so we'll have a narrow window to claim that we came up with the ideas ourselves.
Unless their paper is about wormholes and somehow they get it to us before we see the light, in which case it's like maybe getting a preview or something.
Maybe or maybe the first interstellar war will be started by physicists arguing about who came up with an idea first.
Yeah, it'll be fought on the wormhole Internet probably, or maybe their first paper will be like, hey, Earth, watch out, there's a giant gamma ray burs coming your way that will kill you.
That would be very kind to them. I hope that aliens are out there and looking out for us.
But it is a pretty big question of whether or not we are alone in the universe. You know, it's a vast universe, and we are able to sort of sea and look out there, and we're also able to send messages. But it's a little bit of a debate about whether we should be sending out messages or not.
That's right. Some folks are desperately curious to contact aliens or even just to know about their existence, and other folks are wondering, is it a good idea for aliens to know that we are here?
Yeah, because you might be a learning dangerous aliens to our presence. Right, You might be telling them, hey, there's a whole bunch of delicious looking meat running around here in this blue planet where you can also get a nice drink of water, Come get it.
That's right. Or you might accidentally say something offensive to spark an interstellar war. Sometimes just staying quiet is the best approach.
You're saying, the aliens could have thin skin.
Maybe they don't even have skin, you know, maybe they just take offense to everything instantly, that's right.
Who knows they're aliens, right, it could just be like a cloud of group or something. Who knows. I guess it's sort of the idea that maybe our quest to like reach out and contact other civilizations maybe naive, right, because it could be leading us into a potentially dangerous situation exactly.
And it's a question we often are confronted by in physics, not just whether we can, but whether we should.
So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question is it dangerous to try to communicate with aliens? That question sounds dangerous. I mean, anytime you say sort of aliens, you gotta step back for a second.
You and I often joke about this on the podcast. I'm looking forward to the day that aliens arrived because I hope I can ask them physics questions about like what is the true nature of reality and quantum gravity and how do the universe begin?
Et cetera.
But sometimes I get the impression that you're a little bit more concerned about whether or not the aliens will just fry us from orbit.
Yeah, well, you know, you can look at from all sides, I guess. But you know, first of all, I guess you're assuming that the aliens know the answer to these questions. Maybe they're just as cluses as we are and hungrier.
That's a great point. It depends a lot on how we actually get in touch with these aliens. If aliens come to Earth, then it's likely that they have traveled through space in a way that we haven't been able to. So it's very likely they are more advanced than we are, and so probably they have some answers or at least different perspectives on these questions. But if we just get a message from them, then there's no guarantee that they have developed anything that we haven't developed. And if all they do is hear our message, they might not have very sophisticated technology at all.
I think it's just kind of dangerous to have those expectations, you know, like what if you hail the aliens they come all the way here, and then you ask them like, hey, what are the secrets to the universe, and they're like, we don't know, what are you going to do. It's going to be really awkward.
I'm going to be like, I made all this guacamole just just to have this party with you, to celebrate this, you know, solutions to the universe, and now it's just going to go bad.
Yeah, and then what are you going to do? Are you gonna disinvite them? What are you going to talk about for the next you know, billion years with them in your house.
I'm definitely not great at keeping conversation going, especially with strangers, so it will be a tricky situation. But I think it's worth the risk because they could have incredible answers, or at least, you know, maybe they even just ask different questions, questions we haven't thought to ask. I think, joking aside, the greatest thing we would learn from communicating intellectually within other species is just learning from all the differences in our approaches, not even necessarily the answers interesting.
Yeah, wouldn't it be easier just to try a different approach ourselves? You gonna sit down, brainstorm other ways we could think about things. What do you need to outsource it?
Sometimes I think the human thought is sort of trapped in a rut, and we don't even realize all the time the decisions we've made and the arbitrary choices that have influenced us. And just like the path of human thought, you know, who thought of what when and who had time to go into science and influence the direction of human science. So I think if you ran the Earth is an experiment a thousand times, you would probably get lots of different ideas about science. But we only have this one experiment. So it's a little frustrating, all right.
Well, as usually over, we're wondering how people thought about this idea of contacting aliens or looking for aliens, whether they thought it was a good idea or a risky one. So Daniel went out there, this time in person, out into the campus of UC Irvine to ask people this question.
That's right, you see, I opened up again after the pandemic, and so I was able to walk around campus and make people feel weird by asking them about aliens. So thank you to all the UCI students who answered this question.
Wow, was it extra weird being back and asking questions for strangers, Like I imagine it was weird before to have this you know, scurfy looking physicist approach you and ask you questions about the universe, but now you're doing it with a mask and there's a pandemic going on. Was that weird?
Well, I think I'm a little less scruffy because of the mask. It hides some of the scruff, so maybe it makes me look a little more professional. But it was nice. It's good to be out there again. It's good to see people. It's good to have the campus be alive. So I think people are a little hungry for some interaction. I was surprised everybody was very receptive.
All right, Well, think about it for a second. If someone asked you whether it's a good idea to look for aliens or is it risky, what would you answer. Here's what people had to say.
I don't really know.
I mean, I think it's pretty cool. I guess I think it's more interesting rather than like dangerous if you were to try to communicate.
So, yeah, there is always a risk, but there's also an opportunity. So I feel, yeah, I feel it's actually not necessarily good. It's hard for me to say it's good or bad, but it's also hard for me to say it's necessarily bad.
I think it's incredibly risky. I think that the prospect of an extraterrestrial civilization showing up on Earth is very scary. You don't know what they what their intinges might be, And I think that history kind of shows us that when people who are outsiders show up in a place where you know, they don't really think of the other inhabitants is so much like them, or you know, the equivalent of them, then things are.
Usually turn out so well.
They really do because we could advance our knowledge about how life is formed and how it functions in ways we cannot even begin to comprehend right now.
And what about the.
Risks worth it?
Every new idea brings risks, and everything we do depends on who we are and how we go about it.
So based on that, we could never do.
Anything if we don't trust the people that doesn't, They.
Could bring us diseases that we could fight.
Well.
I think it's a good idea for a multitude of reasons. I think, first and foremost, it's just informative to know whether or not where alone or not. And then that just opens up a whole new line of questioning, which is, you know, how do they develop differently from us? Where did we diverge. Do we look at the universe in the same way, you know, I think in much the same way that it's informative to get other cultures experiences on certain things.
It can be interesting to.
Get in an entirely different species perspective on something.
What about the risks?
There are risks, but there are risks inherent in anything.
Right, the Manhattan projecting full up a new you know, the risk was, are we going to ignite the atmosphere? We're going to wipe out the human race right now?
Probably not, but the risk is there, right, And if we go out into space looking for extraterrestrials, the same risk as inherent.
But I think the benefits out weigh the risks.
But then if it's potentially wiping out the human.
Race, well, some might argue that there is a benefit to wiping out the human race. I wouldn't go that far, but some people would.
Make that argument.
But that is actually a benefit.
I definitely think it's a good idea. Of course we should.
I guess it does have to be balanced with other needs resources. So for example, should we educate our children or do biomedical research versus for all our resources into the hope of maybe finding alien life. I guess I would still vote for like keeping our planet working right here at.
Home, I think would be a good idea.
I could see how it would be dangerous, but I would choose to believe that they would be just as curious as we are.
And not aggressive or a hostile in anyway, and then it would be a mutual communication between both of us.
All Right. We have a pretty wide range of opinions here from people. Some people think it's super risky, some people think it's super cool.
Yeah, And some people think it's risky but worth the risk.
I guess I wonder if they're thinking about the full range of risk potential here.
You know, there was somebody who argued that the human race itself getting wiped out might be a benefit, not necessarily a risk.
Oh my goodness, there was.
Some pretty dark thoughts going on here.
Yeah, I'm pretty dark people who go to UCI apparently. But ye, that's an interesting question whether it's worth the risk, right, because the risk could be pretty bad. You could wipe out the whole maybe human race potentially.
Yeah, we're talking about alien technology with unknown capabilities, So definitely, like sterilizing the entire planet is in the realm of possibility.
And so it seemed like a weird balance to strike the right leg. On the one hand, we could be destroyed and wipe out our species. On the other hand, we might satisfy Daniel Whitson's curiosity.
I don't know, man, that's a tough call. That is a tough.
That's a tough call for the rest of us to be honest.
Well, I promise to share some of the insights if they do come. How about that? Does that change the balance a little bit?
Well, of course you're going to share that, Daniel. I mean, were you thinking that you're going to keep it to yourself?
I might. I might just build a prison of solitude and sit there knowing all these answers on my own.
I see, you're gonna put the entire human race and risk and then keep all of the reward to yourself.
Yeah. I'll just dribble out of paper every ten years or so, blowing everything out of the water from.
The alien prison. You'll be writing us, and then the rest of us will get it through the prison newsletter?
Is that?
Is that the idea? And then we're gonna think, oh wow, that was totally worth it.
Yeah, well, jokes aside, there are some really interesting questions there about how to communicate with aliens if they do come, or they do send us a message, how to speak for Earth, you know, like who gets to speak for Earth? It's a difficult question. We actually talked to Jill Tartar, head of SETI, about that, about how they get a community together, a multicultural, multi perspective community to think about how to respond potentially to an alien message. It's a hard question.
Interesting all right, But before I guess we get into those details, let's maybe take a step back here and think about this larger question of are we alone? What have we learned about that question? What have we done to answer that question?
Daniel, It's a really interesting question, and obviously we all want to know the answer are we alone? But it's sort of puzzling that we don't know the answer already. It's famously said by Fermi that he was wondering, like where is everybody? Because the galaxy is pretty big. I mean, stars are far away, but it's also really really old and then filled with planets, and so if you think that life is not like totally unlikely, not like one in a trillion, then the number of planets means there should be a lot of life out there, which is a lot of opportunity for intelligent aliens. And because the galaxy is really old compared to how big it is, it's totally possible for an intelligent civilization to have sent us messages or to have explored the universe. So it's sort of puzzling, like why we haven't been contacted yet? Why aliens haven't found us or sent us messages yet?
Right, that's the famous Fermi paradox, right, Like we look around, there's so many stars, so many potential habitable planets. There must be other we can't be like the only ones. That would be sort of a crazy coincidence, And so you've got to wonder where why haven't we made contact? Though you sort of also think that, you know, being an old universe, it also makes it hard to contact people if it's an old universe, right, because maybe there was an alien species nearby, but they lived billions of years ago, and so maybe they did send out messages but we weren't around or listening to hear them.
Yeah, there's lots of potential solutions to this paradox, and that's why I love about the paradox, It's not really like a contradiction necessarily makes you question your assumptions, and you say, if all these things that I think are true, then we should have been contacted. So let's go back and examine those assumptions. And one of the important ones is the one you just mentioned, which has to do with how long civilizations survive. Like, if intelligent civilizations only last for a few thousand years before they blow themselves up or you ruin their environments or something, then to be very difficult to have them line up in time so that they could discover each other and maybe even communicate with each other. This is sometimes called the great filter, that maybe most civilizations are extinguished before they can become long lasting civilizations.
Mmm.
Yeah, like it's inevitable sort of yeah.
And then the question is like, well, did we already survive the Great filter? Are we through or is it ahead of us? You know, are we about to extinguish ourselves?
All signs point to yes, Yeah.
Depends on whether those planets have a Daniel Whitson who's crazy curiosity leads them down the wrong path.
Hmmm, I see, So you're the filter? Is that what you're saying the thing that filters us from a longevity.
All I'm saying is that we have one of me, and we've survived so far. You know, that's what the data says.
Forty six years, Daniel, you're barely getting started.
Look I have destroyed the earth and extinguished humanity exactly zero times in my life. So that's all I can say.
In fact, the trend is going the wrong way, Like recently you got a microphone and human reaching more people, and so the filter she's getting more clugged up.
I think that's true. But there's lots of ways to attack this problem. You know. One is to say, well, maybe life just is much more rare than we ever imagined. Maybe we really are alone out there in the universe, and that's certainly possible. You know, we don't know how many times life got to do. We've only ever seen this one example. Though. If you look at the history of life on Earth, we see that it started pretty quickly after the conditions were favorable, and we think those conditions are not that rare. So it'd be pretty strange if life itself, at least, you know heiny Microbia life started somewhere else.
Well, what do you mean it started early, like as soon as Earth form we had sort of self assembling molecules in our primorial soup.
After we had reasonable conditions and liquid water, it only took a few hundred million years at most before we had very simple forms of life. You know, on the timescale of the Earth, billions of years. That's not that long. And it might have started sooner. That's just like the oldest evidence that we have for life. It's very difficult to find very very ancient signs of life in old rocks, so it could have started even sooner.
Wow. So I guess the fact that we got it early means it must have been easy, right, I guess is that the reasoning like, oh, we got it pretty quick, it must not be that hard.
That's the reasoning. Although we only have one example, could be that we got super duper crazy lucky, right, We just don't know. We need to find life somewhere else to get a clear view of that situation. But you know, intelligence arrived fairly late on Earth, and so that makes the opposite suggestion. Maybe life is fairly common in the universe, but mostly it's not very smart and intelligence is very rare, or maybe the Earth is unusual. Right, We just can't draw a lot of conclusions from one example.
Right, That's why I'm always late making things and turning things in, because if you do it too early, people are going to think it's too easy.
That's right. Jorge must be really intelligent because he's always very late.
That's exactly exactly, yes, yes, Or what he's doing must be really hard it's taking in so long, another argument for procrastination.
And there are also, of course questions about the nature of intelligence. You know, would we even recognize intelligent life if it sent us a message or if it flew by? Are we trapped into a box of thinking about intelligent life as sort of variations on the human experience and the human example, unable to even imagine the crazy forms that life or intelligence might take out there in the universe.
Yeah, you mean, like they could have been sending us message all this time. There could be messages from aliens washing overs right now, but maybe in a totally different way than what we're expecting, right, Like, we're listening the way we send signals, but maybe they're sending signals in a totally different.
Way exactly, And we're sending signals in ways that seem obvious to us, and like anybody would do it this way, right, But that's exactly what we want to learn when we talk to aliens. We want to learn how they might think differently. So when we start by assuming that they're doing things the same way, we trap ourselves and only being able to find aliens that are basically like us, you know, with maybe wrinkly foreheads or pointy ears.
Right, But to be honest, that seems like a very human thing to do, like, let's only talk to people who are exactly like us.
I try to only talk to physicists except twice a week. When I talk to.
You, Oh good, I'm your alien, it's sing, Hey, you're taking a risk here, a big risk that I might destroy you, but you get so much out of our conversations.
Exactly, it's worth the risk, as I always say.
That's right. Yeah, well, thank you, Daniel, I appreciate that.
Thank you for not frying me with your death rays so far. Yeah.
Yet, well, there are other possibilities, and it also raises a question why should we be looking for aliens out there? These are interesting and big questions that we are going to talk about. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All Right, we're talking about whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to look for aliens out there in the universe, and it's a tricky balance, Daniel, I guess maybe what are some of the arguments for looking for aliens?
The arguments for are easy to make. I mean, we just want to know. It's one of the deepest questions in modern science. Are we alone in the universe? It tells us so much about the nature of our existence. You know, I'm always saying that the reason we do science is not just to have spin offs and technology and faster phones, but to understand the very context of our lives. What is this universe we're living in? How did it come to be? Because it changes how we live our lives. And knowing that we are alone in the universe or knowing that we are not, both of those totally change the context of our lives. And so I think it's just one of the deepest questions and we're desperate to know.
Yeah, I totally agree, although I also have to kind of say that we sort of have that answer in a way, right, Like, at this point we know so much about the universe that we think that the answer is probably right, like probably there's life out there, or most likely that there's life out there. Isn't that sort of good enough?
Yeah, I'd say the answer is fifty percent plus or minus fifty percent, you know, but we basically don't know anything. You know, we have this one example, we can make estimates, but until you know, you don't really know anything. That's why we do experiments, right. We think we figured out how this works, and we go out there and then the universe surprises us. Every time we open up new eyeballs or new ears into the universe, we learn something surprising and shocking. That changes the very way we think about the universe. So it's definitely worth looking because I bet the answer is pretty different from what we expect.
Well, I guess you know, we expect it to be yes. So you're saying maybe the answers no.
The answer is very so much depends on who you ask. Like personally, I think it's very likely that there's life all over the universe and lots of ways we can't even imagine, and that intelligence takes such varied forms that would be very difficult for us to recognize it, not to mention, communicate with it, or understand a message. I think aliens are probably more alien than we can even imagine.
Interesting, and so you just want to kind of find them and just to see how weird they can be.
Yeah, absolutely, the same reason I like to go traveling, Like, Wow, look what people put on their French fries in this country. I never even thought of that. Oh my gosh. It just you know, expands the horizons of your brain. It makes you thinking newd in different ways. Right, But would you still eat it? Though?
Do you always try them?
I try every condiment once.
I see you just want to sample the aliens, You just want to take a picture of them.
Maybe these aliens are delicious also, you never know.
Oh geez, well, I guess now the question is how are we looking for these aliens? Are we actively listening? I know there's a SETI program out there. What else is out there? Means search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
They're the biggest deal out there in terms of trying to identify messages from space, and so this is very different from questions about whether alien craft are in the skies and these alien UFO videos. SETI is like, let's just listen for messages from across the universe, trying to see if somebody out there is similar enough to us in intelligence and technology that they're sending us messages. At least we should be listening. They got about one hundred million bucks from eccentric billionaires about five years ago, and they've been using it to buy telescope time like the Green Bank Observatory and the Parks Observatory to try to listen for these messages.
But I guess they're listening in the electromagnetic spectrum right, like looking for radio signals, just like we use radio signals. And so that's assuming the aliens use radio signals and within a certain frequency range.
They are doing that. They also have some visible light observations, and they also look for just weird stuff. Jill Tartar was on the podcast few weeks ago, and she was telling us about how they're trying to imagine other ways aliens might communicate, Like what if they're changing the frequency of pulsars through some crazy engineering project, and so not just like listening for messages in the way that we might format them. They're out there trying to think about other ways aliens might be affecting the cosmos that we could discover.
Right. We talked once on the podcast about like our aliens building a giant a Dyson sphere, or are they moving galaxies around or something.
Yeah, And so they're being actually very thoughtful about this and involving philosophers and cultural historians and trying to think really carefully about the assumptions they are making when they're searching for these signals. But in the end, it's limited to our imagination, right, It's possible that there are signals already out there in our data that we just haven't interpreted in the right way.
Interesting, So listen to that episode if you have a chance. There are other things we're doing, not just listening for messages or strange things in the universe. We're also sending stuff out there.
That's right. There's another program called meti MET which is messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And this is a community of people who think that we should not just be listening for these messages, we should be broadcasting our location into space and letting other civilizations know that we are here.
Interesting like a group of people who think we should be more proactive about contacting aliens.
Yeah. Absolutely, And this has actually a long history. It's not just a recent effort. There's some really fun stories. There's an Austrian astronomer who wanted to dig massive trenches in the Sahara Desert, fill them with water, top them with kerosene, and then set them on fire to communicate with people who might be living on Mars.
What this was recent or a long time ago?
This is a long time ago. This is like more than one hundred years ago, back when we didn't know are there civilizations on Mars, and people thought, well, here's a way we could send a message because we saw what looked like canals on Mars, and so for a while people thought maybe there was a civilization on Mars. So it's like writing help in the sand on your desert island, you know.
Yeah, it seems a little desperate if es like you might as well stand outside their driveway holding a boombox or something.
And there was a French guy who asked for money from the French government because he wanted to build a giant mirror which would focus sunlight and write messages onto the surface of Mars. Like, wouldn't that piss people might send their message?
Don't you think so?
Sorry about frying your elementary school filled with alien children. We just really wanted to get in touch.
Yeah, oh boy. Well, it also doesn't make a lot of sense because if there were Mars Martians looking at us, they would already see us, right, They would look at our you know, lights at night and stuff, right, because you can see those from space.
Yeah you could. But this is a long time ago, before I think the Earth was as electrified, some people were thinking about this kind of stuff. But more recently, you know, people like Carl Sagan have thought about how somebody might respond to seeing one of our space probes, and so like on the Voyager, we sent this Golden Record that has transmissions from Earth, you know, whale songs and people singing, and this information on there about like how to find the planet. Done it in a way that's supposed to be sort of self explanatory that anybody with a mathematical and astronomical understanding might be able to decode.
Right yeah, and you can. You can find images of the plaque online, right.
Yeah, that's right. And more aggressively, we actually sent a dedicated message to space from the Air Receivo Observatory, this huge radio dish that used to be operating in Puerto Rico. We sent a message out into space specifically for aliens and design in a way we thought maybe they would be able to decode. It's sort of a pictogram.
Interesting, now, is this group of people medi Is this like an actual institution or is it just sort of like what you call people who want to send messages out.
It's an actual institution. There's a longer history here of this sort of movement of people sending messages out. But there is a group actually it's based in San Francisco called METI, and they are sending messages, Like in twenty seventeen, they sent a message consisting of a scientific and mathematical two tatorial to one particular star that's located twelve light years from Earth, you know, hoping that the aliens would get it and learn about our math and science.
Is there a shorter version of this group called the imety Instant Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Somebody wants to text to other planets.
Yeah, it seems like it might be a little more efficient and you know, casual cash.
Maybe that's the problem. You know, their inboxes are so overflowing with interstellar spam that they're not reading our emails.
That's right, we're in their spam folder. Yeah, that's the nightmare, isn't it.
Nightmare?
Like, Hey, we're here, we're desperate to connect with other people.
Spam delete exactly. They get so many offers.
That's the great filter that I think. Really it's the great spam filter of the Google of the universe.
Now, you see spam really does have costs.
Well, despite this idea of sending messages to aliens, some people think it's a bad idea and something that maybe the reason it's a bad idea could be maybe an explanation for why we haven't contacted other aliens. Like, maybe it's a bad idea. That's why nobody else in the universe is sending signals out.
Yeah, that's right. Such famous physicists as Michio Kaku said, trying to contact aliens is quote the biggest mistake in human history. So there are definitely some people who think this is not a good plan.
Yeah. I think the pictures they're trying to paint is like, maybe the universe is kind of like a dark force, and there could be predators out there, and so we're sort of like a vulnerable species. We maybe don't want to advertise our presence.
Exactly the same way that if you're in a horror movie and you're walking through dark woods, you don't start singing a loud song, right. You tiptoe therey carefully because you don't want to announce your presence, And that's why everybody else is being quiet. So the lesson is like, if the universe seems quiet, maybe there's a.
Reason that's right. And if you're a cheerleader or a football player, you're probably toasted for.
Us exactly, and we are alone, right, we have separated. We decided to go out into this barest by ourselves, and so maybe we should think twice before announcing our location.
So it's sort of an interesting scenario and a potentially dangerous idea to contact other aliens. And so to get more perspective, Daniel went out there to interview an expert on this topic.
That's right. I found a really interesting paper from doctor Kareem Jabbari, a professor of philosophy who wrote a paper about the dangers of communicating with aliens. I reached out to him and he was kind enough to spend a few minutes explaining the ideas to me.
So here is Daniel's interview with doctor Kareem Jabbari on whether it's a good idea or a bad idea to contact aliens.
All right, so then it's my great pleasure to introduce to the program doctor Kareem Jabbari, who has a PhD in philosophy and is a researcher at the Institute for Future Studies. Kareem, thank you very much for joining us today.
Thanks for the invitation.
So you wrote this fascinating paper about the dangers of communicating with extraterrestrials. Tell me a little bit how you got interested in this topic. Is this something people discuss a lot at the Institute for Future Studies, Not at all.
Actually, it's more focused around the future of child poverty and those kind of more mundane issues. But I've always been a huge fan of science fiction, and I made a stab at trying to write a short science fiction story. It turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated, but I did a lot of research for that story, and that research led me to this idea.
And so how was it received by your colleagues? Do they see this as like, Wow, what a fascinating discussion of this important topic, or do they think of you as like, oh my gosh, it's Kareem being contacted by aliens.
No. No, I think my colleagues really appreciate it.
Although there a lot of the ideas that I presented this paper are not especially novel for other philosophers, so when I talk to them, they go like, yeah, this is interesting, but yeah, we know this already. But I thought that the added value was trying to reach out then and try to share these ideas with the non philosophical community.
Right well, as a non philosopher or an amateur philosopher of science. I found it very interesting. So I want to begin by speculating with you about what level of technology or civilization we might be able to guess that extraterrestrial intelligences have. I mean, if they arrive on Earth, obviously they have some technology that we don't have. But in the case that we're communicating with distant civilizations around other stars, do we know anything or can we guess anything about what level of technology or civilization they might have.
Sure, if we got a signal from them, for example, by radio waves, we could infer that they have some machine, some apparatus to produce that signal, because I think that most people in the field assume that biological systems could not produce a signal that is strong enough and accurate enough to convey through many light years. So I think we could we could conclude that, and if the signal allows us to know where the planet is we can pinpoint it, then we could direct our telescopes there and and maybe that would help us to find out other things about about these creatures. Maybe if their star is a yellow star like ours, then that makes it more likely, for example, that they would have a visual system that is similar to ours, because eyes are really good to have, and we see that a lot of different animals on Earth have developed eyes independently of each other, So if they have some like star, then the odds are pretty good that they would have eyes. Other than that, it's kind of difficult.
Can we guess anything based on the fact that many stars out there are older than our sun. So it might be that other civilizations have had, you know, a your head start in terms of evolution and developing technology.
Yes, well, I mean, it's certainly possible that they could be really advanced. On the other hand, if they're so advanced, how come they have not changed more stuff. So one of the ideas out there is that if a civilization is very advanced, they will have great energy needs.
And if a.
Civilization has all this need for energy, they would construct a Diyson swarm, or they would cover their sun or their star in solar cells or something like that, and that would be visible for us because we would see stars disappearing. That suggests that if we don't see it, then we can assume that they're maybe not that advanced. But of course it's also possible that they are very advantage just don't care about don't care about energy, or they get their energy in some other way.
Well, I think the prospect of receiving a message from an alien civilization and trying to figure out what they're like and what that message means, and what they're trying to communicate to us, and how we might communicate with them is certainly a very fascinating one. In your paper, you make the argument that this problem might be harder than people anticipate. In fact, you write in the paper, no entity can translate any message that humans could send with nothing but electromagnetic transmission. Essentially, you're saying that it's impossible for us to send something which could be decoded by aliens, which I guess means in converse, that there's no way we could understand any message aliens send with just electromagnetic transmissions. Can you sketch out that argument for us? Why do you believe that it's impossible for us to understand an alien message?
I can also add that this would be true even if the aliens were very similar to us. So, just as a thought experiment, imagine that the aliens are actually biologically identical to us, they just look like humans. According to this argument, it would be impossible for us to translate that message. But of course it's very unlikely that they would be identical to us, so that would make it even more difficult.
So the argument.
Basically goes a theory that is fairly prominent in the philosophy of language that was articulated by William van Orman Quin and that builds on some very interesting insights that were formulated by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
And the idea is that utterances in a language do not contain the meaning that they are trying to convey. Rather, meaning is something that exists entirely in our heads and that we derive from observing the behaviors of other people. And to illustrate this, Quin has this for experiment where he imagines a person going into a jungle and this person is a linguist, so he tries to communicate with the people who are living in the jungle. They don't know his language and he doesn't know their language.
And the way you start to communicate or start to learn another people's language is by observing their behavior in their environment, and with the help of different hypotheses of how these people work and what they do, you can slowly but surely construct a translation manual. So let's say that you have this person in the jungle and he points at a rabbit and he says, gaba guy. And then you make a hypothesis here that gava guy can mean rabbit, but gava guy could also mean food, or maybe gava guy could be mean rabbitness or being very fast, because this rabbit happened to be very fast. And all these hypotheses are consistent with your observation. So what you need to do is to make more observations. For example, if the people that you're trying to talk to they point out a potato and they say, gaba guy, then we can start discarding some of the hypotheses because the potato is not fast, right, but the potato is food, or so you assume. So then you say that, yeah, it's more likely that you have a guy means food, because that's what is common with these two things. But this is just a tentative hypothesis, right, But at some point, after a long period of interaction, you will be good enough in understanding them that you will be able to ask them. So you will be able to ask them by rabbit, do you mean this or that? But this is not something you can do initially. Initially, the only thing you can do is to observe behavior and from your understanding of how humans work. For example, you know that humans eat rabbits sometimes and they also eat potatoes, and that's why you can kind of make this hypothesis. But with the help of this knowledge, this background knowledge about how humans work, you can start producing these hypotheses. The problem is that when we're dealing with a string of digits that an extraterrestrial might said to us, then we have, first of all, we don't have any information or very little information about you know, if they like potatoes or not.
Or if they call them French fries, or if they call them something else.
Or if potatoes are like some ritual object in their everyday lives.
Or maybe potatoes do move fast on their planet. But let me back you up and ask you a question, just to make sure I understand the point you're making. You're saying that even just pointing to things and saying the words requires some sort of common context. You have to have some common experience, some common culture, some common inherent understanding to make those connections. That you can't truly translate an alien language because you don't have the context to understand that that the framework to fit those things into.
So what Quient actually says is that you can never truly translate anything. So think about it. We learn language by observing human behavior and inferring and observing utternesses and inferring what those utternances can mean by then observing their behavior. For example, if you say pass me the salt, and then I give you the salt and you seem satisfied with that, then I infer that you know, I was in the ballpark of what you meant. But we can never have a complete total understanding of what you meant by the different utterances that you make.
All right, but sometimes we can accomplish what we need to, Right, I don't really know if you have like a deep, you know, philosophical understanding of salt, but I know that you passed me the salt, just like you know. We are speaking English, which is not a perfect language to convey all of our ideas as well. In that sense, you know, you could say no language is perfect, but that's not the sense that we're grasping for, right, we try to develop some basic understanding. So it's this argument saying you could never have a perfect translation of an alien language or you can never have any translation.
So Qui's theory would allow for a good enough translation of an alien language if we had those two preconditions, if you had the interact, and if that interaction was in a context where we can observe the behavior. So imagine you get these people coming here from proximate Centauri with their embassy, their alien embassy, and then we can look at their behavior and then we can see like, ah, they eat, they seem to be absorbing substances from that. Or if it's let us postulate that they're eating now, and they seem to be eating this kind of I don't know, looks like porridge, and then we can do a chemical analysis of that and realize that, yeah, it's pretty similar to porridge. And then that would allow us to slowly but surely construct an translation manual over many interactions. But when we just get the string, we can't make much of it.
I see. So if we could spend some time with the aliens and develop some common context, then we could have the framework for developing some sort of effective but imperfect translation. But you're saying, if all we get other messages, even if they're actually biologically humans, and think the same way we do. It would be impossible for us to translate because we don't have a context or what their lives are like and what they might mean exactly. That's really interesting. And you make this comment in your paper about Chomsky's analysis of language, his universal grammar, this claim that all human languages are based on the same sort of mathematical structure. And you write in the paper that Chomsky never claimed that universal grammar was universal in the sense that it would be shared across all possible species able to use language. That is, you know, his universal grammar universal in the sense that it might also apply to structures of alien languages, which is a really cool concept. And Chompsky was here on our podcast a couple of weeks ago. I actually asked him about this, whether he thought that it was possible that alien languages might be constructed in the same way as human languages, and he made some argument that the development of language and symbolic thought might be due to evolutionary pressure, might be some sort of like optimum solution to this problem, and therefore it might be or it could be likely, or you could argue at least that alien languages might have a similar structure. If that were true, are you saying that that still doesn't help us, Like, even if we have human biological aliens with minds similar to ours that have a universal grammar, in that case, we still couldn't develop enough common understanding just by sending signals to effectively communicate.
I'm not exactly sure what Chanceki means by that, but it's certainly true that we can see convergent evolution across many traits, right. But for example, the wings of bats are similar to the wings of birds, but they're not identical, right, So they are similar in some respects and different in other respects. And I think that a language that emerges some say Proximus centauri, is probably going to emerge under some evolutionary pressure, and I think it's sensible to assume that it would be similar in some respects to human languages and different in other respects. The crucial point here is that would it be similar in the sense that would allow this innate language sense or innate language grammar to allow us to pick out the right translation from a whole range of potential translations. And I think that you know it might be possible, but I think then you would be committed to some fairly controversial views in the philosophy of language, and I think that, I mean, I have the utmost respect for Chomsky and his work, but I think that his view of universal grammar remains quite controversial to this name.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's interesting also to wonder why we haven't been able to cross the species barrier. I mean, if we're going to solve the puzzle speaking with another intelligent species from another planet, we might first want to tackle the question of, like speaking to dolphins or to other intelligent mammals. Do you have thoughts about why we have not yet been able to crack the dolphin language.
Well, it's controversial as to whether dolphins have a language. I mean, we know that they communicate, and I think this is what Chomsky says too, that dolphins and other clever mammals they have advanced communication, but they don't have this ability to generate an infinite amount of sentences from a finite set of words, So they don't have grammar basically, and that makes their communication fundamentally different from what we call language. But if we think about if we bracket that, so to speak, we think that we are actually pretty good at communicating with some animals, especially animals who we have bread to be attentive to our utterances, for.
Example, dogs.
I don't have a dog myself, but I find it amazing at the things that people can do when they train their dogs, and I think it shows a very high level of communication, of ability to communicate. I mean, you can't use understand the language of dogs because they don't have a language. On that kind of more precise notion of what.
A language is.
I understand that you also have a pet, one that you've named after Chomsky.
Yeah, yeah, she's a rabbit.
Her name is Chomska, and she's not as eloquentus as Chomsky, but she's very charismatic.
I hope that you have a shared emotional context with your Chomska at least so. A lot of people speculate that it might be impossible to have a common cultural context with aliens, and therefore these questions of language are always going to be impossible. But many folks argue that mathematics and physics and the sort of physical rules about the universe might be that context that we might be able to communicate with aliens by first starting with simple mathematics and building up from there. You make a reference in your paper to Prudent Doll's cell explaining message in his language, the lingual cosmico, which is built up from these mathematical primitives. Do you think it's not possible to start from just mathematics and develop some way to discuss with each other, some way to communicate and transfer information.
I think that would run into similar problems. So, first of all, if we just talk about science, and this goes also back to a theory articulated by Quin and others in that philosophical movement. But what Quin says is that science is underdetermined by observation. So imagine that you have a theory and you make an observation that seems inconsistent with that theory. That means that, as a good scientist, we need to revise something right, But the observation doesn't tell you what to revise. So, for example, the according to Nittonian mechanics, the behavior of the plant mercury was rather odd. But one of the suggested solutions to this problem was to possibly that there was a planet there that we couldn't see. That they named volcan, which I think is a pretty awesome name for a planet.
It's a very logical choice, yes, but.
Yeah, and I don't think it was a bad hypothesis. But it just shows you that making the observation that Mercury behaves in an odd way doesn't tell you what is the truth. It just tells you that something needs revising. So the idea that Quite has is that you could imagine two distinct scientific worlds or scientific systems with coherent theories about everything about you know, evolution and physics and chemistry, and that you can do the same things with these theories, but that these theories imply very different views about the world. And in the paper I have an example, and I don't think it's mine. Actually it's also from Coin, where you can imagine a civilization, perhaps in an alpha centaury, that developed general relativity and special relativity without first having developed Newtonian mechanics.
It might be unlikely, but it's certainly possible.
And that means that if they had this, then they could make the same predictions, and you know, they could be as a Newtonian civilization like we could in the nineteenth century, but they would have very different views about the world because Newtonian physics implies one set of beliefs about the world, about the universe, and special relativity implies a very different set of beliefs.
So you're saying that even though we exist in the same physical universe and observe the same things about the universe, we might come to different internal mental explanations of that universe, two different theories of science that both work, and therefore just being in the same physical universe doesn't give us enough of a shared mental context to develop communication.
Is that the argument I would like to say that this is different from because sometimes this view is conflated with relativism, for example Koon's view about scientific revolutions and so on.
But this is different.
This is not relativism because here we would say that both scientific theories or scientific systems are true in the relevant sets. So let's say that you have a scientific system that can make correct predictions about the universe and about physical systems and so on, and it also gives an adequate explanation of how things work. I think in many respects we would say that that is sufficient for us to say that this is true. The fact that there are other descriptions of the universe and other ways of making the same predictions that is also true but different does not make our view less true, right.
I think that that would blow the minds of most practicing scientists, especially particle physicists, to imagine that the description we're building of the universe, you know, whether it be tiny strings or bouncing particles or wiggling fields, that these are not necessarily unique. That even if it's true and it works perfectly, it might just reflect mathematical models in our minds rather than the actual structure of the universe in any sort of objective way. That's the argument, isn't it.
Yeah, well almost, because I would say that what makes a theory true is our ability to understand and manipulate the world around us. So if a theory is good at that, then it's true in the relevant sense.
I see. So you're saying my theory could be true and your theory could be true, and they could have basically nothing in common other than that they both work.
Yes, But it's also true that that a theory could be better than the other even though both are true. So, for example, we would say that special and general relativity.
As a theory is better than Newtonian.
Mechanics, but Newtonian mechanics is true for predicting the behavior of small objects moving at non relativistic speeds.
All right, well, this is really fascinating dive into how to communicate with aliens. I have a lot more questions for you, but first we have to take a short break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are. US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being greenhouse gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water, for example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gas? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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All right, we're back and we're talking with doctor Kareem Jabari about how to communicate with aliens and especially how to stave off interstellar war. So the reason that we're talking about how to communicate with aliens is that we're wondering about the question of how to get along with aliens or why aliens haven't contacted us, and the hypothesis that the universe out there is like a dark forest where everybody is being quiet to avoid being wiped out by some sort of predator race. So In your paper, you build on this argument that we can't understand aliens to suggest that we might essentially stumble our way into an interstellar war because we have no good way to communicate with them. Yeah, so walk me through the argument there. You use some game theory to suggest that we'll end up in a situation where it seems logical to us to essentially first strike against these aliens. How do we get there? From we got a message and we don't understand it too. Now we're sending a nuke to Alpha Centauri.
Yeah, really suck. Yeah.
So the idea comes from a game theories called the Thomas Shelling that in turn got the idea from Thomas Hobbes. And the idea is that we can think about our interactions with the extraterrestrials as a coordination game and in a coordination and that there are many classical coordination games. But basically in a coordination game you have two alternatives. One is to cooperate and the other is to play it safe and don't cooperate. And the idea is that when you cooperate, then you take a small risk, or you take a risk. But if I also cooperate, then there will be a great advantage for both of us. But if you play it safe and don't cooperate, then you're not taking as much risk. On the other hand, you're not getting a chance to get a big payoff. And a classical example to illustrate this is to imagine two people walking in the forest and deciding as to whether or not to chase a stag or to chase a rabbit. And to chase a stag, we need to cooperate. So if we both choose to chase a stag, then we'll get the stag and we'll get a lot of food and we'll be very happy. But if you choose to chase the stag and I go for the rabbit, then you won't get the stag and you'll be very hungry. Whereas to get the rabbit, you don't. You can do it by yourself. So I'll get the rabbit. I'll get one piece of food, not as much as a stag, but I would get enough.
You know, I have to say, you talk a lot about eating rabbits For somebody who has a pet rabbit, you know, isn't there be a little bit of a mental tension there for you?
Well?
Yes, sometimes but it's just because they appear so much in the philosophical literature.
Well, I hope you cover her ears when you talk about this in front of her. Al Right, See, you're explaining why you need to communicate in order to cooperate and take risks together.
So if we trust each other, then of course we'll cooperate, right because I know that you're a good guy that cooperates with people. And then we'll go and we'll get a stag and we'll be very happy. But if I am suspicious about you, then I will try to go for the rabbit. So you would say that the rabbit is a risk dominant equilibrium, whereas the stag is a payoff dominant equilibrium. And both of these strategies are rational, or none of the strategies is more rational than the other if we don't know anything. But the problem here is that if we can't communicate, then there will be and we also have this opportunity to defect, to not be cooperative. Then Hobbs and Shelling and others argue that the option to defect or to be non cooperative becomes the focal point. So we get both attracted to that option because I start thinking that, oh my god, he's really going to go for the rabbits. And he also probably thinks that I think that he's going to go for the rabbit, But that means that he's more inclined to go for the rabbit himself, and he knows that I know that he knows that I think this way, so that means that he will be even more inclined to go after the rabbit, which makes me more inclined to go after the rabbit, and so on. And in the context of interstellar war, going for the rabbit or being noncoperative could imply a first strike.
Right. So if our options instead of hunting for a stag or hunting for a rabbit, if our choices are a share all of our theories of physics and all of our knowledge and the beauty that we developed as humanity, and send a nuclear weapon to avoid being wiped out by their nuclear weapon, then you're saying that a rational choice would be to fire first to avoid being wiped out by their nuke, rather than just like dumping the Encyclopedia Britannica into a message and sending it to Alpha Centauri.
Yeah, that's our conclusion in this paper. But I was always very dissatisfied with this conclusion, so I wrote another paper where I argue that that we are wrong. But that's another kind of discussion. But yeah, basically, if we assume that there's only one other player there, then the rational strategy should be to attack first.
I think this game theory approach is really fascinating because you're thinking carefully about the risks you want to take. And obviously we have a lot at stake here, we're just on one planet, and it goes to the heart of understanding what the other player might do, you know, the choices that the other player might make, and the risks we are taking. And I think, you know, we see that of course a lot on Earth and game theory developed in the context you know, human warfare and the prisoner's dilemma and all this kind of stuff. But isn't that also a case of projection? I mean, aren't we assuming in that case that the aliens would be thinking in a game theoretical way, that they would be rational in a way according to our definition of rationality. You know, if we don't understand these aliens and we can't communicate with them, shouldn't we just assume that we we never even understand their motives, that they might operate essentially randomly.
Yes, no, that's certainly true.
So it's a pretty big assumption that we're making here that that game theory is a plausible tool to understand or predict alien behavior. I can add that game theory has, with some success, actually been used in many non human contexts. So we've used the game theory to understand how pathogens emerge and behave and evolve, but also how animal populations interact with each other in complex ecological systems. So there seems to be some fundamental aspect of game theory that allows us to predict these systems where we're dealing with utterly alien life forms. So that is one reason to believe that perhaps this tool can be used in this context. But yeah, it's certainly an assumption that needs to be made.
Well, would be a fascinating problem to have. I think that a more likely scenario if we do meet aliens or get messages from aliens, is that we sort of hilariously misunderstand them, or that we send them a message of friendship which is interpreted to be offensive in their context. You know, we send them a picture of our rabbit and then you know, to them, rabbits are terrifying, or.
Yeah, yeah.
The paper that I wrote was in the context of this idea that some astronomers have that we should send out signals to nearby solar systems, even though we don't know if somebody is there, and just to see what happens.
And we argue that this.
Could be very dangerous if because it were would alert the aliens of our presence. Perhaps, I mean, it's not certain that they know where we are, but if we do this, then that chance increases. If they contact us first, that means that we are not certain that they know where we are.
Maybe they have this.
Kind of equivalent of of the SETI SETI people who just want to send out some random signals. So answering could also be very dangerous because it could reveal our location.
But as a philosopher of science and somebody who's desperately curious about the world, if we get a message from a distance star and it clearly has information in it and we spend time decoding it, are you saying that we shouldn't respond, for example, that we should stay silent, that we should ignore a message from an alien world.
I don't think we should ignore it, but I don't think we should respond, and we should instead invest every effort that we can spare to gather more information about them. So that would be my first option. But of course, if I am correct in the article that I'm writing at the moment, then then it would be fine to answer them. But I think that, yeah, I think we would rather want to collect as much information as possible before we do it. In any case, I mean, if it's going to go, if the message is going to travel for fifty or sixty years, it wouldn't hurt to, you know, take five years, build some cool space based telescopes and try together as much information about that planetary system.
Before and then we discovered that they all look like rabbits, and then we think, oh, how could they possibly be dangerous? So one last question is you suggested that you're writing an article currently which disagrees with the previous article and suggests it might be fine to talk to aliens. What's the essential argument there? What evolved in your thinking to make you think it might be fine to talk to distant aliens.
So let's assume that we stumble upon some aliens in a nearby planetary system, let's say in taosiotic or Trappists. So that means that either aliens extraterrestrial intelligence are extremely common. That's one possibility that would explain why we find alias so close, or it would be a fantastic coincidence that two intelligent beings evolved independently of each other in.
Such proximity.
And the second alternative is of course not very plausible. So the idea is that upon finding one alien species on say Tauxity, then that would mean that we should make a Bayesian update on our subjective probability on the average density of extraterrestrial intelligences in the galaxy. And at the moment we don't know. We don't have any information about that, so we have a uniform prior we you know, the closest we might be alone in the galaxy, or there might be aliens in almost every solar system.
We don't know.
But if we will find some aliens at Tau City that's about twelve light years from here, then we should expect that there to be lots of them and lots of them nearby. The next step is that in that case we should ask ourselves, like, how come we're still here. You know, if there are so many aliens out there and it's very unlikely that nobody is aggressive, you get a conundrum like, how come we're still here? And the only way to explain that would be to postulate that there must be some reason for why aliens don't attack each other, and that could be many different reasons, but there must be some reason for why that explains our existence.
I see. So it's sort of like an inverse for MEI paradox fermi paradox, saying why is nobody out there? The answer is maybe to somebody out there squashing anybody who raises their head. But you're saying, if we go out there and find that actually the galaxy is filled with aliens, and that suggests that there isn't anybody out there hunting species that speak up and make themselves known.
Exactly, because otherwise we would be dead, or we would have an invasion already on our way, or something like.
So for some reason, aliens seem peaceful in.
Or an observation of that kind would suggest that aliens are peaceful, and that means that if the Clauseetians see us, then they would think the same thing if we both have this assumption, then we can move ourselves in the coordination gig to the other equilibrium to the pay of dominant equilibrium because we are not concerned about them attacking, because we assume that it's uncommon for aliens to attack each other, and that makes us more confident that they think that we are not going to attack them, and that makes us even more confident that we shouldn't attack them, which makes us even more confident that they shouldn't attack us.
All right, So I guess the message is if we discover aliens, we hope that they are nearby, because that suggests there's lots more aliens out there, and maybe they're all peaceful.
Yeah.
Or Another possibility, of course, would be that imagine that we would find an alien civilizations but they were not very advanced. Let's say that they're in the Sage or the Iron Age. Then that would not rule out the possibility that aliens in general are aggressive, because if we would find a primitive civilization, that would rather suggest that we just happen to be lucky to be first in our neighborhood or very early.
So if we would.
Find a civilization like that, then we couldn't draw the same inference. On the other hand, a bronzeage civilization is not going to be a threat to us, not for some time, so yeah, that's also a consideration.
All Right, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking about these amazing and super fun and mind bending ideas with us. Very grateful for your time and your energy, and give our regards to your rabbit.
I will thank you.
All right, pretty interesting interview, and I'm sort of getting the general message that he thinks it's a bad idea because of the potential for miscommunication or misunderstanding.
Yeah, or just lack of ability to communicate at all. And so if they misinterpret our message and they don't know what we mean, they might be worried about our intentions. And then who knows what they would do if they're, you know, run by some generals that have their fingers on a button, they might get nervous and launch a first strike when they get our message.
You mean, like they're going to get a message and they're going to interpret the message as like a first strike or something like who gets a message that you can't understand and then and then assumes that they're trying to they're insulting you.
Well, you don't know, Like the Daniel on that planet is probably like, yay, we heard from aliens. Let's send them all of our physics textbooks, you know. But everybody else on that planet is like, hold on a second, do we really want to let those folks know we're here? Maybe it's a trap and the risks, as you say, are large, and so if you put yourself in the minds of those aliens, they might have the same worries and so they might be aggressive in response.
Hmm.
I see.
But then he said sort of said that, you know, if there are a lot of aliens out there, the fact that nobody has attacked us maybe means that maybe that's not a realistic scenario. Perhaps there aren't a lot of trigger happy aliens out there.
Yeah. I like that he ended on a hopeful note there. If there are a lot of civilizations out there, they've somehow learned to live together, and that gives us hope that we can join that community.
I guess either way, you're sort of projecting our own human bias onto these scenarios, right, Like, maybe we would react a certain way, but that doesn't mean other aliens would react.
The same way exactly, And I put that same question to him, and maybe you heard his answer. He thinks that this game theory analysis might be universal, that it goes just beyond humans, that it's useful in understanding like even microbes and all sorts of systems. And so there's some arguments made there that it might be universal. But in the end, you're right, we don't know what motivates an alien, so we definitely don't have a basis for speculating about their choices.
Right, And then I know you've brought something up before, which is like, it doesn't make a lot of sense for aliens to come here for our resources or to eos, right, Like that's what the alien movies and TV shows always show. But I'm always like you, I think thinking in the back of my head, like why would you come all this way just for like a a bit of water or just to eat like you know, a few billion humans, Like it's like trying across the country to eat a hamburger.
You know, I know you want some water. Neptune is basically all water. Help yourself, right, you want platinum? We got asteroids filled with platinum. We don't even know how to get to take some. Please, nobody would come here just for those resources.
Yes, Or you like meat, Hey, we have this great animal thing called the impossible burger. That's just as good. I'm sure with your advanced civilization you can figure it out too exactly.
And so I agree with you that it's unlikely to have interstellar war for resources because they seem essentially infinite. But this is another angle. You know, we might have an interstellar war due to a misunderstanding. If those aliens are worried that we're aggressive, they might be aggressive in response, even if it doesn't make any sense for anybody to be aggressive. And so there is the potential there for misunderstanding.
Like maybe the aliens are just doing it for sport, you mean, like they just maybe like going to war.
Maybe they're just not as curious about the universe. They don't really care about everything we figured out.
To Daniel, did Daniel? We need to like implant the Daniel in there amongst their ranks.
Now, you got it. We need to spread Daniel across the universe. And that's what this podcast is all about. So maybe if they hear this podcast, they'll realize, hey, we're just kind of goofy and curious. We pose no harm.
That would be hilarious. They've like in a thousand years alien come and they say, hey, we're going to wipe you out. But then we picked up this podcast that you're transmitting, and this famous prophet that Daniel Whites and the Chosen One illuminated us into what it means to be curious about the universe.
We were slightly offended Jorge's jokes, but we decided.
That's right, Mother Banana Joeys were terrible. We wish Hora would just go away. Bring on those other guest hos and they were much more interesting. Anyways, Can we be a guest on your show?
Yeah, exactly. Aliens, you are welcome to come and be a guest on the show. Please do come and tell us all about the secrets of the universe. That is my scientific fantasy.
That's right.
Just don't eat Whoha or anybody. Don't need anybody have some impossible burgers, have.
Some impossible humans. All right, Well, I guess it's something to think about, you know, whether or not we want to contact aliens out there, whether it would be worth the risk. You know, how would our lives change if we knew the precise answer to that question.
Yeah, it is an important question, and it's a question that no individual person can or should make on behalf of humanity. That's what scares me a little bit about this realgue group that's just sending messages out there. You know, they're making decisions for the entire human race, and it's not a small decision to make.
Right. Well, I have bad news for you, Daniel. The fate of humankind is already in the hands of like four people.
That's true.
So it sounds like you have a little deeper problem with the way humans organize themselves.
That's true. But atoscope I think for today's podcast, let's.
Try stay tuned for our next episode.
Daniel and Jorge overthrow the Global Elite.
That's right, I yes, talk about global politics and other polit All right, well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time.
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