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Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #292
4 hours 13 minutes 30 seconds
🇬🇧 English
Speaker 1
00:00
We can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see, 1 of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point, things like us appear, very primitive, and then some of those stop being quiet and expand and then for a few billion years they expand and then they meet each other and then for the next hundred billion years they commune with each other. That is the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly a hundred, hundred and 50000000000 years the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then, they will interact.
Speaker 1
00:44
There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations and each 1 of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others. And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community.
Speaker 2
00:58
The following is a conversation with Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and 1 of the most fascinating, wild, fearless and fun minds I've ever gotten a chance to accompany for a time in exploring questions of human nature, human civilization and alien life out there in our impossibly big universe. He is the co-author of a book titled The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, The Age of M, Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and a fascinating recent paper I recommend on quote, grabby aliens, titled, If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, support it.
Speaker 2
01:45
Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Robin Hanson. You are working on a book about, quote, grabby aliens. This is a technical term, like the Big Bang.
Speaker 1
02:00
So what are grabby aliens? Grabby aliens expand fast into the universe and they change stuff. That's the key concept.
Speaker 1
02:10
So if they were out there, we would notice. That's the key idea. So the question is, where are the grabby aliens? So Fermi's question is, where are the aliens?
Speaker 1
02:21
And we could vary that in 2 terms, right? Where are the quiet, hard to see aliens, and where are the big, loud, grabby aliens? So it's actually hard to say where all the quiet ones are, right? There could be a lot of them out there, because they're not doing much, they're not making a big difference in the world.
Speaker 1
02:39
But the grabby aliens, by definition, are the ones you would see. We don't know exactly what they do with where they went, But the idea is they're in some sort of competitive world where each part of them is trying to grab more stuff and do something with it. And, you know, almost surely whatever is the most competitive thing to do with all the stuff they grab isn't to leave it alone the way it started, right? So we humans, when we go around the earth and use stuff, we change it.
Speaker 1
03:09
We turn a forest into a farmland, turn a harbor into a city. So the idea is aliens would do something with it and so we're not exactly sure what it would look like but it would look different. So somewhere in the sky we would see big spheres of different activity where things had been changed because they had been there. Expanding spheres.
Speaker 2
03:30
Right. So as you expand you aggressively interact and change the environment. So the word grabby versus loud, you're using them sometimes synonymously, sometimes not. Grabby to me is a little bit more aggressive.
Speaker 2
03:45
What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean to be loud? What does it mean to be grabby? What's the difference?
Speaker 2
03:50
And loud in what way? Is it visual? Is it sound? Is it some other physical phenomena like gravitational waves?
Speaker 2
03:57
What, are you using this kind of in a broad philosophical sense? Or there's a specific thing that it means to be loud in this universe of ours?
Speaker 1
04:07
My co-authors and I put together a paper with a particular mathematical model, and so we used the term grabby aliens to describe that more particular model. And the idea is it's a more particular model of the general concept of loud. So loud would just be the general idea that they would be really obvious.
Speaker 2
04:25
So grabby is the technical term. Is it in the title of the paper?
Speaker 1
04:29
It's in the body. The title is actually about loud and quiet. So the idea is you want to distinguish your particular model of things from the general category of things everybody else might talk about.
Speaker 1
04:40
So that's how we distinguish.
Speaker 2
04:41
The paper title is, If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet aliens are also rare. If life on Earth, God, this is such a good abstract. If life on Earth had to achieve N hard steps to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the Nth power.
Speaker 2
05:00
So we'll talk about power, we'll talk about linear increase. So what is the technical definition of grabby? How do you envision grabbiness? And why are, in contrast with humans, why aren't humans grabby?
Speaker 2
05:18
So like where's that line? Is it well definable? What is grabby and what is not grabby?
Speaker 1
05:23
We have a mathematical model of the distribution of advanced civilizations, i.e. Aliens in space and time. That model has 3 parameters and we can set each 1 of those parameters from data and therefore we claim this is actually what we know about where they are in space-time.
Speaker 1
05:43
So the key idea is they appear at some point in space-time and then after some short delay they start expanding and they expand at some speed. And the speed is 1 of those parameters. That's 1 of the 3. And the other 2 parameters are about how they appear in time.
Speaker 1
06:00
That is, they appear at random places, and they appear in time according to a power law, and that power law has 2 parameters, and we can fit each of those parameters to data. And so then we can say, now we know. We know the distribution of advanced civilizations in space and time. So we are right now a new civilization and we have not yet started to expand.
Speaker 1
06:21
But plausibly we would start to do that within say 10 million years of the current moment. That's plenty of time. And 10 million years is a really short duration in the history of the universe. So we are at the moment a sort of random sample of the kind of times at which an advanced civilization might appear because we may or may not become grabby, but if we do, we'll do it soon.
Speaker 1
06:42
And so our current date is a sample, and that gives us 1 of the other parameters. The second parameter is the constant in front of the power law, and that's arrived from our current date.
Speaker 2
06:53
So power law, what is the N in the power law?
Speaker 1
06:58
That's the more complicated thing to explain. Advanced life appeared by going through a sequence of hard steps. So starting with very simple life, and here we are at the end of this process at pretty advanced life, and so we had to go through some intermediate steps, such as sexual selection, photosynthesis, multicellular animals, and the idea is that each of those steps was hard.
Speaker 1
07:24
Evolution just took a long time searching in a big space of possibilities to find each of those steps. And the challenge was to achieve all of those steps by a deadline of when the planets would no longer host simple life. And so Earth has been really lucky compared to all the other billions of planets out there in that we managed to achieve all these steps in the short time of the 5000000000 years that Earth can support simple life.
Speaker 2
07:53
So not all steps, but a lot of them, because we don't know how many steps there are before you start the expansion. So these are all the steps from
Speaker 1
08:00
the birth of life to the initiation of major expansion. Right, so we're pretty sure that it would happen really soon so that it couldn't be the same sort of a hard step as the last 1 in terms of taking a long time. So when we look at the history of Earth, we look at the durations of the major things that have happened, that suggests that there's roughly, say, 6 hard steps that happened, say between 3 and 12, and that we have just achieved the last 1 that would take a long time.
Speaker 1
08:32
Which is? Well, we don't know. Oh, okay. But whatever it is, we've just achieved the last 1.
Speaker 2
08:38
Are we talking about humans or aliens here? So let's talk about some of these steps. So Earth is really special in some way.
Speaker 2
08:45
We don't exactly know the level of specialness. We don't really know which steps were the hardest or not because we just have a sample of 1. But you're saying that there's 3 to 12 steps that we have to go through to get to where we are that are hard steps, hard to find by something that took a long time and is unlikely. There's a lot of ways to fail.
Speaker 1
09:07
There's a lot more ways to fail than to succeed. The first step would be sort of the very simplest form of life of any sort. And then we don't know whether that first sort is the first sort that we see in the historical record or not.
Speaker 1
09:22
But then some other steps are, say the development of photosynthesis, the development of sexual reproduction, there's the development of eukaryote cells, which are certain kind of complicated cells that seem to have only appeared once. And then there's multicellularity, that is, multiple cells coming together to large organisms like us. And in this statistical model of trying to fit all these steps into a finite window, the model actually predicts that these steps could be of varying difficulties, that is, they could each take different amounts of time on average. But if you're lucky enough that they all appear at a very short time, then the durations between them will be roughly equal and the time remaining left over in the rest of the window will also be the same length.
Speaker 1
10:08
So we at the moment have roughly a billion years left on Earth until simple life like us would no longer be possible. Life appeared roughly 400 million years after the very first time when life was possible at the very beginning. So those 2 numbers right there give you the rough estimate of 6 hard steps.
Speaker 2
10:26
Just to build up an intuition here, so we're trying to create a simple mathematical model of how life emerges and expands in the universe. And there's a section in this paper, how many hard steps, question mark. Right.
Speaker 2
10:43
The 2 most plausibly diagnostic earth durations seem to be the 1 remaining after now before Earth becomes uninhabitable for complex life. So you estimate how long Earth lasts, how many hard steps. There's windows for doing different hard steps. And you can sort of, like queuing theory, mathematically estimate of the solution or the passing of the hard steps or the taking of the hard steps.
Speaker 2
11:13
Sort of like coldly mathematical look. If life, pre-expansionary life, requires n number of steps, what is the probability of taking those steps on an earth that lasts a billion years, or 2000000000 years, or 5000000000 years, or 10 billion years? And you say, solving for E using the observed durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives E values of 3.9 and 12.5, range 5.7 to
Speaker 1
11:44
26,
Speaker 2
11:45
suggesting a middle estimate of at least 6. That's where you said 6 hard steps. Right.
Speaker 2
11:50
Just to get to where we are. Right. We started at the bottom, now we're here.
Speaker 1
11:55
And that took 6 steps on average. The key point is, on average, these things on any 1 random planet would take, you know, trillions or trillions of years, just a really long time. And so we're really lucky that they all happened really fast in a short time before our window closed.
Speaker 1
12:13
And the chance of that happening in that short window goes as that time period to the power of the number of steps. And so that was where the power we talked about before came from. And so that means in the history of the universe, we should overall roughly expect advanced life to appear as a power law in time. So that very early on, there was very little chance of anything appearing, and then later on, as things appear, other things are appearing somewhat closer to them in time, because they're all going as this power law.
Speaker 2
12:44
What is the power law? Can we, for people who are not math inclined, can you describe what a power law is?
Speaker 1
12:50
So, say the function x is linear, and x squared is quadratic, so it's the power of 2. If we make x to the 3, that's cubic, or the power of 3. And so, X to the sixth is the power of 6.
Speaker 1
13:04
And so we'd say life appears in the universe on a planet like Earth in that proportion to the time that it's been ready for life to appear. And that over the universe in general, it'll appear at roughly a power law like that.
Speaker 2
13:24
What is the exponent? What is n? Is it the number of hard steps?
Speaker 1
13:27
Yes, the number of hard steps. So that's
Speaker 2
13:29
the idea. Okay, So it's like if you're gambling and you're doubling up every time, this is the probability you just keep winning. So it gets very unlikely very quickly.
Speaker 2
13:42
And so we're the result of this unlikely chain of successes.
Speaker 1
13:46
It's actually a lot like cancer. So the dominant model of cancer in an organism like each of us is that we have all these cells and in order to become cancerous, a single cell has to go through a number of mutations. And these are very unlikely mutations, and so any 1 cell is very unlikely to have all these mutations happen by the time your lifespan's over, but we have enough cells in our body that the chance of any 1 cell producing cancer by the end of your life is actually pretty high, more like 40%.
Speaker 1
14:15
And so the chance of cancer appearing in your lifetime also goes as a power law, this power of the number of mutations that's required for any 1 cell in your body to become cancerous.
Speaker 2
14:24
The longer you live, the likely you are to have cancer.
Speaker 1
14:29
And the power is also roughly 6. That is, the chance of you getting cancer is roughly the power of 6 of the time you've been since you were born.
Speaker 2
14:37
It is perhaps not lost on people that you're comparing
Speaker 1
14:43
power laws of the survival or the arrival of the human species to cancerous cells. The same mathematical model, but of course we might have a different value assumption about the 2 outcomes. But of course from the point of view of cancer,
Speaker 2
15:00
It's more similar. From the point of view of cancer, it's a win-win. We both get to thrive, I suppose.
Speaker 2
15:09
It is interesting to take the point of view of all kinds of life forms on Earth, of viruses, of bacteria. They have a very different view. And you know, it's like the Instagram channel, Nature is Metal. The ethic under which nature operates doesn't often coincide, correlate with human morals.
Speaker 2
15:31
It seems cold and machine-like in the selection process that it performs.
Speaker 1
15:39
I am an analyst, I'm a scholar, an intellectual, and I feel I should carefully distinguish predicting what's likely to happen and then evaluating or judging what I think would be better to happen. And it's a little dangerous to mix those up too closely because then we can have wishful thinking. And so I try typically to just analyze what seems likely to happen regardless of whether I like it or whether we do anything about it.
Speaker 1
16:06
And then once you see a rough picture of what's likely to happen if we do nothing, then we can ask, well, what might we prefer? And ask where could the levers be to move it at least a little toward what we might prefer. And that's a useful, but often doing that just analysis of what's likely to happen if we do nothing offends many people. They find that dehumanizing or cold or metal as you say, to just say, well, this is what's likely to happen, and it's not your favorite, sorry, but maybe we can do something, but maybe we can't do that much.
Speaker 2
16:41
This is very interesting, that the cold analysis, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's medicine, whether it's economics, sometimes misses some very specific aspect of human condition. Like for example, when you look at a doctor and the act of a doctor helping a single patient, if you do the analysis of that doctor's time and cost of the medicine or the surgery or the transportation of the patient, this is the Paul Farmer question, You know, is it worth spending
Speaker 1
17:21
10, 20, $30,000
Speaker 2
17:23
on this 1 patient? When you look at all the people that are suffering in the world, that money could be spent so much better. And Yet, there's something about human nature that wants to help the person in front of you, and that is actually the right thing to do, despite the analysis.
Speaker 2
17:42
And sometimes when you do the analysis, there's something about the human mind that allows you to not take that leap, that irrational leap to act in this way, that the analysis explains it away. Well, it's like, for example, the US government, you know, the DOT, Department of Transportation, puts a value of I think like $9 million on a human life. And the moment you put that number on a human life, you can start thinking, well, okay, I can start making decisions about this or that and with a sort of cold economic perspective and then you might lose, you might deviate from a deeper truth of what it means to be human somehow. So you have to dance because then if you put too much weight on the anecdotal evidence on these kinds of human emotions, then you're going to lose, you could also probably more likely deviate from truth.
Speaker 2
18:42
But there's something about that cold analysis. Like I've been listening to a lot of people coldly analyze wars, war in Yemen, war in Syria, Israel, Palestine, war in Ukraine, and there's something lost when you do a cold analysis of why something happened. When you talk about energy, talking about sort of conflict, competition over resources, when you talk about geopolitics, sort of models of geopolitics and why a certain war happened, you lose something about the suffering that happens. I don't know.
Speaker 2
19:19
It's an interesting thing because you're both, you're exceptionally good at models in all domains, literally, but also there's a humanity to you. So it's an interesting dance. I don't know if you can comment on that dance.
Speaker 1
19:34
Sure. It's definitely true as you say that for many people if you are accurate in your judgment of say for a medical patient, right? What's the chance that this treatment might help and what's the cost and compare those to each other and you might say this looks like a lot of cost for a small medical gain and at that point knowing that fact that might take the air out of your sails. You might not be willing to do the thing that maybe you feel is right anyway, which is still to pay for it.
Speaker 1
20:14
And then somebody knowing that might want to keep that news from you, not tell you about the low chance of success or the high cost in order to save you this tension, this awkward moment where you might fail to do what they and you think is right. But I think the higher calling, the higher standard to hold you to, which many people can be held to, is to say, I will look at things accurately, I will know the truth, and then I will also do the right thing with it. I will be at peace with my judgment about what the right thing is in terms of the truth. I don't need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is.
Speaker 1
20:54
And I think if you do think you need to be lied to in order to figure out what the right thing to do is, you're at a great disadvantage because then people will be lying to you, you will be lying to yourself and you won't be as effective at achieving whatever good you were trying to achieve.
Speaker 2
21:11
But getting the data, getting the facts is step 1, not the final step. Absolutely. So I would say having a good model, getting the good data is step 1, and it's a burden.
Speaker 2
21:24
Because you can't just use that data to arrive at sort of the easy, convenient thing. You have to really deeply think about what is the right thing. You can't use, so the dark aspect of data, of models, is you can use it to excuse away actions that aren't ethical. You can use data to basically excuse away anything.
Speaker 1
21:52
But not looking at data lets you excuse yourself to pretend and think that you're doing good when you're not. Exactly. But it is
Speaker 2
22:01
a burden. It doesn't excuse you from still being human and deeply thinking about what is right. That very kind of gray area, that very subjective area.
Speaker 2
22:12
That's part of the human condition. But let us return for a time to aliens. So you started to define sort of the model, the parameters of grabbiness. Right.
Speaker 2
22:25
Or the, as we approach grabbiness. So what happens? So again, There was
Speaker 1
22:30
3 parameters. Yes. There's the speed at which they expand.
Speaker 1
22:34
There's the rate at which they appear in time, and that rate has a constant and a power. So we've talked about the history of life on Earth suggests that power is around 6, but maybe 3 to 12. We can say that constant comes from our current date, sort of sets the overall rate, and the speed, which is the last parameter, comes from the fact that when we look in the sky, we don't see them. So the model predicts very strongly that if they were expanding slowly, say 1% of the speed of light, our sky would be full of vast spheres that were full of activity.
Speaker 1
23:06
That is, at a random time when a civilization is first appearing, if it looks out into its sky, it would see many other grabby alien civilizations in the sky, and they would be much bigger than the full moon, they'd be huge spheres in the sky and they would be visibly different. We don't see them. Can we pause for a second?
Speaker 2
23:22
Okay. There's a bunch of hard steps that Earth had to pass to arrive at this place we are currently which we're starting to launch rockets out into space. We're kind of starting to expand. A bit, right.
Speaker 2
23:35
Very slowly, okay. But this is like the birth. If you look at the entirety of the history of Earth, we're now at this precipice of like expansion.
Speaker 1
23:46
We could, we might not choose to, but if we do, we will do it in the next 10 million years. 10 million, wow. Time flies when you're having fun.
Speaker 2
23:55
I was thinking more like a thousand.
Speaker 1
23:56
10 million is a short time on the cosmological scale, so that is, it might be only a thousand, But the point is, even if it's up to 10 million, that hardly makes any difference to the model. So I might as well give you 10 million.
Speaker 2
24:06
This makes me feel, I was so stressed about planning what I'm gonna do today,
Speaker 1
24:10
and now. Right, you got plenty of time.
Speaker 2
24:12
Plenty of time. I just need to be generating some offspring quickly here. Okay.
Speaker 2
24:19
So in this moment, this 10 million year gap or window when we start expanding, and you're saying, okay, so this is an interesting moment where there's a bunch of other alien civilizations that might, at some history of the universe, arrived at this moment where we're here. They passed all the hard steps. There's a model for how likely it is that that happens. And then they start expanding.
Speaker 2
24:45
And you think of an expansion as almost like a sphere. That's when you say speed, we're talking about the speed of the radius growth.
Speaker 1
24:53
Exactly. Like the surface, how fast the surface expands.
Speaker 2
24:56
Okay, and so you're saying that there is some speed for that expansion, average speed, and then we can play with that parameter, and if that speed is super slow, then maybe that explains why we haven't seen anything. If it's super fast,
Speaker 1
25:11
well, it would get- The slow would create the puzzle. If slow predicts, we would see them, but we don't see them.
Speaker 2
25:16
And so
Speaker 1
25:16
the way to explain that is that they're fast. So the idea is, if they're moving really fast, then we don't see them until they're almost here.
Speaker 2
25:25
Okay, this is counterintuitive. All right, hold on a second. I think this works best when I say a bunch of dumb things.
Speaker 2
25:31
Okay. And then you elucidate the full complexity and the beauty of the dumbness. So there's these spheres out there in the universe that are made visible because they're sort of using a lot of energy, so they're generating a lot of light and sound. They're changing things.
Speaker 2
25:51
They're changing things, and change would be visible a long
Speaker 1
25:55
way off. They would take apart stars, rearrange them, restructure galaxies, they would
Speaker 2
26:00
just, big, huge stuff. Okay, if they're expanding slowly, we would see a lot of them because the universe is old. It's old enough to where we would see them.
Speaker 1
26:12
We're assuming we're just typical, maybe at the 50th percentile of them. So like half of them have appeared so far, the other half will still appear later. And the math of our best estimate is that they appear roughly once per million galaxies, and we would meet them in roughly a billion years if we expanded out to meet them.
Speaker 1
26:35
So we're looking at a grabby aliens model, 3D sim. Right. What's, that's
Speaker 2
26:41
the actual name of the video. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, the fun begins. Okay, so this is, we're watching a three-dimensional sphere rotating, I presume that's the universe, and then the Grabby aliens are expanding and filling that universe with all kinds of fun.
Speaker 2
27:03
Pretty soon it's all full. It's full. So that's how the Grabby aliens come in contact, first of all with other aliens, and then with us humans. The following is a simulation of the Grabby Aliens model of alien civilizations.
Speaker 2
27:20
Civilizations are born, then expand outwards at constant speed. A spherical region of space is shown. By the time we get to 13.8 billion years, this sphere will be about 3,000 times as wide as the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda. Okay, this is fun.
Speaker 2
27:38
It's huge. Okay, it's huge. All right, so why don't we see, We're 1 little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot in that giant, giant sphere. Why don't we see any of
Speaker 1
27:53
the grabby aliens? It depends on how fast they expand. So you could see that if they expanded at the speed of light, you wouldn't see them until they were here.
Speaker 1
28:03
So like out there if somebody is destroying the universe with a vacuum decay, there's this doomsday scenario where somebody somewhere could change the vacuum of the universe and that would expand at the speed of light and basically destroy everything it hit. But you'd never see that until I got here because it's expanding at the speed of light. If you're expanding really slow then you see it from a long way off. So the fact we don't see anything in the sky tells us they're expanding fast, say over a third the speed of light, and that's really really fast.
Speaker 1
28:33
But that's what you have to believe if you look out and you don't see anything. Now you might say well how maybe I just don't want to believe this whole model why should I believe this whole model at all? And our best evidence why you should believe this model is our early date. We are right now at almost 14 billion years into the universe on a planet around a star that's roughly 5000000000 years old.
Speaker 1
28:58
But the average star out there will last roughly 5000000000000 years. That is a thousand times longer. And remember that power law, it says that the chance of advanced life appearing on a planet goes as the power of sixth of the time. So if a planet lasts a thousand times longer, then the chance of it appearing on that planet, if everything would stay empty at least, is a thousand to the sixth power, or 10 to the 18.
Speaker 1
29:25
So, enormous overwhelming chance that if the universe would just stay, sit and empty and waiting for advanced life to appear. When it would appear would be way at the end of all these planet lifetimes. That is the long planets near the end of the lifetime, trillions of years into the future. So, but we're really early compared to that.
Speaker 1
29:46
And our explanation is, at the moment, as you saw in the video, the universe is filling up. In roughly a billion years, it'll all be full. And at that point, it's too late for advanced life to show up. So you had to show up now before that deadline.
Speaker 2
29:58
Okay, can we break that apart a little bit? Okay, or linger on some of the things you said. So with the power law, the things we've done on Earth, the model you have says that it's very unlikely.
Speaker 2
30:10
Like we're lucky SOBs.
Speaker 1
30:13
Is that mathematically correct to say? We're crazy early.
Speaker 2
30:18
That is. When early means like.
Speaker 1
30:20
In the history of the universe. In the history, okay, so
Speaker 2
30:25
given this model, how do we make sense of that? If we're super, can we just be the lucky ones?
Speaker 1
30:31
Well, 10 to the 18 lucky, you know, how lucky do you feel? So, you know, that's pretty lucky, right?
Speaker 2
30:39
You know, 10 to the 18 is a billion billion. So then if you were just being honest and humble, that that means, what does that mean?
Speaker 1
30:48
It means 1 of the assumptions that calculated this crazy early must be wrong. That's what it means. So the key assumption we suggest is that the universe would stay empty.
Speaker 1
30:57
So most life would appear like a thousand times longer later than now, if everything would stay empty waiting for it to appear. What is, so what does not empty mean? So the gravity aliens are filling the universe right now, roughly at the moment they've filled half of the universe, and they've changed it, and when they fill everything, it's too late for stuff like us to appear. But wait, hold on a second.
Speaker 2
31:20
Did anyone help us get lucky?
Speaker 1
31:22
If it's so difficult, what, how do, like, what? So it's like cancer, right? There's all these cells, each of which randomly does or doesn't get cancer, and eventually some cell gets cancer, and you know, we were 1 of those.
Speaker 1
31:37
But hold on a second. Okay, but we got it early. Early compared to the prediction with an assumption that's wrong. So that's how we do a lot of theoretical analysis, you have a model that makes a prediction that's wrong, then that helps you reject that model.
Speaker 1
31:53
Let's try to understand exactly where the wrong is. So the assumption is that the universe is empty. Stays empty. Stays empty.
Speaker 1
32:01
And waits until this advanced life appears in trillions of years. That is, if the universe would just stay empty, if there was just nobody else out there, then when you should expect advanced life to appear, if you're the only 1 in the universe, when should you expect to appear? You should expect to appear trillions of years in the future. I see, right, right.
Speaker 2
32:20
So this is a very sort of nuanced mathematical assumption. I don't think we can intuit it cleanly with words. But if you assume that you're just, the universe stays empty and you're waiting for 1 life civilization to pop up, then it should happen very late, much later than now.
Speaker 2
32:45
And if you look at Earth, the way things happen on Earth, it happened much, much, much, much, much earlier than it was supposed to according to this model if you take the initial assumption. Therefore, you can say, well, the initial assumption of the universe staying empty is very unlikely.
Speaker 1
33:00
Right, so. And the other alternative theory is the universe is filling up and will fill up soon. And so we are typical for the origin date of things that can appear before the deadline.
Speaker 1
33:11
Before the deadline. Okay, it's filling up, so why don't we see anything if it's filling up? Because they're expanding really fast.
Speaker 2
33:18
Close to the speed of light. Exactly. So we will only see it when it's here.
Speaker 2
33:22
Almost here. What are the ways in which we might see a quickly expanding,
Speaker 1
33:30
This is both exciting and terrifying. It is terrifying.
Speaker 2
33:33
It's like watching
Speaker 1
33:34
a truck driving at you at 100 miles an hour. So we would see spheres in the sky, at least 1 sphere in the sky, growing very rapidly. Like very rapidly.
Speaker 1
33:48
Right, yes, very rapidly.
Speaker 2
33:52
So there's, you know, different, because we were just talking about 10 million years. This would be.
Speaker 1
33:57
You might see it 10 million years in advance coming. I mean, you still might have a long warning. Again, the universe is 14 million years old.
Speaker 1
34:05
The typical origin times of these things are spread over several billion years. So the chance of 1 originating very close to you in time is very low. So it still might take millions of years from the time you see it from the time it gets here. You've got a million years of your years to be terrified of this vast sphere coming at you.
Speaker 1
34:25
But coming at you very fast, so if they're traveling close to the speed of light. But they're coming from a long way away. So remember, the rate at which they appear is 1 per million galaxies. Right.
Speaker 1
34:36
So they're roughly 100 galaxies away. I see, so the delta between the speed of light and their actual travel speed is very important? Right, so if they're going at say half the speed of light.
Speaker 2
34:49
We'll have a long time. Then. Yeah, but what if they're traveling exactly
Speaker 1
34:53
at a speed of light? Then we see them like. Then we wouldn't have much warning, but that's less likely.
Speaker 1
34:58
Well, we can't exclude it.
Speaker 2
35:00
And they could also be somehow traveling fast in the speed of light? Or? I think
Speaker 1
35:05
we can't exclude, because if they could go faster than the speed of light, then they would just already be everywhere. So in a universe where you can travel faster than the speed of light, you can go backwards in space time. So any time you appeared anywhere in space time, you could just fill up everything.
Speaker 1
35:20
And so anybody in the future who ever appeared, they would have been here by now.
Speaker 2
35:24
Can you exclude the possibility that those kinds of aliens aren't already here?
Speaker 1
35:30
Well, we should have a different discussion of that.
Speaker 2
35:33
So let's leave that discussion aside just to linger and understand the Grabe alien expansion, which is beautiful and fascinating. Okay, so there's these giant expanding spheres of alien civilizations. Now, when those spheres collide, mathematically, it's very likely that we're not the first collision of grabby alien civilizations, I suppose is 1 way to say it.
Speaker 2
36:09
So there's like the first time the spheres touch each other, recognize each other, they meet. They recognize each other first before they meet. They see each other coming. They see each other coming.
Speaker 2
36:21
And then, so there's a bunch of them, there's a combinatorial thing where they start seeing each other coming. And then there's a third neighbor, it's like what the hell? And then there's a fourth 1. Okay, so what does that, you think, look like?
Speaker 2
36:33
What lessons from human nature, that's the only data we have, can you draw upon the universe? So the
Speaker 1
36:41
story of the history of the universe here is what I would call a living cosmology. So what I'm excited about, in part, by this model is that it lets us tell a story of cosmology where there are actors who have agendas. So most ancient peoples, they had cosmologies, the stories they told about where the universe came from and where it's going and what's happening out there.
Speaker 1
37:01
And their stories, they like to have agents and actors, gods or something out there doing things. And lately, our favorite cosmology is dead, kind of boring. You know, we're the only activity we know about or see and everything else just looks dead and empty. But this is now telling us, no, that's not quite right.
Speaker 1
37:19
At the moment, the universe is filling up and in a few billion years, it'll be all full. And from then on, the history of the universe will be the universe full of aliens.
Speaker 2
37:30
Yeah, so that's a really good reminder, a really good way to think about cosmology is we're surrounded by a vast darkness and we don't know what's going on in that darkness until the light from whatever generate lights arrives here. So we kind of, yeah, we look up at the sky, okay, there's stars, oh, they're pretty, but you don't think about
Speaker 1
37:53
the giant expanding spheres of aliens that are quickly approaching. Looking at the clock, if you're clever, the clock tells you. So I like the analogy with the ancient Greeks.
Speaker 1
38:04
So you might think that an ancient Greek, you know, staring at the universe, couldn't possibly tell how far away the sun was or how far away the moon is or how big the earth is. That all you can see is just big things in the sky you can't tell. But they were clever enough actually to be able to figure out the size of the Earth, and the distance to the Moon and the Sun, and the size of the Moon and Sun. That is, they could figure those things out actually by being clever enough.
Speaker 1
38:27
And so similarly, we can actually figure out where are the aliens out there in space time by being clever about the few things we can see, 1 of which is our current date. And so now that you have this living cosmology, we can tell the story that the universe starts out empty and then at some point, things like us appear, very primitive, and then some of those stop being quiet and expand, and then for a few billion years, they expand, and then they meet each other, and then for the next 100 billion years, they commune with each other. That is, the usual models of cosmology say that in roughly 100, 150 billion years, the expansion of the universe will happen so much that all you'll have left is some galaxy clusters and that are sort of disconnected from each other. But before then, for the next 100 million years, 100 billion years, excuse me, They will interact.
Speaker 1
39:17
There will be this community of all the grabby alien civilizations, and each 1 of them will hear about and even meet thousands of others. And we might hope to join them someday and become part of that community. That's an interesting thing to aspire to.
Speaker 2
39:32
Yes, interesting is an interesting word. Is the universe of alien civilizations defined by war as much or more than war-defined human history?
Speaker 1
39:48
I would say it's defined by competition, and then the question is how much competition implies war. So up until recently, competition defined life on earth. Competition between species and organisms and among humans, competitions among individuals and communities, and that competition often took the form of war in the last 10,000 years.
Speaker 1
40:16
Many people now are hoping or even expecting to sort of suppress and end competition in human affairs. They regulate business competition, they prevent military competition, And that's a future I think a lot of people will like to continue and strengthen. People will like to have something close to world government or world governance or at least a world community. And they will like to suppress war and any forms of business and personal competition over the coming centuries.
Speaker 1
40:47
And they may like that so much that they prevent interstellar colonization, which would become the end of that era. That is, interstellar colonization would just return severe competition to human or our descendant affairs. And many civilizations may prefer that, and ours may prefer that. But if they choose to allow interstellar colonization, they will have chosen to allow competition to return with great force.
Speaker 1
41:12
That is, there's really not much of a way to centrally govern a rapidly expanding sphere of civilization. And so I think 1 of the most solid things we can predict about Gravelians is they have accepted competition and they have internal competition and therefore they have the potential for competition when they meet each other at the borders. But whether that's military competition is more of an open question.
Speaker 2
41:38
So military meaning physically destructive, right. So there's a lot to say there. So 1 idea that you kind of proposed is progress might be maximized through competition, through some kind of healthy competition, some definition of healthy.
Speaker 2
42:02
So like constructive, not destructive competition. So like we would likely grab the alien civilizations, we'd be likely defined by competition because they can expand faster. Because competition allows innovation and sort of the battle of ideas.
Speaker 1
42:19
The way I would take the logic is to say, competition just happens if you can't coordinate to stop it. And you probably can't coordinate to stop it in an expanding interstellar wave.
Speaker 2
42:32
So competition is a fundamental force in the universe.
Speaker 1
42:37
It has been so far, and it would be within an expanding, grabby alien civilization, but we today have the chance, many people think and hope, of greatly controlling and limiting competition within our civilization for a while. And that's an interesting choice. Whether to allow competition to sort of regain its full force or whether to suppress and manage it.
Speaker 1
43:03
Well, 1 of the open questions that has been raised
Speaker 2
43:08
in the past less than
Speaker 1
43:11
100
Speaker 2
43:12
years is whether our desire to lessen the destructive nature of competition or the destructive kind of competition will be outpaced by the destructive power of our weapons. Sort of if nuclear weapons and weapons of that kind become more destructive than our desire for peace, then all it takes is 1 asshole at the party to ruin the party.
Speaker 1
43:45
It takes 1 asshole to make a delay, but not that much of a delay on the cosmological scales we're talking about. So you could still party on. Even a vast nuclear war, if it happened here right now on Earth, it would not kill all humans.
Speaker 1
44:03
It certainly wouldn't kill all life. And so human civilization would return within 100,000 years.
Speaker 2
44:10
So all the history of atrocities, and if you look at the Black Plague, which is not human-caused atrocities or whatever. There are
Speaker 1
44:26
a lot of military atrocities
Speaker 2
44:28
in history, absolutely. In the 20th century. Those are, those challenges to think about human nature but the cosmic scale of time and space, they do not stop the human spirit, essentially.
Speaker 2
44:44
The Humanity goes on.
Speaker 1
44:46
Through all the atrocities, it goes on. Most likely. So even a nuclear war isn't enough to destroy us or to stop our potential from expanding, but we could institute a regime of global governance that limited competition, including military and business competition of sorts, and that could prevent our expansion.
Speaker 2
45:09
Of course, to play devil's advocate, global governance is centralized power, and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 1 of the aspects of competition that's been very productive is not letting any 1 person, any 1 country, any 1 center of power become absolutely powerful. Because that's another lesson, is it seems to corrupt, there's something about ego and the human mind that seems to be corrupted by power.
Speaker 2
45:47
So when you say global governance, that terrifies me more than the possibility of war. Because it's- I think people
Speaker 1
45:58
will be less terrified than you are right now. And let me try to paint the picture from their point of view. This isn't my point of view, but I think it's going to be a widely shared point of view.
Speaker 2
46:08
Yes, this is 2 devil's advocates arguing, 2 devils. Okay, so
Speaker 1
46:13
for the last half century and into the continuing future, we actually have had a strong elite global community that shares a lot of values and beliefs and has created a lot of convergence in global policy. So If you look at electromagnetic spectrum or medical experiments or pandemic policy or nuclear power energy or regulating airplanes or just in a wide range of area, in fact, the world has very similar regulations and rules everywhere. And it's not a coincidence because they are part of a world community where people get together at places like Davos, et cetera, where world elites want to be respected by other world elites and they have a convergence of opinion and that produces something like global governance, but without a global center.
Speaker 1
47:07
And this is sort of what human mobs or communities have done for a long time. That is, humans can coordinate together on shared behavior without a center by having gossip and reputation within a community of elites. And that is what we have been doing and are likely to do a lot more of. So for example, you know, 1 of the things that's happening say with the war in Ukraine is that this world community of elites has decided that they disapprove of the Russian invasion and they are coordinating to pull resources together from all around the world in order to oppose it.
Speaker 1
47:40
And they are proud of that, sharing that opinion and their feel that they are morally justified in their stance there. And that's the kind of event that actually brings world elite communities together, where they come together and they push a particular policy and position that they share and that they achieve successes. And the same sort of passion animates global elites with respect to say global warming, or global poverty and other sorts of things. And they are in fact making progress on those sorts of things through shared global community of elites.
Speaker 1
48:18
And in some sense, they are slowly walking toward global governance, slowly strengthening various world institutions of governance, but cautiously, carefully, watching out for the possibility of a single power that might corrupt it. I think a lot of people over the coming centuries will look at that history and like it.
Speaker 2
48:38
It's an interesting thought, and thank you for playing that devil's advocate there. But I think the elites too easily lose touch of the morals that the best of human nature and power corrupts and everything you just said. If their
Speaker 1
48:58
view is the 1 that determines what happens, their view may still end up there, even if you or I might criticize it from that point of view.
Speaker 2
49:07
So from a perspective of minimizing human suffering, elites can use topics of the war in Ukraine and climate change and all of those things to sell an idea to the world and with disregard to the amount of suffering it causes, their actual actions. So like you can tell all kinds of narratives. That's the way propaganda works.
Speaker 2
49:36
Hitler really sold the idea that everything Germany is doing is either it's the victim is defending itself against the cruelty of the world. And it's actually trying to bring out about a better world. So every power center thinks they're doing good. And so this is the positive of competition, of having multiple power centers.
Speaker 2
50:02
This kind of gathering of elites makes me very, very, very nervous. The dinners, the meetings in the closed rooms. I don't know.
Speaker 1
50:16
But remember we talked about separating our cold analysis of what's likely or possible from what we prefer, and so this isn't exactly enough time for that. We might say, I would recommend we don't go this route of a strong world governance, and because I would say it'll preclude this possibility of becoming grabby aliens of filling the next nearest million galaxies for the next billion years with vast amounts of activity and interest and value of life out there that's the thing we would lose by deciding that we wouldn't expand, that we would stay here and keep our comfortable shared governance.
Speaker 2
50:55
So you, wait, you think that global governance is, makes it more likely or less likely that we expand out into the universe? Less.
Speaker 1
51:09
So this is the key point.
Speaker 2
51:12
Great, right, so screw the elites. Wait, do we want to expand?
Speaker 1
51:19
So again, I want to separate my neutral analysis from my evaluation and say, first of all, I have an analysis that tells us this is a key choice that we will face and that it's a key choice other aliens have faced out there. And it could be that only 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 civilizations chooses to expand and the rest of them stay quiet. And that's how it goes out there.
Speaker 1
51:40
And we face that choice too. And it'll happen sometime in the next 10 million years, maybe the next thousand, but the key thing to notice from our point of view is that even though you might like our global governance, you might like the fact that we've come together, we no longer have massive wars and we no longer have destructive competition, and that we could continue that. The cost of continuing that would be to prevent interstellar colonization. That is once you allow interstellar colonization, then you've lost control of those colonies and whatever they change into, they could come back here and compete with you back here as a result of having lost control.
Speaker 1
52:19
And I think if people value that global governance and global community and regulation and all the things it can do enough, they would then want to prevent interstellar colonization.
Speaker 2
52:31
I wanna have a conversation with those people. I believe that both for humanity, for the good of humanity, for what I believe is good in humanity, and for expansion, exploration, innovation, distributing the centers of power is very beneficial. So this whole meeting of elites, and I've been very fortunate to meet quite a large number of elites.
Speaker 2
52:57
They make me nervous because it's easy to lose touch of reality. I'm nervous about that in myself, to make sure that you never lose touch as you get sort of older, wiser, you know how you generally get like disrespectful of kids, kids these days. No, the kids are, their culture
Speaker 1
53:24
is beautiful. Okay, but I think you should hear a stronger case for their position, so I'm gonna play that 1.
Speaker 2
53:28
For the elites.
Speaker 1
53:29
Yes, well, for the limiting of expansion and for the regulation of behavior.
Speaker 2
53:36
So just, okay, can I linger on that? So you're saying those 2 are connected. So the human civilization and alien civilizations come to a crossroads.
Speaker 2
53:47
They have to decide, do we want to expand or not? And connected to that, do we want to give a lot of power to a central elite, or do we want to distribute the power centers which is naturally connected to the expansion. When you expand, you distribute the power.
Speaker 1
54:08
If, say, over the next thousand years, we fill up the solar system, right? We go out from Earth and we colonize Mars and we change a lot of things. Within a solar system, still everything is within reach.
Speaker 1
54:20
That is, if there's a rebellious colony around Neptune, you can throw rocks at it and smash it and teach them discipline, okay? A central control over the solar system is feasible. But once you let it escape the solar system, it's no longer feasible. But if you have a solar system that doesn't have a central control, maybe broken into 1,000 different political units in the solar system, then any 1 part of that that allows interstellar colonization, and it happens.
Speaker 1
54:47
That is, interstellar colonization happens when only 1 party chooses to do it and is able to do it. And that's what it, therefore, so we can just say in a world of competition, if interstellar colonization is possible, it will happen and then competition will continue. And that will sort of ensure the continuation of competition into the indefinite future. And competition,
Speaker 2
55:09
we don't know, but competition can take violent forms.
Speaker 1
55:12
And many forms. And the case I was going to make is that I think 1 of the things that most scares people about competition is not just that it creates holocausts and death on massive scales, is that it's likely to change who we are and what we value.
Speaker 2
55:28
Yes. So This is the other thing with power. As we grow, as human civilization grows, becomes multi-planetary, multi-solar system potentially, how does that change us, do you think?
Speaker 1
55:44
I think the more you think about it, the more you realize that it can change us a lot. So, first of all, I would
Speaker 2
55:49
say- It's pretty dark, by the way. Well, it's- It's just honest.
Speaker 1
55:53
Right, well, I'm trying to get you there, but I think the first thing you should say, if you look at history, just human history over the last 10,000 years, if you really understood what people were like a long time ago, you'd realize they were really quite different. Ancient cultures created people who were really quite different. Most historical fiction lies to you about that.
Speaker 1
56:11
It often offers you modern characters in an ancient world, but If you actually study history, you will see just how different they were and how differently they thought. And they've changed a lot, many times, and they've changed a lot across time. So I think the most obvious prediction about the future is even if you only have the mechanisms of change we've seen in the past, you should still expect a lot of change in the future. But we have a lot bigger mechanisms for change in the future than we had in the past.
Speaker 1
56:39
So I have this book called The Age of M, Work, Love and Life and Robots Rule the Earth. And it's about what happens if brain emulations become possible. So a brain emulation is where you take a actual human brain and you scan it and find spatial and chemical detail to create a computer simulation of that brain. And then those computer simulations of brains are basically citizens in a new world.
Speaker 1
57:02
They work and they vote and they fall in love and they get mad and they lie to each other and this is a whole new world and my book is about analyzing how that world is different than our world basically using competition as my key lever of analysis. That is if that world remains competitive then I can figure out how they change in that world, what they do differently than we do. And it's very different. And it's different in ways that are shocking sometimes to many people, and ways some people don't like.
Speaker 1
57:31
I think it's an okay world, but I have to admit, it's quite different. And that's just 1 technology. If we add dozens more technologies, changes into the future, we should just expect it's possible to become very different than who we are. I mean, in the space of all possible minds, our minds are a particular architecture, a particular structure, a particular set of habits, and they are only 1 piece in a vast space of possibilities.
Speaker 1
57:59
The space of possible minds is really huge.
Speaker 2
58:01
So, yeah, let's linger on the space of possible minds for a moment just to sort of humble ourselves. How peculiar our peculiarities are. Like the fact that we like a particular kind of sex and the fact that we eat food through 1 hole and poop through another hole.
Speaker 2
58:26
And that seems to be a fundamental aspect of life. It's very important to us. And that life is finite in a certain kind of way. We have a meat vehicle.
Speaker 2
58:38
So death is very important to us. I wonder which aspects are fundamental or would be common throughout human history and also throughout, sorry, throughout history of life on Earth and throughout other kinds of lives. Like what is really useful? You mentioned competition, seems to be a 1 fundamental thing.
Speaker 1
58:57
I've tried to do analysis of where our distant descendants might go in terms of what are robust features we could predict about our descendants. So again, I have this analysis of sort of the next generation, so the next era after ours. If you think of human history as having 3 eras so far, there was the forager era, the farmer era, and the industry era, then my attempt in Age of M is to analyze the next error after that.
Speaker 1
59:21
And it's very different, but of course, there could be more and more errors after that. So, analyzing a particular scenario and thinking it through is 1 way to try to see how different the future could be, but that doesn't give you some sort of like sense of what's typical. But I have tried to analyze what's typical, and so I have 2 predictions I think I can make pretty solidly. 1 thing is that We know at the moment that humans discount the future rapidly.
Speaker 1
59:49
So we discount the future in terms of caring about consequences, roughly a factor of 2 per generation, and there's a solid evolutionary analysis why sexual creatures would do that.
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