Alien civilizations are everywhere | Andrej Karpathy and Lex Fridman

how many intelligent aliens civilizations do you think are out there and uh is their intelligence different or similar to ours yeah I've been preoccupied with this question quite a bit recently uh basically from for me Paradox and just thinking through and and the reason actually that I am very interested in uh the origin of life is fundamentally trying to understand how common it is that there are technological societies out there uh um in space and the more I study it the more I think that um uh there should be quite a few quite a lot why haven't we heard from them because I I agree with you it feels like I just don't see why what we did here on Earth is so difficult to do yeah and especially when you get into the details of it I used to think origin of life was very um it was this magical rare event but then you read books like for example McLean um uh the vital question a life ascending Etc and he really gets in and he really makes you believe that this is not that rare basic chemistry you have an active Earth and you have your alkaline Vents and you have lots of alkaline Waters mixing with the devotion and you have your proton gradients and you have the little porous pockets of these alkaline vents that concentrate chemistry and um basically as he steps through all of these little pieces you start to understand that actually this is not that crazy you could see this happen on other systems um and he really takes you from just a geology to primitive life and he makes it feel like it's actually pretty plausible and also like the origin of life um didn't uh was actually fairly fast after formation of Earth um if I remember correctly just a few hundred million years or something like that after basically when it was possible life actually arose and so that makes me feel like that is not the constraint that is not the limiting variable and that life should actually be fairly common um and then it you know where the drop-offs are is very um is very interesting to think about I currently think that there's no major drop-offs basically and so there should be quite a lot of life and basically what it where that brings me to then is the only way to reconcile the fact that we haven't found anyone and so on is that um we just can't we can't see them we can't observe them just a quick brief comment Nick Lane and a lot of biologists I talked to they really seem to think that the jump from bacteria to more complex organisms is the hardest jump the eukaryotic like yeah which I don't I get it they're much more knowledgeable uh than me about like the intricacies of biology but that seems like crazy because how much how many single cell organisms are there like and how much time you have surely it's not that difficult like in a billion years is not even that long of a time really just all these bacteria under constrained resources battling it out I'm sure they can invent more complex again I don't understand it's like how to move from a hello world program to like like invent a function or something like that I don't yeah I I so I don't yeah so I'm with you I just feel like I don't see any if the origin of life that would be my intuition that's the hardest thing but if that's not the hardest thing because it happens so quickly then it's got to be everywhere and yeah maybe we're just too dumb to see it well it's just we don't have really good mechanisms for seeing this life I mean uh by what how um so I'm not an expert just to preface this but just at it it was I want to meet an expert on alien intelligence and how to communicate I'm very suspicious of our ability to to find these intelligences out there and to find these Earths like radio waves for example are are terrible uh their power drops off as basically one over R square uh so I remember reading that our current radio waves would not be uh the ones that we we are broadcasting would not be uh measurable by our devices today only like was it like one tenth of a light year away like not even a basically tiny distance because you really need like a targeted transmission of massive power directed somewhere for this to be picked up on long distances and so I just think that our ability to measure is um is not amazing I think there's probably other civilizations out there and then the big question is why don't they build binomial probes and why don't they Interstellar travel across the entire galaxy and my current answer is it's probably Interstellar travel is like really hard uh you have the interstellar medium if you want to move at closer speed of light you're going to be encountering bullets along the way because even like tiny hydrogen atoms and little particles of dust are basically have in like massive kinetic energy at those speeds and so basically you need some kind of shielding you need you have all the cosmic radiation uh it's just like brutal out there it's really hard and so my thinking is maybe Interstellar travel is just extremely hard and you have billions of years to build hard it feels like uh it feels like we're not a billion years away from doing that it just might be that it's very you have to go very slowly potentially as an example through space um right as opposed to close the speed of light so I'm suspicious basically of our ability to measure life and I'm suspicious of the ability to um just permeate all of space in the Galaxy or across galaxies and that's the only way that I can I can currently see a way around it yeah it's kind of mind-blowing to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations out there kind of slowly traveling through space to meet each other and some of them meet some of them go to war some of them collaborate and they're all just uh independent they are all just like little pockets I don't know well statistically if there's like if it's there's trillions of them surely some of them some of the pockets are close enough to get some of them happen to me close yeah in the close enough to see each other and then once you see once you see something that is definitely complex life like if we see something yeah we're probably going to be severe like intensely aggressively motivated to figure out what the hell that is and try to meet them what would be your first instinct to try to like at a generational level meet them or defend against them or what would be your uh Instinct as a president of the United States and the scientists I don't know which hat you prefer in this question yeah I think the the question it's really hard um I will say like for example for us um we have lots of primitive life forms on Earth um next to us we have all kinds of ants and everything else and we share space with them and we are hesitant to impact on them and to we are and we're trying to protect them by default because they are amazing interesting dynamical systems that took a long time to evolve and they are interesting and special and I don't know that you want to um destroy that by default and so I like complex dynamical systems that took a lot of time to evolve I think I'd like to I like to preserve it if I can afford to and I'd like to think that the same would be true about uh the galactic resources and that uh they would think that we're kind of incredible interesting story that took time it took a few billion years to unravel and you don't want to just destroy it I could see two aliens talking about Earth right now and saying uh I'm I'm a big fan of complex dynamical systems so I think it was a value to preserve these and who basically are a video game they watch or show a TV show that they watch yeah I think uh you would need like a very good reason I think to to destroy it uh like why don't we destroy these ant farms and so on it's because we're not actually like really in direct competition with them right now uh we do it accidentally and so on but um there's plenty of resources and so why would you destroy something that is so interesting and precious well from a scientific perspective you might probe it yeah you might interact with it like you might want to learn something from it right so I wonder there's could be certain physical phenomena that we think is a physical phenomena but it's actually interacting with us to like poke the finger and see what happens I think it should be very interesting to scientists other alien scientists what happened here um and you know it's a what we're seeing today is a snapshot basically it's a it's a result of a huge amount of computation uh of over like billion years or something like that so it could have been initiated by aliens this could be a computer running a program like when okay if you had the power to do this when you okay for sure at least I would I would pick a Earth-like planet that has the conditions based my understanding of the chemistry prerequisites for life and I would see it with life and run it right like yeah wouldn't you 100 do that and observe it and then protect I mean that that's not just a hell of a good TV show it's it's a good scientific experiment yeah and that it means it's physical simulation right maybe maybe the evolution is the most like actually running it uh is the most efficient way to uh understand computation or to compute stuff or to understand life or you know what life looks like and uh what branches it can take but it does make me kind of feel weird that we're part of a science experiment but maybe it's everything's a science experiments how to does that change anything for us if we're a science experiment um I don't know two descendants of Apes talking about being inside of a science experience I'm suspicious of this idea of like a deliberate Pence Premiere as you described it sort of and I don't see a divine intervention in some way in the in the historical record right now I do feel like um the story in these in these books like Nick Lane's books and so on sort of makes sense uh and it makes sense how life arose on Earth uniquely and uh yeah I don't need a I need I don't need to reach for more exotic explanations right now sure but NPCs inside a video game don't don't don't observe any divine intervention either we might just be all NPCs running a kind of code maybe eventually they will currently NPCs are really dumb but once they're running gpts maybe they will be like hey this is really suspicious what the hell

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 643,272

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, andrej karpathy, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: iG6ZG6drl8M

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022