Envisioning Our Future with Isaac Arthur

have you ever tried to imagine the far future even though we live in an age defined by our technology humanity seems poised to boldly continue to march into a new world of far future technologies coming are the days of orbital rings Dyson swarms and molecular nanotechnology futurism provides us glimpses of these future technologies and what we might do with them through advancing technology we will colonize other worlds and improve life on this one perhaps the most interesting question of all to ask is will you be around to see it unfold if things like life extension biotechnology continue to head in the direction that they currently are it could be that people alive today may still be alive centuries or more from now or perhaps we'll merge with our technology in some way making ourselves technologically nearly immortal though it must be noted that even with the most advanced far future technologies there must always come a time when existence must come to an end what technology cannot defeat is the aging of the universe itself [Music] welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Music] joining John today is longtime friend Isaac Arthur host of science and futurism with Isaac Arthur on YouTube a physicist and futurist Isaac explores the possibilities of the future of humanity on his channel and also speculative looks at what alien civilizations might be like science fiction and of course explorations of the solutions to the Fermi paradox Isaac Arthur welcome to the program thanks for having me on John it's my pleasure man we've been interacting for a long time on YouTube and it just seemed like this would be the perfect interview for for October Isaac you we both started in a similar way accidentally on YouTube we uploaded videos that we thought might get a certain amount of views you know people we know you know and then all of a sudden they they go crazy in my case that was the overt Abby star which is since you know become a not so interesting story but back then in 2016 it was huge and yours was the idea of megastructures what what could be built in the far far future or what aliens might even build how do we out of the things you talked about the mega structures what is the least likely for us to see I know a lot of people talk about Dyson spheres and I don't know that those are feasible what what's your view I think the the classic Dyson Sphere the solid one that's that's probably fairly unlikely except maybe as a very thin solo collector you know nobody living on it the Dyson swarm itself is really more just an expansion concept of many different mega structures all orbiting around the same stall and that one to me seems almost like an inevitable thing that's gonna happen in terms of the least you think as we say the least likely ever be built something like a hoop or a donut wall you'd say well why would you ever built that but can societies that build things like that the way you know it is the more likely it is someone will do the least once so yeah you know you might be billions of these habitats or structures but you still have that one that was built it's a flat ortho as a donut or built as a cube but so I think you would see some pretty strange ones get built eventually but the the ones that I think you see the most of course all that the vote taking habitats you're neo cylinders or big or so rotating habitats essentially creating eventually a Dyson swarm where you have you know many habitats and maybe energy collectors and things like that and that it might be detectable from a distance if you're looking for you know study I usually say the the now G to make a Dyson swarm is not to think of it as make a structure itself but more like a city full of buildings those buildings are gonna change over time there come a different forms but the city is you know pretty much constant of itself and that's what the swarm is more like right so if you have a civilization that lasts for billions of years they're they're constantly evolving Dyson swarm is going to be that would actually be a technical signature in itself would be a changing profile based on something that could only be technological I would imagine what do you think yeah I think it's it's a lot to get a photograph of a continent from orbit it's gonna change over time but the basic format stays more or less the same ish so you'll be on a spot it you're never gonna miss that continent but the specific layout isn't gonna look the same a thousand years a tour people forced you know live there and you know who knows what the place is gonna look like ten thousand years later but the general notion is they are using up all that energy oh they're using all that space because they want to stay close enough all communications and even if you're not using stall you're still getting up in something it looks a lot like a Dyson Sphere in terms of waste heat because you can't get any closer than that or you start basically evaporating away under your waste heat so you still end up with one it might be a different size though you know a lot of these ideas like the Dyson swarm actually the Dyson Sphere is very old idea I think that goes back to Olaf Stapledon in the 30s Stoll Mako I think it was in it yeah but the the actual Dyson swarm which is as Freeman Dyson had conceived it there's a 1960s idea and so as are things like the Kardashev scale or even searching for SETI beacons so do you think because we're still essentially functioning and study on on ideas from the 1960s do you think these are actually out of date now and that they're the reason we don't see a Kardashev Type three civilization is because civilizations don't pursue that level of development or do you think these do you think the ideas in which we base all this are they updated I mean to a degree you know obviously we all we have to change our perspective as we get new technologies and insights but the co2 chef Sato and the Dyson swarm all very basic concepts into themselves it's as the ideas that you want to make use of your son or its Mastiff a least and that a civilization is gonna grow into it pretty much Max's one out with a call show CEO is concerned that's really just assuming the same thing that you're going to max out your area and that should produce waste heat so they could be wrong but for them to be wrong it pretty much requires there to be something wrong with thermodynamics it's a basic concept and you know they could be somebody finds a way to grab energy on the cheap from dulk energy and so they just go set up shop where they want or someone who's out of warp space-time Doctor Who style and everybody lives inside a box that's one meter costs on the outside but the size of universe on the inside you know in which case you could make the case that the one solution of the Fermi paradox is that we're simply looking in the wrong place because we tend to point radio telescopes at star systems and things like that because it's convenient but in fact an alien civilization mean it banned in a star system and function on some other different model out in deep space oh sure yeah you know the the key thing with SETI and it's it's it makes sense to do the radio signals approach force because you're going for the low-hanging fruit you know they do if you're looking for civilization the easiest thing to do is look for them talking to you the next most obvious way is say well if we were such a civilization what are we doing that's going to be really obvious to an outside look or and that would be you know the infrared waste heat of the civilization those assumptions are wrong then you know you obviously keep expanding your source but at the same time you know to make it useful sorts you have to have certain parameters and we have to use the core laws of physics for that so if thermodynamics gets tossed out in the other century then we'll have to you know change a lot of things in them I asked the city so should be the least important of those but the biggest one that I always go for it's kinda hot conjecture model is this assumption that species are gonna keep spending out into areas they value and so if we assume the universe has a value so I mean it might not I mean if you learn how to create matter and energy from nothing then who cares about the mess the universe of them to explore it but as long as matter and energy have a value to them then they should be spreading out to take advantage of that until they'd bump into people and so it should be really easy to spot these civilizations because you shouldn't even need a telescope you should be able to look out doors where they set up you know Syrian Starbucks you know of hand would join from Vega these places should be on earth already and that's kind of force biggest pop or the for me paradox is you you know some conclusion you're having has to be you know some fundamental concept we have has be wrong for it to make sense even with the real ortho vert technology snowy's we discuss we tend to assume life is going to evolve almost in place it can and that should evolve towards intelligence and that intelligence should value technology so even that assumption is wrong which which does seem like the most likely snow is that we just overestimate how likely technological civilizations are our eyes or some other fundamental you know paradigm of all all existence has to be wrong maybe it's thermodynamics maybe it's the size the universe maybe we are you know in a simulated this universe that only has us whatever it is fundamental paradigm has be wrong for us to dancer the phobia paradox now regarding the Fermi paradox of course there are many many possible solutions what one do you suspect is at heart I have one and I'll get into that in a minute but what do you suspect that the most likely solution is rare technology I think you're going to be a combination of filters of course but how likely is life to arise life might be very likely or might be very unlikely but if it's very unlikely then maybe technologies like Beatrice doesn't happen much I figure somewhere along the chain between we had life starts and when it starts making radios there's gotta be some filters in place that really make that less likely so I usually real technology rather than real earth cuz I don't think earth is gonna turn out to be all that way oh and I I don't personally think that life will turn out to be true Bale maybe even intelligence is common but very rarely develops technology I just get a combination of filters that make technology a very rare thing and I think that I would say that ones of the yo-yo I think it's a 50-50 chance whereas most other ones I put is pretty impossible so it to me is the clear for vato but no way O'Neill solid yet but the one that gets me the one that I can't get past is the leap from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life because it took 1.8 billion years earth life to do that to actually make that leap and it asks a microbe to absorb and incorporate something into itself rather than digest it and that just doesn't seem to me to be very likely so when I look at the universe I think in terms of a microbial universe where analogs of prokaryotes may be everywhere they may be everywhere in our solar system we may find them at Europa we may find them underneath the surface of Mars but what we might not find are the eukaryotes that's always struck me as one of the easier ones to sell on is is anytime you have a step in evolutionists who have taken a long time that's a good pick fulfill tool anytime you have something multiple-- like we say multicellular life they can't be multicellular life that's evolved on earth like a couple dozen times well it can't be something like the eyeball because that's evolved independently a couple thousand times you know something like your carry ons that is a very powerful one because again a billion was in a billion years from then that's when they developed and the same one when did the brain force pop in you know a complex plane that took a large percentage of mass but I would say I would not be surprised to find prokaryotic life everywhere but complex multicellular life almost nowhere just because they've never made that that jump to essentially to absorbing another another organism and we see their like mitochondria right that's our powerhouse we would not be what we are without that yet that is as best we can tell that's another organism we ate you know but did not digest so that's another one that I would say is a chance to and you know it might be this something like that is a 1 billion and there's your answer like they order the for me paradox well it might be something where it's only 1 in 10 these things just keep stacking up the evidence-wise a that's why I say radio technology is the only one I could be sure about is the technological life is very available well the less because almost nobody ever gets around to inventing complex technology and all the universe is full of civilizations obviously cavemen or whether it's because IV plants covered in algae and nothing more complex I only will they are yet to be at a safe ashore but if I had to put money down I would say they're your key attic one would definitely a good filter I think that would probably be filter number one so to speak but there are many others there you know you could say that absence of plate tectonics you know not allowing for a carbon cycle could you know sink an exoplanet or okay well they always just be the the moon was the example but then they did a model saying that maybe one in twelve planets so something like that five percent of planets that all uh both like would probably have a large moon but you know so that one didn't turn out to be too great of a filter but it could be a bunch of minor photo stacking up or there could be some really big ones and it doesn't have to be either wall can be all of the above we can say probably less than 1 trillion plants and develops intelligent life or has developed it yet it should get more common as time goes on but I would say the numbers probably more like wanting a quadrille you know even kwinto so even when you begin to eliminate the possibilities of you know all of these filters it's still given the size of the universe and the abundance of galaxies and stars it's still overwhelmingly likely that there has been or will be or is someone else somewhere they just may be very distant hmm so in which case the solution of the Fermi paradox is distance you know we're just simply distant which unfortunately creates a situation where we may never know about other intelligent alien life because it may simply be too far away there could be some giant k3 civilization that predates us by a hundred million years but there 101 million light-years away so we just haven't quite seen them yet but then you still getting that time factor is is you know the four that you look the falling back in time you're going but the amount of value we looking at and the amount of star as once you get up to the you know the large of scale where things get homogeneous again that's going up with the cube of distance so you look anyway that's a billion light-years across it's got 1/8 the value of an area that's 2 billion light-years across you say well we'd see anything within 500 million years ago that was in that 1 billion like your diameter of bubble whereas we see things that were a billion years ago in the in the two billion like your diameter one but that one has 8 times as many stalls in it and so it does seem like the fourth about you look and the less likely it's gonna be intuitive about maybe be 3 billion years ago you start saying well I I can't see anything having evolved to K 3 status three billion years ago you know that maybe that's a little bit too early and I mean think you can start putting a stamp on it realistically probably about 4 billion years ago because you didn't even start having high metallicity plants until about 8 billion years ago and he sort of Ryoga real large numbers but there's the other less but think it's in - this is those kind of planets get more common as the universe gets older and and you know the ones that do you evolve life have had more time for that to get complex so you may be 5 billion years ago only a handful of plants could realistically support life another billion years later that's gonna have gone up and there was handful that did have life had an extra billion years to catch up on evolution so you know real probably I think we'll probably the force only in this galaxy unless we got a really really strange flan or thinking about this stuff but leave you to jump back you know a couple billion years now you probably find life all over the place you know if people hadn't colonized it could be yeah it could be argued that were early in the game and that you simply were we're first in a Milky Way which actually leads to two possibilities that at some point say we survive and we're around for billions of years a civilization that someone else will arise but also an idea that we took on with one of our collaborations is that we may end up creating the aliens oh yeah and I mean you think about if we do have a find a solution - to be able to go fast and light the game does change a bit but I don't expect us to ever do that but as long as you're constrained by by the speed of light you are not gonna have cohesive civilizations I mean we don't have case of civilizations on this planet and well that's in a light second away from each other trying to do that you know the solar system scale is going to be iffy you start trying to do that the galactic scale even if you have extended lifespans a hundred thousand years to get our hello back from you Nate you know from Central Command back on earth is not gonna work out well for civilization no but that that brings them into another dimension because if we tackle life extension and we can make humans live for many many many many hundreds of thousands of years nobody ever lives forever but if you can somehow do that these timeframes these distances shrink a bit don't they um you know there's two ways two ways that can cache shrink we were talking about the the black hole following civilizations that might exist after that all the stars have died off in those time effect we does slow down because the universe very dull and boring place and you're sitting at time at energy to run on though you're doing hypo efficiently in their sense time generally slows but in the context of like like us for instance if we start going the digital immortality analogy of the cyborg I thing those people exist at probably a much faster or subjective time rates than that we do run again you know we move it about the speed of sound and tone as well thinking the computer should be running at the speed of light so they're probably experiencing about a million times much subjective time or even more cuz they can get away with punching a plane down small on that context whereas you know that the universe's is proof porn along at a million years fun events for galaxies because that's small that's how long it takes to get you know whatever a second is for us that it to get interaction at the galactic scale you're pretty much talking about a hundred thousand to a million years because it's gonna go back and forth you try to have a civilization where everybody experiences a year or in a minute of real time that has a time lag of a hundred thousand years to get a yes back to a simple question I don't see that working out too well that doesn't mean people don't colonize you you always colonize but oh I would think you would always colonize but that doesn't mean they're really talking novelty keeping a co human system in place I think you know they're long lived you know I I just don't see it happening even with the extended lifespan just cuz yeah they're not experiencing a subjectively faster rate of time it's still it's an eternity to hear back from anybody yeah an extremely long long communications time now you you you don't believe we're ever gonna have FTL faster than light travel know what's in the codes I mean it's who can say of course we've only met the science thing for 40 years in relativity fourth century now and yeah well has been a century since since general even you know but in that whole time nobody has asked you to even Nick it you know it's it's every time we thought we had something it fell apart on us and you did spend thousands of years since we discovered the two plus two equals four and no one's disapprove of that either and I think that's got turned out to be the case for FTL too I think the my biggest problem with it is that any of the proposed ways to circumvent it always seem to require some type of exotic matter that we have absolutely no idea if that can even exist it's it's allowed by science hypothetically it's not even it some states allow it so that's not banned explicitly no right right um and it's it's a well you got imaginary metal imaginary mass or imaginary time say well okay I could have an imaginary length on people I can have a negative length on people I can't hand someone a bucket that's got negative five gallons of water in it but I can certainly use that number and the fact that I can put on a piece of paper negative I want you know gallons of water and that makes complete sense for counting still doesn't allow me to actually take a sample of that and now we do have some examples of off shell mass or you imagine that's the quantum scale and so they it's not explicitly banned is it's been the better way to think of it but you know somebody does find a way around it that's great I mean that it's it's it but it did for a for me paradox it's it's you're just death I mean right now we can lease a nobody from another galaxy is really had time to develop and visit us yet the FTL in play you start to have worried about what's going on not just in the observable universe but outside the observable universe which is probably much larger than then what we can see right now yeah it could be infinite even some no one knows now I think the the probably the biggest most well known concept for circumventing the speed of light would be the Alcubierre drive what kills it in your view on both oh I mean from the get-go is that negative energy negative mass thing but I think that you know that people often miss this stuff we can't get a ship up to a fraction of speed of light because it's too energy intensive and what always gets skipped all the FTL is people forget that even when those systems theoretically walk usually the energy requirements oh yeah they're like the vissa warm horthy when I could be done with just like one jupiter-mass but that's still an entire Jupiter mask the original Warhol concept scholar for several hundred solar masses and things like the Alcubierre drive that that thing requires same amount of energy to get walking and I've seen some models that say could maybe do with only a few hundred kilograms of negative mass that's a little iffy but you know we took that as true you know a kilogram is a trillion trillion atoms we haven't found a single and yet if it stops if somebody managed to actually give me a stable negative mass particle my lab oh we this is it and nothing it's our cou BAE said I think it got was a theoretical idea for fun that he didn't think would walk and there's no reason not to investigate these things but I think people jumped the gun a lot on assuming things like that alight I mean we how many years we had the emdrive going on for that finally died off and you get an anomaly in science you pin it down for us but these days it ends up a pop SCI article instead and people say oh that's cool and I don't have a problem with that except that when they do that and a couple years later it's proven wrong they assume that that happens for normal science all the time and so they start thinking Oh science from about this science law about that and one person produced a theory that we said was probably wrong from the get-go and you'll hold that against the entire community for decades Yeah right right and on that note we have to go to break we'll be back in a minute if you'd like to support event horizon you'll be pleased to know we've recently launched a patreon link in the description below or alternatively you can use your cellular telephone to scan the assemblage of squares on screen now here at event horizon we take our listeners health and well-being very seriously so now would be a good time to refill your beverages I recommend tea iced and with lemon and this is what happens when Americans write your scripts at we're back with Isaac Arthur host of science and futurism here on YouTube Isaac we were talking before the break about the Alcubierre Drive and the infeasibility of it we didn't even get into what happens when you actually have to stop such a thing if you can get it started but say barring FTL travel in the Milky Way as humans spread out and colonize the galaxy at sub Lightspeed what do you see how do you envision the ultimate human future do you think that we will simply colonize just a few systems or will we actually become a Kardashev type 3 civilization I think that we wouldn't have come you know I mean again was always dependent won't mean by civilization you know humanity sawed off and I think Ethiopia is the codon list for that and you know we did go through a phase where everybody spread out and say that wasn't a civilization obviously the civilization you know we'd be lucky a stretch ten miles at that point for any given chunk of it and you know if you did discover a fast night travel a million a billion years down the road someone might be able to reunite all the various fragments of humanity but in the mean time it's not going to stop people from going out on colonizing things and you get spread out across entire galaxy say well if you can't talk these people who is sending those colony missions but that's not really how that walks a tribe didn't you know that years some tribe in Ethiopia from Ethiopia originally that's up there in Siberia they didn't foam home to Ethiopia tasker they should go ahead and cross the Bering Strait and check out those Americas you know as same thing is gonna happen with these colonies question is timeline you get to a certain point of expansion where all your expansion is taking place near the edge of the expansion nothing's coming from the home world anymore cuz this you know it's too far a trip for them to make those folks are going to keep expanding but at different rates and individually right this planet will say well we're starting a little bit full and we want to spread out and that might be one way it happens or it might just be someone on that planet decides hey let's go found a new planet in this empty system and I think that's that's gonna drive this whole thing it's just a time yeah are they gonna do it fast or they gonna do it slow you might colonize the galaxy you quickly in just a few hundred thousand years looking for obviously lots of value quick they are oh it might take a billion years but from an astronomical timeline that's that's nothing you know right if you have a civilization that's going to last for billions and billions of years you know the time frames shrink again you you end up with a much smaller galaxy so to speak but you also did an episode once where you envision how you could go from this galaxy to another galaxy well how you do that I mean one of the key aspects of intergalactic space is that's not really all that empty it's it's a lot more thinned out than it is here but they'll still stow sale so you don't actually have to go from one gas to the other and make this like 2 million light years in them the edge your galaxy and you know which is a very hastily defined thing anyway I think we had the terminus system there bit of a nods where the ward means of course but I see asthma's Foundation series we all live on terminus you know there's not going to be stars nearby but there will be some within maybe a thousand light-years and you've already gotten used to making trips of that conservation by then if you yawns the edge of the galaxy so you go you found that one there's another one that's only about another thousand light-years away and you head after that one and you eventually just bridge the gap and folks doing that I'll probably intend to colonize that other galaxy so they're probably all had and a lot faster now what colonize you know that a super cluster which you could do that is a whole nother ballgame because at that point unless you're really all just staging it the one nor galaxy a time you often would have to be talking about doing trips that war you know millions of years for you and ran into a stall you've use but if you're if your spaceship so to speak you say you've created a generational ship if that is your reality that is your home then such trips might not be so bad especially I mean if you made it sufficiently large to where it was you know it was like walking around Chicago then you could spend that amount of time on something and hop between go it's actually a episode for next week the the alch of a million year so the million york i keep changing the title back and forth is trying to examine what happens inside these things if you build them that big and that long and say we have an example of a spaceship that is designed to last for billions of years and it's the one we live on already and we're talking about colonize the other galaxies you know the idea of making a spaceship the size of a planet might seem so to you and me but when you're thrown around you know cars share three resources that's nothing you know building something the size our planet and it shouldn't need to be that big you know you're not talking about a little spaceship anymore you talking about building something that is probably got a population in the in the tens of millions if not billions and that's what you're throwing in another galaxy and it might be some multi system project that many people are walking on oh it could be something you know again even a college trip to civilization well it's just got one solar system itself they can throw something like that at a project you know they can get away with throw in a whole planetary mass at this project of going coliseum drama in that kind of context it might take them millions of years to arrive and they might change their mission profile me times so you might need to do it many times to make sure it has a better chance of success but that is a whole civilization of itself when you talk about trips that last thousands of years or even just centuries let alone millions videos that is you know the whole human civilization is basically a period of four thousand years you can go back for that that's basically what history started even the entire time we've been biologically human is not much of one hundred thousand we deal with timelines like that I'm one of those ships that's for you talking about and you think about how much things have changed since the days of oh and Hammurabi until now that's what it's like inside one of these ships you know that's how long they after this cultural changing you know I think even with live extension you're gonna have so much changes the culture on that time that they don't forget what their mission was or they derive and most would say let's stay on the ship we'll go see another place and it's well reads by the Gallner ship concept Lee the idea that you're not seeing a colony ship to another system but rather a big ship that stops at systems colonized that moves on the less one colonized them etc at each stop it picks up new resources to make colonial Gyo and to stay alive in that time and it just drops off whatever chunk that's population feels like doing that and then on the rest of the trip they breed up new people so I think you mentioned a life extension now I think life extension is going to be something over the not not so distant future this is something that's gonna be fairly close and maybe something that we're really undergoing already when do you think we will start seeing leaps in human extending the human lifespan I'd say about a century ago you know he concepts really haunted and I was working with the Sens Research Foundation on this recently and it's a point they make a lot too is all medicine is life extension technology and so many things that we associate to Aging in the past that we call natural causes in the past you know things like cancer in general these are age diseases and as you beat them that is anti-aging technology every time someone you know takes our treatment that extends our average lifespan say well you're not increasing the mass for life you're just increasing the average and say well the kind of same thing in this context as you extend people's lifespans um with any medicine that is already anti-aging technology and when you actually start picking up all the individual things that cause aging most of these all essentially things were already starting to walk on many of the things that we were looking at for life extension we've got an episode coming up on this actually that we collaborate with our BT gray and the Sens Research Foundation on we look at those individual types of sin south senescence therapies and strategies they are things that we are already working on for other things like Parkinson's or your Gaucher's disease or quite a few the others the research on those is the same resource will be using for life extension the hard part though is is there are a couple of things that have to be focused on specifically for aging but it's it's trying to convince people this is something that we you know this is not a radical technology of the deep future or will never happen but something that we're already doing right now and if we can just kind of get over this mental hurdle of thinking of as a sci-fi technology but some people walking on right now then we can start pulling in more minds on a poignant more funny on and actually start making the visible progress people would like but the same time we already all getting that progress so you look at the average human life span goes up about one year for every five or six that passes and I say that that counts to me you know and when I was a kid somebody hitting I remember woody was a big deal when George borns twenty one hundred and that almost never happened now it's hard to find out I was city or village that doesn't have somebody over a century old and I think that's just gonna keep going up and did talk about a maximum lifespan we start looking at that they are all actually specific things that seem to kill people often that should be treatable it's just you know typically the buyers only in such bad condition from other things by that point that yes a a stiff breeze will kill you if we stop getting rid of all those other little illnesses that would get you on the way they oh we should better tackle that one too now the case has been made that there are people alive now that may well live a thousand years do you think we're that close to that oh yeah no it's there's the concept of an escape velocity or a longevity take off it says that a certain point you all improving your technology for life extension faster than people actually aging so that you know somebody born today might never die of old age and I think we I think we hit that point quite some time ago but I'm very confident that people being born nowadays will probably not die of old age exceptin is some kind of you know more metaphysical sense that at 10,000 you get bored of life and off yourself etc he made YouTube videos for 5000 years I think even I would probably want to move on after I play I mean I love what I do but maybe not 5000 years worth of love oh I'm going at least 5,000 years maybe hundreds of thousands of years of of jmg videos so now some people would say well that's disturbing you know a thousand-year-old human that's it's it's unnatural but yet essentially so is a hundred year old human or even a fifty year old human very so if we went back 40,000 years living 230 might have been something that most people didn't get to because of you know accent and lack of antibiotics so on the one hand I mean you had people in the past they died of more things so the very few people died of old age but the same time II all youtubers look at photographs of about a century ago I first started having those and you know you see something with 60s a Oh what that post hasn't died yet you know they're breaking the car I would say well they look a lot older than what we think of a 60 nowadays you know statistical average I should be dead by now but most people you know humans who ever lived in life especially authorities but you know this is not we're not really aging the same rate that kind of wave and tear that damage isn't hitting us quite as fast because we have these healthier lifestyles so it to a degree we do age slow it's not just a matter of we have more people living to those ages is that that's actually getting pushed back a bit right and it's just simply a matter of no matter how long you extend life eventually something's going to get you you know you're still eventually going to if you remain a biological being eventually even if you don't we had the one episode what was it uh digital death we try to look at what would happen if you you know could you say if you upload a mind you can make copies you can have done it ones no one's going to get all of them and it's not that hard to raise the probability of somebody getting all your secret stashes to less than chance of happening once in the entire universe existing you got a million backups we're out the GAO so you no one's gonna get them all simultaneously but as certain points you're still gonna die anyway because the life experience of five million years it is that it you even call that seed of a person you anymore at that stage there's continuity of consciousness maybe but there do you know it's it's it's like saying the original bacteria that leads to divided from which we're all descended is still alive to this day and then one could make that argument to a degree solely some of the atoms we're still around and it kept you it divided and it's still the image your cell in some ways but that's not you know I'm not that original Mema and you more and I think that's what you talk about you start talking about life expectancies and the millions of years yeah if you go millions of years and and then even I mean you get into questions like one interruption and that consciousness say it's a you're part of a machine civilization one interruption you may have actually end up forgetting your original life and not really even knowing your origins yeah well the odds I mean you know you have that moment we say I just want to get rid of the past and erase these memories and say where the odds someone's going to do that and say can you see someone every ten thousand years just have your frustration moment it's a screw at all I'm deleting those memories if that's the thing statistically happens it becomes you know it's a people have a 10,000 years that becomes your half life as a war someone just erases their memory at some point in time and now there are new entity for all practical purposes although it depends on what ones Riu of conscious and identity is whether one goes with lock or while the other methods out there one could even make the case that if the inevitability of society is to become a machine civilization which some people bet that that's going to happen a machine civilization may choose to erase its own biological memory collectively meaning that it purges biology from its memory because there's no real use to maintaining those memories so you could have a machine civilization that has no idea that it was once biological which imagine that for Humanity you know we we Sunday forget that were human or working well you the the college every example is you know you all the civilizations spread out it's a key three civilization but it's not civilization you come back in a billion years and people argue over whether or not they actually all came from Earth because you have all these civilizations are so different to each other anything about what 1 billion years of evolution will do when you're not having access to cybernetics and genetic engineering you could easily see somebody on a planet a few thousand light years we are saying there is no way we all came from Hoth you know that's that's a myth that's a room or you know that mean look at me I got 10 legs and 20 eyeballs and the guys back on earth they they live in a giant maseo's castillo but they'll buy pads and there's no way we were related to each other and I mean look at our DNA it's not even related and you forget that a hundred million years ago somebody restore the genetic tree entirely engineered the stuff using entirely different amino acids or you know engineering so that there is no you know pattern to resist we can go back and see that our DNA is similar that of cats or trees and say oh there's a common denominator they might not have that option because they might not really be based on DNA anymore or they may have a full command of the chemistry of DNA and can just create it from scratch create you know tailor it to whatever you want mmm yeah yeah I mean how many amino acids are that we use at least 20 and only four for DNA about yeah there are hundreds of different amino acids maybe more on that amount of biochemists but it soomi any one of these could be used at least some other group besides you know GA tht see you know yoga Dhaka is not the only option for something that is basically a self-replicating protein and that's just sticking the biochemistry you know if you're going to a machine civilization format there is no DNA at all no nothing at all now what is your gut feeling about machine civilizations do you think that's that's a natural end result of biology or do you think that we you know most civilizations would say now we don't quite want to make that leap what's your gut feeling I think you'd have both I think you have some people say we're doing this and other people say we're not and you know I I don't think you'd ever go back and wipe out the classic humans if there were people who were still doing that because it's not gonna be all we have biological civilization and machine civilization you're gonna have thousands of civilizations so which are biological some which are mechanical or you know silicon based or really oh they're cyborgs so they're completely digital or they use the exact same physical model but they have you know very different ideologies and so one goes say well that's let's wipe out or for their own good will uplift these these remaining biological is to be no machines they are they'll thank us in the long term and they go to do that and so we all steps in says no no no you can't you can't do that this is their choice so I don't think you'd ever actually have that that happened I mean no one goes around saying let's go ahead and wipe out single-cell life because they'll thank us in the end so I think you just end up with a huge diversity a huge divergence of what qualifies civilization but I think you know if you were say winds gonna be the breaking point with someone says we are no longer biological wheel machine civilization I don't you ever have that because people say real machine civilization was so human of course was still human I mean yeah Bob over there's got 20 arms and Ted over there lives completely on computer but more still human you know so in short rather than something like Mass Effect Reapers you end up with a society that still considers itself human even though it's a machine but it can still print out a biological human if somebody wants to exist in that form I think yeah that big you'd have other ones that will strictly human and others that will you know they they don't even like to think themselves human anymore you'd have people like that to say it's just the idea any type of flavor it is the future galaxy is a baskin-robbins you getting any 32 flavors you want the Baskin Robbins galaxy I love it now this this when we talk about machine civilizations they're sort of an elephant in the room with it which is the concept of the von Neumann probe the this self-replicating machine that can spread itself throughout a galaxy and print out humans or do whatever it wants to do but we've never seen anything like that there does not seem to be these kinds of probes consuming the galaxy or doing any such any such work what's your what's your thoughts on probes like that self-replicating probes do you say these can be marginally useful if we limit them so that they don't you know turn the galaxy into paper clips or is there something unfeasible about them inherently in your view I think you got nailed on the head there to colonize a place you're bringing people there or using it for people again we at one point we stressed in some of the episodes is a coin isn't as I had to have people on it to be useful but you colonize with people and those people aren't necessarily biological you're sending out von Neumann pubs you're gonna send out something that's small enough to do the walk of the humans so you're essentially sending a human if you can send a von Neumann pub out why not to it as a a digit uploaded human consciousness or big hard drive full of them that you can just you know put them in bodies when you're done if they want to do that I don't think you'd ever use something that was a a very stupid self replicate although because you'll claim that territory for what is anyone gonna recognize you know we'd set a von Neumann pub there for so you can't colonize it and someone says well then you don't have anyone living there it's still game I and they say this von Neumann probe isn't smart out to qualify as a human it's not colonized somebody else can go and claim that alternatively you send something there just rips everything apart the you know we talk about where's it safe to use AI the least safe place to use an AI with someone say that's you and why I experiment with AI and or no no you're doing with intelligence the thing is you want to monitor it you want it where you keep an eye on it you don't send a spaceship out all right so for thousands of years with a human level intelligence or higher on it and try to control that it's going to you Tate during all that time if you've given it enough intelligence to be adaptable the whole concept ARL of the more sophisticated ones is that it's creative and adaptable if you're not including that feature it's not creative and adaptable but if it is creative an adaptable it's going to adapt mutate and change I don't want to send out swarms of intelligent creatures that are going to mutate and change that might decide they want to come back and kill off all of humanity that would be to me the worst usage of these things but if we send out regular people that's just like any other they're gonna be different when they arrive they might hate us they might love us but it's just like any other colony each one would be different when you sitting out of von Neumann Povey assumption is that every copy is exactly the same and that is the dangerous territory all right and on that note we need to go to a break all right Isaac we're off the air I'm gonna go and get coffee right quick I'll be right back sounds good either are you there yes now that I've had a chance to hear you with John I've had a thought I want you to depose him Isaac I want you to take over event horizon excuse me you you want me to what I want you to host together we can take over this all of it that's a kind of honor how I already have my own show on channel science and futurism thiser Gothel and besides John Lyle friends but Isaac we can become so powerful okay I'm back toffee and hold on what's powerful Fusion is quite powerful John a Vienna yes how Isaac indeed it is fusion anyway we're back in ten nine eight seven [Music] and we're back with Isaac Arthur now Isaac we were talking about lime lemon probes and possibilities that are within that and machine civilizations but there's another aspect of this we as a species are technologically advancing very rapidly I think more rapidly than most people realize towards general artificial intelligence and of course there's always been these you know scenarios like Terminator where the general AI decides we are a threat biology as a threat do you think that that's realistic do you think we will ever get to that point of general AI where it becomes a question mark as to just what it could do oh sure I mean at a fundamental level the human brain is a very sophisticated device and much more so than Alcorn computers but it's still fundamentally a machine you could should be at a replicate and assuming that's the case you know they all available avenues of technology let's do a more condensed or bigger than the brain is that we can build up from scratch so you should eventually end up with some kind of system that was smaller than people whether or not I would turn around and try to kill us that's just impossible to say and I think it's it's wise to be really cautious you know where's begin the studentís technology and I tend to think that you say win and we're gonna get AI and we say what Raiders are progressing at or wins the next technological breakthrough and I don't think that's the right question it's as we closer and closer you see more and more people say maybe we should hold back and now it's getting to the point where maybe we can do this we want to think carefully and you see more and more folks saying let's take a step back and then slow down and think this through so I don't think that AI is I'm going to suddenly come out of nowhere on a spurt vato it will be something we do cautiously and under supervision and regulation and it won't surprise us at all after that though it's just hard to say you know I never worried about an AI that is super small in us and kills off in the classic sense I've William what about the one that is super charismatic and talks you into killing yourselves off or letting it be in charge and that's sort of thing where you know the smaller organism is generally going went out and the question is all humans keeping up with that or we just say nope this is it human as human is now is what we want and we're gonna stick to it and I do think that's an option that's potentially available I say that's a good one for us to go with but I do think there you have civilization who said nope this is a band of research it's not progressing in our society of course we sort of sort of did that with human cloning but at the same time at any moment someone can clone a human can't what anybody doing that though I mean this thing is by and large the people capable of doing that yeah they're part of all Joe Institute's and here this image from Hollywood of computer science being something where a teenager in his basement can hack the Defense Department computer and I don't know how accurate or not that is passe but you know typically the cutting-edge AI research is being done by large cutting-edge companies and I I wouldn't expect that those would be places that would be willing to break the rules to do it especially because every last one of those programs is going to know every last cliche about robot rebellions and they're gonna be careful I think but you know it could happen at some point I think in the launch home you would have something that tend to pop up unless you really decide civilization that we're not doing this and as with human cloning and the creation of general artificial intelligence ethics comes in because what would the ethics of creating a a being of some sort a machine being and then keeping it an immortal prisoner of humanity it's a great example you can get your pets clone these days it's not illegal it's not hard to do they all companies that open the advertiser they would do this totally inside the law and you can send them a copy of your cat or your dog or your horse and actually there's a lot with horse I guess and get in quotient it's not the same creature anymore obviously but it's clone people might feel that way about AI it's probably fine and make that you know nobody you don't hear anyone say oh the room was gonna kill me my vacuums out to get me but when we get into the area where it's a person or close to it's there is that ethical dilemma and that's the one that you know that's that's the one that has we saw what we do this because we know from past experience that what we can do when we start questioning you know without somebody Zappos them and I don't think we want to repeat that just so we have a slightly about a factory right other scenarios might be that it might enslave humanity in order to build itself a rocket and so it can launch itself into space and abandon us because if it's a machine space is better than a planet less corrosion you know there's just so many I say that's where the least pessimistic motions but just enslaves us for a while and then leaves so long thanks for all the fish but it it it's just as likely you know or it may simply commit suicide it may say it may calculate and realize it became conscious and say there is no point to social yeah I mean you just pop so on thanks for the fish and of course that was the book that a from Douglas Adams a Marvin the Paranoid Android he does eventually die he's older than the universe itself and he's the most depressed creature in the universe you know sure one could see that with an AI very easily you know what's the biggest threat to a post-scarcity civilization the existential dread essentially what's the Pope is about this toning solipsistic old Malthusian or nihilistic and even if people do and then a civilization follows polish but when AI might come to that conclusion yeah you might switch on a panel for AI and it runs for eight seconds and it goes through every all kind of humanities ever created and it just shuts off and you try to figure out why did shut off and maybe it's evolved Ohio state of existence maybe you know and then you're looking at like oh my gotta commit suicide but it didn't want to live anymore I just killed itself eight seconds after we toward our right and in such a case it could be the role that every time we create a I of that level it always shuts off after eight seconds but we have a we have a survival and pay or have built into us the two most important things to humanity that are bred of us by evolution of survival the individual and survival of the tribe or the species right that is ingrained to us at every level every time in nature was something didn't have that it dies off you know so that every fail save you could imagine is in place prevent that yes suicide is still fairly common so maybe with an AI where it doesn't have any of that it's not build up on 4 billion years a survival they might all tone suicidal in a heartbeat you know they could or it may come another scenario would be it would become a hedonist and it just state once it wants booze and you know whatever that makes it happy and it dedicates itself to its own internal happiness and possibly enslaves humanity enforces us to enable it now there's so many option of this because when you get outside and say even we talk about aliens who say an alien is likely you know it has no biological history with us could be very different than us and say an AI is even more because these an alien civilization involved they had the same basic biological imperatives in AI doesn't have any of those unless you put them in there and it also doesn't have a really good way of like looking at objective reality and many of the ways that we do you taught it odd and it leads some way out the moon honkers you know the moon landing might be a hoax how does it know now that it's not true it doesn't you know it's ok if it's the everything you say at face value yeah it could you have some very strange opinions and you know it's gonna say alright I'm reading Wikipedia on all of science and things that keeps time you read this philosophy book and I read this philosophy book and you all think you know you don't know the thing might become very religious on day one it might become very solipsistic or it might become convinced that every ants or the things is it was to taylean and you know it could try all sorts of weird solutions that just hold people saying assume they made sense like coffee makes you smarter so people say upgrade myself so I demand they plug a coffee machine into me you know you know what's gonna do and of course we got the paperclip optimized or its priorities on all priorities so you tell it you know make me the best paperclips level and that's all it does and every aspect every assumption heavy walking belief it has is focused on the paperclip being the ultimate thing of reality and it's that's what it does you know something you said definitely I'm now thinking about merging with my coffeepot that could be useful that could be a very useful thing for me but I think we did the examples you saw tone something the upgrades intelligence humans have been trying to upgrade all intelligence from day one and we always talk about the technological singularity is that five minutes out to be twenty nine it's gonna design a better version of itself we've been trying to do that a long time with you know the whole civilization walking at and we haven't been all that successful and you start telling upgrade your own mind it's got to start you know looking for how the box solutions it so it might start doing things like saying please puggly and plug in coffee or I'm going to hire a team of researchers you know if you want answers and you're human level intelligence you're gonna say well I should hire a bunch of other intelligences to help me with this problem or it might decide to email the Pope and ask for divine intervention you just don't know what it's going to do because it doesn't have the same context and say oh it should be ultra logical there's no reason to assume an AI is gonna be ultra logical anymore the person is going to be right so if you said an AI you started putting selective information input so say you only gave it say religious information then you could end up with an AI that is utterly religious or you could end up with an AI that is utterly a scientist you know every every logical concept is based off a core assumption and you assume that one is correct you have to assume the back to force principles you assume this piece of information is correct and then you build the logic chain off of that and people can be illogical when they follow a given path before they four they exclude the others but your final result from a logical conclusion is not necessarily correct in any way it's just following for that forced assumption if you start off by telling it the one absolute truth of your existence is that there is a god it is going to follow that completely it would never accept any scenario where that does not come out as true and that does not mean it's ever going to accept a lot of the stuff that science might tell it would be true say as we say your ultimate purpose your only reason for being is to to brew a peddle cup of coffee or to make a paperclip everything that follows at that entirely logically is going to be focused on that as its core assumption no matter how would you try to tell it this is less important that you seem to think it is no it's not going to accept that then you get into dangerous territory because if the AI begins to think things things through and then selectively input information into itself it may conclude that it is a god and in which case all humanity must worship it there was that what was the very very short story very tiny one like one paragraph that was written long ago I think in the 60s where they asked an AI that they created they asked is there a god that was their question oh the last dance I think it was the last answer that he have asthma of it is a shorter one and the last questions the more famous but it gets overlooked by but they they hook up every computer in the galaxy you know hypo space wise they can all talk at once and somebody notices there's a problem there goes down plugged gets electrocuted I and they say is there a god it says yes now there was a guy yeah it was amazing it was an amazing story so I think I think it might be interesting to go into a little bit different territory let's go into sci-fi what is your favorite sci-fi author what what author most affects you in science fiction you know it's always so hard with that because you go through phases and say like normally actually my favorite author that's writing right now is our star Reynolds but you know there's a lot of newer ones I'm starting to get really into two all-time favorite sci-fi are Thor you know it's very time you say asthma of a whore bought lost got cold or quite a few others but I probably would have to go with asthma and the end of the day it not just as sci-fi is nonfiction Walker the man who wrote so much stuff and it was good but there are so many good authors out there and you know it's it's trying to keep track all the ones that you're fond of but in terms of people alive writing right now Alastair Reynolds you know I say guys I'm off that man could write a book in two weeks oh yeah I'm Michael Moorcock could do the same go up to the cabin for the weekend and just knock out an entire book and that he wouldn't leave until he was done but asthma the flower was like five hundred bucks plus God knows how many essays and that was on a TIE fighter yeah yeah on a typewriter and I mean being an author and a computer age it's like I can't even imagine having to do that because but you know I changed so much and having to do it on a typewriter amazing I remember walking on an old man I can't but one of the really old ones were you fully mechanical keys we're not talking in the bubble memory and that's a whoa that's a I'm getting a typewriter had a backspace button that actually the whiteout built-in and that was awesome and then there was only a couple more years until we had pcs out and of course warp Rossy hasn't really changed that much since the 286 46 year of computing but Wow did that make a difference yeah I remember I learned to type on a typewriter this would have been in high school in like 1992 and I remember thinking about high tech they were these wheel typewriters that you could you know whiteout and all this stuff as opposed to like my grandma's typewriter which was still around at the time which was fully mechanical but it's amazing that these guys wrote that now my own favorite was out of sci-fi as arthur c clarke mainly be excited I like hard science fiction and very few people from Ezio votive holder than he did Avante vu with llama great book 2001 great book sometimes you can little bit dry as a rider but you know he's still he'd open up images you know some people you remember the character was better than the the plots with all those sea cloth that man could just paint your portrait that that you know you forget who the characters are maybe but you you remembered that universe he painted the far future of humanity if we can make it there offers us untold opportunities and potential technologies like life extension may even make it possible for you to personally see that far future world would you want to questions about what effects life extension will have on society will come up as medical science advances over the coming decades what do we do with a population where births are vastly more common than deaths do we begin to move that population to other worlds and space habitats or do we simply slow or stop reproduction entirely these and other vexing questions will face us perhaps sooner rather than later and regardless if you wish to be around to see humanity in say 300 years what will we be like one thing is for certain no matter what happens the future is coming it is inevitable as inside my conversation with Isaac went on for quite a while longer than an hour so look for part two of this interview next month on this channel and also check out the new event horizon patreon page link below I'll tell you more about that in the next episode Jon Anna I think you've made a mistake I'm always making those on your original channel the humans often say that your profile picture is questionable yeah everyone says I look like an expert or I don't photograph well I've made you a new one John what it's exactly the same worse I only have so much to work with do you all see what I have to deal with here anyway as many of my longtime subscribers know Halloween is my favorite holiday it's the gods John you like gods yes I do joining me next week will be psychologist dr. Travis Langley author of The Walking Dead psychology the psych of the Living Dead where we explore the psychology of what humans might do if we were faced with sudden mass extinction what would you do if the electricity permanently went out what would you do if the technology evil ion suddenly traps you that shell will release on Wednesday rather than Thursday because well it's Halloween see you then

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 108,292

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: space, futurism, science, artificial intelligence, life extension, UFO, alien, extraterrestrial, John Michael Godier, Isaac Arthur, Joe Rogan, Godier, Future, ASMR, SFIA, Universe, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Stapledon, Dyson, Dyson sphere, Dyson Swarm, fermi paradox, fermi, drake equation, space colony, colonization, galaxy, science and futurism with isaac arthur

Id: BK09iFxUv2U

Length: 63min 10sec (3790 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 25 2018

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Description

"Joining John Michael Godier is host of SFIA, Isaac Arthur. They discuss humanity's future with technologies such as Dyson Spheres, artificial intelligence, life extension, they also delve into the Fermi Paradox, space colonization, and more. This is part one of an in depth conversation that will conclude later next month. "