Jaron Lanier - Why Aren't Aliens Already Here?

jaren one of the fascinating questions is are we alone are or are there intelligent alien civilizations that we can see it's a very interesting and important human question for our own grounding and on one hand a large majority of scientists would say obviously there are it's ludicrous to assume that we'd be alone this little planet outside the the mainstream of our even our own galaxy and there are 100 billion galaxies and 2 300 billion stars in our galaxy just impossible virtually impossible that we could be alone but then the famous fermi paradox enrico fermi one day said okay where are they why don't we see evidence of these kinds of civilizations one of the arguments against that is that all of these smart alien civilizations have descended into virtual reality i don't know if you've been cloned on all these other worlds maybe you're the the messiah in these worlds that show that they should go into the virtual reality and not show themselves right yeah it's it's a funny idea that that virtuality would be the thing that that is um absorbing all of this energy in the world you think there would at least be some civilization somewhere that would make some other choice right right virtual reality can't be that beguiling maybe like this universal sponge yeah of course of course i mean um the the fermi paradox is haunting and as a boy i would look up in the sky and wonder about it the the intense pit of loneliness of thinking that we're really it in this enormous vastness is almost unbearable and yet it is truly strange that we see no evidence and you would think that you would i mean when europeans first came upon the western hemisphere they found evidence of civilizations you know machu picchu and so forth there should be something up there so what's going on um because the universe has had 14 billion years before us and if evolution takes five billion years and we can look in the past and we're seeing five billion years back i mean there should have been enough time to see stuff well i can offer a few thoughts on this i can offer a couple of explanations for why we might not be seeing alien life that actually does exist i can offer some thoughts on what we might be able to observe of alien virtual worlds and i can offer some thoughts on some signs that we might be able to send to aliens or that they might be sending to us that we haven't recognized yet i think these are all extremely important okay well um i i'll start with the question of why we don't see them i'm an optimist about the amount of ignorance that we possess i believe we possess huge stores of ignorance that we don't acknowledge and therefore i think it's conceivable that there's some layer of physics that we haven't come upon yet something that's so spectacularly more interesting than electromagnetic radiation that civilizations that discover it just don't bother with sending out radio and tv signals and the like anymore and as soon as we discover that thing we'll build an instrument to look at it and then the sky will light up with constructions okay that to me is a conceivable feature although of course i have no idea what that phenomenon might be like not even the slightest beginning clip but it's at least a possibility it's also possible that we're just precocious now remember the civilizations that we might see out in the sky are exist in our past in our light cone going backward in time if we're precocious it might be that it just takes a while for things to get going and that the galaxies will indicate life star systems near us will indicate life if we wait long enough which could be quite a long time conceivable the argument against that says that it took us four or five billion years to evolve from when the earth formed and we can look back and see very large numbers of stars that have have had that time but again if we're very precocious and it takes 10 billion years instead of five which is not even an order of magnitude then maybe you're right well this isn't the only problem right now for somebody to see us they would see electromagnetic radiation from us and remember that they have to exist within a light cone trajectory very precisely at the same moment in which we've been doing this i mean of this in the enormous time spans evolved in evolution we just have a few decades of these emissions you know and so and they have to be receiving during those few decades and that's a very tiny aperture of alignment and it's very easy to believe that there could be a multitude of civilizations that last for a long time for tens of thousands of years and that yet we don't have that particular alignment yeah and it would have to be even longer than that it would have to be really millions of years to really increase the likelihood so this leads to my lunatic proposal for how to overcome this problem that is exactly all why i always want to see you darren no okay if i feel if i feel in need of lunatic ideas that just might be right and will set me thinking in a way i could have never imagined i come to you well maybe this is one of those let's and i i don't yet know if this is plausible but i can it's an answerable question and i'm just starting the work there's a lot of calculation involved but hypothetically if we were to set up some sort of a radio beacon emitting news of our presence that was supposed to outlast whatever would happen to us how long could it possibly run if we built it very reliably tens of thousands of years i don't know but that would be tough okay and so then that we that doesn't solve this narrow aperture problem so here's what we do uh you know how to prevent an asteroid from hitting earth if it's due to hit the earth what you do is you put a spaceship in front of it and the spaceship flies at a trajectory that just gradually pulls on the asteroid over a long time without gravity even though it's very small compared to the absolute tiny amount of gravity but over enough time it actually can adjust the trajectory all right now what we're going to do is we're going to start sending up spaceships until they can assemble in a formation now this might take a long time ten thousand years what the hell if our civilization falls apart the next one after a few centuries or a few millennia can pick it up but over some tens of thousands of years we assemble a formation of spaceships it goes out to the kuiper belt out beyond the large planets starts changing the trajectories of things now what we're going to do is we're going to play a gravitational hedge fund game we're going to take a small amount of mass and leverage a large amount of mass and then we're going to recycle that and leverage a larger amount of mass and what we're going to do is gradually round up enough of the kuiper belt that over a very long period of time and now we're starting to talk about truly long periods of time far beyond the scope of thinking about our civilization far beyond it we're gonna start to change the sun's course around the galaxy okay no no but we're not done at the same time we've sent out spaceships to nearby stars maybe i don't know 10 12. and over the course of tens of thousands of years they've arrived and they've started the same action and i believe we can build computers that will last for tens of thousands of years the now what we're going to do is we're going to guide all of these stars that are neighbors very slightly so they fall into a beautiful geometric pattern in a special orbit that they couldn't have fallen into naturally that will last for hundreds of millions of years or longer now we have stable stable orbit stable if it exists and i have to say the mechanics problems here are substantial and i could i could argue that this isn't possible but not absolutely and therefore i'm going to keep on pursuing it i think there's a there's i think there's a shred of hope that this can happen now if we create this weird thing this weird structure that is stable under the sorts of perturbations that can be expected that all of a sudden solves our aperture problem that's something that can be noticed for a long enough period of time hundreds of millions of years but potentially you know so there's this weird thing going around the galaxy that's like this little geometric marvel now once we have the proof of concept in theory we can do a sky survey and see if anybody else thought of it and there you are so that now that's my proposal for you know what to do about this this fermi paradigm i think this is terrific because what it allows us to do is imagine all the ways that intelligent aliens could signal us because we know electromagnetic and that can be you know radio waves as we first looked at and now we're looking for for laser pulses directed laser pulses sure and uh you know maybe new ways as you've said here here's another way you know nobody has said that so that's fascinating to do and uh you know maybe we'll find something and if we don't over long periods of time that's its own statement of significance yeah well it's very possible that the scenario i described is simply not achievable and the math will tell us that and if somebody came to me and said they proved it was impossible my clinician would be to believe them but i haven't seen that proof yet so i'm going to pursue it if it is impossible well then we're done if it's possible then we definitely should do a sky survey

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 172,408

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Jaron Lanier, Why Aren't Aliens Already Here, fermi paradox, extraterrestrial life, extraterrestrial intelligence, alien life, Fermi Paradox, alien civilizations

Id: CCKAaa66l5k

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022