Jill Tarter and Neil deGrasse Tyson Intelligent Life in the Universe

but today we're going to have a conversation about intelligent life in the universe and so I'm setting the timer so that we are not tardy and when you run the session so you could know no extra minutes now the rules no no I'm a stickler for rules all right so we're here honoring Stephen Hawking in many ways and I'm curious about what Stephens best guess right now is about how an ETI earthling interaction might turn out you know he's on record as being pessimistic and I'm on record as saying he might be wrong which means he might be right so what's your take he might be wrong also means he might be right that's right yeah logically hmm so what do you think sir I think Stephen Hawking's famous Proclamation one of many that he makes that aliens coming upon us will if they manage to find us it meant they traveled through the depths of intergalactic or interstellar space on ships that we can only dream about so clearly they've leaked technologically more advanced than we are and taking a cue from human civilization that anytime a more advanced technologically advanced civilization encounters a less technologically advanced civilization it never bodes well for the less technologically advanced civilization right that has never voted well but there's disease so decisions in to go both ways okay now disease can transmit between humans because we all have common DNA if you have another kind of species it's not obvious whether they could catch a human disease any more than an oak tree could catch the human flu for example I mean there's not all viruses work across species that way sometimes they jump but most times not they're very specific and and how and what they target so sure diseases can go back and forth this was the theme in HG Wells's for the world the only way we were able to defeat defeat the evil aliens from Mars was because they caught a virus that we had developed an immunity to here on earth so very clever infusion of sort of bio biophysics bio astrophysics in the day this is now didn't we put a virus in the code of Independence Day yes so Independence Day is basically the original I haven't seen the new one the original is basically a retelling of HG Wells's War of the Worlds because we defeat the alien powers because we upload a computer virus to it that was our modern way that we dealt with the virus problem but I would say that the Stephen Hawking argument let me let me take take a positive angle on this I think the Stephen Hawking argument assumes that aliens will behave the way we know we would treat one another using we as an example for they but so he's basing it on a mirror to human conduct today today so it's not on actual knowledge of what how aliens would behave it's on actual knowledge of how humans would behave and maybe we should give aliens higher credit for conduct than we give ourselves well as you mentioned if they can get here they have more advanced technology presume I always gets me in these alien movies like a spaceship comes from space and people come out just shoot their gun at it like do they really think just their ray guns exploding buildings and it's just time to go home at that point now what gets me is the spacecraft that come millions of light-years and crash in the last mile yeah yeah I don't have any patience for for alien spaceships that can't navigate and crash land on Earth you cross the galaxy at least land safely otherwise we don't need to have a conversation alright so um also the the models of past advanced and less advanced societal interactions have been Co temporal right it's the same epoch and the same cultural evolution of the species to that point what if so in spite of being different in technology we are basically genetically the same yes and we're at the same time alright so an advanced technology an older technology may have evolved in a way that Steven Pinker is suggesting humans are involved are evolving in fact he says we're kinder and gentler than we've ever been right so maybe we don't have that much - way better angels of our nature yes so maybe we don't really have if they've managed to get old maybe they're nice guys yeah I I I'm a fan of the fact that we are kind ler kind kinder and gentler than we've ever been I think these arguments are compelling in spite of the world wars and all the rest of what we think of as really bad times in the history of our species if you go farther back where everybody was tribal then tribal warfare was happening all the time right and and so so there's some hope that this kind of cultural evolution which is what this reference is may bode well for not only how we treat each other but how we might treat aliens and how aliens who had already gotten there then might treat us so I so I'm a little more positive about this than others would be another part of me that keeps me positive which is a little which is simultaneously disturbing and positive is a sufficiently intelligent civilization I'm pretty sure would have positively no interest in us at all anymore than as you walk down the street and there's a worm there you're not wondering gee I wonder what is the worm thinking about but let me see if I can communicate with it well let me bring my ray guns you know it's why way step on you just step on it yes but you're not going to step on all the worms you're gone by then you get bored quickly right so maybe our biggest protection from being killed by alien powers in the universe is their conclusion that there's no sign of intelligent life on earth I think there's a Calvin and Hobbes part to that effect all right well Stephen also is um on record that he thinks it's imperative for Earthlings to become an interplanetary species but I think you disagree with that yeah no I know I agree with the idea okay by the way any time Stephen Hawking says anything from his office in Cambridge the press gets a hold of it and then I'm like the next person they call in the United States could you comment on what he said so I feel like calling up to Steve can give me like a few months break for a while just give me a chill out for a little bit so so yes being a multi-planet species I think that that looks good on paper all right put your eggs in more than one basket if one basket gets smashed the eggs are preserved the species is preserved sure that looks good on paper in practice it is completely unrealistic because what does this involve ask yourself okay lettuce terraform Mars you're not terraforming Venus not anytime soon turn Mars into an earth Haven and then what are you gonna do ship a billion people there okay so let's do that terraform Mars ship half the population of the earth four billion people okay now a killer asteroid is coming towards Earth what do we say we're fine half of us will live the four billion of you on earth too bad if that are we really gonna do that and my point here is my point here is whatever effort it takes to terraform Mars and ship four billion billion people there I bet that's more effort than figuring out how to deflect the asteroid in the first place I bet that's more effort than figuring how to protect against any super virus I bet that's more effort than figuring out how to protect us from our own AI inventions whatever it is it's gotta be easier to solve those problems here then ship before billion people to another planet and be ok if half the people are incinerated and and the Martian microbes actually might thank you to not terraform their planet oh yeah if anymore yeah the Martians you want to make sure that we're not displacing yet another indigenous community we got a great history yeah yeah it's not it's not been good so yeah you wanted terraform planets where there's not already life trying to hang on so so I think it plays well as a news headline let's become a multi-planet species Carl Sagan a big fan of this as well and who wouldn't be I want the solar system to be our backyard but the motivation would not be so that not everyone dies from something we can't prevent because let's just build the world where we prevent it and then go to these planets or cosmic destinations for tourist attractions or to do science or two or just find reasons to go there not just so that you don't die while everyone else does and figure out if there's anything else there before us yes all right um so maybe Steven will let us know what he really thinks before the end of the festival but so I need to talk to you about what do you think the probability of the evolution of intelligence on other worlds with life is like I know you're more pessimistic than I am but you know how do you hear your artists let me hear your numbers and then I'll jump all over I don't have any numbers right there's nobody has numbered that we are numbers I know data I'm simply thinking that our good friend mr. Dawkins has pointed out that a predator-prey relationship inaudible yes in our evolutionary history has probably been behind ratcheting up intelligence and that so that'll get so that we don't get eaten and then when the prey gets smarter the predator has to get smarter so that it doesn't get hungry and starve so I'm thinking that perhaps that's an evolutionary trick that might be part of the game any place that life gets a start okay so I I think there are numbers we can invoke here how come if watch up all over yours if if by our own definitions we are the only intelligent species there ever was on earth and there's there ways to define time know there are ways to define it for that to be true you could say the only species that can build that a spaceship ok so that's us the Dolphins are not building spaceships so let's just assume this for the moment okay okay or I have art or poetry or you know dolphins won't have fun they don't have opposable thumbs they're not doing much other than thinking they for be poets okay so don't you know my favorite comic is there two dolphins swimming together and they look up and they see humans on the shore and one dolphin says to the other even though they face each other and make sounds it's not clear they're actually communicating with all right so I didn't mean no offense no I just I don't need to argue over how you might include other species as intelligent because I'm making a very different point so for the purposes of this point let's define humans as the only intelligent species there ever was on earth okay now you can ask how many total species have there been and when did intelligence as we come to define it arise both of these numbers argue strongly against the high frequency of intelligence in any biota that we might find okay so mammals which we generally might add more than humans as being intelligent very late in the evolutionary tree the primates later in the evolutionary tree humans the latest few hundred thousand years in the evolutionary tree and we've got four billion years of life if you take a dart and throw it at that timeline randomly and ask how often are you hitting and intelligent species it's hardly ever so now put planets and scatter them into the galaxy and have life begin at random times on them then you come upon them at whatever is their time line of their evolutionary tree what are the chances you're hitting intelligence if earth is any example it's hardly ever even if the galaxy is teeming with life no no wait a minute wait a minute you know quite well that in this particular corner of the galaxy our solar system is pretty young most of the other stars around here are a billion or so years older than we we can only be twice as old as us not ten times as old that's alright but that if technology which is sort of the intelligence that you're defining manages to last for a significant period of time cosmic timescales right then your dart throwing exercise has a lot more probability of hitting a technology than if the technological species is short-lived unless the unless the technological species does not have the foresight of its own survival right okay now well right now hold on hold on so so consider however the contingencies of life the dinosaurs as we think of them thrived on earth for a longer period of time than has elapsed since the big dinosaurs have gone extinct of course the birds emerged as their descendants but of the kinds of dinosaurs that would eat us they were around for longer than the time that's been around since they'd gone extinct from an asteroid so were not for that asteroid there is no reason at all biologically to think that they wouldn't still be here and our mammal ancestors would be these scurrying rodents running underfoot trying to not get eaten so to speak of our intelligence as something inevitable when an asteroid might have been the thing that enabled us I think is over playing the cards you've been dealt no it is defining that that's the only way it could happen you know you're a physicist you know that what we really would like to know is the branching ratios we'd like to do this experiment and know the the total number of different ways that could come out and how probable it is to go down any pathway yes all right so you line up all of those probabilities that the possible possibilities and they become the probability and then we have something to say and we just don't were not there but to say that errant an asteroid we wouldn't be here or technology non technological species wouldn't be here I think is incorrect because the earth is not static if it hadn't been an asteroid it might have been some other catastrophe extinction events major extinction events have happened multiple times we're forcing one now ourselves I would not have said it had the dinosaur has not been around for longer than the time that they've been extinct that is my evidence that there's no reason to think they would all of a sudden become extinct in the 65 million years that followed the 250 million years they were on the earth that's what I'm using that the past that the past evidence of how long they have tried how successful they were as a as a community of animals whatever the branch would biologists would call call them I'm not given any reason to think that they wouldn't still be are surviving whatever cycles of ice ages carbon dioxide cycles and the like we know that that's not been the history of the planet you know animal species have a good run at a million years perhaps yeah the dinosaurs had better than average but I don't think that we should expect that they would have continued on I think something would have though they might have morphed into other kinds of dinosaurs right totally that that's what they did over the time that I'm describing so I'm just saying that over the time when you had huge animals with big teeth that like eating tasty rodents it didn't bode well for the rise of mammals that's kind of all I'm saying so it took a catastrophic event to change things a highly contingent catastrophic event on this planet way late in the time that life has been on earth that's right okay that's not just so I'm just thinking you could be hopeful and that's fun but let's take what you're saying to an extreme yeah suppose in fact intelligence is common in the galaxy mm-hmm however we want to define common okay we're intelligence uh intelligent exactly okay let's assume that who are we to then decide that we are intelligent would they what we defined our own intelligence so of course we're intelligent because we're defining it if an eagle defined intelligence they would say those poor humans all they could do is walk and their measly 20/20 I cite and I mean think of what how another species would define who's at the top of their evolutionary chart we would not be at the top of most of their charts the microbes in our lower gut who think of humans as a a dark anaerobic pocket of fecal matter in the service of their life right okay that's the purpose of human life to them okay so so then you might say maybe they need a frontal lobe to have these abstract thoughts fine all I can send I've said this many times I've said this many times I'll say here I have to say it again okay here when I think of the closest animal species to humans chimps of some kind okay chimpanzees what is the DNA we have in common it's very high the highest of any animal 97-98 I don't remember the exact numbers but it's high so this tiny little percent then accounts for all the measured differences we find so what does the smartest chimp do the smartest chimp can maybe stack boxes and reach for a banana they will know what stick to use to get the termites out of a mound and and eat them they will know maybe you can teach them some rudimentary sign language that's what our toddlers can do the smartest chimps do what our toddlers can do and we have poetry and and the Hubble telescope so so what is the response what a difference that 1% makes but I pose to you maybe that 1% difference may be the difference between stacking boxes and reaching a banana and the Hubble telescope is as small as that 1% genetic difference implies we don't think about it that way because we have human hubris that prevents it imagine some other species be it alien or otherwise that's that same 1% different on the intelligence scale as we've come to measure it as we are different from chimps what would we look like to them the smartest of us would look like their chimp of their toddlers right they were there they could bring Stephen Hawking forward in their species and say this one pointing to Stephen Hawking he's slightly smarter than the rest of the humans because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head like little Timmy over here who just came back to then preschool so know why might wait so so so so if our if we so so this is no different from the chimp and the human the human and this other species we would not be able to comprehend their simplest of thoughts any more than a chimp can understand if I just posed here's a sentence you ready ah let's go have dinner at the buffet later I'm going to have some some carbohydrates and some protein because I'm on a low-fat diet well what does that sentence me to a chimp they have no knowledge of physiology or fats or proteins or carbohydrates or health or calories but it's a simple sentence coming from me imagine the conversations this other species would have contemplating the cosmos so so I if your your thought that maybe intelligence is inevitable and it can take reach extreme limits beyond us not only biologically but technologically I fear the day we come upon a species such as that because they may be I don't fear it maybe I would just hope that all they would do for us is create a zoo where we are happy and and it maybe that is what they call Earth well you know that the chimp actually manages their diet and health al hell of a lot better than we do so I I'm not sure Neil that that I'm disagreeing with you but I'm also not pessimistic I I want to find out it's cooked really like if the chimps had evening TV give them sodas give it a big Slurpee don't get that lazy like the rest of the humans will be fine all right so you don't want to meet a pet you um if maybe we already are the pets of this intelligent species that created Earth as a zoo for their entertainment and this zoo contains humans and occasionally we get boring to them so they throw in some weird politics or some that we and that's so we are their evening entertainment maybe we don't get it are we gonna have a long run are we gonna be canceled next season yeah you don't want to be canceled because of low ratings so so I just want you to be careful of what you wish for by saying maybe there are species that our evolution has taken their intelligence beyond where as it ours is and so too would then be their technology yeah I actually I don't wish one way or another I want to know what is what is the universe done with uh you know thirteen any good scientist that's exactly what should be thought out here all right so um when we're talking the other day we talked about the singularity right so what do we mean by that for this audience and do you think it might happen we heard some indications from Peter Schwartz yesterday yes but not for a long time and what does it mean if it happens what happens to the biologicals so why don't you explain what it is and and what I'm angry that the whole singularity movement took the word singularity at all that belongs in the middle of a black hole okay so they let me just already nice they stolen the work that's word singularity and applying it to some future time where cyber and biology merge and would possibly become indistinguishable and it's an intriguing hypothesis and I I'm I don't fear that I would be intrigued by it and I might even welcome it uh what I do know is if you take your entire brain and upload it to a computer to assume that that's still you I don't get it because we have that experiment already they're called twins twins have identical DNA yet they do not share the same conscience and so conscious and so one thought lives within the brain of one and not the other and they can one can go to the beach one can go to the movies and they can accumulate different life experience so if I upload all that is me into a machine and I go to the beach I'm having fun at the beach and the machine is stuck in my living room plugged into the wall alright so so because I'm not building it with legs chasing after me right so I'm gonna make sure I can unplug the thing in case stuff goes down you know so so I don't I think machines will continue to be used in the service of our needs and that's been happening since the Industrial Revolution mechanically at first then intellectually to follow we have a machine beat us at chess a game that we invented did all of civilization destabilize when that happened we have a machine beat us at jeopardy which is based on human culture was that the end of civilization we have a machine beat us recently at go by some considered the most complex of the games we've ever invented for ourselves is that the end of colas Asian machines make better cars than we can buy by hand more with higher precision they make better clothing there's a whole manner of labor that's been replaced by machines and I'm ok with that I don't I don't have a problem with that the idea that we're going to build some animatronic humanoid the human form is not the best form to get stuff done we're not very much right there's a lot of stuff that's oh no no the Hubble telescope is a machine that's doing our observing force it doesn't have arms and legs and walk after us it's a machine nonetheless and it can do things automatically we have Rovers that know not to crawl off a cliff because they can see where it is and it knows where not to roll all right so I'm just I just don't fear this at all I welcome it bring it on yes so um Stephen Hawking last year produced this show called the genius right did you have difficulty sort of saying it the whole bit um and he had a he had an episode on this are we alone question and it made me think about he's he's dealing with people today much younger than me a little younger than you and I wonder whether that experience by talking to the next generation has brought up any new thoughts on this old question we seem to rehash many of the same concepts and ideas do you you do a lot of interaction with the next generation do you are they thinking about this question of life beyond Earth and intelligent life in any different ways what can we learn from them I can't answer that specifically but I can answer it generally and normally it's the job of adults to complain about what the future of the world would be because they have no confidence in the next generation I have the opposite sense by the community of people generally younger than thirty but especially younger than 25 and younger than twenty they're born into the era of the Internet and in fact anyone born 1995 after that was the year where we discovered the first exoplanet yes I think of them as generation exoplanet they've only ever known a world where a universe where we've known of planets in orbit around other stars they've only known a world of the internet they've grown up with a smartphone where a satellite is telling them where to make a left turn to visit Grandma's house so they have a completely different relationship to information and technology and they as a community embrace science they may they took science in high school or in college and they didn't say oh I wasn't good at it therefore I will reject it whether or not they were good at it they understood its importance and its value as the foundational understanding of how we're going to protect our survival in the 21st century as a species so in terms of whether we're alone well aliens in space global warming that there is no generation I would rather pin my hopes on then that next generation that is rising up and the only difference is they're not yet old enough to be in charge not yet old enough to become Prime Minister Court but the day that happens that is a new world and the reason I'm hopeful for that generation is that they were brought up global the same connectivity makes them have a different view of this world earth is smaller to them than in any previous generation well we've run out of time and I have to thank you very much for enlightening us entertaining us putting me in my place okay thank you you

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Id: 06rIWC7r968

Length: 32min 28sec (1948 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016