Lex Fridman: Aliens are here

if you were an intelligent alien civilization oh boy and you came about Earth how how would you interact with it can you put yourself in the mind of an alien civilization because there seems to be some parallels here it is actually right it's like a microcosm of we're very aggressive human civilization is very aggressive so if we were easily we get threatened easily yeah for stupid reasons because we start like a American Military probably thinks it's like the Chinese or the Russians if we see any kind of flying objects it gets very on edge I don't know I mean because you know part of it is like you just want to ask like that's the thing I just want to ask questions yeah but you know but you don't know the same language yeah you're gonna get first of all you send a boat of bananas you send a boat of bananas you get shot um I mean picture if aliens landed in New York how long would it take for one of them to get shot minutes if you're a matter of minutes yeah that's because it's New York and everywhere else look where we are right now that's true it'd be even worse here yeah uh make makes me really makes me wonder what is the right way to interact with intelligent life that's not like our own I hope I I dream of In Our Lifetime we would interact with possibly Life on Mars or on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn and like how do you interact with that thing well this is very technical biological and chemical processes but also if there's any kind of intelligence how do you try to communicate with that intelligence yes we're not talking about like a cockroach we're talking about like some something that's clearly like doing things making things well cockroach possibly how do you know the difference between a Cocker like how do you know we were just talking about yeah we don't know we don't know we have just like a race of like philosopher cockroaches right chilling on the Rocks well here on Earth we kind of there seems to be a strong correlation between size and intelligence like yes it seems like the bigger things a bigger nervous systems and brains and so they're usually smarter but that doesn't I think it's brain it's the ratio brain to body sure because you have like crows yeah that are up among the most intelligent it's like the size of the brain to the size of the body but there also could be kinds of intelligence will work completely no idea we're not appreciating maybe cockroaches it's survived the longest they're talking [ __ ] about us right now it's dumb humans like dude these rocks are so great a couple of hundred years exactly um did you ever you ever hear that Kurt Vonnegut where the two space Travelers get lost this this this really impacted me as a kid because my dad was an English teacher so he's always quoting Dostoyevsky and uh and Kurt Vonnegut and there's this there's two space Travelers get like crash landed in a cave and on the walls of the cave are the harmoniums and these kite-shaped animals and they feed off the vibrations of the cave and that's all they do they don't hurt each other they just do that and so for like two years these Travelers are stuck and they're trying to fix their ship and one of them starts playing music for the harmoniums and the harmoniums love him for the music and they all come around him and and he plays this music for him and finally they they fix the ship and then the one guy is like all right let's let's get out of here and the other guy's like you know what I'm staying he goes I I found a place where I can do good I'm not hurting anybody and they love me yeah I'm staying right here yeah this whole ambition thing we got going on always trying to build a bigger boat bigger thing that might not be the the ultimate um conclusion of a of a happy existence as a civilization that's probably that's one of the possibilities why we haven't met the aliens yet at scale it's because they're once you get good enough at technology you realize that happiness lies in a peaceful coexistence as possible so where do you stand on like aliens now like there's a lot coming out about the the pilots and the the things people have been seeing and again like I kind of come in and out of this stuff like I'll be in the jungle for three months I miss I miss a lot so like update me like or or are we are we being contacted right now like of course nobody knows but I tend to believe my intuition says there's aliens everywhere that um there are even our galaxy sure that's biggerly but I believe our galaxy has probably billions hundreds of millions of planets with life on it like bacteria type of life sure and I believe there is I don't know thousands of alien civil intelligent aliens civilizations that exist or have existed the problem is there's a lot of time and it's very difficult to contact each other so to achieve a kind of civilization that's able to actually send out enough signal or um radiate enough energy where we would notice I think that's really tough that said statistically speaking it seems like that should have been possible inside our galaxy or maybe nearby and so I suspect that um once an alien civilization is just many orders of magnitude smarter than us humans the way it would contact us is going to be very difficult for us humans to understand we're very egocentric we want the message to be sent as like a in English versus you know I think Consciousness itself yeah emotion um thoughts could be like fingertips um could be words in the story that the aliens are telling us or the things that are just like a low dimensional projection of a much higher dimensional message that's being said by aliens and it may be our striving to create technology is to create the kind of sensor that's actually able to hear some of the message maybe that's what AI is trying to do so I I think that bridging that barrier of communication between us and cockroaches I think that's the biggest challenge interesting like the messages are all around us they're here I I suspect that the the alien messages are here the aliens are here we're just too dumb to see it so first of all the imagining planets where there are like just picturing like a like a not a silent Planet but just like a planet of alternate life forms you know maybe it's not something that's that we can communicate and have a conversation with but just like a planet of like butterflies and centipedes and and weird you know unfortunately bacteria for billions of years it was uh bacteria as a single cell prokaryotes and eukaryotes but they're not they're boring but yeah but animal animals of some sort in an environment of some sort imagine that would just be such an interesting beautiful amazing thing and I'm sure they're out on that I'm yeah the kind of viruses they got going on it's uh but they could also not be biologically based they could be different chemistry so you have to be humbled to that too sure but then you know depends on the day like I think you caught me on that day today an optimistic one sometimes I I think that we're all we this is all there is because you start you ask that question the family Paradox like why aren't they here you can't imagine an advanced animal civilization that would not be explorers because we're explorers why is that depressing to you that the idea that that let's just say you found out right now that there isn't anything else let's just say that for for example sake that the Earth is the earth and the universe is the universe and it's sort of like the backdrop of a video game and it's just what's out there would that be tremendously depressing to you I think it's exciting for an engineer it's probably exciting for an Explorer but I would equate that to your going out hiking for three days with one match it kind of terrifies me that we only got one match really yeah really yeah one all you got is one match this no no hold on a second hold on a second wait Paul wait wait a minute you're going out there's no more matches but this this is the only match no we couldn't extinguish the planet like there's not as far as we know there's no there's no meteor coming I'm saying like do you live in a so I'm saying is that is is your worry then that we need to have a backup plan yeah really well there has so like what if we do what if we do mess it up so bad that uh we can't live here anymore well there's different ways to mess it up there's there's ways to mess it up to make life really difficult uh but there's nuclear war yes with the further and further advancement of the technology that can destroy destroy all of Earth it just feels like that's going to be exponentially growing yes it's going to get worse and that I I it's uh listen I'm I'm very optimistic but it's a it's a heck of a Russian Roulette we're playing okay so but I'm still curious about your your intention though or like where you're where your your passion for this comes from are you is your or maybe it's both but is it is it is it the need to have a backup plan for humans which which is which is admirable for your intense love of humanity and our Consciousness and love and art and everything or is it also just that the the raw fascination of imagining what's out there um because I just the way you said that about like oh you caught me on a positive day where I think it's there was some there was something in there that made me think that that you need there to be uh yeah yeah there's I think I'm the kind of person that sees Beauty in everything but to me a universe full of diverse life is more beautiful than one where it's just humans it's just the Earth life interesting there's more Beauty I mean uh I'm not egotistical about the awesomeness of humans I like if humans are not the smartest in uh in our galaxy are not even close to being the smartest and that to me is I don't know that that to me is exciting about the possibility of what's oh the universe can create yes I'm with you on that that it's wildly exciting to to like if we found even if it was just a distant inkling that we found out that there is there is a planet that has life there's no there's no communication coming from but we know for a fact there's stuff going on there we'll just change how we think about our entire reality we know now and it could be to me I guess the little inkling of a thing that is depressing if all there is is Earth and humans destroy it then we're the coolest thing that the Universe has ever created it's over I'm interested to have this conversation I'm really I'm really I'm saying like I would be interested to bring you to the Jungle yeah um and and this I like now I'm also wondering I'm wondering like what what your Wilderness experience is because I feel like for me I'm so earth-centric to the to the point where I'm like we differ in that for me this is like it's a curiosity I feel wonder and I feel it's fun to talk about like what's at the edge of space like you know there's the conundrums of of space-time and but but I'm so to me I'm like what if what if the aliens are watching us or what if the aliens aren't watching us but what if the challenge here is we've been put on on Earth as as the most intellectually complex of these creatures and and and we're being observed to see how we manage it and it's like yeah we haven't made a good job of managing each other you know before um orianna went down the the Amazon I mean they showed up and just sacked the Incas I mean we do our history and we don't have to tell you you just got back but it's um I just sometimes I wonder you know what what the is is there a grand narrative with with what we're doing to Wildlife because it's like we have all these other species and we're we're struggling even here in this conversation to sort of quantify like you know and I think that most people don't think outside of the human framework you know what I mean like just driving around for me living outside of the Jungle even just for a few weeks I get you don't you don't you don't even think about the fact that there's other species around us we really don't day to day you look at TV and you look at you listen to the radio and it doesn't it's not very consequential to the average person living in a city that there are these you know Islands covered in walruses and that there's rainforests filled with birds and and frogs and all these things happening and that you know the salmon are contributing to our fresh water and and that that life is literally given to us and made possible by these ecological systems to me that's where like the whole you know essence of my existence comes from and so like okay thank you for that reminder because you're basically saying like the alien civilizations you dream about are here on Earth those those those worlds are here for me yeah yeah no I agree with you I think I I agree with you and I think that's actually the way I uh think most of the time the you know I I think I'm on mushrooms all the time genetically somehow because when I go out in nature it's just the the beauty even of nothing you talk about the Amazon man just basics of nature yeah fill you fill me with awe and the other thing that fills me with all is our own mind like the the biology of these things firing basically are not our own mind but biology yeah of any living organisms because it's like an ecosystem they've came these cells came together they somehow functional they delegate they mostly operate in a local way but they uh first of all it's just like you said with the anacondas you start out as a tiny snake and you become giant when you're a tiny snake you're you're praying for everything when you're a giant snake you're a predator or you're afraid to no one yeah and like just that whole process same starting with a single embryo single cell is a human into the embryogenic process constructing this giant human that's able to have limbs move about the world think about things write books and so on just so that that is incredibly beautiful and all of that is here on Earth yes um and so actually I was being sort of poetic about aliens and so on I think I can spend 99.99 in terms of uh filling my mind with awe and Beauty just looking down here on Earth for sure I agree with you yeah and I'm and they shouldn't cancel out like I think it's beautiful that there's that there's people that are fascinated and obsessed with looking out into space and that will travel there um I mean just to me the the idea of I mean I have a little piece of meteorite at home that I hold and it does amazing things to my mind because I'm like everything I've ever touched is from this Earth holding this thing that's been places that we can't even think about and it blows my mind and I love it but but when it comes to like intelligence I think it's like I'm I'm so concerned with the fact that we're at this moment in history and it's interesting to me that you know we had the internet and now that with the emergence of AI and more and more I feel like we are starting to resemble like an ant colony where there's more and more connection and there's more and more interaction globally between everybody in the next 10 years we're gonna have to decide are we gonna let our ocean ecosystems just collapse are we going to just take that three percent of rainforest and just let them log the [ __ ] out of it until it's gone and it's like we're gonna be in a very different reality then then it's going to be very dystopian future or can we keep the good things about Earth transcend that realize that we have these incredible alien species around us that are animals that we grew up with that we wouldn't be here without that we owe something to and I feel like at that stage then the the the outward look becomes something else it's almost like we've we've proven that if aliens came up to us that's when I'd feel good aliens would come up to us and they said you know that Louis has the thing where he goes God comes back and he goes what did you do he goes to polar bears are brown he's like I left food for you it's like if the aliens came and were like you know and they interviewed the elephants and they said how are you feeling and the elephants would be like listen [ __ ] these little primates yeah you know what they've done to us and it's like I mean you know I've seen people break an elephant I've seen I've seen I've seen it all with that stuff and it's like if if anybody was to ask them they'd be screaming and and so like to me it's just you know I I have trouble trouble looking out into space I have trouble looking out into normal life as a human because I'm so concerned with trying to make sure that they're okay because not enough people are doing that

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 901,503

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

Id: mN3mSOtcPEA

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 08 2023