Lex Fridman and Paul Rosolie argue about aliens

what does the rainforest represent to you when you zoom out look at the entirety of it Carl Sean's pale blue dot resonated with a lot of people that everything you've ever heard of all the heroes all the villains all of your ancestors every achievement tragedy Triumph everything has happened on that one spot this one tiny tiny rock that has life on it and to me the rainforests represent the crown jewel of that as far as we know into the best of our knowledge and with our shrewd scientific brains at their fullest capacity this is still the only place that we know that has life and given that the fact that there are still these tropical towering complex ecosystems that we are barely understand crawling and full of the most incredible life it's just to me it's it's it's so wonderful it's so incredible those the waterfalls and the birds and the Maca and the Jaguars it's barely believable like if you were to theoretically tell a hypo hypothetical alien I live on this planet and there there's just these places where everything is interconnected everything means something to something else and the whole thing is this system that keeps us alive and each tree is pumping air into the river and there's an invisible River above the actual River and the whole thing goes into stabilizing our global climate and each little tiny leaf cutter ant somehow contributes to this giant biotic orchestra that keeps us alive and makes our environment possible that is beautiful I love that and so the the rainforests to me are the greatest celebration of life and probably the greatest challenge for us as a global Society because if we can't protect the Crown Jewel the best thing you know the most beautiful part then then we're really really missing the point yeah the diversity of organisms here is the biggest celebration of life that is at the core of what makes Earth a really special thing that said you and I have been arguing about aliens for pretty much the day I showed up all right he you brought a machete to this fight um luckily the table is long enough you can't reach me so to you Earth is truly special yeah you don't think there's other Earths out there millions of other Earths in our galaxy when you look up you know we were sitting in the Amazon River okay at dark the storm rolled over and you started counting the stars yeah one two and that was once you can count the stars that was a sign that the storm will actually pass eventually will pass and that's what you were doing three four five and it's going to pass you're not going to have to sit in that River for like all night so just a couple hours to keep yourself warm War okay each of those Stars there's earthlike planets around them okay why do you think there's not alien civilizations there you can write down a calculation on a napkin you can cite different Hollywood movies you can point up to the pieces of light and the stars but if you if I talk about show me a single cell that's not from this planet it's still not possible and so I agree with you that the likelihood is there all indications point to it it would be fascinating especially if it was done in especially you know imagine finding a a planet of alternative life forms not necessarily even intelligent imagine just a a planet of butterflies whatever you know something else that would be amazing but but I'm concerned with the reality that we have in front of us is that this is the spaceship this is life yeah and so right now given that reality maybe that's maybe that's the case maybe maybe there are other planets or or maybe we are the first maybe life originated here maybe God the universe whatever maybe maybe this is it this is the this is the this is the the testing ground for something bigger and and and and this complexity and this diversity of life and this life that we have is that important and I think that part of what we do when we go oh yeah but there's other planets we're first of all we're we're we're taking an assumption into reality without I mean you know aliens right now are about as real as Santa Claus we think they're out there but we're not sure maybe a little more real because you know it could make sense we no one has an alien no one's seen an alien no one's even seen cellular life and so I'm not again if they showed up tomorrow great let's study them but right now we have this very simple threat going on where we can't stop killing each other in our living environment and so while some people can speci Iz and looking to the stars and to other planets and talking about being an interplanetary species I'm very much concerned with the fact that here in our home turf our living environment where the air is good and the rivers are clean and the trees are big and there's MAA flying through the sky and salmon in the rivers not only do we have a responsibility to each other and to our children to protect this incredible gift that is our entire reality seems kind of weird to at some point it conservation seems kind of ridiculous like you're begging people to not pollute the things that keep them alive it's it's it's almost kind of silly at a point but but we have this incredible thing where there are fish in the ocean and in the rivers they come standard with life on Earth and and we're we're we're harming the ability of Earth's ecosystems to provide for that life and we are the generation that's going to decide if those systems continue to provide life to all the people on Earth and all all the generations and by the way all the other animals that exist for their own reasons other consciousnesses that were just beginning to understand elephants humpback whales whatever families of giant River roders you not everything can be seen from a human perspective these are other species that have their own stories and so I'm I'm more biocentric than anthropocentric and that I I I think that that nature is important but I also believe that we are we are special we are the most intelligent animal so one I I agree with you there's some degree to which when you imagine aliens you forget if by for a moment how special important life is here on Earth yes but it's also a way to reach out through C curiosity and trying to understand what is intelligence what Consciousness what is exactly the thing that makes life on Earth special another way of doing that and I see the jungle in that same way is basically treating the animals all around us the life forms all around us as kinds of aliens as that's a humbling way that's an intellectual humility with which to approach the study of like what the hell is going on here this is truly incredible like are are the animals we've met over the last few days conscious what is the nature of their intelligence what is the nature of their Consciousness what motivates them are they individual creatures or are they actually part of the large system and how large is the system is Earth one big system and humans are just little fingertips of that system or uh are each of the individual animals really the key actors and everything else is in the emerging complexity of the system so I think thinking about aliens is a necessary uh I like my to with a little Drop of Poison from Tom waes is a necessary perturbation of the system of our thinking to sort of say hey we don't know what the [ __ ] going on around here sure and Aliens is a nice way to say okay uh the mystery all around us is immense cuz to me likely aliens are living among us not in a trivial sense Little Green Men but the force that created life I think permeates the entirety of the universe that there is a force that's creative now the force that created life is a is a big one and then the other thing is what do you mean by that there's aliens living among us you mean extraterrestrials yes living among us yes you believe that not like 100% but there's a there a good percentage I don't understand how it's possible for there not to be a very large number of alien civilization throughout just our galaxy but that's different than saying that they're living among us if you tell me that there's aliens living five galaxies over and that they're just out there somewhere I'm kind of I'm kind of more on your side than that they're here because just like Bigfoot like we have camera traps we have DNA sequencing through through water now like we can you're telling me no one found one wing nut of a of a of a ship in all like the Egyptians up until right now no one in Russia saw like a a crash ship took a picture tweeted that [ __ ] real quick and you know I I think there's no Bigfoot there's no trivial manifestations of aliens I think if they're here they're here in ways that are not comprehendable by humans because they're far more advanced than humans they're far more advanced than any life forms on Earth so they're even if it's just their probes we cannot just even comprehend it I think it's possible that they operate in the space of ideas for example that ideas could be aliens feelings could be aliens Consciousness itself could be aliens so we can't restrict our understanding what is a life form to a thing that is a biological creature that operates via natural selection on this particular Planet it could be much much much more sophisticated it could be in a space of computation for example as we in the 21st century are developing increasingly sophisticated computational systems with artificial intelligence it could be operating on some other level that we can't even imagine it could be operating on a level of physics that we have not even begun to understand uh we we barely understand quantum mechanics we use it quantum mechanics is a way we used to make very accurate predictions but to understand why it's operating that way we don't and there's so many gigantic powerful Cosmic entities out there that we detect sometimes can't detect Dark Matter Dark Energy but it's out there we know it exists but we can't explain why and what the [ __ ] it is we give it names black holes and dark energy and dark matter but those are all names for things that mathematical equations predict but we don't understand and so all of that is just to say that aliens could be here in ways that are for now and maybe for a long time going to be impossible for humans to understand so aliens in the in the strict biological sense like like like like horseshoe crabs we agree that they're they're not we haven't found physical aliens the only way I can imagine finding physical aliens is if alien species are trying to communicate with us humans uh or with other life forms and are trying to figure out a way to communicate with us such that we dumb humans would understand like let's create a thing yo there's a moth the the size of a small Eagle let's try to get us 15 minutes of ATT it just might it just might fan of the podcast okay Lex I love you um all right so so what's your wouldn't it be interesting it would be really fascinating to me if we found out that there were aliens living among us and we couldn't see them and what some of the people were calling aliens the scientists the the religious people were calling angels and then everybody had this realization that whether you call them aliens or Angels there are these other there is more way more to the universe than we're realizing I just for me the fact that there's there's a skull on the table yeah there's a skull table skull in your hand there's now a skull in my hand of a monkey with a bullet in its head that I found on the floor of an indigenous Community where they eat monkeys I didn't kill the monkey so save your comments but you know in terms of of the animals I think I think that when I see space it my feeling and I'm I'm not requiring anybody else to have this feeling but because we know because this is the only place that we know that there's life and we have no idea how it started I just think it's so important to protect it and and and for me it's just as much about our children as it is about the little spider monkeys and the little baby Cayman that are in the river right now because life is so beautiful and I think that there's a huge amount of intellectual responsibility that we can transfer off of ourselves if we go yeah the rivers are filled with trash and yeah Extinction is happening but we have to be an interplanetary species anyway because at any moment this could all end from an asteroid and like everything's going to [ __ ] anyway and so it's like we're [ __ ] up this planet it's like that's that's we're just being angry teenagers who are you know going goth for a while and it's like what if you just rolled up your sleeves and said holy [ __ ] wait a second you know we can pretty much do whatever we want we can fly all over the world we have we can do heart transplants we can watch Netflix and the Amazon if we wanted to like we could do all this amazing stuff we can capture on video or adventures and go back and watch them again and again and again there's so much incredible opportunity that technology has allowed us to do and we're the we're the richest in history I mean we could do everything we could cross the whole planet in a second and it's like that's an amazing time to be alive and if we just don't [ __ ] up the ecosystems and kill all the other animals we got it made yeah so it is true that we can destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons but it also is true that that snake that I got to handle yesterday is like one of the most beautiful things Earth has ever created in in that little organism is encapsulated the entire history of Earth and it's it's beautiful so we both things are true we should we should worry about the existential destruction of human civilization through the weapons we create and we should become multi plantary species as a backup for that purpose but also remember that this place is is really really special and probably if not difficult probably impossible to recreate elsewhere and by the way there's something incredibly powerful about a skull yeah if you've ever hold a human skull it it'll give you uh it'll it'll it'll it'll weigh on you for a sec because you look into this the hollow eyes of this face and suddenly you go you feel your own teeth you got you feel your own skull and you go holy [ __ ] you go what is going on it's like taking acid you just go oh boy I forgot that I'm a ghost inhabiting a meat vehicle on a floating Rock but even even a monkey yeah it's like looking at a ancestor you know the not a direct ancestral but there's a it's like a you know like you you looking at a puddle at a reflection mhm a little blurry but it's still blurry but it's still there yeah it's still there and like the roots of who we are is still there and it's it's all kind of incredible do you ever think of the the tree of life just kind of like where we came from yeah the jungle is ephemeral it just keeps it's a system that just keeps forgetting because it's just churning and churning and churning and churning has in some ways no history but to create the jungle to create life on Earth there's a deep history of lots of Death Sex and Death a festival of Sex and Death life on Earth that's what I see in the skull yeah there's something it's there's something kind of terrifying about that image to me like when I hold that every now and then at night you hold that skull and you it just reminds you that you're temporary yeah both you and I will one day have one of those yeah H mine will be bigger God the male competition continues the silver back slaps the Lesser male once again

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 158,357

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: bn3bha3udoA

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024