Ray Kurzweil - Where are All Those Aliens?

Raye and reflecting on human purpose and existence the question are we alone or is the universe filled with other intelligent beings of which we are just the very minor part is a fundamental one to understand what it's all about most scientists would say based on the numbers that it is virtually certain that there are other vastly more intelligent civilizations in the universe you approach this from a technology point of view let's let's explore it well we can't rule out that they may be out there but most other scientists actually look at this from a linear perspective and assume that other civilizations are out there and it would take millions of years to get from where we are now to a point where they might for example have solar system or even galaxy-wide technology based on the exponential progression of technology which is really the correct way to look at it that's the historically accurate view we've gone in just a century and a half from the Pony Express to where we are now which is very impressive and you go out another century half we will be saturating the matter and energy at least here on earth with computational processes there will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than all of human intelligence today so that's three centuries to go from the Pony Express to very transcended technology that will at least dominate our planet and in fact I'd say within a century or so from now will dominate our solar system and if if the seti assumptions are correct there should be millions of these civilizations out there it's someone would be behind us some would be ahead of us but the ones that are ahead of us which would be about half of them would not gonna be just twenty years ahead they're gonna be millions of years ahead well it's only a few centuries ahead they would be taking over their solar system and within certainly within a million years they would be really taking over their galaxies and would be not only doing galaxy wide engineering but would be transforming their galaxies into beacons of incredibly transcendent and technology and intelligence and there should be millions of them that are millions of years ahead of us and we don't notice any of them we don't notice anything going on and people describe this process as finding a needle in the haystack but a civilization like that would be putting out trillions of trillions of needles which is to say intelligent signals and that people have arguments why we don't see them well then they all blew themselves up well it's possible that if you talk about one civilization that it blew itself up but to talk there should be millions of them or they don't want to visit us because we're too primitive and they want to let us develop that's a Star Trek another one is that they've gotten into virtual realities so they really don't care about visiting or doing anything everything they live in themselves they don't use radio signals anymore but it may be that they find better ways of communicating but it's still hard to believe that they wouldn't be using electromagnetic signals at least as a byproduct of second-order effects I mean there's bound to be intelligent electromagnetic signals coming from such a civilization at a vast scale and and we would notice this and you can make an argument as to why any one civilization wouldn't be noticeable but the whole SETI assumptions should be millions of them based on the Drake formula maybe if you know millions in our galaxy alone and then our galaxy is a hundred billion galaxies so there should be a vast number and what we don't notice anything along these lines the interesting thing is that big numbers are what drive these assumptions the big numbers of numbers of planets around stars and stars in the galaxies and galaxies in the universe and so you you run that out what you've done is you've shown that the the exponential increase of technology would enable every one of those if they were technology civilizations to within million years dominate the universe in some way again record the speed of light is an issue it depends on the speed of light certainly within a million years they would dominate and transform their galaxies and that would be very noticeable no matter what galaxy it was if it was in within our light sphere we have trillions of galaxies within our light sphere the the exponential part is is the key process because once a civilization just reaches the dawn of being radio capable and we're a little bit past that already within a century if not two or three they will be vastly you know trillions of times I can even argue suppose Ray Kurzweil doesn't know what he's talking about and he's off by a whole order of magnitude so it's ten times more difficult than you say so it's a thousand years instead of a hundred years that's that's a that's a it's an eye drop in the ocean of time right but if you don't examine the issue exponentially if you examine it linearly you do get a very different perspective and then the fact that there are millions or billions of these civilizations out there it takes a very long period of time for them to do anything that's interesting but that's really not a reasonable assumption if you look at you know be history of Technology and where it is likely to go so what's your conclusion my conclude conclusions were probably alone I really would be surprised if we ran into somebody else out there it's not a proof because you know there may be one other civilization that's ahead of us and happens to be ahead of us and maybe they have taken the Star Trek ethical command to to you know not be noticeable to us and or maybe we just haven't noticed their signals yet so I it's not a rock-solid proof that there cannot be another civilization but my expectation is we are alone if that seems very unlikely lots of things are unlikely the existence of our whole universe being so exquisitely calibrated to having all the physical constants to allow for the evolution of complexity it's also extremely unlikely by the anthropic principle if it weren't the case we wouldn't be here talking about it well if weren't the case that we were here on a intelligent civilization we wouldn't be here talking about it if we didn't have some radio technology this program within each your viewers if we are indeed alone would seem to contradict the Copernican principle which means that humanity is nothing special and would go against a lot of scientific thinking that has informed our our philosophy well even if we just look here on earth there is something special about humans yes we're not the center of the universe and yes we didn't descend from the gods we descended from the worms but we're the only species that creates knowledge that passes knowledge down to the next generation where the knowledge base expands that creates technology we have thus opposable appendage and this ability to do recursive rational thinking it can do what if experiments in our brain it can change the environment and they can use the latest generation of tools to create the next so we have this whole evolutionary process of technology no other species does that so even even here on earth we are very special in that regard even though we came from this evolutionary process we did finally gather that those prerequisites to create this whole other evolutionary process which is technology that makes may be a special here on earth or among ourselves but to say we're special in the universe would almost imbue it with some theological implications well if you assume that sooner or later this would happen and that is the seti assumption that there'd be some civilization they would evolve some kind of ability to manipulate the environment and ability to think well enough to actually create technology and then have technology evolved you assume that that will happen sooner or later somebody's got to be in the lead and why not us

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 213,883

Keywords: Ray Kurzweil, Closer To Truth, Aliens, Extraterrestrial life, SETI, Universe, Cosmology, Space, alien intelligences, fermi paradox, deepest questions, fundamental questions about reality, ideas of existence, life's big questions, online learning, pbs science show, robert lawrence kuhn, search for purpose, stem education channel, ultimate reality of the universe, vital ideas, alien life

Id: cBVUdEQXvmc

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2017