The Growing List of Solutions to the Fermi Paradox with Stephen Webb

the big problem with the Fermi paradox is that we really don't know what all of the rules of life are in the universe we're in some ways an infant civilization unsure if we'll even be around in 500 years much less tens of thousands of years where we might become an easily detectable civilization to the rest of the galaxy perhaps millions of years to be detectable outside it this has led to the deep question of what solution if Fermi paradox actually is on one end of the spectrum we are simply alone right now and can't detect anyone else that might be out there they don't exist at the same time as us or aren't close enough for us to see yet on the other end of the spectrum they might be everywhere and we cannot or are not allowed to see them it's anyone's guess and that leads us to something my guest has been studying for decades the many possible solutions to the Fermi paradox you have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Music] in today's episode John is joined by dr. Stephen Webb dr. Webb is the author of numerous popular science books including measuring the universe the cosmological distance ladder as well as if the universe is teeming with aliens where is everybody 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life dr. Webb earned his PhD in theoretical particle physics at the University of Manchester his many interests include 50 sci fi football cosmology and asteroid by ology Stephen Webb welcome to the program John it's a pleasure to be here thank you for inviting me now Stephen you wrote one of the one of the a book that's very close to my own heart because I've been intensely interested in the Fermi paradox for decades and in this book if the universe is teeming with aliens aware is everybody 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life now 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox that's amazing since the this edition of the book which I believe is 2015 have you come up with any more it's not me that's come up with them it's the community one of the the fascinating aspect I find of the Fermi paradox is that it is so productive it brings in so many different aspects of science of eating sociological thinking so the community as a whole has come up with solutions since 2015 and it's strange that you mention it because a couple of months ago the publishers said it's been five years what about the third edition and as you know I got into the habit as a as a young man of collecting these and sure enough since 2015 there have been other solutions proposed so there will be I think a third edition that it would be awful to call it a hundred solutions it started off with 50 then it was the first edition then it became 75 everyone including myself would lose the will to live if I just give a hundred so it'll be a slightly different approach I think I'd like to look into the motivations perhaps of the people who were proposing these ideas and perhaps take a slightly more general approach but I can walk you through some of the the solutions if you wish that have been proposed absolutely so let's go with gravitational waves your example so I wrote a book a few years ago about the incredible new observatories that are going to come online they've started to come online they'll be more in the next few years we're entering a golden age of astronomy and cosmology and one of the chapters this is about eight years ago was about gravitational wave Observatory and back then I was still unsure whether we would ever actually detect gravitational waves because physicists had been promising me that for decades it hadn't come it was an incredibly difficult technological challenge that the astronomers had set themselves so I wrote that chapter back then thinking well maybe maybe not about two years after that book was published LIGO and Virgo detected gravitational waves I now have an app on my phone that alerts me to the latest gravitational wave detection when a neutron stars have merged and the distance you in the distant universe and been detected the ripples in space have been detected by Virgo or LIGO it's incredible incredible increase in technology and those short few years well people have said may be truly advanced civilizations recognized that if you can detect electromagnetic waves then you can detect gravitational waves now that seems crazy because it's incredibly difficult to detect gravitational waves right but there are plenty of people still alive who were born before the first radio telescope was created so from the perspective of a advanced extraterrestrial civilization who's perhaps thousands millions billion years in advance of us that's timescale between finding radio waves and having a radio telescope and detecting gravitational waves it's an eyeblink it just is no time at all so they could reasonably suspect that if you can detect radio waves then you could detect gravitational waves so people have said well maybe that's how extraterrestrials would send a signal it's really difficult to send a signal but one paper I read recently I think it's still in preprint but the idea is that an advanced civilization says where is any what what's the unique place in the galaxy when it comes to gravitational waves well that is Sagittarius a star it's this central supermassive black hole in the galaxy and being a unique part of that object is the inner most stable circular orbit so you get a massive object a star say and you feed it with energy so you put it in that in a most stable circular orbits feed it with energy so it doesn't just get sucked in beyond the event horizon into the black hole you keep it there you can keep it there for billions of years and it will constantly radiate gravitational waves of a particular frequency so you don't get that chirp of gravitational wave increase in frequency as you get within spiraling neutron stars for example it's a constant frequency gravitational wave if they did that and we could relatively easily detect it with the next generation of detectors like Lisa space-based Observatory then you'd immediately know something was up so this is this idea of the gravitational wave beacon and I'd certainly want to explore that I think in more detail in a in a book now it would seem to me that with a gravitational wave that would get past some of the problems inherent with radio SETI in that everyone would detect the gravitational wave unambiguously correct absolutely so it's this idea of omnidirectional signaling to the entire galaxy absolutely it's just one of the advantages the disadvantage is it requires an incredible amount of energy to do that so we're talking about civilizations that far far in advance of our own but they've had time to develop but millions of years even conceivably you know billions of years and and you talk about that in both your book and your TED talk that you know this galaxy has had a lot of time to develop a civilization give us some sort of scale on that well III think that's the the the crux of the paradox isn't it so on the one hand the galaxy is big by which I mean it can contain a lot of stuff a lot of planets a lot of places where life could get going so now usually perhaps not even naively you would expect by the Copernican principle this idea that there's nothing special about earth you would expect lots of planets to have life and at least some of those planets to be home to intelligence and perhaps technologically advanced civilizations so the galaxy is big but on the other hand yes the galaxy is old we know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old give or take and there doesn't seem to be a fundamental reason why those civilizations could not be billions of years in advance of our own and it is difficult to get a handle on how long a billion years is but if you compress the age of the universe into one year then all of the interesting stuff that's happening here on earth takes place in the last weeks of December and all the really really interesting stuff in the stuff involving intelligence that takes place just before midnight really 31st December in the that's where we are right now but those civilizations they could be popping up in the summer months so this there seems to be plenty of time for civilizations if they follow the same technological arc as as we do and again by that Copernican principle if you say that there's nothing special about us we came into being on an ordinary planet therefore other beings could come into being on a an ordinary planet there's nothing to stop them advancing technologically in the way that we've advanced but they just have more time to achieve incredible things and if a billion years presumably would allow enough time for civilizations to develop a level of technology that Arthur Clarke would say was indistinguishable from magic in such a situation and we have the the Kardashev scale to sort of you know general guide on what this might look like so if you have a type three civilization that that is I mean we certainly see no evidence of anything like that but we don't know necessarily what one would look like it's usually assumed that if they'd be building Dyson spheres or something but they very well may not be you know they may take some of their form so would it be within the power of such a civilization as Carter should have laid out with type-3 to use gravitational waves as a form of communication like that I mean was that would that be a note not a big deal for that kind of a civilization or would it still be a problem even at that level for Kardashev three they could have so if you run the numbers for instance with the particular scenario that I mentioned which is putting a an object say the size of Jupiter in that inner most stable circular orbit of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy then the energy associated with keeping it there is is large but it's sort of on the order of the energy output associated with a stellar object over the period of its of its life so it's not outlandishly large and a k3 civilization you might imagine would have access to that sort of of energy resource you could ask yourself would they use it in that way why if they've got access to such large energy reserves why would they they do that that's a separate question technologically it would be possible for them to do it the problem with that particular scenario having a Jupiter say Jupiter sized mass is that something like that or a star would be tidally disrupted so it couldn't actually be that sort of object you'd need a white dwarf with sufficient structural integrity as it were to stand up to those gravitational tidal interactions and maintain its integrity but a white dwarf would require incredible amounts of energy to keep it there over a long period of time all you say well you can they somehow compactify Jupiter so that it becomes an incredibly dense small object you still get the gravitational waves because the same masses it's going around this in a most stable circular orbit but how on earth would they compactify Jupiter's a whit I'd either way we're talking about civilizations that have access to energy resources and access to technology that we just don't really understand but what could certainly imagine it and there doesn't seem to be anything in the laws of physics that absolutely forbids it so we're in the realms of imagining things whether these ever practical or not we can argue and that's part of the fun of the paradox isn't it oh of course now what are some of the other options that are there don't involve radio or laser what about neutrinos can we see any utility to communicating that way if it's even it's another option it's again in that in that book I talked about neutrino astronomy and I was again slightly but there are there are problems with with with that neutrinos a great in that they go almost as fast as light and in certain circumstances and neutrino signal gets here before light doesn't I'm thinking of things like supernovae where light itself from deep within the star struggles to leave the explosion but as soon as neutrinos created it's off because it doesn't interact much with matter so it's off the fact that neutrinos just leave the scene of the crime as it were is tantamount to saying it's incredibly difficult to detect them and it's incredibly difficult to modulate them for a signal so yes we can imagine neutrinos carrying a signal very very quickly and and because they don't have an electric charge they go where you would want them to but it requires again a level of technology that makes you think would civilizations go to that bother it's it's difficult to modulate the signal it's difficult to know where the signal comes from and to detect i i'd i'd personaly would favor gravitational waves over neutrinos but I was wrong about gravitational waves several years ago so I might well be wrong about that now the the case can be made too though that you know one of the earliest things that humans develop was fire and actually protohumans for humans yet we still use fire and there are probably more many more fires of artificial origin burning on this planet right now than there have ever been in human history so that it may be that radio is just so useful that even the biggest civilizations all the civilizations most advanced civilizations still use it and we look for it but we don't see it except maybe in one case what's your opinion of the WoW signal that's interesting it's such first of all just to step back I think you're right to make that a point it's all that there's a modernity bias maybe we can discuss that later but as a community and scientists in general we tend to look at the new thing that's the interesting thing to investigate to research so I just mentioned gravitational waves everyone's thinking about these things because we've just detected them but actually I think you you're dead right radio is very very easy to create civilizations out there if they exist would know that other civilizations can easily detect radio it has its own problems in terms of you go on the directional versus beamed and all that sort of stuff but radio is a almost lowest common denominator I think so absolutely we should be looking in the radio as for the Wow how frustrating is it but potentially we have a signal it meets all the criteria that you might expect that it's a one-off and I think the in the absence of anything else to verify it you would probably be looking for some sort of mundane everyday explanation what that is I don't know but I wouldn't bet the house on that being a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization the tantalizing frustrating thing is well it could have been how frustrating is that extremely it that the while signal is probably the one thing in in astronomy that that bothers me I think about it a lot because there's just certain you know certain things and I actually interviewed Jerry Eamon recently who was the scientists who are at Wow in the paper and it's just very perplexing you know but I unless it repeats we're never gonna know yes yeah that's the big awful the awful thing about that sort of signal we have to be careful that just because we don't immediately understand something we immediately think oh a Lien's and and that's a leap a logical leap that many people make and they shouldn't sense things like I don't know fast radio bursts puzzling phenomenon but you know we'll get there we'll get this understanding of it eventually that's the interesting part of science isn't it figuring out things but the WoW signal yes because it is that single intriguing event it is just so tantalizing now that leads us to another area of solutions because one would be that all we ever pick up are while signals and if you look at the history of our planet these signals that we produce that might be easily seen by another study experiment in the galaxy are things like when we raid our asteroids using Arecibo and it doesn't repeat nor did any of our messages that we sent the Arecibo signal never repeated it so it could simply be that everyone lives in a state of question mark what was that was that another civilization and yet nobody ever really does a concerted effort to contact anyone what are some of the other solutions like that where it's just simply ships passing in the night and missing each other well that if it turns out that that describes the galaxy I think it would be just so so lonely and such a frustrating situation it might actually turn out to be the case because SETI is incredibly hard isn't it the search for extraterrestrial intelligence if you're going to go via by a radio you have to be looking at the right time so civilizations if they pop in and out of existence we don't know how long own civilization is going to last so you need civilizations to be around at the same time taking into account like to travel distance between them you have to point your radio telescope in the right direction you're assuming that they're they're beaming you have to have it tuned to the right frequency you have to be looking at the right for the right sort of signal there's a vast phase space to explore and yes it's entirely possible that as you said you have these things beeping off here and there and only occasionally to the two things the signal and the receiver align and it's as you say ships passing in the night but there are other ways of disturbing the universe if you like in a way that can make your presence felt so it doesn't have to be just radio you could if you were a civilization and you wanted for instance to send out your encyclopedia Galactica decide that actually radio isn't the best way of doing it because who's going to pick it up let's send probes so you can actually physically send self-replicating probes to deposit your encyclopedia Galactica's or try colonize if that's the way you're inclined so the Fermi paradox is not just that we don't hear or see them out there there's also this aspect that none of them have bothered to use any other means of contact seemingly and I'm thinking about probe and it again since we're in the realm of imagination it's easy to imagine scenarios whereby a civilisation can colonize the galaxy or distribute its encyclopedia Galactica to all planets in the galaxy on a relatively small time scale so the paradox for me is that there's absolutely no indication and often perhaps things like the WoW signal there's there's no indication yet of life out there in the universe but yet if we're just talking about radio it's a difficult difficult task that SETI astronomers have set themselves now in regards to self-replicating probes idea originally by John von Neumann these wouldn't necessarily be the easiest things to find in in your solar system if there is one present so if it's not transmitting to us say it's only transmitting home and not in our direction we would never even know it was there right so we're getting into those sort of classes of solution that say that yes they exist and they're here and there perhaps monitoring us so there's this whole idea of the zoo scenario so absolutely if technology is so advanced that they can send these probes it will be advanced enough to ensure that we don't spot them if they don't want to be seen I think maybe it's an opinion it's not widely shared but I think that if the civilization was advanced enough to do that it wouldn't have anything to fear from other civilizations so I don't see that there's any necessarily any benefit to keeping itself hidden but if it wanted to for whatever reason prime directive is Star Trek and all that sort of stuff and yes you're right it's it's only could and it would be difficult to observe these things having said that a couple of years ago there was all the interest over a more and we have the second interstellar visitor very soft Borissov yes it's here right now stable beginning to leave isn't it there's an again go back to this idea of new observatories there's a an incredible new observatory gonna come online in the next year or two it's not called the Veera Reuben telescope was the large synoptic survey telescope oh really yeah it hadn't heard that they oh that's neat I hadn't heard they decided to name it that but I am so excited for that yeah yes absolutely it's great isn't it and yeah just so so well deserved so the observatories is the Veera Reuben Observatory and that is going to be an incredible instrument and it will be capable of detecting because of the way it's observing the universe it will be capable of detecting a whole load of these interstellar visitors things like a muumuu and so on and if you combine that with advances in machine learning so astronomy is not just increasing in the sense that it's getting these incredible observatories machine learning and artificial intelligence is letting us analyze these huge data sets in in ways that just an impossible for humans so it opens up another approach I think to to SETI and I I think it's important that we broaden that the approach it's it's not just radio yes that's probably the base case and it's the lowest common denominator as I said but we don't know what civilizations out there would actually do because they would be by definition alien and I think it's important that we broaden it as much as possible and we look at gravitational waves and then search through the data for that we look at the data from if you were Ruben Observatory when it comes and look through that and there's all of these different approaches that we could use and I think it's important that we do use that we don't prejudge as it were what a signal might look like kind of give you another solution that's been proffered since that second edition of the book absolutely just just to give you an idea of what it is I'm trying to get at it seems an outlandish idea but it's a do to claim on without a Belgian astronomer and philosopher and he says look at millisecond pulsars x-ray millisecond pulsars they're rapidly spinning neutron stars that send off pulses it turns out that they are ideal for a passive navigation system and in fact that nASA has investigated it and probably if we start exploring the outer reaches of the solar system we'll have something like that onboard the probes that we send out because it means that the probes themselves can use these x-ray the second pulsars as a GPS is a galactic positioning system it turns out that they're ideal these these pulsars fit for that sort of endeavor and we don't have to then steer the probe from Earth so how would how would that you know what's own alien civilization might use that as a passive navigation system but how would that be how how does that work into the paradox itself well III just want to highlight that as a as a way that the dude al says we should be approaching these massive datasets so he says most scientists will be one of them says x-ray navigation I also as Paul says themselves entirely natural objects it's just we have to be clever enough to make advantage or take advantage of them you could go one step further and say well extraterrestrial civilizations if they're out there would be using them to navigate themselves but video says well you can look at this hypothesis on a schedule you could say that maybe advanced civilizations could modulate the signals and use it not just for navigation but perhaps also for communication you could go right to the end of the scale and say that these super advanced civilizations have actually created these millisecond pulsars for a GPS and communication system if you go that route right at the end scale say that these super advanced civilizations are going off creating supernovae to create these x-ray with a second pulsars for their own purposes under that hypothesis you would expect certain distribution of x-ray millisecond pulsars you'd want them beaming preferentially in the beam in the the plane of the galaxy you would want them if they are an artificial GPS system they would have certain characteristics we could search for that I don't believe for one minute that these pulsars are anything but natural but if you take the hypothesis that they could be artificial you can then start looking at what the hypothesis would predict and then go and test it and so what I think what I'm saying is that we're getting these huge datasets coming through and I think we should be open to interrogating those datasets in a variety of different ways that might seem completely off the wall and probably won't succeed but there's no harm in trying no not not by any means you have to look as a matter of fact I recently had a discussion with the scientists uh Beatriz Villar old which is she's looking for stars that seem to unnaturally disappear yeah where there's no you know no known you know I'm sure she's gonna find all kinds of interesting natural phenomena that can make a star dimmer disappear I mean we've already started seeing that with tabby starred cases like that well maybe you might see one that is disappearing in a way that just isn't possible without a civilization and it's been interesting because it just seems to me over the last ten years we have come up people have cooked up way more detectable techno signatures than what anyone had thought back in the days of you know Taccone and Morrison you know when they'd said look for radio beacons well then Britney Oh beacons how many directional ones don't really make a lot of sense but then everybody came up a whole bunch of other ones looking for CFCs and an exoplanet atmosphere and all kinds of interesting stuff in recent years but go back to the idea of the modernity bias it's if you go back to 19th century ghosts one that one of the greatest minds in in history it never tably you know he had a set of mental furniture produced by the world in which he he was living and his idea about communicating mankind's humankind's presence to Mars in that case would be to plant Pythagorean forests in Siberia you have a 3 4 5 triangle forest his idea was that any Martian astronomers seeing that would immediately know that wasn't a a natural phenomenon and therefore earth must be inhabited that was the level of technology that was available to him that's how he was thinking one of his students came up with a similar idea about digging a ditch he put in kerosene in and setting it alight that was the technology that was available to them at the time that's what they thought they could do a little bit later um civilization here was almost synonymous with canalization this idea of getting dirty water away from you and clean water to you and as soon as that was happening in Victorian cities people started seeing canals on us and coming up with romantic ideas about why that might be the case 20th century we invent radio and then suddenly radios the way to do communication across interstellar distances mm everything's digital and then people say well maybe we're living in a simulation maybe that explains the paradox 2015 LIGO Virgo see gravitational waves and then with pinking humps sat here talking to you thinking petty gravitational waves is the way to go so the suggestions tend to follow our technological capacity at anytime and I think it's inevitable what else can we do but we need to be aware I think of that bias and you maybe just be a little bit more humble and think let's not prejudge let's try and be as flexible in our thinking as possible now speaking of biases there are others and another one would be that a technological civilization might be producing radio but they're just not doing it from a star system they might be for some reason not located on a planet so that that brings in a location bias where word of like well we live on a planet therefore they must and there's just no reason to say that you're right I mean there's so many biases and it's so difficult to move away from anthropocentric thinking I would suggest that for life to get going it requires certain things so for example it's difficult to imagine life as we know it we always have to say life as we know it and there is I guess a philosophical question involved around how do we define life how would we recognize it perhaps if we go out there and see something indeed is it possible that there's a shadow biosphere even here on earth that's another question we could investigate yes that's interesting stuff that I mean we may have a shadow biosphere that we don't really have an easy way to detect I mean it may be all around us yeah I mean if if the claim is that life gets going easily you know one us what one answer to the Fermi paradox could be that actually it's an incredibly rare fluke that you get from inanimate matter to animate bidding material we don't know precisely how it happens you could say it's a an incredibly rare fluke in which case Fermi paradox solved but but if we assume it's you know a natural event and some people say it's actually very easy to get from non-life to life then you could imagine back on earth when our abiogenesis event took place that the event that led ultimately to us maybe there are other events that relied on different chemicals different coding systems and if that's the case if you swap one of the key elements I mean life as we know it depends of carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen phosphorus sulfur phosphorus actually gives rise to yet another possible answer to the problem maybe touching it later but you can imagine swapping out one of those elements for some other element it would lead to potentially a life form that's very different to what we have so it could be potentially if life gets started very very easily but multiple Genesis events took place on earth and we have this shadow biosphere around us that we just don't recognize it's possible and again unless we look unless we with an open mind which is hard because what yes microbiology is hard it's hard to do absolutely but none of this is AC which again makes it fascinating now the interesting thing I think the most interesting thing is if we did find a shadow biosphere it's certain to be microbial or else we'd see unrelated macro fauna walking around but if it's microbial and say it's old as well say it's Genesis happened a billion years after our type of life you know came about it brings us to one scary filter the idea that prokaryotic and life tends to vary only very rarely or perhaps uniquely jumped to eukaryotic life and we'll get into that when we come back we have to take a break I'm joined today by steven web author of 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life back in a moment John you haven't told the viewers to subscribe for ages like subscribe and share and we're back with dr. Steven now Steven do with in this idea of a shadow biosphere as we mentioned it brings up one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox and it's the one that I admit I am most sympathetic to you that I wonder about that it took a very very long time for the simplest life on earth the prokaryotes to make the leap to eukaryotic life an extremely very glaring amount of time and if we did find a shadow biosphere it would be microbial and it never made that leap so that might suggest that this dissolution of the Fermi paradox is that intelligence is simply very very very rare extraordinarily so what's your view on that I think that if we did detect a shadow biosphere or if we detected the remains of even if it's fossilized remains of life on Mars or if we go to Enceladus or one of these moons and discover an independent Genesis event it makes it incredibly likely that the galaxy is filled with planets where something similar has happened you know that I don't believe this such a uniqueness about the solar system that it could happen multiple times in the solar system and never anywhere else so yes we would then expect lots of planets to have microbial life at least but then yes you asked this question can we get from simple single-celled organisms to multicellular life this prokaryotic eukaryotic transition and there's some recent work and the reason I'm not microbiologist is I can never pronounce the words that they use and these species but I believe it's called Promethea rkm in the past couple of weeks that they've believed it's Japanese researchers have found evidence that this actually might have been the event that Promethea archaea had tentacles and it's grabbed and passing bacterium and then instead of that being food that bacterium entered a symbiotic relationship and it actually provide provided useful energy to that from if you are km that could be an incredibly flukish event so it's not just that that event has to happen and that that symbiosis takes place but then it has to be such a useful thing that it spreads and III think yes but I had to bet I would yes that we probably are living in a galaxy where there are multiple places where Genesis abiogenesis took place and that there's lots of microbial life but that that transition to a higher grade of life is relatively but probably very rare and then in order to reach a stage of intelligent technological civilization you have to have a variety of other things happen one of which is a nice stable climate for billions of years and and there are reasons to suppose that Earth is flukish in that event so then you start thinking about the number of different things that have got to go right in order to reach this this end point and I think for a long time people have been over awed by this large number in the problem when we discuss the Fermi paradox which is the number of places that life could have started but we don't actually know whether that's a big number in this in this case if it turns out that it's it's relatively flukish to go from prokaryotic grade of life to eukaryotic grade of life if it's relatively difficult for that to take place on a planet that is then stable climatically over billions of years and so on and so on personally I think that that could resolve the paradox and it seems it seems a reasonable solution because the the chemistry of life is complex of course but it clearly is not impossible intelligence is a completely - everything from that so just the chemistry part of it even though it's complex we're probably going to know within the next 20 30 40 years how that works and we'll be able to say this is either a fluke or this is just a natural end of chemistry of organic chemistry in a certain situation and life at least microbial life will arise regularly and again we could we have two ways of finding that out we have the scientists that are looking at the origins of life and we also have Europa Enceladus and all these ice children's to look at that may well have something living in them but that's that's exciting to me because that that's a question that can be answered within my lifetime where is an alien civilization maybe not yeah it is just such what one of the frustrations isn't it is getting old that this all of these interesting scientific questions you want to live long enough to see the answer to and some of them you think yeah yeah that's that they're gonna nail that and I'm sure biochemists will in my lifetime there are others where and I'm gonna be on my deathbed just cursing these things I'm not going to know I mean going back to it an earlier question about new resolutions of the paradox and I mentioned phosphorus earlier I I should say that chemically life on Earth again it's life as we know it but all life forms that we know about depend on carbon hydrogen oxygen nitrogen phosphorus and sulfur and that phosphorus is actually relatively rare and we're not the hundred percent sure about how earth got its phosphorus ultimately it would have been cooked up in a supernova and this is very very tentative suggestion at the present and the astronomers who made it want follow-up time to recognize whether this is actually the case on our but it's possible that certain supernovae are required and to explode in certain ways to deliver the phosphorus into the interstellar medium that is then later transported to to a planetary system so it's possible that this is another aspect that makes chemistry or biochemistry difficult that you need a planetary system that was formed around the right sort of supernova but again these are sorts of questions that I think we will get a better handle on over the next ten twenty thirty years now what of alternative biochemistry is because some people have said well what about silicon you know or variations on I think boron is one of them too that maybe you know and there's there's there's counts against all of them much much more so than carbon but do you think it's possible that I mean silicon-based life that isn't a machine could possibly be out there and surmount that problem of the phosphorus rarity issue I don't think silicon would swap with with phosphorus is occasionally you get claims that you can swap one thing with another and arsenic-based life was going to say all the rage while ago there was a suggestion made a couple of years ago that arsenic could be could form the basis of a life form it turns out that actually what it was was an arsenic tolerant organism it still required those six elements and there's no to the best of my knowledge no life form on earth that doesn't require those base six organisms now it's possible I guess that's again in the next 10 20 30 years biochemists will start tinkering with the basic building blocks of life and they'll get a better handle on whether these things are required or not my guess is actually probably yes it's it's anthropocentric I know but there are certain properties of water for example that I can't imagine life doing without carbon and it's a very one of my teachers once called it very element it'll go with anyone it's so it's a very it's it's almost unique quite a bit so it's almost unique in its properties so it's difficult to move away from this anthropocentric thinking but if I had to guess I would probably put money that if we ever find life out on other planets it'll be based on the same sort of chemistry it might look completely different it might be very very different but basic building blocks I suspect will be the same that it'll be a reliance on water it'll be a reliance on carbon and so on you mentioned interestingly silicon-based life-form that's artificial that I think is an interesting question you know when we go out there will we see silicon-based life that is artificial yes I made that distinction for a reason because we will we will get into this later but there there may be in certain scenarios where you don't want to answer the Fermi paradox it especially has to do with machine civilizations however now in regards to the chemistry of life I had an interesting thought so if supernovas only if a certain type very special supernova will produce all that phosphorus we know of at least one sibling of the Sun that seems to chemically have formed in the same solar nebula as our Sun did would that be an interesting indicator to look for exoplanets with life on them close by that are also siblings of the Sun because they would have the phosphorus is that could a focus be put on that absolutely I think that's a tremendous idea that we should be looking in the local neighborhood for that sort of experiment and again going back to this idea of credible new observatories we can also get a handle on that sort of question about whether phosphorus whether earth might be special in in having phosphorus and being formed around a particular type of supernova we have the James Webb Space Telescope coming that the launch date keeps being put back we've waited so long it will it will get up there I'm sure and it is going to be in a tremendous observatory and it can answer those sorts of questions so again it's about waiting but we are going to get industrial amounts of data from multiple different observatories in the next few years and a lot of these questions I think will be answered the question in my mind is is it gonna sharpen that the Fermi paradox and I suspect it will all of this data leads to interesting thinking I was just again thinking is that if you if you have a a civilization that finds another civilization around a star that formed as a twin of sorts in the same solar nebula created by the same supernova are they actually really aliens well what an interesting thought we are here on earth we are all interaural life is interrelated in we will share if we ever find life we will share only prebiotic chemistry presumably with that civilization unless we were seeded deliberately I mean that's another possibility isn't it that directed panspermia that there was a unique civilization that deliberately exceeded planets with life in which case yes we would be connected but assuming we just share prebiotic chemistry I think there are ethical questions involved are we would we somehow be closer to those life forms than life forms that formed around some other supernovae elsewhere in the galaxy an interesting question I've never really thought about it one could also ask to that what effect does this type of star that you live around have on the evolution of your species so if you have another civilization that evolved around a sun-like star they might bear similarities to us as opposed to a civilization around how much darker star say a red dwarf and I know there are problems with red dwarfs and habitable zones but say it's possible life there may look radically different akin in some way maybe but but it would appear radically different you would have you know I don't know much bigger plant like things or something like that that can collect much much more light or light at different wavelengths that starts producing or maybe maybe it evolved to use ultraviolet which brings us to another question if a civilization decides you know there are stars that are wholly unsuitable for life to appear around you know we'll use Betelgeuse as an example because it's currently acting up you would not expect to find any planets or anything at Betelgeuse so therefore you're not gonna point a radio telescope towards it at least for SETI purposes but could such a thing be more useful for an alien civilization or a black hole for that matter could they be getting their energy from a black hole where we normally just wouldn't look and that we're just missing we're just missing them and or could it be the life you know I remember there was a concept of Dyson sunflowers where life can presumably exist in space itself so this again gets into biases do you think that we should probably alter our strategy in SETI to look at those types of scenarios a little bit more than is being done because as far as I know it's not being done yes so you mentioned that earlier and I am I went off on a tangent as I tend to do yes you're right this is another bias I think it's likely that if we see life out there it will have formed on planets that are relatively similar to the earth and the reason I mentioned that is going to do with water and to do with things that I think a probably a real requirement of life once you get to a certain level of technological advancement and that's beyond what we currently are at but you can imagine that in a few hundred years or a few thousand years if we survive which is another possible solution to the paradox isn't it maybe civilizations don't but if we survive then yes I think the bias against having to look at earth-like planets going around sun-like stars that becomes then in play because would civilization necessarily want to stay there if it can move a driver might well be access to energy ready and access to lots of energy and there are ways of doing that for instance creating a Dyson swarm so they may stay in Scituate use something like a Dyson swarm but I think you're quite right maybe they decide to go to these hot brights short-lived stars make use of the copious amounts of energy that are there and then move on so given that we don't know anything about what a civilization might do I think again it's important to try and broaden what we search for as much as possible just on the off chance if nothing else that that's what the civilization decides to do let's look there yeah now what just to shift gears what initially drew you to compile this list of solutions to the Fermi paradox what what in your mind said I'm interested in this I'm gonna go do it was there something that precipitated it um yes so I I was a science fiction geek as a kid as a moth Heinlein Clarke you know the the big three in particular Asimov I remember going to public library and picking a book off the shelf and I was so young that I mispronounce the name as manof at the time I think it was probably one of our most science books and and as you know he wrote about everything he wrote science books for kids very very good science books adults he wrote about history he wrote about literature the Bible pretty much everything and science fiction as well and he was a big influence on I think the way I think I would have celebrated his hundredth birthday this month it's five hundred and six books on the canonical list of my books I had five hundred three of them incidentally if any of your listeners have got history of chemistry a chart history of mathematics a chart history of biology a chart those are the three I'm missing give me a call it's just Asimov was so unbelievably prolific in writing that I don't have them all either so I'll compile all the ones that I don't have yes he was a zombie and in many ways I got an education from him but one of the the activities he was involved in was his magazine Asimov's science fiction magazine he lent his name to it he wrote editorials for it I get it still and I first came across the Fermi paradox in 1984 issued that magazine and Stephen Gillette wrote an essay called the Fermi paradox and the next issue there was a rebuttal by Robert Freitas and it was quite a heated exchange subsequently in the letters column and I thought what a fascinating question in part because you can view it from these two these two angles on the one hand of course you know science fiction is telling me that we live in a galaxy that's full of life it's teeming with life if some of my favorite television programs Star Trek and doctor who were telling me that my favorite films Forbidden Planet it was telling me that I was living in a science fictional world you know people were walking on the moon you know of course we were gonna go out into the galaxy and we'd meet other civilizations but on the other hand there's this observation or rather lack of observation it certainly seems as if the galaxy is cold and dead and there's that you can almost flip-flop between opposing views I think with the Fermi paradox on the one hand you're part of me wants to believe that we inhabit this exciting galaxy full of life and imagine what we could learn from them but on the other hand there are various indications I think that maybe it's just as I say I just found this a fascinating question and I learned almost by accident that people from different fields were bringing different points of view to bear on it so physicists of course we always pile in with our opinion on everything but astronomers of course but biologists historians sociologists everyone was chipping in to this question and I just got into the habit of of collecting them now one thing you mentioned in the book and this is something I doing what I do I get asked about constantly is the UFO phenomena what is your take on that I know you have a unique take well I I've seen the UFO again it was one of the the most formative experiences almost I guess you'd say that I was out in the streets I was playing football soccer as you say in America that was back when you were able to do that in an in a street and I was with the friends we looked up and we saw a beautiful silver disc hovering over the houses we stopped and we watched it and then it just shot away incredibly quickly and we ran into the the house to tell the grown-ups looking back at the time it was a huge huge thing looking back as a grownup myself I would say well there must have been some explanation that my my brain was imprinting a meaning on the visual that I was getting and short-circuiting various logical processes and just seeing that light in the sky and saying it's an alien craft I was living in that science fictional world it was always on television the invaders for instance probably watched that the night before so I think my youthful brain was imprinting a meaning on photons that were entering my eye back when I when I experienced it it was incredibly real now I'm sure that when people look up in the sky and see lights they're seeing things right oh I agree I agree we have to make a distinction here yo foas unidentified flying object that places no identification upon it and of course there are many many things that can happen that might produce a phenomenon that one misinterprets I have seen on cruise ships out of the ocean fata morgana z-- of lights from cities and if one didn't know what that was it might easily be taking taken as a UFO as a matter of fact there's one famous example of a cruise ship bridge a fat immigrant Morgana of a crucial bridge that some said was an alien spacecraft which it was not but one might see something in the atmosphere especially if you're young and not really understand what it actually is and misinterpret it is that what you feel that's exactly what I did look looking back I can still clearly visualize what I saw I can't explain what I saw someone recently said perhaps it was an imprint of the football the soccer ball that I've been playing with you sometimes get that after impression that's something maybe I don't know it's just one of these things that you have to say you don't know it was unidentified what in recent years has interested me is the way that there are cameras now around the world we have cameras in cars - times we have cameras on bicycle helmets we have security cameras on buildings and in houses and they're beginning to catch really what were rare astronomical phenomena sugges meteorites and shooting stars and song he was used to be very difficult to capture those because they happen so quickly now you see them relatively frequently what none of those cameras have detected so far is a flying saucer and I find that very telling I've also noticed too that there is a geographical aspect to it the people that see UFOs tend to be in while they overwhelmingly tend to be Americans and Canadians but also Europeans in the first world countries essentially but you if you talk to people that aren't familiar with the pop cultural phenomena that surrounds that they never really see them and that's that's another telling thing I think yes and another telling thing is that the form of the observations again tends to track human technology and what appears in human films and entertainments so I think it's very telling of course you have these people that say they were abducted and there's always a lot of probing going on and clearly if that were a true event then yes if you take them at their word that resolves the Fermi paradox isn't it they're here and they're probing people but there's absolutely no supporting evidence for any of that so I think we have to rule that out as a solution I I would expect so unless in one specific case the von Neumann probes if they were one happened to dip into the atmosphere to do some sampling and someone saw it well yeah yeah yeah we always have to I think approach these things with it with an open mind but as Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence so certainly things are possible but I wouldn't accept that as evidence unless there were some supporting evidences to go along with it certainly possible but I find it unconvincing I agree I agree and there's also wishful thinking I think there I think there there are people that wish that were aliens here but I say be careful what you wish for because there are some very frightening solutions to the Fermi paradox all right doctor thank you for joining us today it's been a fantastic discussion and when you release the next edition of the book I hope you'll come back and visit us absolutely it's been a pleasure Randy's garage won't let you in on a little deal we're having a sale this week on used auto parts from an 85 LeBaron to deal you gave a few now how can I help you an injured bill you say what are you doing building a rocket that makes perfect fit well here's what I can do for you undo the whole package 450 grain if you could just text me that delivery address wait a second I know this the address I don't know who you live with and it's gonna cost you an extra $600 turkey charge for association with that turkey yeah that's easy for you to think you're using his credit card I don't have this that T around about next Thursday [Music] you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 806,445

Rating: 4.7667365 out of 5

Keywords: fermi paradox, enrico fermi (academic), physics (field of study), aliens, ufo, space, alien, space ship, planet, science, science fiction, solution, great filter, documentary, universe, kardashev scale, interstellar, galaxy, astrobiology, exobiology, extraterrestrial, life in the universe, exoplanet, dyson sphere, proxima b, kic 8462852, asmr, stephen webb, ted talks, john michael godier event horizon, event horizon, where is everybody?, teeming with aliens, Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

Id: f8eklCtMbbc

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Horribunny]

Horribly self-promoting piece of tripe.