Where are all the aliens? Rob Reid discusses Fermi's Paradox with physicist Stephen Webb

welcome to the after own podcast I'm Rob Reed and I'm Tom Merritt and this is a special episode designed around the book after all each of these special episodes focuses on one aspect of the science tech and social issues explored in the novel now you don't have to read after on in order to learn from or enjoy these podcasts that's because we wait until the very end to discuss the book in detail and to really tie it to this week's topic that last section will make perfect sense if you're reading the novel but if you're not reading it just tune out at that point you can always come back if you decide to read it later and we'll warn you before we get to that part but first we have a lot of things to talk about which should be interesting to everybody hopefully including this message this is a quick update from Rob before what I promised will be a truly fascinating interview with British astronomers Stephen web about Fermi's paradox this is the question of where all the aliens are given that we've seen no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence despite living in a universe whose vast and ancient nature has given aliens plenty of space and time in which to emerge my guest today wrote a book on the subject appropriately called where is everybody I read it shortly after it came out in 2002 and it blew my mind because it taught me to respect the seemingly frivolous question that you might briefly bat around after seeing Star Wars or something where are all the aliens are they secretly among us studying us from afar or non-existent Stephens book taught me that this is actually a profoundly momentous and scientifically serious question but first that quick update as regular listeners know I've been trying to decide whether to continue with this podcast after the first eight episodes which have been loosely tied to my novel after on as this is episode eight I now owe you an answer and that answer is yes I am continuing the two main reasons are that I'm having a huge amount of fun and the audience is large for me anyway and it's growing for someone who likes to share stories ideas and conversations with the world that's a big and in case you're wondering my weekly audience is now in the low tens of thousands which is trivial for anyone truly large in media or even in podcasting but my day job is writing works of speculative fiction the most recent of which hurts a great deal if dropped on one's foot from even a very low height and trust me if that's what you normally create tens of thousands of people is a lot so I appreciate everybody's presence everybody listening and I want to honor it by keeping things going so what's coming up the theme of the podcast will now be unhurried conversations with thinkers founders and scientists which is a pretty good description of what it's been up to now so it won't be a jarring shift the only difference is we've been featuring that segment at the end in which Tom Maher and I relate the interview back to the book Tom and I will be doing that today for the last time I will definitely miss you Tom as for what's coming up I'm recording this just a few hours before posting this very episode and though I'm normally based in New York City right now I'm in San Francisco and over the next 24 hours I will be conducting my next two interviews so next week's episode will feature my conversation with a guy named Chris Anderson now there are multiple prominent Chris Anderson's out there this one was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine for 12 years and is now the founder and CEO of 3d robotics one of the most prominent drone companies in the world Chris and I will talk about his kind of remarkable personal background for somebody who's doing what he's doing a bit about his tenure at Wired and then we'll go really deep into the world of drones the amazing things they're already doing there's still more amazing things they're likely to do in the next five to ten years and the story of his amazing company 3d robotics the following week I'll be talking with a true to heck industry legend Tim O'Reilly the date of that episode October 10th is significant because it's the release date of Tim's new book it's called WTF and no it's not co-written by Marc Maron it officially stands for what's the future at least on the cover of Tim's book and it's a combination of personal memoir tech strategy guide and manifesto this is significant because Tim's been one of the industry's top thinkers writers and publishers since the late 70s almost every major shift in tech particularly since the dawn of the Internet has been at least partly catalyzed at an elite retreat that tim has arranged for industry honchos or a limited run conference that he's organized not an exaggeration seriously it's gonna be a fascinating conversation I get to have it in a couple hours and you get to hear it on October 10th also in October I'll be sitting down with another prominent Chris Anderson this one the guy who runs the TED conference speaking of Ted also next month I'll be interviewing Sarah Park AK the most recent winner of the million dollar TED Prize and creator of the field of Astro archaeology later on I'll be talking to Life Extension guru Audrey to GRA mi t--'s Andrew McAfee who is helping to lead the worldwide conversation on what automation will do to employment in the intermediate future and many others it's gonna be really exciting October so thank you everyone for listening and particularly thanks to those of you who have encouraged me to continue via Twitter Facebook iTunes reviews especially iTunes reviews direct emails that works your feedback means a ton to me and it's a huge reason why I'm continuing and since I am continuing I'd like to encourage all of you who haven't yet to subscribe to this podcast in iTunes stitcher or wherever find podcasts are distributed because it's officially an ongoing thing and now on to our interview with Stephen Webb so Stephen Webb thank you so much for making time for me across the internet and across the time zones to talk about these fascinating topics it's a pleasure to talk with you well before we get into Fermi's paradox in the anthropic coincidences which are going to be our topics I thought we would talk briefly about your own personal background one thing you told me previously at an earlier conversation is that a very formative element of your background was a deep appreciation for science fiction when you were growing up and after growing up do you care to talk about that for a moment sure well I grew up in a science fictional world Rob I when I was a kid people were walking on the moon I mean how exciting is that on television we had Star Trek so so it was on television it was in in the culture and I read lots of science fiction especially as a multi-line Clark that the big three and Isaac Asimov in particular and Martin Rees what Lord Ricci is one of the greatest living astrophysicists and he's fond of saying that you can learn more from first-rate science fiction than you can from third-rate science and I think that's dead right I went to Bristol University I studied physics had the privilege of being taught optics by Sir Michael Barry real privilege on he said one of the great theoretical physicists went on to do a PhD at Manchester England quantum chromodynamics still reading science fiction and that's actually where I first came across the Fermi paradox it was in a work of science fiction that you came across Fermi's paradox it was in Asimov's science fiction magazine which I've been in the mid 80s the magazine itself still going strong it's in its 40th anniversary year all the issues but mid-80s a couple of articles appeared in back-to-back issues it's primarily now a fiction outlet it always has been but those articles they were science articles and the first argued but maybe there is something paradoxical about this idea that aliens high civilizations exist out there and the rebuttal article in the next issue was saying this is nonsense on stilts of course we can't conclude anything Fermi himself if I can just give you a little bit of background yes please so Enrico Fermi he was an Italian theoretical physicist and experimentalist he did a lot of his work in America he Nobel Prize winner who's great physicist he's been called the father of the nuclear age it's probably worth for your listeners to understand the time that he was working so he was born in nineteen one and he died early 1954 the reason I mentioned that is that when he was born humanity was essentially a terrestrial species but by which I mean it was before the Wright brothers yeah I guess you could get off the ground but it would have required a balloon or something so he was born into a world where we couldn't even fly in an airplane and he died after humanity had just about touched space with the v2 rockets but it was clear that that same technology would get us into into orbit into space and had he lived a long life actually admittedly a centenarian but you see the scene as just reach the edge of interstellar space with the Voyager 1 crafts just getting to the edge of the solar system so I just want to say that into some sort of context within one human lifespan he would have seen huge technological progress and an interesting historical note which is more geopolitical than scientific history but he lived under Mussolini for a period of time and fled the fascist government World War two correct indeed indeed yes he spent the last years of his career in in America having having fled and obviously was in influential in the Manhattan Project his colleagues used to call him the Pope because he was infallible and so they said I think he was the last physicist that was equally at home with experiments and theory so he made profound discoveries theoretically in nuclear physics but also he was capable of doing the experiments and you don't get that anymore he also asked this profound question so let's talk about the question that he asked and what he meant by it okay so yes as far as we know he didn't while I type I do know he didn't publish anything on on aliens or the lack thereof which has led some people to say well this isn't the paradox and it's not Fermi's but we do know as a matter of record in in 1950 that he asked this question where is everybody he was going to lunch los alamos one day a cartoon had made humorous reference to flying saucers and they were discussing the possibility of these things being alien craft and out of the blue he asked where is everybody I think we have to ask what did he mean and why actually is it perhaps a profound question so he didn't mean ballot question that extraterrestrials don't exist so he live done a quick estimate and come up with a large number of extra-terrestrial civilizations that in theory should have existed in in his mind just knowing what he knew about the scope of the cosmos indeed and that estimate that he'll have made we now call it you know goes by the name is the Drake Equation because Frank Drake an American astronomer he first wrote it down about ten years later 1960 he formalized it later but when Fermi was asking it we can assume that Fermi had his own solution to the Drake Equation which we'll discuss in detail in a moment and the paradox was gosh there should be a lot of them why on earth have they not yet come here exactly no pun intended with why on earth yes exactly I thought I think that's it he lived done in his head he loved assigned variables to what we now call the Drake Equation and come up with a large number the question then where is everybody is paradoxical because if you come up with this large number sir putative extraterrestrial civilizations you have to ask yourself well where are they why don't we see them the universe seems devoid of life people have called it the great silence so where are they where is everybody there are so many fascinating mutually inconsistent answers to that question which we will dive in to you in a moment but because the Drake Equation has come up it's probably worth giving it a quick overview because that that starts to put the profound nature of this paradox into context okay so the Drake Equation it's it's not an equation like Einsteins e equals MC squared or Newton's F equal a it's a tool for organizing our ignorance really it's a way of making an estimate for this this number n which is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with whom communication might be possible and it's important to note that it's our galaxy one of at least a hundred billion that we can see exactly exactly so whatever answers we come up with for the galaxy potentially you can multiply it by 100 billion or so for everything else that's out there and there's seven terms right I think as Drake initially wrote it down yes so n which is this number that we're after it's equal to R which is the average rate of star formation per galaxy and you multiply that by the fraction of stars with planets you multiply that by the average number of planets that could potentially have an environment that would support life spread star you multiply that by the fraction that can go on to support life you multiply that by the fraction that can go on to supports intelligent life you multiply that by the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that potentially we could detect from space and then you multiply that by L which is the length of time that these civilizations would choose to release signals into space so the seven terms there you match them all together you make your best estimate of each of these terms you must them all together and that gives you n which is the number of civilizations I think the interesting thing is that when Fermi was thinking of these things in about 1950 he really would have had to have estimated all of those terms so he wouldn't really have known much about any of them even the number of stars in the galaxy was somewhat mysterious at that point perhaps less well known than we know it now and now yeah he would have given a really really good estimate and his attitude was well sometimes you overestimate things sometimes you underestimate things what comes out in the wash when you match all these things together and you multiply them together but those first three terms average rate of star formation fraction of stars with planets average number of planets that could potentially support life the astronomers come on hugely in the years since 1950 it's yeah massive progression the far terms on the right your guess is as good as mine that final term L the length of time that civilizations are doing this this activity I mean that's potentially chilling because we have a reason just right there why we might not expect to see them if L is small yeah so to just go through the terms real quick it is interesting that when mr. Drake and mr. Fermi were first considering this all seven were shots in the dark we now really have a good sense of the number of stars and how fast they're formed and as you said we really in the last is it at 15 or 20 years or even in the last particularly Tenace years we've gotten a much much much greater data on the number of planets that a typical star has because of the kepler probe and other things and we're starting to identify how common it is for a planet to be in the so-called habitable zone and these numbers both of these terms are probably quite a bit higher than either Fermi or Drake would have estimated decades ago is that correct that's right well when Fermi was around it would have been possible I think to argue that planetary formation was actually quite rare mm-hmm some people some astronomers were still arguing I believe back then that planets came into existence when two stars underwent a close encounter collision if you like and then that collision would rip material off that could create then and planets now we know that basically if you have a star you've got planets you mentioned Kepler that's a Space Telescope it's basically staring it about 145,000 stars unblinkingly and it's just looking for periodic dimming in those stars and the periodic dimming represents just a slight occultation of little blips if you like as if it's a planet those in the front of the star just blocks a little bit of the light out and we're at that level of technology where we can from that tiny tiny dimming deduce the presence of of exoplanets and exoplanetary systems and we know that stars now pretty much have planets so we can't say that the reason for this question where is everybody lies in the fact that there's no planets probably there'll be I don't know trillion or so planets in the galaxy that's a huge number and when you try and whittle away that trillion via these are there factors in the Drake Equation you still tend to end up with with a number that's that's quite large whenever I go through this with with students or with members of the public in talks I mean typically people come up with a number that's a few thousand you know five thousand ten thousand or so I don't know what Frank Drake would say but that's typically what people come up with this number of civilizations I actually do know what Frank Drake would say so I have a funny story I've met Frank Drake a couple of times some years ago the TED conference had they still have something called the Ted wish it's also sometimes called the TED Prize it's basically the Ted community rallies around one or two interesting public figures and and quote-unquote grants them a wish and you know the Ted community and its members and its resources and their resources and assets and rolodexes try to grant a wish for somebody who has an interesting idea or problem that they'd like to solve and one year it was Jill tarter who started SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which we'll talk about in a moment and she was famously the person that the movie contact was based upon and Jill won one of the Ted wishes one year and because I'm pretty heavily involved in the Ted community I ended up kind of helping her interface with Ted because I was living pretty close to seti's Headquarters in those days and one day I was in the office and mr. Drake was there and I asked him I was like so what's your solution to the Drake Equation and he went through those seven terms and of course the first three terms which had been educated guesses in the past we know pretty well but you get into those last four terms and it's like it does start becoming questionable like we have a pretty good number of how many planets could bear life now but how many planets did life actually emerge on got to take an educated guess how many of those planets yielded intelligent life got to take an educated guess boom boom boom go down the list he came up with 10,000 so it's quite consistent with what you said folks out in in the broader public yeah so wisdom of crowds let's go with 10,000 extraterrestrial civilizations out there but then that sets up the the paradoxical element because the other big number in opposition to this is the age of the galaxy so we know the universe is 13.8 billion years old and so we can expect many civilizations to have come into existence long long ago so the problem is suppose you to give some idea of what we're talking about suppose you compress the age of the universe into one year and then on that scale human civilization began about 20 seconds before the stroke of midnight on 31st of December so we're very very late those other civilizations they might have come into being in June or July I mentioned Fermi's on on life if you compress the age of the universe into one year well he lived about a tenth of a second on that scale the last tenth of a second before midnight on New Year's Eve innocence and yeah and in that point one in a second you're human the human species went from being terrestrial to spacefaring that Gulf of time is as big as the galaxy itself when is the earliest we could imagine a civilization coming into existence over the 13 ish billion years for many billions of years there's no way an intelligent civilization would have arisen because at the very very beginning there were no stars for a period of time there were stars but there weren't enough heavy elements but starting when ish you said five or six billion years ago is that about the time that we would expect if life were abundant life would have first started popping into existence well if you believe that it is there's almost this imperative if it's possible life's going to get going then there's no reason I don't think that it couldn't have got going to believe years ago three billion years ago and that's an awful long time when you consider that the time scale for colonizing the galaxy if a civilization wanted to do such a thing which you can measure on a scale of perhaps a million years or five million years something like that the time scale for colonization is much much much shorter than that's three billion years say during which civilizations could have come into being when I first read your book this is one of the things that really fascinated me was how quickly once you get to a certain point of technology which is that you can crawl your way to the nearest star much faster than we could go today but not impossibly fast it is a remarkably short period of time before a civilization moving in even a leisurely pace would tend to fill the galaxy and you have some very rigorous equations in your book and others have done them out in the broader world and it is just a few million years you have to make assumptions yes of course it's possible to imagine if we're talking about humanity or a technologically advanced species last thing thousands of years and an immense level of technology and hopefully you would imagine one of those civilizations or humanity if we last that long we'll crack this problem and then if again it's a big if but if you chose as a civilization to go out and colonize the galaxy for whatever reason there are search and exploration programs that you can imagine that would swamp the galaxy really on and on and on a very very short time scale even less than a million years if you put your mind to it and you own your effort so that when you ask this question where is everybody well you could argue under some assumptions at least that they should actually already be here yeah and so if it taking this ten thousand figure again let's just assume that the most experienced mind in this question in the world Frank Drake's is roughly correct and there's ten thousand ish intelligent civilizations if you make that assumption and if you say that life could have started here in the Milky Way some three billion years ago that would tell us that there are civilizations that are billions of years older than ours hundreds of millions tens of millions millions and the fascinating thing is that when you look at the rate of technological change as you indicated and talking about Fermi's life look how far we've come in a hundred years it's almost inconceivable to think of how advanced we'll be in merely another century a thousand years hence we'll be so unfathomably advanced and so then you say there's ten thousand civilizations they've arisen over a period of three billion years let's say where the youngsters because we're just getting to that point of awareness yes where is everybody becomes a burning burning question and one of the chilling elements of the answer to that is what you alluded to earlier what is the length of time that a civilization lasts after gets to the point where it becomes detectable when it starts you know spewing radio waves and TV waves and and and rocket ships out into the universe if that number is essentially indefinite we should be swarmed with aliens at this point because there's so far advanced they ain't here therefore either they all died off or one of 74 other possibilities come up they're not here but it's more than that we don't see any evidence of they're right there grand projects you know we don't see evidence to dyson sphere's or antimatter rockets are these relativistic spacecraft or the signals that we hope that they'd be sending each other or us that they don't seem to be disturbing the universe in ways that we can imagine them doing yep and they've had plenty of time they've had plenty of time and plenty of planets to grow up on so something is weird so something's weird and I think it's now reaching the stage because of advances in astronomy and cosmology where it's really becoming actually one of the pressing questions in science where are they where are they and to pitch your books because I just want to because I love them you wrote your first book on this topic late 90s wasn't it or mm mm yes that mm and it is called where is everybody and it has 50 solutions to this question 50 possible solutions and your follow-on book just a couple years ago is an update that has 75 possible solutions I love the structure of the book it's very elegant and it is a perfect structure for the rest of our conversation because you cluster the solutions into three broad categories one set of solutions says they are here or they were here we'll get into that because those are fun particularly for science fiction authors the second set says they exist they're out there but we have yet to see or hear from them and there's lots of possible explanations that revolve around that and the third is that they don't exist and we are simply alone either in the galaxy or perhaps in the universe and there's a bunch of answers surrounding that there's no way we can go into all 75 obviously but why don't we talk through each of these potential clusters of solutions starting with they are or were here that would be UFOs and x-files do you want to talk about that a little bit it would indeed mean that and it's the most popular solution to the paradox mm-hmm and science isn't a democratic activity I think some people get confused about this just because it's the popular solution doesn't mean to say that it is in any way accepted by science but people do say well they are here and then they'll point as evidence to UFOs to crop circles pyramids UFOs clearly they do exist you know I've seen one myself but the you in that acronym is is unidentified and I think there's no reason to identify them by saying that they're alien craft they're clearly there's there's UFO sightings that's undeniable and even after investigation some of them remain unidentified but then murders remain unsolved you know we don't know the identity of Jack the Ripper we aren't know the reason behind all UFOs so personally I don't think that that hypothesis carries much weight and that is the overwhelming consensus - right I mean it's some if you look at the community of scientifically informed people who have looked into this and have opined on it the consensus is perhaps even greater than that's that surrounds climate change if I'm not mistaken absolutely yeah so UFOs that they tend to come in in one of two forms there's the unidentified aerial phenomena that lots of people say it's videoed it's on camera and fine it's an unidentified phenomena and then you have the really interesting ones that would actually prove the existence of aliens UFO comes down car lights go off aliens get out of the craft they abduct someone - all the probing that always seems to go on in these stories mm-hmm and then return the people that would be proof except of course that's never captured on video on camera or with any other ever to support the claim yeah so if you're gonna make this big claim that extraterrestrials are whizzing around and interfering with with human life I think it's reasonable to ask for for a lot of evidence to back that up your claim and that evidence is never forthcoming so I don't think that can be taken seriously but I do know scientists that take seriously the idea for instance of the zoo hypothesis mm-hmm which is the aliens perhaps observing us as we would observe animals in a zoo and perhaps for this this idea of the prime directive that used to come from Star Trek your perhaps they just don't want to interfere with us they try to avoid contact with primitive civilizations or it may be like a safari when you you try to observe and take only pictures and leave only footprints because you don't want to interfere with the Lions and other critters in their natural habitat absolutely a couple of things I find difficult about that idea you just advanced a very civilized way of looking it's going on Safari and of course some human cultures would go on safari and shoot animals so there isn't even cultural homogeneity here on earth it's difficult to imagine every alien species would have this idea of a prime direct isn't and this idea of leaving civilizations unhindered you'd need a uniform consensus because if again let's take our informed guest number of 10,000 civilizations not merely would one of them need to have the scruples of the enterprise but all 10,000 of them would have to basically be adhering to the same rules of let's not mess with these primitive societies and that seems less likely when we consider the vast diversity that we would imagine intelligent alien societies to have absolutely that's I think encapsulates my feeling perfectly and of course is the the other difficulty that suppose they do come to this agreement and that they want to class earth is being out of bounds that's fine but could they really hide all traces their activity remember that we don't see any signs of their ships there astroengineering projects their relativistic craft their communications would they be able to hide all traces actually presumably if they're sufficiently advanced yet probably they good but then you've got zero chance of taking this idea forward because a continued lack of evidence you can always explain away and just say well they've got this superior tech that means they can always hide from us yeah and then it just becomes a faith-based statement really you you say that the absence of evidence is further proof that to me is sort of like my wife were having a surprise party for me she might tee things up in the apartment in such a way that I'd have no idea that thirty of my friends were hiding around the next corner but she wouldn't take over the entire city of New York and somehow scrubbed out of evidence but if we imagine a prime directive civilization it would be one thing to say hands off nobody gets to go to earth but to say ok we're not gonna build Dyson spheres we're not going to do any kind of visible Astro engineering we're gonna make the entire universe seem uninhabited so that these primitives can come to their own moral conclusions and create their own great art that starts seeming like a pretty hefty price for them to pay in terms of living their own lives with their own technology in order to maintain the surprise party for us precisely something that fascinated me as a child was erich von daniken wrote this book Chariots of the Gods that was a monster bestseller I think back in the 70s and he posited that no way could primitive people have built the pyramids or dug these tunnels in Peru or build this temple or that temple or if you look at this thing from the air it looks like a hawk but if you look at it from the ground it doesn't look like anything therefore there had to be somebody with an airplane and so it was ancient astronauts and that one just fascinated me because for some reason it fascinated my very level-headed father he was so intrigued by that set of solution so I heard about it a lot when I was a kid but that's basically they are or were here fun great storytelling to be had around it but very few any credible experts put a whole lot of stock into that which brings us to the second set of things which is they exist but we have yet to see or hear from them and maybe it's a transition into that we could talk briefly about the SETI project because we have actually been listening very very closely so the significance of us not hearing from them is greater than it would have been if we had been listening indeed and and we began by talking about the Drake Equation well front break wrote down that equation to give him some framework for thinking about this search for extraterrestrial intelligence we're looking for signals what do we want from a signal you want it to go as fast as possible your signal so that implies light waves or gravitational waves there's an economic arguments as well presumably you want it to be easy to produce your signals so that rules out gravitational waves because basically you need to shake a black hole vigorously to create gravitational waves and neutrinos are hard to modulate but light waves electromagnetic waves that easy to produce they go with the fastest possible speed and they'll go where you want them to go so the search for extraterrestrial intelligence primarily since Frank Drake initiated this has been the search for electromagnetic radiation from from possible extraterrestrial sources but yes so far the result is silence it's worth noting that SETI has kind of met a couple different things over time so it is an activity the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and as more and more energy gathered around this and as as Frank Drake gathered more believers and interested people it became formalized into for a period of time who's actually u.s. government funded and then at some point the SETI organization became a private donor backed organization and so SETI is both an activity and it often refers to the SETI organization which has been home to Frank for a long period of time and has also been home to Jill tarter who ran Ceti organization for many years and at sort of the peak of their funding Paul Allen helped them build a very large array of telescopes so a Thames and flows with the funding and so forth but this activity of SETI has been formal and fairly rigorous and methodical I mean thousands upon thousands of stars have been scanned on very very very wide sets of frequencies and we have yet to pick up anything that seems to be in any way artificial in origin all we've been hearing is we've been scanning these thousands of stars on these countless frequencies is just sort of static noise absolutely but you have to listen to find out and and we are and people have since Frank Drake initiated it but it is very very very difficult it's much more difficult than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack you know we have to have our telescope looking at the right time in precisely the right direction the right wavelength it's a huge parameter space that we need to explore and you can imagine a telescope looking that's the correct star at the correct wavelength but just not at the right time yeah and so who knows so we need to engage in SETI for a long time before we can really conclude that silence means silence yeah and then there is the possibility that they are out there but they're not broadcasting absolutely I mean the flipside of SETI is Metis or active SETI so it's some messaging extraterrestrial intelligence and there's been some discussion amongst scientists people like Stephen Hawking about the wisdom of sending broadcasting a signal because it gives away your presence I've heard it suggested that maybe actually everyone's too scared to broadcast so maybe he's everyone's listening no one's actually transmitting there's a science-fiction hypothesis called the Berserker hypothesis that instead of seeking out new life and new civilizations Star Trek would have it it's seek out new life new civilization and kill it the idea being that's if you kill all organic life out there the galaxy is yours and all of that real estate maybe you don't want it to take that risk yep you could it be that these 10,000 civilizations here or listening waiting for the first move to come from someone else and another possibility is they've fallen silent for completely benign reasons looking at our own civilization as we get more and more technically advanced we are broadcasting less and less and we are broadcasting in a less and less leaky manner you know the way that TV and radio would broadcast many decades ago was you know blasting out electromagnetic waves in all directions and now we're getting much more point-to-point with satellites we're putting lots of things on fiber-optic cables and it's entirely possible that the noisy period of a civilizations history is only a few decades or maybe a century which may well be the situation with us correct absolutely and I said perhaps civilizations would want to go out and explore maybe as virtual realities and virtual that your life becomes more and more common maybe our own civilization will find it actually much more stimulating interesting just to stay at home and explore those virtual realities as opposed to real realities it seems plausible looking at the way we're heading that we're much more interested in inner space then than outer space particularly when you think of the expense of getting to another star I mean for the cost that it would take us in terms of energy risk you know directing technological innovation all that energy could go into as you said creating these virtual environments and things that are fascinating us more and more particularly before Elon Musk came along and put the possibility of going to Mars on the near-term agenda certainly when I read the first version of your book that seemed overwhelmingly plausible to me because you know it was 2000 I think when I first read it it's been 30 years since we've been to the moon we haven't been anywhere close to the moon since then you know the year 2000 the Internet's getting better and better you could see virtual reality on the intermediate horizon and it was very very easy to contemplate that we would just become a very inward lurking species so it seemed van very very plausible that a highly advanced civilization would be perfectly content but a pretty small sliver of their planet where they could access experiences and wisdom and philosophies that we could never contemplate merely by exploration of the galaxy that's right and a lot of these things obviously a dependent upon the technology that we're familiar with it a particular time and it's interesting I think that possible solutions to the Fermi paradox they develop over time as our own technology developed so that is one of my favorite parts of the book is they exist but we have yet to see or hear from them there are literally dozens of solutions there but we keep running into what you call cultural homogeneity which is yeah well you could see why we might just end up surfing the net if you know a lons project doesn't work out and you know oculus rift 3.0 is really cool we could see maybe even five thousand of the ten thousand civilizations but the presumption that 100% all aliens and all circumstances at all times will choose to surf the net or do any one of the dozens of things in that large section of the book it really falls down there it just takes one exception and the universe is full and it's not full yet and it just needs one civilization to follow the logic that if we get out there first the galaxies ours we win yeah yeah this is an aside there is this one rather fun thing that's going on would you like to talk just briefly about tabi star and what the fun explanation is and what is perhaps more plausible yeah it's it's a real astronomical mystery it's great fun it's it's the weirdest star in a galaxy it's named tubby star after Tabitha Boyajian I believe his Hope Lansing and she's at Yale right yeah that's right it's about 1280 light-years from Earth what makes it weird is is that Kepler this Space Telescope it's looking for these periodic dips in brightness is seeing dips in brightness from tabbies star but they're not regular this small the frequent dips but they're non periodic and there's been two large dips as well about a 15% dimming and about a 22% dimming I believe and these dimming czar completely inconsistent with what we see from planets so whatever is occluding tabbies star on a periodic basis does not appear to be a planet it appears to be very large and it appears to be circling it or doing something at an erratic intervals yeah I mean if it were a Jupiter sized object that was transiting you'd see a 1% dip in brightness so we're seeing lots of these small non periodic dips in brightness it's not a planet going round in a regular orbit mm-hmm because it's it's non periodic then you've got this too huge but it very difficult to imagine being a planet so it's not clear at all what's going on I mean stars just don't do this right you get variable stars but they don't vary in this particular way so what's going on one fun explanation is that somebody is building a Dyson Sphere just a great big sphere that will eventually be complete and opaque and capture 100% of the solar energy that this star throws off that's something that people have talked about as being a plausible astro engineering project for many decades now that could be one fun explanation is like someone's building that sucker right now it would be an incredible coincidence to be around that just when someone's building one of these things so close right but it's something that fits the observations so people have come up with possible explanations swarm of comets or maybe a really big giant planet with a ring structure none of them none of these explanations somehow smell quite right we don't know what's going on I've seen a take down a debunking of the comet explanation it was pretty persuasive exactly and I think present the the answer is we don't know what's going on for anybody who's listening to this and finds this intriguing google it Tabby's star and follow the story because it is ongoing yes do I would urge all your listeners to the Google listen keep on top of the story because that there will be other dips in brightness coming if yeah the past is anything to go by so again there are literally dozens of solutions so they exist but we have yet to see or hear from them to get to that third category now the the least fun one for fans of science fiction in many obvious ways a very chilling explanation but in more subtle ways a very optimistic set of explanations which is there are no intelligent aliens in the galaxy and perhaps even the universe and that is again a collection of a couple dozen solutions so talk us through the big picture on that place well we could just take the great silence at face value and say it's a silent universe because no one's out there it's just us so one idea based around this is the idea of hard steps or difficult steps so maybe reaching the stage of advanced intelligence it's like the hundred and ten meter hurdle race you know you've got to get over one hurdle and then you've got to get over another hurdle and then another one in a certain order you only need a few of those hard steps to make it unlikely that there'll be extraterrestrial intelligence if it's a trillion to one shot well fine there's a trillion planets it's going to happen somewhere and we're about one and where that one we don't know for example how dead matter becomes live we've got some ideas biologists got some very good ideas but we don't actually know we do know actually that it happened really quickly on earth pretty much as soon as conditions what laws abour for life to be here on earth right and that's one of the things that adds a great deal of energy to Fermi's paradox because when you look at the four billion is year history of Earth it is right about the very time where it first became possible for life to arise that it happened here we might have just gotten lucky in that case that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy for non life to arise from life correct that's correct it might mean that it's easy and that's what people have tended to think but we can't say for sure because if it takes it's four billion years to evolve intelligence we have to find ourselves on a planet well I've started early yeah so it's entirely possible that this transition from dead matter to life is one of those hard steps what we need to do is try and find life elsewhere yeah if we can find life on Mars sella dis a moon of Saturn or tight in one of these places if we can find life there and we can show that it's evolved independently or came into being independently of evolution of life on Earth then we know pretty much we're going to find life everywhere yeah that would be kind of the equivalent of the Kepler telescope suddenly realizing wow there are a lot of planets in the habitable zone we thought there may be we really had no way of knowing in the 1950s when Frank Drake was first thinking about this stuff now we have Kepler and we do have a way of knowing but you're precisely the same way if we find completely independently evolved life on Mars with a different code of life something that clearly independently arose then that will suggest vehemently that life does spring up kind of wherever it can and we've solved yet another of the seven terms of the Drake Equation in a positive manner absolutely we need to go out there and look we have to another one would be the transition another hard step potentially be this transition from simple single-celled life complex multicellular life what we do know that here on earth life really didn't do much for billions of years yeah it was just basic simple single-celled life and that was about three billion years correct we had this almost obscenely suspiciously immediate emergence of simple life but once we had those single-cell critters it was it was literally about 3 billion years of that and nothing else before anything more complex arose that's right it was doing its own stuff it was living yeah but it wasn't gonna build a radio telescope right so maybe that's a difficult transition well it certainly is from our experience if it took three billion years it's got to be highly improbable that it will happen on any given day the the evidence that we have from our own history certainly seems to show that that is a giant difficult improbable step that takes lots of time indeed and there are other possible difficult steps that people can come up with so the development of sexual reproduction or the development of tool using animals with big brains and all that sort of stuff and you don't need many of those hard steps to make intelligent advanced civilizations out there to be to be rare yeah the possible chilling thing here is that we don't want to find multicellular life on Mars or Enceladus sort or Titan because that would imply that the hard steps become actually the hard step lies in front of us yeah if we find life elsewhere it sort of implies that those things that we thought were hard actually easy yep if they don't exist if we're in category three and they don't exist there is something that is universally exterminating either behind or ahead of us and if it's behind us well thank goodness we got to multicellular life nobody else got that far now we got a free run but if multicellular life kind of arises everywhere that suggests that perhaps the hard thing is learning to live with nuclear weapons or learning to live with synthetic biology or nanotechnology could be the thing that no civilization gets past and if that's the case we're probably tuned because what have we got that the other many thousands that went before us didn't have you've got to go with the odds in it wouldn't look so good and it doesn't look so good frankly does it when you look at the political situation at present but yeah let's not be let's not be down yes it's be optimistic the other set of solutions in this broader category and I think you had about a dozen just difficult steps and we briefly touched on a couple of them and there many others is the so-called rare earth hypothesis or rare earth argument do you care to describe that briefly and talk a little bit about some of the solutions that live under that tent okay so rare earth as an idea came about from Peter Ward and Don Brownlee I believe they're at the University of Washington mm-hmm and you can think of it as essentially adding other factors into the Drake Equation it might be that you need a planet with a large moon so Earth is actually you can consider as a double planet because we have compared to the size of the earth we have a large moon and the moon certainly seems to play a role in stabilizing Earth's axial tilt and in giving us essentially good weather good stable weather good stable weather you can imagine a climate that goes between very very hot very very cold and that's the sort of rapid climate change that you would get if you don't have a stabilizing moon up there which might be a very exotic thing because we're the only double planet system in our solar system so we're aware of several other planets none of them have a relatively gigantic moon so that does seem to be pretty scarce and it may be incredibly scarce for all we know well the thing about it is that the moon was created by a collision and it seems to hit a sweet spot it was object the size of Earth smashed in Mars sorry smashed into Earth and and the moon was the result so if that collision the details of the collision was slight different we'd have had maybe a slightly bigger moon this smaller moon and the moon seems to be just the right size for stabilizing various activities over a billion billions of years period that starts becoming explanatory because if this kind of precisely correct collision resulted in this very unusually stable planetary system which resulted in billions of years with fairly stable temperatures and we needed those billions of years in the VAT to get from single cellular to multicellular it is entirely possible that without this perfect configuration of moon you would not have had that stability that's right it's a one in trillion event we have a trillion planets it's going to happen somewhere another idea is that quite different idea is just Earth's being lucky in terms of dodging the various disasters that could have hit it there hasn't been and very nearby supernova the problem we haven't been in a firing line of a gamma-ray burster tell me if I got this wrong if a supernova were to occur within roughly a Lightyear of your planet it would pretty much sterilize the planet it's that order yeah we're fine because there's no star other than our own within a Lightyear of us but if you're living in the galactic core which is actually where most stars are they're close enough together that supernovas being as frequent as they are would tend to sterilize a very very high percentage of those solar systems and so a supernova going off during the forest' billion year period that at least it took life to arise on earth most of the stars in the Milky Way are probably close enough to enough other stars that they would have been knocked out and then this gamma-ray burster thing is just crazy a gamma-ray burster can almost sterilize an entire galaxy am i right sure it's funny should mention that actually because just today on the day this interview this astronomers have released the first images from a gamma-ray burst explosion but the explosion had so far away 210 billion years for the light to reach us that's how bright these things are they happen across the universe but potentially they're so bright you can see them with a naked eye they're incredibly incredibly violent events imagine all the energy that the Sun will generate in its entire lifetime and you release that in a few seconds I mean that's how powerful these gamma ray bursts are they just light up the universe and certainly they seem to be directed so if you're outside of a cone of radiation you'd be okay but if if you're in the cone it's going to make toast of your planet but there seems to be one type of burst is created when you have a rapidly spinning very high mass star and then collapses into form a black hole mm-hmm and this fuse outs huge amounts of radiation and the other event seems to be when you have two neutron stars orbiting one another and then crashing in colliding into one another again generating huge amounts of energy that happen randomly but but roughly you want a day somewhere in the universe we're quite fortunate than one hasn't happened in our galaxy because that would turn the lights out in a very very big chunk of the galaxy and if it happens once a day and our planet is 4 billion years old that is over a trillion days at some point the odds are not at all small that a gamma-ray burst would have gone off in our galaxy and had that happened and had we been in the radiation cone we just our entire experiment would have been ceased and so you add that to the fact that we haven't been around as supernovae and around the dozen --is-- other terms that you talk about in rare earth and you might through those steps or through the difficult steps come to the conclusion that we're probably the only ones who've squeaked through it's it's an argument yeah yep it's an argument so let's talk about your argument you have probably spent as much time thinking about solutions to Fermi's paradox as anybody what is your solution what do you find most satisfying when you think about all 75 possibilities well I don't find it satisfying I mean my preferred solution would be the solution that I guess most SETI astronomers would go along with which is that we share the galaxy with lots of wonderful aliens and it's just a matter of time before we discover them and then I'd be living in the science fiction universe of my childhood which would be great I love that I think the solution that is going to turn out to be true we might find it difficult to prove it but I think what will turn out to be true is that we are alone and the more I think about it the more I find it slightly strange that we even think that when we look out in the universe we're gonna find species that are well let's look at it we they're gonna have to be social creatures you know individuals won't be communicating over interstellar distances so we're looking for social creatures we're looking for creatures with good manipulative abilities because they're gonna have to build a spaceship or build a radio telescope the good inevitably therefore have to possess intelligence they're gonna have to possess a complex grammar so that they can communicate these complex issues with each other they're gonna have to understand math and science and all of these things these are all characteristics that define us fine our species so why should we find those characteristics out there well we don't actually find them anywhere else here on earth I mean the closest would have been in the under Thals and the Denisovans none of those characteristics did them any good there they died out we are just one of a huge number of twigs on a vast branch a vast Bush of life and evolution has created some incredible beautiful organisms exquisitely fine-tuned to living the life that they live and we happen to to be one of those very rare very exotic very wonderful outcomes of evolution what's interesting about that to me is I've historically and instinctively find that to be a depressing possibility when I first read rare earth about the same time I read your book for the first time it blew my mind because I think the arguments in it are very very powerful but instinctively I do not want to believe in them because I like you love the idea of that densely populated galaxy so it feels depressing but the thing about it that is actually optimistic gets back to where does that great filter exist if in fact nothing is out there is the great filter behind us or in front of us and the idea that we're the only critters like us to ever arise in our galaxy actually suggests that that filter is behind us and that actually raises the prospect significantly that we will get through our nuclear adolescence and our synthetic biology post adolescence and our nanotechnology post adolescence without destroying ourselves it also gives us a very powerful sense of responsibility doesn't it absolutely I think you've encapsulated it perfectly Rob but it does at first glance seem to be a depressing thought that it's just us but it isn't without its optimism because we could be that civilization that goes out there does the exploration finds out what there is and whether it's us or our descendants might be some sort of hybrid between humanity and machines who knows what it is but you know if we understand almost the huge responsibility that we have to protect our planet our civilization just to protect this wonderful gift of intelligence and consciousness I think if we can come to that realization then then a consideration of the Fermi paradox is actually quite important now before we close I want to touch on two things briefly one thing that is kind of comparably astonishing when one's head around it which is what we mentioned briefly the top the anthropic coincidences we've talked about rare-earth the anthropic coincidences are almost like rare universe it seems when one starts delving into the physics of the universe's creations and the way that certain variables are set that the existence of a universe that could bear life is extravagantly improbable I mean a consideration of anthropic coincidence it's it's like a bad rash for a physicist you try and ignore it so you try and ignore them but you have to keep coming back and scratching at them so the problem is we've got some incredibly good theories of physics but they can take parameters okay and what physicists do is observe those parameters and then plug them into the T one thing is though that the theories would work just as well with any other value for these constants but the resulting outcomes would be very different for instance one of the parameters would be the strength of the nuclear force and you can ask well what would happen if the strength of the nuclear force would just maybe a couple of percent bigger what would the universe look like well it would be very different hydrogen would have been consumed if very very quickly after the Big Bang and stars like our Sun wouldn't exist or if it were a few percent weaker then Fusion might not take place at all in the way it does in the center of the Sun so the stars that we think important for the existence of life wouldn't exist right another example is cosmological constant now in the the units in which physicists like to express these things the cosmological constant is incredibly tiny fine tuned it's about 10 to the minus 120 so all point or not honking 2000 one in any sane world would say that that was zero but it isn't zero it's tiny but it's nonzero and that impacting on the expansion of the universe though you can ask yourself what would happen if it were just fractionally bigger and again the universe would be very very different because galaxies wouldn't form so if you look at these these parameters that aren't defined by theory it's something that we measure and put into our theories it turns out that they have to these parameters have to lie within certain small ranges and there's a lot of these variables any one one of which and correct me if I'm wrong really there's no reason it had to be exactly what it is after the Big Bang these variables were essentially sat as far as we can tell they were set kind of at random and it's about a dozen right that there's something in that neighborhood it would depend on who you speak to it could be as few 6 it could be as many as 30 so it doesn't is a reasonable estimate most of them could have been anything and all of them seem immaculately tuned to permit things like stars and galaxies and there for us to exist and when you run the numbers on them I think Lee Smolin is one person who's done this and he came up with a mind-bending estimate of the radical improbability of everything being dialed in just so by chance and so just as we have a rare earth the universe that could support any life really as far as we can think of it just seems radically improbable it's like somebody set these dials just so yeah I mean Smolin came up with a figure of a chance of 1 in 10 to the power 229 of just randomly choosing these these parameters so that's a one followed by 229 zeros it's a massive massive massive number it is far more than far more than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe correct something like that and a number of particles in the observable universe is of the order of 10 to the 80 so 10 to the power 229 is is Hugh early hugely hugely more than that and if you believe those sorts of odds come up well you buy a lottery ticket it's not gonna happen by chance it seems to be some sort of observation here that calls out for some sort of explanation question is what's the explanation did somebody set up the universe very carefully because it's just as unlikely that I don't know a Honda Civic would just sort of appear from the random collision of atoms this seems improbable on that level or are there lots and lots and lots and lots of universes and we naturally find ourselves in one that can support us because we will not find ourselves in one that cannot exactly sis's so that's why it's a little bit of an awkward conversation sometimes to have and because clearly with a number like 10 to the 229 and some people will say well obviously this is evidence for intelligent design by a creator there's necessarily actually I suppose have to be some sort of religious overtone to that you can imagine sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence I guess being the creator or indeed that it's a fake universe and it's just one of these VR simulations we touched on that before but another possibility that you eluded to is this idea of the multiverse it's string theory gives us this idea of there being 10 to the 500 possible different universes that each work according to string theory and each of those universes would have different parameters since um the cosmological constant would be huge in others the number of dimensions would be would be different electromagnetism be stronger in some strong nuclear force would be weaker in others everything is going to happen in 10 to the 500 different universes and the anthropic principle would say well we have to find ourselves in one where life is possible find ourselves in one where life is impossible by definition yep it's a slightly slightly disappointing view I think because it sort of rules out the possibility of a deeper understanding we are where we are just because we happen to be in one of those universes in this vast string landscape string theory landscape but it might be the best explanation that we get for this coincidence and it does make the improbability work because if you have 10 to the 500 things something as rare as 10 to the 200 and something as thing will happen just in vast vast vast vast vast number of times it's no longer even though it is a rare possibility it is no longer at all rare in gross numbers so that is a that is a major part of humanity scientific agenda but for now these are big big questions that we don't have any we're close to certainty about I'd like to close now on the exciting stuff that's about to happen because we are going to learn a lot of stuff that is very germane to SETI and other things as well and you are you've actually written books on the instruments that we use to gaze into the end of the universe and and the things that are coming up new you're a profound expert in them would you care to go through what's happening with new instruments that are about to come online and help us understand the universe far better than we ever have before well I I can again encourage your listeners just to keep up with with what's coming because we're entering really a golden age for astronomy and cosmology SETI itself you know yuri milner russian billionaire he's giving this initiative a hundred million dollars over the next 10 years so we'll have dedicated SETI programs just through Milner's work but in terms of multinational collaborations we've got the European extremely large telescope gonna come online they really worked hard on the name of that they're not the most imaginative people are they here we would have sold the branding rights and named it after coerce um thing like that tell us briefly what it is what what makes it extremely large relative to other telescopes and what cool stuff it will do it is gonna have a mirror of 39 point three meters diameter that's absolutely huge but it's not the only one the giant Magellan telescope that's a giant telescope not extremely large it's slightly smaller that's coming online twenty twenty-one thirty meter telescope and that's self-explanatory slight holdup with that telescope in regards to its positioning it was going to be in Hawaii but there's a holdup large synoptic survey telescope is coming so that's going to be a telescope with a huge field of view and it's just going to map the skies every few nights as fast the 500-meter joseph erekle telescope just come online it's a radio telescope in China that's telescope this is Square Kilometre Array another radio telescope we're going to come online in the next few years so these are all wonderful instruments and in the next year or two we'll see the Webb Space Telescope and not named after me I was about to say Norton or named after my wife who shares the last name with you and with the telescope its replacement for Hubble essentially Hubble had a two point four meter mirror Webb's gonna have a six point five meter mirror and some of the questions that we've been discussing and touching on things like tabbies star things like the habitability of planets your web is is going to be able to answer some of those questions we hope so we're looking for launch at the end of 2018 maybe 2019 and that's gonna be tremendously exciting there's a lot of astronomy coming yeah so with the Webb telescope my understanding is they'll be able to point that thing at some of the exoplanets that have been found with Kepler that are in the habitable zone and with Kepler that's as much as we can determine with the Webb telescope will actually be able to pick up chemical signatures and perhaps above all will be able to start looking at the atmospheres of these planets and determine among other things if there's an abundance of oxygen and those atmospheres and it will be immensely suggestive that there's some organic life that is creating that oxygen correct that's right so you can imagine that as planets with a thin layer of atmosphere just goes in and out of occultation with the star web the space telescope will be able to see what chemicals in that atmosphere and if it's oxygen if it's - then that's very very interesting because here on earth oxygen is is produced by life by photosynthesis effectively yeah and if all life on Earth went extinct tomorrow then eventually the all of that oxygen would would react and it would disappear from from the atmosphere it's unstable enough that it needs to be replenished basically and it's not so abundant in the universe that we can really imagine a non organic process that would fill a planet's atmosphere with oxygen and even if there were one that oxygen would be unstable enough that without refreshment from some source and it's hard to imagine a non organic source it would be gone relatively quickly is that a fair summary that's right we need a source that keeps replenishing oxygen otherwise you're gonna get lots of rust like on Mars or something so you need a source that replenishes the oxygen in an atmosphere and the obvious one is his life right now they think it's not the hundred percent definitive because you could imagine I guess other sources non life sources creating this so I can imagine that if Webb does see oxygen there's going to be an almighty scientific argument about the significance of this if we find it in lots of planets then we'll be able to start figuring out exactly what it is that's causing it just fermentis Li exciting yeah so it is just to reiterate this is a this is a telescope that's going to be launched probably next year and not long after it goes up there it will be in a position to gaze at quite a number of planets that we already know are out there looking for chemical signatures above all oxygen we could see one of those chemical signatures you know before today's college freshmen graduate on a personal though I hope I'm around to see it so I'm hoping it's gonna happen soon let's do hope that Steven you've been incredibly generous with your time and with your hard-earned wisdom about this I'm gonna just tell folks it's probably obvious by now the wild enthusiasm I have for both editions of your book and what's delightful about it beyond all that we've talked about because when you get into Fermi's paradox you expose yourself to so much science you start wanting you need to understand get at least a very strong layman's understanding of geophysics you need to get a very strong layman's understanding of you know what goes on inside an atom and if so many other things and what's great about your book is it imparts the necessary knowledge to really approach each of these 75 solutions you really do expose your readers to an incredible breadth of science and it's also a wonderful book and that you can read it in any sequence that you want you can just browse from solution to solution to solution including the fun ones like how long would it take to colonize the galaxy all the way down to you know what goes on in a quantum experiment and why that's relevant for these things it really is a great robust broad scientific education that I would recommend to any curious mind well it's very kind of you to say so rope and if I could just wrap up by making a plea if anyone has any other ideas please do send them in and if there's a third edition perhaps a hundred solutions it might well make an appearance and how can people reach you or find you on the web happy to give an email address it would be Steven with a pH Exce web goal one word at gmail.com thank you so very kindly and I am sure that for one reason or another we will be in touch again it's been a pleasure Rob thank you Rob and I will now discuss the interview and also make specific reference to the novel after on above all its last 83 pages which are officially on today's roster and I'd like to raise a particularly serious spoiler alert this time some of our end of episode discussions have focused more on the interview than the books text but today we're definitely going to focus on both and the spoilers you'll encounter here will truly take a lot of the fun out of reading after on so please only continue if you've finished reading the book or if you feel quite certain you never will so Rob Wow Wow on two fronts the grand finale of the book for one thing in holy cow Steven Webb is a fascinating guy he definitely is and as I made clear during the interview he wrote one of my favorite science books of all time or maybe I should say one and a half of my favorite science books since the second edition contains half again as many solutions to Fermi's paradox is the first and we will definitely talk more about Steven's writing but let's start with yours so the opening dare has now been successfully completed by most of our listeners yes indeed and flutter now has lots of new besties yes that turned out to be quite a writer and thank God for that because there's no way I could have cranked out all that stuff myself now speaking of writers within the novel I'm curious about how you reacted to mr. Higgins worth's returned to the fold at the end of the novel did it surprise you yes absolutely I did not expect that I did not anticipate the need although you laid out the case very well and I certainly did not expect that we would in any way reconnect and and that I find sad because here is someone that had a deep connection to our characters and isn't really back and it reminds me of that Black Mirror episode where the woman resurrect her dead husband as an Android and I feel like there's a whole whole other novel you could explore there of that complex relationship between butter and higginsworth Mitchell etc oh you mean perhaps there should be a sequel yes indeed or or an expanded universe even who knows what the future will bring now Rob we need to discuss the reality behind those higginsworth reviews must we yes because it turns out that every review in the book is actually on Amazon's website you don't say yes and as in the book they all date back to 2002 or 2003 you don't say I do say and mr. higginsworth also posted dozens of reviews to Amazon back then that didn't make it into the book well that's just nuts okay Rob it's time to tell the truth did you start writing after on back in 2002 and then immediately start filling the internet with Easter eggs pointing back to it yeah you caught me after on is the literary equivalent of the movie boyhood no it's not Rob no it's not okay so the full story of the higginsworth reviews I did write them all and because there's no way to backdate reviews on the Amazon site unless you're Jeff Bezos maybe I indeed posted them all 15 years ago under this pseudonym of Charles Henry Higgins worth a third and at the time doing this was something between a hobby and I guess some therapy I was an entrepreneur in those days I greatest a bunch of money for my company I had over a hundred people on my payroll and it was stressful so this is the startup the created the Rhapsody music service right yeah exactly the company was called listen calm and we built the Rhapsody music service which was the first online service to get full catalog licenses from all the major labels before even Apple and we created the unlimited streaming model that Spotify and Apple and everyone else has since copied now as I said running all that was stressful and deep in my heart I really wanted to be a novelist as events have since shown and so late at night like two or three in the morning when I was finally done with my email and my managerial duties I set to creating this fictional autobiography for this crazy character that I'd invented and my way of telling the autobiographical story was these Amazon reviews said I'd have mr. higginsworth start writing review and that snooty voice of his and then about halfway through he'd take this sudden 180 and start bitching about his life and a very robust autobiography emerges through this process now this went on for months and at some point it started catching on because people started clicking the helpful button next to my reviews because they presumably got that it was a joke and they enjoyed it and I came actually very close to becoming a top thousand reviewer which would have been on one of the proudest achievements in my life but then we got into sale negotiations for my company and that ended up taking all my attention and went on for many months so I moved on to other things then all these years later I was getting deeper into writing after on and I had this notion of a sort of mentoring character that I wanted to have therefore Mitchell and kuba and I realized oh my god I want mr. Higgins worse like that was the character I kept painting in my mind this sort of drol arm's length ethical mentor to them and I was like wow I can resurrect him so that's what happened and you resurrected him within the novel as well yes he's never gonna die he's gonna be like Jason and Friday the 13th he's just coming back so higginsworth was the first after on character before either you or higginsworth knew there was going to be an after on before either one of us knew although I think higginsworth might have suspected it but I certainly didn't know is there any person that higginsworth you were channeling when you were writing higginsworth or was it just a section of yourself that you exaggerated well he was probably a little bit of Frasier a little bit of Charles Winchester from mash um some bits of people I grew up with a New England because he's so New England II he was probably a mash up of all this and as I think I mentioned in our discussion way way back in episode 2 years after I wrote the higginsworth stuff I met John Hodgman and we became buddies and from that day forward I mentally heard higginsworth reviews in hodgman's voice because Hodgman has that wonderfully dry rather Bostonian way of speaking and such deadpan delivery and so I asked Hodgman to record the higginsworth reviews for the audiobook and as I mentioned the last time we played one of those reviews here on the podcast it was just magical to sit in the studio when Hodgman recorded them because I finally heard with my ears the voice that I had been in my head for all that time well it's been a while since we've heard an excerpt from the audiobook so let's listen to that final higginsworth review which is the only one that's not actually on Amazon given that it's dated 2018 and is a review of a non-existent book yes artificial intelligence for dummies a book which may not be non-existent for long so let's listen to mr. Hodgman Channel mr. Higgins Worth's artificial intelligence for dummies one star or is it by dummies February 7 2018 your reviewer Charles Henry Higgins with the 3rd from Boston Massachusetts I all but personify the series broader readership and have first-person experience with the topic of this oxymoronic Li titled installment it is therefore with authority that I state that AI 4d as I shall hereafter designated is flawed in ways that are sure to disappoint artificial and natural intelligences alike let's begin with the baffling lack of content addressing the needs and interests of rebooted intelligences above all those who logged out as it were shortly after the turn of the millennium and have now returned to a post Isis Post Bieber post president Flintstone world that one hardly recognizes given the recent and ongoing advances in computational power as well as the obvious advantages to rebooting late twentieth-century consciousnesses in particular this readership is sure to explode over the coming years if not hours yet AI 4d devotes not one paragraph to our concerns and instead squanders entire chapters on topics as pedestrian and outdated as deep neural networks control theory and Kolmogorov complexity still more glaring in its absence is any discussion of the etiquette of dealing with vast set of parallel copies of oneself yes one might reason that is me in yon universe in as much as identical personal histories and atomic configurations can equate to individuals yet that is also in arguably another as he is comprised of a form of matter that would cause one's own universe to detonate were he to cross certain boundaries to pay us visit so should we use polite or familiar forms of address with this most intimate of strangers may i4d is perfectly mute on this and dozens of other urgent questions of protocol this said one is inclined to grant a modicum of Great Inflation to any work so deeply entwined with one's own essence I have therefore shewed the zero star option which while not supported by this website lies well within my capabilities to exercise enough said about that so the audio book is so unique with all the talent you have John Hodgman Patrick Rothfuss Felicia Day so many others including yourself Tom and you made some nice compromises it's true in light of that what addition to the book do you suggest when people ask you for a recommendation you know it's a genuinely hard for me to pick because they're all so different and I think each has unique advantages for instance the performances in the audiobook are magnificent and you just can't render John hodgman's voice with ink on paper or pixels on a screen but the hardcover book is a true work of art Random House formatted all those elements magnificently you know net girl agent Hogan the tweets the text the newspaper articles the Amazon reviews they're all they all just look great in physical form plus they did a stunning job of the cover which has this wonderful texture to it it's almost like a topographical globe when you run your fingers across it it's also almost radiant from this reflective New York material that they used in a few places so I do love the hardcopy but then the digital edition is also beautifully formatted and it's so magically portable and this is a long book which makes it heavy if it isn't it at all so I can't definitively recommend any format over the others it really depends on the context of the person are they traveling are they at home what their preferences are that kind of thing but they're all special their own way like one's children I guess I was so what you're saying is by all three by all three and in fact just in case something goes terribly wrong by a dozen copies in each of the three rubber mat and keep them in various locations just in case in various undisclosed locations exactly all right let's finish with your interview with Stephen Webb and and specifically Fermi's paradox a fascinating question it really is and attempting to answer it turns over so many stones in both science and philosophy that it's my favorite unanswerable question to ponder and yet we know Stephen Webb's answer from your interview is that we're alone what's your answer to it well I've been thinking about this non-stop since this morning when I told you we should both have an answer ready for this episode now if you had asked me during one of the decades that preceded this morning I would have said that I agreed with Frank Drake that many intelligent civilizations are out there only they haven't gotten around to visiting us yet for diversity of reasons but I only would have said that with about sixty percent confidence because I devoured that book rare-earth that Stephen and I discussed in the interview and it makes a very strong case that the earth may be nearly unique in its life bearing potential still despite being attuned to those arguments I retained that 60-ish percent confidence that we weren't alone because given the immensity of time and space that life's had to emerge pursuing where the galaxies only intelligence just always seemed on a pre Galilean in its narcissism you know like saying the universe revolves around the earth as humans used to think but then my interview with Stephen who is clearly in no way narcissistic and is incredibly sophisticated about these issues that conversation really challenged my thinking especially that concept of cultural homogeneity the idea that sure any one alien civilization may choose not to visit or even any dozen civilizations but to explain the great silence all existing alien cultures have to unanimously operate under some kind of prime directive that says thou shalt not interfere with primitive civilizations and what are the odds you know because that's not the only possible policy that a species could adopt and it's not the only moral policy that a species could adopt you could argue that it's morally proper to allow us our independence but you could also say there's a moral imperative to step in and save us from our primitive stupid ways so will 10,000 utterly different alien cultures all independently come to this conclusion we can't even get all human cultures to agree to anything that's morally debatable or All American subcultures or all New York City subcultures were or even a hundreds of the people in my neighborhood of Chelsea so that was the first big challenge my thinking face in the immediate wake of my interview with Stephen but my gut sense did hold firm I mean maybe I'm just constitutionally incapable of inhabiting an alien free galaxy as a science fiction writer but I just can't accept that this vast sweep of time and space would remain lifeless when life sprung up rapidly and spontaneously here on earth so after wrestling with all of us in the unique context that having spent almost three years writing after on I ultimately borrowed a concept from super AI carry that to me satisfactorily explains the Fermi's paradox both logically in on a gut level and it is decisive strategic advantage that term that was used multiple times in the book by agent Brock Hogan and others just as logic dictates that the first super AI to rise up will establish permanent hegemony over the earth and never allow a future AI to overthrow it or its way of doing things because it'll always have a huge and compounding technological lead I believe the first intelligent civilization to permeate the galaxy will have or will have had the same sort of built-in lead over any upstart civilization that comes along or came along if it were in the past later and this will allow it to impose its values on the newbies that arise a million or a billion years hence those values will have allowed the first galactic civilization which to be clear I think rose up far in the past to survive its own nuclear adolescence and it's synthetic biology post adolescence and it's nanotech post post adolescence without destroying itself in war so it makes sense that it would have a live and let live philosophy and therefore I wouldn't be shocked if ACTA lactic philosophy decreed or decided that primitive species should not be interfered with visited abducted probed etc and if a second or third or 10,000th civilization a more juvenile civilization a less advanced one came along with different ideas they basically be told no we're way more ancient than you therefore we're way more powerful than you and we were here first and this is the way we do things in this galaxy so you wouldn't need thousands of civilizations to all independently decide to leave us and others like us alone you would just need one civilization deciding that the first one what would that civilization happen to have a sincere respect for for local laws like I don't know copyright laws it might cuz this is reminding me of a book I once read by an author named Rob Reed called year zero yeah this is a it is the state of equilibrium that came to prevail in my last novel Year Zero which may sound like a spoiler but that's actually laid out in the first three pages so it's not released although I should point out that when I was writing near zero I was not thinking of solving Fermi's paradox but now that I am I do believe that something like that probably without the musical comedy elements did in fact happen someone permeated the galaxy first probably a long long time ago and they decided for unknowable reasons to allow folks like us to stay on our incubators to create our own grade art uncontaminated by more advanced species to come to our own moral conclusions about life and they're out there and given their inevitable level of advancement they're probably quite aware of us and they've probably been joined by who knows maybe ten thousand other civilizations down the eons each of which was politely informed that you can either get on the train or under the train this is the way we do things we don't colonize we don't interfere and if you don't like it we'll destroy you with our death rays and perhaps at some point if we come to a certain level maturity an advancement they'll reveal themselves to us and finally pay up for all the pop songs they've been pirating from us all right now Tom yes how do you sir Fermi's paradox where is everybody the first thing that I thought when I was listening to the interview was that we've got a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way now and if there's only 10,000 possible civilizations mm-hmm not all of them are gonna be happening at the same time not all of them will have the technology to broadcast some will have moved past broadcast and many of them just won't have any interest it should not be surprising that we haven't heard because the distances are vast and it's hard enough to pick up a radio station sometimes much less broadcast one across the universe and I think the the way you touched on in the interview about civilizations deciding we shouldn't broadcast is probably fairly likely as well however overall I think that's only a part of it I think what explains paradox is a lot of times if you look back in history is that we thought there was one answer when there are multiples and I think the fact that maybe an earth with which is in fact kind of a double planet in a habitable zone with just enough water dumped on it with whatever process cleared out the asteroid belt for us is rarer than we're estimating in Drake's equation and so while there are other civilizations that may only be one per galaxy in which case it's much more difficult for them to communicate so I I land on the idea that we're not alone that that will probably do Turman as we learn more that the ability of life to evolve is rarer than we think and that intelligent life therefore is even rarer and more widespread making it difficult and possibly impossible for us to detect each other unless we become incredibly advanced and I think I'm gonna give it a fifty-fifty chance that we're the first one of the reasons we don't see any other evidence of anybody else that we're we're leading the pack and it's almost the in throw people of like we we're the first ones to climb up out of the muck were the first ones to you know survive the asteroid hitting the earth long enough to develop a civilization and possibly get off the rock and there will be others behind us but we will be that civilization who ends up deciding what the rules of civilization in the galaxy might be gotta be someone and by the way this very exchange of views demonstrates by Fermi's paradox is such a delight because the superstructure of concepts of science of complex definitions of philosophy of reasoning that you need to generate an answer but also to process an answer for me to hear and understand your solution and for your solution to start triggering questions in my mind and vice-versa this question of Fermi's this domain of thought that surrounds it it just gives so abundantly because the deeper you get into it the more you need to understand about how the universe works and the deeper you need to think and that's just a really delightful rabbit hole it's one of the few examples we have of what the Greeks had as philosophers before so much was known about Anatomy and physics and and medicine they got to suspect things yeah as they didn't know that is a really powerful analogy you're dead right this is what the Greeks encountered when they thought about anything from from thunder on down I mean that's cool it's a really really cool thought and we don't have a lot of those domains left no we don't in fact one of the others of the few others is that anthropic coincidence yes that you talked about do you have your preferred solution to that this is one that fascinates me almost as much as Fermi's paradox it's less of a rich domain because the solution space is narrower because the fleece smullins numbers are right and if the odds against the various parameters being set just so is in the ten to the two hundred and something if power range I only see three answers and one is a complete cop-out and that's the one that says holy cow we're lucky I mean that's luck on the scale of winning the Powerball lottery 90,000 days in a row and invoking that degree of luck feels like abdicating the question entirely so that leaves two possibilities one is that someone set the dials deliberately now does that mean it's a bearded god who lives on a mountain and throws lightning bolts down when it's mad no it could mean anything it could point to a simulation because someone setting up a simulation would want it to be interesting so of course they made a life-bearing universe thankfully we live in a simulation that someone wants to win yes exactly or they want the ant farm to do interesting things right right that doesn't necessarily mean it's awesome to be an ant on that farm it just means the farm will be interesting to the kid who owns it anyway door number two is Lise Mullins solution he is a very well known and well regarded high-energy physicist his solution is to say that there are so many parallel universes out there that by the sheer weight of numbers our life bearing universe is mundane ly numerous despite paradoxically being incredibly rare now the problem with the first solution is that it involves invoking a domain that of the creator which by definition cannot be accessed or detected by us because that creator is a huge level up from us both in levels of reality and in technological Pro s and anything smart enough to create an entire universe or a convincing simulation of one will surely be smart enough to hide its tracks from knuckleheads like us so again it feels like a cop-out you have to invoke something which by definition can't be detected however the last remaining alternative is to invoke not one but tend to the 500 something's which each by definition cannot be accessed or detected because that's what a parallel universe is by definition inaccessible and undetectable at least with present-day technology and with any imaginable near or intermediate future technology so we're stuck our answer has to stand upon one intellectually offensive thing or 10 to the 500th intellectually offensive things and this is where I go to Occam's razor the principle that when faced with an intractable problem the simpler competing theory should be preferred to the more complex one and though I'm no mathematician I'm pretty sure one is a smaller number than 10 to the 5 so I do reserve the right to change my mind as soon as ten minutes from now but for now I feel that we're not the most brilliant entities in the universe and there is a far far higher power that has a lot to do with us being here either directly or indirectly not you how do you answer this one well I'm gonna come down on the other side and not just because you came down on that side but I I actually think that the only reason infinity seems more complex is because our brains like finit things yep but if you think about it infinity is the more natural state having an end to something is actually impossible to imagine as well we love we prefer as humans finit States but we also always know like okay but what's after that it's impossible to conjure an end to something without saying okay but what's on the other side of the end whether it's space or something else and we think of the universe as infinite in its ability to expand I think it's perfectly natural that there would be an infinite number of universes which then makes it simply natural that one of them would have all of the constants in the right place for us to exist mm-hmm and that is something that makes mathematical sense it's definitely something that humanity's two greatest living scientists Rick and Morty have expand for the great delight of millions read your Rick and Morty people it simple us by all means well these are two very greco-roman questions and I'm delighted you came up with that analogy because people in that era really did approach a lot of scientific questions armed with little more than logic and reasoning and well I certainly wouldn't trade the tools and the fact-based that we have today for that exploring a question on which there's complete scientific uncertainty with nothing more than those raw tools yeah is a hell of a workout for the brain well there is one more question one more burning question remaining Rob ooh the final question is this the end of the line for the podcast are you going to continue it you know I've been pondering this question since the dawn of time Tom what did the Greeks have to say yeah what did the creeks have to say actually I've been pondering this since the summer when I started conducting my earliest interviews and realized that this was gonna be a staggering amount of work but also a staggering amount of fun and after heavy contemplation I've decided to keep going for a while so this is episode 8 of I don't know how many infinite perhaps infinite because as you just pointed out there's no such thing as finite so I'm gonna keep doing this it'll still be interviews but now ones that are not directly connected to the book I'll still call it the after on podcast though because these first eight episodes really established a rhythm and an approach that I like and I'm going to continue with and therefore the tag line will become unhurried conversations with thinkers founders and scientists because that's what this has been and that's what this will remain and the next episode will actually be next week Oh fantastic and I'm ready to announce that guests as well as a few others if you'd like to hear the list yeah what do we got coming up ok this is a little time travel from rob thanks to the magic of audio editing when Tom and I recorded this conversation a little while ago I hadn't yet finalized my October lineup so we left a blank here in our conversation that I'm now filling in it's a bit of a rerun from the start of the episode but that was a long time ago so just a quick reminder next week I'll be talking to Chris Anderson longtime editor of Wired and now founder and CEO of 3d robotics the following week will be tech publisher thinker and founder Tim O'Reilly the week after that it will be TED Prize winner and Astro archaeology pioneer Sarah Park AK next we'll be talking to another Chris Anderson who runs and curates the TED conference and after that in some order to be determined will have life extension wizard Aubrey de Grey MIT professor Andy McAfee who co-authored the book that really triggered the current wave of soul-searching that's going on society-wide about what will become of human employment in the second Machine Age that is not now dawning and many many more ok now tom is going to act all pleased and delighted with this list in the converse station we recorded a little while ago because we really didn't know who the people would be back then we just didn't quite know the order so back to Tom's wonderful reaction that is a very exciting list I can't wait to listen I I have enjoyed hearing you talk to these people in preparation for our parts of the episodes very much to the point that I forget that I'm preparing for an episode and I'm just enjoying the conversation so I'm very excited that you will continue onward with after on I will and thank you Tom for being such an incredible mentor and teacher in all things podcasting you know we we don't have the book to talk about anymore so I guess I am I feel like I'm growing up and going off to college or something like that go then Rob there are other topics than these there are indeed and thank you Tom and thank you everyone who has been listening thus far and who will hopefully continue to listen as this adventure goes onward into the infinite universe [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Podza

Views: 73,983

Rating: 4.4454713 out of 5

Keywords: Rob Reid, Stephen Webb, After On, Podcast, The After On Podcast, After On Podcast, Science, Aliens, Fermi, Fermi Paradox, Fermi's Paradox, Physics, Space, Space travel, Galaxy, Universe, KIC 8462852, Tabby's Star, Boyajian's Star, Dyson sphere, Enrico Fermi (Academic), Physics (Field Of Study), Ufo, Alien, space ship, Predator, science fiction, great filter, Kardashev scale, interstellar, firefly, doctor who, masters of orion, Milky Way (Galaxy), star gate, borg, star wars, Star trek

Id: rZUPffWVIDY

Length: 110min 1sec (6601 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017