Where Are They, All Those Aliens? | Episode 305 | Closer To Truth

[Music] [Music] are there alien civilizations in the universe some vastly more advanced than we it gives me chills fevers my brain there are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 200 billion galaxies in the universe there must be other intelligences scientists assume why there is nothing special about our sun and our earth but if there are so many alien civilizations why no evidence no artificial structures anywhere in space no communications the great silence that's the fermi paradox the haunting question asked by physicist enrico fermi alone not alone either way changes us forever i'm robert lawrence kuhn and closer to truth is my journey i start my search with those who do search jill tarter is director of the center for seti research the search for extraterrestrial intelligence she was the model for the jody foster character in the film contact doug valkoch is the only social scientist at seti how do we deal with the so-called fermi paradox if there are intelligent aliens where are they the fermi paradox has a robust structure of a paradox only if you can say they aren't here and then you can conclude that there cannot have been any technological civilizations at any other time in any other place we're the first but can we say they're not here well i don't think they're abducting aunt alice off the streets for salacious medical examinations and i don't think that they've come hundreds of or thousands of light years to crash in the last mile in the deserts of new mexico but we've so poorly explored even our own little corner of the universe that there could be many forms of intelligent technologies alien colonizers here but they're nano scale or they're not the model that we think of of the big wet fat biology it may just be very implausible that if another civilization wants to make contact that they would use all of the energy to travel across interstellar distances when they can really get everything that they would want out of sending radio signals sending very brief laser pulses to establish communication with another civilization to learn about another civilization in a much easier and much quicker way and we can't rule out the possibility that extraterrestrials may have very different motivations than we do so that when we posit colonizing civilizations that may be a reflection of what we would do if we had the capability now again the argument perhaps all it takes is one civilization to do that can be a compelling argument if you view all civilizations in the galaxy as independent of one another but perhaps there is a coordination between civilizations you know one of the explanations for why no one is here is that the earth is sort of a wildlife preserve uh that we're under quarantine or that that there may be well someone out there but they are not making themselves known that it's very intentional not to and maybe they're waiting for us to initiate contact what about the argument that you hear sometime about civilizations when they get to a certain point that virtual reality becomes more exciting than real reality then the prize would be to go find the real ones and not destroy what's unique about them murray gelman once talked about the the simulation versus reality as being like the difference between math and physics or the difference between masturbation and sex and and we we as a species an intelligent curious exploratory species do seem to prefer the sex part of it the the reality well what to me is so exciting is that the more you push yourselves in your thinking the more you expand your horizons because whatever we're going to find the history in astronomy and cosmology just without any life forms is so rich with surprise i'd hope so but we do have a long history of still seeing ourselves as the pinnacle of an infinite descent and maybe not being as open-minded as we should be there should be vast numbers of aliens but there's no evidence of any of them maybe they don't go visiting maybe they don't like talking maybe they're too busy [Music] there are a million maybes how to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy it's called the drake equation and i go see the man himself frank drake is a pioneer in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and renowned for devising the drake equation the equation is an equation which gives us an estimate of the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy it simply quantifies the history of the evolution of our solar system and the life on earth and the way it works is that we start with the rate of star formation more stars you have the more opportunities to have life obviously you multiply that by the fraction of stars which actually have planetary systems right you have the rate of production of planetary systems more is better as far as we're concerned right you then multiply by the third factor which is the number of possibly habitable planets in each system the question that some ask is that if there are all these civilizations why don't we see evidence for it we have been in a way misled by science fiction where you dial up scotty and say warp seven and you go from one star to the next and time it takes to give a commercial well the universe isn't that way it is a great distance between the stars and the time for travel between the stars is enormous even the nearest star takes four years to reach at the speed of light it takes us with present spacecraft hundreds of thousands of years to go the distance to the nearest star would you really want to spend 100 years traveling in a cramped spacecraft watching the same movies over and over and it's even much worse than what i just said because the amount of energy required no matter what your propulsion system is if you work it out is equivalent to 200 years of the total electric power production in the united states in other words you have to shut down america for 200 years to launch this mission which is never going to come back so my answer to the fermi paradox is well there are two answers one is an intelligent civilization want not attempt interstellar space flight only the dumb ones would and they don't know how to do it and the other answer is there's no need because what we want to gather is information and we can do that at the speed of light with radio and light waves at much less cost the hypothesis that for whatever reason our civilization is indeed the only intelligent civilization in our universe is that something that you would consider i think it's preposterous there's nothing special about our solar system if you came to the milky way galaxy and looked for an interesting star to visit you wouldn't come to the sun the sun is the most average star in temperature age chemical composition nothing happens with the sun it doesn't vary much it has a few sunspots boring boring boring it's boring until you get close enough and you say hey look there's that blue planet and if you look closer oh hey there's chlorophyll on it when you look real close you see super highways and airplanes flying around which tells me that what happened here must have happened in many many places and given that there are 10 000 million million million stars in the universe it's preposterous that there aren't other intelligent creatures preposterous frank statistically his argument seems sound the number of stars are unfathomable and ours is just a normal boring one i am still troubled by the lack of evidence something seems missing [Music] much of the extraterrestrial debate revolves around advanced technology this is the world of ray kurzweil inventor and futurist no one sees technology's horizon clearer than rey we meet in his office near boston we can't rule out that they may be out there but most scientists actually look at this from a linear perspective and assume that other civilizations are out there and it would take millions of years to get from where we are now to a point where they might for example have solar system or even galaxy wide technology we've gone in just a century and a half from the pony express to where we are now which is very impressive and you go out another century and a half we will be saturating the matter and energy at least here on earth with computational processes that will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than all of human intelligence today and if the seti assumptions are correct there should be millions of these civilizations out there okay someone would be behind us someone would be ahead of us but the ones that are ahead of us which should be about half of them would aren't going to be just 20 years ahead they're going to be millions of years ahead well it's only a few centuries ahead they would be taking over their solar system certainly within a million years they would be really taking over their galaxies and would be not only doing galaxy white engineering but would be transforming their galaxies into beacons of incredibly transcendent technology and intelligence and there should be millions of them that are millions of years ahead of us and we don't notice any of them we don't notice anything going on and people describe this process as finding a needle in a haystack but a civilization like that would be putting out trillions of trillions of needles which is to say intelligent signals and we would notice this and you can make an argument as to why any one civilization wouldn't be noticeable but the whole city assumption is there should be millions of them based on the drake formula so what's your conclusion my conclusion is we're probably alone i really would be surprised if we ran into somebody else out there [Music] here's rey's argument if there are alien intelligences they have technology technology grows exponentially thus even one advanced civilization anywhere in the visible universe would have so transformed its galaxy as to be noticeable nothing such is noticeable therefore we are likely alone i've heard all the other arguments but rey's technology argument stopped me cold is there an argument from biology [Music] francisco ayala says there is he is a distinguished evolutionary biologist at the university of california at irvine where we meet well first let me start with my conviction that the probability of intelligent life evolving is so incredibly low if intelligent life would have a listen somewhere they would have allowed us to know it they would have communicated with us so i believe the efforts to communicate with aliens with intelligent life in the universes it's wasted effort i i don't believe they are there maybe they're just sitting on their planet and they're just not curious maybe curiosity is a human trait and if you're a very intelligent species you just want to sit where you are until you kind of use up the resources of your planet then you just hop to another one and that's all you should do and it's to me this is a sign of lack of intelligence intelligence seeks knowledge if some intelligent beings exist they want to know whether other creatures are there like them where they can communicate you cannot avoid that i don't know any serious evolutionist who believes that there is intelligent life in the universe i think the ones who believe in that do not understand the evolutionary process because they're incredible in probability which goes beyond anything that the universe can handle of intelligent life coming about this means that you are actually contradicting a large percentage of the scientific community who believe strongly that there are innumerable planets maybe billions that have intelligent life well i believe there are billions of planets that are likely to have life but i don't think they have intelligent life one who understands evolution realizes that no matter how many billions and trillions and trillions of trillions of planets the probability that intelligent life would have come about is so insignificant that it could never come about again so the almost impossible leap according to francisco is not from non-life to life but from life to intelligence because intelligence requires so vastly many steps to evolve he concludes that the only intelligent life in the universe is us [Music] either way alone not alone changes our world view how would aliens affect religion [Music] to find out i meet stephen dick the chief historian at nasa he has something called cosmo theology [Music] we meet at the u.s naval observatory in washington well if we are not alone uh it has uh many implications probably more implications than if we if we are alone because if we are not alone we have to interact with those extraterrestrials we have to rethink our entire philosophy and theology i would say if we are alone then we can move out into the solar system into the cosmos and basically shape the cosmos to our own wills our own wishes what about theology and humans understanding of religion how will that be affected either way on this debate if we're not alone or if we are well if we are alone that's the scenario that's been worked out over the last several thousand years by theologians if you take just uh christianity for example there's no problem with the doctrine of the incarnation humans are the center of the universe christ could have saved them and and it's no problem if you have extraterrestrials then you get into a scenario well either that christ by dying on the earth was somehow able to save everybody in the universe which seems unlikely or that you have a planet-hopping savior who has to hop around every time there's an adam and eve on another planet and keep living and dying all over again exactly which has some internal contradictions yes the theologians wouldn't like that or the third possibility is that there's another way to salvation on other planets other than through christ and that's a whole other kind of problem yes it opens all kinds of interesting questions which i think should be addressed and probably would enrich current theologies in any case people who are atheists who are outside of religion tend to think that it would be the end that would be it and i tend to agree with the former there would be adjustments that will be made because the alternative is extinction and i think over the last several thousand years if anything's been proven as that theology and religion is very uh robust robust yes this is a good word and it's going to continue in one form or another now i would argue that we should have something like that what i call a cosmo theology cosmo theology just means that we need to take into account what we know about the universe including whether or not there are extraterrestrials if we're not at the center of the universe in a biological sense that means that we are most likely not at the top of the great chain of being of all these beings if we are not alone if the universe teems with intelligent life then the theist says see god created the universe so that it would surely bring forth life but the atheist says see humans aren't special at all if we are alone if the universe has no intelligent life but us then the theist says see humans are special but the atheist says see the universe does not easily bring forth life and we are just an accident i need a visionary [Music] david brin with a doctorate in space science is an award-winning science fiction writer if there's anything about extraterrestrials that david has not thought about it's probably not important do you think we're alone well i have made it my thing to not answer that question because i'm trying to take a multiple perspective on it let's dismiss from the start ufos okay uh if if there are silver guys coming down and disembowelling cattle and kidnapping farmers they're not intelligent life just look at their behavior but the gap goes back even farther for two billion years the earth was prime real estate ever since microbes made an oxygen atmosphere and there were no people around to defend it what slime molds and reptiles are going to tell you go away there are no signs in the rocks not only of ancient cities but of the biological changes that would have come with colonization from above now the seti program has been looking for aliens and we've already wiped out one part of their scenario vast tutorial beacons beneficently given by altruistic advanced aliens to help us youngsters along but if we ever do get a hit it will change our culture forever we would become consumers of a greater culture this happened to all human civilizations but let's say we go out a million years or a billion years and it really looks like we're alone we still haven't heard anything seen anything the facts what are you saying i've been in this for years and there's a tendency among all the bright minds who get involved in this field to pick one to pick one explanation and say this is it earth-like planets are rare life is difficult to get started the internet will become so such a honeypot and we'll all get implants and we'll all get plugged in and we'll be so much bigger than we are now as people almost godlike that no one will want to go in starships because you'll be lobotomized but what all of these explanations do is they leap on one thing and say this explains the silence but very few of them deal with the problem of exceptions let's say 99.99999 percent of human beings become these cyber gods there will still be some funky exception hell's angels who will say ah forget that make starships go to some other planet sorry system have babies and pass on that trait whatever exception to whatever your favorite explanation is that's what's going to fill the galaxy and we calculate that would fill the galaxy in 60 million years that's a very short time and i blink okay now let me take you to the time when you would be confident and it's gonna fall into one or two buckets either there are going to be alien intelligent life or there's not well the implications if there's not alien life anywhere anywhere then i would have to say that we're living in a simulation or an intelligent creation because in my opinion the odds of that in a randomly created universe are virtually nil if we're totally alone yes then the implications are theological that it implies that the galaxy has maybe one chance to fill with intelligence and that would be us going out there it puts an even greater burden on us to make our civilization succeed but suppose we do make contact and we start getting information what happens to our culture at that point well i think that one of the great dangers and one of the reasons why they might be keeping us isolated in a zoo is that as soon as we do meet and advance alien civilization our culture will be effectively over i mean we see this from first contacts all across human civilization maybe they're keeping us isolated to find out what we would become most scientists assume that it is virtually impossible that intelligent life should appear only on earth but where are they all those aliens as for the absence of evidence there are explanations intelligent life destroys itself aliens are radically different from us they don't travel they don't communicate they live in virtual worlds they're here but undetected the problem with any explanation is that there can be no exception not in the entire universe because one exception could populate a galaxy in say 50 million years barely a blink in cosmic time if we are truly alone would we be a creation or a simulation what about brute fact luck that seems absurd if we are not alone what could we learn would our culture survive so we continue searching perhaps getting closer to truth for complete interviews and for further information please visit closer to truth.com [Music] you

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 235,928

Rating: 4.6804547 out of 5

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Jill Tarter, Douglas Vakoch, Frank Drake, Raymond Kurzweil, Francisco Ayala, Steven Dick, David Brin, fermi paradox, where are the aliens, closer to truth full episodes, closer to truth aliens, extraterrestrial life, are aliens real, what is the fermi paradox, why can't we find aliens, where are all the aliens, do aliens exist, alien civilization

Id: 5PTO8fJzae8

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021