Why Intelligent Life in the Universe May Be Hidden with Isaac Arthur

answering the question of are we alone has turned out to be a bit more difficult than was originally envisioned when said he first began decades ago at first it was a matter of looking for a giant omnidirectional beacons blasting out high-energy messages much like what we saw in the movie contact but as we've gone through the process of searching it's becoming evident that such a scenario was in a way wishful thinking we have seen no such unambiguous beacons and thinking on just why civilization would expend massive amounts of energy on a signal has changed it's very likely to be far more subtle than that and that any intentional message will be beamed at directly at us but beacons aren't the only game in town since the advent of SETI other techno signatures beyond radio have been thought of now we can look for laser emissions industrial chemicals in the atmospheres of exoplanets Dyson swarms and a host of other signatures that would tell us if there are alien civilizations out there when and if we ever do find them it will then be a matter of envisioning what they're like going on whatever facts we glean about them my guest today specializes in just that imagining alien civilizations welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] in today's special episode John is joined by longtime friend Isaac Arthur host of science and futurism with Isaac Arthur a physicist and futurist Isaac explores the possibility and the future of humanity on his channel and also speculative looks at what alien civilizations might be like science fiction and of course explorations into the possible solutions for the Fermi paradox welcome everyone to event horizon with me John Michael Gautier if you enjoy what you hear fall into the event horizon hit the like button and become an active subscriber by ringing the bell Isaac Arthur welcome back to the program John thanks for having me on what first brought the Fermi paradox to your attention how long have you been looking into it I don't know when I first came became aware of the Tom poppy in the early 2000s but I mean I've kind of grew up watching all that sci-fi Doctor Who in Star Trek and a lot of times it never seemed to relist me when it was dealing with all the alien civilizations and I guess they got me pondering away we knew what the tome was but I'd say probably only 2000s when I first encounter the actual Tom the concept but you know it's it's just one of those ones if you watch a lot of sci-fi you just find yourself wondering you know while these alien civilizations acting this way where all these ones at and all ward if things were like they were on the show where all these guys at so I think it just kind of comes naturally do you want they get a lot about sci-fi or space and how big it is now if you if you had to take a guess a gut feeling what do you think the solution to the Fermi paradox is what is the most likely explanation for why we don't see anything when we look out into space I think the I mean it's the fact that we see anything at all is usually the biggest indicator to me that there won't see big civilizations out there now for me that says that that either they almost never cook or or something happens to them before they can actually get out there and expand and it's so hard for me to imagine a disaster that gets everybody that it just seems like it's more likely at this stage that the pathway to intelligence just doesn't pop up much now whether that's cuz both like plants are really rare or evolution doesn't tend to go to complexity much or just brains and concepts and abstract think you know uncommon I don't know but I tend to favor the idea that life itself is probably pretty common but just doesn't go intelligence too often I'm generally in agreement there I think we live in a microbial universe where you'll probably run across lots of microbes and maybe some photosynthesizing plants and things like that but they're for me the best option of a great filter is the leap between simple life and complex life and that conspicuously took a very very long time here on earth you know life was was prokaryotic for over almost two billion years and then all of a sudden that you know something ingested something else and didn't digest it and all of a sudden we have a leap do you think that that's a strong solution as well as do you think that's the great filter or do you think there's an even more likely one than that I'm hesitant to call that one a full-blown great filter because that's me as always a great filter is the one that reduced the odds from basically almost of a planet that could conceivably have life - you know - intelligence right they are but I do feel like that's gonna be the major one that you just don't see life getting very complex too often and again the for the same reason and you had very very simple life he or for a really long time and once it started going complex it got really complex and you know land-based life is only 400 million years old whereas life's been around here for almost 4 billion meaning when I showed the exact time line and it just strikes me there was a lot of complex in the ocean for that of course - but you know there are so many little conditions on a planet that could prevent complex life a coin if you haven't got photosynthesis you're probably never gonna get the density of life necessary for your divorce tea and food chains of complexity and you know those predator-prey cycles are gonna be so important for intelligence it's easy to say well you know an algae could get intelligent or a tree could get intelligent and and you could make an algae or tree that more intelligent but it's the predator-prey cycle that drives that it's mobility there's no advantage to having a brain unless it's being used to keep you alive in some fashion and if you're not mobile that brain doesn't really help you do much of anything where's your pain so much energy to keep it around that should just by Darwin go away but you know a plan that was very cloudy for instance because they're just a little bit more and you know humidity the nose might never actually have photosynthetic life because might have become you know worth it you use light a source like that all one denied just little bit more water than us as would well be the case if all gravity has been high off we might retain more hydrogen have more water and then you never get land-based life so there you might have complex life but never gets to be land-based f1 events file and for that matter we had file for a million years we really did much anything besides cooking shopping sticks with a you know ceramics is ten thousand years old about and that's metal or even yong-chol that's a long time for Humanity have existed without really doing much with technology certainly truths conspicuous and you you have to ask a question is technology a natural end result for a civilization or if is it simply the way it was you know and the most complex thing you do is painting you know paint pictures on cave walls but I don't think it feels like that would be a great fill to itself or the idea that you have intelligence and I mean fully abstract intelligence like humans have I could see a lot of civilizations sticking around a long time not making much progress seem as we didn't you know with the advanced to pottery for so long after all planes no he developed but I can't see you know their level of filters you know great Philippine something it is like lot of yards almost nobody ever does it whereas you might have filters that like coin-flip odds and I I'd have typically seen that anything with like all level of intelligence and social interaction not going technology less than one time out and I would seem improbable to me so how likely do you think it is that you know of course the the biggest of the great filters are the most ominous anyway is that civilizations invariably destroy themselves yeah the leading seconds do you think that's just a bit too pessimistic or do you think it could very well be the case it really is in my opinion very pessimistic I got some other scenarios for late photos I mean the Trisha needs say that it's you can't colonize the galaxy because it's in Platteville or you destroy yourself because you can't see civilizations all sighs they fall off so they don't have to be doll that uncommon to be hidden but it's these galaxy spanning ones you can see I don't feel you can make a case team or that interstellar colonization isn't gonna be practical it seems like that that's not you know too many things potentially allowed like laser highways for instance days or sales you know so then you have to come for the reason why we destroy ourselves or why we didn't colonize a galaxy but could have and that either means you found something better like you can open up portals to other parallel earth so you colonize those instead or you know I don't habitat ones we're Homo sapiens ever arose or you kill yourself off and you have to kill yourself often a particularly fellow and non replaced way you know if Skynet kills off then all you've God is and that's not for me paradox and so Skynet goes and colonize the galaxy instead that's like saying that he if that homeless sapiens are the answer to Neanderthal was as a phony paradox does it walk out and then once you in a plants Harry how do you kill yourself officer species it would take a lot of walk and it would just seem improbable that that could be possible so I don't want to Skol the late photos but I to me they just don't walk out very well now what do you think about that do you think it's actually still feasible in modern day thinking within science and sci-fi to actually colonize an entire galaxy sort of car - of type three-level civilization or do you think you just stop at a certain point and where it's you know practical to maintain a civilization or a cohesive civilization of humans do you think we we go full-on all galaxies or do we just stay local I think we and I individually i me bite stay local but you think about people the streamer has to be some kind of you know organized process everybody does not have to be when we emerge from I think Ethiopia is usually where as part of these days those tribes that had migrated the Middle East we're not asking whether they could migrate to India by going home and phoning the government of Ethiopia at that time each tribe just kind of split off and did its own thing and and slowly wanted out no civilization that should have a form of Technology should ever be non expansionist by nature now they might change themselves later on but if you clouds our way up to all winds lateral you've done it with the ability will place your numbers inside your natural environment you have to have that color level fourth-rate and you have to have that kind of desire to spread out war that that's just built by evolution there's really no pathway to avoid that you can change it later on but the first thing technology does this kind of force point of technology is to increase the number of surplus people you have because nature is not killing them off as well you know you increase your food stores so less people die in the winter you make it easier for other people to live long or productively you have less babies dying that kind of thing so you have a population so plus an intensity to grow every culture that descends out of that should tend to have the same mindset if we can comfortably go you know the overpopulation is is not a new console and it's been a constant of humanity's existence in LA before there was humanity and we've always had ways of dealing with that but then every time we had access to brand-new 4/12 places that but you know we've expanded every time we found a new way to enhance our carrying capacity for you know how we for more evidence we've expanded if you can come to lis expand someone's going to think that's a good idea and unless you're going to actually shoot them to keep them from expanding then gonna do that so if you can make an interstellar spaceship that can actually go colonize a place and set up a colony they are then someone is eventually going to do it again and again and again and you know it doesn't have to be organized and the timelines for human generations are just so tiny compared to galactic timelines that you're gonna be filling up as you go very quickly but that's that's an interesting thought colonization now we have two opposing views on that right now with our current two billionaires going into space Elon Musk says colonize planets and make use of a planet like Mars Jeff Bezos completely opposite he says we need O'Neal cylinders and make that our habitat which do you think is more realistic do you think it's better to have just a perfect environment within an O'Neal cylinder or do you think we should have planetary environments at least as well I think you know it's a false dichotomy to me it's you do which people want to do with it at the time you can do a lot more with a lot less until my raw material was when you're building habitats like O'Neal so indoors because you only need a few meters or maybe a kilometer if you want to be really you know earth-like of doors whereas we got several thousand kilometres of doors and lock and more of magma underneath us and you can make an awful lot more layers you can turn a planet into a million times the living area with an O'Neill so indoors being made out of it so that's always gonna be your you know more economic approach although even that's arguable because somebody might say well why even bother with gravity why not do some kind of cybernetic enhancements an enhancement that makes you not a NEET gravity or go to the digital Vout so either one of those might turn out to be the violent one you know we'd say we're gonna colonize force tomorrow's or the moon or you're gonna build no to your sword off pretty good odds are the force Ward's were actually colonize will be right here on earth they might be virtual walls you know you build shared realities very extreme versions of MMORPGs that people spend a lot of time in and if you can do that you can also make sure they can pretty much get their work done there too so it could be that the force wars we colonize all right here on earth and in that sense if you're creating virtual environments you know virtual worlds nothing stops you from having virtual aliens no and interacting with them it's it's you know you can go colonize a ward where you could genetically engineer yourself some flying dragons or you could go make a virtual ward where they're just as realistic you know and if we take for a moment as a granted that you can simulate a human mind to the point that is it's just a human it just happens beyond a computer which many people disagree about then that's gonna be even more efficient option than things like rotating habitats because you can build a lot more computer chips out of the same amount of our materials you can habitats which is way more than planets but the critical thing is some people are gonna want to live in ownio so they're gonna want to live on a planet and other folks are not gonna want to live in a digital environment they're gonna wanna live in AI when you're sewing or planet or you know live in space is a cyber neo cybernetically or do they be enhanced or not you're modified Horsham the biggest thing about the ideas that you're not gonna ever have humanity colonize the galaxy you just gonna have a whole bunch of different branches that have broken off they now call themselves human no or not but they're not gonna look the least bit alike after they've been gone for a while from this from this region of space and so it's kind of saying that I don't know what the precursor animal was for humans and dinosaurs but maybe I seen the colonized space in some ways Oh though there would be a faster timeline but then again you've got genetic enhancement cybernetics that might speed up things like evolution quite a lot what would you pick if you could live on Mars earth or an O'Neill cylinder where would you go oh I have to I have to say I tend to agree I'm not leaving but yeah for somebody that talks about colonizing Mars and everything else I am gonna be the last person that actually goes and does it oh yeah I'd be willing to go visit place like that probably but then I say well if you don't want to leave you know then why would you assume nobody else's and so I'm not assuming every else's you know the United States was not colonized by the majority of people living in other you know I mean after Eurasia but some people decide they want to go out you things like life extension going on and then when you're growing both way it's and things like that you're always gonna have folks who want to go to you'll be a big fish in a small pond or just go tiny oh that's that's actually built into us by evolution go find new territory new toff and that should be built into every else - which is part of the part with the phoney paradox it's hard to come up with an evolutionary pathway that isn't going to produce a technological civilization that isn't expansionist explore Toye curious and social it might be many different degrees of this compared to humans they might be much more aggressive and much less aggressive they might be slower growth than we are or faster boat than wheel I mean compared to most mammals we be very slowly and they might be any number of differences with us but they're gonna be curious they're going to want to explore and expand and they are going to be chatty you know because specialization is how you go get technology your brain is not going to be enough to you you don't evolve a plane big enough to invent all the technology by yourself you could eventually maybe something had been trapped into water or you know somebody has access to fire for the first time might be you have evolved such a huge brain they could do all that technology themselves but rather when you first get just enough technology and just enough you know brain power to start having basic technology you get specialization so that's person X masters this post and Y masters that because it takes a whole lifetime to excel at it to the best and that pathway only works for your socialization you they have to be willing to walk with each other there you has a coop now that's that's it well but essentially that's what we do nowadays my big concern about the future is you touched on it was virtual reality because that seems to me to be a way to build a civilization of lotus-eaters where you have just too many people that are wishing to spend as much time as they can in virtual reality do you see this is a problem or do you think it'll just be deep like how video games are today some people will spend too much time doing it but most people won't uh yes yes and no I guess it could be a problem I think a lot of people would give into it as kind of a costly I don't want to say a bad stereotype I see no giving into it it's so long as they are doing but I was necessary to keep the civilization going and if they want to spend all their time staying at the naval and robots are handling it that's fine too but the reason why it's not a good for me paradox answer is because if I want to simulate something as simple as a portion I'm I'm willing to spend time talking to you in a virtual reality you know it's a III go stop in Westeros and I want to go talk to the guys on the wall those people need to be believable to me they need to be more interesting to than than regular life is otherwise I'm not gonna get you know hooked into it some people might but the majority would not it has to be very realistic it has to be basically able to mimic being a human any well and then you compare that to what's necessary to build a robot that is able to take an asteroid apart and turn it into devices you know the simple manufacturing that that simulated person in that reality is way way more complicated than that robot is way more complicated so before you can actually ever get the technology to do really good virtual simulations that would be addicted for most people I mean a sense of more than video games or TV years now you already have the technology to colonize the galaxy and you you know you're gonna have some people who want to do that but it doesn't matter if they do or not because colonize a very ambiguous tom you know it's not a space off you don't go settle planet after planet what you're doing is mine them and accessing them for resources and if what your resource is all life-support chambers for bodies and then computer chips then you strip-mine the entire galaxy and bring it home and you can do that you can stuff all that into a relatively small area and you have all the technology for it so even though you're not colonizing the galaxy you're still breaking the Fermi paradox because a galaxy that somebody has gone and mined out all the way down to a star lifting stuff does not look the same as what we absorb so if somebody had been now doing that if they'd gone virtual like that even they took no steps to prevent their site from falling apart on some kind of internal or navel-gazing their galaxy therein is still going to be exploited for resources because they had the technology to do that forced even was just by a couple of minutes and then you know it's gonna take a lot longer to go from simple robot to you know enthralling simulation the other aspect of that is if you have the technology to you know fake wards that people want to live in you have the technology to fake parents that you can raise kids with so those people could still be having kids or growing them in tanks and having them raised by virtual reality simulations and they can raise them in a way that is going to be fairly resistant to going into that utopia navel-gazing even if it's only temporary so they could set them up so you're forced 20 years you're not really playing the simulation all that much and you're not allowed to enjoy to the same degree of analysis you a new productive walk of maintain the civilization yeah and then you're allowed to do the Utopia you know that that these are options people would think of if this is starting it to be a real problem and I'm sure other species would think of them to other aliens so it just doesn't walk out you know the divorce reality thing doesn't make sense a way to stop you from not necessary classically colonizing galaxy but to answering the for paradox because the phony paradox is looking for evidence of intelligence not colonize planets you know that I mean the caller should have three concept is even about detecting planets it's about taking tile in globe galaxies it's just not a good answer in that context and we have to take a break when we come back we'll talk more about the Fermi paradox and the great filters and also the far future we'll be back in a moment ah coffee time do you think everyone realizes we only take these breaks so we can enjoy a good cup of joe last week someone said I sold out the big coffee have you sadly no it's ready Anna what is this it's tea John green tea where is the coffee I've detected that you're slightly dehydrated John the tea is better for you and it's better than coffee you're on a Health Week wait did you put tea in mine - of course not Isaac your coffee is freshly ground black and in your science and futurism with Isaac Arthur mug well thank you Anna that's the stuff you have your own coffee mug yes would you like one what I'd like is my coffee and we're back now Isaac one thing about this the solutions to the Fermi paradox is that we may not know what we're looking for really leading to a discussion of techno signatures and do you think it's simply could be that we just don't have the technology or the precision of technology to spot alien tech no signatures yet or do you think we would just have seen them by now or haven't we look enough what's your general sense of that um you know the biggest techno censure you'd have from a civilization that was really out there doing stuff is that you never invent astronomy because you wouldn't see nice Talos with your eyes everything we can look at that a civilization Juan do that that's still bound by the laws of physics as we know it and of course if those go out the window you know if they got entropy breaking stuff the game changes but they all bound by known physics they're going to want to play with mass and energy as much as they can because that's what they run everything on ultimately and stall so the biggest source of those that we have readily collected and so they're going to do something with them and that something is either gonna be tapping them for energy or just use them as a nice gravitational place to build around and slowly harvest for fusion fuel or take an important freedom into a black hole and you know that's kind of was all that infrared heat sinks you're going off on from the waste heat but even if they don't use stores for that even for some reason that were they using stalls for their mass and energy which is kind of hard think about why they wouldn't you know if there are few and the black holes or taking them apart they still gonna want to cluster together into what looks like a Dyson Sphere because you want to be as close you can to everybody else if you unless you have something like instantaneous transport even if you got fashion alight stuff has to be instantaneous otherwise you got a lag time on signals and travel and so you cluster as close together as you can not not everyone when you have some folks who would want off the side but the majority their civilizations gonna want to cluster together and the limitation how close they can cluster is is how much heat they can get rid of in that area and that's you know a Dyson Sphere is already that maximum it the size might change but you're still going to have that big infrareds feel and that's your ultimate techno central they'll with basically their garbage which is often very handy in archaeology so anything though they're gonna use complex so you can see it if civilizations don't really have much reason to hide from less advanced civilizations and they can't hide for more advanced civilizations if you if it's a threat thing I'd yeah everyone saw you before you developed your technology to hide they knew you are there and except the folks weren't around yet who you're not afraid of because you're God you know millennial advanced over top of them so they have no real reason to hide and anything they're doing I mean civilization is just not something you hide when you're going big like that you see that stuff around nobody tries to hide all cities here you know there's a million different ways you can detect New York City without seeing with your own eyeball and you suddenly can see with your eyeball because we don't try to hide it we put billboards and signs are pointing towards it so when we talk about trying to find a techno central what it might not be what we expected to be it might not be what we expected to be but it almost seems like it's inevitable that it would be something to be visible well there's also the the complicating problem that it may not also be where we think it is because we tend to look at sun-like stars and you know exoplanets and things like that but an advanced civilization may instead prefer to exist near a black hole and I don't know if anyone has ever checked black holes for techno signatures or if there would be even be a techno signature that you can detect of a civilization no I mean there's been no real and one of these is why you go around say I collect a coral black hole which is a popular one is because you know you you go clustering the real title ounce and that that cuts a great power source you dump matter down and does better than in fusion stores does is come some of energy efficiency and that is when you could potentially miss because if it was just normal gas a cluster around the center of that galaxy that's a lot of light and infrared and stuffing in the way and it's a very concentrate a little dot where you'd expect it to be a concentrate dot off of energy you look pretty precisely is spot that little you know very bright but still relatively little infrared wave on the other hand though if you collapse entire galaxy into something there's some kind of mega structure around the center of a galaxy what we call bullsh Planet it's not that that's hidden it's just that it's really quite small and your odds are statistically just happening to look at that random spot because not in the galaxy more that's visible it's just a point in space and a relatively small point in space that's very very far away you know you might be looking for one that's a billion light-years away there's only a Lightyear cross and so we could miss something like that but the problem is that it's not that you're missing where they live it's that you can see other stuff and they should live everywhere you know you there's no reason for the don't stop advancing nor whether you ever expect them to be a cohesive civilization you know some of them might decide to cluster around that and that might be with a big empire that one spot but what about all the folks didn't want to be part of that then want to go off and do their own thing and what about the civilizations just didn't go that specific route the the big problem that we always come back to you what techno angels of finding them is is that it's not that you can't see what they built is you see stuff that they haven't touched and you know you try to look at this planet right now we don't have places we haven't touched not very many and there's a reason why we haven't touched them yet and we'll get around that you know you look at the earth a thousand years ago look less touched and we're not talking about some brand-new civilization here we're talking one is bound for millions or billions of years at this point and you know they should have gotten their fingers onto everything nearby them in some fashion some people have advanced that certain phenomena that we see in nature and one example would be the fast radio bursts some of them some of them might actually be mistaken and might in fact be of alien origin do you think that there's any chance of that or do you think that this is completely Astrophysical phenomenon I'm P sure it's national physical phenomenon you know you into you know what it is you can ever be sure but it's kinda quit going tabby stall for instance you don't know that it's not artificial but and some that should be the last you think about was the first thing we all thought about way for us what about that is could that be a Dyson you know but you know you got to be kind of careful just speak about stuff like that if there is a natural explanation that's the first one to go to not just because you know wanna aliens exist recall if they did rather because odds are anything that's a sign of artificial life is gonna be so obviously artificial that it's not gonna be a discussion for more than a day before it's like yep that's that's it you know you see a random phenomena and say well maybe that could be artificial and they say okay or not right you see a sign of human civilization it's not like we have to debate whether or not that's that's random is this candy bar wrapper of a natural phenomena or was it manufactured not really some of y'all you about much you know and I mean the faster your boss we still don't know what they are but they don't seem to match up the profile we expect for a beacon and that's really the only is I can think of why you'd omit something like that as as a beacon and it doesn't match up to what you expected to be it's kind of same time we have a muha moo-ha if it was a spaceship it only makes sense a spaceship or a space probe if it was a broken one answers the whole idea is that we're trying to detect something that's artificial and a probe it being broken is you know because it meets the template of being broken isn't really the best logic to base that off of you know that's one of the big problems with doing any of this is that the ambiguity of some of the stuff that I talked about on my original channel and here the ambiguity of it is so high that you can't really you can't point to that and say that's an alien civilization still there are some weird ones you know oh yeah tons of weird phenomena and they could be artificial it's it's not that I don't want them to be artificial I mean obviously in theory I shouldn't have an opinion one way or another but I'd love for them turn out to be artificial to be honest because I don't figure they're hostile towards us but it's just more the feeling that if it's ambiguous it's probably natural because if it's not natural it's probably not ambiguous and you know it's one thing when you like only have a trace note of something in passing you can't be sure if that lock is an arrowhead or not but you're not gonna walk through an abandoned town here in the United States and world ghost town even one that's been half buried for centuries and say I think this might be natural it's my feeling that what is artificial you know intelligence recognized intelligence if it's artificial it's gonna look out official if it's not official signal it's gonna look artificial and I mean that's debatable in some cases you know he got you know encrypted or compressed signals you will get out you say well we can't see if that's noise or not and say well ya know you probably do use compressed and encrypted signals law in space the problem isn't that you can read what they are radio signals on that planet and say well I can see what this says so it's artificial it's that there's no reason that plan should be emitting that much of that signal and you don't need to be able to read someone's email to know that they got an email you know if there's no natural source for that much radio transmission that's probably artificial but there's the problem is we do have an idea on my cost radio voice and they only meet one profile you can't look and say this one might be artificial and say well if this was artificial what is it I said well it might be X okay if it is X what other characteristics might it have and you say I'd expect to have XYZ or doji or whatever and it doesn't come up with any of those and see I mean that's not falsified yet but that that you know definitely points against it they say if I'm building a space probe and I'd expect to have these qualities and it has one of those but that one could be natural yeah there's a problem because you should expect to have more than one of those you know you expected to have quite a few of those and when I seen him couple together and that's the you know whenever we come across some of these phenomenon of forcing to ask is what would produce this effect what could produce this effect and if it's one of these five or six things that might potentially be what other effects should be seen your by it seems like almost every time this comes up it doesn't really hit and then of course the other palm is what long-term effects what produce say well this might be a Dyson Sphere say okay good where the other dyson's feels knew it and this natural phenomena we found nearby where they in the rest the universe and if we look further out we see more of them and say if we see more than for the route are we seeing you know if it's artificial I we should expect to see more than as universe ages so the further out you look the less time they say elapsed there should be less of these things where's like a quasar we do we see more quays always in the past you know there's no increase in density as we approach new your time if we were looking at we saw a phenomenon a lot of galaxies that they had less of them in the past that would be a good sign of artificial mass but that still say well is doing explicitly artificial about this because otherwise you might say it's a natural phenomenon we have a lot of galaxies that are hidden the this is more common new us than far away a genie oh and time and they have some other characteristic of artificiality to them that's we start saying that might be a techno signature and I think I think there are two outstanding examples of this unfortunately both a problematic the first one that looked artificial was the WoW signal it was a narrowband signal at the hydrogen line and that's problem for nature on both counts so that one looked like it but I never repeated what's your feelings on that do you think that was probably more likely to be a glitch or do you think that might have been something I mean I've seen the list of various possible scenarios and one thing I try to avoid doing on these is is they say well what natural phenomena could it have been and say well I don't know what natural phenomena is and since I don't I don't want to say what it could have been besides that there's a lot of things that could have been in - you have evidence of what it is a natural phenomena of what type you're not really hoping by by saying it was x-ray than all official but no I don't need the WoW signal indicated too much and then they encounter indicated by the fact that it did only happen one time and say that's a good example to use or how we'd say what else would we expect what indicates they see no only happening once in a plausible for me paradox scenario and say well that one they are that zoo hypothesis somebody is you know keeping us from seeing the rest of civilizations around us and somebody snuck through the prime directive is a wall and got a single to us so it only happened once right and now you're saying in that context you saying this only makes sense if it was a zoo hypothesis knocks no yo somebody broke the rules five now you know what the motivation is and now you should say what other things would we expect to see or not see based on that motivation and you get a problem you're not hiding you entire civilization the natural universe if you guys new hypothesis scenario the most sane way to go about that is to not change your entire Galactic Empire to look different so what's hidden is to hide the people you're trying to hide from you encapsulate they are they our solar system in in a artificial net ISM or something that's you know not showing them the real galaxy outside and that's kind of follow not because why would you make a artificial universe that's so big that that's so much extra stuff you have to hide and conceal and then worry about knocking screwed up if we found out the universe would look like there's only a million miles across a few centuries back we're gonna be sitting around wondering about other civilizations and if your goal is to hide yourself from us you don't want to be leaving evidence like a gigantic ego fake universe around you so that will be an example of how the Wow angel by indicating a zoo hypothesis no I or a prime directive where they don't like to intervene or let us be seen doesn't fit with the natural universe around us the same flaw something like a simulation do you never want to make your lies or bigger than it has to be and you never want to make the lie that actually encourages people to look into it and the apparent universe around us which would presumably be fake in a zoo hypothesis oil doesn't correspond to somebody who's trying to hide them you know hide you so you don't see or Tec them because they should make it a lot small though and simple and we have to take another break be sure to LIKE subscribe and hit the bell and also check out Isaac's channel science and futurism with Isaac Arthur and we're back with Isaac Arthur so Isaac what people are looking for techno signatures we have a fairly robust SETI infrastructure with several different groups looking if you had to guess do you think it's gonna be radio or do you think it would be something some other techno signature that shows us an alien civilization if we actually find one what sector do you think it's gonna come from well it's contra key on that once you have to say you ever you're trying to guess by this thing just say if we haven't already seen it why haven't they done it yet and and what would they do be doing instead and you know it does that factor in the kind of probability that being seen we haven't seen any radio signals yet so I really don't think we'd be too likely to if folks are trying to communicate with us that way we should already pick that up and I can't imagine why suddenly the universe would change in the next 3040 years that people sighs today let's talk abut we might pick up a video scene shows around planets and it might be kind of ambiguous because again it might be encrypted and compressed and in fact it almost only will be if it's being broadcast a lot that we could actually see and read it but at the same time I don't expect us to see radio saying shows I don't expect to see any same shows to be honest but when I think we foresee one of these it's going to be so far away that the force won't we see is gonna be a k3 style one where it's going to be the die Sounion SETI type thing only at the galactic scale where you see that waste heat across the entire galaxy but if we saw one in the near future I mean actual radio signal I would expect it to come in English possibly other languages too but I expect to come in English and live inform you that they you know delegation was arriving soon so you would expect it if we get it through radio it's gonna be close yep then I'd expected to be on a broadcast method we already use and might be a little bit an you know antiquated version and I had expected to be in one of the languages that we force broadcast in which we get mostly English and a few other major languages this brings up Bracewell and von Neumann probes because that would give a situation where it might be out there monitoring and then at some point when it thinks it's time they can just simply turn on and say hello in our language and do all kinds of crazy things because if it's been here for millions of years it may have photographed dinosaurs and basically would give us a reconstructed past history observational history of Earth but do you think that's actually feasible this idea of a fine Norman probe oh sure I mean when you get around to it by Newman probe is is nothing different than a basic biological organism that just happens have been engineered and and presumably is made out of metal as opposed to you know carbon and Waddell it's a good approach for colonizing a galaxy on the surface of things but in practice you probably wanna either sense you have a choice when you do with these things so have you embraced AI or not and if you haven't embraced AI because you've desires too dangerous then you go with the stupidest pokes you possibly can because you don't want them getting smart and coming home for a visit and if you have kind of been based AI you feel safe using us then you send the smallest post you possibly can and if you sending out the dumb kind it needs to have some kind of mechanism where it's not gonna touch planets that you know you don't have life on them otherwise that's an act of war whether or not you happen to think that's that's some ethical or not for the aliens might have no problem with exterminating new species ethically but they won't want to do it because they don't know what they're gonna run into they know they exist and they're kind of playing that they might bump into something else and they bump into something else it might be something old or nasty or or more altruistic they are and you know you don't want to send out your own conversation fleets and getting all model coming by to say hey you know you just killed off onto our civilization you know and we come back to return the favor so your baseball poyo and finally impose either gonna be really simplistic always be very advanced and in this context very advanced means at least human level intelligence and that case it's just going to make its presence known in the way that it decides is going to least shock us it's going to study us it knows way more about us and we do and in most force contact scenarios it's either gonna be you know you're not gonna bump into each other on accent that's possible but very improbable the idea is just two spaceships wandering into each other very unlikely either you're coming across to civilization less advanced than you in which case you're gonna take the time to learn everything about them before you say hi or they are coming to cost you flipped around they're going to learn about you forced or you looking something that's dead or something that's so far where you basically just pick you up the existence by their waste energy and random noise or beacons they put out to say hello so you know those very far distant ones they're like be an ignorant facto but if I want to communicate with civilizations very far away from me that I don't know and can't realistically talk to any kind of sane timeline I would be saying in the Rosetta Stone over and over again and the most unambiguous bay if possible if my goal is to say hello if not I'm gonna pick them up by their waste heat now the thing about the speaking about fundament purpose is that there are a number of terrifying scenarios where such an idea could go horribly wrong to the point that it might be banned in the Milky Way if you sent out of on women probe that's when you see the alien civilization because they destroy your probes so that it doesn't go and turn the entire galaxy into paper clips the infamous paperclip maker but there's another problem with it too malicious fun lineman probes because if you're sending something out that's autonomous and electronic it's going to get hit by cosmic rays and it's gonna be subject to data corruption but every so often that data corruption might be a good thing and that evolution of sorts might be able to occur now a lot of people are gonna say Oh that'll never happen but it did happen with the one example of von Neumann machines that we have which is life on Earth do you think insane von Neumann probes wandering the galaxy doing whatever they want to do is a possibility no and for a couple of reasons it's a very vital a GU is one of those few doomsday scenarios that that could hit us and not replace us I said if you just get cured off by Skynet you haven't saw the for me paradox because now there's just Skynet same as Homo sapiens Neanderthals or Homo erectus and so forth the problem with Gregg you of course is it's stupid but then again so was the green goo that got the planet the first place all those nothing were placed to doing the oxygen Holocaust they were stupid too they're not any more gray goo could mutate if it's accidental the thing is about an engineered probe we were messing around this stuff you're going to think about mutation we do not randomly evolve all machines we build them you can create processes that are so unlikely to produce a mutation even under radiation that the odds would happen even once in the entire course the universe is basically zero you know so having two things that just randomly cost Connect exchange data on how to do a template you might say these probes can only replicate if they lock in place with 20 other probes compare data and 19 out of 20 them with the exact same data for a given stream and if it's less than say 17 out of 20 they all just self-destruct or similar but and you've got things like check some things we have ways that we check data and prevent corruption nowadays and that's kind of you prevent that happy on accident in terms of mutation as they all fly out there to colonize things so that is a doable option you know you can't stop mutation a coin but you can stop mutation from spreading as a wall on the other hand you don't have to worry so much about maybe people saying these things out and being destroyed by enemy fleets because you'd probably shoot on them yourself you know somebody says they're gonna send a probe out you're probably gonna shoot it down before it leaves because they're putting you at potential risk not just from you know what if this probe avail shows up on an aliens doorstep and piss them off but because they've sent out a mass of colonization fleet as a war by doing that and that's Shane the entire us the galaxies are from you in possibly from them to because it's that much recklessly deployed and you can always kill anybody else's probes even if you're not using them yourself because they had to December 8 I can send a probe out that can accelerate way faster on B way smaller than a man-made ship would be but as soon as the max same maximum speed who wants to supplement it has it's using the same power drive it has to spend a lot of its fuel to slow down you know cuz a probe with that a PO can't crash into a planet at the speed of light and the star replicating it would be destroyed it I don't care what you make it out of so they send that thing out there has a slowdown but reach this destination to start spawning you on the other hand can send a probe out behind it that can burn all of its fuel just to catch up nothing in hid and all has to do is give it a love tap and it's destroyed and it doesn't have to be as big as their Powe enters and be as sophisticated as their probe because our job is to chase after taking hit you know and that's kind of one way you can prevent one of those space races the other thing is unless you have really unified solar system that's you know doing this civilization that's completely unifies or which is in my pian probably not too likely no one's gonna let you play around with you know secretly manufacturing vast amounts of nanotechnology and self-advocating machines without oversight because that effectively is an act of war and yeah they can go Connor has the galaxy but the people who did the colonize yeah publicly give themselves nuked back home nobody wants you playing out that technology that close to home because all these things are effectively weapons you know if you have a spaceship it's a weapon and they don't know if you're building base spaceships to colonize the galaxy or missiles to hit their planets because they are the same thing so if they see you doing that or they see trying to be you know manufacturing secret and there's no self in space they're going to demand oversight and what she was all gain that going on people to say well how does this probe deal with you know bumpy into an intelligent alien race and they say oh we don't have that modern out we don't have that you know sufficient be controlled we don't know for sure how it walk you know we only have a basic plan they're not gonna let you launch that because that thing could come back to bite you you know it comes across some alien race eventually that's gonna take that personally you know and that's just not something you want to do to get out slight head start on colonization when no one's gonna let you keep that headstone anyway now we're getting into something that's interesting galactic doomsday scenarios so could a solution of the Fermi paradox simply be that civilizations don't interact with each other because they conclude that it's always going to end up in conflict so they just simply say don't talk to the aliens is that viable because one can envision that if someone sends out von Neumann probes and it's it's you know take the other civilization concludes that this is a weapon then that civilization could do things like conceivably build a Dyson nickel Dyson beam and it just completely emaciated galaxies with this giant Death Star which is way bigger than Star Wars is Death Star and way more powerful and you know fairly straightforward to build if you can figure out how to engineer it so wouldn't you think that maybe maybe everybody just avoids the great galactic arms race by just not talking to each other viable or not sounds valve on the surface but then there's always that issue the you know unless you're actually willing to shoot down your own colony ships which I don't like me people would I'll shoot down your own trade ships or it's a high-tech cultural it's it respects curiosity it pretty much has to it's all these guys behave anthropology departments all they were gonna have history departments and they're gonna watch it you know talk to each other now you might say here's a buffer zone we do not call eyes within a hundred light-years of any planet that's got you know more than algae on it period right and we do not Kona has been 100 light years or in your own colonies you're gonna have people who break that rule to some degree and you're gonna have to have some method of dealing with that that doesn't involve blowing that planet up all the people on it you don't want somebody sending huge fleets in to go deal with the problem you know so you got a place up your own and all that kind of points to having a diplomatic structure in place and again these are all have going to be evolved from cultures that have diplomacy because they are all going to be social cultures they might be much more antagonistic than us so much less antagonistic must be they're going to be used to talking about problems and arbitrating and because they have evolved con that same pathway we did and I just don't see a way they did say no communication all now I don't think most alien civilizations would really watch chat with each other too much proportionally yeah you're not gonna go on vacations ago shake their hands they are but there are academics who study that they they really hold universities devoted to you know an alien civilization exists if we find one you know they're going to be busy with that they're gonna watch them and get questions and vice versa so there will be in exchange of information not and then they start to talk to all their dato colonies and I don't see anybody I just can't see life being so common that no one's gonna colonize any other star systems so there has been a case like that I think that says this space is yours do with as you please because from a realistic standpoint that's gonna happen anyway how do you negotiate multi-thousand yalong treaties because that's how long that has last just consigned there has to be a very solid logic to why you're doing each individual rule and there's not a lot of logic saying stick to your own planet and only on Planet or your own solar system period because they're gonna be stores near value that nothing could be able realistically evolve on in the first place like a supergiant I got supergiant asks me how to do something about it it's gonna blow up otherwise they say well we're gonna go colorize that install if that no one's nothing's evolving around there yeah we have no choice but do something with anyway and now it's almost we had to invest all that energy to take anything apart or moving it Souls who's likely create a treaty that bans that it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense so you just expect them to want to use their own space up and big buffer zones are possible but I can't imagine anybody having buffer zones that were bigger than their own total territory or the envisioned total territory so if you got a you know a million species in the galaxy current or upcoming as you know but you look at these players to say well they might have life than 50 million years is in space whatever you get a million of those then that's a hundred billion stars and that's that's you know a hundred thousand a piece and then I can't see them seen well you only get ten of those of this hundred thousand they'll be more like well no you got above a space of like ten percent around you so you should have some civilizations on the other side who took their you know hundred thousand solar systems and colonize the ninety percent of them they were allowed to and so I just really make sense that they that they wouldn't want to talk to each other too much in the way that we talked to neighboring nations go visit them yes the idea that they don't talk at all and they don't expand it all to avoid conflict I can't see that one happening so essentially they're you you couldn't stop the scenario if it occurred but at the same time it may be so it may be the case that the galaxy is just so vast that nobody needs to go to war with each other because there's no territory Wars because of all those I should just never expand enough to meet each other on that kind of a level which is why we don't see a giant galaxy war going on but my last question for you is what I find to be the most terrifying scenario of the Fermi paradox that there is a machine civilization and you know there's some some astronomers will then study say you know it's probably more likely that if we ever find something it's going to be a transmission from a machine rather than a biological being and we ourselves are moving towards you know some kind of existence of merging with our machines at least if not eventually becoming though but isn't it terrifying that there could be a machine civilization out there just simply watching and like the Mass Effect Reapers it occasionally just causes an extinction and that's the solution do you think that's viable do you think that's possible that there could be something out there that's oh sorry nice it's something not nice sure there's a couple of problems with that though and it's up in this case um you can't have a machine civilization because the machine doesn't civilize doesn't do anything it would just tell you about something it doesn't happy biological that's not a good you know it's a false dichotomy if I upload my brain tomorrow assuming there's no weird magic in place that makes me no longer human or sane or lose my soul if I can just upload my brain to a computer I'm still human you know and if it's a machine that thinks and does stuff and does all in creation and growth it's a person it's not a human but it's possible so there's some of the machine me more oh yeah humans a machine in which case we could say we're already a machine civilization but if we're taking an opinion or that that machine is and in that kind of context where it's it's not people then how can I have a civilization you know now ask them being you know the guys sleeping you know Cthulhu style and the dog called mass reports of a mass effect repo style the perm there is it is one way of saying although if you say here's what they all here's what their motivation is you don't have to ask how would they go about pursuing that motivation and if your motivation is to keep the galaxy clear of nasty biological life and then that's a lot more easily accomplished in the first place you sweep through the place every 10 million or so years which is quite a long time to go through a galaxy but nothing on the astronomical timelines you could do that fairly easily every 10 million years you sweep Fiat through and every time you find LJ you do scorch it it's that easy or you take those plants apart so nothing can ever evolving them and you build stuff out of it instead right and if you're just if it's one of those civilizations is trying to wait it out till the end of time and stockpile the resources then they should be stockpiling those resources they shouldn't be letting stars form they should be letting plants form they should be taking those all apart and storing those materials so you have to ask why why are they popping up just to kill off intelligent civilizations because there's no way they missed us for four billion years they saw us when you know the bacterial force formed or oxygen forced from the atmosphere and there's no real reason I can think of why you go and kill off intelligent civilizations specifically is they don't like to kill off Ecology's for some reason unless they get intelligence and even then they should have seen us by now we've been around for a million years as as something clearly detectable as intelligent right if their goal is to keep the galaxy clear such things and they're not stupid which is kind of implied by them being maintian civilization they ought to have that down to a T by now and that would involve sending a probe down to check on each one of those plants and look for those signs of artificial files or other technology shows they've detected and there are many years of poor gene and so we should not be around to to even notice that this is a problem right all existence is the best proof that there's no hostile aliens out there unless they just happen to coincidentally involved about the same time we did and that's astronomically and improbable what a lovely Douglas Adams style solution of the Prairie paradox that the Milky Way is sort of like the Florida galaxy where machines civilizations are sleeping to through loose style and it's just that everybody's asleep on that note we are out of time Isaac as usual it's been a pleasure thanks for having me on John if you're new to event horizon it's subscribe it's free and we upload videos every Thursday plus additional content [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 461,056

Rating: 4.7488604 out of 5

Keywords: Why Intelligent Life in the Universe May Be Hidden, Isaac Arthur, Event Horizon John Michael Godier, Event Horizon, Godier, SETI, Dyson swarms, alien, aliens, alien civilizations, dyson spheres, intelligent life, universe, biosignatures, technosignatures, science, space, fermi paradox, von neumann probes, finding alien civilizations, signal, Hidden aliens, does intelligent alien life exist?, intelligent alien life, alien life, Science and Futurism, Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur

Id: D_EX9FUDv3o

Length: 58min 56sec (3536 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/westward2002]

yikes, another podcast I now am subscribed to

[u/gaylord9000]

I listen to this guy when I'm going to sleep a lot, I think I've listened to almost every episode on his YT. Also John Michael Godier.