The best comparison I've heard about finding signs of alien life in space was a little something like this... Imagine yourself standing on a dock off the shore of the ocean. And you take a bucket and throw it into the water, then pull it back up with a rope that was tied to it. And whatever is pulled up in that bucket is all you have to guess what could be living in the entire ocean.
@@mrbamfo5000 the universe is much much much bigger in scale than a person sitting on a dock aside the Atlantic Ocean. It is just too vast in size....I doubt we will find any evidence of alien life (even at our level of tech) in the next many centuries if ever. The universe is just too big. We will nuke ourselves out of existence eventually anyways. This is the great filter. Once aliens figure out how to split the atom or create a WMD, that's it. We even have a leader who is threatening to use nukes today. or better yet, some research lab creates (develops, combines, etc) a superbug, like they did in the lab in Boston of Covid that is 80% fatal, and it gets released by accident or some terrorist group funds a similar project... And nothing against research labs, but as we know, humans are humans, and no matter how good workers are, we all get lazy, take shortcuts, and shat happens. Or some superbug is released from melting ice sheets that we have no immunity to, and most of us die, setting civilization back 1000's of years.
Well not exactly we can still see the light of stars that were gone long before the light was able to reach us. It makes you feel really small and insignificant. Hardly sonar.
Why would anyone “expect” to see aliens everywhere? The paradox isn’t a paradox at all. More of a major overestimation of our technical ability to detect anything at all at the distances required to assume a paradox in the first place.
@@IlmarBeekman it also makes a lot of (IMO unwarranted) assumptions about aliens accomplishing things that we haven't been able to. From the standpoint of the Fermi Paradox, *we* don't exist!
I love this channel so much. I have trouble sleeping due to depression and ptsd, but listening to discussions like this really helps me to distract my mind from thoughts that would keep me awake otherwise. And on top of that I'm learning something. Thanks to John Michael Godier and everybody else that helps to make Event Horizon as great as it is.
I've discovered that myself! My only problem falling asleep because I don't want to miss anything. So I have to figure out how to determine which videos I've 'watched' while sleeping. I also listen to this and the World Science Foundation programs (there are a ton of them actually). Take care, man. Avoid caffeinated things (or whatever has the same effect) at lease 12 hours before you sleep.
I think Stephen Webb is one of the best guests you have ever had. The breadth of his knowledge, combined his humility with regard to what other scientic disciplines might contribute is beautiful to listen to
But claiming that we are alone takes more fantasy than claiming we are not. Furthermore i think the lack of "seeing" things in space is down to our "aperture threshold" and perhaps the fact that humans only know about 4% of what the universe is made of, and on that basis we have chisled some laws in stone and anything outside those human rules is not accepted at all. Maybe those civilisations are located in those remaining 96% :)
@@JohnnyWednesday ET: I see you are still treating your cats well enough; like we taught the Egyptians... but it seems you guys forgot that you can plant cats to make kitten trees-- the growth and blossoming of these kittens will cure your ailing atmosphere, and the fruits grown around the kitten trees prolong life. Chinese Person: Wait, that is the secret to immortality? ET: Of course. _what else would you use a cat for?_
One solution: They're waiting to throw us a surprise party. They haven't finished setting up the bar with all the Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters quite yet. The UFO at Roswell couldn't contain their excitement and wanted to spoil the surprise, so the party planners shot it out of the sky.
Something people rarely bring up is that we wouldn’t be able to detect ourselves from any appreciable distance. That combined with the fact that advancing technology may make high energy radio waves obsolete, I think a likely explanation is that we could have neighbors that we just can’t hear yet.
Also and maybe I'm wrong but I doubt radio waves would even be detectable after traveling 100's or 1000's of light years unless they were aimed right at us with a laser. IMO the problem with detecting other life is the crazy distances we have to look for it, even with our technology today if I stood on the moon waving a 50 ft flag nobody could see me from earth.
@@rogerdodger5886 Too far away, and yet not actually that far, really. I can't wait until we start building huge telescopes on the far side of the moon. I'm rather certain that will be enough to find something.
@@caperpaul5935 people regularly talk all the way around the world with just one watt. That's just non line of sight communication for example. We are able to detect the atmospheres of planetary bodies in other solar systems already, any advanced civilization within about 100 light years should know we are here easily, the problem arises that their message takes just as long to get back from wherever they recieved ours. It gets more likely we are detected the longer we broadcast, but of course the answer will take longer to reach is as well. Similar to how fast some galaxies and stars are moving away from each other, we may never reach worthwhile communication. For instance, if we recieved a message from 50 LY away, they wouldn't revieve confirmation for another 50 years, 100 years after they sent their message. And we'd get a response 100 after ours went out. If they are 100 LY away... 200... 300... It basically get pointless unless there is enough information shared in the first message to be worthwhile. There is just no real practicality, and if we detected them tomorrow, it wouldn't even be in our grandchildren's lifetimes that anything we transmit would get a reply back...
Here's one of my solutions: there are dozens of other civilizations around us like you would see in Star Wars. They have trade, traveling, cooperative governments, and all of that good stuff. They also keep exploration going and search for other worlds that harbor upcoming civilizations. When they got to Earth, they found these absolutely absurd, angry, irresponsible fire monkeys that just love breaking shit. So they put out a warning to everyone else in the galactic area for strict radio silence (or possibly planted a bunch of small, signal-obfuscating devices around our solar system) so they can keep an eye on us until they determine if we can be let in on the secret or left in isolation until we all die off. The other (much more serious) solution I consider is that perhaps many of these civilizations/beings operate on much different time scales than we're expecting. That could be in either direction, faster or slower, so that we simply aren't able to notice their presence. It's even possible that there are civilizations that exclusively live close enough to black holes that their communications and technosignatures are either so heavily distorted that we cannot see them or that the pause between signals would last decades or centuries on Earth. In fact, most of the things I consider to be plausible solutions tend to be heavily focused around time and distance rather than biology or filters. Nothing says that other civilizations have to be much older than ours. If multiple civilizations arose within thousands or millions of years relative to us, it's completely possible that the signatures and messages we could detect haven't even have enough time to make it here or vice versa. The problem with all of this is that we have absolutely no idea where to really begin asking the right questions to answer. We don't know how anything really works, not completely at least. We make inferences and educated guesses based on observation and experiments, but it really comes down to not knowing what we don't know. I think it's entirely illogical to conclude that this is the only specific location in space and time where life arose. And even if we knew exactly what, where, when, and how we can find other civilizations, we will always face the reality that most ideas are entirely unfalsifiable. We can't prove that life DOESN'T exist elsewhere just like we can't prove if we are in a simulation or are a Boltzmann brain. I agree that we should absolutely keep looking, but perhaps remaining silent is the best bet rather than sending out messages in the event that other beings are hostile. Then again, I don't have the slightest clue as to what the appropriate course of action is. Maybe it's better to die with clarity than to slowly either away without every asking the question.
There's also the possibility they just don't care. We are not dangerous or scary we are just irrelevant to them because they are far more advanced than us.
@@JS-vn1og Right, but the point of my comment is that the assumption is almost always asserted in that "more advanced" category, which there's no reason to believe is any more likely than being equally or even less advanced than us. That's one way I think could be a huge part of why we don't see aliens or technosignatures. The other (as stated above) main point would simply be the distances and time scales. Besides, any alien life that is more than 150 light years away would have virtually no idea that we're even here. At that distance, they would be currently viewing the Earth as it was in 1872.we won't really show up on their radar for a while. They could see bio-signatures from our atmosphere, and likely some chemicals as a sign of non-geological processes. The exact same scenario could explain the Great Silence. For all we know, there could be some factor that disallowed the occurrence of biological activity or life until 5 billion years ago- around the same time our planet was formed. We could easily be in a universe where life was only just allowed to begin and everyone is on an even playing field.
I would just like to thank JMG and the makers behind the scenes guests ect this show has helped me though alot of bad times happening in my life just like others and the calming voice of JMG just really helps me into a peaceful sleep without thinking of everything else going on just want to thank the show and tell others if your going through troubles your not the only one speak to someone anyone as it lightens the load peace to all
Very well said! I was in the hospital last year for a couple of weeks in extreme pain, and I listened to every episode of JMG multiple times and it helped a lot to get my mind off the anxiety and pain for sure
@@johnfyten3392 I understand fully it's like someone reading directly to you in the darkest moments in you life I'm glad he helped you as much as me politics and religion aside JMG I feel just wants to help the Betterment humankind and his contant and the way he delivers it is a service to everyone ❤️
Officially my favorite guest. I love his balance between hope and cynicism. My feeling is the human species has become lazy and impatient. Profit over progress has been the norm for too long now, and it is slowly killing us. This problem is compounded by that profit being is in too few and undeserving hands. If we fail, we deserve that failure for being astoundingly short-sighted. I hope we last long enough to have another conversation with Dr. Webb. Thanks.
I think the one Fermi solution that seems to fit the best for me is simply we're early. When you think about how elements above Iron (Fe) are created, it take a large amount of time to build up those heavier than Fe elements. The reason why Fe is so important is Fe has the highest binding energy per nucleon so you can create heavier elements without a large input of energy. Our solar system got a good amount heavy elements due to the molecular cloud that created out solar system got seeded with heavy elements due to a kilonova or two occurring.
I ve always thought the same. In movies and fiction stories, there is always talk about very ancient species or civilization in the universe, that left artefacts or legends to all those newer civs. In star wars, star trek, warhammer 40k, lords of the rings, .. anything .. there is always somewhere a race or specie that is ancient .. Those ancients, are maybe the few intelligent specie (like us) that exist at this point in the universe. And in a couple of billions of years, maybe a trillion years, more sentient/intelligent beings will present in our universe ... while we ll be extinct since long.
@@nidhogg6344 I think that's a fair point. In all these scenarios and sci-fi works, the aliens are usualy older, and more advanced than us. But we could be the advanced ones. Which means a scenario where, if we want to see the aliens, they would most likely not be the ones who would visit us - we will have to be the ones who visit them.
Okay, let's assume only 1% of space is viable. These are still immense seemingly "silent" areas, millions of stars and solar systems. I don't really see it as an answer to the Fermi Paradox when it simply creates an identical albeit smaller paradox still exists.
I don’t think this is accurate. Our solar system is a very new one compared to the average of the rest of the universe. Statistically it is also true that most change (i.e. possibility of life) happens at higher entropy (the past) rather than lower entropy. Life is basically entropy trying to maintain its existence in a decreasing entropy environment.
I find the idea that we're alone in the universe to be extremely unsettling not because of any grand philosophical implications, but because of the human behaviors that would be likely to lead to. We have a long tradition of believing that we are the pinnacle of creation, that we are special and therefore entitled. And that sense of entitlement has led to some pretty terrible things. We are only just starting to take seriously the idea that we should care about the welfare of those outside our social in groups, that we should care about non-humans, if we drive species to extinction, if we destroy entire ecosystems. Why would a society value empathy if it adopted the belief that there is no one to have empathy with?
@Event Horizon I have another question and ultimately the solution to the Fermi paradox . Question - Do we know of anything in nature or the (known)universe that is completely and utterly unique(besides "intelligent" life)? As far as I know, everything in existence can be extrapolated to a spectrum, including intelligence. Universe tends to repeat patterns with infinite amount of variations and you can witness it all around you in nature. I think all the animals are on the spectrum of intelligence and since we dont know of any higher intelligent life forms, we assume we might be the only ones(the TOP G-s). Another problem for me - humans tend to assume they are unique and intelligent(God complex, bias). Relative to what? Relative to the existence of biological life forms on this 1 single planet(amongst trillions out there). We might be perceived as common and stupid like ants to another advanced civilisation. Can ants even comprehend the existence of human-like intelligence? No? So, why would we assume, we can comprehend or detect advanced intelligent life-forms(especially on such vast distances)? We have detected how many of the exoplanets in the universe? Around 7000, in the past few decades(a nanosecond relative to universe time scales)? From hundreds of trillions(100 000 000 000 000) of possible planets? ...And we are stupid enough to already question whether we are alone and why we havent seen them? Isnt it a stupid questions regarding the probability of finding life on these distances and time scales? The questions that The Fermi Paradox assumes, proves we are dumb and therefore there must be something smarter than us on the spectrum of intelligence! - THE QUESTION OF FERMI PARADOX IS THE SOLUTION. We havent seen them, because we are simply too dumb to see them at the moment. We are the ants on the meadow of the vast universe. In my mind, there is absolutely no doubt about the existence of another tehcnologically avanced intelligent life-form somewhere in the universe and probably in this very Galaxy. Is it teeming with complex life? Probably. Is it full of intelligent life? Probably not. Are we alone? Absolutely not.
It still doesnt answer the paradox. Intelligence is a spectrum, so while a hyper evolved and intelligent species may be invisible to us. Why can we not see different species that are say 2 or 3 times more intelligent than us, and have had millions of years extra to develop technology. For illustrative purposes, lets say there are 200 species that meet your description. We should be able to see hundreds more that are "dumber". The galaxy is so large there should be lots of variation
It's that time of the week again!Stephen Webb part 2 was the first event horizon I saw during lockdown and I fell in love with the show and the format instantly. I havn't been able to comment for a while as I've been watching via Xbox. This is hands down the best show I know of, I've learnt so much and love returning to older videos to see what I've missed. Keep up the amazing work guys, it's only getting better ❤️ Now it's time to fire up the bong and fall into... The event horizon 👽
@56:45 “shouldn’t we not act as if we are alone?” Awesome philosophical question from the great scientist whom seeks the insight of a philosopher! This entire video felt like an epic discussion at the edge of Fermi Paradox thought. Love this channel!
Quaint, but Incorrect. The only thing that matters *in practice* is the projected conversion of irreplaceable and quite limited planetary resources into imaginary paper tokens in the next quarter. Such is the hijacking of reward mechanisms selected over millions of years in the natural environment.
@@appearance8932the imaginary tokens reflect and keeo track of your productivity in our civilisation. Not perfect, but they represent productivity which is not arbitrary or useless
I devoured the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu--in it, a malicious/grabby civilization caught wind of us and warned us they'd be here in 400 years. We had four hundred years to try to figure out what to do to prepare, but our nature was to fail to coordinate our efforts or even to keep our own first contact knowledge & directive fresh enough in our memories to get it together in time. Not that we could have done anything if we had. Such a great concept.
Can you do an episode on the recent Nobel prize awarded for the quantum entanglement experiment? It seems it was recently proved that particle interactions are not locally real. My mind has been blown.
@@dimwillow7113 PBS Space Time has a new video on the topic. Although the whole point is moot if we stop pretending that people are classical objects and simply include the experiment's observers in the wave function. (Thank you Hugh Everett) It's excruciating to watch these elaborate contrivances, just to explain wave function collapse, when there's no reason it should collapse at all!
@@7heHorror Everett is a proponent of Multiverse hypothesis and if anything is contrived it is that nonsense. It is the most contrived interpretation I can personally think of when it comes to QM. You said there is no reason it should collapse at all, why not? Why shouldn't an observer "wave" interacting with the particle wave trigger a disturbance of the delicate balance needed to maintain a superposition. Look at sound waves for instance, If I reflect a soundwave off a wall and have it come back with the distance being an integer multiple of the source frequency we get a Classical Superposition of the soundwave in the form of a Standing wave. Now, This is very sensitive to frequency and distance so if I were to say, introduce a measuring device to measure the frequency or momentum of the wave the result is destruction of the standing wave. This is demonstrated MUCH better using Faraday waves in a Cymatic setup. Once a patch of Faraday waves forms, try sticking something else into the water and see what happens. Faraday waves are an almost perfect Analog to various effects we see in Quantum mechanics and the only reason it is not perfect is because we do not really have access to Inviscid fluids as the math clearly demonstrates a 1-1 analogy between Quantum and Classical Mechanics. Everett, and all other interpretations for that matter, just seem hellbent on removing people from the Universe instead of accepting we are simply tiny clumps of Faraday waves in a giant ass pool with the entire Universe effecting the entire Universe. Entanglement gives us a glimpse of what is likely the whole of underlaying reality and decoherence is not really anything of the sorts but instead us simply losing track of the entangled states due to overwhelming complexity that develops quickly when you attempt to map every particles state against every other particles state. TLDL: Many Worlds hypothesis is unscientific garbage and the creator should be ashamed of himself for ever even suggesting such a thing.
@@7heHorror Yes, collapse is just one way to describe it, it is not necessary. The big result is that non-locality is true. One bit of information can be in two containers at once.
I've always been an atheist. So if it ever is found that Earth is the only planet in all the universe to harbor life in any form, that revelation would shake me to the core. At what point is it safe to assume that some sort of God, or deity, or higher power hand-selected Earth to make of it what it is? At what point in finding ourselves to be completely alone in all the universe are we also proving the existence of "God"? This is what disturbs me most deeply about the Fermi paradox. The never-ending list of perfect conditions necessary for the emergence of life being found on only one planet in all the universe goes far beyond circumstance. It would have to be the work of a divine hand. It disturbs me to think about it because it alters everything I know about life, our world, and my own belief system. It would be very jarring, and I think it would cause some real panic.
What if there are vast differences between galaxies, with respect to whether or not they have the right conditions for hosting and generating life? The solution to the Fermi paradox would be that perhaps the Milky Way Galaxy is one of the 'have nots' in this respect.
Gripping discussion. Brilliant, thank you so much! Deuteronomy 1:10 'The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.'
Terrific episode! I love the question itself and I really enjoyed Dr. Webb's intelligent thought on the matter. One random thought I had that's probably already on the Fermi Paradox list: maybe civilizations get out of the galaxy as soon as they can. We seem to be destined to be a lonely group of galaxies in the darkness due to Dark Energy. Maybe they realize this and travel to the biggest local cluster. Just a random thought.
If our star we call Sun give us life = atleast one in our Milky Way, why so many stars in other Galaxies? What do they provide? We may not be alone. Universe is just too big and more challenging is lack of applicable technology which can move higher than speed of light between stars and Galaxies.
For me, the Xenomorph from Alien is the most terrifying sci-fi extraterrestrial and probably the most believable. The "facehugger" part of it's biology perhaps the most contrived aspect of the lifeform, but everything else is something that is definitely conceivable as a path evolution could take in making a really fit creature in the evolutionary sense. Great episode again John! Thanks for your work.
but senseless violence doesn't necessarily *fit-in very well in terms of biological evolution at all. 🤔 nothing the beasts does makes any sort of sense 🤣 *that's how darwin meant the "survival of the fittest", but many people came to believe it's about fit-ness around "strength" and agression, for some odd rea$on. Huge misunderstanding.
@@aerobique Yeah, Xenomorphs are spooky, but something like Tyranids solves the "life being out there" and the "why we don't see life out there" all in one.
A fascinating discussion 👍🏽 We will be alone until the day we are not! Perhaps THEY are already here, observing, waiting patiently until we evolve past waging war.
There is a very good documentary about the statistical improbability that life would arise through natural events. The probability is like one in a number that contains zeroes that go to the moon and back 1000 times. It's like inconceivable numbers. The kind of numbers that would require an infinite universe to achieve. This science is really fascinating and the documentary is worth a watch. People who say there has to be other life out there should watch because it changed how I see this question.
Thanks John. I love the fermi paradox and Stephen Webb is an excellent guest. I loved every second of it. All else I want this year is another collaboration with Isaac Arthur 😍
One thing worth bearing in mind is that while we're so busy looking for a civilization out there similar to ours, we might give some serious thought to that our own civilization is on the rocks bigtime and is in fact highly vulnerable to going poof any day now for any number of reasons. We can speculate all we want about "We made it, so why didn't anyone else?", but the truth is we haven't made it _anywhere_ just yet. A handful of probes and a smattering of radio signals over the course of a meager 100 years amounts to absolutely nothing but a flicker on cosmic timescales if it's all we manage to do. A civilization watching us would easily miss us entirely. Maybe the great filter is just absolute for any number of reasons.
Another riveting interview and discussion. The guest believes that we are alone in the universe yet I still leave the discussion with optimism that we are not alone. There is a hell of a lot of organised mass and energy out there that is dynamically moving and transforming within space-time just for us puny humans to be aware of - we must have company somewhere sometime.
Y must we?? Maybe we are not alone but due too distance time nature and tech even we won’t be able to find it kniw otherwise bcuz of things we do not yet understand or never can understand… so it’s unknown till known
@@ishikawa1338 The human species is on a train heading for the cliff's edge Mr Kawasaki. We are not at the top of the life tree as some sort of elite intellectual Apex predator. The Human species has become a pan-parasitic life form on earth threatening many of its systems and behaving in a self destructive manner. And we all know how Nature deals with parasitic infections dont we Mr Itchyback?
I very much appreciate the quality of this discourse and the depth of thought being shared. One point which I wish discussions of the Fermi Paradox would touch upon more often, however, has to do with the certainty (or not) with which the particpants totally reject the voluminous bodies of reportage and evidence regarding ET contact which in fact are readily available for cataloging and study. Given that even our slow-moving and secrecy-prone government now admits to having had long-term programs of study and that it is changing its policies regarding sightings by the military, we might reasonably want our discussions of the FP to include at least some passing, contextualizing reference to both credible testimony and other evidence (radar in particular) which support the possibilty that somebody or something has been making itself known. Charging forth as though the Nimitz/tick-tac episode(s) or the Skin Walker Ranch study or the Phoenix Lights incident(s), for example, just never happened strikes me as scientifically questionable. I'm saying this as a practicing, career-long scientist. Throwing out or consciously ignoring "anomalies" absolutely can put one on the wrong path - I've done it myself and had to wipe the egg off of my face later. Forgetting to stop and periodically re-examine one's assumptions going into a given scientific investigation or analysis similarly tempts fate.
If faster than light travel is really hard to figure out while nuclear weapons are relatively easy, I think it might just be the norm for civilizations to destroy themselves before ever getting close enough to see any hi.
I love when he talks about UAP and how we shouldn't pre-judge and then immediately pre judges and says probably nothing to it. The Fermi Paradox will never be solved if you don't look at all the evidence. Their are 100s of cases going back decades with radar, video, physical, eyewitness, photos all at the same time and instead they'll pick a part each thing individually with unlikely hypothetical.
Yah caught that too. (Keeps talking about the universe, yet there is so much happening in our own atmosphere. Just listening to these Navy pilots…we’re missing so much of what’s going on right off the coast of California. It’s befuddling how much this is ignored. It’s like pissing all over the best eyewitnesses.)
We live in an impossibly wonderful Universe, on the most breathtaking Planet possible. I don't believe we are alone in the Universe and we are certainly not alone on this Planet as we have eachother. It's all beautiful, wonderous and mysterious and the more we discover, the better everything becomes. Stay kind to eachother and look after everything you have.
Actually, it would be very interesting to have followers of various disciplines on at the same time giving their takes on a specific area or problem. Have you done this before and, if not, would you consider doing that? To hear a physicist and a philosopher talking about space and time (among other things) would be fascinating.
It's called "vanishingly small sample size". It's like concluding that the ocean is entirely barren because you waded twenty feet out into the shallows and didn't feel anything brush against you.
My take on Fermi paradox: aliens realize that optimization of energy usage is better than increasing energy generation, leading to massive civilizations with unrecognizable energy signatures on a cosmic scale. For example, we currently need a complex and delicate environment to survive because of our biologic bodies. In order to move anywhere outside of Earth, we need terraforming or some other large-scale environment-altering technology to support our bags of flesh. However, at some point we might find a way to box our minds in some mechanical objects (brains in vats or a mind uploaded to a quantum computer or whatever). What this will do is that we will no longer need such a massive alteration of our environment to live there. Communities that currently consume swaths of land and gigajoules of energy to satisfy their food, water, housing, communication and other needs could be reduced to wardrobe-sized machines with a bunch of people "uploaded", living lives with essentially zero energy loss outside of the system, on a single solar battery somewhere in orbit. If a civilization gets to that point, how would we detect it? Perhaps there's tons of them out there, they just don't waste energy on having it radiated needlessly into outer space, so we can't see them. Note that some of the optimization will absolutely have to happen, because with our use of medicine we've essentially turned off natural selection. Genetic disorders that used to kill individuals, not letting them produce offspring and thus not propagating through populations are now spreading like wildfire, because we have medicine to prevent them from being lethal (e.g. some types of diabetes). Our genome will eventually degrade to junk (unless we return to barbaric methods like killing/castrating genetically-imperfect individuals, which I think nobody would agree with in the 21st century), so we need some other form of keeping our genetic health in check, for example in the form of genetic engineering, cybernetics or the things mentioned earlier.
Very good program tonight with Dr. Webb. I found your line of questioning toward the end of the segment regarding the lastest information from our military on UAPs to be refreshing...Stephen had an interesting response suggesting astronomers may not have the best technical set of skills to be the first profession to ask...haha! Well, I'm an aerospace design engineer and I'm not sure I have the right skill set to interpret what the military has documented/recorded...and here's the analog. So would a blacksmith from the say 15th Century, who heated up and melted simple metals such as bronze/copper/iron/silver/gold etc.. be able to discern what a Manufacturing Engineer who was running a large metal powder 3D Printing Machine making parts from powdered Nickel based super alloys such as Inconel or Haynes 230 etc for a Rocket Engines? I think the blacksmith probably would have a general idea that metal was being processed, but the technical details would be lost....the level of the gap between us and our visitors is so radical...it's difficult to comprehend what we are looking at...
I think the blacksmith would understand modern metallurgy and processing far better than most of his contemporaries. Hot working and cold working metal is what he does. Quenching to case harden is what he does. Tell him about mixing nickel with iron to make a superalloy and he'd say "That is so cool!" Some of his contemporaries such as Galileo, da Vinci, Isaac Newton would get it. Czar Peter would say, "You standardized the inch to enable interchangeable parts. Hey! That was my idea, I required Russian inches to be the same as English inches!"
Yes, but the metallurgy is the only portion of Additive Manufacturing Process that the 15th Century Blacksmith would understand...the rest of the laser tech, the robotics mechanisms, the software driven control system, the thermal management technology etc, etc...he would have no idea regarding what was working inside the 3D Printing Machine...
@@theilluminatist4131 But those smiths, millers, shoemakers, and other craftsmen made the whole of the modern technology revolution possible. Thermal management technology? That's what a smith does! I visited the USS Texas a few years ago. The machine shop is still in use! What a machinist does is an extension of what smiths did. Automation, standardization, interchangeable parts, the smith and shoemaker would understand the advantages of these systems. Millers ground grain using water power, they would understand the advantages of inventing steam and internal combustion engines to turn shafts. The smelting of metals from ores developed into modern chemistry. Electricity would look like magic to them, but they would understand that harnessing the power of the thunderbolt is like Promethius showing us the gift of fire.
I heard almost psychological distress in the discussion here, and I feel it myeslf to a degree as I ponder the Fermi Paradox more and more. The thing is we're narrowing in factors that can give an answer, and we still aren't seeing anything (that we can readily perceive of at last) That's part of the problem, though, isn't it? There are sooooo very many factors and what ifs to this. What if life is all arouund us but it's so alien we can't see it? What if FTL is not possible and with the universe being so big, cviilizations just don't bump into each there. I can't think of another question with so many variables that we don't even know how to account for. We cant' say for sure just how alien aliens will be from us, with their motiviations etc. It's staggering, really when you think of all the factors and how they all interplay with each other. I would hope that we can at least resolve it one way or the other definitvely, and sooner rather than later...
The 2 most likely solutions to the Fermi Paradox are: 1. We are alone in the observable universe. Abiogenesis is an extremely rare event, and we are alone in our observable universe, but our universe is just one of an astronomical, or perhaps even infinite number of universes. 2. The Zoo Hypothesis. This is a variation of the Zoo Hypothesis where we might have been visited or observed by extraterrestrials, but they live far far away and not in our observable universe. Why do I believe this? For a couple of reasons. First, an intelligent civilization will likely develop self-replicating artificial intelligence that will quickly spread out first across its home galaxy and then across other galaxies. The fact this hasn't happened to earth or anywhere in our galaxy or other observable galaxies as far as we know is strong evidence that life is extremely rare and that we are alone in our observable universe. Also, we have not detected any techno signatures an advanced alien civilization would have given off before they learned how to mask it, taking into account the fact that we are looking far into the past when we observe other stars and galaxies.
I appreciate your intelligent argument, though I disagree with the self-replicating artificial intelligence likelihood. Non-human Intelligences are already here, manifested in the UAP Phenomenon. Once you've mastered faster than light travel (and the only thing in the Universe that could is the fabric of spacetime), electromagnetic spectrum communication is obsolete.
@@FMDD168 I don't think I follow... Just because you no longer have to communicate using electromagnetism, why wouldn't you harvest sources of matter and energy? It could be that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would eventually find other sources of matter and energy that don't require macro objects like stars, but that would likely be much longer after they started harvesting stars/planets etc. Since we can see far into the past when looking at other galaxies, the fact we haven't seen this on mass scale, is evidence that we are alone (at least as far as intelligent life goes) in our observable universe. There are some more far fetched scenarios such as advanced alien civilizations setting up some kind of masking or cloaking mechanism, to alter or block out the light signatures and rays of these other galaxies, but that's highly speculative and fails the scientific test of falsifiability.
Love it! So many good ideas to think about further. I have always wondered why we are always looking for certain conditions when looking for life. If the life we find is very different from that on earth, it might not need the conditions that we needed for life on earth to develop. But I guess we can only look for what we know already. I still think that there are ways for intelligence to exist that we don’t know yet. Hopefully we will know it when we experience it.
In the grand scheme of importance, life comes before intelligence, so life is fundamental, and higher intelligence is conditional being a epiphenomena of life in an advanced stage of development. meanwhile, cleverness is the worst kind of stupidity.
I would be disappointed if we are alone, but on the Plus side, it would all be ours, we can claim everything and populate wherever our technology can take us.
It^s been a while since I listened to this podcast...not happy to return and the Ad is the first thing I heard. Ok, have ads, but in the right moments please.
On our dude's most unsettling solution, I consider the possibility of us being alone uplifting. In all the cosmos, our arrival happened and no one else? It's an absolute miracle that makes me want to endeavor and improve.
I love that he included science fiction writers and philosophers as groups that could be included in discovering new solutions. I would add that *some* spiritual leaders and scientists who research the nature of the human mind (the positive side of spirituality rather than the superstitious, like meditation and other spiritual practices that have measurable positive impact on our brain and biology) could be included as well. The US government has researched psi phenomenon and other unexplained aspects of our species that could be overlooked methods of communication or abilities our species have yet to unlock within ourselves (I’m a science fiction/fantasy/supernatural writer myself, so this is the kind of weirdness I think about. Lol!). Rather than have areas of studies separated and some seen as more valid than others, have a kind of multidisciplinary panel full of scientists, spiritualists and those of us who are artists/writers where the latest scientific research as well as philosophical and hypothetical thoughts can be shared in an open environment without judgement. The “without judgement” part would be difficult in our culture and species, as we tend to like to mock and judge and create in/out groups. We have to constantly fight and overcome our inherent tribalistic tendencies as a species, and we still struggle with it not only in academia, but socially with issues such as racism or political bias.
I hope we find a solution to this conundrum sometime within my lifetime. I'm 43 now....but running out of time. I just want to know if something, someone is out there among the stars with us.
If the universe is empty, eventually, we'll go on to seed it. Even if it's only sending out small ships containing the seeds of life. It it will absolutely be something we'll look to do, given more time to advance.
There are a lot of sightings of alien spacecrafts (even i saw one with my friend). That is not the question if there are another intelligent life other than us around universe but why are they hiding themselves from us?
Think of how uneducated the average person is. Half of everyone is less intelligent than that average person. We simply are nowhere near interesting enough. We are like a crying baby, announcing ourselves with electromagnetic waves throughout an 80 lightyear radius sphere.
Because comparatively we are barbaric. If we discovered a planet of chimpanzee like animals, besides basic curiosity and investigation would we be rushing to talk to them? We have for starters wars, religion, many many people on this planet everyday die from lack of basic needs like lack of food and basic medical care, we are horrifically damaging the planet environmentally etc. Personally I think we are barely 2 steps out of the primordial cave’s developmentally wise and overall just really not that great of a species at this point.
One of my three preferred solutions that never fails to get a reaction is the "Nothing is Natural" idea. Wherein we are so ignorant of the natural world that we assume the universe isn't an artificial superstructure. Maybe that means we were intentional, maybe that means it was recently abandoned, maybe that means we were unplanned. The whole universe just being a massive structure where all observed processes are a device working as intended, maybe even directed. Similar to Simulation Hypothesis, but with a sense of scale I find gets overlooked.
All throughout the ages we’ve wondered what the moon is. Turns out it’s just another 3D landscape like Earth. It’s obvious that all lifeforms’ purpose is to move beyond their planet. And after that, to leave the universe for what lies beyond. Black holes are a dead giveaway. Don’t you think that if there was some form of intelligent “creator” outside of time and space, that was above all else, that they would be extremely lonely? What better thing to do than setup a Darwinian playground experiment and wait a few minutes (100 billion years for us) for something to evolve and pop their head out of the universe and say “hello” to it. The universe may simply be a creators attempt to find a friend
I've always thought the idea that we are it to be the most terrifying. If that's the case, we as the only technological beings are the universes stewards of life.
The one solution that bothers me the most is a version of the simulation hypothesis. In this version we are actually something like a headstone for an already dead species. The simulation is running for any others that come along to witness. In this simulation we have the illusion of free will because the original humans had it, but now we are following a preset path according to history.
You got my sub, these are great questions being asked and I'm glad I've found this channel to understand more about the meaning of existence and the universe itself
wouldn’t it be ironic if the solution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe started at the same moment everywhere, and the reason we haven’t seen signs of other life is because they’re currently at the same technological level as us?
I have never heard the thought, nor considered the idea, that intelligence plus opposable thumbs could be a dangerous combination. I laughed when it was said, but the idea is not so crazy. Fantastic conversation
What an amazing episode. There is a question I’d like to ask about black holes. If a black hole was left to itself to loose mass due to Hawkins radiation, would it eventually loose mass and stop being a black hole and if so what elements might be created or left over from it. And if not then would the black hole just get infinitely smaller until it’s nothing?
For me the worst thing that could be happening is that they are all out there but they are not saying anything for reason, a sinister reason. The other thing I've always wondered is as big as the listening arrays on our planet are I'm just wondering why we don't go further out, make a much larger ear, maybe be able to get a better stereo effect to narrow down sounds that are interesting. After all, with everything rotating around everywhere I have a hard time thinking we would pick up anything unless an object is broadcasting everywhere all the time, loudly.
I don't really understand the principal of extra terrestrial predation? Why would life forms so dissimilar have any interest in one another? I don't believe it would ever be possible for any biological life form to move very far from its home. We are far to specialised and fragile. Any roving ET is more likely to be a machine intelligence that only requires basic quantum energy source.
Why does no one consider that the further we look out, the further back in time we see. If we could observe as things are "now", we may see alot more. I think we need third generation stars for life, therefore we are at the beginning....
I experienced the phenomena of being completely alone and all of reality being my personal made up delusion on a mushroom trip once... yeah that was terrifying, and at the same time I still can't disprove that it was real and that that's not what's really happening right now lol....
Lynn Margulis had books you should read on the jump from simple cell to eukaryotic cells (complex life). Being a biochemist, my money is on abiogenesis being a bigger hurdle than getting eukaryotes. High energy phosphate bonds are not just for RNA, you need temporary energy storage to have coupled reactions (a step in abiogenesis that likely preceded self-replication of nucleic acids). Organelles (the descendants of the ingested cells) have slightly different genetic codes for protein synthesis), more than one event likely.
I find no fear in this thought. Just fascination, if we ARE alone...how utterly fascinating is that? Why and how is that? And if we arent... same thought. Im not sure why its occured this way for me over the years, but fear is sort of thrown out the window with what id feel. I think all results are beautiful and id love to be alive to be part of whatever happens.
Thankyou, interesting discussion. It is fun to play with the Drake equation. It not only suggests how much intelligent life might exist in the galaxy but how nearby it might be. Using realistic numbers it is relatively easy to show even if such life is quite common the chances of finding anything within 2,000 light years is vanishingly small and at such distances they would fall below the threshold of detection with our current technology.
‘…the chances of nucleotides assembling in the right order (RNA) is more than astronomic, it’s an impossibly in our observe able universe…..’ This is one of the most mind-blowing unknowns that is rarely mentioned in popular science. I didn’t know that it’s an impossibility in our universe as we know it. From the way they present it in school it’s easy to get away thinking, we already know pretty much how it could have happened. Far from it, it seems. Thank you!
What a great conversation! You know, if we are alone it's still possible to have conversations with alien life if we create our own aliens by uplifting chimps and octopi and so on. Just leave them alone in their own environment (the hard part) for a couple of hundred years, then make contact and see what they have to say about things.
The "we are alone" one reminds me of how Tommy lee Jones' character in Ad Astra broke when he was at a massive telescope station out by neptune and only found dead worlds...
I can think of nothing more troubling to me, personally, than the idea that in all the universe, it's just us. That disturbs me to a degree I don't think any language could properly express.
The best comparison I've heard about finding signs of alien life in space was a little something like this...
Imagine yourself standing on a dock off the shore of the ocean. And you take a bucket and throw it into the water, then pull it back up with a rope that was tied to it. And whatever is pulled up in that bucket is all you have to guess what could be living in the entire ocean.
With modern day telescopes I think it is more like sonar now. We can now see much farther than the bucket on a rope method.
@@mrbamfo5000 the universe is much much much bigger in scale than a person sitting on a dock aside the Atlantic Ocean. It is just too vast in size....I doubt we will find any evidence of alien life (even at our level of tech) in the next many centuries if ever. The universe is just too big. We will nuke ourselves out of existence eventually anyways. This is the great filter. Once aliens figure out how to split the atom or create a WMD, that's it. We even have a leader who is threatening to use nukes today. or better yet, some research lab creates (develops, combines, etc) a superbug, like they did in the lab in Boston of Covid that is 80% fatal, and it gets released by accident or some terrorist group funds a similar project...
And nothing against research labs, but as we know, humans are humans, and no matter how good workers are, we all get lazy, take shortcuts, and shat happens.
Or some superbug is released from melting ice sheets that we have no immunity to, and most of us die, setting civilization back 1000's of years.
Well not exactly we can still see the light of stars that were gone long before the light was able to reach us. It makes you feel really small and insignificant. Hardly sonar.
@@mrbamfo5000 depends on how big the ocean is.....and how many oceans there are....
We can see almost 10% of the known universe so it would be a huge bucket if that's the case
Why would anyone “expect” to see aliens everywhere? The paradox isn’t a paradox at all. More of a major overestimation of our technical ability to detect anything at all at the distances required to assume a paradox in the first place.
Exactly. They could be passing by fairly close and we'd have no idea.
@@IlmarBeekman it also makes a lot of (IMO unwarranted) assumptions about aliens accomplishing things that we haven't been able to. From the standpoint of the Fermi Paradox, *we* don't exist!
YES! Thank you. The signals would be so weak by the time they reached us they wouldn't be distinguishable from background noise.
I love this channel so much. I have trouble sleeping due to depression and ptsd, but listening to discussions like this really helps me to distract my mind from thoughts that would keep me awake otherwise. And on top of that I'm learning something. Thanks to John Michael Godier and everybody else that helps to make Event Horizon as great as it is.
Really happy to know it helps.
Keep ur head up mate.
Same here I like to listen these conversations as I fall asleep at night.
I've discovered that myself! My only problem falling asleep because I don't want to miss anything. So I have to figure out how to determine which videos I've 'watched' while sleeping. I also listen to this and the World Science Foundation programs (there are a ton of them actually). Take care, man. Avoid caffeinated things (or whatever has the same effect) at lease 12 hours before you sleep.
Love you for this comment💙
.....
I have similar problems.
We'll make it.
I think Stephen Webb is one of the best guests you have ever had. The breadth of his knowledge, combined his humility with regard to what other scientic disciplines might contribute is beautiful to listen to
He is wonderful.
@@EventHorizonShow Who is the main host of this channel.
@@rockoyheadjohn
Can we please have a follow up episode “Most settling solutions to the Fermi paradox”?
Being alone in the universe is unsettling enough. 😊
But claiming that we are alone takes more fantasy than claiming we are not. Furthermore i think the lack of "seeing" things in space is down to our "aperture threshold" and perhaps the fact that humans only know about 4% of what the universe is made of, and on that basis we have chisled some laws in stone and anything outside those human rules is not accepted at all. Maybe those civilisations are located in those remaining 96% :)
"They found our home. They came in their ships. Delicious cake fell from the sky."
This, that would be deeply scary.
@@JohnnyWednesday
ET: I see you are still treating your cats well enough; like we taught the Egyptians... but it seems you guys forgot that you can plant cats to make kitten trees-- the growth and blossoming of these kittens will cure your ailing atmosphere, and the fruits grown around the kitten trees prolong life.
Chinese Person: Wait, that is the secret to immortality?
ET: Of course. _what else would you use a cat for?_
One solution: They're waiting to throw us a surprise party. They haven't finished setting up the bar with all the Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters quite yet. The UFO at Roswell couldn't contain their excitement and wanted to spoil the surprise, so the party planners shot it out of the sky.
Something people rarely bring up is that we wouldn’t be able to detect ourselves from any appreciable distance. That combined with the fact that advancing technology may make high energy radio waves obsolete, I think a likely explanation is that we could have neighbors that we just can’t hear yet.
Sun space n quantum even light transmissions
Also and maybe I'm wrong but I doubt radio waves would even be detectable after traveling 100's or 1000's of light years unless they were aimed right at us with a laser. IMO the problem with detecting other life is the crazy distances we have to look for it, even with our technology today if I stood on the moon waving a 50 ft flag nobody could see me from earth.
Exactly. There could be many civilization as advanced as us or more that are just too far away to have heard us yet or us them.
@@rogerdodger5886 Too far away, and yet not actually that far, really. I can't wait until we start building huge telescopes on the far side of the moon. I'm rather certain that will be enough to find something.
@@caperpaul5935 people regularly talk all the way around the world with just one watt. That's just non line of sight communication for example. We are able to detect the atmospheres of planetary bodies in other solar systems already, any advanced civilization within about 100 light years should know we are here easily, the problem arises that their message takes just as long to get back from wherever they recieved ours. It gets more likely we are detected the longer we broadcast, but of course the answer will take longer to reach is as well. Similar to how fast some galaxies and stars are moving away from each other, we may never reach worthwhile communication. For instance, if we recieved a message from 50 LY away, they wouldn't revieve confirmation for another 50 years, 100 years after they sent their message. And we'd get a response 100 after ours went out. If they are 100 LY away... 200... 300...
It basically get pointless unless there is enough information shared in the first message to be worthwhile. There is just no real practicality, and if we detected them tomorrow, it wouldn't even be in our grandchildren's lifetimes that anything we transmit would get a reply back...
Yay! Thank you for bringing Mr. Webb back! He is one of my favorite guest that you’ve had on in the past.
Here's one of my solutions: there are dozens of other civilizations around us like you would see in Star Wars. They have trade, traveling, cooperative governments, and all of that good stuff. They also keep exploration going and search for other worlds that harbor upcoming civilizations. When they got to Earth, they found these absolutely absurd, angry, irresponsible fire monkeys that just love breaking shit. So they put out a warning to everyone else in the galactic area for strict radio silence (or possibly planted a bunch of small, signal-obfuscating devices around our solar system) so they can keep an eye on us until they determine if we can be let in on the secret or left in isolation until we all die off.
The other (much more serious) solution I consider is that perhaps many of these civilizations/beings operate on much different time scales than we're expecting. That could be in either direction, faster or slower, so that we simply aren't able to notice their presence. It's even possible that there are civilizations that exclusively live close enough to black holes that their communications and technosignatures are either so heavily distorted that we cannot see them or that the pause between signals would last decades or centuries on Earth.
In fact, most of the things I consider to be plausible solutions tend to be heavily focused around time and distance rather than biology or filters. Nothing says that other civilizations have to be much older than ours. If multiple civilizations arose within thousands or millions of years relative to us, it's completely possible that the signatures and messages we could detect haven't even have enough time to make it here or vice versa.
The problem with all of this is that we have absolutely no idea where to really begin asking the right questions to answer. We don't know how anything really works, not completely at least. We make inferences and educated guesses based on observation and experiments, but it really comes down to not knowing what we don't know. I think it's entirely illogical to conclude that this is the only specific location in space and time where life arose. And even if we knew exactly what, where, when, and how we can find other civilizations, we will always face the reality that most ideas are entirely unfalsifiable. We can't prove that life DOESN'T exist elsewhere just like we can't prove if we are in a simulation or are a Boltzmann brain.
I agree that we should absolutely keep looking, but perhaps remaining silent is the best bet rather than sending out messages in the event that other beings are hostile. Then again, I don't have the slightest clue as to what the appropriate course of action is. Maybe it's better to die with clarity than to slowly either away without every asking the question.
Great comment.
There's also the possibility they just don't care. We are not dangerous or scary we are just irrelevant to them because they are far more advanced than us.
@@JS-vn1og Right, but the point of my comment is that the assumption is almost always asserted in that "more advanced" category, which there's no reason to believe is any more likely than being equally or even less advanced than us. That's one way I think could be a huge part of why we don't see aliens or technosignatures. The other (as stated above) main point would simply be the distances and time scales. Besides, any alien life that is more than 150 light years away would have virtually no idea that we're even here. At that distance, they would be currently viewing the Earth as it was in 1872.we won't really show up on their radar for a while. They could see bio-signatures from our atmosphere, and likely some chemicals as a sign of non-geological processes.
The exact same scenario could explain the Great Silence. For all we know, there could be some factor that disallowed the occurrence of biological activity or life until 5 billion years ago- around the same time our planet was formed. We could easily be in a universe where life was only just allowed to begin and everyone is on an even playing field.
You can only open your minds when you recognize how unintelligent you are.
penal planet in a comms interdiction zone
I would just like to thank JMG and the makers behind the scenes guests ect this show has helped me though alot of bad times happening in my life just like others and the calming voice of JMG just really helps me into a peaceful sleep without thinking of everything else going on just want to thank the show and tell others if your going through troubles your not the only one speak to someone anyone as it lightens the load peace to all
Thank you Ryan!
I listen/watch JMG videos multiple times. Once to get the message of the video. And multiple times for rest/relaxation/sleep.
Very well said! I was in the hospital last year for a couple of weeks in extreme pain, and I listened to every episode of JMG multiple times and it helped a lot to get my mind off the anxiety and pain for sure
@@johnfyten3392 I understand fully it's like someone reading directly to you in the darkest moments in you life I'm glad he helped you as much as me politics and religion aside JMG I feel just wants to help the Betterment humankind and his contant and the way he delivers it is a service to everyone ❤️
@@johnfyten3392 ❤️
Excellent guest! You get the feeling he could’ve talked for hours and hours as he’s so passionate about the subject!
I actually disagree with him. He shows a tremendous lack of appreciation of scale
All the solutions are unsettling. The whole thing is disturbing.
Happy Halloween!
The unknown is more scared of you than you are of it
Don't worry, god loves you and there isn't a "space" anyway.
@@aimokoivunen7046 Dumb. You failed basic science. Gtfo of here with your conspiracy nonsense.
@@aimokoivunen7046 what a cop out
Officially my favorite guest. I love his balance between hope and cynicism. My feeling is the human species has become lazy and impatient. Profit over progress has been the norm for too long now, and it is slowly killing us. This problem is compounded by that profit being is in too few and undeserving hands. If we fail, we deserve that failure for being astoundingly short-sighted. I hope we last long enough to have another conversation with Dr. Webb. Thanks.
I think the one Fermi solution that seems to fit the best for me is simply we're early. When you think about how elements above Iron (Fe) are created, it take a large amount of time to build up those heavier than Fe elements. The reason why Fe is so important is Fe has the highest binding energy per nucleon so you can create heavier elements without a large input of energy. Our solar system got a good amount heavy elements due to the molecular cloud that created out solar system got seeded with heavy elements due to a kilonova or two occurring.
I ve always thought the same. In movies and fiction stories, there is always talk about very ancient species or civilization in the universe, that left artefacts or legends to all those newer civs. In star wars, star trek, warhammer 40k, lords of the rings, .. anything .. there is always somewhere a race or specie that is ancient .. Those ancients, are maybe the few intelligent specie (like us) that exist at this point in the universe. And in a couple of billions of years, maybe a trillion years, more sentient/intelligent beings will present in our universe ... while we ll be extinct since long.
@@nidhogg6344 I think that's a fair point. In all these scenarios and sci-fi works, the aliens are usualy older, and more advanced than us. But we could be the advanced ones. Which means a scenario where, if we want to see the aliens, they would most likely not be the ones who would visit us - we will have to be the ones who visit them.
Phosphorus is another big potential "putting the brakes on" item on the arising of biological life.
Okay, let's assume only 1% of space is viable. These are still immense seemingly "silent" areas, millions of stars and solar systems. I don't really see it as an answer to the Fermi Paradox when it simply creates an identical albeit smaller paradox still exists.
I don’t think this is accurate. Our solar system is a very new one compared to the average of the rest of the universe.
Statistically it is also true that most change (i.e. possibility of life) happens at higher entropy (the past) rather than lower entropy. Life is basically entropy trying to maintain its existence in a decreasing entropy environment.
I find the idea that we're alone in the universe to be extremely unsettling not because of any grand philosophical implications, but because of the human behaviors that would be likely to lead to. We have a long tradition of believing that we are the pinnacle of creation, that we are special and therefore entitled. And that sense of entitlement has led to some pretty terrible things. We are only just starting to take seriously the idea that we should care about the welfare of those outside our social in groups, that we should care about non-humans, if we drive species to extinction, if we destroy entire ecosystems. Why would a society value empathy if it adopted the belief that there is no one to have empathy with?
And so humankind shall stay. Alone. Shooting down one or two UAPs that are alien probes and speculating. Why would any alien species make contact?
when John Michael Godier does a Fermi Paradox video, i drop what i am doing and tune in for a treat like no other
Just dont drop glass!
sweeping it up as i listen 😅
So do I.. 👍
Same!
I would’ve risk losing my job for it! 😂
@Event Horizon I have another question and ultimately the solution to the Fermi paradox .
Question - Do we know of anything in nature or the (known)universe that is completely and utterly unique(besides "intelligent" life)?
As far as I know, everything in existence can be extrapolated to a spectrum, including intelligence. Universe tends to repeat patterns with infinite amount of variations and you can witness it all around you in nature. I think all the animals are on the spectrum of intelligence and since we dont know of any higher intelligent life forms, we assume we might be the only ones(the TOP G-s).
Another problem for me - humans tend to assume they are unique and intelligent(God complex, bias). Relative to what? Relative to the existence of biological life forms on this 1 single planet(amongst trillions out there).
We might be perceived as common and stupid like ants to another advanced civilisation. Can ants even comprehend the existence of human-like intelligence? No? So, why would we assume, we can comprehend or detect advanced intelligent life-forms(especially on such vast distances)?
We have detected how many of the exoplanets in the universe? Around 7000, in the past few decades(a nanosecond relative to universe time scales)? From hundreds of trillions(100 000 000 000 000) of possible planets?
...And we are stupid enough to already question whether we are alone and why we havent seen them? Isnt it a stupid questions regarding the probability of finding life on these distances and time scales?
The questions that The Fermi Paradox assumes, proves we are dumb and therefore there must be something smarter than us on the spectrum of intelligence! - THE QUESTION OF FERMI PARADOX IS THE SOLUTION. We havent seen them, because we are simply too dumb to see them at the moment. We are the ants on the meadow of the vast universe.
In my mind, there is absolutely no doubt about the existence of another tehcnologically avanced intelligent life-form somewhere in the universe and probably in this very Galaxy. Is it teeming with complex life? Probably. Is it full of intelligent life? Probably not. Are we alone? Absolutely not.
It still doesnt answer the paradox. Intelligence is a spectrum, so while a hyper evolved and intelligent species may be invisible to us. Why can we not see different species that are say 2 or 3 times more intelligent than us, and have had millions of years extra to develop technology.
For illustrative purposes, lets say there are 200 species that meet your description. We should be able to see hundreds more that are "dumber". The galaxy is so large there should be lots of variation
It's that time of the week again!Stephen Webb part 2 was the first event horizon I saw during lockdown and I fell in love with the show and the format instantly. I havn't been able to comment for a while as I've been watching via Xbox. This is hands down the best show I know of, I've learnt so much and love returning to older videos to see what I've missed. Keep up the amazing work guys, it's only getting better ❤️ Now it's time to fire up the bong and fall into... The event horizon 👽
@56:45 “shouldn’t we not act as if we are alone?” Awesome philosophical question from the great scientist whom seeks the insight of a philosopher! This entire video felt like an epic discussion at the edge of Fermi Paradox thought. Love this channel!
I've been waiting for this drop all day ever since you teased it with that community post. Definitely "stop everything, watch now" material
The Fermi paradox. The most potent question of all because it’s the ultimate question, who are we and what is our position in the universe.
Quaint, but Incorrect.
The only thing that matters *in practice* is the projected conversion of irreplaceable and quite limited planetary resources into imaginary paper tokens in the next quarter.
Such is the hijacking of reward mechanisms selected over millions of years in the natural environment.
@@appearance8932the imaginary tokens reflect and keeo track of your productivity in our civilisation. Not perfect, but they represent productivity which is not arbitrary or useless
John, you ask some of the most fascinating questions. Amazing interview. Thank You!
Thanks for watching Terry!
I devoured the Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu--in it, a malicious/grabby civilization caught wind of us and warned us they'd be here in 400 years. We had four hundred years to try to figure out what to do to prepare, but our nature was to fail to coordinate our efforts or even to keep our own first contact knowledge & directive fresh enough in our memories to get it together in time. Not that we could have done anything if we had. Such a great concept.
Can you do an episode on the recent Nobel prize awarded for the quantum entanglement experiment? It seems it was recently proved that particle interactions are not locally real. My mind has been blown.
We may, it is a tough subject!
That sounds interesting.. can you explain more please for a dumb boo..
@@dimwillow7113 PBS Space Time has a new video on the topic. Although the whole point is moot if we stop pretending that people are classical objects and simply include the experiment's observers in the wave function. (Thank you Hugh Everett) It's excruciating to watch these elaborate contrivances, just to explain wave function collapse, when there's no reason it should collapse at all!
@@7heHorror Everett is a proponent of Multiverse hypothesis and if anything is contrived it is that nonsense. It is the most contrived interpretation I can personally think of when it comes to QM. You said there is no reason it should collapse at all, why not? Why shouldn't an observer "wave" interacting with the particle wave trigger a disturbance of the delicate balance needed to maintain a superposition. Look at sound waves for instance, If I reflect a soundwave off a wall and have it come back with the distance being an integer multiple of the source frequency we get a Classical Superposition of the soundwave in the form of a Standing wave. Now, This is very sensitive to frequency and distance so if I were to say, introduce a measuring device to measure the frequency or momentum of the wave the result is destruction of the standing wave. This is demonstrated MUCH better using Faraday waves in a Cymatic setup. Once a patch of Faraday waves forms, try sticking something else into the water and see what happens. Faraday waves are an almost perfect Analog to various effects we see in Quantum mechanics and the only reason it is not perfect is because we do not really have access to Inviscid fluids as the math clearly demonstrates a 1-1 analogy between Quantum and Classical Mechanics.
Everett, and all other interpretations for that matter, just seem hellbent on removing people from the Universe instead of accepting we are simply tiny clumps of Faraday waves in a giant ass pool with the entire Universe effecting the entire Universe. Entanglement gives us a glimpse of what is likely the whole of underlaying reality and decoherence is not really anything of the sorts but instead us simply losing track of the entangled states due to overwhelming complexity that develops quickly when you attempt to map every particles state against every other particles state.
TLDL: Many Worlds hypothesis is unscientific garbage and the creator should be ashamed of himself for ever even suggesting such a thing.
@@7heHorror Yes, collapse is just one way to describe it, it is not necessary. The big result is that non-locality is true. One bit of information can be in two containers at once.
I've always been an atheist. So if it ever is found that Earth is the only planet in all the universe to harbor life in any form, that revelation would shake me to the core. At what point is it safe to assume that some sort of God, or deity, or higher power hand-selected Earth to make of it what it is? At what point in finding ourselves to be completely alone in all the universe are we also proving the existence of "God"?
This is what disturbs me most deeply about the Fermi paradox. The never-ending list of perfect conditions necessary for the emergence of life being found on only one planet in all the universe goes far beyond circumstance. It would have to be the work of a divine hand. It disturbs me to think about it because it alters everything I know about life, our world, and my own belief system. It would be very jarring, and I think it would cause some real panic.
What if there are vast differences between galaxies, with respect to whether or not they have the right conditions for hosting and generating life? The solution to the Fermi paradox would be that perhaps the Milky Way Galaxy is one of the 'have nots' in this respect.
This video should have over 1M views just by the thumbnail alone. Thing is a work of beauty!!!!
Has anyone ever considered that perhaps our senses can’t detect alien beings? They may have developed a completely different set of senses.
Gripping discussion. Brilliant, thank you so much!
Deuteronomy 1:10 'The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.'
Terrific episode! I love the question itself and I really enjoyed Dr. Webb's intelligent thought on the matter. One random thought I had that's probably already on the Fermi Paradox list: maybe civilizations get out of the galaxy as soon as they can. We seem to be destined to be a lonely group of galaxies in the darkness due to Dark Energy. Maybe they realize this and travel to the biggest local cluster. Just a random thought.
Yes! And they wear their pants inside out. They don't have 7 day weeks, and music to them is tasted, not heard.
If our star we call Sun give us life = atleast one in our Milky Way, why so many stars in other Galaxies? What do they provide? We may not be alone.
Universe is just too big and more challenging is lack of applicable technology which can move higher than speed of light between stars and Galaxies.
John you always ask simply the best questions. And your guests acknowledge it.
For me, the Xenomorph from Alien is the most terrifying sci-fi extraterrestrial and probably the most believable. The "facehugger" part of it's biology perhaps the most contrived aspect of the lifeform, but everything else is something that is definitely conceivable as a path evolution could take in making a really fit creature in the evolutionary sense.
Great episode again John! Thanks for your work.
of course after eating a human; they'd spit us out quick; for our proteins aren't likely to agree with their digestive system.
Well there are definately species on Earth that live in Acid and Radioactive environments. So lets just wait till the tardigrades grow up ehh lol
Some cool solutions to Fermi Paradox ua-cam.com/video/ZK0CB2Bk_QA/v-deo.html
but senseless violence doesn't necessarily *fit-in very well in terms of biological evolution at all. 🤔 nothing the beasts does makes any sort of sense 🤣
*that's how darwin meant the "survival of the fittest", but many people came to believe it's about fit-ness around "strength" and agression, for some odd rea$on. Huge misunderstanding.
@@aerobique Yeah, Xenomorphs are spooky, but something like Tyranids solves the "life being out there" and the "why we don't see life out there" all in one.
A fascinating discussion 👍🏽 We will be alone until the day we are not! Perhaps THEY are already here, observing, waiting patiently until we evolve past waging war.
Really looking forward to this :) thank you John and Stephen!
There is a very good documentary about the statistical improbability that life would arise through natural events. The probability is like one in a number that contains zeroes that go to the moon and back 1000 times. It's like inconceivable numbers. The kind of numbers that would require an infinite universe to achieve. This science is really fascinating and the documentary is worth a watch. People who say there has to be other life out there should watch because it changed how I see this question.
Thanks John. I love the fermi paradox and Stephen Webb is an excellent guest. I loved every second of it. All else I want this year is another collaboration with Isaac Arthur 😍
That's very likely to happen. It's been a bit since we checked in with Isaac.
Sfia and event horizon are the best shows on the internet the best content for those of us who are curious
I liked your recent video about how pulsars might be alien tech and it adds a lot of context to this conversation in hindsight.
Terrific to have these pressing themes so comprehensively thrashed out by you both. Many thanks.
One thing worth bearing in mind is that while we're so busy looking for a civilization out there similar to ours, we might give some serious thought to that our own civilization is on the rocks bigtime and is in fact highly vulnerable to going poof any day now for any number of reasons. We can speculate all we want about "We made it, so why didn't anyone else?", but the truth is we haven't made it _anywhere_ just yet. A handful of probes and a smattering of radio signals over the course of a meager 100 years amounts to absolutely nothing but a flicker on cosmic timescales if it's all we manage to do. A civilization watching us would easily miss us entirely. Maybe the great filter is just absolute for any number of reasons.
Loved this podcast. This was an absolutely fascinating discussion 😌 Thank you for posting for us all to get a chance to listen!
Another riveting interview and discussion.
The guest believes that we are alone in the universe yet I still leave the discussion with optimism that we are not alone.
There is a hell of a lot of organised mass and energy out there that is dynamically moving and transforming within space-time just for us puny humans to be aware of - we must have company somewhere sometime.
Y must we?? Maybe we are not alone but due too distance time nature and tech even we won’t be able to find it kniw otherwise bcuz of things we do not yet understand or never can understand… so it’s unknown till known
@@ishikawa1338 The human species is on a train heading for the cliff's edge Mr Kawasaki.
We are not at the top of the life tree as some sort of elite intellectual Apex predator.
The Human species has become a pan-parasitic life form on earth threatening many of its systems and behaving in a self destructive manner.
And we all know how Nature deals with parasitic infections dont we Mr Itchyback?
He was actually a very uncurious person. Rather uninspiring to listen to
I love the fermi paradox topic. it's so fascinating. I refuse to believe that we are alone in the universe. it just wouldn't make any sense.
Why should it make sense. Sense in the way you understand sense to be.
One of the best conversations I’ve listened to here on the channel. And that’s high praise I think!
Great episode!
I very much appreciate the quality of this discourse and the depth of thought being shared. One point which I wish discussions of the Fermi Paradox would touch upon more often, however, has to do with the certainty (or not) with which the particpants totally reject the voluminous bodies of reportage and evidence regarding ET contact which in fact are readily available for cataloging and study. Given that even our slow-moving and secrecy-prone government now admits to having had long-term programs of study and that it is changing its policies regarding sightings by the military, we might reasonably want our discussions of the FP to include at least some passing, contextualizing reference to both credible testimony and other evidence (radar in particular) which support the possibilty that somebody or something has been making itself known. Charging forth as though the Nimitz/tick-tac episode(s) or the Skin Walker Ranch study or the Phoenix Lights incident(s), for example, just never happened strikes me as scientifically questionable. I'm saying this as a practicing, career-long scientist. Throwing out or consciously ignoring "anomalies" absolutely can put one on the wrong path - I've done it myself and had to wipe the egg off of my face later. Forgetting to stop and periodically re-examine one's assumptions going into a given scientific investigation or analysis similarly tempts fate.
If faster than light travel is really hard to figure out while nuclear weapons are relatively easy, I think it might just be the norm for civilizations to destroy themselves before ever getting close enough to see any hi.
Thank you JMG and the team for all the amazing Content. Keep up the encouraging work 🌎🌠
I love when he talks about UAP and how we shouldn't pre-judge and then immediately pre judges and says probably nothing to it. The Fermi Paradox will never be solved if you don't look at all the evidence. Their are 100s of cases going back decades with radar, video, physical, eyewitness, photos all at the same time and instead they'll pick a part each thing individually with unlikely hypothetical.
Yah caught that too. (Keeps talking about the universe, yet there is so much happening in our own atmosphere. Just listening to these Navy pilots…we’re missing so much of what’s going on right off the coast of California. It’s befuddling how much this is ignored. It’s like pissing all over the best eyewitnesses.)
We live in an impossibly wonderful Universe, on the most breathtaking Planet possible. I don't believe we are alone in the Universe and we are certainly not alone on this Planet as we have eachother. It's all beautiful, wonderous and mysterious and the more we discover, the better everything becomes. Stay kind to eachother and look after everything you have.
Actually, it would be very interesting to have followers of various disciplines on at the same time giving their takes on a specific area or problem. Have you done this before and, if not, would you consider doing that? To hear a physicist and a philosopher talking about space and time (among other things) would be fascinating.
followers?
It's called "vanishingly small sample size". It's like concluding that the ocean is entirely barren because you waded twenty feet out into the shallows and didn't feel anything brush against you.
Space is big, very big. You wouldn't believe just how mind-boggling big the universe is.
It's been a while since Stephen Webb was on John. Excellent guest. I'd love a three way discussion with you, Stephen and Fraser Cain on this subject.
I love this channel. Seriously. Thank you Mr. Webb, thank you John M.G. All hail the LeBaron. And that be said cue the opossums.
You should totally do a round table discussion video with these guys. This is a really solid episode.
Is that Anthony in Katakana?
@@HAL-vu8ef If google serves me right, it should be, maybe Honestly, I had no idea that's what it was called, I was shooting for japanese haha
My take on Fermi paradox: aliens realize that optimization of energy usage is better than increasing energy generation, leading to massive civilizations with unrecognizable energy signatures on a cosmic scale.
For example, we currently need a complex and delicate environment to survive because of our biologic bodies. In order to move anywhere outside of Earth, we need terraforming or some other large-scale environment-altering technology to support our bags of flesh. However, at some point we might find a way to box our minds in some mechanical objects (brains in vats or a mind uploaded to a quantum computer or whatever). What this will do is that we will no longer need such a massive alteration of our environment to live there. Communities that currently consume swaths of land and gigajoules of energy to satisfy their food, water, housing, communication and other needs could be reduced to wardrobe-sized machines with a bunch of people "uploaded", living lives with essentially zero energy loss outside of the system, on a single solar battery somewhere in orbit. If a civilization gets to that point, how would we detect it? Perhaps there's tons of them out there, they just don't waste energy on having it radiated needlessly into outer space, so we can't see them.
Note that some of the optimization will absolutely have to happen, because with our use of medicine we've essentially turned off natural selection. Genetic disorders that used to kill individuals, not letting them produce offspring and thus not propagating through populations are now spreading like wildfire, because we have medicine to prevent them from being lethal (e.g. some types of diabetes). Our genome will eventually degrade to junk (unless we return to barbaric methods like killing/castrating genetically-imperfect individuals, which I think nobody would agree with in the 21st century), so we need some other form of keeping our genetic health in check, for example in the form of genetic engineering, cybernetics or the things mentioned earlier.
always thought Stephen Webb one of the best guests on the show .. excellent stuff
had to watch it again. love it. this topic never gets old.
Very good program tonight with Dr. Webb. I found your line of questioning toward the end of the segment regarding the lastest information from our military on UAPs to be refreshing...Stephen had an interesting response suggesting astronomers may not have the best technical set of skills to be the first profession to ask...haha! Well, I'm an aerospace design engineer and I'm not sure I have the right skill set to interpret what the military has documented/recorded...and here's the analog. So would a blacksmith from the say 15th Century, who heated up and melted simple metals such as bronze/copper/iron/silver/gold etc.. be able to discern what a Manufacturing Engineer who was running a large metal powder 3D Printing Machine making parts from powdered Nickel based super alloys such as Inconel or Haynes 230 etc for a Rocket Engines? I think the blacksmith probably would have a general idea that metal was being processed, but the technical details would be lost....the level of the gap between us and our visitors is so radical...it's difficult to comprehend what we are looking at...
I think the blacksmith would understand modern metallurgy and processing far better than most of his contemporaries. Hot working and cold working metal is what he does. Quenching to case harden is what he does. Tell him about mixing nickel with iron to make a superalloy and he'd say "That is so cool!" Some of his contemporaries such as Galileo, da Vinci, Isaac Newton would get it. Czar Peter would say, "You standardized the inch to enable interchangeable parts. Hey! That was my idea, I required Russian inches to be the same as English inches!"
Yes, but the metallurgy is the only portion of Additive Manufacturing Process that the 15th Century Blacksmith would understand...the rest of the laser tech, the robotics mechanisms, the software driven control system, the thermal management technology etc, etc...he would have no idea regarding what was working inside the 3D Printing Machine...
@@theilluminatist4131 But those smiths, millers, shoemakers, and other craftsmen made the whole of the modern technology revolution possible. Thermal management technology? That's what a smith does! I visited the USS Texas a few years ago. The machine shop is still in use! What a machinist does is an extension of what smiths did. Automation, standardization, interchangeable parts, the smith and shoemaker would understand the advantages of these systems. Millers ground grain using water power, they would understand the advantages of inventing steam and internal combustion engines to turn shafts. The smelting of metals from ores developed into modern chemistry. Electricity would look like magic to them, but they would understand that harnessing the power of the thunderbolt is like Promethius showing us the gift of fire.
@@vandalayindustries3057 Well you know what they say about what that says about you...if not better talk to "Mr Ed!"
I heard almost psychological distress in the discussion here, and I feel it myeslf to a degree as I ponder the Fermi Paradox more and more. The thing is we're narrowing in factors that can give an answer, and we still aren't seeing anything (that we can readily perceive of at last) That's part of the problem, though, isn't it? There are sooooo very many factors and what ifs to this. What if life is all arouund us but it's so alien we can't see it? What if FTL is not possible and with the universe being so big, cviilizations just don't bump into each there. I can't think of another question with so many variables that we don't even know how to account for. We cant' say for sure just how alien aliens will be from us, with their motiviations etc. It's staggering, really when you think of all the factors and how they all interplay with each other. I would hope that we can at least resolve it one way or the other definitvely, and sooner rather than later...
It terrifies me if we are alone. It would be very sad. But , the ufo phenomenon gives me hope, and terrifies me also. Zoo paradox
Liquid water and Life are rare in the Universe...yet here we are?
The 2 most likely solutions to the Fermi Paradox are: 1. We are alone in the observable universe. Abiogenesis is an extremely rare event, and we are alone in our observable universe, but our universe is just one of an astronomical, or perhaps even infinite number of universes.
2. The Zoo Hypothesis. This is a variation of the Zoo Hypothesis where we might have been visited or observed by extraterrestrials, but they live far far away and not in our observable universe.
Why do I believe this? For a couple of reasons. First, an intelligent civilization will likely develop self-replicating artificial intelligence that will quickly spread out first across its home galaxy and then across other galaxies. The fact this hasn't happened to earth or anywhere in our galaxy or other observable galaxies as far as we know is strong evidence that life is extremely rare and that we are alone in our observable universe. Also, we have not detected any techno signatures an advanced alien civilization would have given off before they learned how to mask it, taking into account the fact that we are looking far into the past when we observe other stars and galaxies.
I appreciate your intelligent argument, though I disagree with the self-replicating artificial intelligence likelihood.
Non-human Intelligences are already here, manifested in the UAP Phenomenon. Once you've mastered faster than light travel (and the only thing in the Universe that could is the fabric of spacetime), electromagnetic spectrum communication is obsolete.
@@FMDD168 I don't think I follow... Just because you no longer have to communicate using electromagnetism, why wouldn't you harvest sources of matter and energy?
It could be that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would eventually find other sources of matter and energy that don't require macro objects like stars, but that would likely be much longer after they started harvesting stars/planets etc. Since we can see far into the past when looking at other galaxies, the fact we haven't seen this on mass scale, is evidence that we are alone (at least as far as intelligent life goes) in our observable universe. There are some more far fetched scenarios such as advanced alien civilizations setting up some kind of masking or cloaking mechanism, to alter or block out the light signatures and rays of these other galaxies, but that's highly speculative and fails the scientific test of falsifiability.
Love it! So many good ideas to think about further. I have always wondered why we are always looking for certain conditions when looking for life. If the life we find is very different from that on earth, it might not need the conditions that we needed for life on earth to develop. But I guess we can only look for what we know already. I still think that there are ways for intelligence to exist that we don’t know yet. Hopefully we will know it when we experience it.
In the grand scheme of importance, life comes before intelligence, so life is fundamental, and higher intelligence is conditional being a epiphenomena of life in an advanced stage of development. meanwhile, cleverness is the worst kind of stupidity.
We evolved 3 billion yrs to find out the universe has NO meaning nor Purpose. No eternal destiny for us. Drinks on me mates! 🍺 🍻
I would be disappointed if we are alone, but on the Plus side, it would all be ours, we can claim everything and populate wherever our technology can take us.
Another entertaining and education hour with two greats!
It^s been a while since I listened to this podcast...not happy to return and the Ad is the first thing I heard. Ok, have ads, but in the right moments please.
On our dude's most unsettling solution, I consider the possibility of us being alone uplifting. In all the cosmos, our arrival happened and no one else? It's an absolute miracle that makes me want to endeavor and improve.
If we’re alone, the chances were in a simulation skyrocket.
I love that he included science fiction writers and philosophers as groups that could be included in discovering new solutions. I would add that *some* spiritual leaders and scientists who research the nature of the human mind (the positive side of spirituality rather than the superstitious, like meditation and other spiritual practices that have measurable positive impact on our brain and biology) could be included as well. The US government has researched psi phenomenon and other unexplained aspects of our species that could be overlooked methods of communication or abilities our species have yet to unlock within ourselves (I’m a science fiction/fantasy/supernatural writer myself, so this is the kind of weirdness I think about. Lol!).
Rather than have areas of studies separated and some seen as more valid than others, have a kind of multidisciplinary panel full of scientists, spiritualists and those of us who are artists/writers where the latest scientific research as well as philosophical and hypothetical thoughts can be shared in an open environment without judgement.
The “without judgement” part would be difficult in our culture and species, as we tend to like to mock and judge and create in/out groups. We have to constantly fight and overcome our inherent tribalistic tendencies as a species, and we still struggle with it not only in academia, but socially with issues such as racism or political bias.
I hope we find a solution to this conundrum sometime within my lifetime. I'm 43 now....but running out of time. I just want to know if something, someone is out there among the stars with us.
Would you entertain the thought of a creator ?
If the universe is empty, eventually, we'll go on to seed it. Even if it's only sending out small ships containing the seeds of life. It it will absolutely be something we'll look to do, given more time to advance.
There are a lot of sightings of alien spacecrafts (even i saw one with my friend). That is not the question if there are another intelligent life other than us around universe but why are they hiding themselves from us?
Think of how uneducated the average person is. Half of everyone is less intelligent than that average person.
We simply are nowhere near interesting enough. We are like a crying baby, announcing ourselves with electromagnetic waves throughout an 80 lightyear radius sphere.
Because comparatively we are barbaric. If we discovered a planet of chimpanzee like animals, besides basic curiosity and investigation would we be rushing to talk to them? We have for starters wars, religion, many many people on this planet everyday die from lack of basic needs like lack of food and basic medical care, we are horrifically damaging the planet environmentally etc.
Personally I think we are barely 2 steps out of the primordial cave’s developmentally wise and overall just really not that great of a species at this point.
The same reason God does, I suspect...tongue firmly in cheek...!
One of my three preferred solutions that never fails to get a reaction is the "Nothing is Natural" idea. Wherein we are so ignorant of the natural world that we assume the universe isn't an artificial superstructure. Maybe that means we were intentional, maybe that means it was recently abandoned, maybe that means we were unplanned. The whole universe just being a massive structure where all observed processes are a device working as intended, maybe even directed. Similar to Simulation Hypothesis, but with a sense of scale I find gets overlooked.
That would be even more terrifying than the simulation hypothesis.
All throughout the ages we’ve wondered what the moon is. Turns out it’s just another 3D landscape like Earth. It’s obvious that all lifeforms’ purpose is to move beyond their planet. And after that, to leave the universe for what lies beyond. Black holes are a dead giveaway.
Don’t you think that if there was some form of intelligent “creator” outside of time and space, that was above all else, that they would be extremely lonely? What better thing to do than setup a Darwinian playground experiment and wait a few minutes (100 billion years for us) for something to evolve and pop their head out of the universe and say “hello” to it.
The universe may simply be a creators attempt to find a friend
@@gold333 Way to turn a spooky thought on its head in a wholesome way.
I've always thought the idea that we are it to be the most terrifying. If that's the case, we as the only technological beings are the universes stewards of life.
It is very possible
@@ishikawa1338 I agree. Far too many people have a faith like belief that life must be everywhere. Even though we have zero evidence to support that
As a connoisseur of every Fermi paradox video on UA-cam
We are in a simulation
The one solution that bothers me the most is a version of the simulation hypothesis. In this version we are actually something like a headstone for an already dead species. The simulation is running for any others that come along to witness. In this simulation we have the illusion of free will because the original humans had it, but now we are following a preset path according to history.
@54:25 “an absolute cosmic tragedy.” Powerful.
A one horsepower El Camino, you're riding in style John. Thanks for the episode!
Happy Halloween Strick!
@@EventHorizonShow Happy Halloween! 💀
"If we assume the Copernican principal" which "we" shouldn't ...James Webb has disproved this
This was an amazing interview and I hope to hear more from both of you.
You got my sub, these are great questions being asked and I'm glad I've found this channel to understand more about the meaning of existence and the universe itself
wouldn’t it be ironic if the solution to the fermi paradox is that life in the universe started at the same moment everywhere, and the reason we haven’t seen signs of other life is because they’re currently at the same technological level as us?
so that means that they are also looking and so are we, so why cant we find any detections which may lead to them
@@llama079 2 things, space and time
I have never heard the thought, nor considered the idea, that intelligence plus opposable thumbs could be a dangerous combination. I laughed when it was said, but the idea is not so crazy. Fantastic conversation
You really do put out a lot of Fermi paradox videos.
What an amazing episode.
There is a question I’d like to ask about black holes.
If a black hole was left to itself to loose mass due to Hawkins radiation, would it eventually loose mass and stop being a black hole and if so what elements might be created or left over from it. And if not then would the black hole just get infinitely smaller until it’s nothing?
For me the worst thing that could be happening is that they are all out there but they are not saying anything for reason, a sinister reason. The other thing I've always wondered is as big as the listening arrays on our planet are I'm just wondering why we don't go further out, make a much larger ear, maybe be able to get a better stereo effect to narrow down sounds that are interesting. After all, with everything rotating around everywhere I have a hard time thinking we would pick up anything unless an object is broadcasting everywhere all the time, loudly.
I don't really understand the principal of extra terrestrial predation? Why would life forms so dissimilar have any interest in one another? I don't believe it would ever be possible for any biological life form to move very far from its home. We are far to specialised and fragile. Any roving ET is more likely to be a machine intelligence that only requires basic quantum energy source.
Why does no one consider that the further we look out, the further back in time we see. If we could observe as things are "now", we may see alot more. I think we need third generation stars for life, therefore we are at the beginning....
I experienced the phenomena of being completely alone and all of reality being my personal made up delusion on a mushroom trip once... yeah that was terrifying, and at the same time I still can't disprove that it was real and that that's not what's really happening right now lol....
Can confirm, I'm a figment of your deluded mind!
Booga booga!!!
simulation just for you.
Youre the main character and the only person capable of thought, we are NPCs. That 16/ 17 year old energy
Lynn Margulis had books you should read on the jump from simple cell to eukaryotic cells (complex life). Being a biochemist, my money is on abiogenesis being a bigger hurdle than getting eukaryotes. High energy phosphate bonds are not just for RNA, you need temporary energy storage to have coupled reactions (a step in abiogenesis that likely preceded self-replication of nucleic acids). Organelles (the descendants of the ingested cells) have slightly different genetic codes for protein synthesis), more than one event likely.
We don't have enough information to make any sort of predictions about it extraterrestrial life or intelligence.
Exactly.
I find no fear in this thought. Just fascination, if we ARE alone...how utterly fascinating is that? Why and how is that? And if we arent... same thought.
Im not sure why its occured this way for me over the years, but fear is sort of thrown out the window with what id feel. I think all results are beautiful and id love to be alive to be part of whatever happens.
If we’re alone, I would find it sad, not fearful. If we aren’t, then that is exciting.
Thankyou, interesting discussion. It is fun to play with the Drake equation. It not only suggests how much intelligent life might exist in the galaxy but how nearby it might be.
Using realistic numbers it is relatively easy to show even if such life is quite common the chances of finding anything within 2,000 light years is vanishingly small and at such distances they would fall below the threshold of detection with our current technology.
This is the only channel that I nod my head in agreement, subconsciously.
Wonderful interview. I like that you are so respectful to your guests. Spot-on questions as well.
Cheer up Stephen 🥳
They're here.
Great thinking! 👍
‘…the chances of nucleotides assembling in the right order (RNA) is more than astronomic, it’s an impossibly in our observe able universe…..’
This is one of the most mind-blowing unknowns that is rarely mentioned in popular science. I didn’t know that it’s an impossibility in our universe as we know it. From the way they present it in school it’s easy to get away thinking, we already know pretty much how it could have happened. Far from it, it seems. Thank you!
Excellent conversation, was worth the silly ad at the beginning 👍😁
29:15 "Does that [argument] have legs?"
Nice. Smoove.
What a great conversation! You know, if we are alone it's still possible to have conversations with alien life if we create our own aliens by uplifting chimps and octopi and so on. Just leave them alone in their own environment (the hard part) for a couple of hundred years, then make contact and see what they have to say about things.
Ooooor….and this is a crazy idea here, don’t uplift animals so we don’t have any alien civilizations to compete with
The "we are alone" one reminds me of how Tommy lee Jones' character in Ad Astra broke when he was at a massive telescope station out by neptune and only found dead worlds...
I can think of nothing more troubling to me, personally, than the idea that in all the universe, it's just us. That disturbs me to a degree I don't think any language could properly express.