Thanks so much for watching everyone, make sure to like/share/subscribe if you enjoyed this! This has been a major research effort over the last year and I'm thrilled to finally share it with you. We have so many other exciting projects on the horizon but only so much in the way of research resources to pursue these thrilling ideas. If you want to support our research, you now can through the Columbia Just Giving platform - www.coolworldslab.com/support - thanks for anything you can do to help us unravel the Universe's secrets!
Excellent effort, and a great example of how Bayesian statistics allows to get a lot from a little. I was a bit confused during reading the paper as "T" is overloaded in "Adopted Values for the Observational Data", being simultaneously 4.408 Gy and 5.304 Gy - Perhaps this is down to the web publishing? I'd be interested in knowing how your model would take to followup evidence - Suppose we detect non-intelligent life on some other world a time t2 after its last sterilizing event, what would that imply for the odds of slow versus fast intelligence as a function of t2? What if the detection is of intelligent life?
@BLAIR M Schirmer Maybe the Great Spark (great name btw) is not what we think it is...maybe that spark is a low-probability sequential and well timed narrow process within an already existing abiogenesis...what if it had to happen in a very specific order at a very specific time, while of course benefiting from the specifics of an all relatively stable stellar environment....? Life is the template and intelligent life its unlikely and immensely rare by-product. I don't know.
I love how the main host basically turns his peer reviewed papers into layman's terms videos for those of us who either can't access peer reviewed papers or have trouble digesting their dense text. Thanks, to both him and everyone else who helps these videos happen.
@@bunkerbuster6729 Great video ! Except perhaps were it was alluded to the fact the Bill Nye is a scientist? He just pretends to be one on a children's TV show.
I can’t even begin to tell you how, first off, fantastic this man is. This is a college professor explaining the universe to you. That in itself is a phenomenal fact. Secondly, he’s doing it on UA-cam, which means one of two things. Either he wants to spread this knowledge to the masses, appreciating the thought of the knowledge itself, or he wants his work and research out in the masses. Either way it’s a fantastic thing. Maybe he just has fun doing it, but I’d like to think otherwise 😁 but the man cites his sources and provides the formulas as well. So remarkable!
The rigorous qualification of most claims in your videos is extremely refreshing. So many arguments in popular media are based on absolutes that this is a remarkable deviation from the vast majority of communication, including science communication. Thank you for the excellent content Dr. Kipping.
Did not expect this video to be so wholesome! 😂 We do have to make many assumptions just to get to any hypothesis, thinking of "human intelligence" as point of comparison when this concept can be something else, intelligence for an alien organism could be something we can't even imagine. But that's a completely different topic. Truly fascinating. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and knowledge with us.
i love and appreciate that this man doesn't talk to his subscribers and viewers like they're uneducated children, his videos are so interesting and they just pull you in like a trance. another wonderful video, great job 👍
This is the first time I've heard such a thoughtful, logical, carefully-argued answer to this question. Next time someone asks what I 'believe' about alien life I'll show them this video. Thank you for your wonderful outreach work.
Even at rare that still would leave billions of planets with life It’s debatable about intelligence since is a whale intelligent? Life is out there like it or not, will we ever meet them who knows the distance is vast, debate all you want we are not alone. We think we understand the universe we don’t know shit, until we really get out there we won’t.
This isn't an answer to the question to whether we are alone or not. We will never know until we make contact there's no evidence yet to either outcome.
@@MF-LXRD There is plenty of evidence, is you are serious enough to look at reliable sources. This might change your opinion, that indeed this planet is being visited from another life form.
@@dennisd7668 His analysis here is based on an Earth like planet around a Sun like star. These are extremely rare in the rest of the galaxy. Not that they are needed, but a non-totally hostile environment is needed. For example, nearly 60% of stars are in the core of the galaxy where radiation levels should preclude life. Nearly 85% of stars are red dwarfs where planets in the goldilocks zone should be tidally lock (rare chance of life) and red dwarfs sporadically have huge amounts of solar activity which should remove atmospheres (again, rare chance of life). Nearly 85% of star system in our galaxy have 2 or more stars, again rare chance of life due to planetary orbital instability. There are hundreds more different ways that the galaxy is hostile to life. The galaxy (and presumably the universe) is deadly to life. Extremely deadly. We just happen to sit out in a calm galactic arm with a calm star, a good orbit for life, and many other factors in our favor. Based on our knowledge, intelligent life here was an extremely rare fluke. Even a few billion safe stars in our galaxy probably indicates some chances for life, but intelligent life is an entirely different story. The cooling of our planetary core took so long that simple multicellular life only occurred about 1 billion years ago out of the 4+ billion years that Earth has existed.
I've only watched this video about 10 times. I imagine that I'll be here another 10 times as well. Thanks for all the arguing points Cool Worlds. You guys help me look and feel a little smarter then i really am to my friends and loved ones.
One of the mistakes of our antropomorphism is that we think that evolution YES or YES led to intelligence...and this is not true...in 600 millions of years of animals evolution on Earth,intelligence (to a grade of civilization type) just happened once...with humans...(we can assume that dolphins or cephalopods also have some type of intelligence but not to human level or capable to form civilizations)... For example...Dinosaurs as species run the planet during 180 millions years...even so the dino most intelligent,doesnt was smarter than an actual chicken... Dinos evolved in thousands of ways,on air,land and water...but never evolved to understand a diferencial equation,because basically evolution doesnt lead to intelligence as final result...intelligence is just a subproduct of evolution... I intuitively end with the concept of common life-uncommon intelligence...we could talk about the asteroid and dinosaurs 60 millions of years ago,and other extintions that led to mammals and eventualy to humans...a russian rulet en many case our human existence... we only need to go 70 thousands years in the recent past,a volcano erupted...a hard climate change that almost lead to the extincion of human race...only a hundred or maybe a thousands of human individuals survived...of a population of hundred of thousands...we were closed to total desimation,and humans 70 thousands ago were more or less as smart as us... And what would had happened if those humans disappeard...nothing...the life on the planet would continued normally...its not that humans would had been replaced by other smart mammal...not necesarely...chimpanzees,that are our most close relative...are smart,but not to human level... Someone can say "hey,evolution need intelligence species because who gonna build rockets to abandon the planet and colonize other places???"...well,nature have a response to this Panspermia...living thing travelling on meteorites from planet to planet to other planet systems eventualy (as Oumuamua and Borisov as showed)... So,intelligence its not the pinnacle of evolution...just a subproduct that can or not happen...because evolution not need it in ultimate instance...
You’ve really outdone yourself with this video Prof. Kipling. This channel feels like a pioneer that paves the way for all future space related exploration. Thank you!
The way you articulate points, your voice and tone..your unbelievably high degree of intelligence..it's all like one big massage for my brain, thank you very much.
How Cool is that I fall asleep to these vids every night for months now. Even cooler that I wake up and find myself a lot more happier than the day before. Cannot thank these guys enough!
Louis Cypher Yep! We adapted and evolved to our environment, it wasn’t created for us. No such thing as Goldilocks zones or the need for water to exist as if life is common it may mean that other life forms have evolved to withstand much higher/lower temps or are not even carbon based, gas breathing life forms. We only need to look at the bottom of our own oceans for evidence of this! I think this same thing all the time.
Well, we have 20+ different environments in our solar system. How many lives adapted to any of them? Where are the lives that adapt to the sulphuric oven conditions in Venus? or the freezing CH4 lakes on Titan? What that tells us is that there are very few suitable environments for life and probably only one environment that life can adapt to.
This not absolutely knowing is fascinating. How much we just don’t know boggles the brain . Can’t get enough of the theorising and love these videos.. thanks to the people that have put in the work producing these ...👏👏
Dude your videos are so awesome. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more and more interested in space and just everything about it and just how mind bendingly insane space actually is. Its so awesome to have people like you who know so much to be able to learn from. Keep making videos man love it
Your channel happens to be the easiest to listen to, with being under isolation at home, not from going out endangering our families. Thanks for these productions!
I was literally just watching this video when a science journal i read here in Germany notified me on my phone about this new study using Bayesian statistics to determine the probabilities of life and intelligence by a certain David Kipping... Sadly they didn't link this Video :D Keep it up professor! You and your channel are a true gem on UA-cam
I really do think if I had better teachers I would have done much better in school/collage. Everything turned out well for me thankfully, but it was only bc of a lot of hard work and perseverance. I can't imagine what could have happened had I had someone like him as a teacher
Your video re-inspired my imagination and made me think of these more fundamental factors rather than just basing my assumptions for the existence of life on the huge amount of stars out there in the universe. I look forward to reading your paper!
This channel is the perfect combination of an awesome host and deeply interesting content that you couldn't get anywhere else. It's a (team of) scientist(s) showing their brand spanking new work. It's so great, I love it.
I literally have no head for numbers as I have dyscalculia, but I am so glad that this channel explains physics and stats without being condescending about it. I'm definitely more of a biology minded person since I was a forestry wildlife management major in college, and xenobiology has always been fascinating to me. I do think there's other life out there, but I don't think we'll ever come in contact with it. It's sad to think about, but I also think it means we should take better care of this bubble we have because when they come across us, we'll probably be long gone, and we should leave behind something to be proud of. And also cat memes. Leave behind cat memes.
Unfortunately, it is a complete fail when you consider the lifespan of smaller stars than the sun. Yes, it becomes less likely that intelligent life evolves if it takes 80% plus of the habitable period of a planet for intelligence to happen (as with us). However, all of that beautiful Bayesian math goes right out the window if you consider a K type star with a habitable window of. say, 8 or 10 billion years, and it still only takes 4 billion years for intelligence to evolve. Like so many "solutions" to anything, it is easy to come up with a model that is simple, plausible and completely wrong.
@@paulpeterson4216 This is a very important criticism of using such models. But is it not possible to calculate the priors for different types of stars that could support life on different time scales?
@@dronesightingsmith3979 Best advice I was given was "always expect the worst, then anything better is always a bonus!" Pessimism has it's uses, but it shouldn't stop us looking for intelligent life elsewhere. At the very least we need to be looking for a new home for the human race, this one is going to be uninhabitable in less than a billion years.
But there is an issue he doesn't make clear: *Drakes Equation does not factor the entire Universe. It factors **_only_** the Milky Way Galaxy. It also factors **_out all life except_** intelligent communicative civilizations.*
You're absolutely correct the parasites that ask for a government handout are the epitome of unintelligent including scientist who look to manipulate the government is he giving them taxpayer money teachers anybody who work for the government is a parasite and is unintelligent a nun creative
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your voice is so soothing, and when you talk about the wondrous enigma of space, it puts me to sleep. Thank you!
Hey Bill Schopf was my professor at ucla when I was in college doing my general education 20 years ago! Great class. Funny guy. He's Mr. Microfossil. He showed us how a closeup picture of a pepperoni pizza could look like micro fossils to the untrained eye
@@exoplanets Yeah it was a year-long class called "GE Cluster: History of the Cosmos and Life." The first third of it was basic cosmology and astrophysics, the second third was geology, and the last third was biology. Schopf taught the biology part, but he was present in the lecture hall during the entire course, sometimes trash-talking the other professors if he thought that they hadn't explained something well. Always making jokes. He was a big skeptic of the Martian "microfossils" from 1996. The class was for non-science majors only.
Mate. Your videos are unreal. I listen to you every night when falling asleep and you feed a curiosity in my brain. Thanks for making such good content.
i’ve watched a lot of content speculating on intelligent life existing elsewhere and i can say with my whole heart that this is the first video i’ve seen that gave me some new, fresh insight into the matter. really appreciate all the hard work you put in over at cool worlds
Your way of conducting real research, simplifying it for us mortal men and then sharing it in the best visual way possible. I think you found a way to shift the way how science should be conducted. Just think if every professor in the world had the possibility with funds, to spend time on subjects they find interesting and conducted real research, simply it, and then illustrate it and share it for everyone to see, just like you do here and have been doing for years now. I believe the world would look very different and in a positive way. Thank you and much love!
I like the concept of incorporating human bias into the equation. Also, it's very cool that you bring in your young lab assistant into your work in a playful manner. She must be quite proud of her teacher and educator. You must also be quite proud of her. Maybe she will be inspired to become a scientist, educator and/or artist herself when she grows up. Should I ever become a father myself, I certainly would want to have moments like this. Passing on the passion for learning and curiosity I think is one of the most important and beautiful things in life
Didn't you watch the one about the formation on the Earth? It was very recently made and very well done, with ever second a massive amount of years passing.
We currently know so little about the Universe around us. I feel assuming we can apply how intelligent life came to be on Earth to other planets is an example of natural human hubris. We currently have a sample size of one. Our data set is frustratingly incomplete, but I love that channels like this exist to get us all thinking deeply about these topics and leave us better informed after each viewing. Awesome to have an expert like this helping us to make sense of it all. Keep up the good work!
As always David, you do an excellent job in describing a complex subject in the most simplistic terms. I never miss your latest videos. keep up the great work.
Hmm.. very interesting. How about red dwarfs and their earth-like analogs? Let's say a lifespan of 5-10 trillion years, which, I expect, is very common for the most common star type. That should give life more time to find the way, by a significant factor. How does the star affect the probability? Our sun is not a typical star, it's a rare one (7%). We only had 14 billion years so far, so maybe that is a factor as well? Maybe 100 billion years from now, the odds are somewhat different?
The star systems with a higher probably of life as we know it are currently believed to be K-type stars. No Earth-like planets are expected to exist around red dwarfs. But the higher number of stars are red dwarfs, so they could host the highest number of exoplanets with alien life (different to ours).
I think a major argument against habitability around red dwarfs are the conditions around such stars. To my knowledge red dwarfs are predominantly flare stars, meaning they have massive stellar storms, which could feasibly change average temperature on their planets by tens, even fifty degrees in irregular and unpredictable periods. Any planets around them that are in the habitable zone are also likely to get tidally locked very soon, because of their proximity to the star, meaning one side would always face towards the star and the other always away, potentially complicating the situation further. That doesn't mean it's necessarily impossible for life to form there, but the red dwarfs are far less stable than usually presented and maybe more hostile to simple life even if it comes into existence, so all in all it's difficult to say.
Its difficult to realize how early we are, in the grand scheme of the universe lifetime, which will be seemingly impossibly long. At some point, there will ONLY be red dwarves, white dwarves, black dwarves, and black holes. All star formation will cease. All galaxies will be so far apart from one another, that any observer will have no idea that any others ever existed. WTF?
@@Deeplycloseted435 Well, if the Eternal Inflation theory is true, there always will be some other universes beginning to exist (maybe with different laws of physics) where the inflaton field settles down and a Big Bang will happen, even while this universe/region ends in the heat death.
Wow I didn’t think it was possible to approach this issue in any meaningful way but I stand corrected. You made the logical argument so easy to follow that an average person like i can follow it. Thanks for your time and effort. May you have all the success in the world. Keep up the good work it is changing and inspiring many lives.
I would also assume that intelligent life is even more rare because here on Earth mass extinction played a big role on how life evolved. Maybe it's also possible to shrink it down if accounting for stellar system stability, flux received by stars, magnetosphere force, if gas giant could sustain life on satellites. There are way too many factor and we know so little.
So just by using Bayesian Statistics, we arrive at an already pretty low value. Sadly, accounting for the Fermi Paradox (Space and Time, Rare Earth, Rear Intelligence; see _Isaac Arthur_ ) probably only worsens the odds oof.
Do intelligent people have to all think the same things? Like, instead of calling someone stupid, behind their backs or amongst you own, did it ever occur to the intelligencia to be nice and persuade the less intelligent to be informed of the truth? I know that I am not smart enough either. Is it humility, or self-reflection?
That’s just speculation that the dinosaurs or other more superior species needed to be wiped out by some sort of mass extinction event for us or any smaller species to evolve into intelligence! We don’t 100% know that, maybe with or without that event we would’ve still evolved into who we are... we still had dangerous predators to overcome like lions, tigers, bears, mammoths, saber tooth’s etc & still made it to high intelligence so idk bro, we still don’t even really know if dinosaurs were a threat to other species survival or not, it could all be myth. They probably weren’t all that hard to live around in regard to smaller species being able to evolve properly into us or any intelligent alien species on another planet facing a similar issue
@@JAYFULFILMZ Nah I doubt it, just look at us, as the new top predator , not event taking that into account, just us moving in and building a house will displace other species of animals and eventually ruine their habitat and go extinct. Id imagine it was the same with dinos around, probably worse since we've found other things to eat and they still had to eat what came across their mouths so us early mammals were definately on the menu just like todays pigs who are smarter than dogs dont have a chance to evolve because we're keeping them in prisons for food, we are definatley keep other species from evolving. I think the dinos did the same. But nature has inbuilt balance so in the end being on the bottom of the food chain for so long while the top predator was busy feasting, probably helped us develope the intelligence, or at leaste kept the Dinosaurs from needing to evolve, they thought rulilng the planet was the end all and be all of existance, and in their mind they were right, rulling for millions of years, but didnt take into account outer space, so they were just a sitting target to get whiped out by a mass extinction event. We on the other hand can see it comming, but i guess will also be distracted by our own feasting while some other unseen thing will take us out too. And then the animals we've been keeping under our thumbs might go on and take over the planet and could evolve in higher intellillgence then we've reached.
This has got to be the most depressing channels on YT. When I'm feeling depressed, I watch this channel and find out that whatever it was that was depressing me is nothing compared to this. So it immediately cheers me up. Figures.
The calculations you discuss include “abiogenesis” occurring individually on each candidate world. But - even if it is rare for life to “begin” on a world - our existence proves that it happened at least once in the history of our universe - and once we know that it happened once - we have to acknowledge panspermia. Life arising on any planet could potentially spread to many more - even those that didn’t have the necessary conditions for abiogenesis to occur on them. We do not know if abiogenesis ever occurred on earth - but we do know it occurred somewhere. How long it takes for that life to evolve intelligence probably depends on the selection pressures which will vary greatly world to world. On earth it took 4 billion years - but on another planet it might only take 40 million years. Learning more about how intelligence evolved on earth will probably allow us to assign a low and high range answer to the question “how long does it take for intelligence to emerge”. Finally - every time we have tried to think of the Earth as “special”, we have been proven wrong by the universe. I think it is a mistake to think that we are unusual and will get the best answers to our questions by assuming the Earth is typical - at least until it can be proven that we are not.
I agree with you. I think it is way better to see us as "average" rather than an extreme, think about it. I think it is really likely that there are Millions of Civiliations out there, that are just as far developed as we are. Some are behind us in development and some are ahead of us.
@@systemicchaos3921 how do you come to that assumption? I think there will be at least as many that are more developed as we are as there will be civilisations that aren't. And a big number that is about as much developed as we are. Why should the vast majority be ahead of us? Because factoring that our solar system is kinda "young"? Only reasonable explanation I could think of. 🤔 Glad to hear about your thought process!
My own theory is that there are many intelligent forms of alien life, but they live too far away and they are too adapted to their biosphere to be interested in ours. Pathogens, wrong levels of gases, wrong kinds of light that could cause cancer, gravity to little or too much all make our world uninhabitable for most others.
But there is an issue he doesn't make clear: *Drakes Equation does not factor the entire Universe. It factors **_only_** the Milky Way Galaxy. It also factors **_out all life except_** intelligent communicative civilizations.*
stay safe professor, we need you to talk to us in english 😆 explaining complicated formulas with warm and charming voice and patience, thank you professor david kipping.
An excellent video. Thank you. IMO, the difference in time between the start of simple life, and consciousness, really does strongly indicate that we have grossly underestimated the difficulty in life becoming sentient. i.e. We are in a so-called goldilocks zone, yet sentient life took the entire age of the universe to arise on this planet. Even worse: we have a narrow window until the evolution of the sun makes sentient life here almost impossible. My guess is that simple life is probable throughout the universe, but sentience is exceedingly, vanishingly rare. We should never expect to see it within our lifetime, within our light bubble.
The question he asks is wrong. The question should be what is the mechanism that spreads life through the universe, once it’s developed once, can spores, survive space and propagate life . If so, then the equation is far more simple to achieve life
@@jaylucas8352 That's only for simple life. Sentient life is likely to be an incomprehensibly more unlikely result. We could have a galaxy full of amoeba, but still have no sentient life. The "equation" is unhelpful because we don't know the constants or variables. It's all guesses.
Love your videos! Your conclusion - primitive life is common, intelligent life is rare - is the same conclusion of Dr. Nick Lane, but approaching it from the abiogenesis perspective, (he's a biochemist who leads the "Origins of Life Program" at the University College London). In his latest book, "The Vital Question", he walks the reader thru abiogenesis via energy flux in the white smoker deep sea vents ("Lost City"). Then convincingly describes how eukaryotes evolved, how it was a stochastic event (endosymbiosis leading to mitochondria) that occurred only once (in billions of years), but was essential to the creation of complex life. Think that you would find it a good read (if you haven't done so already!). Thanks for reading!
Urey-Miller all over again. I've heard that nuclear decay was responsible for abiogenesis. I guess some computer simulations based on actual physics, I care not what ingredients you start with, will prove the abiogenesis question and the even more difficult explanation of origin of species by natural selection. But we'll have to have a robust simulator, and a correct one at that, to do any sort of proofs. Did keyboards evolve because I have two hands or did two hands evolve so I could type?
@@CandidDate actually Dr Nick Lane is describing something completely different than the Urey-Miller experiment, and reflects the amazing advances we have made in the biological sciences since Urey's time (1950s). You can say whatever you want - "it's a free country" - but your comments do not represent science.
Wow, a fascinating topic made even more so with real some in-depth analysis - love it! Please keep making this long form format - it's really really good, and the talented "lab assistant" obviously takes after Dad!
I've always found it fascinating that multicellular life only emerged 600 million years ago, relatively much closer to now than the emergence of life itself. I wonder if this method you've developed has anything to say about the relative difficulty of progress from abiogenesis to multicellular life, versus multicellular life to intelligent life?
It doesn't. This guy does not know anything about biology or our geological history, which is why he is using unreliable and meaningless "Bayesian statistics," which are for attempting to guess the probability of things we don't understand; but we DO understand it. The Cambrian explosion occurred 0.5 Gya not by chance, but because of changes in the Earth's geotectonic activity. The "Boring Billion" before then (1.8-0.8 Gya) was uneventful because Earth was geologically dead. Life depends on biogeochemical cycles, like the phosphorus cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the carbon cycle. Phosophrus is the main limiting nutrient for life, and can only break out of the rocks and soil to be utilized by life mostly by the tidal forces of water. It has been calculated that an exoplanet entirely covered in an ocean could not support complex multicellular life such as even plankton because it does not have waves eroding important minerals like phosphorus out of the continental rocks and into the ocean for later biological use. What changed between 0.8 Gya and 0.5 Gya is that the Earth's core has partially solidified. The core of the Earth has been fully molten for most of it's history, but is cooling down and between 0.8 and 0.5 billion years ago formed a solidified inner core while still maintaining a liquid outer core, forming a dynamo (Dynamo theory) that resulted in the creation of the modern geomagnetic field that surrounds the Earth approximately 600 million years ago. In 1 billion years the Earth's core will cool down to the point of solidifying entirely. The other thing the cooling of the Earth's core did was cause the emergence of modern plate tectonics (primitive plate tectonics had already existed), resulting in the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia about 750-633 years ago. All this movement of the continents has and still is releasing minerals into the oceans and atmosphere that life, including us, need to eat in order to maintain our complexity. Just look at the nutrients and minerals on the back of food packaging.
@@edit4310 I found some good sources, articles and studies for further reading. Ocean planets probably can't support complex life: "Exoplanet hunters rethink search for alien life" by Alexandra Witze. Earth's core and internal heating is responsible for both magnetic field and plate tectonics: "If the earth's core provides heat that drives plate tectonics, what would eventually happen if the earth's core cooled down?" by USCB ScienceLine. Volume and efficiency of phosphorus cycle in Precambrian: "Less life: Limited phosphorus recycling suppressed early Earth’s biosphere" by Peter Kelley. Plate tectonics relationship to oxygen rise and phosphorus production: "Plate tectonics may have driven Cambrian Explosion" by University of Exeter. A more general overview of why Earth became more habitable, including both solar radiation and the gradually growing inner core: "Why did life develop on the surface of the Earth in the Cambrian?" by Doglioni et al.
One of the best science videos I've seen anywhere. Brilliant! Would love to see more explanation of Bayesian statistics with such astonishing clarity. :-)
Until we find evidence, we're alone. And we may never find out. I know everyone thinks humanity's potential is limitless, but there are limits to the universe and thus limits to what humanity can achieve. Not to mention that intelligent life on Earth not only arose with the right conditions, but also after 5 mass extinctions. If any one of them hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here.
I would counter that those were the necessary conditions for intelligent life to start on Earth but how about in those countless exo planets elsewhere in the habitable zones around their stars? Personally, I believe the universe is teeming with life, intelligent life is a different matter but odds are in favor that if it happened on Earth, surely it can happen elsewhere. Maybe the massive distances is also a barrier for that intelligent life as it is for us too. There is probably a civilization on the other side of our own galaxy but the immense distances make it basically impossible to detect them, let alone make contact with them. Just a thought.
Humanity is wayyyy over optimistic vis-à-vis the universe, the harsh reality is that we will quickly face extinction just like all other species on earth soon faces, we can forget about the cosmos, there is utterly no hope, just look at how we struggle on a planet that has everything set up perfectly for us! But we think we can "conquer space"🤣🤣
@@CaptainSaveHoe lmao ok. That’s very dramatic for no reason but I see your point. If we ever had self sustaining colonies in our solar system you’d need a solar system destroying event to make humanity go extinct. The more places humans can occupy, the less likely any one event could ever wipe us out. Have hope, the future isn’t lost yet
Interstellar travel may be so impractical as to be impossible. Every warp engine requires negative energy, which if it existed, we wouldn't. So that means to would take thousands of years to go to the nearest planet. So you would need a lit of people to avoid inbreeding. The number to avoid that is 14,000. That would be impossible. So what would be the minimum? Maybe 1000? Then you need lots of water. No mater how good you recycle, it will never be 100% efficient. Then you need a machine shop for repairs that will be needed. Plus one ship is a single point of failure so how many? 5? 10? Going to another planet could be so expensive it may never be done. Then as we run out of resources it becomes even more expensive as people on earth go wothout. Maybe we never seen any aliens is because they cant go anywhere and we will just go extinct.
@@marveloussoftware4914 if you're gonna mention something as ridiculously impossible as warp engines, you might as well talk about suspended animation, or even transcendence out of our original biology, even those are FAR more probable than warp engine will ever be.
Does it though? If life is common it might be considered uninteresting by advanced civilisations. There may be all sorts of exotic physics and technology to keep them interested.
@@systemicchaos3921 I see this happening, in fact it might have already happened.... web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
@@systemicchaos3921 Look at it this way.... an extremely advanced civilization will have unlocked every last secret that physics and technology have to offer. Quantum mechanics to them would be like arithmetic to us. So what do they do then? Go looking for other life forms in the universe! (Their curiosity is what let them become advanced in the first place. ) We may not be that interesting, but we're the only game in town. Even very intelligent people love watching goldfish, so we just might be putting on an amusing show for somebody!
Yes, "I don't know" is honest and mature. But, forgive me, "an open mind is the perfect receptacle for gems and dung." An open mind needs to be discerning and selective (note the order!). I would argue that the enlightened mind *and heart* begins with "I believe."
i tell you, this channel is one to cherish for the rest of your days and always hold dear to your heart!:) consider yourself lucky that you found it, just saying!
Are there any Sci-fi stories about how people would react if it was discovered that we are alone? anything can happen in sci-fi but I've never seen that.
There was an episode of Twilight Zone, I think, or perhaps Outer Limits?, that realistically depicted “the last man on Earth.” I forget how he came to be the only living being, but it was terrifyingly realistic.
@@ekay4495 You need to reread the question. The question is asking if there are any shows that show how people would react if we're alone. In the Expanse is pretty much humans scattered all over the system and even alien life which doesn't fit into the initial question.
Is it really possible to discover that though? How would you possibly prove that we are alone? It's incredibly difficult to prove some even much more simple things. In practice, we'd just constantly be searching.
I am so grateful that David shares his knowledge and is such a good teacher. I cannot get of space, the unknown and psychics. I am like a sponge that just wants more and more. For someone like him with such a great gift to share is beautiful. Thank you for such great content
Really interesting analysis, thanks. Could it be considered that Fi might be very, very low based on the fact intelligence has only appeared a handful of times, if not just once, amongst the millions of evolutionary branches of Earth's "tree of life"?
In this case Fi is over the course of the entire history of Earth. There is some reason to believe that the chance of intelligence appearing goes up over time, as while it’s effectively impossible to have a civilization made up of bacteria, complex lifeforms can have intelligent civilization-building species arise amongst them, and the evolutionary advantage that intelligence provides ensures that more and more species will have the intelligence needed that making that final leap is not as difficult as the million years prior. If that is the case then we may just be the first civilization-building species to have arrived, and given another several ten million years, we could expect several more. The fact that we appear to be near the start of what we might expect to be an age of intelligence-dominated creatures, seems to indicate that it takes a while to get to here which is far more telling.
I finally got around to reading the paper and I have a question: can you generalize this to the galaxy itself? We know that the sun is among the earliest ~8% of stars of its type (G2V, population I / relatively high metallicity). And we know that no one has a ~200M year head start because we'd see some kind of galaxy-spanning civilization. Does this work using your same calculation or did I misunderstand something that keeps it from being generalized like this? And would doing a full Bayesian network MC simulation with *all* the drake equation factors be feasible? Would it be worthwhile? FWIW, I think it that the most ambiguous item is final part of the drake equation: the fraction of intelligent life that develops a technological civilization we can detect. Our own civilization got to this point by a long a sequence of apparent accidents. We don't really know how lucky or inevitable things like that are. So if you told me that the other factors mean we should be seeing tons of other intelligent life, my conclusion will be that our history has more luck and less inevitability. Is this last aspect something anyone has tried to quantify or otherwise make scientifically meaningful? I couldn't find anything, but I might not be doing the right searches since this isn't my field of scholarship.
>And we know that no one has a ~200M year head start because we'd see some kind of galaxy-spanning civilization. Nonsense, they could just decide expansion isn't worth it. Which, honestly, it kind of isn't, it's just more of the same. Vast, vast, vast distances. Why explore the universe if you could in theory, control your perception?> It would be much easier to alter your biology long before entering even a neighboring star system...
Im so glad y'all explain and break it down because im real curious but the stuff y'all do is just mind boggling and its so crazy how smart you are cuz thats mind boggling too lol!! But it's so fascinating and i love it!! So thank you.
Love the video... quick question... Have you considered that life might not be constrained to the type of life we see on Earth? Maybe life is possible under different chemistry... that would have an impact in the probability calculations, wouldn't it?
@@JGM0JGM He's shown that based on the data we currently have it make probabilistic sense to enter a high value for probability of life on habitable planets in the Drake equation. It doesn't matter what form life takes for this to be true. Depending on how you think about alternate biology you may however tweak your value for habitable planets in the Drake equation slightly, and possibly the probability of intelligence as well when life occurs (most likely lowering it, ours is the only biology we know can produce intelligence).
Good question. The short answer is that we don't know, but the long answer is that for terrestrial planets like ours, carbon based life seems like a near necessity. Life as we know it is very lucky that the key difference between Autotrophs (plants and cyanobacteria) and heterotrophs (consumers) is that one consumes Co2 and produces Oxygen, while the other consumes Oxygen and produces CO2. While you might argue that most alien biospheres should work this way, but might use a different pair of 'key molecules', ISNT IT LUCKY that One of these is a greenhouse gas and the other isn't? Not only that, but crucially, that the output gas of consumers is the greenhouse gas. If this wasn't the case, the biosphere would quickly destabilize itself. Snowball earth scenarios cut the number of autotrophs, and allow CO2 to build up, and warm the planet. While hothouse events warm the oceans, increasing autotroph activity and consuming all the available CO2 in the atmosphere. With a different set of molecules, this simply wouldn't be the case. In fact, CO2 is perhaps UNIQUELY qualified to fit this role for terrestrial planets, since it is the primary greenhouse gas (aside from water vapor) that is produced by volcanic activity and will naturally build up in the atmosphere over time (pulling the planet out of snowball earth scenarios). It isn't lucky that Oxygen and CO2 are the molecules that balance the metabolism of producers/consumers, it's a necessity to support the kind of stable temperature feedback loops that maintain a habitable world over the geologic timescales necessary for life to develop intelligence. All that said, in a planet in a different temperature regime (colder, most likely), there may be other similar feedback loops that may exist, for example with methane as the 'solvent'. The problem is, chemical reactions slow way down under colder conditions, which would slow the evolution of life and therefore decrease the chance of intelligent life evolving.
@@insertphrasehere15 Great response, thanks. I did overlook the basic feedback loop that makes life possible.... If O2 producing bacteria hadn't evolved, the Earth would still be crawling only with anaerobic bacteria, and it is doubtful that intelligent life would evolve from such bacteria. I was also thinking about silicone as a base to replace carbon, but I think there aren't as many possibilities with silicone as there are with carbon for exchanging energy and for creating different biochemical process overall, so it is kind of discarded as an actual possibility. Maybe I've watched too many scifi movies and read to many books, but I can't help to think that the universe might surprise us in totally unexpected ways. Maybe a process that can generate life is possible in the atmosphere of giant gas planets for instance where a feedback loop might not be necessary...
Cool result. Trained as an evolutionary biologist, I had the exact same feeling simply from assessing the ease or difficulty of evolutionary parameters to both abiogenesis and the very particular parameters for the evolution of hominids.
I think - or maybe better stated feel - that the question of whether or not we are alone is moot. The distances between us and them are so great that having a true two way conversation is not possible. Is faster than light travel possible? That seems quite unlikely. Even if it is then for FTL to be of any real use it must provide speeds well in excess of just two, three, four or even five times C. There are only a few dozen stars that are less than 100 light years away. Like it or not, we are, for all practical purposes, alone.
Professor Kipping, the content of your channel is absolutely amazing. You have an incredible mind, even just listening to you is pure gold. Thank you for your great work. You definitely have a magical talent to make me truly enter into all these Cool Worlds.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Psalm 139
The universe might be teeming with life, even intelligent life. But the odds of meeting up with intelligent life in another star system are probably close to nil due to the propensity for intelligent life (judging by intelligent life on earth) of destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life due to over-exploitation of resources, destruction of the environment, and overpopulation. That happening before they are able to achieve interstellar travel seems a plausible outcome.
That is already placing increasing anthropocentric expectations on alien civilizations. Just as life elsewhere would be nothing like life here, I would bet intelligence there would also be much different than it is here.
Good points indeed. Evolution on other life-bearing planets may have led to mental realization early on that industrial and scientific progress need to be carefully tempered by cautiousness regarding potential negative ramifications of new technologies and such. Perhaps those mental predilections toward greed and overconsumption and carelessness about waste products, have been eliminated via mental evolution. With the billions of possible places organic life might have developed, as well as civilizations that crossed the so-called AI singularity and evolved into hybrid or possibly completely electro-mechanical existence, then the so-called “goldilocks zone” may be irrelevant. Ergo, make that trillions of possible home worlds for life in the universe-this universe!! All sorts of possibilities, and I agree that to judge the potential for alien life to have evolved enough to have achieved super-luminal space travel capability without creating the destructive side effects as we are familiar with here on earth-to arrive at any conclusions based on the logical assertion I made previously-is a biased assertion at best.
Mine would be the capacity to learn. Questioning ones own existence is perhaps related to a certain degree of cognitive intelligence sure, but is hardly of functional value in and of itself.
The concept of zero, and by extension, oblivion or nonexistence, wins for me. What more bottomless profundity can there be, if not the alarming possibility of no-thing?
I'm personally going with, if said life can realize it lives on a planet and that there are other planets in the universe. That means we basically just got " intelligent" the last couple of decades. Who wants to contact beings that can't even fathom other planets? You might say, "Well ancient Greeks and Egyptians if told would be able to understand planets and orbits and stars. etc etc.. " But I think that their culture, society and science have to get to a point where they discover planets in other stars on their own. Sort of like the prime directive. Interfering in that and coming into contact before hand may not be for their own best interest.
Awesome/inspiring video, as always. I see another underlying assumption here seems to be that life also originated on Earth to begin with, as opposed to a panspermia model. I wonder how much the 9:1 odds widens if you widen the Lf range to the formation of the solar system itself.
What if we are the first? When we search for life we have a bias and search for life similar to us and I think that Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when he writes that after millions of years the super computer Deep Thought reaches the conclusion that the answer is 42. When the priests object he tells them that is the answer BUT they don't understand the question and I think that is the problem because we only have one example, we don't know what to expect life to be like anywhere else and do not know how to detect it.
Would you agree, that water might be the foundation of most life in the universe? There might be exceptions to the rule, perhaps a combination of hydrogen & carbon dioxde.
Ah the never ending Story of live in the Universe^^ I want to believe it is out there! And I've got some Theories why we don't found them yet. 1. They don't want to discover because they know there is something out there you never make attentive on your Present. OK this is very unlikely but it's a possibility😉 2. We have them discovered (maybe for years) . Somthing like 6EQUJ5 or even we don't have identified it as such Signal. 3. They doesn't exist anymore because they terminate their selfes. 4. The Planet we found are great candidates for live maybe one Day but the live on this Worlds must be evolve. (like Snowball Earth for billions of years) And so on. What I'd like to do is: start some Missions to explore the best candidates in our homesystem. Like Europa, Mars, Enceladus and maybe Titan to search targeted for traces of life. and only for them. And if we find something we have an excellent evidence live is possible on Exoplanets. And if it intelligent we don't no BUT it is very likely there are out there. The live on Earth had been started on the same conditions. This was a great Video and I enjoy to read your Papers there helps me to understand somting more and giving me another perspective on many things👍😀 Great work
I agree. I have a few theories of my own. 1. There is intelligent life but it's so far away from us (ei, other side of the galaxy), that the chances of finding them is nil. 2. That we are not technologically or mentally advanced enough for them to make contact. (Star Trek based) Putting intelligence aside, I do believe that there are single cell organisms out there. But what's the chance of us actually finding them..?
@@rossrobotics6342 Isn't there evidence of single-celled life in meteors that fall to Earth? It is not inconceivable that life didn't begin here at all.
Thanks so much for watching everyone, make sure to like/share/subscribe if you enjoyed this! This has been a major research effort over the last year and I'm thrilled to finally share it with you. We have so many other exciting projects on the horizon but only so much in the way of research resources to pursue these thrilling ideas. If you want to support our research, you now can through the Columbia Just Giving platform - www.coolworldslab.com/support - thanks for anything you can do to help us unravel the Universe's secrets!
Are the Greys gonna colonize us using GMO bees or black goo such as in the X-Files?
Excellent effort, and a great example of how Bayesian statistics allows to get a lot from a little. I was a bit confused during reading the paper as "T" is overloaded in "Adopted Values for the Observational Data", being simultaneously 4.408 Gy and 5.304 Gy - Perhaps this is down to the web publishing? I'd be interested in knowing how your model would take to followup evidence - Suppose we detect non-intelligent life on some other world a time t2 after its last sterilizing event, what would that imply for the odds of slow versus fast intelligence as a function of t2? What if the detection is of intelligent life?
pure conjecture.. the arrogance of man, and his ability to tell great stories.. hear we go again.. care to play.?
Thank-you, sir.
Can't even put words to my appreciation.
@BLAIR M Schirmer Maybe the Great Spark (great name btw) is not what we think it is...maybe that spark is a low-probability sequential and well timed narrow process within an already existing abiogenesis...what if it had to happen in a very specific order at a very specific time, while of course benefiting from the specifics of an all relatively stable stellar environment....? Life is the template and intelligent life its unlikely and immensely rare by-product. I don't know.
I love how the main host basically turns his peer reviewed papers into layman's terms videos for those of us who either can't access peer reviewed papers or have trouble digesting their dense text. Thanks, to both him and everyone else who helps these videos happen.
Me too
This channel is a gold nugget on UA-cam. Such interesting content.
True
Feeling when you discover this channel must be the same as when we discover life itself in another planet :)
Aye! 🙂
@@bunkerbuster6729 Great video ! Except perhaps were it was alluded to the fact the Bill Nye is a scientist? He just pretends to be one on a children's TV show.
Also check out Isaac Arthur and Event Horizon.
I can’t even begin to tell you how, first off, fantastic this man is. This is a college professor explaining the universe to you. That in itself is a phenomenal fact. Secondly, he’s doing it on UA-cam, which means one of two things. Either he wants to spread this knowledge to the masses, appreciating the thought of the knowledge itself, or he wants his work and research out in the masses. Either way it’s a fantastic thing. Maybe he just has fun doing it, but I’d like to think otherwise 😁 but the man cites his sources and provides the formulas as well. So remarkable!
Bro also wants AdSense
@@jamieconnor3505 absence
@@jamieconnor3505HAHAHA yes, this is actually the ONLY reason he is doing this🧐
How lucky are we to live in an era when a mind such as David's is but a click away!!!
Let's apply Bayesian statistics to find out.!! :D
Gene Lowe amen
I really shouldn't be here.
He is truly a genius
Unlucky*
The rigorous qualification of most claims in your videos is extremely refreshing. So many arguments in popular media are based on absolutes that this is a remarkable deviation from the vast majority of communication, including science communication. Thank you for the excellent content Dr. Kipping.
Did not expect this video to be so wholesome! 😂 We do have to make many assumptions just to get to any hypothesis, thinking of "human intelligence" as point of comparison when this concept can be something else, intelligence for an alien organism could be something we can't even imagine. But that's a completely different topic. Truly fascinating. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and knowledge with us.
i love and appreciate that this man doesn't talk to his subscribers and viewers like they're uneducated children, his videos are so interesting and they just pull you in like a trance. another wonderful video, great job 👍
He doesn't bother talking to guys in a trance...
This is the first time I've heard such a thoughtful, logical, carefully-argued answer to this question. Next time someone asks what I 'believe' about alien life I'll show them this video. Thank you for your wonderful outreach work.
Even at rare that still would leave billions of planets with life It’s debatable about intelligence since is a whale intelligent? Life is out there like it or not, will we ever meet them who knows the distance is vast, debate all you want we are not alone. We think we understand the universe we don’t know shit, until we really get out there we won’t.
This isn't an answer to the question to whether we are alone or not. We will never know until we make contact there's no evidence yet to either outcome.
@@MF-LXRD There is plenty of evidence, is you are serious enough to look at reliable sources. This might change your opinion, that indeed this planet is being visited from another life form.
He is asked if he believes alien life exists and dodges directly answering yes or no. Did you even watch the video?
@@dennisd7668 His analysis here is based on an Earth like planet around a Sun like star.
These are extremely rare in the rest of the galaxy. Not that they are needed, but a non-totally hostile environment is needed.
For example, nearly 60% of stars are in the core of the galaxy where radiation levels should preclude life. Nearly 85% of stars are red dwarfs where planets in the goldilocks zone should be tidally lock (rare chance of life) and red dwarfs sporadically have huge amounts of solar activity which should remove atmospheres (again, rare chance of life). Nearly 85% of star system in our galaxy have 2 or more stars, again rare chance of life due to planetary orbital instability. There are hundreds more different ways that the galaxy is hostile to life.
The galaxy (and presumably the universe) is deadly to life. Extremely deadly. We just happen to sit out in a calm galactic arm with a calm star, a good orbit for life, and many other factors in our favor.
Based on our knowledge, intelligent life here was an extremely rare fluke. Even a few billion safe stars in our galaxy probably indicates some chances for life, but intelligent life is an entirely different story. The cooling of our planetary core took so long that simple multicellular life only occurred about 1 billion years ago out of the 4+ billion years that Earth has existed.
I would really like to know why someone would thumbs down this video. The only thing I can think of is thank it presses their mental limits.
I've only watched this video about 10 times. I imagine that I'll be here another 10 times as well. Thanks for all the arguing points Cool Worlds. You guys help me look and feel a little smarter then i really am to my friends and loved ones.
The fact you're drawn to this suggests you've only scratched the surface of your intelligence.
LOL
Strange, I forgot I watched this 1 year ago and now my opinion has changed
On an off chance, do check that you've not left loop playback ON... /s
One of the mistakes of our antropomorphism is that we think that evolution YES or YES led to intelligence...and this is not true...in 600 millions of years of animals evolution on Earth,intelligence (to a grade of civilization type) just happened once...with humans...(we can assume that dolphins or cephalopods also have some type of intelligence but not to human level or capable to form civilizations)...
For example...Dinosaurs as species run the planet during 180 millions years...even so the dino most intelligent,doesnt was smarter than an actual chicken...
Dinos evolved in thousands of ways,on air,land and water...but never evolved to understand a diferencial equation,because basically evolution doesnt lead to intelligence as final result...intelligence is just a subproduct of evolution...
I intuitively end with the concept of common life-uncommon intelligence...we could talk about the asteroid and dinosaurs 60 millions of years ago,and other extintions that led to mammals and eventualy to humans...a russian rulet en many case our human existence...
we only need to go 70 thousands years in the recent past,a volcano erupted...a hard climate change that almost lead to the extincion of human race...only a hundred or maybe a thousands of human individuals survived...of a population of hundred of thousands...we were closed to total desimation,and humans 70 thousands ago were more or less as smart as us...
And what would had happened if those humans disappeard...nothing...the life on the planet would continued normally...its not that humans would had been replaced by other smart mammal...not necesarely...chimpanzees,that are our most close relative...are smart,but not to human level...
Someone can say "hey,evolution need intelligence species because who gonna build rockets to abandon the planet and colonize other places???"...well,nature have a response to this Panspermia...living thing travelling on meteorites from planet to planet to other planet systems eventualy (as Oumuamua and Borisov as showed)...
So,intelligence its not the pinnacle of evolution...just a subproduct that can or not happen...because evolution not need it in ultimate instance...
You’ve really outdone yourself with this video Prof. Kipling. This channel feels like a pioneer that paves the way for all future space related exploration. Thank you!
:)
The way you articulate points, your voice and tone..your unbelievably high degree of intelligence..it's all like one big massage for my brain, thank you very much.
How Cool is that I fall asleep to these vids every night for months now. Even cooler that I wake up and find myself a lot more happier than the day before.
Cannot thank these guys enough!
Hes right
Lol I use them to fall asleep too! So calming and relaxing.
Me too.
I fell asleep to one of Isaac Arthur's videos a few weeks ago and had dreams of living on a space station orbiting Neptune. It was pretty cool.
The thing that has always annoyed me Is that everyone! Assumes that life needs the same conditions to exist.
Louis Cypher Yep! We adapted and evolved to our environment, it wasn’t created for us. No such thing as Goldilocks zones or the need for water to exist as if life is common it may mean that other life forms have evolved to withstand much higher/lower temps or are not even carbon based, gas breathing life forms. We only need to look at the bottom of our own oceans for evidence of this! I think this same thing all the time.
@@poobrainsmellypants1 www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
It's as well hard to think of..
Well, we have 20+ different environments in our solar system. How many lives adapted to any of them? Where are the lives that adapt to the sulphuric oven conditions in Venus? or the freezing CH4 lakes on Titan? What that tells us is that there are very few suitable environments for life and probably only one environment that life can adapt to.
@@sirsia1st the original web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
This not absolutely knowing is fascinating. How much we just don’t know boggles the brain .
Can’t get enough of the theorising and love these videos.. thanks to the people that have put in the work producing these ...👏👏
Dude your videos are so awesome. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more and more interested in space and just everything about it and just how mind bendingly insane space actually is. Its so awesome to have people like you who know so much to be able to learn from. Keep making videos man love it
My day just got a load better seeing you posted. Love it all. Your voice is akin to Attenborough. Very calming
Yea he could definitely narrate some nature or space documentaries.
Same
Your channel happens to be the easiest to listen to, with being under isolation at home, not from going out endangering our families. Thanks for these productions!
I was literally just watching this video when a science journal i read here in Germany notified me on my phone about this new study using Bayesian statistics to determine the probabilities of life and intelligence by a certain David Kipping... Sadly they didn't link this Video :D
Keep it up professor! You and your channel are a true gem on UA-cam
Hahaha nice
What are the odds?
If this guy was my teacher when I was in school I would never of bunked off so much.. what a genius
*would never HAVE bunked. You’re welcome, Grammar Nazi
Smoking weed is important
I really do think if I had better teachers I would have done much better in school/collage. Everything turned out well for me thankfully, but it was only bc of a lot of hard work and perseverance. I can't imagine what could have happened had I had someone like him as a teacher
Your video re-inspired my imagination and made me think of these more fundamental factors rather than just basing my assumptions for the existence of life on the huge amount of stars out there in the universe. I look forward to reading your paper!
This channel is the perfect combination of an awesome host and deeply interesting content that you couldn't get anywhere else. It's a (team of) scientist(s) showing their brand spanking new work. It's so great, I love it.
:)
D353rt I love it, too. Such an honor to be treated to intelligent authenticity while we’re stuck in an age of flubbergushing mediocrity.
I literally have no head for numbers as I have dyscalculia, but I am so glad that this channel explains physics and stats without being condescending about it. I'm definitely more of a biology minded person since I was a forestry wildlife management major in college, and xenobiology has always been fascinating to me.
I do think there's other life out there, but I don't think we'll ever come in contact with it. It's sad to think about, but I also think it means we should take better care of this bubble we have because when they come across us, we'll probably be long gone, and we should leave behind something to be proud of.
And also cat memes. Leave behind cat memes.
Thank you prof Kipping for trying to explain these super complex ideas in such an entertaining and engaging way
Unfortunately, it is a complete fail when you consider the lifespan of smaller stars than the sun. Yes, it becomes less likely that intelligent life evolves if it takes 80% plus of the habitable period of a planet for intelligence to happen (as with us). However, all of that beautiful Bayesian math goes right out the window if you consider a K type star with a habitable window of. say, 8 or 10 billion years, and it still only takes 4 billion years for intelligence to evolve. Like so many "solutions" to anything, it is easy to come up with a model that is simple, plausible and completely wrong.
@@paulpeterson4216 This is a very important criticism of using such models. But is it not possible to calculate the priors for different types of stars that could support life on different time scales?
There’s nothing complex about being a pessimist.
@@dronesightingsmith3979 Best advice I was given was "always expect the worst, then anything better is always a bonus!" Pessimism has it's uses, but it shouldn't stop us looking for intelligent life elsewhere. At the very least we need to be looking for a new home for the human race, this one is going to be uninhabitable in less than a billion years.
But there is an issue he doesn't make clear: *Drakes Equation does not factor the entire Universe. It factors **_only_** the Milky Way Galaxy. It also factors **_out all life except_** intelligent communicative civilizations.*
An intelligent approach. We see on Earth that intelligence is rare.
Lmao
And until we destroy superstitious religions, that will never be resolved.
Hehe
@BLAIR M Schirmer In my line of work I met quite a few sociopaths who were brilliant.
You're absolutely correct the parasites that ask for a government handout are the epitome of unintelligent including scientist who look to manipulate the government is he giving them taxpayer money teachers anybody who work for the government is a parasite and is unintelligent a nun creative
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that your voice is so soothing, and when you talk about the wondrous enigma of space, it puts me to sleep. Thank you!
This may just be my favourite science channel on UA-cam! Thank you so much for you work 🙏
Giggity
Hey Bill Schopf was my professor at ucla when I was in college doing my general education 20 years ago! Great class. Funny guy. He's Mr. Microfossil. He showed us how a closeup picture of a pepperoni pizza could look like micro fossils to the untrained eye
There was a James Bond movie that used a woman's body to prove you need to know distance and magnification to analyze a photo.
Wow
@@exoplanets
Yeah it was a year-long class called "GE Cluster: History of the Cosmos and Life." The first third of it was basic cosmology and astrophysics, the second third was geology, and the last third was biology.
Schopf taught the biology part, but he was present in the lecture hall during the entire course, sometimes trash-talking the other professors if he thought that they hadn't explained something well.
Always making jokes. He was a big skeptic of the Martian "microfossils" from 1996. The class was for non-science majors only.
@@ByteMeCompletely
Is it an old james bond movie, or one of the new ones from the last ten years? I'll have to check that out
Mate. Your videos are unreal. I listen to you every night when falling asleep and you feed a curiosity in my brain. Thanks for making such good content.
i’ve watched a lot of content speculating on intelligent life existing elsewhere and i can say with my whole heart that this is the first video i’ve seen that gave me some new, fresh insight into the matter. really appreciate all the hard work you put in over at cool worlds
Your way of conducting real research, simplifying it for us mortal men and then sharing it in the best visual way possible. I think you found a way to shift the way how science should be conducted. Just think if every professor in the world had the possibility with funds, to spend time on subjects they find interesting and conducted real research, simply it, and then illustrate it and share it for everyone to see, just like you do here and have been doing for years now. I believe the world would look very different and in a positive way. Thank you and much love!
so yas saying we shouldnt learn ta read, let the preacher man tell us whats what in that there bible and all will be well huh?
I like the concept of incorporating human bias into the equation.
Also, it's very cool that you bring in your young lab assistant into your work in a playful manner. She must be quite proud of her teacher and educator. You must also be quite proud of her. Maybe she will be inspired to become a scientist, educator and/or artist herself when she grows up. Should I ever become a father myself, I certainly would want to have moments like this. Passing on the passion for learning and curiosity I think is one of the most important and beautiful things in life
💯 Absolutely 💯. One of the hardest, best jobs being a parent. David seems like he'd be a fantastic father
The window only closes unless we engineer the sun, or sling the earth outward? (Another great video)
Finally, I've been waiting for a new episode. Professor please keep them coming. Your channel brings me great insight on cool new worlds. Thanks
Didn't you watch the one about the formation on the Earth? It was very recently made and very well done, with ever second a massive amount of years passing.
This is one of my favorite UA-cam videos of all time.
We currently know so little about the Universe around us. I feel assuming we can apply how intelligent life came to be on Earth to other planets is an example of natural human hubris. We currently have a sample size of one. Our data set is frustratingly incomplete, but I love that channels like this exist to get us all thinking deeply about these topics and leave us better informed after each viewing. Awesome to have an expert like this helping us to make sense of it all. Keep up the good work!
I think it’s almost impossible that we are alone. The universe could be infinite too
"We currently have a sample size of one. Our data set is frustratingly incomplete" or frustratingly complete.
As always David, you do an excellent job in describing a complex subject in the most simplistic terms. I never miss your latest videos. keep up the great work.
I just finished reading a wonderful book : the Einstein Enigma. This is one of the topic of this book and I recommend it to everyone !
Thanks for the recommendation~👍
your scientific rigor is truly under appreciated
Hmm.. very interesting. How about red dwarfs and their earth-like analogs? Let's say a lifespan of 5-10 trillion years, which, I expect, is very common for the most common star type. That should give life more time to find the way, by a significant factor. How does the star affect the probability? Our sun is not a typical star, it's a rare one (7%). We only had 14 billion years so far, so maybe that is a factor as well? Maybe 100 billion years from now, the odds are somewhat different?
The star systems with a higher probably of life as we know it are currently believed to be K-type stars. No Earth-like planets are expected to exist around red dwarfs. But the higher number of stars are red dwarfs, so they could host the highest number of exoplanets with alien life (different to ours).
I think a major argument against habitability around red dwarfs are the conditions around such stars. To my knowledge red dwarfs are predominantly flare stars, meaning they have massive stellar storms, which could feasibly change average temperature on their planets by tens, even fifty degrees in irregular and unpredictable periods. Any planets around them that are in the habitable zone are also likely to get tidally locked very soon, because of their proximity to the star, meaning one side would always face towards the star and the other always away, potentially complicating the situation further. That doesn't mean it's necessarily impossible for life to form there, but the red dwarfs are far less stable than usually presented and maybe more hostile to simple life even if it comes into existence, so all in all it's difficult to say.
Its difficult to realize how early we are, in the grand scheme of the universe lifetime, which will be seemingly impossibly long. At some point, there will ONLY be red dwarves, white dwarves, black dwarves, and black holes. All star formation will cease. All galaxies will be so far apart from one another, that any observer will have no idea that any others ever existed. WTF?
@@Deeplycloseted435 Well, if the Eternal Inflation theory is true, there always will be some other universes beginning to exist (maybe with different laws of physics) where the inflaton field settles down and a Big Bang will happen, even while this universe/region ends in the heat death.
juan tuan we will never know, cause we will all be dead and the universe will not know of our existence!!!
Fascinating, well-made and I didn't understand a word of it
Oh God! I thought I was the only one
What are you going to do about it?
@@dsdy1205 the question is what are you going to do about it?
@@commentarygold8553 Well I understand it, so that question is irrelevant
@@dsdy1205 well that’s great for you. Please enlighten us O wise one
Wow I didn’t think it was possible to approach this issue in any meaningful way but I stand corrected. You made the logical argument so easy to follow that an average person like i can follow it. Thanks for your time and effort. May you have all the success in the world. Keep up the good work it is changing and inspiring many lives.
I love the extra effort you put in, with the casino and everything! Really shows how you want to teach and show people
Thanks, Doc Kipp, damn I wish I had someone like you as my professor during my education.
I would also assume that intelligent life is even more rare because here on Earth mass extinction played a big role on how life evolved.
Maybe it's also possible to shrink it down if accounting for stellar system stability, flux received by stars, magnetosphere force, if gas giant could sustain life on satellites.
There are way too many factor and we know so little.
So just by using Bayesian Statistics, we arrive at an already pretty low value.
Sadly, accounting for the Fermi Paradox (Space and Time, Rare Earth, Rear Intelligence; see _Isaac Arthur_ ) probably only worsens the odds oof.
Do intelligent people have to all think the same things? Like, instead of calling someone stupid, behind their backs or amongst you own, did it ever occur to the intelligencia to be nice and persuade the less intelligent to be informed of the truth? I know that I am not smart enough either. Is it humility, or self-reflection?
Oh
That’s just speculation that the dinosaurs or other more superior species needed to be wiped out by some sort of mass extinction event for us or any smaller species to evolve into intelligence! We don’t 100% know that, maybe with or without that event we would’ve still evolved into who we are... we still had dangerous predators to overcome like lions, tigers, bears, mammoths, saber tooth’s etc & still made it to high intelligence so idk bro, we still don’t even really know if dinosaurs were a threat to other species survival or not, it could all be myth. They probably weren’t all that hard to live around in regard to smaller species being able to evolve properly into us or any intelligent alien species on another planet facing a similar issue
@@JAYFULFILMZ Nah I doubt it, just look at us, as the new top predator , not event taking that into account, just us moving in and building a house will displace other species of animals and eventually ruine their habitat and go extinct. Id imagine it was the same with dinos around, probably worse since we've found other things to eat and they still had to eat what came across their mouths so us early mammals were definately on the menu just like todays pigs who are smarter than dogs dont have a chance to evolve because we're keeping them in prisons for food, we are definatley keep other species from evolving. I think the dinos did the same. But nature has inbuilt balance so in the end being on the bottom of the food chain for so long while the top predator was busy feasting, probably helped us develope the intelligence, or at leaste kept the Dinosaurs from needing to evolve, they thought rulilng the planet was the end all and be all of existance, and in their mind they were right, rulling for millions of years, but didnt take into account outer space, so they were just a sitting target to get whiped out by a mass extinction event. We on the other hand can see it comming, but i guess will also be distracted by our own feasting while some other unseen thing will take us out too. And then the animals we've been keeping under our thumbs might go on and take over the planet and could evolve in higher intellillgence then we've reached.
Great work for both: the paper and the video. Can't wait to see what comes next. Best regards from Germany and Italy.
This has got to be the most depressing channels on YT. When I'm feeling depressed, I watch this channel and find out that whatever it was that was depressing me is nothing compared to this. So it immediately cheers me up. Figures.
Thanks, your videos are incredibly informative and I hope you become one of the big great science channels on this platform!
Yes, his approach is quite unique. Its really almost like art the way the videos and themes are composed.
The calculations you discuss include “abiogenesis” occurring individually on each candidate world. But - even if it is rare for life to “begin” on a world - our existence proves that it happened at least once in the history of our universe - and once we know that it happened once - we have to acknowledge panspermia. Life arising on any planet could potentially spread to many more - even those that didn’t have the necessary conditions for abiogenesis to occur on them. We do not know if abiogenesis ever occurred on earth - but we do know it occurred somewhere. How long it takes for that life to evolve intelligence probably depends on the selection pressures which will vary greatly world to world. On earth it took 4 billion years - but on another planet it might only take 40 million years. Learning more about how intelligence evolved on earth will probably allow us to assign a low and high range answer to the question “how long does it take for intelligence to emerge”.
Finally - every time we have tried to think of the Earth as “special”, we have been proven wrong by the universe. I think it is a mistake to think that we are unusual and will get the best answers to our questions by assuming the Earth is typical - at least until it can be proven that we are not.
As many variables as this video addresses that others don't, they still have to leave out thousands more.
I agree with you. I think it is way better to see us as "average" rather than an extreme, think about it. I think it is really likely that there are Millions of Civiliations out there, that are just as far developed as we are. Some are behind us in development and some are ahead of us.
@@tminuszehn4048 Thinking statistically the vast majority will be far ahead of us.
@@systemicchaos3921 how do you come to that assumption? I think there will be at least as many that are more developed as we are as there will be civilisations that aren't. And a big number that is about as much developed as we are. Why should the vast majority be ahead of us? Because factoring that our solar system is kinda "young"? Only reasonable explanation I could think of. 🤔 Glad to hear about your thought process!
I couldnt have said it better. So I didnt. Thank you for sharing.
I just LOVE how this channel promotes Bayesian reasoning!
Very informative. I could put my phone down and take in information through my headphones for hours. Calm voice narrative.
honestly your my new bedtime jam. your voice is so soothing
Dark5 who?! 😂
Your = You're
16:30 My heart literally melted into the keyboard as I type this
My own theory is that there are many intelligent forms of alien life, but they live too far away and they are too adapted to their biosphere to be interested in ours. Pathogens, wrong levels of gases, wrong kinds of light that could cause cancer, gravity to little or too much all make our world uninhabitable for most others.
Why do you believe that?
Nice job David.
First time this hypothesis is being supported statistically and i would say quantitatively rather than the usual qualitatively method.
But there is an issue he doesn't make clear: *Drakes Equation does not factor the entire Universe. It factors **_only_** the Milky Way Galaxy. It also factors **_out all life except_** intelligent communicative civilizations.*
This has become my favorite channel on UA-cam. I discovered this channel only 2 days ago.
stay safe professor, we need you to talk to us in english 😆 explaining complicated formulas with warm and charming voice and patience, thank you professor david kipping.
:)
Thanks for posting these videos up I absolutely love them they definitely make the day go by. Thanks for your hard work @cool worlds!
Amazing speaking voice. He must be a broadcaster. So clear and precise.
Just can't get tired of these videos!
Thanks Kipping! So hooked😅
Only thing broader than the universe is this dudes impressive jawline
And check out that stylin' cardigan!
Is that a PRS you’re playing?
His chin, like the universe, is constantly expanding..
lol
He can totally "big bang" my wife anytime his heart so dires
An excellent video. Thank you.
IMO, the difference in time between the start of simple life, and consciousness, really does strongly indicate that we have grossly underestimated the difficulty in life becoming sentient.
i.e. We are in a so-called goldilocks zone, yet sentient life took the entire age of the universe to arise on this planet. Even worse: we have a narrow window until the evolution of the sun makes sentient life here almost impossible.
My guess is that simple life is probable throughout the universe, but sentience is exceedingly, vanishingly rare. We should never expect to see it within our lifetime, within our light bubble.
The question he asks is wrong. The question should be what is the mechanism that spreads life through the universe, once it’s developed once, can spores, survive space and propagate life . If so, then the equation is far more simple to achieve life
@@jaylucas8352 That's only for simple life.
Sentient life is likely to be an incomprehensibly more unlikely result.
We could have a galaxy full of amoeba, but still have no sentient life.
The "equation" is unhelpful because we don't know the constants or variables.
It's all guesses.
Love your videos! Your conclusion - primitive life is common, intelligent life is rare - is the same conclusion of Dr. Nick Lane, but approaching it from the abiogenesis perspective, (he's a biochemist who leads the "Origins of Life Program" at the University College London). In his latest book, "The Vital Question", he walks the reader thru abiogenesis via energy flux in the white smoker deep sea vents ("Lost City"). Then convincingly describes how eukaryotes evolved, how it was a stochastic event (endosymbiosis leading to mitochondria) that occurred only once (in billions of years), but was essential to the creation of complex life. Think that you would find it a good read (if you haven't done so already!). Thanks for reading!
Urey-Miller all over again. I've heard that nuclear decay was responsible for abiogenesis. I guess some computer simulations based on actual physics, I care not what ingredients you start with, will prove the abiogenesis question and the even more difficult explanation of origin of species by natural selection. But we'll have to have a robust simulator, and a correct one at that, to do any sort of proofs. Did keyboards evolve because I have two hands or did two hands evolve so I could type?
@@CandidDate actually Dr Nick Lane is describing something completely different than the Urey-Miller experiment, and reflects the amazing advances we have made in the biological sciences since Urey's time (1950s). You can say whatever you want - "it's a free country" - but your comments do not represent science.
Me too
Wow, a fascinating topic made even more so with real some in-depth analysis - love it! Please keep making this long form format - it's really really good, and the talented "lab assistant" obviously takes after Dad!
intelligent and humble. two things that always stand out when watching your videos. love it.
I've always found it fascinating that multicellular life only emerged 600 million years ago, relatively much closer to now than the emergence of life itself. I wonder if this method you've developed has anything to say about the relative difficulty of progress from abiogenesis to multicellular life, versus multicellular life to intelligent life?
It doesn't. This guy does not know anything about biology or our geological history, which is why he is using unreliable and meaningless "Bayesian statistics," which are for attempting to guess the probability of things we don't understand; but we DO understand it. The Cambrian explosion occurred 0.5 Gya not by chance, but because of changes in the Earth's geotectonic activity. The "Boring Billion" before then (1.8-0.8 Gya) was uneventful because Earth was geologically dead. Life depends on biogeochemical cycles, like the phosphorus cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the carbon cycle. Phosophrus is the main limiting nutrient for life, and can only break out of the rocks and soil to be utilized by life mostly by the tidal forces of water. It has been calculated that an exoplanet entirely covered in an ocean could not support complex multicellular life such as even plankton because it does not have waves eroding important minerals like phosphorus out of the continental rocks and into the ocean for later biological use.
What changed between 0.8 Gya and 0.5 Gya is that the Earth's core has partially solidified. The core of the Earth has been fully molten for most of it's history, but is cooling down and between 0.8 and 0.5 billion years ago formed a solidified inner core while still maintaining a liquid outer core, forming a dynamo (Dynamo theory) that resulted in the creation of the modern geomagnetic field that surrounds the Earth approximately 600 million years ago. In 1 billion years the Earth's core will cool down to the point of solidifying entirely. The other thing the cooling of the Earth's core did was cause the emergence of modern plate tectonics (primitive plate tectonics had already existed), resulting in the breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia about 750-633 years ago. All this movement of the continents has and still is releasing minerals into the oceans and atmosphere that life, including us, need to eat in order to maintain our complexity. Just look at the nutrients and minerals on the back of food packaging.
@@codys447 Do you have any pieces of books/literature /documents that you could refer me to? That was quite insightful
@@edit4310 I found some good sources, articles and studies for further reading.
Ocean planets probably can't support complex life: "Exoplanet hunters rethink search for alien life" by Alexandra Witze.
Earth's core and internal heating is responsible for both magnetic field and plate tectonics: "If the earth's core provides heat that drives plate tectonics, what would eventually happen if the earth's core cooled down?" by USCB ScienceLine.
Volume and efficiency of phosphorus cycle in Precambrian: "Less life: Limited phosphorus recycling suppressed early Earth’s biosphere" by Peter Kelley.
Plate tectonics relationship to oxygen rise and phosphorus production: "Plate tectonics may have driven Cambrian Explosion" by University of Exeter.
A more general overview of why Earth became more habitable, including both solar radiation and the gradually growing inner core: "Why did life develop on the surface of the Earth in the Cambrian?" by Doglioni et al.
One of the best science videos I've seen anywhere. Brilliant! Would love to see more explanation of Bayesian statistics with such astonishing clarity. :-)
Man I love this Channel. This top level information you don't find anywhere
This is brilliant. And let’s get busy investigating life in the outer solar system’s ocean moons so we can potentially get a second data point.
Just found your channel. I love it. Love it!
Welcome to Cool Worlds!
Im comfortable with the conclusion yoi have reached, not just because you've crunched the numbers but because it makes the most sense
Until we find evidence, we're alone. And we may never find out. I know everyone thinks humanity's potential is limitless, but there are limits to the universe and thus limits to what humanity can achieve. Not to mention that intelligent life on Earth not only arose with the right conditions, but also after 5 mass extinctions. If any one of them hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here.
I would counter that those were the necessary conditions for intelligent life to start on Earth but how about in those countless exo planets elsewhere in the habitable zones around their stars? Personally, I believe the universe is teeming with life, intelligent life is a different matter but odds are in favor that if it happened on Earth, surely it can happen elsewhere. Maybe the massive distances is also a barrier for that intelligent life as it is for us too. There is probably a civilization on the other side of our own galaxy but the immense distances make it basically impossible to detect them, let alone make contact with them. Just a thought.
Humanity is wayyyy over optimistic vis-à-vis the universe, the harsh reality is that we will quickly face extinction just like all other species on earth soon faces, we can forget about the cosmos, there is utterly no hope, just look at how we struggle on a planet that has everything set up perfectly for us! But we think we can "conquer space"🤣🤣
@@CaptainSaveHoe lmao ok. That’s very dramatic for no reason but I see your point. If we ever had self sustaining colonies in our solar system you’d need a solar system destroying event to make humanity go extinct. The more places humans can occupy, the less likely any one event could ever wipe us out. Have hope, the future isn’t lost yet
Interstellar travel may be so impractical as to be impossible. Every warp engine requires negative energy, which if it existed, we wouldn't. So that means to would take thousands of years to go to the nearest planet. So you would need a lit of people to avoid inbreeding. The number to avoid that is 14,000. That would be impossible. So what would be the minimum? Maybe 1000? Then you need lots of water. No mater how good you recycle, it will never be 100% efficient. Then you need a machine shop for repairs that will be needed. Plus one ship is a single point of failure so how many? 5? 10? Going to another planet could be so expensive it may never be done. Then as we run out of resources it becomes even more expensive as people on earth go wothout. Maybe we never seen any aliens is because they cant go anywhere and we will just go extinct.
@@marveloussoftware4914 if you're gonna mention something as ridiculously impossible as warp engines, you might as well talk about suspended animation, or even transcendence out of our original biology, even those are FAR more probable than warp engine will ever be.
"Life Looks for Life"
What happens when life finds life? Might not be pretty
Does it though? If life is common it might be considered uninteresting by advanced civilisations. There may be all sorts of exotic physics and technology to keep them interested.
@@systemicchaos3921 I see this happening, in fact it might have already happened.... web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
@JustJitzu and there it is. Something springing from the vacuum and dissapearing again.
@@systemicchaos3921 Look at it this way.... an extremely advanced civilization will have unlocked every last secret that physics and technology have to offer. Quantum mechanics to them would be like arithmetic to us. So what do they do then? Go looking for other life forms in the universe! (Their curiosity is what let them become advanced in the first place. ) We may not be that interesting, but we're the only game in town. Even very intelligent people love watching goldfish, so we just might be putting on an amusing show for somebody!
Dr. Kipping seems the closest voice this generation has to that of Carl Sagan. I feel that is very high praise and well deserved.
The biggest difference between science and religion is "I don't know". It takes an open mind to use those three words.
Yes, "I don't know" is honest and mature. But, forgive me, "an open mind is the perfect receptacle for gems and dung." An open mind needs to be discerning and selective (note the order!). I would argue that the enlightened mind *and heart* begins with "I believe."
When you come for some Space junk food, and you get the whole damn buffet !!!
i tell you, this channel is one to cherish for the rest of your days and always hold dear to your heart!:) consider yourself lucky that you found it, just saying!
Definitely dude 😎
I've just discovered cool worlds.....I'm hungry for more.
Top UA-cam channel. The only notification I have ever turned on. Please discuss in depth the Miller-Urey experiment.
Great work! I almost spit out my coffee when the ancient aliens dude came on the screen. I'll continue to watch and share your vids!
Are there any Sci-fi stories about how people would react if it was discovered that we are alone? anything can happen in sci-fi but I've never seen that.
DMT.... forget the stories live it and experience it
There was an episode of Twilight Zone, I think, or perhaps Outer Limits?, that realistically depicted “the last man on Earth.” I forget how he came to be the only living being, but it was terrifyingly realistic.
@@ekay4495 You need to reread the question. The question is asking if there are any shows that show how people would react if we're alone. In the Expanse is pretty much humans scattered all over the system and even alien life which doesn't fit into the initial question.
Is it really possible to discover that though?
How would you possibly prove that we are alone? It's incredibly difficult to prove some even much more simple things.
In practice, we'd just constantly be searching.
@@Pythoner it's sci-fi, the impossible happens all the time.. I think it's something that hasn't been written about and it would be interesting.
I am so grateful that David shares his knowledge and is such a good teacher. I cannot get of space, the unknown and psychics. I am like a sponge that just wants more and more. For someone like him with such a great gift to share is beautiful. Thank you for such great content
Just like Earth's population: Life is common. Intelligence is rare.
How do you know that life is common in the universe?
@@dumishaba7804 ...
Really interesting analysis, thanks. Could it be considered that Fi might be very, very low based on the fact intelligence has only appeared a handful of times, if not just once, amongst the millions of evolutionary branches of Earth's "tree of life"?
In this case Fi is over the course of the entire history of Earth. There is some reason to believe that the chance of intelligence appearing goes up over time, as while it’s effectively impossible to have a civilization made up of bacteria, complex lifeforms can have intelligent civilization-building species arise amongst them, and the evolutionary advantage that intelligence provides ensures that more and more species will have the intelligence needed that making that final leap is not as difficult as the million years prior. If that is the case then we may just be the first civilization-building species to have arrived, and given another several ten million years, we could expect several more. The fact that we appear to be near the start of what we might expect to be an age of intelligence-dominated creatures, seems to indicate that it takes a while to get to here which is far more telling.
Ugh I want you to teach me more ! Your thinking is so beautiful and your rational probability statistics make very reasonable sense
I finally got around to reading the paper and I have a question: can you generalize this to the galaxy itself? We know that the sun is among the earliest ~8% of stars of its type (G2V, population I / relatively high metallicity). And we know that no one has a ~200M year head start because we'd see some kind of galaxy-spanning civilization.
Does this work using your same calculation or did I misunderstand something that keeps it from being generalized like this? And would doing a full Bayesian network MC simulation with *all* the drake equation factors be feasible? Would it be worthwhile?
FWIW, I think it that the most ambiguous item is final part of the drake equation: the fraction of intelligent life that develops a technological civilization we can detect. Our own civilization got to this point by a long a sequence of apparent accidents. We don't really know how lucky or inevitable things like that are. So if you told me that the other factors mean we should be seeing tons of other intelligent life, my conclusion will be that our history has more luck and less inevitability.
Is this last aspect something anyone has tried to quantify or otherwise make scientifically meaningful? I couldn't find anything, but I might not be doing the right searches since this isn't my field of scholarship.
>And we know that no one has a ~200M year head start because we'd see some kind of galaxy-spanning civilization.
Nonsense, they could just decide expansion isn't worth it. Which, honestly, it kind of isn't, it's just more of the same. Vast, vast, vast distances. Why explore the universe if you could in theory, control your perception?>
It would be much easier to alter your biology long before entering even a neighboring star system...
"Only today, in my bath-robe with messed-up hair but still looking strikingly good, I'm gonna give you one."
It is clear logic that we are intelligibly designed by the way our parts work together...
Im so glad y'all explain and break it down because im real curious but the stuff y'all do is just mind boggling and its so crazy how smart you are cuz thats mind boggling too lol!! But it's so fascinating and i love it!! So thank you.
:)
Love the video... quick question... Have you considered that life might not be constrained to the type of life we see on Earth? Maybe life is possible under different chemistry... that would have an impact in the probability calculations, wouldn't it?
It impacts the Drake equation when run, but shouldn't change the relative probabilities shown here.
@@Eminar5 Why is "here" different from the Drake equation?
@@JGM0JGM He's shown that based on the data we currently have it make probabilistic sense to enter a high value for probability of life on habitable planets in the Drake equation. It doesn't matter what form life takes for this to be true.
Depending on how you think about alternate biology you may however tweak your value for habitable planets in the Drake equation slightly, and possibly the probability of intelligence as well when life occurs (most likely lowering it, ours is the only biology we know can produce intelligence).
Good question. The short answer is that we don't know, but the long answer is that for terrestrial planets like ours, carbon based life seems like a near necessity.
Life as we know it is very lucky that the key difference between Autotrophs (plants and cyanobacteria) and heterotrophs (consumers) is that one consumes Co2 and produces Oxygen, while the other consumes Oxygen and produces CO2. While you might argue that most alien biospheres should work this way, but might use a different pair of 'key molecules', ISNT IT LUCKY that One of these is a greenhouse gas and the other isn't? Not only that, but crucially, that the output gas of consumers is the greenhouse gas. If this wasn't the case, the biosphere would quickly destabilize itself. Snowball earth scenarios cut the number of autotrophs, and allow CO2 to build up, and warm the planet. While hothouse events warm the oceans, increasing autotroph activity and consuming all the available CO2 in the atmosphere. With a different set of molecules, this simply wouldn't be the case.
In fact, CO2 is perhaps UNIQUELY qualified to fit this role for terrestrial planets, since it is the primary greenhouse gas (aside from water vapor) that is produced by volcanic activity and will naturally build up in the atmosphere over time (pulling the planet out of snowball earth scenarios).
It isn't lucky that Oxygen and CO2 are the molecules that balance the metabolism of producers/consumers, it's a necessity to support the kind of stable temperature feedback loops that maintain a habitable world over the geologic timescales necessary for life to develop intelligence.
All that said, in a planet in a different temperature regime (colder, most likely), there may be other similar feedback loops that may exist, for example with methane as the 'solvent'. The problem is, chemical reactions slow way down under colder conditions, which would slow the evolution of life and therefore decrease the chance of intelligent life evolving.
@@insertphrasehere15 Great response, thanks. I did overlook the basic feedback loop that makes life possible.... If O2 producing bacteria hadn't evolved, the Earth would still be crawling only with anaerobic bacteria, and it is doubtful that intelligent life would evolve from such bacteria.
I was also thinking about silicone as a base to replace carbon, but I think there aren't as many possibilities with silicone as there are with carbon for exchanging energy and for creating different biochemical process overall, so it is kind of discarded as an actual possibility.
Maybe I've watched too many scifi movies and read to many books, but I can't help to think that the universe might surprise us in totally unexpected ways. Maybe a process that can generate life is possible in the atmosphere of giant gas planets for instance where a feedback loop might not be necessary...
Cool result. Trained as an evolutionary biologist, I had the exact same feeling simply from assessing the ease or difficulty of evolutionary parameters to both abiogenesis and the very particular parameters for the evolution of hominids.
Based on prior research papers that I've read, I would expect chemical X to produce 3 Powerpuff Girls.
I think - or maybe better stated feel - that the question of whether or not we are alone is moot. The distances between us and them are so great that having a true two way conversation is not possible. Is faster than light travel possible? That seems quite unlikely. Even if it is then for FTL to be of any real use it must provide speeds well in excess of just two, three, four or even five times C. There are only a few dozen stars that are less than 100 light years away. Like it or not, we are, for all practical purposes, alone.
Professor Kipping, the content of your channel is absolutely amazing. You have an incredible mind, even just listening to you is pure gold. Thank you for your great work. You definitely have a magical talent to make me truly enter into all these Cool Worlds.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Psalm 139
The universe might be teeming with life, even intelligent life. But the odds of meeting up with intelligent life in another star system are probably close to nil due to the propensity for intelligent life (judging by intelligent life on earth) of destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life due to over-exploitation of resources, destruction of the environment, and overpopulation. That happening before they are able to achieve interstellar travel seems a plausible outcome.
That is already placing increasing anthropocentric expectations on alien civilizations. Just as life elsewhere would be nothing like life here, I would bet intelligence there would also be much different than it is here.
Good points indeed. Evolution on other life-bearing planets may have led to mental realization early on that industrial and scientific progress need to be carefully tempered by cautiousness regarding potential negative ramifications of new technologies and such. Perhaps those mental predilections toward greed and overconsumption and carelessness about waste products, have been eliminated via mental evolution.
With the billions of possible places organic life might have developed, as well as civilizations that crossed the so-called AI singularity and evolved into hybrid or possibly completely electro-mechanical existence, then the so-called “goldilocks zone” may be irrelevant. Ergo, make that trillions of possible home worlds for life in the universe-this universe!! All sorts of possibilities, and I agree that to judge the potential for alien life to have evolved enough to have achieved super-luminal space travel capability without creating the destructive side effects as we are familiar with here on earth-to arrive at any conclusions based on the logical assertion I made previously-is a biased assertion at best.
My definition of intelligent life is whenever a species has the ability to question it's own existence
Yes, it's possible. But maybe there are no threshold ? Maybe intelligence start wit life and looks like an exponential curve ?
Mine would be the capacity to learn. Questioning ones own existence is perhaps related to a certain degree of cognitive intelligence sure, but is hardly of functional value in and of itself.
The concept of zero, and by extension, oblivion or nonexistence, wins for me. What more bottomless profundity can there be, if not the alarming possibility of no-thing?
I'm personally going with, if said life can realize it lives on a planet and that there are other planets in the universe.
That means we basically just got " intelligent" the last couple of decades.
Who wants to contact beings that can't even fathom other planets?
You might say, "Well ancient Greeks and Egyptians if told would be able to understand planets and orbits and stars. etc etc.. "
But I think that their culture, society and science have to get to a point where they discover planets in other stars on their own. Sort of like the prime directive. Interfering in that and coming into contact before hand may not be for their own best interest.
You are an amazing talent and my wife and I enjoy your videos very much, you have a great narrator voice, soothing!
Awesome/inspiring video, as always. I see another underlying assumption here seems to be that life also originated on Earth to begin with, as opposed to a panspermia model. I wonder how much the 9:1 odds widens if you widen the Lf range to the formation of the solar system itself.
Wouldn't this same argument of Kipling's be applied equally to life existing elsewhere anyway, before being brought to earth?
What if we are the first?
When we search for life we have a bias and search for life similar to us and I think that Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when he writes that after millions of years the super computer Deep Thought reaches the conclusion that the answer is 42. When the priests object he tells them that is the answer BUT they don't understand the question and I think that is the problem because we only have one example, we don't know what to expect life to be like anywhere else and do not know how to detect it.
Would you agree, that water might be the foundation of most life in the universe? There might be exceptions to the rule, perhaps a combination of hydrogen & carbon dioxde.
@@Louisiana1975 We do not know outside of Earth what conditions could be possible as we only have this one case, Earth life.
I can listen to you for hours. Thank you for all your brilliant thoughtful videos.
Ah the never ending Story of live in the Universe^^
I want to believe it is out there!
And I've got some Theories why we don't found them yet.
1. They don't want to discover because they know there is something out there you never make attentive on your Present. OK this is very unlikely but it's a possibility😉
2. We have them discovered (maybe for years) . Somthing like 6EQUJ5 or even we don't have identified it as such Signal.
3. They doesn't exist anymore because they terminate their selfes.
4. The Planet we found are great candidates for live maybe one Day but the live on this Worlds must be evolve. (like Snowball Earth for billions of years)
And so on.
What I'd like to do is: start some Missions to explore the best candidates in our homesystem. Like Europa, Mars, Enceladus and maybe Titan to search targeted for traces of life. and only for them.
And if we find something we have an excellent evidence live is possible on Exoplanets.
And if it intelligent we don't no BUT it is very likely there are out there. The live on Earth had been started on the same conditions.
This was a great Video and I enjoy to read your Papers there helps me to understand somting more and giving me another perspective on many things👍😀
Great work
I agree. I have a few theories of my own.
1. There is intelligent life but it's so far away from us (ei, other side of the galaxy), that the chances of finding them is nil.
2. That we are not technologically or mentally advanced enough for them to make contact. (Star Trek based)
Putting intelligence aside, I do believe that there are single cell organisms out there. But what's the chance of us actually finding them..?
@@rossrobotics6342 Isn't there evidence of single-celled life in meteors that fall to Earth? It is not inconceivable that life didn't begin here at all.