Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Are there Aliens?

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Are we the only life in the Universe? What are scientists doing to find out? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. life in other parts of the universe. You mean, are aliens real? Yeah, I mean, some of these questions are so deep that no matter what the answer is, it's going to blow your mind. So, like, if there is life out there... That would be totally mind-blowing. And if we're the only living beings in the entire universe?

Oh, my gosh, also mind-blowing. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And I'm a cartoonist, former roboticist. And I'm a particle physicist, which means I know things about particles and space and the universe, and I make up things about aliens. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Today on the program, we're asking the question, Are we alone in the universe?

Is there anyone else out there that thinks and feels and loves and slips on bananas, or is it just us in the universe thinking and feeling? Are we the only ones intelligent or somewhat intelligent in this entire universe? At least you think humans are intelligent, Jorge. I mean, that says something about you right there. Well, it's a little bar, I think. Sometimes I wonder if aliens have come to Earth and just sort of dismissed us as not intelligent life and moved on. Yeah, they're like, oh my God, we don't want to associate with these people. These dumb rocks. So we were wondering about this question, and as usual, we went out and we asked people on the street.

We said, do you think we're alone in the universe or is there other intelligent life out there? What do you think? Are we the only ones in the universe? Here's what they had to say. Definitely think there's other intelligence. there. Why is that? Well, first of all, I think it's kind of arrogant to think that we're the only ones here because it's a pretty big place. I think it's possible that there's other intelligent life just because of how spacious the universe is. I think there's another

intelligent life somewhere out there. Yeah. Because I think the universe is so big and I don't, I just don't think it's possible that human is the only intelligent life. Yeah. All right. So I think most people seem to be pretty optimistic about it, right? You think that's optimistic? I was surprised that everybody believes in aliens. Like, almost every single person thinks there is other intelligent life out there,

right? I was really shocked. I thought there was going to be a lot more skepticism. Really? A lot more, like, human-centric people, like, were special. Yeah, well, you know, America is a fairly religious nation, and the narrative of the mainstream Christianity is that humans were made in the image of God, and

there's not a whole lot of plays in that narrative for other intelligent races. Well, I guess there's nothing in the Bible that says that there aren't aliens, right? Oh, that's true, I suppose, but are they human-like or, you know, other weird stuff? Yeah, I suppose, yeah. Anyway, it would be a fascinating moment and a reckoning for Christianity in most religions the day that we discover other intelligent life. You and I should write that Extra Testament.

The newest Testament by Jorge and Daniel. The extraterrestrial testament. The terrestraiment. But I was surprised by how subtle people's arguments were. You know, they were like, it's a big universe, so it would be surprising if we were the only ones. Like, that's a very kind of subtle argument, right? What's subtle about it? I mean, they're just saying it's huge, and so it's probably not empty, right?

Yeah. There's a lot of interesting nuances there, like, yeah, it's big, but we don't know how rare life is. And so we have no idea if being big means that there's a lot of life. We could still be the only ones, you know? What I'm really interested in is your comment. You said you thought they were optimistic. So you think having aliens out there is good news? Well, I don't know if it's good news, but it's kind of like it sort of feels like the sadder option is that we're the only ones in the entire universe, right?

Like there's something comforting emotionally about the fact that we're not the only ones out there, right? Like you wouldn't want to be the only person alive in the universe. I don't know. It depends how friendly they are, you know, if there's other ferocious life out there way. kill us. I'm not sure I'd be too comforted knowing that they're not very far away and they could come over here and squish us in a moment. Oh, I see. You're pessimistic

about the optimistic scenario where we're not the only ones. Yeah, the fact that we're not the only ones, if we discover that there is other intelligent life out there, I agree it means something really fascinating and deep about life and intelligence and consciousness,

but I'm not sure it would be good news for humans, you know? And what you said a moment ago was fascinating as well because you say it would be comforting to think that there's other intelligent life out there. On the contrary, if we are the only intelligent life in the entire vast cosmos, that means we're quite special. You know, in the history of science, mostly the role of science has been to put humanity in its place. You know, oh, the earth is not the center of the solar system.

Oh, the earth is not the center of the galaxy. Oh, this galaxy is one of zillions. So it turns out we're tiny little things living on a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere. Wouldn't it be amazing if science then put human beings, right back in the center of importance and said we are special we are the only intelligent life in the universe we are basically the universe is brain that would be a fascinating new role for science in sort of the you know communal mindset I guess I don't have the same ego as a physicist maybe oh right cartoonists are famously

self-deprecating right it doesn't take any ego to put your art online for millions to admire But yeah, I mean, it's a big universe, and so it would be weird if we were the only ones. And so that's a big question, right? Like, why haven't we, by now, we've been listening to the skies and looking out there by now, why haven't we heard from or been contacted by or seen evidence of other intelligent life forms? Right. It's a famous question, and people call it the Fermi paradox for Enrico Fermi, who first posited it.

He said, the universe is huge. And it's old. And that's another important factor. The universe is old. And that means that even though it's pretty big, it doesn't take that long to get across it. Like take our galaxy, right? It's pretty big, but you could traverse it in, you know, a couple million years if you had pretty good technology. Right.

So by now, we should have seen some passing cruise ship or alien cruise ship or some sort of probe or something by now. Yeah. Like if I wanted to explore the galaxy, how would I do it? I would send out a probe, which would then self-replicate. It would, like, land on an asteroid and mine the materials to build two copies of itself, which would then land on an asteroid, which would then land on asteroids. So you get this exponential growth in these probes, and it only takes, you know, a few hundred thousand years to visit every single thing in the galaxy

if you use that technique. So then the question is, why haven't we been visited? If the galaxy is billions of years old and not that hard to get across in a fraction of the galaxy's lifetime, where is everybody? Right. So that's Fermi's famous question. Right, right. And it's kind of related to this idea you mentioned earlier, which is that it sort of depends on the probability of things. Like the probability that we would be contacted by life is equal to the probability that life can form and that it can do other things, right? That's right. And you have to sort of break the problem into pieces.

And the guy who did that first is called Drake. And so there's this equation called the Drake equation, which tries to sort of compartmentalize the questions. It says, you know, the probability for us to be contacted by aliens is the number of stars out there times the fraction of those stars that have Earth-like planets, right? That gives you the total number of Earth-like planets out there, times the probability for life to be formed on those planets, times the probability for that life to be intelligent, times the probability for that life to have technology, times the probability that we overlap in eras so that we can actually talk to them. So it's a lot of different pieces. So it's like you have to stack these probabilities one on top of the other. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of like what's the probability you're going to roll a two ones when you roll two die? And it's like you have to multiply the probability of rolling one in one die and then another one in another die, which is one six times one six.

So there's like a one in 36 probability you're going to throw a deuce, a two ones and a pair of die. Exactly. And the more pieces you have that have to line up, the harder the chances are. Even if you do something more likely like flip a coin, right? What are the chances you're going to flip a coin eight times and get eight heads in a row, right? Well, not very high. One over two to the eight is a small number. So even if all of those numbers are pretty big, it's the probability of all them together can be kind of small.

Oh, I see. It's like you have to flip a coin and get ahead and then flip another coin and get ahead. And so that those probabilities stack up. And if you have one coin that's like messed up, that tails in both sides and you'll never get all heads, right? That's right. And that's the calculation I think people were doing in their heads when we asked them, is their intelligent life out there? And they thought, well, the first part of that number, the number of stars, is huge. And so it doesn't really matter what the other numbers are.

I think that's the argument they were making. But I think that argument is pretty flawed, actually. What do you mean it's flawed? Well, the first number is big, right? So how many stars are there in the universe? Well, every galaxy has about $100 billion, which is already a totally infathomable number. like it's just it's hard to even imagine right how many stars that is plus you have to multiply that by the number of galaxies in the universe and in our observable universe the part we can see is two

trillion galaxies so we're two trillion times 100 billion it's a bazillion stars that's the official that's right technically that's right a gazillion and so and in fact i think they've figured out that um on any given star the probability that there's an earth like planet there's like maybe three or four of them, right, per star? Yeah, this is something we've only learned pretty recently because of the rise of this exoplanet science where we can look at other stars and see the planets around them and try to estimate.

We've seen enough now that we can start to estimate what fraction of those stars have an Earth-like planet, meaning a planet that's pretty rocky, reasonable size, and has a reasonable amount of solar radiation, right? It's not fried to a crisp or totally chilly. And yeah, the fraction of stars that have an Earth-like planet is one in five. One in five stars as an Earth-like planet.

Yeah, which is amazing, because that takes that huge number, two trillion times 100 billion, and just divides it by five, which still leaves an enormous number. There's a huge amount of planets out there that are just like the Earth. That's right. And we only learned this recently. You know, a few years ago, it could have been that Earth-like planets were super rare. That number could have been one over two gazillion, right?

So the fact that the first number is big, that the number of stars is huge doesn't guarantee that the whole number is big because if any of those numbers, the fraction that have Earth-like planets, the fraction that have life, the fraction of intelligent life, if any of those are tiny, then the whole number is tiny, right? So, but so far it's pretty big still. Number of stars times number of Earth-like planets, still an enormous number. But that's as far as we know. We really just don't know. Like, can you answer the question, what fraction of Earth-like planets have life on them? That's a pretty basic question, right? You might ask a biologist, like, If you ran an Earth simulator a hundred times, how many times would you get life on it? We just don't know the answer to that question. It's one of the core questions in modern biology. And I'm speaking as a particle physicist who doesn't know that much biology except for being married to a biologist. But we still don't know. They answer that very basic question.

So basically she would say, you don't know anything. You don't know anything. She says that to me a lot, and she's usually right. Yeah, not just by biology. That's right. It's more of a broader conversation that we have. Before we keep going, let's take a short break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. don't trust her now he's insisting we get to know each other but i just want her gone now hold up isn't that against school policy that sounds totally inappropriate well according to this person this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age and it's even more likely that they're cheating he insists there's nothing between them i mean do you believe him well he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet so do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not to hear the explosive finale listen to the okay

Storytime Podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call, said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. We sort of know a little bit about how live form, right? Like you have a planet like the Earth and that maybe has water. It's in the right spot relative to the sun. It's not too hot, not too cold. It's called the Goldilocks planet. We sort of know a little bit about, you know, you need this kind of primordial soup.

And eventually, at least on Earth, like some of those molecules kind of came together and became life. Yeah, that's true. We know what's necessary, but we don't know if it's sufficient, right? So we know that you need liquid water and you need basic amino acids and you need some source of energy, right, to organize things, lightning or the sun or whatever. But we don't know if you put that all together, if you get life every time or if it's a totally freak chance. Right? We just really have no idea how many times that happens. And people are studying this. You know, they do things like put that primordial soup or our understanding of it in a test tube and zap it with electricity. And they see cool stuff happen like basic amino acids, the building blocks of DNA and stuff. They do form. But that doesn't make life, right? Life needs to be self-replicating and has to have metabolism. But, you know, there's a whole other question there about what is life anyway. Well, so even if you can get life at a primordial soup, you still have to have that live. survive and evolve and become critters and beings and intelligent beings who can build radios and

technology and harness and launch podcasts yeah and launch podcasts and then get transmitted across the cosmos like that's that's a huge gap too right like a huge improbability that's right we just don't know and so we've already gone past our knowledge right that the fraction of planets that form life could be one in two. It could be one in a gazillion, right. You're absolutely right. And then you're right that we don't know what a fraction of them make intelligent life. Like, yeah, we have the example here on Earth.

We also know that that one example is highly dependent on a bunch of random events, like a meteor crashed into Earth and killed all the dinosaurs and made room for the mammals to evolve. Would the dinosaurs have become intelligent if we hadn't come around? Is it guaranteed that something becomes intelligent?

Or is this just a total fluke? And in a thousand different other similar Earths without a meteor or if the meteor hit somewhere else, you wouldn't have intelligent life or you'd have super intelligent life or like dumb life or life all life would be dead. We just, we really have no way to answer that question. But even then, that's just the probability that there is life out there, right? Like, you just need all those factors to add up to more than one in a gazillion. Like, if it was two in a gazillion, there's probably definitely life out there.

But then there's the other question of like, why haven't we heard from them or contacted them or seen them, right? Like, it's kind of two separate questions. Like, is there life out there? Right. And then there's a question of why haven't we, like, seen it or had contact with it? I like that thought. Let's assume that life is not so rare, and even that intelligent life is not so rare.

Okay, so then we live in a universe filled with Earth-like planets that have some sort of squishy, weird, intelligent life on them, right? And then the question is, if that's true, why haven't we heard from them? Right? Because as we said earlier, it's not that complicated to make self-replicating probes that explore the entire galaxy. So why haven't we heard from them? Yeah, and there's a lot of fun ideas there.

Like my favorite hypothesis is that maybe we have heard from them and we just don't know. I mean, would we understand a message from space? I mean, in order to understand it, it would have to be in a language we recognize. It would have to be in a communication medium we're looking for. Like maybe they're sending us signals, but it's in some kind of thing that we don't even look for,

like neutrinos or some other medium that's not light. Exactly. We're listening to messages from the sky. We're not actually listening to after. hard, and we're only listening to a tiny little slice of the possible messages we can get. And the message could be in a totally different medium, you're right?

Or it could even be, you know, in radio waves, which is what we're listening for, but just be undecipherable. I mean, what if aliens live thousands of years? And so their messages last hundreds of years. And we're hearing it. We're just hearing the first few snatches of it, and we don't even recognize that it is a message.

Like maybe we're getting a message saying hi, guys, how is it going? But it's so slow if we don't even pay attention to it. Yeah, exactly. Or it could be the reverse. It could be like super fast, like super picosecond signals that we can't even detect. Yeah, absolutely.

We have actually in the past heard messages or heard things from space that we don't understand. One of my favorite stories is this message called the wow signal. That's the scientific term. It's literally called the wow signal because when somebody heard it, they wrote, wow, down on a piece of paper when they saw it. And it was exactly the kind of signal you would expect to

get from space if they were aliens. I think it was in 1977 and they had a telescope and they heard this extraordinarily loud, intense burst of radiation well above the background and nothing they had seen like that before. And, you know, they said,

is it a satellite? Is it something reflecting off this? Is it some weird bounce off the moon? Is it something else? And they ruled out all those possibilities. Did they record it? They recorded it, yeah, absolutely. So we have the data.

But nobody knows if it comes from an intelligent life or not because, first of all, it was never repeated. So we only heard it once. And we can't decipher it. It's very short. We don't know what it means. So without being able to decipher it, it could just be like some weird omission. It has no structured to it. Yeah, that we can determine, right?

I mean, who knows how these things could be structured? It's encoded in a way that's totally alien to us. Anything we get will be encoded. Think about the message that we sent into space. I think about that a lot. We send messages into space like on the Voyager probe and Pioneer, right? There's like a famous golden record. That's where we send a satellite out there into space with like information about it.

Like a little note that says, call me maybe. Maybe I'm crazy. Call me maybe. And I wonder like if you're an alien species, would you have any chance of deciphering that, right? In order for that to work, we have to have a lot of stuff in common about the way we think. And I think that's the critical factor is that really all we're capable of

discovering is life that's very similar to ours in the sense that it thinks the way we do. It uses math and it communicates the way we do. And also that they want to communicate. I mean, it could be just life out there that just doesn't care about finding other life. That's busy living their

squishy little eyeball life, right? Like we're the only extroverts in the universe and most people out there are like why would you want to talk to other people that's insane that's right to just slam the door and pretend it not home you know we could be the weird ones in that perspective

and you know we sent other messages into space when we got this wow signal we can tell where in the sky it's coming from from directionality of the antenna and so people actually sent a response like they beamed a response back into space was the response like a what see again

It was new phone. Who dis? Who dis? So that's one possibility is that even if there is intelligent life out there and there are signals to be seen, it's just too alien for us to even recognize or process or be able to decipher. That's right. And I think that's honestly likely because it's hard for us to imagine things that are really alien to us. I mean, look at all of our science fiction, right?

Usually the aliens are like some variation on humans with like fuzzy eyebrows or pointy ears or something because it's difficult to extrapolate that far into the unknown. I mean, even here on Earth, people travel to other countries and they're like shocked at the weird stuff people eat and the way they talk and how they sleep and what they wear. And even human cultures are bizarre and alien to us if we're not familiar with them. And I love traveling for that reason that you discover what's universal about being human and what's just like totally arbitrary. and made up about your culture. And that's one of the amazing things about aliens. Like what stuff that everybody does and what stuff that only you for some reason do, or your culture?

Yeah, exactly. Like, everybody needs caffeine in the morning of some kind, right? But only we drink this water from a weird bean on a tree. Right. And so if we discovered aliens, then we would learn so much about, you know, what is common in life. Like, do they use math to think? Do they have scientists? Right.

You know, are they spiritual? Do they see color? Do they have two genders, nine genders, no genders? Like, what is basic and similar in life and what is totally different? That would be so fascinating. That's pretty cool to think about, yeah. There's another possibility, like, maybe there's life out there, but the universe is so big and so vast and so old

that the chances of us hearing about them or contacting them is just too small. I don't like that one, because I feel like eventually somebody's going to invent the self-replicating probe. your civilization doesn't even have to survive. You could just send out that probe and eventually it'll contact everybody in the galaxy. I like how you're thinking like a physicist. I'm thinking like an engineer and I'm like self-replicating probes.

That's an impossible engineering feat. Are you kidding me? Is that what engineers do? They say things are impossible? No. You can't have this. You can't have this. How hard is that?

I mean, all you've got to do is land on an asteroid, mine some materials, build a factory. Yeah, a factory, right? Sure. That's super easy. I mean, we've been doing it for a long time. Why not? I'm going to call Elon Musk, and I'm sure he'll start a company to do it tomorrow.

Ask him how those self-driving cars are doing. Hey, when you're done building Model 3s, can we build self-replicating probes that explore the galaxy? And while we're at it, let's give them artificial intelligence so they can interact with the aliens and answer their questions. That would be pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. We'll be right back in a minute. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded. into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In Season 2, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit.

Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age.

It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was.

Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was. going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think the idea is that it's like we're in an ocean, right? Like, if you're stranded in the ocean on a raft, like what are the chances you're going to run into other people stranded in a raft? It's pretty small, right? Depends how many rafts there are, right?

But also there's not just like the space of it, there's also the age of it, right? Like maybe we are alive right now in a moment that's after the most populous time in the universe. Like maybe everybody was alive a few billion years ago or maybe everyone's going to be alive a few billion years from now but right now we're maybe like

the first ones at the party or something yeah or the last ones yeah and that's the last element in that Drake equation right is the probability that we're alive at the same time to communicate and you're right in terms of how long we've been around and like listening to this guy and talking to it it's a tiny fraction of the life of the universe

and then you have to wonder how long is humanity going to be around and receptive to messages is it going to be 50 years which is all we've had so far, or 50,000 years, even still, which would be a tiny fraction. So you're right,

it could be that life flourishes and intelligent life is created and then, you know, destroys itself every time and so that these things don't last very long, which would make it difficult to talk to each other, yeah. Yeah.

But, boy, that's not very optimistic. The idea that maybe life is super popular in the universe, but it all eventually, like, kills itself. That's right. Blows itself up in a glorious fireworks. Yeah, like maybe there have been other civilizations

that have followed the exact same steps we have, you know, like evolved, made cars. You're about to say that Donald Trump is inevitable. Is that what you're saying? It's a universal truth that every civilization creates Donald Trump eventually. Trump is an alien. That would explain a lot. But like it is like at some point,

all civilizations eventually maybe like learn how to split the atom and then they all blow each other up inevitably. It's possible. But again, I think that's just extrapolation from, our experience. That's the kind of things humans do. And so we like to think, well, probably everybody does that, but we really don't know, right? Remember, we really have no idea. I mean, it could be that other aliens don't have such a defined sense of individuality, right? I mean, we have this notion that I'm me and you are you, and there's this biological difference defined

by our skin. But that's a biological, that's a conclusion from a biological artifact, right, with this skin that we have. And other beings could be like more fluid where like the nature of an individual depends on who's near each other. And so the concept of like resource sharing and therefore war is totally different. And it may be very unlikely that they kill themselves. So we just don't know. But it's certainly possible that life is flourishing and destroying itself very rapidly. Well, I also, I thought the craziest idea that I read out there was this idea that maybe the universe is teeming with life, but nobody wants to talk to us.

Like somehow we're in a bubble where they're like, let's not. even touch these guys or there's an idea out there that we're like in a zoo or something. Oh, I hate that idea. Oh, my gosh. I hate that. Not because I think it's wrong. I think it's actually pretty reasonable and clever. But how frustrating, right? I mean, I said earlier that meeting aliens would be dangerous and I think that probably would be. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to. I mean, I would love to meet aliens. We could learn so much about the universe and physics and math and life. So if they're out there and could contact us and they're just not because we're lame, And boy, that would be pretty disappointing.

That would be a crush to our self-image. So I think it would be comforting to know that we're not alone in this universe, right? Like to the idea, it's kind of like having an older sibling or something. You know, somebody who's been through it, who sort of maybe has some more knowledge than we do. I think that would be cool. But you're thinking that maybe it might be dangerous to contact other life forms. Absolutely. I think it would be dangerous.

The history of contact between different cultures is that the more advanced one always crushes the lesser advanced one. And if we're going to contact aliens, more likely they're going to come to us than we're going to get to them, which means they are the more advanced. And, you know, what that means, right? I mean, think about the way we treat lesser

intelligent creatures. We domesticate them, right? Dogs and chimpanzees don't have rights in our society. And we argue that they're less intelligent. We even eat some less intelligent creatures, right? So when aliens come, do we apply that same morality to them and say, well, yeah, you guys are twice as smart as us, so go ahead

make us your pets and eat, however many of us you want, right? I think that's the most likely outcome. I see. Like, if you run into less intelligent species, you're most likely your thought is not, hey, let's bring these guys up and show them all we can do. More likely,

like, hey, slave labor or something like that. Exactly. Food. Look, resources. We've been traveling on the spaceship for millions of years. Finally, we get to eat something warm. That's right. Roasted human. That's my concern. And we have sent messages into space

and I think that's kind of dangerous. I mean, you're like advertising where you are and who you are and the fact that you're pretty clueless. So imagine, for example, say the universe is teeming with life and nobody's contacted us just because nobody knew we were here. And then we, just on the edge

of our technological capabilities to contact people, we announce ourselves, hey, everybody, look at us. We're totally weak and helpless. You know, what's going to happen? Hot food right here. Exactly. Exactly. Imagine dropping a baby into the most dangerous neighborhood on Earth, right?

It's going to scream and cry. And then what's going to happen? Well, it's very unlikely somebody kind-hearted is going to pick it up and take care of it. So, again, I don't know if finding intelligent life in the universe is an optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint. So it doesn't seem likely that we will ever contact or talk to or learn a lot. So maybe the lesson here is that we should learn to be by ourselves. a way, you know, like don't expect some civilization to save us or to destroy us. Maybe the lesson is to really just kind of own being alone and take responsibility for our existence here on Earth. Yeah, I think the best case scenario would be if we discover intelligent life. You know, we develop technologically, we move on to other planets, maybe we explore the galaxy,

we build those self-replicating probes, then we discover alien life and we learn from them. I think that would be the best case scenario for humans. To be the colonizers. not the colonizees. Well, I hope by that time, you know, we will have developed the higher morality and we will, you know, not take advantage of those squishy little cute aliens we discover around whatever planet. But, yeah, I think it would be better if we found them before they found us, for sure. But I would also love to see another planet and to meet aliens and to get to talk to them.

But, you know, every time I see a science fiction movie where there's aliens, I'm always amazed at how it always takes, like, six minutes for them to figure out how to talk to each other. You know, you just raise your hand, part your fingers, and that's it, right? Live long and prosper. Well, whether we are alone or we're one of many, go out there and enjoy the experience of being. And to our alien listeners, if you're going to come to Earth, please arrive gently. Eat something before you get here. That's right.

Fill up for the trip, please. Yeah, please. Thanks a lot. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. That's one word.

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