Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Adam Frank: Are We About to Discover Alien Life? [Ep. 425]

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All .edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN! Are we alone in the universe? This question has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Now, we finally have the tools and theoretical frameworks to explore the possibility of alien life scientifically. But how far have we come in our search? And are we close to finally finding our otherworldly neighbors?  Here today to help us answer these questions is none other than Professor Adam Frank. Adam is an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at the University of Rochester. His ground-breaking work has transformed our understanding of the universe and life itself. In this episode of Into the Impossible, we explore the scientific frontier of detecting aliens, the incredible potential of new technologies like the JWST, and how to evaluate extraordinary claims about UFOs and other phenomena. Tune in! Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:18 Does Adam agree with Carl Sagan?  00:04:44 Judging a book by its cover 00:08:51 What are the odds? 00:15:09 Does space equal life? 00:27:02 Addressing the replication crisis in astrobiology 00:31:49 Theoretical frameworks for understanding extraterrestrial life  00:34:38 Technology for discovering extraterrestrial life 00:39:38 There is no Fermi paradox!  00:44:59 Rare Earth hypothesis  00:48:55 Video “evidence” of UFOs  00:54:34 Audience questions 01:08:21 Outro — Additional resources: 📝 Get one month of Snipd Premium for free with this link: https://get.snipd.com/Cx7S/brianSnipd Snipd lets you take Smart Notes 🧠 with AI 💡 — it’s my favorite podcast player 😀 ! ➡️ Connect with Adam Frank:  💻 Website: https://www.adamfrankscience.com/  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamFrank4/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, on Into the Impossible, we have a truly out-of-this-this-world discussion lined up for you as we dive deep into one of humanity's most profound questions. Are we alone in the universe? Joining us to help us answer this age-old question is the brilliant professor Adam Frank, a leading astrophysicist and astrobiologist from the University of Rochester. Adam's groundbreaking work on biosignatures, echinoc signatures, and the search for extraterrestrial life has radically transformed our understanding of the universe. In this episode, we'll explore mind-melting scientific frontiers in the quest to detect alien

life and the potential of technologies like the James Webb Space Telescope. And lastly, the rigorous standards required to validate extraordinary claims about UFO's already being among us. Buckle up and get ready for an intergalactic journey into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, hell. I want to welcome you back to the podcast. Professor Adam Frank, how are you doing for your second time on the podcast?

Doing well. It's a real pleasure to be back. I enjoyed last time. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy the start. You finally, the book sales have finally sort of tapered off asymptotically from that first visit three years ago. I believe around now we talked about your previous book. Today, we're going to talk about, well, we're going to talk about one of your books in detail. and we'll mention the other one as well.

But before we begin, I do want to, I do want to consult with Carl Sagan, our guru. And he said, you know, that famously, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Adam, I'm a professional cosmologist for the last 30 plus years now. I've never reached into a drawer labeled extraordinary evidence. I think that's saying is BS. I think it's kind of, it's cute, it sounds good. But really, scientists, you know, we should have our mind on, you know, being epistemologically, you know, humble. And we shouldn't discard evidence or not.

We should allow it to take us where the evidence leads us rather. So what do you think about that flaw or that thought that it's a flaw in the great, otherwise great, you know, perfect, saintly Carl Sagan? Well, I think that it's funny you call because that's why I call him St. Carl also. And it's amazing how in the last two books, and The Light of the Star is my last book. And then this book, he's just everywhere. Like his, how many pies he had his fingers in. From climate change, the first studies of nuclear winter,

to being in the, just like he was in the office when James Lovelock came up with Gaya. Like he's just, he's not doing it. He's just sitting over himself. It's ridiculous. But, you know, I do, I'm not going to be, I agree with that because we were called him on something in particular, and it was about UFOs, right? And in particular, what he was trying to talk to the UFO community about, which he tried very much to engage with them was this tendency to see any evidence as evidence, right? So, and I covered this in the book, in the new book, in the little

book of aliens, when I talked about Roswell, where like book after book, after book gets written, and there's more and more witnesses, but the witnesses are people like, you know, somebody's uncle's, cousins, hairdressers, who knew a guy who talked to a guy. guy who said he saw something. And it's like, oh, there, that's evidence. That aliens landed on Earth. And so I think he was, you know, within science, if you're a scientist, you understand what the standards of evidence.

When we talk about standards, rigorous standards of evidence, you understand what they are. And in general, in any field of science, everybody gets held to those. But I think what he was addressing was this tendency within the UFO community to not really understand what standards of evidence meant and to take any fuzzy, blob any account by a guy, he's in the military, he must know what he's doing, he's an intelligence officer, he must, wouldn't lie, you know, as being evidence of the most dramatic conclusion that there is, to me, the most important question in science, and it's been around for

2005 years is, are we alone? And so what he was pointing to there is you're not going to take a picture with a fuzzy blob in it. And some guy saying, I saw it moving in ways, you know, no plane could move as being conclusive evidence for that claim. And so there I think what he was talking about, he was right to say, you're going to need more than that, you know, before I'm going to buy that we're being visited by technically,

technologically advanced species. Yeah. And of course, in the zeitgeist nowadays, there's reports and there's like you said, pilots. And I've talked to several of the prominent ones, including Ryan Graves,

who apparently won't talk to me anymore because he didn't get a joke that I made about his former, you know, co-worker in the Navy is a friend of mine here, flew with him who, uh, disputed. We did a podcast, all three of us in person here, but, I'm sorry, Ryan, if I offended you. But the, but the point is, you know, how much should we really trust eyewitness testimony and, and these, you know, it's, it's, it's always a question because if you, if you question them, oh, are you saying this? You don't have the balls to join the military and fly around an F-18 kidding. I'm like, well, if I wasn't such, you know, a fat ass, when I was 18, maybe I would have. But I'm actually, I fly a little Cessna's around. And I am familiar

with what happens. And we had a great discussion about it. But the fact remains that all these people, David Grush is another one. Oh, how can you doubt him? He's, and Lou Elizondo. And I just find that the grifter charlatan line has never been more clear. And as you point out in the little book of aliens, to which we will now turn, you know, there's good reason for the military to be investigating these things, if not only for the fact that, that it could prevent, you know, the untimely accident occurring because they crash into a weather balloon or a retroreflector. So let's do now what I've patented in the last time since the last time you're on and judge this book by its cover. So this book is called The Little Book. I listen to it

on Audible and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's endorsed by past in-person guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carlo Rovelli and many other people, Marcelo Gleiser, who you also coached. wrote another book with. I should actually mention that book, too. This is called The Blind Spot. And I loved Sandra Bullock in this movie portrayal of the Blind Spot. Now, we're not going to talk about the Blind Spot today, but we will talk about this. Adam, help us join a judge this book by its cover. Explain the title. There's no subtitle. And that's, I think makes it a little book, but explain the title and the cover art, please. I can not tell you how much effort I put with other people into that cover. So the title, the little book of aliens, came to me in the middle

night. I was very happy with it because it kind of cracks me up, right? Because I had this idea of like, oh, open the page five of the Little Book of Aliens now. So, but the idea was I wanted to give people like a really fast, fun, you know, very sort of ground level view of what's happening in astrobi including what was happening with UFOs. And so the cover, we thought so much about the cover, about how the cover could communicate something a little bit whimsical, but then also had the wonder, because that's the both sides. Like I wrote this, you know, I'm from Jersey. You know, the voice in my head is always kind of like, you know, I grew up on Bud's Bunny,

you know, that kind of like sarcastic. And so I just wanted to write it the way what was going on in my head, which was going to be a little bit funny, a little bit sarcastic. But I also, the reason I'm in this field is because it's so awesome, right? I mean, we are, when I'm trying to communicate to people is so much has happened in astrobiology that we in the next 10, 20 to 30 years are going to actually have data. that is going to address this question. I can't tell you what the answer is going to be, but for the first time in two south, 500 years,

we are going to be actually go beyond just arguing over your opinions, man, to actually having some data that we're going to be able to work with. And that awe was what I wanted to communicate with that title, with the cover of the book, Wizzy and Aw. And so I think, you know, the idea of just the arc of the, you know, the crescent of the alien world with, you know, the earth in a kind of a cartoon way. We went through so much.

I had friends of mine to our graphic artists. We really poured over that. So in the end, you know, usually with a book, as you know, they'll hand you the, they'll give you two designs and be like, well, choose between A or B or shut up. And this time, my publisher and my editor, Sarah Huygens, just so helpful. She was also amazing.

And we spent a lot of time on it. So I've never been more happy with the cover of a book than this one. That's wonderful. Yeah, I really enjoyed the audio book version of it. the snarkiness of the frank trademark snarkiness comes through in the in the narrator. I really enjoyed it. And I guess the, you know, kind of first thing I wanted to turn to, I sent you a PDF that I made up. And this is a cosmologist's take on the problem of what's called, you know, one of these

things that sounds dirty, but it's not. It's called panspermia, panseparmia. And that involves the transference of material, which may include biological, material from planet to planet or from the cosmos to Earth and so forth. I believe maybe it was Hoyle who coined the term or popularized the term. He was a character too. But the concept is that, you know, meteors hit the Earth and they hit Mars and they hit other planets and they blast off fragments.

By the way, if you are blessed to be one of Adam's students and or you have a dot edu email address, you're guaranteed to win an actual chunk of space schmutz and real meteorite, which landed in Argentina some 7,000 years ago, and you go to Briankeetting.com to edu to win that. If you don't have an EDU email address, go to Briankeeting.com slash list, and you may win. You may not. But the fact is, Adam, that we exchange material all the time. And I asked this question to you, which I actually asked Joe Rogan, when our talk to Joe Rogan about when I was on his fair podcast, experiencing that.

And I actually brought him, not only did I bring him a chunk of meteorite, Adam, I brought him a of Mars. So I have a tiny Martian meteorite and I understand he smoked it and I think he enjoyed it. But anyway I said to him, Joe, you know, because he's very bullish on aliens existing, the life existing in the universe and but he's not

as sanguine about their visiting the Earth even though he seems to portray it as a done deal in many ways. I said to him, Joe, imagine astronomers find a binary planet system, two planets in orbit around a sun-like star. They see on one of them, lights, twinkling lights, you know, eat at, you know, Joe's and they see all the signs of life, technology, everything, but they haven't had time to look at the other planet

in the same orbit, more or less. What do you think the odds are? And, and I described it. And, you know, he said, oh, it's extremely high. And I said, okay, well, that's, that kind of, you know, pretends negatively for the ability and facundity of life spreading throughout the universe, because we have just such a system, Earth and Mars. And Earth is teeming with podcasters and Kardashians, not Cardishavs, but Kardashians. And the fact is we have no evidence for, now, it doesn't prove, you know, as as Carl would also say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And you bring that up.

So what do you make of this statement? So I go through the calculation and the email I sent to you, which you know, probably deleted. That's fine. That's fine. No, no, I looked at it. Just look at it. What I love about you, you use the Bayesian and the basic. Bayesian techniques that are actually, you know, people have used. So for people who don't know,

the idea of using Bayesian formalism of probability of statistics as opposed to the frequentist is that when you only have rare events, when you something only happens once or twice, or you only have data for it, how do you then extrapolate from that? So I like, you know, I find Bayesian the probability so important. And it's actually one of the foundations for my favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is cubism, quantum basin. So I love the way you did that calculation. And of course, one of the things you, so you ended up with about 8%, like, you know, 8% probability that if you see life on one, which you see life on the other. Which actually, that's not that low. It means I have to look at 10, you know, it's about 1 in 10. And so if I look at

10 binary systems, then I'm going to find one that adds two. And also, you know, we look at Mars and we don't necessarily see existence of life of Mars. But it could have been earlier, right? That's really the thing. Mars underwent such extreme climate change. And, you know, if you looked at the solar system three and a half billion years ago, you might have seen two green worlds. Also, there is a real possibility that Venus was a water world for a while, right?

I mean, there are, there's really evidence out there from the, I think it's the oxygen. Isotopes. I forget whether it's oxygen or hydrogen during, isotopes that Venus may have undergone a massive climate event about 700 million years ago. And before that, it could have been inhabited. So, you know, we're getting a view of the solar system now, but it's possible it looked at different earlier. But again, right now, if you looked at Mars and didn't see anything and say yes, so 10,

one in 10 would fit basically with what we see, right? But it is, you know, if it was one in a million, that would have been bad. But one in ten means that we have a reasonable shot of seeing maybe two worlds with. But of course, everything, as would always with Bayesian stuff, everything's in the prior, right? You had to come up with a probability that there's life on any world, which I think you use that argument based on extinctions to get, I think you started with one 0.15 or was it 0.0.0.1. Right. So 15% of planets that can have life will have life. And so that, of course, but, you know, that the prior, everything in Bayesian probability comes down to what guess you're making for the prior. So if you've chosen something much smaller than that, it would have been different.

So, but I love the idea that it's very much in that spirit, like what David Kipping does. I don't know if you've ever had David Kipping on, but he's well worked. No, he's scheduled to come on. Yeah. Yeah. He said, he and I've worked on a couple of paper or one, at least one paper with him. And by luck and where he, you know, applies. He has great Bayesian unfu.

And he's used that to ask questions. Like, our paper was, if you find a civilization, will it be probable that's going to be younger, older, the same age? And the answer was much older. He's done it to sort of ask, what is the probability for, but using Earth's history, what is the probability for just planets having life versus planets having intelligent light?

So I think that Bayesian framework is very useful. Yeah. It's peak pollination season. and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. It's fun to do. You know, it's just I'm an armchair. Alien Hunter, you're a professional. Yeah, but I asked this, you know, kind of a similar question to your fellow

upstate New York, Alien Hunter, Lisa Kaltanager, when she was on recently. And the question of whether or not, you know, such, how do, and she approaches things, different perspective that, you know, I think she does follow more frequentist and also looking for the chemical fingerprints and spectroscopy. But, you know, one thing that is just so interesting about the way that you approach things is that you guard against, you know, kind of the rational exuberance, not irrational, but ration. It's, you know, this is, as you say, potentially, arguably, you know, aside from cosmology and understanding the origin of the universe, you know, much as way that the bread

gets buttered in the Keating household, you know, finding life in the universe would be a very close second. But the problem is we get so much nonsense. We get so much chaff that comes in. It's not really clear how to how to defeat this. I'm sure you get it every day as well. You know, Professor Frank, you know, I'm not good at math, but I have this incontrovertible evidence or belief that, you know, Alcubieri warp drives or, you know, and these are things people spend hours on, you know, podcast, it's just melting my ears. I've even got, you know, professional trolls that pursue me and, and comment, you know, how stupid I am because, you know, I require actual scientific evidence. But the fact is, Adam, we have no evidence. And for life existing in the

universe. We have an awful, with large, you know, amount of space, as Carl said. And so it'd be a waste, but so what? Nature's not under an obligation to, you know, make use of space as you see. How many elements are other in the periodic table that have no, you know, use as far as what we can do with life, right, right. But the argument, again, I'd love for you to approach this. I've asked it of many people as well. Like, I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to the South Pole twice and spent a good month or a month and a half, although it felt like much more, it felt like being in New Jersey. No, I'm a New York or two, so don't have any too much.

But the fact is, you know, it's one seventh of the continents on the earth's surface, right? And yet, you know, there's no life there other than the life that we, you know, scientists wearing red parkas, you know, Canadian goose jackets bring there. And there's a couple of, you know, giant size seagulls called scua that are there. And then that's it. You know, sea lion. There's nothing. So if you said, well, space is the available continent is the predictor of life, you'd be totally wrong.

So why doesn't that apply to, you know, the calculations that you do and others do with the calculation of how many possible worlds there could be? Yeah. So, I mean, what happens always is that and justifiably, you know, people look at the number of stars in the galaxy and then the number of galaxies in the universe. And then it seems like, wow, there's so many stars. Of course there has to. The universe has to be teeming, particularly with. civilizations. And that is possible. But the also, and once you start engaging with it, you start also coming to this radical possibility looking at Earth's history of how many accidents that have

happened were required for especially advanced life. When we say advanced, we have to be very careful. But you know, metazoines, you know, animals, multi-soluble animals, that you start just getting a little bit humble, right? That it's possible that, you know, life requires, and especially anything more than microbes. In general, there is a kind of a consensus that microbes may be easy to get, which also, I want to say, if we only discovered other microbes, that would be the most radical thing ever. I don't want to like this, my dumb life. As microbes are important. And we can talk about how and why I think it doesn't matter. Intelligent or non-intelligent. I don't care. It's the most important scientific discovery in history.

Hey there, brilliant Brainiacs, students of the impossible. It's your favorite professor, Brian Keating here. If you're fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial life and the mysteries of the universe, make sure you're subscribed and following the podcast on either video or audio formats. I've interviewed plenty of experts, skeptics, and believers in the quest to understand the question of whether or not we're alone in the cosmos. So until we finally have definitive answer to that question, make sure you're subscribed, because you do not want to miss some of the interviews coming up on this channel.

Now, back to the episode. Although it's happened before, Adam. It did happen in 1996. In fact, it's featured in the movie Contact, Bill Clinton, announcing the possible discovery. And to my knowledge, it wasn't officially retracted. Nobody believes that the Allenland Hills meteorite contains fossil microbial evidence anymore in this professional community that you inhabit. Am I right? Yeah, no.

Most people think that the evidence. just wasn't compelling enough. There were enough counter arguments that this is not, you can't take this as being the kind of solid footing for microbial life on Mars. I still think, you know, I did this paper with Woody Sullivan back in 2016 where we redid the Drake equation

but took out the question of whether there's any overlap. And we, you know, with us and the civilizations right now, so we got the total, we were able to derive a probability, really what we derived was a probability whether or not there were, whether it had ever happened before. entire history of the universe, whether or not we were, how bad would the probability of getting

a technological civilization on any planet across the universe? How bad would it have to be in order for us to be alone? The only time it happened. And it ended up being a pretty ridiculously low number, 10 to the minus 20. Like you'd have to, like nature would have to be super biased against forming, you know, going through the whole chain of events. But that's where the entire universe, right? The entire observable universe. over the history of the universe too. Over the entire history of the universe. So on one level, I would argue that, you know, if you really think that it's never,

ever, ever happened before, then you've got to actually do the work to show why all the experiments that the nature has run, meaning all the habitables on planets, why it's never happened. But whether or not we're in a galaxy that is well populated, especially with technological civilizations, I think it's possible if the galaxy could be sterile right now or that, you know, civilizations don't last long enough for there'd be a lot of overlap. Well, just see. I mean, that's, I think we're just, you know, that's the awesome thing. We're finally going to go look. Part of my mission, you know, when I've spoken to Nobel laureates, you know, 19 so far,

I've spoken to eminent scientists, colleagues, authors, you know, fighter pilots, whatever. But whenever there's a teachable moment for my mostly, you know, I won't say unfortunately, but it tends to be mostly male, about 85% male, but very highly educated. Students, graduate students and postdocs faculty, my number one cohort on LinkedIn, but I always like to make these teachable moments. What Adam just did is an incredibly important moment for you, young person, and even older people, he's showing that he has the integrity. What you did, Adam, and I'm sorry to rephrase what you did, but what you said, but I think it's important to double click on it, so to speak. And that's that you have this incredible paper and it comes

out with really an optimistic, you know, cosmically optimistic, but you're pointing out just now, you pointed out the inherent limitations of that calculation. It requires the age of the universe. It requires the entirety of the observable universe, which has a radius of 46 billion light years, not just 13.8 billion light years. It's three times as big because of the expansion of the universe. Anyway, students, pay heed to scientists like Adam,

emulate scientists like Adam, because my mission on this podcast is to kind of assemble this dream team of university professors that you can learn from in your pajamas and owe no tuition to, unlike my tuition, you know, my college tuition, I still owe to Trump University. But Adam, I wanted to kind of, you know, segue from that because I, what I care about, I don't care that a protozoan existed in an M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. I have a picture of it over there, you know, four billion years ago. I just don't care about that. But I care in the, let's call it, instead of the habitable zone of our son,

Let's call it like the technological zone. The zone that would know about our existence from our technological broadcast in the form of radio waves and light and from cities and so forth. And I want to kind of ask you about this question because I did a search, again, I'm a cosmologist. The smallest things I think about are like, you know, super clusters, okay? But I have to demean myself and look up brown. Like it turns out that most, there's about 15,000 stars within 100 light years of the earth, meaning they could have heard the first, you know, Jesse Owens winning the 1936 Olympics, right? So they know about us existing now.

And so there's about 15,000. About half of those are Brown dwarves. So I don't know, maybe I'm sure my colleague Adam Burgasor and Jill Tarter who coined the term, you know, Brown dwarves that they could figure out some way. Well, let's just say, sun-like stars within a technological communications radius where we could have a communication or maybe even visit them. I mean, what does that probability rise to that we're the only one in, that zone. Let's say it's pretty close to one, right? Well, okay, well, first of all, I need to,

I don't know if you want me to answer this now or we can put a pin in it, as they say, but I want to argue against that you should care about a protozoan on 51 because, I mean, so I mean, so I mean, so I mean, let's do that, yeah, because I, because I was obnoxious. So here's the thing, right? Because you and I are both physicists, right? You know, we're, we do astronomy, we're astroo, but we're physicists first. And the thing about life, Life is freaky, right? As physical systems, there is nothing else in the physical world that we know of that's like life.

Like black holes cannot hold a candle to how weird life is, right? Because if you gave me a star, right, at the beginning of its lifetime and you give me its mass and its chemical composition, I can pretty much tell you what's everything that's going to happen in its life, right? Yeah, they're fungible, yeah. Right. Made sequence, blah, blah, blah. If you give me a cell and then ask me, well, what's going to happen in a few

billion years, I would never be able to predict a giant rabbit that's going to punch you in the face, right? Which is a kangaroo, right? Evolution, life is the only physical system which innovates, which creates, which, you know, speaking tactively has an under, you cannot prestate the face space of life. It literally opens up whole no windows of face space of possible functions and forms. And in that way, life is the most interesting physical system that we know of. And so even, and right now it is possible that there's only one us, you know, that earth life, it's possible, earth life was a stinking accident, right? And how, whoa, what would that mean?

But if we find just one example of life, one other micro, you know, that's not from our evolutionary tree. That is a different, comes from a different A-Bodibus. biogenesis, a different event. That means there's lots more than one, right? From a Bayesian perspective, right? If I find two, now I can assume that yeah, yeah, this happens all the time. And then all bets are off, right? Because life can create and it can invent, I am not able to say what kind of crazy things have happened. Choose your wildest science fiction, you know, fantasy. And life could have done it. It could have, you know, become so advanced that it literally restructures the universe because, you know, it becomes the laws of physics. Because life has that possibility of innovation and creation. So that's why even one micro, the discovery of it, would

fundamentally change our understanding of ourselves, of life, our place in the universe, whether or not we're part of a cosmic community of life. So that's why I get like, you know, microbes. I'm super pumped about microbes. Find me some. I love them too. I mean, you know, we're more microbe than man at this point. The only, you know, again, to push back with love and respect, the only counterpoint I'd make is that, you know, again, this, this evidence from 1996 when for a decade and a half or more, you know, people didn't really disabute. In other words, the retraction, the news comes on the front page of the New York Times.

And I've had personal experience with this with the Bicep affair, right? So it occurs on page, you know, the retraction if and when it ever comes is on B-17 of the Sunday edition, which is the least read, Saturday edition, which the least-reacted. or at least read it about, right? So you write for newspapers, you know, how important that the, you know, placement is. It's on the front page versus, you know, buried the topic of the retraction. We almost never have that. I had on Guido M. Benz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics two or three years ago.

And, you know, he talks about this thing, the replication crisis. And which is a deep affliction, you know, we have our own crises in cosmology, but they're of the scientific, Kanye, is the Hubble tension, you know, is the Hubble constant correspond to a universe that's 12 billion years or 14 billion, right? So these are important things, but they're not crisis of confidence in the ethical practices. But I find in this field, I'm not going to say your field because I see you as a physicist, again, as a physicist, not coming to it, approaching it from a phirmy. It wouldn't call him an astrobiologist, even though he thought about such things, right? Or even Drake, he was a radio astronomer, and that's how you got your start in some sense, too. So anyway, the point is, you know, there's a huge obligation.

When you have things like it goes on the front page of the New York Times, it's featured in a movie, you know, people make policy, you know, Dan Golden, use that event to advocate for funding that, you know, hopefully you got some, I don't know, but the point is, don't we have these ethical obligations that, you know, we have to really tamp down. And I'm not speaking as, you know, someone who's never, you know, lived in a glass house. So to what extent do we have to be careful about the, because it's so important, about the importance of not only getting it right, but, but also doing the proper mea culpa when we get it wrong. In fact, as I advocated in my first book, you know, we should have 10% of our PR budget should be reserved for

retractions. So what do you think? How do we address, you know, the replication crisis in astrobiology where the impact might be much higher? Yeah, no, I think that's an excellent point. I mean, and I love the idea of 10% for retractions. There was that famous, I remember the video I saw, but of the guys who thought they discovered a planet orbiting a pulsar. And then they, they stand in front of it. It's a double a S meeting and they stand up. And they stand up. This has been, again, front page news. Oh, my God, first point. There's 1990, I think.

And they stand up and they give a 20-minute talk on how they were wrong, right? They go through all the details. It was periodic. It was actually a six-month signal because of, and everybody, they got a standing ovation from the astronomers, you know? And I was like, yeah, this is why I love science. These people stood up and said, we were wrong. We're going to show you in detail exactly where we were wrong. And nobody threw eggs at them.

They were like, thank you. We love you. You know, so I think that's a great thing. You know, the astrobiology, the astrobiology community has done exactly this. Last year, there was, or two years ago, they had a workshop that Vicki Meadows from the University of Washington, she was one of the leaders on Eddie Schuederman also was part of this, where they tried to say, like, look, how should we, what are our standards of evidence? What are the thresholds that we think has to be overcome before we say, like, yes, we've

discovered a biosignature. And so I think that there's, you know, there's been a lot of work and a lot of effort to try and figure out. Because the biosignature or techno signature thing, this is what's coming down the pike. Like, it could happen. JWST is, you know, it's really on the hairy edge of what it can do. But the next telescopes that are coming up in the next 10, 20, 30 years, the habitable world's observatory, right? That's going to be optimized for that. So there absolutely could be a biosignature detection in the next few decades.

And that could be oxygen. It could be, you know, oxygen and methane. You know, there's a whole variety of molecules. Or these abiotic, sorry, agnostic ones, which could be network kinds of thresholds that we could talk about. But either way, I mean, so I think the community has fought hard and will continue to think hard about how to properly tell people this is what we found. this is what the confidence we have in it, here are the possible false positives, here's the limitations of it because always our data is going to be a little bit crappy. So I think what you're focusing on is absolutely important and hopefully will be followed, you know.

So the book talks on the concept as life as we don't know it, unlike the Star Trek quote, right? Life. Or no, it's like life. Yeah. But not like us, right? So what are some theoretical frameworks the way you approach it to expand on our understanding of potential other forms of extraterrestrial life. Yeah, this is this is so thrilling and I find it both interesting both for the biosignatures, which is just, you know, the question of how what other kinds of biochemistries might nature have, you know, put together? And then when it comes to techno signatures, how might intelligence or technological intelligence manifest itself with other evolutionary trajectories, right? Because we have this tendency seems that everybody's mind, if you build technology, your mind is going to be like our mind.

And I don't think that's true at all. I think there could be a wide variety of cognitive structures. So when it comes to the biochemistry is what's interesting, people have done a lot of work on first of all, like alternative not using carbon, right? Because that's the first thing everybody always asks. And it's like, well, what about non-carbon-based life? Well, silicon, you can, you know, it's all about looking what the, we got the periodic table. It tells you who likes to bond with whom? You know, who does the chemical walk of shame? And so, you know, you can, and you can see from that that really there's a, you know, there's a good reason why we're made a carbon, because carbon is, yeah, carbon, cartill. But, you know, carbon likes to bond. Carbon gets

around. But so people are looking at, like, Sarah Seeger's done some really interesting work in what she called, they called it the small molecule project. Life basically is, uses Lego, chemical Lego blocks. It takes little building blocks, builds bigger things out of this. This is where Sauer Walker's work is also very interesting on the assembly theory. And so how might, how might you find other ways of assembling things that does what light does? So there's been a bunch of work along that complexity, looking at like the complexity of molecules as a basis for how to scaffold the functions of life. And all of this requires something I'm very interested. We have a new grant that we're studying, which is thinking about life in terms of its information architecture. And that is a way of

doing it thinking about life agnosticly. Instead of like being like, oh, DNA and RNA and proteins, thinking about life just as a system which processes energy and information through networks of matter is a way of really sort of releasing the, you know, releasing the constraint of our own evolution. And so I think these projects are just beginning this and the search for aggraves. agnostic biosignatures and techno signatures. And the cool thing about is it requires us to not only imagine what we haven't imagined, we need to imagine what we can't imagine. And how do you do that?

You know, when I look at these, you know, kind of the attention that we get to, you know, this topic, it's just, there's just no end to the fascination. And to live in this epoch where we have the JWST, which is, you know, already returning incredible scientific results, including, you know, measuring not just, you know, exoplanets, but, you know, what, exo moons and, you know, things orbiting around these exoplanets as well as their atmosphere. But talk about the technology. What to you is, you know, the most important technology that we have, is it Kepler, is it JWST? And then what is coming down the pipe in a few years for our graduate students to get excited about? Yeah, yeah. So the interesting about JWST is for both of our fields, right? for cosmology, the day it turned on.

It was like, oh, my God, we're seeing galaxies forming earlier than we thought they would. So I think for it, but for astrobiology, the most important thing, the real game changer is this technology that is the basis for what we call atmospheric characterization, right? So people ask, how are we going to find signals? Unfortunately, we still have the ideas, the classic setty ideas in our ed about like, oh, there's, you know, Jody Foster listening on her headphones. for messages being directly at us. And that's how we're going to find aliens.

And that is, that's the old technology. We're still doing that. That's all super interesting. But because we know exactly where to look with our telescope, meaning all of these habitable zone exoplanets, and now we know how to look at them, which is we're going to be able to peer into their atmospheres. When a planet passes in front of its sun,

some of the light from the sun passes through the planet's atmosphere and gets absorbed by chemical constituents in the atmosphere. And that means when that light finally gets to us, there's a fingerprinted of exactly what's in the atmosphere. So we call that atmospheric characterization. So if we see something like oxygen, which can only be there because, as far as we know, for most planets, can only be there because life puts it in there. That's a biosignature.

And having that technology, the technology to be. able to discern those chemical fingerprints, those minute chemical fingerprints, that's the game changer for us. And that is how, as I like to say, we're going to be like detectives. We're not listening for someone sending us a message. We're like detectives outside an apartment with our cold coffee and our crappy donuts. You know, just watch it. We're just watching, you know, a planet go about its biosphereic business or its technospheric business. And we can do that now. And we could not do that 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And I've spoken to Sarah Seeger and many times in person and had her on the show.

And back, we had her even on when there was the claim of discovery of phosphine. So if you had, you know, the ear of God or Gaia or whoever you worship these days, Kathy Huckle, if you had, if you had a, you know, kind of one chance, one molecule, what would that be? What would it be phosphane? Would it be this, what, sulfur methyl sulfide? Dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfide. Would it be carbon dioxide? Would it be oxygen? You only get one, Adam.

Oh, you get one? You know, one damp. Chlorophy. Chloralera carbons. Because, well, we did, we published a paper. So, you know, I'm the principal investigator of the first grant that NASA has given in like three decades to, you know, really go after intelligent life. And particularly what was really the first grant for atmospheric technosignatures. And one of the first things that we did was we did a study of how.

how chlorocarbons in a planet's atmosphere at the level of Earth right now, or at five times that level, 10 times that level, would we able, would JWST be able to detect that in the atmosphere of an alien exoplanet? And what we found was like, you know, if the conditions for, if JWC turned out to have, you know, proper kind of observing conditions, yes, we would be able to find the spectral signature of chloral fluorocarbons, even at our current earth levels of that atmospheric pollutant. And fluorocarbons would be a definitive techno signature.

You found that you would know there was a civilization that either by accident or on purpose, because they're great greenhouse gases. And if you wanted to warm up a planet, you'd use chloro fluorocarbons. That would be a definitive signature of a technological civilization. So I'm all for chloro fluoroporocardines. Well, it would cause great horror from my late, great colleague, Mario Molina, here at UCSD, who passed away, sadly, in October 2020. But he, of course, won the Nobel Prize for his work in discovering the threat of these things to... Don't put me more.

Imagine, what's that? I said, don't put any more in Earth's atmosphere. Oh, yeah, yeah. But for our atmosphere, yay on CFCs. So speaking of that, you know, we came together. It was a great kumbaya moment. and it was wonderful that this happened, thanks to Mario's work and other scientists around the world. But often I hear about the threats of global warming, which you have novelily proposed as a really important techno signature,

which would come from producing agriculture and industrial, planetary-wide scale, in fact, right? So that's one of the highlights of your kind of the attention that you rightfully have gotten is for that as a, as a, as a, as a techno signature to use a term that Jill Tarter passed many-time guests as coined. I want to turn to that. And I've had on climate skeptics, Steve Coonin at NYU and others, as well as climate, you know, kind of people that are concerned, like Tim Palmer, who's also a Nobel laureate through the IPCC. Talk to me about, you know, reasons to be optimistic. In some sense, Charles Keeling and his son David, or David is the father, Charles is the son.

Anyway, he made the case that, you know, there's only finite number of molecules of carbon, you know, trapped in the Earth's crust that are accessible. So there's an upper bound on how much carbon dioxide we can make. And it makes up, you know, less than three, one hundredths of a percent of the Earth's atmosphere. But talk about planetary limits to growth. In other words, how could we get to a point, you know, could we ever get to a point to make Dyson megastructures and and really exploit those things? or would we, you know, extinguish ourselves, whether through war or climate change and so forth on another planet? In other words, what is the great filter, in the words of past guest, Elon Musk? You know, how can we be expected to pass through it? And is there any hope from the fact that we live

on a planet with finite resources? Okay, well, let me address just the issue of the great filter because the great filter is tied to the Fermi paradox. And here's my, here's my hot take. Okay, I'm going to say it right now. There is no Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. I love it. Go for me. So I think let's be very clear about what most people think of as the Fermi paradox, right? So as we have talked about that Jason Wright and I in papers, there's the direct Fermi paradox, which is the one Fermi was actually talking about, which is why aren't they here right now

walking around? Now, if you're a UFO guy, you think that's true. The rest of us know. But what most people think of when they think of the Fermi paradox is what we call the indirect Furby Paradox or what's been called the Great Silence. And that's the idea that, oh, look, astronomers have been looking at the sky since Frank Drake. They haven't found a single signal. You know, they searched and searched and searched. And therefore, you know, what's going on? There's no aliens out there. And that's where the idea the great filter comes from.

It must be that there's something which is keeping the universe from building technological civilizations. And there's a giant flaw in that argument right there at the beginning, which is that, oh, we've searched. the answer to the question is we've never searched. We've never searched for the most basic of reasons. There was no money to search, right? So SETI was always marginal at best. And then by the 1980s or so, politicians started making a lot of hay, beating up NASA, anytime they tried to even drop a little bit of funding towards it.

So Jason Wright did a great paper based on work that Jill Carter started, and they added up all the SETI searches. that have ever been done, right? And so the idea is if the parameter space of the sky that you have to search to look for aliens was the ocean, and we're looking for fish in the ocean, how much of the ocean have we actually searched for fish? And the answer is a hot tub.

That's how much water we've looked at. The entire ocean, we've looked at a hot tub. Now, if you did that and you didn't find any fish in that hot tub of water you pulled up, would you be like, well, that's it. Bushin doesn't have any fishing. So there is no Furby paradox. There is no great silence.

And therefore there is no great filter. We don't know. We've never looked. And now finally we're looking. So let me just, I just wanted to bracket that if that's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So now on our own future, though, in the future of aliens in general. You know, I mean, humanity, we've got something weird evolutionary heritage where we're like higher art. Excuse me. We're hive mind enough. Where you social is the word that, you know, we're very good at organizing ourselves and working together, but we're not, you know, use social enough that we don't, we're not constantly at war killing each other. And, you know, and so we've got this weird capacity from kind of our chimpanzee link as opposed to the bonobos.

You know, the bonobos will take care of conflict with sex. The chimpanzees beat the crap out of each other. That's obviously a simple organization. So we may have things that no other civilization, no other species does. Other species may like come across a nuclear power and be like, you built a weapon out of it? Like, what is wrong with you people? So in general, I'm quite hopeful that there's a variety of species out. There's a variety of cognitive structures, some of which will make long-term civilization, the sustainability of it difficult, and other civilizations will have no problem recognizing

the dangers and moving through. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room.

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even more realistic, I think. What's wrong with you? So the concept of the rare earth hypothesis gets a lot of kind of attention. And I actually find it very appealing. I got some assistance in my first book from Don Brownlee. And that's that conditions for complex life to emerge might be truly rare in the universe. So you mentioned in the book, the Miller-Uri experiment, and both Miller and Yuri were at UCSD after the initial approach. But now you mentioned, as you described in the book, it's not really suggestive that the

conditions they replicated are actually representative of the conditions in the early Earth for a variety of reasons. They neglected eukaryotic life, making the great oxygenation and so forth. But just as I'm kind of skeptical about even microbial life, let me ask you to kind of stram in and maybe take down the rare earth hypothesis, so I don't get too confident in my assertion that even microbes may not exist. So what are some of the flaws in the rare earth hypothesis as you see it? Well, first of all, I would like to say I like the rare. I think the rare Earth hypothesis hypothesis has a lot to it. There's there's some really strong arguments in there, which is why in general I tend to think there's probably lots of microbes, my bias, my, you know,

it's proven otherwise. Microbial life may be easy to make and metzoans complex life may be difficult to make. I think the problem with their argument is they never, you know, because they couldn't, set any bounds. Like how uncommon is uncommon. Right? You know, and you know, the interesting thing, of course, what's really unique about if you can actually get to technology, right, is that when we have a recent paper on this as well, which I thought was really important, we were in this paper, we were asking the question, what should you look for first? Biosignatures or techno signatures? Or which one are you more likely to find? Big difference between biosignatures and techno signatures, which is related to your question. If for biosignatures, they're tied to biospheres. Let's say you just have a microbial planet, right? And all micro Acrobial life dies, the biosignatures are now. Technosignatures are tied to techno spheres, but in a different way. Technosignatures leave, right? Right now, we have five, is it five?

Yeah, five spacecraft, still beeping out very low-intensity radio waves, but nonetheless, you know, those are techno-signatures. They've left the solar system, right? So once you start making techno-signatures, they can spread across the entire galaxy. unlike biosignatures. So really you only need, and this was the original Fermi paradox, and that was the insight that he had,

once you build a technological civilization that could be spacefaring, even if it's only within the planetary system, they can effectively be immortal and they can spread. And so that really changes everything. So even though I kind of agree with, I think it's going to be harder to get technological life than micro,

But once you get it, there is the possibility of having it spread and having it be very, very long-lifts as well. Hey there. It's me back again. As a professor, I have to assign you a homework assignment. And that's to join my Monday Magic mailing list. And you'll not only get extra credit for doing it, you may win a chunk of space dust, a real meteorite that you'll get when you subscribe to my Monday Magic mailing list, where I share exclusive content, the latest alien discoveries and highlights from behind the scenes of your favorite podcast. So if you haven't already subscribed, head over to Brian Keating.com slash list and join. You'll be entered to win one of these beauties, a real 4.3 billion-year-old piece of space schmutz. And you're guaranteed to win if you have a dot edu email address and you live in the United States. Go to Brian Keating.com slash edu to enter there. Now, back to our alien overlords. Talk to me about the kind of video evidence, the eyewitness evidence that you describe early in the book, the GoFast, the gimbal videos,

the claims by David Fravor and his wingwoman, Alex Dietrich, who I've talked to, at least by phone, not on the podcast. Talk about those claims. And to what extent should we, you know, be requiring and demanding that the data is ours. And, you know, we own the data as citizens of the U.S. and taxpayers, presumably. Talk about those videos. Are they convincing or how do you as a professional, you know astrophysicist how do you interpret well the first thing is i you know so i've also i've spoken with ryan graves a bunch of times i'm really you know i really you know i really actually liked ryan's perspective he's like had him over for sabbat dinner yeah yeah his perspective i you know he's like i'm just telling you what i saw you know it's your guy's job to go figure it out you know i like that

he wasn't like he's not saying it's aliens um it's like you know it's just this this this is what i saw i want you to know and also from that i think it's fine it's there should be no stigma for the pilots to be able to say, look, man, this is what I saw, you know, and, and, you know, do with it as you will. The question is, and this is where people take what Ryan Graves and others say, and turn it, spin it into this thing of that we're being visited by a highly technological civilization that wants to hide, yada, yada, yada. That's where the problem goes. And those videos, right, those videos, people need to be shared, those videos in no way can be treated as scientific evidence of anything. Why? One. They're predigested. Somebody cut them up

and you were the least. And there's only three to get replayed over and over again. It's not like there's 10,000 of them. There's the same three, which we see over and over again. We don't get any 25 years ago, too. I mean, these are not recent videos. Right. Right. Yeah. You know, and even like that, you know, we hear this pilot, uh, chatter, we're like, oh my God, this is happening. Now, I'm not doubting that that's them. But how do I know that's them? Because, you know, Because I didn't get the raw data. And I also don't know the cameras. Look, when JWST, if we were to say that we found oxygen, a bioseignature,

we know what the JWST, how it responds to, you know, infrared, near infrared, far infrared, at this temperature, that temperature. The instrument is fully characterized, right? We don't even know when was the last time these cameras were serviced. How do I know there's not a glitch in them? How do I know there's not a goal? Some of them, Ryan was operating a brand newly installed radar system in his F-18. Right, right.

So unless you can't make a plane, like we've discovered evidence of alien civilizations, based on, you know, any kind of evidence where I don't have this thing that took the, you know, the data. So that's what's most important. And then, of course, you know, there, you know, people like McWest have shown that, look, the cameras rotate. I've given lots of plausible arguments for why some of the behavior seen in the videos is not that extraordinary. There was, I forgot the astronomer's name, who was part of the NASA's panel, where it just looked at the data on the camera and calculated that in one of the videos, it was moving at

40 kilometers an hour, you know? I could do fashion that on my mountain bike, right? So it's just like, and everybody pushes back. But I just think like those videos we've got three. They're predigested. They've been used over and over again. When you examine them, a lot of times kind of the claims of them being extraordinary fall apart. You know, the various government agencies which have been tasked with looking at all of these, you know, the UFO reciting or UAP sightings, they come to the conclusion that everybody else who's ever looked at it.

96, 97, 98% of these are explainable, right? And then there's a few that can't be explained. And some of those, because you just don't have data to, you don't even start an investigation. And then a few of them, as I say in the book, are freaky-daky. And I'm all for having an agnostic, open, transparent, scientific investigation of the rest of them. Because that would be a great, in a world of science denial, where people are saying climate change isn't happening, even though like there is, the evidence is like literally on your front page when, you know, San Francisco is, skies are red in the middle of the day, never happened before. You know, in an age of science, it would be great to have this is an example. So people could see how science understand what it understands.

But there just is zero data from any of these things that is compelling enough to drive us to the conclusion that we're being visited. by alien civilizations with high technology. Yeah, it sounds like you really haven't updated your perspective, which I think is understandable since your 2021 New York Times piece that I'm a physicist who searches for aliens, UFOs don't impress me. And the thing that I kind of resonate the most with you is that it's the most pernicious outcome of this and problem with this is that it detracts from the scientific process that is going on to do it. And then scientists like you will be acute.

I'm sure you get a, you're just in NASA's pocket and you're just paid by NASA. Like Upton Sinclair said, you can't get a man to understand something that his job requires him not to understand. I mean, I go, I'm just from big cosmology that is invested in Lambda CDM. Big cosmology. Yeah, I get that all the time. And so I've had on, you know, people, I'm actually interviewing is Regenda Gupta, who believes that the universe is 26 billion years old. But you say the most frustrating thing is that obscures the fact scientists like me and my colleagues. on the threshold of gathering data that may be relevant to it.

And Adam, isn't it true that you and I would be, you know, among the most, perhaps you more even than me, excited if that these are real. And that's another thing for my young students to think about. I mean, Adam has the perspective not to claim as many have that, you know, not only are they definitely here, but we can interact with them because that would be the most exciting discovery and probably be an incredible breakthrough, not just for you personally, but for humankind. So I think guarding yourself against this confirmation bias and this kind of optimism bias is incredibly important.

So students take note of that also take note. You can get your own meteorite if you go to briankeen.com slash list. Adam, we've got a bunch of questions from the audience. I know you only have 12 minutes left. So let's make it quick. You can always ask questions at bryankeating.com or my Twitter. Follow Adam, Adam Frank, four. And here we go.

So first one I want to ask is from a University of Rochester grad. Bachelor of Chemistry. When is the U of our laser lab going to have its commercial breakthrough in laser fusion? I worked there as an undergrad 40 years ago. That federal government has put a billion dollars into that, you rich Rochester. Horrible investment for you. When is that going to be fired up and using to blast alien civilizations out of existence? I know. It's a giant laser. That's one of the coolest things I'll work with the University of Rochester is the giant laser. It's the second largest laser in the world. Do any of my fellow Jews control that? Do we, do we, We have any control over that later?

No, elite controls. So the cool thing is that, you know, we had this breakthrough a couple years ago where we actually finally, not NIF, you know, wasn't Omega, the Rochester Lizer, but we finally achieved break-even. Like we've shown that, yes, humanity can trigger sustainable fusion. So, but the commercial application, I mean, it's a long distance from doing it, you know, under, you know, once and then being able to get it like every tenth of a second. So I think we're still decades away from, I mean, which is funny because

Fusion's, that's the joke. Fusion is always decades away. But at least, you know, it used to be that just getting Fusion at all was decades away. We passed that. So now we're decades away from actually having a commercial plant. But maybe it'll be sooner from some other mechanism because once you show it's possible, then lots of things can happen. So thank you, JMF 5246.

I was going to use that as a name of one of my kids, but I didn't. Next question comes from Russ Chadwick. well, how old was the universe when all the building blocks for life were finally available? That is a great question, right? And it's, you know, what you need is the, you know, stars at the one generation after another of stars building things like carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and sulfur and things. I think it's reasonably early. Like I don't know the exact time, but certainly, you know, probably within the first couple of billion years, I'm going to guess, and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but that you had enough generations of supernova because it's really mostly supernova that are

building more, you know, advanced ones, or larger, you know, molecules, chemicals, elements. So I think it's, you know, relatively quickly within a couple of billion years, if not sooner, you've got what you need to start building biochemistries. And next question comes from Caduramu, do 43. If there is intelligent technologically advanced life like humans elsewhere in the galaxy, would they have bodies like us? They would need to manipulate objects to build things, communicate with complex ideas. Would this not mean that convergent evolution made humanoid bodies?

This is a great question. Thank you. It's a very, it's a really excellent question in detail. And my answer is my feeling, I have a whole chapter on this is no, you're never going to see humanoid again. You'll see jointed sticks and you'll probably see, you know, curved surfaces to fly. But the idea that you're going to get the exact, you know, trillion different accidents said lead to like a head sitting on a shoulder with you know I don't think that's ever going to

happen again um because you know convergence doesn't mean convergence to a particular form it means convergence to function and there's lots of ways to have the functions that an arm does so yeah my this is and of course it's a guess but my guess is that no we are the only humanoid's in the universe joe space boss asks a very long question but it boils down perhaps the last sentence which i might embellish when it comes to funding isn't there jealousy that only government and military scientists get access to it and the ones that work at universities like you and others don't get this. So I want you to answer that question. Are you jealous of those rich flyboys and girls in their Zoom jets? A. And do you really think you'd get access to it

if there was, say, a cover-up or some conspiracy to preclude the whole world from panicking over the existence of alien technology? Well, first of all, in terms of jealousy, yes, I'm I'm jealous because I want to fly jet serks very much. And when I talked with Ryan Graves, it was like, he wanted to talk about it. I was like, look, man, tell me what it's like to land one of those things. He's like, can we get to the other? He's like, no, no, tell me again about landing.

So, no, I'm not jealous because I don't really think that there is, you know, this idea that there's been a 70-year cover-up. I just thought, you know, the government is not very good at keeping secrets, right? If you look at it because there's not one government. there's lots of different government agencies who aid each other, you know. And so I just don't really think that there's, I just, you know, this idea, you know, that the government has known and is not saying goes all the way back to like literally 1952.

You see it again and again. The government knows you're not saying. Nobody can ever find anything. I just don't take it that seriously. I don't see real. And it goes nowhere. It's a black hole where you can go into and you're never coming out of, you know. So I'm just not, I just don't, I don't think about it.

very much because I don't really see it bleeding anywhere and I don't really have the confidence that it's actually that there is anything there. But go ahead. Do have government, look, I'm all for open transparency. Let's have hearings. Let's find out what the government knows. But, you know, on a probability scale, I got other things to work on, which I think is going to pay off more. And then maybe, you know, the last question, sociological question, what do we make of these, you know, kind of beefs, you know, between Avi Loeb, Jason Wright, Steve Dash, and many other people in the, you know, techno-signatures world and then other people, you know, in the life and panspermia world that argue about, you know, assembly theory versus, you know, directed evolution or

even intelligent design. What do you make of these, you know, controversies? First of all, like, can't we all just get along? What is going on with Avi and Jason Wright? And your community seems to have a lot. I don't want to, you know, point the finger at you at all. But you're the biggest, most, most, most, uh, munificent gentlemen in all of astrobiology as far as I can. But anyway, Adam, what's going on? Why these people hate each other so much? Well, I don't think, you know, listen, Avi Lowe plays a very singular role. Like, you know, in the rest of the field, I, you know, there's not, I don't really

see the field being caught any more than anybody else. You know, you know in cosmology, man, there's some beaks, right? I think, like, the problem for astrobiology is that it gets so much attention. And, you know, Professor Lowe has, you know, gone off on his own in ways that I think most of us, you know, almost everybody else in the community has a hard time with. So I don't, I think, I think I'm pretty singular in what he's done. And I have great respect for the work that Avi had done in Teptosignatures. He was a leader in the field. I have questions about the things, the claims he makes now.

So I don't really see it as being, you know, I think it's because it's such a high profile field. and because of the claims Abi himself has made have gotten, have launched to the stratosphere of media attention. But the rest of the field I see is quite banon. You know, like working on it every day, other than Professor Loeb, you know, it's got the usual amount of scientific, you know, because listen, you know, in science, we love ripping each other apart. That's our job. Just to rip each other apart ideal-wise. But in terms of cordiality, everybody's pretty damn cordial.

That's my, you know, I'm going to add the astrobiology conference next week. And I don't anticipate any, you know, other than the usual fights, you know, I don't anticipate anybody being. What do you make about these, you know, the, you know, astrobiology is so white and, you know, these policy papers and it sounds like struggle sessions that come on from an outsider. What do you make of the kind of cultural implications and maybe, you know, ethical for against marginalized communities? What's going on there in that community? There's a real point there. I mean, listen, you know, I mean, like I said, everybody should get along. Everybody should reasonable.

Everybody should be. But, you know, what's really interesting about SETI is that, or in general, like here, the interesting, unlike cosmology, really, where you don't really have to think about cultural influences in cosmology or maybe they're downstream, you know, but, but thinking about other, if you're doing techno signatures, I don't think you have to worry about this for biosignatures, but techno signatures, you've got to ask, what do you mean by civilization? What do you mean by intelligence? What do you mean by, and you know, that requires you to actually talk to a broader community of like anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists.

What do we even mean by technology? And so I think the field has opened itself up, rightly so, to get past some of the limitations that we have. So let me give you an example, right? Here's this one that really cracks me up. There was the famous Bakunin meeting that Sagan held, I think was 72, and they invited lots of physicists and and they invited one historian, right? And so, you know, one physicist after another is getting up and saying, alien civilizations will progress this way, and then they'll do this, and then they'll do that.

And the story is like, what are you guys talking about? Like, where did you get these ideas from? He's like, no human civilization ever has done that. I know what they did? They're like, oh, shut up. Like, we don't want to hear from you. And so he wrote a really funny piece later on about this. And so it falls.

really, when you're talking about technology or techno signatures, you've got to broaden your views. And you've got to broaden your views more than the culture, the European culture you came from. Because, you know, if you're going to ask about how different might an alien civilization be from human civilization, then you better at least consider all the ways human beings have made civilization. And it's more than just, you know, Paris. So I think some of that has gotten in the some of the media stuff has gotten played in ways, thought that were ridiculous. Sometimes it can stray off in ways that I don't necessarily agree with, but overall, the idea that you got to go past the biases that you have, I think it's just critical.

The question goes to the host, Matt, is how are you changing your pedagogical techniques, tools, and the age of AI, other things you and Marcelo and others have talked about, how, you know, I always joke our professor hasn't really changed in a thousand years since the very first university opened in Bologna, Italy, in the Western Hemisphere in 1080, and they had this barbaric practice where they didn't have tenure. So, Adam, how is our profession changing as you see it? And what can we do to avail ourselves of new technologies and methodologies of communicating to our students? This is a really interesting question because I think about this a lot, because I got to tell, I don't know if you see this. I see a really profound change in the students over the last

just four years in detrimental way because of the technologies, right? So I do not allow cell phones or computers in my class because, you know, I try and tell students, I can see everything you're doing. So when they're like this or, you know, I'm like, look, you're clearly not paying attention. And I have as much problem with, you know, electronic devices as anybody else. I actually think in a certain way we do have to avail ourselves of the new technologies and see the way like, for example, if we're teaching fluid dynamics to students, it's like, look, man, yeah, you've got to solve the analytic equations, but here's go light your own piece of code, you know, to simulate these things. So I think in that way, physics education is really blossomed because now people can actually play with the equations rather than just, you know, solve the, you know, the really hard integral. Don't that's still important. But when it comes to like introductory kind of stuff, non-science major stuff, I actually think there's a certain way in which we have to conserve. We have to conserve the part of scholarship.

and teach this to students about focus. The worst thing these technologies do to us is they split us. We're never anywhere, right? We're never actually here. And what scholarship requires this deep thinking. You've got to actually hang on to something for a few days even. One idea that you're just slowly trying to pick apart. And maybe we need to like actually hold the walls up and be like, look, these technologies

are great. You got to use them, but you've got to have discipline. And what's real is not what's on the screen. what's real is your experience. And you've got to understand that these technologies, some of how they're being deployed is all about making the money. You are the product, right? And so you should be really careful of that to reclaim your own damn life.

Because, you know, these technologies, somebody's making chingo off of it and it's not you. So, you know, I want students to really be aware that this experiment got run on them. And I don't think it's worked out well for it. There might be those big, those cosmologists that work for big cosmology. Big cubs. It's you guys. Big lens of CDM, Adam.

It's a reality. Adam Frank is a professor at the University of Rochester's scientific research has impacted their search for our star formation, evolution of stars, in particular studying life and existence of life in the university. He's a co-founder of the 13.7 Cosmos of Culture Blog that originated and, you know, You better change that if the Hubble tension gets resolved on NPR. And he's a regular contributor to New York Times, all things considered, and many other venues. Adam, thank you so much. You're the one of the most frequently requested guest, and my audience loves you.

Hopefully, you'll write another book with maybe we'll get you on it. Maybe you and Marcella will come back together. Other costs. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Sorry, I kept you over a little bit. No, no, it's great, Brian. I love talking with you.

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