Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Canadian Prepper & Brian Keating: Will Humans Soon Go EXTINCT? (#372)

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Remastered from our interview in May 2023 Will humans soon go extinct? Are we already on borrowed time?  I had the honor of discussing this with none other than the Canadian Prepper himself! Canadian Prepper is an educational YouTuber who talks about self-defense, survival, and all things preparedness. He analyzes current events, reviews innovative equipment, and theorizes about the demise of civilization as we know it. In our interview, we dive deep into extinction-level events. Tune in! Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) Are we on borrowed time? (02:17) Why are we so obsessed with end times? (14:22) Types of civilizations (20:37)  Fermi paradox and the great filter (26:52) — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Check out Canadian Prepper: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfgtuaUadGgOA-91geQ8Qog  ➡️ 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/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ 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 follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've actually done quite a good job throughout history. We've come close to creating apocalypses. We've created the atomic bombs of all different types. But we also have created atomic energy. We've created astronomical travel to the stars. We've created the laser, the mazer, the MRI, the catskin. Physics can do great good. The question is, how do we make it resilient by building into our systems a more close connection to physical reality?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, pal. Hi folks, Canadian Prepper here. It's an honor today to have on the channel Dr. Brian Keating. He's a world-renowned cosmologist who just missed the Nobel Prize by a hair. Apparently, he's been on Lex Friedman, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Michiukaku, the Weinstein brothers, Neil de Grass Tyson. The list goes on and on. It's an honor to have you here today because I'm always looking for alternate perspectives on this whole preparedness.

And I'm hoping that we can get into a conversation about the existential crises that might befall humankind. I'm talking about eschatology, end time stuff from a physicist perspective. And you are no stranger to the internet. You have your own YouTube channel who I would encourage people to go and check out, especially if you like rumination on extraterrestrial beings, among other things. This is something we don't typically talk about on the channel, but I think we might even do a little alien talk today,

which I'm totally fine with because I got a world-renowned physicist here. The best, this is not the guy with the crazy hair on the history channel, okay? This is the real deal, guys. So I'm really looking for this. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, well, my kids give me a lot of experience with dark matter, and they wouldn't let me miss the father of the Roblox prepper. Just incredible.

I have the Paw Patrol prepper here in San Diego. loves your content. She loves your son and your daughter. So thank you for having me on. It's my second Canadian podcast host of this month after Jordan, your countryman Jordan. So it's an honor to be in the same league as the two of you. That's a hard act of, how could I follow Jordan Peterson? I mean, come on. It's a Canadian prepper here. So we're going to bring it down just a little bit, I think, in terms of the intellectualizing. But I just want to ask you, okay, so like as a father, you know, obviously you've been watching the channel apparently for a while. But I want to know, are you bullish or bearish about humanity's prospects?

And on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being certain near-term human extinction, one being total utopia, sunshine, and rainbows, where do you think we fall right now? Yeah, that's an excellent question. So what I love about your channel for a long time, it's been focused not only on what to do, but what not to do. And as a father and as a scientist, as a man of science, I'm caught in this ambiguity of not knowing where the future will take us, but wanting to be prepared. And the hardest thing in life is to be in the middle. And that doesn't mean to think of, you know, everything's sunshine and roses, half the time, and then everything's doom and gloom half the time. It's knowing what to

pay attention to and what to ignore. So for example, we have imminent threat of potential nuclear annihilation, happening right now, suspended on top of an overlay of a global pandemic. I mean, if you thought in 2014, when you started the channel in earnest and those initial not cringeworthy moments compared to my channel's like current genesis of my channel, okay, man, but if you go back to those times, and you said, like, look, man, you got to get ready. There's going to be a global pandemic. There's going to be legitimate chance of nuclear holocaust. There's going to be tensions in the Middle East. There's going to be oil crises. They're going to be accelerating global climate change. There's going to it.

All these things, you'd be like, well, I'm going to have like 20 million subscribers, but, you know, that wouldn't probably be your first thought. It would be, I'm going to just prep for the future. Now, conversely, if I take you back 50 years and I tell you all this is going to happen, probably not that much different. You wouldn't, you wouldn't like reorient your life and, you know, go into hiding right then. In fact, probably if you gave any human being of the hundred, we think that there have been a hundred billion people that have lived in the span of homo sapiens on this

a little rock of a planet. If you ask them, would you like to live now or when you lived? The preponderance of people would say, right now, you know, plus or minus a few years. So I think it's a golden age. It's the best of times. It's the worst of times. It has the potential for this very annoying aspect for the human mind, which is ambiguity. We just don't know. It's like Schrodinger's cat. Is it alive? Is it dead? We can agree on things. We can disagree on things. Here in America, we have the Second Amendment, which we take advantage of. But we don't think we should have a portable thermonuclear, you know, harm ours two system in our house. Even reasonable people, you know, who are gun-toting members of the NRA would agree to that. Conversely, we believe,

you know, in a right to choose, but we don't believe, like, you should have abortion the day of the birth of a baby. And that's why there are so much polarization, because we try to find what the answer is. We try to predict. We try to throw out alternative. consequences and just focus on one. So right now, I'm kind of short-term nervous, long-term, very optimistic about the state of humanity. Yeah, that's good. I mean, part of the reason why I got into preparedness in the first place was there is an overall optimistic bias towards the future that's present in our society. Some people might call it the normalcy bias. So in order to kind of counterbalance that, you almost need to go in the other direction.

and somebody's got to be the guy in the room saying, hey, this can go wrong, this can go wrong, this can wrong, so it doesn't inevitably go there. So you almost need to stoke the fires of that every so often with maybe a little bit of alarmism to get the conversation going, which is why, you know, there's people like Guy McPherson, who's very climate-duming gloom, I don't agree with his prognosticating about the environment and how, you know, things are going to collapse by 2030. but I think it gets people talking. So there's potentially a value to it in that respect. But there's different conflicting views on whether or not that's useful. I think one of the things is that if you're contrary and you sound smart, I mean, you only have to be right, you know, once to have basically a career.

You've had on, I've had on Peter Schiff, you know, on our podcast, had him on to talk about the virtues of Bitcoin, which he refused to do. But we talked about, you know, all these predictions that he needs. made back in 2006 and seven. And he was right. And now the question is he right about everything else. Well, you can make a career out of this. In science, though, it's very different. You can only be wrong ones. If you make a mistake in science, your credibility is on the line. And you can do that. You can get away with that. And we'll talk about famous examples of that. And it's actually one of the most pernicious and diabolical forces in all of science right now is the reliance of the public on

science has never been more. But the public's understanding. of science has never been less. So how do you, you know, kind of balance the Cilla and the charybdis together? It's very precarious position that we're on. I mean, we control the powers of the atom, the powers of the cell, the nucleus. And what can we do with it is kind of limited by sober heads prevailing. And we've missed destruction, come very close to destruction many times. You've categorized this on the channel many times. But what I'm worried about is that the the polarization does seem sort of irrevocable. Like we only seem to go in one direction.

I have yet to see the ratchet move the other direction. And maybe that's because it can't, because the human mind is wired towards contrarianism, towards Cassandraism, and so forth. But we have to always maintain this optimistic, positive bias, not be Polyana, but always maintain the bias that humans are capable of this magical future, but only if we act soberly and rationally, the problem is, you know, the leadership is really just not taking us there. One of your recent conversations with Eric Weinstein, he had said that he thought that we were on borrowed time. And it was just kind of a passing comment that he made, but it was in reference to

the incompetence of our leadership. Now, do you share that sentiment or do you have faith in their ability to mitigate some of these issues that we face? Or do you think that, you know, we have to go through a great reckoning first. I want to first pledge my allegiance to Klaus Schwab, Nate, as you know, we have to always have our allegiance clear and present. I took down my shrine before the video started. Yeah, you've got your Trudeau shrine. So here's an interesting contrast. So Eric, when he had that conversation with me, it was, you know, a dire warning to humanity. And he's loved, you know, I love him for his rants. And I get to hear some of them over a bottle of scotch in a cigar that that the general public's not privy to. But the point I think he's trying to make

is we have an 80-year-old president and just take, you know, not not being Democrat or, you know, Republican. I always say, look, I became an astronomer because there's no Republican constellation. There's no Democratic asteroid, you know, there are different, you know, kind of procedures that both parties might adhere to, you know, climate change versus, you know, economic benefit. But look, let's look at Biden. He's 80 years old. Take an 80-year-old American male. what's his life expectancy? It's only six years. And that's an average figure.

That means in any given year, he has like an 8% chance of dying. You just take 92% to the 8th power and you see what that's going to come out to be. And that's about 50% or so if I do the math in my head. The point being that he's very likely to die. He's much more likely to die. And he should live and be well. And I'm not a huge supporter of him and the way that he is kind of polarized, not just, not just, you know, politics is natural for a politician nowadays, but science and making dire predictions

that encroached upon the domain that I'm an expert in. But let's leave that aside. But the point being, you can't just say, well, because Biden's old, he shouldn't be president and we're in great danger. You have a very young leader in your country, a very, very, you know, kind of handsome man who I think is clone of my governor, who's also my boss, Gavin Newsom here, very handsome. He doesn't, he has a, you know, 0.05% chance. of dying in any given year. So the point being, you can't necessarily rely on the kind of intrinsic qualities of a particular candidate. You have to think about the systems that support them. So what is the bias of our system? Is it resilient to perturbations? We ask a question.

If you have a marble, you know, and you take a bowl and you put the bowl upside down, you put the marble on top, you move it a little bit. It will actually be stable at the very top, but the smallest perturbation will send that careening off into oblivion. Likewise, if you invert the bowl and put the marble at the bottom, it'll stay there all day. So the point being, how resilient is the architecture that supports the technology, the society, the military? I have a huge number of people that are in the military and my family and my audience. I know you do as well. The point being, they're incredibly resilient.

And I once heard it said by, I think it was, it wasn't a guest. Oh, yes, it was a guest. His name is David Marquay, spelled Marquette. He's a commander of the USS Santa Fe, which is the worst performing nuclear-powered submarine with nuclear-tipped missiles in the whole United States Navy. And he turned it around from worst to first. And he has a book called Turn the Ship Around. It's a great book on leadership.

And people always ask me, why are you like reading books on leadership? You're an astrophysicist. Well, I'm not one-dimensional. I contain multitudes. I love to learn different things. I watch about prepping and I watch about string theory. Okay. These are the most of – and I talk about these things on my channel, too, which gives me an outlet

for my otherwise narcissistic behavior. But the point being, David Marque, commander in the U.S. Navy, said, if Joe Biden wants to kill somebody, it takes about 20 different phone calls and 14 different organizations before a guy on a wire who's a dangerous, violent man, will pull that trigger and off somebody. And it's a good thing that we have those systems. It's a good thing that we have these resilient systems. They've come close to breaking down in the past, though. So we have to ask ourselves, what can we do to build in systems?

at the base layer of reality, which is physics. And I think there's a whole lot of opportunity for us in the physical sciences that we normally shirk because we like to be in our comfortable white ivory towers and speculate about things that are completely esoteric and in some cases quite meaningless. But we have an obligation and we've actually done quite a good job throughout history. We've come close to creating apocalypses because we've in molecular biology, which is the science behind, you know, viral manipulation, CRISPR. That came out of physics.

Another name for molecular biology is biological physics. Watson and Crick were physicists. Rosalind Franklin was a physicist. So we've been in the DNA field. We've been obviously in the nuclear realm. We've created the atomic bombs of all different types. But we also have created atomic energy. We've created astronomical travel to the stars.

We've created the laser, the mazer, the MRI, the catskin. Physics can do great good. And the question is, how do we? make it resilient by building into our systems a more close connection to physical reality. And I hope we can talk about some of that today. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the impossible Tis I, your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it depending on your podcast catcher of choice. I did some research of my own and found out that

about half of you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now before you forget. Let's go back to the episode.

Absolutely. I mean, technology is definitely a double-edged sword. Now, as a cosmologist, you're always talking about, and a lot of your work focuses around what happened at the Big Bay, you know, how far does our ignorance go back type thing? There seems to be this obsession within society with end times, whether it's just the psychology of the alpha and the omega, and rightly so because, you know, I've been listening to a lot of,

I've been on this Terrence McKenna kick, and he says one of the most absurd things in science is at its core, this idea that something just manifested out of nothing. Like, the idea is so incredibly absurd, but it's like the basis of all scientific inquiry, yet we're told, you know, that, well, the belief in God is silly or, you know, it's not scientific or rational, yet at that one fundamental belief. But, I mean, maybe that's just another question altogether, but why do you think there's this fascination with,

the end, and maybe in your case the beginning, the alpha and the... 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 speed. That's why I chose Google Fi 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 FiWireless is not subject to data traffic de-prioritization during times of high network usage.

Omega. Yeah, that's a wonderful question. So I always ask people, you know, what's the most important day on the calendar? Now, don't tell me because it's personal information, I'm sure. But what kind of day is most important to you, most memorable to you? Ah, that's a good question. I'm pretty, before we started this, we talked about we should have metric time because I'm not a person who puts great significance in terms of days,

terms of, you know, I guess, you know, for my kids, it would be Christmas or something, you know. Right. Okay. So Christmas. What's Christmas? By the way, I think you just proved without admitting it that your wife doesn't watch your channel very much because, you know, if you were smarter than, you know, than me, you might say my anniversary.

Oh, yeah, right, right, right. I'm not going to hold that against you. So, honey, you know, I would say my anniversary. Yeah, we're pretty unconventional like that. But, yeah. Okay. So you are. Very good.

Very good. So most people will say Christmas, New Year's, my birthday, my wife's birthday, anniversary, kids' birthdays, et cetera, et cetera. What are those? Those are beginnings. They fascinate us because they're the only event that you really weren't around for, and it happens to be, you get a reminder every year, right? The Earth orbits around the sun once per year. So we come back to the same place, although not really, it's kind of interesting to think about what it actually does, but be that as it may. It's a beginning. And your own personal beginning, you did not witness, okay? Even if you have video, it's not really the same thing. And I don't want to watch those

videos. Anyway, the point being, humans are fascinated with this because in principle, the origin of the universe is a time before which there were no yesterdays. And that's a mind-blowing concept. So when we think about time, we think about time in very, very few concrete ways that we can really understand. And some people say time is not real. It's an emergent phenomena. And that means it is not individually definable any more than the temperature of a single oxygen molecule in this room is definable. It's only definable with respect to the collective ensemble behavior in which it's part of. So, so too, is the universe when we consider time. So what happened before, let's say there is a moment of time. And I would say there's a preponderance of cosmologists and others that believe

that there was a true beginning of time. Some people say that's the Big Bang. That's not technically correct. The Big Bang could be just, quote unquote, doing a lot of heavy lifting with these quotes, but the Big Bang could be just the beginning of our observable universe, or it could be just the beginning of the matter that makes up our observable universe, or it could be the endpoint of a previous universe. But if it is the beginning, true beginning of not only our observable universe in the matter within it, but of time itself, question is, what happened, you know, the Tuesday before that? Does that even make sense? So these are my mind-bending concepts that really reckon with what normal people with present company excluded are

fascinated by time because time is so difficult and squishy to pin down that we have a multitude of different ways to define it, which is not true of most other quantities, right? If you talk about measuring mass, you can determine what the mass is in different ways. You guys use kilograms. We're much, you know, wiser. We use pounds down here. But intrinsically, there's only a finite number of atoms. You can count those atoms, right? So the point being, that's an extrinsic type of measurement. You can't redefine it. But time is not like that.

So it plays gimmicks with the human mind. And so it becomes very fascinating with it. On the other hand, in the deep future, there's a similar question. What will happen to our universe in the very, very far future? Will it go on forever? Is it part of an unending series of cycles? Is it part of a new universe which will emerge in what's called the multiverse, which is all the rage in cosmology nowadays.

These are questions, and what makes them so delightful, aside from getting paid to answer them, or try to answer them, building experimental tools, unlike my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson that you mentioned and others, he doesn't build telescopes. He looks at data that has come in from other telescopes or Michi Okaku or others. They don't actually build the hardware that gathers the data that reckons with the claims made by people much brighter than I am

as to what is the nature of the base layer of physical reality. And then there are some, Nate, who say that we can manipulate space and time. If only we understood the ultimate building blocks of nature and how the laws of nature via their symmetries and via their properties are either universal or can be modified, melded, and contorted to potentially suit our needs as technological beings, as preppers, and so forth. So I think it's a fascinating thing. It's delightful to be able to get paid, you know, all amount of public university, but I get paid to do this.

And I just want to be an evangelist for other young people that care about big picture topics, philosophy. This is a job that enables you to grapple with what I think it means to be a human being and ask questions that only the human mind is capable of. Now, there's this thing called the Kardisch of scale. And I don't know how much stock you put in this theory, but I think it might be a good place to start for our conversation because, you know, it's this idea that there's these, type zero, type one, and maybe type two civilized. I don't even know the scale, but the idea that there's this great filter that typically species will destroy themselves with the technology that they create before they can lift off and traverse the cosmos. Can you explain what, you know, these type civilizations are and whether you think we are a type one civilization? So there's only

one immutable law of physics. All other laws are basically provisional and subject to potential revision. And that's that energy is concerned. Not matter. Matter is not conserved. We can destroy matter. We can create matter from pure energy, but you can't create or destroy energy. And it's deeply ingrained in what's called the laws of thermodynamics, which are a construct of the physical universe that was discovered when things that are practical, like steam engines and so forth came to be in the industrial revolution and pre-industrial revolution, because people start to know. notice, there's a connection between heat, energy, temperature, pressure, volume, and all these different variables.

And so they became obsessed with characterizing these things. And lucky for them, those laws are really, as I said, inviolable. Unlike, say, the law of gravity from Isaac Newton, which held that gravity propagates throughout the universe faster than the speed of light, you know, infinitely fast. That was provisional. That was revised by Albert Einstein. And yet, and yet, we still use the laws of Newton to get the starship into orbit, hopefully eventually, get the landers on the moon in a couple of years again, and so forth.

So what the Kardashev scale is attempting to tap into, and it's not something that we practicing physicists, you know, make use of, although it does connect the very first guest I ever had on my podcast, Nate, which is a man by the name of Freeman Dyson, not the Dyson vacuum guy, although I did get a picture of him once with a vacuum. He's passed away. He passed away right after COVID began in 2020, 94 years old, wonderful man. And he was the first guest on my podcast into the impossible. And we used to talk about these things called Dyson Spheres. Well, what is a Dyson sphere? A Dyson sphere couples to the Kardashev scale in the following way. The Cardyshev scale attempts to classify the different levels that a civilization's technology could achieve, which would be

driven by the most fundamental inviolable quantity in all of the universe, which I said is energy. So how much energy is available to a particular planet or a particular civilization? So this guy, Cardashev talked about how you could actually harness this energy. Now, the energy can come in many different forms, but it was classified according to the laws that were available back then. In other words, solar energy, thermonuclear energy, et cetera. There may be other forms of energy that we don't have access to or can't tap into. In that case, this Cardishev scale is also provisional, as I said. So a type 1 civilization has harnessed all of the energy that is available on its home planet. So we do believe that if you live on, say, a water world or something like that,

there would be no way to really harness that energy. I always say, you know, to get where we are today, to have this conversation at the speed of light over, you know, 15 billion transistors on each one of our devices, it required a lot of whales to die. And people are, what are you talking about? Well, how do you think, you didn't design a computer using a computer, right? The first computer was not made using a computer. The first transistor was not made by making a transistor. The first computer program was not written with another computer program. In other words, things have to come from more primitive, more basic, more fundamental in elementary building blocks. In this case, we needed to burn whale oil to have light in order to see to write down the laws of

thermodynamics. We needed a lot of billions and trillions and trillions of tons of plankton to die and descend to the bottom of the earth to make a lot of the petroleum that we use to eventually maybe get to a civilization that harnesses the wind on its planet, too, harnesses all the sunlight that falls on it. So that's a type one civilization. So it has a lot of pre-existing technology. We're nowhere near that level, okay? We don't harness all the energy available on the planet.

As an example, we could power all of humanity's energy needs by, you know, by plastering over, you know, Saskatoon with solar panels with 100% efficiency. Bout power the whole planet, okay, or Alberta maybe. I mean, I'm demonstrating how little I know about provincial geography. Saskatchewan is the province. Saskatoon is the city. So I was a little, yes. And it's not a very big city.

So I'm thinking you're referring to the province. My PhD advisors, PhD advisor, so my grandfather of PhD, he did his research in Saskatoon. That's the only reason I know about it. Okay. So there are a lot of... I know Elon Musk spent a bit of time here too, surprisingly. So it is deeply connected. So let's get back.

to Cardishab, okay? So Cardishab scale type 2 is one that's going to use all the energy available from its star. And this is where my friend Freeman comes into play Freeman Dyson, because he postulated that to get to a type 2 civilization, you'd build a sphere around the star. We, because of the inverse square law, which sounds very complicated, but it's not, it just means that light diminishes by a factor of the distance squared. So if I move a factor of two away from these very expensive light bulbs that I bought from Canadian Preparedness.com, if I move away from that distance by a factor of two, the intensity goes down not by a factor of two, by a factor of four. It's the same law of gravity and for similar reasons, as it turns out. Anyway, that distance squared

is what causes the diminishing. So you want to capture the entire spherical area or the area surrounding it, the shell of light, that would create, you'd make a Dyson sphere to do that. And then a civilization that's of type three would do that for every star in the galaxy that inhabits. So we're nowhere near. I think we're in like type zero. We're using a fraction of a trillionth of a percent of the energy, just of our home planet, let alone of our star and let alone of our galaxy.

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I think that's something, you know, I referred to earlier with respect to, okay, are we going to destroy ourselves before we get off the rock? Do we even want to get off the rock? You know, if we're going to create metaverses and things which can simulate a far more entertaining reality that is out there in the cold, dark universe, will we ultimately come to the realization that spaceflight is futile and just wasteful and we're just going to stay on the rock with our virtual reality headsets? Do we get past the great filter in your mind?

What are going to be some of the sticking points? I guess, if you will, and potential ways that we might meet our demise. So Enrico Fermi was one of the Titanic physicists of all time. He was one of the last great people to understand theoretical physics and also to understand experimental physics. So at the University of Chicago, where he was working and where we now have Fermi Lab, the first accelerators, the first nuclear reactors, and the first self-sustaining critical mass came together. As I said, it was in the 30s and 40s. And the reason that that's important is what else happened?

What happened in 1947? Well, there's a Roswell crash and we were getting to understand the properties of, you know, quantum mechanics better. All these things came out of the same time. Nuclear weapons, first sightings of, you know, claimed alien craft, quantum mechanics, the Cold War was beginning, the end of the hot war was beginning. The Apollo moon missions were beginning. The space race was beginning. All these are tied up. And the reason I want to take that little detour is just to say that, well, what if we're in that same kind of an age right now? It sort of feels like it, doesn't it, where you think about how the universe is kind of conspiring. We have these wars, hot and cold simultaneously. We have thoughts and claims of new physics. We have threats of war in the nuclear

realm. We have biological war. We have all these different things. I'm hopeful that as that ushered in a golden age of spaceflight, of understanding the base layer of physical reality of understanding computation, by the way, came out of that, Alan Turing and so forth. Now we're into the age of AI, which we're going to get into, and actually becoming an interplanetary species as Elon Musk hopes to do. And he said that he hopes to die on Mars. And I hope he does too, but just not on impact. I really don't want that to happen to the guy. He's got more kids than you and I combined. So he's got to be careful. I think he loses track of how many kids he has. And so it causes him to make new ones. So I'm

kind of jealous of them. But anyway, the point being, when Fermi came up with this paradox, it was based on the following type of calculation, which he was known for. He would ask his physics class, he would say something like this. And I might say the same to you, anybody who's watch. How many piano tuners are there in Saskatoon right now? You have to think about it. You know, maybe there are how many people have pianos? How often do they need to be tuned? You know, what's the, you know, sustainable, you know, rate of a piano tuner to keep his family, you know, prepared with their preps and their peak refuel and everything else, right? So you'd have to go through that calculation.

And so he would do that and he would train his students to think physically. And these are theoretical physicists mainly. So he was teaching people that are truly esoteric, brilliant brains, much smarter than me. And he was teaching them to think about physical realities such that, not so they can fix a toaster or call a piano tuner, but so that they could be more in tune with what reality is presenting us based on evidence. Then he asked the following question, how many stars are there in the galaxy? And since then, by the way, this question has only become more paradoxical on one hand. But as I'll point out, I think there are very many simple resolutions of which you mentioned

one of them already, the great filter. We'll get to that. Okay. So Fermi said, take the number of stars that are like the sun, not too hot, not too cold, last long enough so that conscious beings can come into existence to build technological machines, robots, and metallurgy. So you need a certain set of properties, right? You don't have metallurgy underneath the Hudson Bay, right? You don't have metallurgy at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You can't have a water world. You can't have an ice world. You can't have a

pure desert world. So there are many, many compromises that it would have to be met in order for us to have the right conditions to make a technological light. He wasn't concerned with, you know, Where is the yeast slime mold, you know, from planet, you know, Blurcon 7? He didn't care about those because they're not going to come to us presenting us with the paradox or fail to come to us, presenting us the paradox as to why they don't exist. So he said, take the number of stars that have Earth-like planets in what's called the habitable zone where you can have liquid water. On occasion, it can be solid water.

I've heard that you sometimes get solid water up there and maybe even this time of year, but we'll see what happens. So the existence of all those conditions, then you take how many stars there are in our galaxy that are like that. Now, multiply that several of them. We have multiple planets that could either host life right now. And bodies, I mean, by any planet, I could mean a moon of Saturn or Jupiter, any solid body that has some liquid on it that also has a crust that you could build technology on.

And it turns out you say maybe there's 10 or 100 in our solar system alone. and then you multiply that by the number of stars in our galaxy that are like our sun, not too hot, not too cold. And you get an astronomical number. You get literally millions, you know, if it's 1% of all the stars in the Milky Way, and each one has 10 planets, you're talking about 10 billion sites in which life could exist in a technological form, not just slime mold, okay? Then he said, well, there's about 400 or 500 of them that are within a few 100 light years

and maybe a few that are within 10 or 20 light years. Remember, he's operating back in 1960, 1950s. So he's saying, since we turned on our first radio transmitters in the 20s, broadcasting our existence to any alien species, here we are. Either it's a dinner bell, either it's a warning. We can't say for sure what we're broadcasting because we don't know who's listening to it. And at any communication channel, you need to understand the transmission and the receiver, just like with a walkie-talkie.

It doesn't matter. You have your walkie-talkies from the store. If I'm not on the right channel, it's totally irrelevant. You're just broadcasting into the void. So he asked the question, with tens of billions of potential places for life of a technological store to exist, how come no one's come to visit us? And that's the essence of Fermi's paradox. Now, is it a true paradox like Xenos paradox?

Is it a mathematical conundrum with potential mathematical resolution? Or is it just kind of a curiosity? It's not a law of nature. So after that in the 1960s, a man by the name of Frank Drake, who sadly passed away last year, he came up with something called the Drake equation. The Drake equation, according to him, parameterized the likelihood, probability, and number of exoplanets, of other planets, and technological civilizations. He became the basic founder of what's called the SETI Institute,

which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute is in Northern California. These are legitimate, hardcore physicist. These are people that are influenced by great thinkers, Carl Sagan, among them, was one of the great influences and Frank Drake as well. Again, we want to parameterize what we know about the universe. And since that time, we've measured how many planets are. The number of planets went from one, you know, where life could exist or where we thought life could exist hundreds of years ago. And then 1995, it began an explosion of exoplanet discoveries made by various colleagues and friends of mine and so forth, leading to Nobel Prizes for the first time in true astro searching for extraterrestrial planets and so forth. So this is legitimate science.

It's not woo-woo tinfoil stuff. But still the question remains. How come we don't see them? And there are a variety of reasons why we might not see them. And we can get into some of those reasons. the problem with those reasons is that often we anthropomorphize them. We say what would obstruct us from getting to another star system? It could be technological. It could be pandemic. There causes our demise. It could be a nuclear war. And there are some that say that these civilizations

don't exist for Fermi's question to be answered in the affirmative that they are out there because these civilizations destroy themselves and they reach what's called a great filter. There's some event that causes the suffocation that is still birth, although it's long after our birth, but once you reach a certain level of technological maturity, of biological complexity, that things emerge, viruses, you know, and so forth on the emerging phenomena, asteroid impacts on the galactic scale, all the way to nuclear and in human-made or organism-made extinction-level events. So I think it's fascinating to talk about these things, only in the past.

few years, would I say that these are out of the realm of science fiction and into the realm of true scientific fact? But more than that, they're really fun to think about because the more we think about them, the more we learn about who we are. We have to, you know, Elon tweeted, you know, recently, we have to pass the great filter. And some say if we discovered extraterrestrial intelligence, that would mean that we should be very pessimistic about our survival, which is kind of weird, right? Because undoubtedly any technological civilization that we discover is likely to be much, much more advanced than we are. And so it could be discovery because they're here to, you know, eat us or mine are liquid water. I think those are far-fetched, by the way. But the point

being that they've made it past the great filter. And that means that we still have to go through the filter. That means we haven't even, we haven't even gone to the halfway point yet to see where the filter could possibly be. And so that's a terrifying thought, right? But, But it could also be a hopeful one when you think about how many people live before you, if you ever think about how many grandparents you have, how many great-grandparents, go back thousands of generations and think that's only the tip of the iceberg. We think there could be, in a very basic scenario, some people like Will McCaskill and others have calculated, you know, we could live for like a trillion generations, or not a trillion

generations, but there could be effectively the upper limit on the age of the universe sets the actual limit for how long a civilization could live and how many generations could fit in there. That's an absolute upper bound, not the one that I take seriously. But thinking for the long future, I think it is useful to think about these things. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.