Modern Wisdom - #030 - Adam Frank - Are We Alone In The Universe?

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

Professor Adam Frank is an Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, Author and a Founder of the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Get ready to blast your brain off into interstellar space as this badboy is my absolute favourite episode so far. Discover the likelihood of other alien civilisations in the universe, how we could colonise the galaxy in 700,000 years, where the future descendants of the human race are heading, the implications of global warming and an awful lot more. If you love this episode, share it with a friend! It would make me very happy. Further Reading: Adam's Website: http://www.adamfrankscience.com/ Adam's new book: Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth: http://amzn.eu/d/5J3oyly NPR Cosmos & Culture Blog: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/  Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, are you ready to blast off into outer space? Because this week is nothing short of mind blowing. Professor Adam Frank is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, an author, and a founder of the NPR blog, 13.7 Cosmotic Culture. He may have heard him recently on Jorogan's podcast, and that's where I fell in love with the material that he works on. In short, today we're going to find out, are we alone in the universe?

Or at least what's the likelihood that we're alone in the universe? This episode honestly ranks as my favorite one that I've recorded so far. It felt like every two minutes there was some insane new statistic that I'd never heard of or insight that I'd never thought of before, from how humans could colonize the galaxy in as little as 700,000 years to where the future descendants of the human race are heading and the implications of global warming with an awful lot more thrown in. This episode really is jam packed. Hopefully you'll love this episode as much

as me. And if you do, I'm going to ask a favor for the first time since I started the podcast. If you enjoy it, please share it with a friend. One friend, two friends, fire it in a group chat, screenshot the Apple podcasts image or copy the link to listen from Spotify. However you do it, I don't mind, but sharing this podcast and increasing the number of exposures that we get is a real key for me over the coming months.

And if you could help me in that way, it would be really appreciated. Coming up soon, we have the long awaited Lifehacks 105. Me, Johnny and Yusuf, back in the hot seat again to give you our favourite chips for a productive and efficient life, along with some slightly more useless tips as well. But we'll leave that for you to make your own mind up about. In the meantime, it's Adam Frank's turn to take the microphone. Here we go.

Professor Adam Frank, how are you? It's great to be here. Thanks for having given me the opportunity. No worries at all. Where in the world are you at the moment? I'm currently in my office at the University of Rochester in beautiful upstate New York. That sounds lovely. And tomorrow's your birthday, right? Mars my birthday. Gonna party like it's my birthday. Which at 56 means I'll probably just like chill out and play video games. Yeah, well, so that is a, that's a $50 million question. And depending on how you want to argue it, you can get different kinds of opinions.

But what we did, my collaborator and I did a couple years ago, is we used the actual empirical data from the Kepler results. The basically our studies of exoplanets, we now recognize that there are exoplanets everywhere, pretty much every star you see in the sky, has a world, at least one world going around it. And so what we did is we used that data to at least set a limit on the kind of answer you want to give. And so here's, with science often,

the most important thing is to what question can you answer with the data you have? Yeah. So all of that exoplanet data. This question we could ask was, how bad does the probability per planet have to be for us to be alone, like deeply and truly alone? And it turns out that given what we now know,

the only way that we are, the first, the only time it's ever happened and civilization has happened in cosmic history, is if the probability per planet of making a civilization is one in 10 billion trillion. That's a pretty big number. Yeah, well, I mean, it's a, well, it's a, the big number is the number of planets, the number of, but it's a pretty small number for, yeah, the odds of us being

alone. So, yeah, so sweet, right? As you said, that's, you're right to point out that really what's important here is how many habitable zone planets there are. How many planets there are where life has had the chance to run the experiment, right, of forming life and then the life going on to become intelligent and the civilization forming. And that, that's it. That number is 10 billion trillion. There are 10 billion trillion planets in the cosmos that are in the right place for life to form.

So the only way that it hasn't happened before is if on every one of those 10 billion trillion planets somehow the experiment failed. And I think those numbers now are so, they're so large that it really falls to the pessimists to tell us, to explain to us, how could nature run the experiment so many times? And what's happened here never happened anywhere else? I understand.

Am I right in thinking that an observation effect occurs with this, though, that the odds could be actually an awful lot less likely than one in 10 billion trillion. And we would still be the only potential viewer to see it. It could actually be in the other direction, right, as well as it could be more likely, it could actually be less likely, because as far as we can see, there's only one instance. Right, but we haven't realized, so let me just address that question. So what we really were able to do, the thing that we could put a data driven limit on was

how bad would the probability have to be in order for us to be alone? So like the actual probability per habitable zone planet is something you'd have to go out and do observations and you know you've got to feed real data in terms of observations to figure it out, right? So nature has that, like nature over the course of cosmic history has actually established for each planet how, it's all about the processes of evolution and then sociology if you wanna get into civilization.

So we don't know what those are. We don't know what nature actually did. What we could do is we could set a limit and we called it the pessimism line. And as long as nature is not this pessimistic, as long as nature hasn't set up her rules of chemistry and physics and evolution, such that the odds are less than one in 10 billion trillion.

Yeah. And then it's happened before. And one in 10 billion trillion is so small that it seems like you don't, nature doesn't have to do much to get it above that. And if it's above that, even if it's a little bit above that, it means this has happened before. This meaning a technological civilization. And that is mind blowing.

Okay. So it's running, nature's running the experiment and awful lot of times. Right. So if that's the case, then rolling it forward, why is it likely, oh, why does it seem likely that we haven't seen any galaxy conquering civilizations? Right, that's a great question. So that's the Fermi paradox.

And so the Fermi-Barr paradox actually breaks down into two parts. So when Fermi's famous question that he blurted over lunch in 1950 was, because they've been talking about aliens, and he said, well, where are they all? And so that question eventually by people scientists like Hart and Tippler eventually became what we now think of as that furry paradox, but really, there's two ways to think about it. One is, why aren't they here now? Why haven't they landed on the White House long? The other part is why haven't we seen them in our observations, right? And so the second part,

people often talk about the silence of the stars about, you know, why are there stars? Why haven't, you know, we seen alien intelligence and signals and since we haven't seen it yet, that we must be alone in the universe. But what they really don't realize is that we've hardly looked, right? I think most people have this idea that scientists have been scanning the skies for alien signals for, you know, 50 years, and really, you know, there's no money for it. Nobody's doing that. So, the number, you know, the amount of actual searching we've done is minuscule, as Jill Tarder says, if the ocean is the amount of space, parameter space too, you know actual stars that we have to

look at radio frequencies. If that's the ocean, all we've looked at is a symbol of full of wool. Does that seem like an appropriate analogy as well? Yeah, absolutely, and so you know you can't look at the symbol and say, oh I didn't find any life in the Thimble and go well there you go the whole ocean's dead So you know, so people need to understand that really we have just we've barely begun to actually search for evidence In among the stars telescopic evidence of Alien of other civilizations, but when it comes to the earth You know them visiting the earth,

that is actually because we're working on a paper on that one. That is a bit more of a problem, but there's kind of lots of ways around that, like maybe interstellar travel is really, really, really hard. And it's so hard that nobody gets to do it very much. And actually, that's kind of on my opinion. So, you know, the first part of the Fermi paradox, I worry less about, and the second part of the Fermi paradox, I worry less about, and the second part of the Fermi paradox is that even a paradox, because we haven't even looked yet. So I would say the question is completely open about whether or not there are other civilizations out there. So in terms of the Fermi paradox still being used as a basis for inquiry, it seems like the

current field has moved forward a little bit and that the questions have now evolved a little bit more. So with that in mind, your recent research, how accurate or how important is it to still consider the Drake equation for as a basis for inquiry? And could you briefly explain what the Drake equation is for the whole? Yes, the Drake equation has a really amazing history. So Frank Drake was a radio astronomer who in the 1959 he was the first guy to ever point a radio telescope at a star and actually look for a signal from you know for you know an intelligent signal. Some kind of signal that could be interpreted as being from civilizations. And that was really the beginnings, both for me and Drake, in that this is all happening in the 50s.

I was going to say the 50s are shit up for getting some search of some aliens, right? Well, it was the beginning really of us thinking scientifically about exoscivilizations, right? People have been asking this question as long as there have been people, you know, do the stars? Are we the only ones, the only intelligent species in the universe? And people have been asking that question, long as there's been people, you know, do the stars, are we the only ones? The only intelligent species in the universe and people have been asking that question. You can see it back to the Greeks, but Furby and Drake were the beginning of people starting to ask this question scientifically trying to ask a question that you could actually formulate in a way that you could build a research program from so Drake really he's the first one to ever actually look You know because now we actually had telescopes that could do it.

And then two years after or a year after, he does this, you know, the search people found out about it, you know, it went, you know, it was a big news. And then the United States government asked him to hold a meeting on interstellar communications and he invited, you know, there's maybe 10 people at the meeting Carl Sagan, you know, other people. And he, in order to set up the meeting, he wanted to wait a sort of frame the agenda. And so he came up with this equation,

which was basically, was an equation for the number of civilizations that we could contact in the galaxy, like how many are out there. And his equation had seven individual terms in it. And each term in the equation was really a sub-question. So he asked how many stars are there in the galaxy? How many galaxies are there?

Or sorry, how many planets? What fraction of those stars have planets? The number of planets in the habitable zone, the right place for life to form around those planets, etc., etc. But that way of formulating and of breaking the problem of how many civilizations are there into a bunch of subproblems, that's what's enduring. And his, that formulation has become so powerful for us in terms of thinking about what you need to get a civilization.

And that's what we used in our own research we modified the Drake equation to get that one in 10 billion trillion number. Wow okay so it actually provided a framework for you to move forward from that's really interesting and it still does I think it's you know for for what was really it just supposed to be an agenda you know for a meeting it turned out to be enormously potent. That's awesome. So, there's still, if the chance of life on your current ones appears to be pretty low, it seems like it should have happened from both the recent research that you've done and the Drake equation. We should have seen something by now, right?

I've read an awful lot about von Neumann probes, and there's some crazy fast colonization statistics that are cited for being able to take over a galaxy for the listeners who don't know von Neumann probes are self-replicating robots that go to a particular system, they suck up some of the resources, they replicate themselves and they go again. Is that right?

Right, right, right. It's a way of settling the solar system, touching every star, every planetary system in the galaxy. And yeah, in about 700,000 years, you can cross the entire, even if you're going at like a 10th of the speed of light, you eat about a 700,000 years,

you can pretty much touch every system in the galaxy. Okay, so, you know, why tenth of the speed of light, you hit about a 700,000 years, you can pretty much touch every system in the galaxy. Okay, so, you know, why have we not seen that? Yeah, that's a really interesting crime. We're working on a paper on this right now. You're working on a lot of papers at the moment. You're putting yourself to the bone. Here's the interesting question, right? The question really should be when did they visit, right? Because there's lots of ways out of this.

But let me just assume that there were colonizers, that there were settlers, or there was a species that wanted to settle the different star systems. If they arrived three billion years ago, right, and they lasted every civilization's a finite lifetime, right? Nobody lasts forever. So if they were here three billion years ago and they lasted for a million years, which would be a long time, all evidence that they ever existed has gone. At least I heard. Yeah, yeah. Over so deeply. So, you know, you have to take both space and time into account. And so that's one of the things we're looking at, like how far back could they have visited and still really

left some kind of evidence. So that's one way around it. They just visited so long that it happened, but it didn't happen close enough for us to see evidence. Another thing is that, like I said, that von Neumann machines assumes a certain level of being able to produce artificial intelligence. We don't know if that's true. Yeah, that's a nice science fiction idea, but we don't know if that's true.

So, and then if you don't have von Neumann machines in artificial intelligence, then you need actual living beings to do that. And space travel, building a world ship, are you familiar with the idea of world ships or century ships? No. So it's the idea that if you have to,

like if we want to travel from one start to the other, and we don't have some kind of super drive that can take us out, first of all, the speed of light is a limit. As far as we know, it's an absolute physical limit. We don't even know if a work drive is even a physically meaningful thing. So, you know, let's just say the laws of physics that we understand hold, then you have to go at the speed of light or less than that.

And to say, let's say you could manage, it would be a miracle to be able to get up to 10 percent of the speed of light. It would still take you hundreds of years to get to even the closest stars. So therefore, you'd have to build a ship that they call it a century ship or a generation ship where you put people in the ship and they'd have to live their entire lives in the ship on the way crossing over to the next star. Live and die and live and die and then there would be generations

that would never get off it and then finally you may be born in a generation that does actually get to see dry land, so to speak again. Yeah, exactly, right? So that could be like, yeah, it could be your great, great grandchildren who actually get to see dry land so to speak again. Yeah, exactly, right? So that could be like, yeah, it could be your great, great grandchildren who actually get there.

And that has all kinds of issues, moral issues. Like what does it mean to condemn, you know, your future generations to live in a tin can they're in dire lives, right? Absolutely, yeah. So a lot of great science fiction written on that subject. For sure. I just recently read a paper where the scientist estimated the size of the economy

that you would need to be able to build one of those things. And it would basically, you would need on the order of like a thousand earth economies, you know, in order to have the resources to build a machine of that scale. And so, right, right. And that was really surprised by that. And it just sort of speaks to the fact that, you know, we always have these science fiction ideas like, oh, technology's gonna progress endlessly.

But, you know, we don't really know if that's true. There may be real limits that we can't get around. And so, you know, it's quite possible that it's just so expensive and hard to travel between the stars that you rarely do it. I was gonna say, so what can you see as being the most likely hurdles for civilizations to get over before they can colonize the galaxy?

Is it a pandemic? Is it resource exhaustion? Is it malignant AI? Is it a combination of the few? I think there's a great barrier. Are the climate change, and climate change is the first major hurdle. Because the difference the climate change and climate change is is the first major hurdle because the difference between climate change and say nuclear war Or pandemics well, but maybe not but you know, you know art a.i.i

A we don't even know if a.i. Is possible Nuclear war, you know, there could be some species that are like I'm not building those things. That's crazy You know, but climate change, you know, this is the thesis of the book, everybody hits climate change. If you build a world girdling civilization, as I like to say, there's almost no way around climate change because at least triggering it, because if you're using that much energy to build a large scale civilization, the planet, which is a giant thermodynamic system, has got to notice. So, you know, triggering climate change, I think, is universal. And the question is whether or not you're smart enough to make it through.

Or fast enough to negate the effects, I guess, before it makes it uninhabitable for you. Because by its very nature, evolution has allowed us to evolve on a planet which is we are fine-t tuned for it, rather than it being fine tuned for us. And as we begin to make amends to that climate, we can actually make it inhospitable for ourselves to exist on, right? That's exactly it. People often talk about climate change as being like, oh, we've got to save the Earth.

You know, as if the Earth was like a furry little bunny. And as you know, the Earth is going to be just fine. You know, there's literally nothing we could do to destroy the biosphere. Well, change the biosphere. We'll set it on a new path. But the biosphere will be just fine. It's us.

Right, we're the one with the one with the one with the one. We're gonna be fucked. Yeah, right. As you said, you put it in, you put it beautifully. It's, you know, the earth, we're fine tuned to the planet, not the other way around. And so if we push the climate hard enough and it drifts off into a new state, as it has many times

before, you know, this complex technological society is the thing that probably won't make it. Yeah. Wow. You've touched on a term there that I did want to, I did actually want to get your thoughts on it. It's a little bit of a segue. Do you, do you have any ideas yourself as an explanation for why the universe seems fine tuned for life? Wow. That is, that is such a powerful and profound question. And I don't. Because, no, no, that problem speaks to side. Now we're doing, you know, we're heading off into a slightly different territory, but it's fun territory.

So we should talk about it. You know, the laws of physics, right? We, there's a lot of questions about why the laws of physics look the way they do. The universal constants and such like that, right? Yeah, exactly, right. You know, so there's, you know, anybody who's taken high school physics remembers Newton's laws of gravity, and there's that G sitting in there. There's this number that just sits there.

And you're like, where'd that come from? It's like, well, the universe just gave it to us. The value of it, 6.67 times 10 to the minus 11 Newton kilogram meters squared. I think that might be it. I might score points for getting that right. So, why did nature choose that value of the constant and not a little bit different? Then there's all these other constants that go along with the laws that we understand. It seems like if any of those laws were just slightly different, then life as we know it couldn't have formed.

This has been a major question for physics. Why did the universe choose that? Now some philosophers look at that problem and are like, look, it's not a big deal. It's just the ones you ended up with, right? There's not, you know, I mean, if I go outside and it's raining today, you know, that's the day you found that it was raining. It's not, you know, it's not some strange, something that needs to be explained. You know, there's, there's past history, et cetera. But of course, with the universe,

if there's only one universe, then, you know, at some point, you run into, you know, you run out of past history. So for some philosophers, this is not a problem. It's just a given. For physicists, we feel like there could have been, you know, that the, we tend, and this is the problem. We tend to think of the universe as being like an experiment on a table. Like, I could have been, you know, that we tend, and this is the problem. We tend to think of the universe as being like an experiment on a table. Like I could have run the experiment differently. So maybe I could have run, but maybe that's the problem, right? Maybe, I think this is really a problem both in physics and philosophy, because here's the question, how do you do the science of something that has only happened once? Yeah. You know, how do you talk about the probability? How do you talk about the statistics of something that has only happened once. Yeah. You know, how do you talk about the probability?

How do you talk about the statistics of something that you don't have statistics for? You know, and so, you know, in physics now, I am not a big fan of like things like the multiverse and string theory, I think there's real problems with that. And so the idea that like, oh, you know, some people are really very happy about the idea. There's lots of universes there popping off all the time.

And then, you know, the reason why the universe appears fine-tuned for life is we just happen to live in a mediocre universe. And that's the value that most of the universes have gotten. Yeah. Yeah, I think that whole way of thinking, first of all, there's no data for it, you know, so it's a fiction. And second of all, it comes from mistaking this one-time thing, which is the universe, for something that's reproducible, that you could, that's like an experiment on a table. So-

And it's done completely, yeah. Yeah, so the big, you just had Sabine Hopuffensator on your blog. I go with it. Very recently did. Yeah, she had a lot to say about the dogma and the ideology, which appears to be really, really prevalent in physics. I was very interested in chalk to find out that not only are physicists humans, but they're also subject to the emotions and the cognitive biases that the rest of us are.

Right. Well, the problem is, and so I really agree with a lot of things she has to say, and the problem, it's not all physics, it's just this, what we might call the frontiers, like the absolute frontiers of space and time and cosmology, right? And the problem for them is particularly when it comes to particle physics is that there's no data that they've run, that we're kind of, we've run to the edge of where we can get data. And you know, science has got to have data.

And if you run out of data, then you become subject to all of the cognitive biases, et cetera. So things like the multiverse and such to me are enigmatic of the fact that those branches of physics, as exciting as they are, have kind of reached their limit of what, of having data. And so we got to go back really now and think much more deeply and philosophically. We have to realize, I think addressing these philosophic, I'm a big fan of philosophy. I think it's very important in science when you run into these boundaries. So yeah, so fine tuning presents a real challenge, but I think you know, there's going to be scientific answers to it, but it may take us in really exotic and interesting

places. It's as big of a question as we can get to right so let's get let's get back on to the core ten and so the Kardashev scale yeah I absolutely love this concept I think it's so cool I just think it's such an awesome way to categorize civilizations and it gives you a real sense of awe and is it's quite grounding as well. You know, when we think we looked back at 1,000 years ago, even a hundred years ago, or you think how far have we come and you realize just how much further there is to go. But it's also, and yeah, also built into it is an assumption that I think we have also stuff. We've realized how wrong that assumption is. So let's just go through what the Kardashev scale is, right? Just so, what is on the same page.

Okay, so just as Frank Drake was writing down the Drake equation, there were, Kardashev was an astronomer in Russia who was also interested in extraterrestrial civilizations. And he came up with this idea, because he was actually thinking about what you should look for. And he came up with this idea that civilizations would naturally progress through three different categorizable stages or types. And it was all based on energy. And type one civilization would be a civilization that could harness all of the energy available to its home planet. And that's basically solar energy or stellar energy. They could harvest all the energy falling on the planet from the star.

And then a type two would be a civilization that could harvest all the energy that came from the star itself by, say, wrapping a giant sphere around the star with solar panels on the inside and harvesting the entire energy output of the star. A type three was where a civilization could harvest all the energy coming from their home galaxy with its 400 billion star. So that is like, that idea has also been,

both for science fiction and for people thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence, that has become a kind of a keystone idea that a lot of people have worked with and developed. And where about a 0.7, right, I think? Of course, yes. So I think Carl Sagan, who was the master of all of this, did a calculation and said, it log in log scale, we're at a 0.7. But here's the thing, for me, what's really important.

So my whole thesis in my book is that we've been looking at climate change all wrong. We think of climate change as some kind of weird political issue, or the question is, did we or didn't we change the climate? But in fact, actually, when you look at it from a kind of the 10,000 light year view, we're just, you know, and any exo-civilization,

any civilization on a planet will just be something that the biosphere of that planet evolves. It's just gonna, just like there were dinosaurs and grasslands, a technological civilization is gonna be one of the things that's possible for a biosphere to evolve. And when it does, that civilization is no less subject to the laws of the biosphere, to the laws of planets and how planets evolve than dinosaurs or grasslands.

Absolutely. Do you think that we are potentially wrapped up in our own genius to a degree? That's exactly the problem. We think, this goes back to this idea of like, oh my God, we're gonna destroy the planet. We just have a very large view of our, a larger view of ourselves than we deserve, right?

We are what the planet, what the biosphere and the planet is doing now, and there's no guarantee where the planet's gonna be doing a thousand years from now. And we're not gonna destroy the planet, what the biosphere in the planet is doing now, you know, and there's no guarantee where what's going to, the planet's going to be doing a thousand years from now. And we're not going to destroy the planet. We don't have that kind of power. Yeah. The concept to say that we are going to destroy the planet, it's all based on perspective

of what exists in destroyer, right? Because to destroy the planet by melting the polar ice caps, it's probably going to be pretty good for some fish, but it's going to be pretty good for some fish. Right. It's going to be pretty shit for us. Right. So what they mean is that we're going to change the nature. Right.

We're going to change. Right. We'll alter. We will. We will move the biosphere into a new state, which probably won't include us anymore. Right. But we're not going to destroy the biosphere. In fact, the biosphere has gone through many changes, including the only reason we're here

is because of a mass extinction 65 million years ago, right? So mass extinctions from the biosphere's perspective can be an opportunity to fill niches, right? So now, clearly we don't want to trigger a mass extinction now because we depend on all of that biodiversity for our own complex civilization. But the idea that somehow what we're going to do is going to destroy the biosphere is just insane. And that goes to the mistake in Kardashev's scale because the Kardashev's scale was all about energy use, right? And it was a very kind of 1960s, you know, shiny, future,

kind of science fiction idea, right? So in the 1960s, you know, we had all of you, you look at the movies of that, everybody's flying around and gleaming perfect spaceships and, you know, and so there was the idea that if you just could, you know, marshal enough energy, if you had enough energy, you could bring a planet to heal. You know, you could almost as if the technology was just going to be a byproduct of time going by. And it was simply resource acquisition that was going to be the only hurdle to get over.

Right, right. And the lesson of climate change and what we call the anthropocene. So I talk a lot in the book about the idea of the anthropocene, which is this new geologic era that we've triggered, the human-dominated era. So the last 10,000 years, we've been in what we call the Holocene,

the last interglacial period. And now we've pushed the earth out of the Holocene and we're doing it, we're pushing it into a new era, which people call the Anthropocene. What? Anthropocene is in anthropology, right? Yes, fantastic. Nice etymology is in Anthropology, right? Yes. Fantastic.

Nice etymology of the word. Right. So it's going to be an era where human effects dominate. Even if we're gone, we will have already pushed the planet into that era by our activity up to now. So the lesson of the Anthropocene, which goes against what CardiShep was saying, was that it's not just energy, it's not just how much energy you have available to you. You've already got a planet and a biosphere, which is incredibly powerful, and it's got its own rules. And those rules are just as much about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics as they are about just harvesting energy. So, you know, CardiChef doesn't take into account that by using all of that energy,

you feed back on the planet in ways that could end your civilization. So, you know, I think it's, I mean, I love CardiChef scale, but I think it's really important to notice that we've gone now beyond CardiShift scale to recognize that it's more complicated. The transition for civilizations, at least planetary civilizations, is more complex than just harvesting energy. Yeah, yeah, it definitely seems to be so. So regardless of how unlikely it seems that we're alone, the moment we are as far as we can tell. Right.

And if we are on our own, what implications does this have for our behavior, both personally and globally and environmentally? It sounds to me, it seems to me an awful lot like the stakes have been raised for everybody. Well, yeah, I said, okay, I'll think about this in two ways. So on one level, right, we're not, there's no other planet for us to go to. You know, Mars, I'm a big fan of, you know, settling the solar system and I kind of think of it as the prize

we get for making it through climate change. But you know, Mars, we're not gonna be going to Mars, we're not gonna get enough people to Mars anytime soon to, you know, to make, soon to make living on Earth easier. So that's out of the picture. But I do think, from my perspective, we now know so much about planets because of the...

We visited every kind of planet in the solar system and we've also now know that there's all these other planets and we also know an amazing amount about earth's 4.5 billion year history that even if we don't even if we haven't found ex exo civilizations as I like to say we now have you know we have good arguments for why they should have existed you know that they're there probably I would say is they probably have existed in the past doesn't mean there's anybody around now. But we know enough now to ask ourselves, what is the generic consequence of a civilization emerging from a biosphere? Are you saying, would you say that it's inevitable that any civilization,

unless they get something incredibly right or incredibly fortunate, that this is part of the course. This is, you're along for the ride. That's exactly what I'm saying. I think, and I think that's why it's really important to start thinking seriously about exoscivilizations, because what we realize is we're just one of many, right?

And that the stage, you know, of, we now know there's so many planets that, you know, unless nature is insanely biased against it, this has happened before. the stage of, we now know there's so many planets that, unless nature is insanely biased against it, this has happened before. It's probably happened a lot. And everybody's triggered climate change. So the problem becomes is, what on average,

how long on average does anybody last? And what do you have to do on average in order to make it through? So in that way, what's happening with us, we're just cosmic teenagers, right? Yeah, yeah, I get that. Do you think that by framing the question in this way, that it takes global warming a little bit

out of the political sphere and into the civilization shit we need to fix this fear? I think it changes everything, and that's why, you know, as the book has come out, you know, it's been great that the book's gotten a lot of attention, I've had that the book's gotten a lot of attention I've had the opportunity to talk with a lot of people about this You know and some people are always like well what is this change and for me it changes everything because you know

The So you as I like to say you can't solve a problem until you understand it and you can't understand it until you can tell its story And when it comes to climate change we've been telling comes to climate change, we've been telling the wrong story. And because we've been telling the wrong story, that's one of the reasons why after 30 years of knowing about it, we haven't done shit, right? You know, the Paris Accord was a great beginning, but it wasn't even close to dealing with this, you know?

And so the climate change, it seems, either you end up with denial, people saying it's not happening, or it just seems so overwhelming that people, their heads just turn off, right? Yeah, I totally understand that you've just got this distribution at both ends of the curve. People think there's nothing that we can do

or people think we don't need to do anything. Right, right. And then the people who are even, you don't wanna do something about it, you just get locked into this thing like, oh my God, human beings, we just suck, we're disease on the planet, you know, and it becomes this really negative story.

And with this, when you look at it from the astrobiological perspective, as I like to say, you know, from the 10,000 light-year view, you see like, look, climate change is not a problem that you have to make go away. It is a transition, an expected and predictable transition that is dangerous and that you have to navigate. Nobody said adolescence has to go away, right? When your kid turns 12, you're not like, oh my god,

stop with the adolescence. You know, you're going to have to go through adolescence. Adolescence is a very dangerous phase. Not everybody makes it through. And what you hope for is the wisdom to be able to make that transition. And when you come out on the other side, you have enormous opportunities and potential if you make it through the other side. Yeah. So where do we go from here? What are the directions that we can go in from 2018? Well, I think the first thing is this beginning, you know, the, the recognition that as we talk about climate change is the recognition that climate change is really our Copernican

revolution, right? So, you know, you look at the Copernican revolution and before the Copernican revolution, everybody, you know, when the, they went outside and they saw the, the sun, you know, over the eastern horizon, they said, oh, the Earth is the center of the universe and the sun is orbiting the Earth. And then after the Copernican Revolution, everyone was like, no, the Earth is just another planet orbiting the sun.

Like the whole universe changed. Everything, and it had huge consequences for politics and philosophy and religion. And it was a fundamental transition in how human beings saw themselves in the world. Yeah. And that's what climate change is. It's the moment when we are forced, like many other civilizations across cosmic space

and time, we are forced to grow up. We are forced to enter into our maturity. And so that's the first thing to understand. And that to understand that actually it's very dangerous, but it also signals something, I mean, this sounds weird, but there's a way in which we could be proud of triggering climate change, right? We have, with our collective project of civilization,

we change the atmosphere of an entire planet, right? That's not bad for a bunch of hairless monkeys, you know? So the real question now is, okay, we triggered climate change. We didn't do it on purpose, right? It was an unintended consequence of just doing what we've been doing forever, which is using energy to build civilization. I think that's such a good point that you touch on it earlier on, people think human suck and we're disgusting to the planet and we're mistreating it and all the rest of things, you know, should there are some energy companies throughout the years that could have probably been more responsible. But I bet that I would wager that none of them went out of the way and thought, you know what I really fancy waking up and doing today. I really fancy fucking up the planet. Like no one thought that. Right, not the beginning, nobody knew, right?

So when we discovered oil and coal, right? All we were doing was the exact same thing we'd been doing since the birth of agriculture. Where we were like, we started using animals to do work first. We started using their poop to burn. And we found oil and we were like, oh my God, this shit is awesome. You can heat your home with it. You can build an internal combustion engine. I mean, we didn't know that we were going to trigger climate change with it. We just built a great civilization with it. Once we realized that climate change

was happening in all of the 1980s, then the companies who knew that it was happening and purposely drove climate denial or purposely didn't do anything about it. was happening in all of the 1980s, then the companies who knew that it was happening, and purposely drove climate denial or purposely didn't do anything about it, now it does get to fall. Now it does get to, they are going to be the folly that will lead to our civilization not reaching its potential of us potentially collapsing. For most of us, for you and me, we didn't, it's not like we're shitheads

for coming into a world where we drive cars. I mean, now the question is, as a collective society, can we make a transition to a different kind of energy infrastructure? So it changes the whole way we think about this, is we've got to understand that this is a transition that we should have expected, you know? And now that it's happening, you know,

we've got to marshal our forces and see whether or not we've got the evolutionary, you know, potential to make the next step and have, you know, a long history in front of us. Yeah, definitely the evolutionally cajonas to keep on giving us. That's the one I was looking for. Yeah, like, I'm sort of,

gap up to the plate. Because when you think about, okay, there's all these civilizations out there, I think, that have gone through this before. And lots of them have probably not made it. And maybe some of them didn't make it. What was it that distinguished the winners from the losers?

Right. Concentrally, what can you think of? What can you conceive of that would get them through it? Well, you know, so it's funny. So one of the things I talk about in the book, and that it was a recent paper that we just published, where we modeled, we did these sort of, you know, simplified models of the interaction between a civilization and a planet, and a planet as an ecosystem. And what we wanted to see, sort of like,

what are the generic kinds of histories? And what we found is there were three basic kinds of trajectory for a civilization and planet together. The first was sustainability. You actually, the civilization started using the planet's energy. It was the population went way up because of it, the planet started to heat up because of it, but you came to a nice stable equilibrium.

The planet stopped heating and the population came to a steady state. That was good, right? And that was, okay, so that showed you that at least from the mathematical modeling, yeah, okay, it is possible to have sustainability. Yeah. The other two classes of trajectory were a little bit more worrisome.

One was just straight out collapse. The population rose really fast, the planet heated up, the population overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and they just dropped like a stone. You basically went extinct. As the planet just drove off into an entirely new climate state. So that was bad. And then the other one was sort of like intermediate where you had a huge die off. You didn't go extinct, but you lost 70% of your population.

So from those three different classes of trajectory, what it tells you is like, okay, it should be possible to have come to some kind of equilibrium, some kind of sustainability. But you're going to have to really have treacherous waters to make sure you don't end up on one of those other kinds of trajectories. And in the future, we're going to make these models more complex, more realistic, and hopefully we'll be able to see really in fine detail what distinguished the winners from the losers. Amazing.

So, in this particular projection, what is some of the key elements? Is population control something that we need to really be carefully thinking about? Or is energy the first port of call? Is the greenhouse gases, you know, what are the, what's the low-hanging fruit, so to speak? Yeah, you know, I mean, if I, the answer I give is going to be, it's not going to be based on my models because the models didn't have that kind of fine detail in them. But I would say, but, but okay, but what I would certainly say is it's not just population, it's energy per capita, right? So, you know, for example, if you look at like the energy, so here's a, if you look at energy per person versus happiness or wellness, like the UN has a wellness index.

And what you find is that, you know, for countries that use very, very little energy and are very poor, people are pretty miserable, right? But then as you ascend the amount of energy you use, you find people get, you know, their wellness index goes up, people are happier. But once you get to about Italy's level of energy use, it kind of tops off. So we like, you know, the average of American or Canadian uses way more energy than the average Italian. But they're really not much happier, right? So the question is, can you find, you know, if you've got seven billion people on the planet, can you, you know, what's the right amount of energy that each person can get to have a fulfilling life, right?

Maybe everybody doesn't get three cars, you know, but you still get, you know, you get, you get, you know, easy transportation and you get to fly around every now and then. And you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you

miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, miss, you miss, miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, miss, you miss, miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, miss, miss, you miss, miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, miss, you miss, you miss, miss, you miss, you miss, you miss, miss, you miss, miss, you miss, miss, you miss, miss, miss, you miss, miss, you That's exactly what it is. And so that's what I think we really have to think about. We have to recognize that every kind of energy we use has consequence. Like even if we switch to all renewables, that doesn't mean we're not going to have any impact on the planet. We're always going to have an impact on the planet. The question is, how do we tune those impacts so that actually we're helping the biosphere rather than hindering its own flourishing. So who does the responsibility lie with here? Is it scientists to improve the science? Is it politicians to improve the politics? Is it individual people of the societies to

alter their usage and reduce their usage? Is it governments to better educate those people? I think it falls to, I mean, really what it falls to is it's the level, I'd say it's the level of cities or town, really cities, on up, right? Because you and I, we should recycle and we should be careful about our impacts on the planet. We should not practice ecological hooliganism. You know, it's like you're up in your crap and the river kitchen is fell off. I've got LED bulbs in the house, so, you know. Yeah, but you know, in the long run,

you, you know, our individual actions mean less than, because this is really an infrastructure problem, right? And it's, I'm talking about, it's not much more than that, right? And so, you know, you and I can't control what kind of energy comes into my house, right? And it's, it's, I'm some level, it's not much more than that, right? And so, you know, you and I can't control what kind of energy comes into my house, right? You know, plug, when I plug my thing in, you know, my plug into the wall, I get electricity out of it, but, you know, there's only so much control I have over where that, how that energy was generated, right? So, it's really on the level of, what we, you know, so, so what we really need to do is put pressure on governments from the city level on up and companies to to like make the sweeping infrastructure changes that we need in order to solve this problem.

Like, you know, so to zero order, we've got to be done with fossil fuels. Like that is the simplest thing that we could do. That's your number one low hanging fruit. That's the low hanging fruit. If we did that, we would be so far along the curve to a new kind of relationship with the biosphere. It's so simple to be done. I mean, it's building a new infrastructure is non-trivial. But on the other hand, we've done that a lot across civilization. I like to point out that here in Rochester, there's a place I can stand where I'm looking at the Iri Canal, which was this canal that ran across New York State. It was a big deal when it was built in the 1830s. And then that was like the main mode of creating wealth and infrastructure, a transportation

in 1830. But then in around the 1850s, 1870s, train lines came in. And I can stand on a place where one of those train train lines came in. And I can come to, I can stand on a place where the, one of those train lines was put in, and I can see the train line. And then a little bit further than that, I can see the highway. And then above that, I can see the airplanes landing, right? So those are four different transportation infrastructures that we built in the space of, you know, 100 years, you know, 50 years.

And they required enormous blood and effort and money, but we just built them. And in some cases, we abandoned them, right? So the idea of like that, oh my God, switching from, you know, a fossil fuels to something else is impossible, is just like you just look at our recent history. And it's like, that's what we're good at. We know of it comes stuff, right? Yeah, that's right, our, our ingenuity. So, you know, making that switch is important, and it has to happen at the higher levels. Because one of the problems with climate change

is we were talking about before, is people feel like every choice they make has this overwhelming moral consequence. Oh my God. I left a light on. Yeah. Right, I'm a horrible person, I suck. And you know what, the problem is actually bigger

than you individually. So for those of us who live in democratic societies, the real effort is not just voting once, right? Not just voting once, you know, if we have an election like in the United States, you know, once a year, we should be voting all the time. We should be showing up, you know, we got an, like in America in my town,

I've got an opportunity to vote probably every week. I could go down to the city council and you know push for for Responsible climate-friendly energy modalities, you know I can help choose the candidates I should make sure that the candidate who's gonna run next year is you know thinking about climate change So that's what I say is really you know the most important thing is to put pressure on the, you know, the systems that we're part of to affect change. I agree. I think what's lovely about the way that you've presented it is that you've

created the foundations for reframing the whole concept, the whole argument, taking it out of the political sphere to a degree, making it less of a emotionally charged and passionate issue, passionate topic. And what's actually happening now is it's like, look, this is happening. Don't beat yourself up about it. Just work out how the fuck we can fix it. Right, exactly.

That's really the thing. And we should have, it's happening because it was supposed to happen. Yeah. That's really the thing. Of course this happens it's happening because it was supposed to happen. Right? That's really a thing. Of course this happens. The same way that you turn the light bulb, you turn a traditional light bulb on, it gives off light, which is what you want, but it also gives off heat, which is not necessarily

what you want. A byproduct of us developing as a civilization was this effect on the biosphere. Yeah. You didn't mean for it to happen. Now how do we move forward? Right. That's exactly it. That's exact that's you know That's a really nice analogy that idea the light bulb right? Yeah, so like oh we were using these light bulbs That did what we wanted them to do but they had this negative side effect oops. Okay, just fucking change the light bulbs man Yeah, you know, I'm gonna miss that big a deal the people right the problem problem is, because of climate denial,

because there are people who stand to lose a lot of money, if we make this change, they've kept us from changing the light bulbs. The analogy I like to use is, look, when I was a young man, we had this thing called typewriters. And there were these big machines that you'd push buttons on and you could write, you know, you'd write things. And then of course, you know, when the computers came in in the mid-80s, the typewriter's all went away, right?

That business just went away. If you owned a typewriter company, I'm sorry, you're screwed, right? Right. And now what's happening is it's as if the typewriter company somehow convinced the government to not allow computers to ever be developed. Yeah. to the government to not allow computers to ever be developed. Right? Oh, computers, man, they're all bunch of tree huggers. You know, they're bad, they're anti-different, they're like, they're eating, they're like, oh, man, it's just a new technology. I'm sorry you're gonna lose money, but like, that's capitalism, pal. Sorry.

Yeah, exactly. Get yourself on the forefront of what's coming next, so to speak. Exactly, right, right, you know, so. I understand. So to round up, what's your general sentiment at the moment obviously you are As I would put it your dick and balls in this particular subject field at the moment What's your what's your sentiment like can you sometimes do sometimes struggle to have perspective? Can you see the wood for the trees so to speak?

Well, you know the great thing about being an astronomer is it's all forest, you know what I mean? The, you know, I mean, the great thing about being an astronomer is it gives you a superpower, and that is time, right? So, you know, it's really, you know, the idea of thinking on century timescales is just, you know, it comes really easily, because that's what I'm trying, you know,

century to the shit, millennia timescales comes easily. So, you know, in that sense, you know, when I wear my astronomer hat, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. I don't know if we're going to make it, but on some level, it doesn't really matter because you've got a whole universe out there. You know, our story is just one story out of a very large book of the universe. And, you know, I really feel very confident that there's other places where this is happening. And, you know, maybe somebody makes it through. If I put my dad hat on because I got two kids, then I'm like holy shit, we gotta do something. So I am generally optimistic. You know, things

are pretty bad right now. But on the other hand, human beings have an enormous capacity for resilience and optimization or you know, or yeah, or resilience and innovation, excuse me. And I really feel like, you know, this is kind of the dark time before we really kick in. Cause you know, I teach a lot of students, and when I talk to students, you know, millennials and the younger generation, I find them to be pretty amazing, pretty amazing and pretty full of ideas.

And, you know, I think we're gonna be able to do it. I think so as well. So Adam, would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online, please? I'll make sure that Light of the Stars, Alien Worlds and The Fate of the Earth will be linked in the description below. I recommend everybody to go and pick the book up.

Is there an audio book version as well? I know a lot of listeners are... There is an audio book version, yeah. So you can get those both on your favorite website,. Obviously, you know, lots of people go there You can get the book on my own if you want to follow my stuff. I'm on Twitter at Adam Frank for the number four I also have a Facebook author page. I spend to do most of my time on Twitter social media wise And I also have a website Adam atomfrankscience.com. And if you want to send me a question or something, I'm very, I suck an email.

So it's going to be very hard sometimes. It may be two months before I answer. But there's also a place there where, you know, and I love it when people do, you know, do shoot me at least, you know, comments or things you're thinking about. Well, at least two months isn't a cosmic time scale, are they? Exactly, right, yeah, right. In the grand scheme of things, you waited a little while for a reply, but it wasn't millennia. That's right. It wasn't, yeah. The earth hadn't switched into a new climate state in that time.

Adam, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this. I'll make sure that everything's linked in the show notes below and enjoy your birthday tomorrow. Thank you very much, sir. Cheers, bye-bye. Hey man, bye-bye.