Modern Wisdom - #130 - Keith Cooper - The Contact Paradox: Where Are All The Aliens?

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

Keith Cooper is the Editor of Astronomy Now and an author. Why is searching for aliens so hard? How would they contact us? How would we decode a message? What are the potential dangers of responding? Should the general public be told if we find them? Should we be freely sending messages out into space?  Extra Stuff: Buy The Contact Paradox - https://amzn.to/2EXuFsR Follow Keith on Twitter - https://twitter.com/21stCenturySETI The End Of The World Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the-end-of-the-world-with-josh-clark/id1437682381 Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - 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

Hello friends, welcome back to the final modern wisdom of 2019. Massive thank you to everyone who's tuned in over the last 12 months. And I will finish up with an episode I actually recorded a couple of months ago but took quite a bit of editing due to some technical problems. But finally got it ready and it's definitely a unique one. Keith Cooper has written his most recent book called the Contact Paradox, challenging our assumptions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So essentially we're learning all about aliens. How would we know if we've received a signal from an

alien's civilization? What sort of language would they be using or how could we decode it? Should we respond? What are the dangers associated with that? Should we tell the general public if we've received it? What are the implications for religion across the globe? I have to say that I'm in full nerd mode on this episode with Keith. And if space and aliens and astrobiology and physics isn't your thing, then go back and listen to another episode because we're going in deep today, but for those of you who enjoy this sort of stuff, it's absolutely amazing. That's it. The year is over. We have next week, potentially, one of my favorite, ever episodes that we've released. Myself, Johnny and Yusuf sitting down to say, what we would tell our 18-year-old selves if we were able to give them a 30-second call and then analyzing why we would do it. So yeah, as we enter the new year 2020, hopefully that

will give you some really good ideas for New Year's resolutions and lessons that we've learned. But for now, that is it. 2019, we're saying goodbye. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Keith Cooper. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Keith Cooper. We're currently on planet Earth, but I'm not sure for how much longer. Keith, welcome to the show. Thank you, it's currently on planet Earth, but I'm not sure for how much longer. Keith, welcome to the show. Thank you, it's probably beyond Chris. So we're talking about the contact paradox today, which is your new book.

And it's all about this search for extraterrestrial intelligence and messages from the sky, right? Yes. Okay. And, and, yeah, our attempts to send messages into space as well for extraterrestrial life to hear, that's a major part of it as well. I see, yes, so it's a conversation, not just us listening. So why does this book need to be written at the moment? Settie has had, well, setied search for extraterrestrial intelligence when anybody not familiar with the acronym. It's had a big resurgence recently. For many years it was kind of the periode of the sciences. It didn't get much funding at all. Mainstream science didn't really pay

much attention, NASA weren't interested in it. And then a couple of years ago, Yuri Milner and the breakthrough foundation, he's a billionaire philanthropist. He donated $100 million to a 10-year setty project using all the big radio telescopes in the world to listen for extraterrestrial signals. And that's given it a real boost. Now NASA are starting to get a little bit more interested. Another part is as well. So it's really starting to come into its own and mature as a science. And everybody likes space and aliens. Why was it so lambasted in the first place? Why was it sort of looked down on? I think there was a stigma attached, you know, with flying sources, UFOs. It was around 1960 when Frank Drake did the first setty radio set. And I think at the time it was

too small a project for anybody really to notice, but as time went by I think people did associate it with with flying saucers and little green men. And I don't know I mean NASA, you know they talk about astrobiology and searching for microbes on Mars and things like that, but they never seem to take it to the next level and look for a more complex life. So it's a strange kind of thing, especially when you consider how popular science fiction and aliens and things like that are, that scientific community hasn't really reacted to it in the way that you would expect. Didn't get embraced as a real science then it doesn't sound like. And perhaps Hollywood

caused that issue in part because there's not many Hollywood blockbusters about microbes in space. But there's a lot about that and it might just make people feel like, well, this is just trying to replicate film in reality. It's a waste of money. Yeah, when people think of aliens on movies on TV, they think of xenomorphs from aliens or independence day world of the world, aliens coming here to steal our water and our women, which seem to be a common theme in 1950s. Two resources that they desperately need, yeah.

Yes. So I think, you know, I think that's in the back of a lot of people's minds when they think of setting. And hopefully it won't be in the back of a lot of people's minds when they think of my book. I don't want that to put them off. Water of mind. Yeah. But it's, you know, one of the things that I discovered writing the book is that setty is as much about us as it is about aliens. We don't know anything about aliens. I know as much about aliens as you or any scientist. But when we consider what extraterrestrial life might be like, the only thing we have to go on is life here on earth and human life.

So we're kind of extrapolating from that to explore what's alien life might be like. And in doing so, I think we learn a lot about ourselves. There's a phrase I use in the book that the stars are like a mirror. And whenever we look at the stars, we see our own self reflected back. And that's a big theme from the book. It doesn't matter. I mean, I don our own self reflected back. And that's a big theme from the book. It doesn't matter. I don't know if everything is existing. There may be no life out there.

We may be on our own in the universe. But I don't think that devalues the search because we're going to learn about ourselves in the process. And that could be more valuable than anything. Hmm. So you mentioned that we're extrapolating forward how us as a species have developed, how our planet has developed as well. Is that leading to some assumptions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which are limiting?

I think so. I think so. One of the big ones that I talk about in my book is the nature of altruism. So back in the early days of setting and still I think quite a lot today there's this idea that aliens are going to be an advanced civilization that are wise and they've grown past war and all that kind of thing and that they're going to be altruistic. This is the phrase that comes out. The aliens are going to be altruistic and it's usually radio that comes out. The aliens are going to be altruistic. And it's usually radio astronomers saying this. And I think you don't actually know what altruism means. Altruism doesn't just mean being kind to somebody. Evolution of biologists and people studying animals

and things. In nature, there are two different kinds of altruism. The first kind is kin altruism. Basically, you're going to be altruistic to siblings, your children, your cousins, your nieces and nephews, because they carry your genes forward. So when I got a couple of dogs, I take them out into the park, they chase squirrels.

And you hear sometimes they hear the squirrel squawking, it's like a warning, there's a dog get out of here. They're putting themselves at risk, betraying where they are so the dog can find them to save, you know, their siblings carry their genes forward. So that's kin altruism and we certainly don't have any kin with, you know, extraterrestrial life, you don't share any genes with them or anything like that. So that's not going to work. The other kind of altruism is reciprocal altruism. Ball it down to, I'll do something for you, you do something for me.

And that's how most of us get by in life. I mean, of course, we display pure altruism to an extent, but I don't think it's the most common kind of altruism that humans show, otherwise the world would be a much better place. People tend to do things for themselves, for their family, or to do something in return for something else, sadly. And I don't see any reason why Alien Life would react differently. So if you think that aliens aren't going to bend over backwards, but bottom of their hearts far as when they don't even know us and don't even know where we exist for sure, then that

changes how you approach setty because, you know, we're looking for a radio signal from space. You know, these are coming from, if any civilization is out there, they're going to be many light years away and the power they need to transmit a signal, not just once, but if you want to stand a good chance of it being detected, you've got to transmit it over and over again for years and years and years. That's a lot of power, a lot of resources. So that already starts to make you think, well, how much power are they going to devote to that? How many of their resources are they going to devote to sending this massive beacon into space that nobody may ever hear. And it could also play into how they're going to react to us when they discover that we

exist. This idea, again, that they're going to give us all their knowledge is, I think, a bad assumption. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're also going to wipe us out or anything, but I don't know if it's going to be the reaction that we expect. And if we do engage in any kind of contact with them, extended contact, even if it's just radio or signal swaps, you know, if a few dozen years, you know, the information that they could give us could end up being disruptive to our society. So I don't think we have to, you know, we shouldn't assume that any alien civilizations that may exist, we shouldn't assume that they have our best interests

at heart. It's a total paradigm shift, isn't it? When you talk about this, when you actually think from a first principle's perspective about what will happen if first contact is made, like everything, there's's sort of out. Baby, bathwater, full works. Like, and you're totally starting a fresh. It's really quite terrifying. You mentioned there twice about radio signals being the chosen mode of communication.

Is that, I mean, I don't know how technology works. Do aliens have radio? Is radio this ubiquitous technology which is inevitable across the universe? Or how does it work? Well, there you go. That's another huge assumption. The historical reason for searching in radio wavelengths is just that radio was a mature technology

when we first started doing it. And radio does have some advantages. It's not absorbed by interstellar dust. So it's able to penetrate through the gas and dust clouds and be detectable at longer distances. But it disperses, radio waves disperse. They're not that great in that sense and their bitrate isn't as high as something as similar like a laser. That has a much higher bit rate can transfer a lot more information. But when Frank Drake did the first setty search in 1960, the laser was just being invented by Charles Towns about 50 miles down the road. And when the laser was invented, you know, other physicists called it a solution without a problem.

And nobody knew what to do with them. I mean, obviously today, that sounds ridiculous because we use them everywhere. And now we have lasers that can outshine the sun for a nanosecond. And problem with lasers is they do get absorbed by interstellar dust. So you can transmit them, but they don't go as far.

You could use an infrared laser, which would pass through some of the dust. So I think if we could start setting again, we'll certainly continue to look for radio waves. And another rationale for that is that astronomers studied the universe in radio waves anyway. So the idea is that alien astronomers are going to want to use that wavelength because that's what we're looking in and they might assume that we'll be...

Not more extra-sling out, isn't it? It's more we did it and therefore we must presume that someone else might. Absolutely. It's so limited. Well, it's both limiting and enabling, isn't it? The fact that we have this viewer perspective. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, if, you know, there might be a million year old civilization and we're thinking they're still gonna be using AM&F.

Right, you do. But we cannot, but we can only look for what we can detect. You know, maybe they're using some kind of fantastic technology we don't have. Well, we can't detect that. You know, some people suggested maybe they could transmit using gravitational waves. That's the, you know, the new big frontier in science. I think discovered gravitational waves from merging black holes recently.

That's great, but you have to, you know, manipulate very massive objects to produce gravitational waves. The radio waves seem much more simple. You know, new treanos are another possible method, but they don't interact with matter very much. And I'm not sure that you can convey as much information as you could with a laser or with radio. So I think lasers and radio are certainly, you know, the best modes of communication that we should look for at the moment. But of course, you know, maybe using something else. Okay, so that's what I'm talking about, the kind of technology that aliens might use.

How about what would be in that message or how we would decode it? I mean, like, if I got an email from someone in Chinese and I wasn't able to use Google Translate, that might as well be from an alien. I have no idea how to use that. So how would we even begin to decode or translate a message? I remember once reading a blog post a very, very long time ago about the ubiquity of mathematics across the universe, that there are certain things, I think the number pi was one of them and perhaps some of the cosmological constants, for instance, gravity, etc, etc. There are some of these numbers which will be universal and would be recognizable perhaps.

Does that tie into it and how would we decode a message? Yeah, I mean, that has been mooted that perhaps aliens will use mathematics. There's a starting point to establish communication, you know, 1 plus 1 equals 2, right? You've got that, We'll get my advanced. Trouble is, I don't think you can try, you know, communicate culture with mathematics or, you know, take us to your leader. I'm not sure you can communicate that in mathematics. Yeah. And I think if we ever did discover a signal, I'm not sure we'd ever be able to decode it fully anyway. That's kind of, I mean, you know, just discovering the signal would be amazing enough that

we'd tell us that they're out there. And if they're close enough, we could send a reply and maybe we could kind of figure something out in terms of communication. But one of the big stumbling points I think is going to be culture and you know, even in human language, there are cultural idioms in there that we don't even realise we're using and to an age, it's just been meaningless. Well, I don't... Was it the film Mass Attacks where the mash-ins mistook applause as some kind of insult or something? I remember. But I think it's just stupid things like that. But you know, you know, you made the analogy of receiving an email from somebody in China

you can't understand. Now, if you met that person from China, you might still not be able to understand their language, but you don't understand what a smile meant. Or a wave, or if they were frowning. So we have that kind of commonality, but which we would not have with extraterrestrial intelligence. The other thing, this was really cool that I talk about in my book is something, these two things called Shannon entropy and Ziff's law. And it's all about the complexity of language. And, you know, we might find that extraterrestrials

have a far more complex language than we do. And what I mean by that is I give the example of, okay, so, let me see if I can find it in the book. Okay, so I make this analogy with a gorilla. There was a captive gorilla called Coco, and she died recently at I think, I think, at the age of 46, but it was remarkable because with her trainer, I guess, you know, able to learn up to a thousand words in sign language, but certain concepts had difficulty with. So if you said to her that you're going to take her for a walk tomorrow, she would understand what tomorrow means. But if you told her that it was raining yesterday, she'd understand that would mean in the past.

But if you mix the past and future tenses, so if you said we would have finished lunch by this time tomorrow, she wouldn't understand that mix of tenses. Now imagine if aliens have such a complex language that we couldn't understand it the same way Coco couldn't understand that same mixing of past and future tenses maybe to correspond with an extraterrestrial life form so advanced, they might not even be biological, they could be machines. They might have their own machine language. And again, how would we even know how to

communicate with a machine lifeform, when we don't have anything like that here on Earth? There's just so many unknowns, science fiction, I think, you know, the best science fiction touches on some of these, but, you know, I don't think we can say what it's going to be like until it happens across that bridge when we get there, but it's not going to be as easy as in that trek and, you know open loops and open doors and potentials. What would be said? How would you then translate it? What's the medium that it's going to be broadcast on?

But there's certain things that we can talk about with a bit of certainty. And one of those would be, how could we respond and then, well, first off, should we respond? Like if we receive a message, as we've already identified, we don't know how friendly or altruistic this civilization is, the presumption, I think,

is that because the universe is age, compared with the age of humanity as a civilization is quite long. So I think the presumption is that we're not likely to be the most advanced civilization if there are others out there. That's am I correct there? Yeah, that's correct. There's been billions of years for other species to evolve. Intelligent and has been around, you know, modern humans

for 12,000 years, modern human civilization is nothing. So the chances are that they're going to be much, much older than we are. So if they are technological, then you get correspondingly expect them to be technologically more advanced as well. I get that. So we've got that. We've presumed that this is going to be some more advanced as well. I get that. So we've got that. We presume that this is going to be some more advanced civilization. We received, let's say that we received this message. First off, if you were, let's say it goes to SETI as well, because it could just be like some guy, I guess, but the people who have the resources, I suppose, to be looking for this, firstly, should SETI tell, should that be publicised?

What would the implications of that be, do you think? I don't think they could keep it secret. Seth Shostak in the Seti Institute is a senior astronomer there. He wrote a great book called Confessions of Annalion Hunter. And this that's it out in the first chapter is talking about a signal they picked up in the mid 90s. And they wrote up all night trying to figure out what the signal is. And thought this could be it. This could be it. And all of a sudden, he gets a phone call from a journalist in New York asking about the signal. He's like, we told

you, you know, we know the outside is building those. And somehow it got back to him. And it turned out to be an orbiting satellite, so it wasn't aliens. So I just, you know, I don't think that there would be able to keep it secret, first of all. It's not like a sea top secret government, you know, project. These are just citizen, civilian scientists. It will get out people talk. A bigger question is, should they divulge the coordinates from where they detected the signal? Again, that's going to be difficult because if you detect a signal, you want to be sure you're right. So you have to share the coordinates there. So again, I don't think you can keep that secret. In setting, in the setting community,

one of the things I love about being a science journalist is when I find scientists arguing, and one of the things that drew me to writing about this is this issue of whether we should respond has caused a huge schism in the setting community and some real arguments. So that's, you know, I honed in on that straight away, in fact, this is going to be great with you. Love a bit of drama, some serious drama going on in SETI. Absolutely, yeah. And there are two entrenched viewpoints. One is it's safe to transmit messages into space

or to reply. The aliens are going to be nice. Don't worry about it. The cat hut has any way because it's too far away. And the other viewpoint is, we don't know anything about what's out there. Let's not be hasty. Let's think this through. Let's be careful and not

respond straight away. And there's something called a setty protocol that was drafted by a setty scientists. The details basically what a scientist should do if they think they've detected a signal, but part of it is, you know, don't reply until, you know, there's some kind of authorization from the UN or whatever, you can't just reply on your own. It's not legally binding. Yeah. Yeah, it's not legally binding. So if somebody wanted to send a reply, they did have to stop them.

They did want to have a second protocol that was going to forbid just sending messages into space willy nearly in the hope that a civilization out there would hear as that got that didn't get the support that the people drafting the protocol wanted. So one of the arguments that the call is messaging extraterrestrial intelligence on Meti. And the idea is you tag a star, maybe a star where astronomers have found planets around potentially be habitable. You send read your messages, then case there is anybody there to detect your signal, and maybe they'll reply. We've been listening for going up to 60 years now, and we haven't really detected any

short fire safety signals. Maybe they're not transmitting, maybe they're waiting for us to message them before they send to us. And you know, the argument is safe because they're too far away. So if they wanted to invade or whatever, they wouldn't be able to do that, they wouldn't be able to do that when they're able to reach us unless they have some kind of fancy walk drive. Which is more likely. But the opponents to that say, well, let's look at human history. And every time a less advanced civilization has met, tomorrow advanced civilization, it's ended bad. The less advanced civilization. But what's interesting is when you look at history, things are more complicated than that. Contact is a very complex issue, which I discovered writing the book. Often the analogy brought up is the fall of the Aztec Empire when the conquistadors marched in. The Aztecs, even though there was conflict, the Aztecs didn't fall because the conflict

ultimately fell because the Europeans brought diseases over. And another analogy I make in my book is something called the tulip, tulip mania, which apparently hit the Netherlands and the 1500s, I think, where tulips were imported from Varroflans and it caused an economic bubble. Everybody was buying and trading these tulip bulbs until the bubble burst and people lost their money and homes or what have you. It turns out that was over exaggerated a little bit but there was an economic bubble and what that tells us is that if we introduce a new idea, a new technology, a new thing into society, it can prove disruptive. Even things that we invent to ourselves, cars are proven disruptive.

Yes, they get us from A to B and that helps with economy and helps get jobs and things, but air pollution from the cars is an undesirable side effect. So that's an example of something that has a mixed consequences. And basically, if we make contact with an alien civilization, we don't know what the consequences are going to be. It might be good, it might be bad. And the point that people oppose ascending messages into space as saying is that we don't know. You can't assume it's all going to be good. There's probably going to be some bad things that come from contact, so we should wait. We should not send messages into space, we should not reply until we know what we're doing. And to be honest, I probably fall on the side of being cautious.

I think a lot of that's probably going to be personality, preclivity, right? It's just going to be, do you tend toward a slightly more conservative mindset with these things or not? Because as you've mentioned before, the actual understanding of what's going on here is is fairly limited right or is it a game theoretic perspective where most people have just looked at the odds? Yeah Possibly I think I think you probably write about the slightly more I don't know if I want to use a conservative mindset, but certainly more of a safety first.

You want civilisation to be bold and ambitious and to explore new frontiers, and I agree with that. But at the same time, you don't want to move, you don't want to get ahead of yourself, you don't want to move too fast that you don't really know where you're going. And the great thing about astronomy is that we're exploring exoplanets. We're finding new star systems, new planetary systems nearby. We're beginning to study their atmospheres. In a couple of decades, I imagine, that we'll have discovered planets that are possibly

like Earth with an oxygen, nitrogen, atmosphere, and water. So we're starting to get a good idea of maybe where we could find life. And I think if we just wait and look, do a bit of reconnaissance. And if we say we find a civilization on a planet and on a 20 light years away, let's listen, can we pick up any of their radio leakage? Can we learn anything about them before we start transmitting? And I'd like us to do that. I'd like us to do it responsibly.

If we want to be a cosmic civilization on the cosmic stage and to act responsibly, I think to just be a bit grown up about it, not rushing to things. And just do things carefully. I suppose the bias that we all have if we're not Professor Nick Bostrom or someone else who's able to look at existential catastrophes with a very, very unbiased view, the issue is that we think within our own lifetimes as time scales, right, or perhaps within hundreds of years as time scales. But if you decide to reply to a signal and that leads to a

complete collapse of human civilization, that is not a decision to be rushed. That's a decision to take millennia over. That's a decision that takes 10,000 years and why not? Because if the consequence of getting it wrong is so great, it's asymmetric, right? There's a bottomless downside, but we've made it upside. Upside is, maybe we get some cool information and get to meet some aliens. Downside is, everyone dies. Yeah, I don't know, you know, I'd be cautious of saying that would be the ultimate conclusion that everybody's going, everybody would die, but in long die. But in long term, it might be that contact is going to be great, but it might be short time it could end up being disruptive.

Maybe aliens have a religion that supersedes religions here and earth, and is that going to human religions and that could cause destruction? So it's that kind of level of destruction I'm talking about, rather than invasion or I don't know any kind of aid from Andromeda scenario if anybody's seen the old science fiction series. Basically, anybody who doesn't know it was written by Fred Hoyle, the astrophysicist in the 1960s and depicts scientists detecting their signal signal from another planet and it carries instructions to build a computer and you know the big debate should we build this is it going to take us over

as it hits a helper turns out to take us over and they stop the time. Of course it is. On the other hand you've got Carl Sagan's contact where the signal was to build an apparatus. Again, what's he going to do? Well, it was to transport humans to them so they could introduce themselves and say, hey, so they're kind of like the two extremes. And I think contact is going to be somewhere in the middle, I think, with both good and bad. And we don't know how we're going to react.

We don't know how they're going to react. We may not even be able to understand them, may not even care about us. There's so many permutations. It's just fascinating to think about it. It really is. I did a podcast with Robin Hansen about the elephant in the brain, not about his The Great Filter, but I did want to discuss that about the fact that the silence from the stars at the moment lends us toward thinking that nothing is out there, or at least there's

no proof that anything is out there yet. And the great filter is a hypothesis that's been put forward by Robin. I wondered if you might be able to explain that and then give you a views on it. I'd love to hear that. Yeah, so the great filter is this idea that somewhere in the evolution of life, of all life, there is something that is like, it's like, I think Ian Lennbank's described it as when a sentence meets her full stop at the end. So, you know, maybe the great filter is something that happens early in the evolution

of life. Maybe it is the origin of life in the first place. Maybe life is so rare that it's just a huge clue that it happened here on Earth. Maybe it's the jump from single self-life to complex life that is so difficult that hardly any planet develop life, complex life. Maybe it is the jump from dole things to technological life. Somewhere along, the theory is that somewhere along the line there is something that stops life in its tracks.

We don't know whether it's in our past and we've just managed to sneak through. We don't know if it's waiting for us in the future. Nick Bostrom, Oxford University, said that if we found microbial life on Mars, for example. A lot of astrobiologists would be that brilliant, another planet with life, surely there's life elsewhere in the universe then, but he would be a little bit worried because he would say, well, why didn't it evolve past microbial states from our complex life? So that brings the great filter a little bit to do. If you see what I mean, it's, and, you know, maybe it is something like an asteroid strike or a supernovae or, you know, climate change that inevitably brings

a civilization to its knees. And that would be why we don't detect anyone because they've all died out. I don't know. See I view all these things, you know, all these potential obstacles, whether it's nuclear war or climate crisis or asteroid strikes or disease or one of all these things that could cause a collapse of civilization. To me, I view them as challenges for civilisation, for society to overcome. I think every generation

has its own challenges and you know, it's a measure of that society of whether it can progress. So the great filter, I don't think we should be afraid of the great filter if it's real. It may not be real. There might be life everywhere in the universe, and we just haven't detected it yet for various reasons. But if it is real, I think we should view it as something to overcome, rather than something to fear. Because that's what we can do, really. It's a much more proactive approach, isn't it, rather than just being scared of it.

I do love thinking about the great filter hypothesis and the fact that it does suggest that somewhere down the line there is a very, very high hurdle. And you're right, it could be the pro-credit, is it pro-ciotic to eukriotic life is one of the ones that gets right forward? And then there's potentially what happens if all civilizations develop artificial intelligence, perhaps that the control problem

might be one of the concerns, maybe it's nuclear war, maybe they all do that. I saw, I can't remember where I was reading it, it wasn't the contact products, it was somewhere else. It was, it was Professor Adam Frank actually. And what he said was that pretty much all civilizations are likely to have to deal with some form of global warming because a byproduct of energy creation would inevitably be some sort of heating. There would have to be some sort of heating going on. So he suggested that

one potential suggestion, I don't think he believed in it, but it was one potential suggestion, it might be global warming or climate change of some kind. But yeah, I think he's, I think he's, again, he's drawing assumptions that they're going to follow the same sort of development as human society. Can you, can you think of any others? What other sort of life? Imagine the life that is involved on a planet where to survive, it's had to be very in tune with its environment. Maybe it's a slightly difficult environment, more difficult than we are here on Earth. And the only way that they've been able to evolve and survive is by being in tune with

that environment. And then suddenly building factories and being odds with that environment isn't going to be part of their nature. So possibly they would identify that that's going to cause a problem and they won't go down that path. Or maybe they don't invent industry or technology. Look at dolphins, they are intelligent. I don't care what anybody says, they are another intelligent life form. They have blippers, they don't have opposable thumbs. They can't manipulate things. So maybe they're

never going to develop top technology. Who knows if they sophisticated enough to have hosier whatever, but you know, there's certainly a degree of intelligence there that should be respected. And maybe life in the universe is all dolphins. Maybe there's not many human kind of life, but you know, astronomers suspect that a lot of planets are water worlds. You know, there's this idea that you know, water's red, that's rubbish. It's made of the two of the most common atoms in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen, there's water everywhere, and a lot of models of planetary formation predict that there's going to be a lot of planets that are basically just going to cover denotion. And maybe they're full of dolphin-like societies that don't invent technology, but nonetheless, our intelligence. Do you know how I reckon it would be? In fact, it's

octopuses and cephalopods, they're terrifying. All of them. They're here to take over the universe. I'm telling you, Keith, that's who we need to be concerned about, we need to be concerned about the octopuses. But yeah, the underwater thing is interesting. Red blog post about how underwater civilizations would naturally be on a back foot because they can't do stuff like metallurgy as easily, which would really restrict their ability to develop certain in certain sort of ways. And if you know Jupiter's moon Europa is covered by an icy shell, but you know several dozen kilometers thick, but underneath is a global ocean. And if there's life in there, they may never know that there's anything outside of their ocean that have to go through all that ice and maybe they never will. I was reading. So, the website universe. Yeah. So, that might be

why we're not using signals. Yeah, I get what you mean. It's interesting just thinking about all the different ways that life could develop. There's a fantastic podcast called The End of the World with Josh Clark. Have you heard of this? Oh, wow. You've not heard of it. Oh, Keith, man, let me send it to you once we're done. It will, I mean, it will all be low hanging fruit for you, but it is amazing. To the listeners, I will be linking it in the show notes below if you want to go and check it out, but it's a nine part series done by I Heart Radio. So super mega, mega high quality sound production. And it's essentially all of the different ways that civilization could end.

And it's framed nicely at the beginning. There's an episode about the Fermi Paradox. It moves forward into biological worries about the great filter. there's all sorts of artificial general intelligence. Absolutely amazing. And one of the things is he really gets towards the end and he really starts sort of pushing the limit that he mentioned was any sufficiently advanced civilization would realize that the best way for them to live potentially would be by using computing power. I can't remember if it was to simulate themselves or for something else. And that with that in mind, the most effective way to do this would be to essentially go to sleep until the universe itself was a lot, lot cooler.

Is this a theory that you've heard before? Yes. Who came up with that? Do you know where the origins of it? I don't know if it was any single one person who came up with the idea. I want to say Brandon Carter might have had some ideas that way, Frank Tippler, John Barrow, people like that. So yeah, so it comes down to, it's like, you know, you have your computer servers and they're kept in a cool room. That's because the producer lot of heat and they need to get rid of that heat, otherwise they're going to melt. So the cold of the environment around them, the faster they can get rid of that heat and the faster they can process information.

So that's the idea that really advanced life that is, I guess, if you're existing as some kind of computer simulation or machine, your life is going to be based around thought process and data. And you know, that is going to generate heat and you're going to have to shed that heat. So you're going to want to go to the call this place possible. Some people have suggested that if there's intelligent life out there now, may have gone to the edge of the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, because that's, you know, space is going to be colder out in intergalactic space and they're going to be able to run their giant computer computers.

How much colder are we talking like tiny, tiny fractions of a degree? I don't know to be honest. But it's not much. It's not much. It's just not the difference from going in and elect from a hot after a cold shower, surely. I think, I mean, obviously in the outing and galactic space, there's your far away from all the stans. I imagine it's probably pretty close to absolute zero. And that's great for any kind of advanced computing life that needs to get rid of the heat from its own processing of

its own thoughts. And the idea of going to sleep now is because the universe at the moment is hot, there's stars and the creation disks around black holes and supernovae, there's all kinds of radiation. In the far, far, far future when protons have decayed and galaxies are disintegrated, and there's nothing left but just a super photons that the temperature is equalized, and everything is just almost absolute zero. You can't get colder than that. Whether life could survive in those circumstances, I don't know. Reading a lot of Stephen Baxter science

fiction novels, you know, often his advanced aliens are like that. But again, that's extrapolating from how we perceive life is going to develop in the future and what its motivations are going to be. We don't know, but it is fun to speculate, I think. I love that idea. And again, if Van's life has gone to the edge of the galaxy, where it's colder, when they can run their giant servers, or whatever it is, then we may be looking in the wrong direction for their signals if we're looking into the galaxy. Maybe we need to look out.

Well, it's all these different permutations? And I think detecting a signal is going to be more that a look than anything else. One of the things that I do like doing when we're thinking about these more grand, more universal scale approaches is that it does remind me about just how much of a paradigm shift, or how many different ways of looking at the universe or potential life in the universe there is. Right? When you're talking about potentially waiting, going to sleep somehow

until the universe has cooled down. Like, until the whole universe and just all of matters chilled out, and everything's gone except for let you say this sort of photon soup and you're a fraction above absolute zero. All right, brilliant. Well now it's more efficient. You think what a ridiculous approach but that's been postulated is one potential solution for this sort of stuff.

I just find it so interesting to think about things in that sort of a way. So as we move forward now, you've got a little bit more funding behind SETI because of this crazy super billionaire that's given them, you know, 100 million, it's not, it's not shit loads, but it'll go, it'll go a fair way, I way I'm gonna guess like what do you think or what would if you were directing the funds at SETI and you had to put your money on the table you're 100 million on the table what would you be doing at the moment? I'd be training new scientists do SETI. Okay you've got you know people like Jill Tater, Cessros Thach, Rank Drake, they've been doing

sety for years and years, but they're not getting any younger, and you need trained scientists to be able to replace them when they retire. You know, until recently it was very difficult to be able to do a PhD in Zincetti or anything like that. You used to do it by stealth, Dan Wirtheimer at Berkeley. He would do PhDs. It would be in building equipment, but the equipment would be for CETI experiments.

Oh my God. It could do it. So yeah, we need a lot more scientists thinking about this, because I said it's, even though it's been going for 60 years, modern CETI, it's still very mature science, because it just hasn't had the numbers of people doing modern, you know, setting. It's still very mature science because it just hasn't had the numbers of people doing it, the funding, to really develop those ideas. So, yeah, we need more

scientists being trained to do setting. We need to remove that stigma for them so that they can see, you know, when they're going to do their PhDs, they can see it as a reasonable career path. There's no point doing a PhD in setting, planning to get any jobs in it. But once we can do that, once we can get more people doing it and the stigma is removed, and then we're going to have more people thinking about new ideas, new possibilities, and that's a kind of broad and our horizons. And I think that is going to be worth just as much as as any extra radio setty search that we could do. Because it's going to be worth just as much as as any extra radio sety search that we could do. Because it is going to be a long-term project, probably.

We may get looking detector signal next year, but it might take 100 years, 1000 years, maybe never. Hopefully, I think Seth Shostakov always says that he eludes to Mars Law, which is this law that, you know, seems to be holding so a fan number of transistors on a circuit doubles every couple of years, which increases your computing power, and it enables you to process much more data faster and possibly find signals faster. And that's speeding things up. But yeah, yeah, I just get more people doing setting, I think, has got to be the main thing. Okay. So I'm not being, you know, not being

barris by doing setting and getting, you know, not just radio astronomers, but getting historians, getting evolution of biologists, getting anthropologists, getting people from all kinds of walks of life and disciplines doing it, because they're going to bring their different perspectives on things like contacts and how civilisations might have evolved and things like that. The moment the city has been a discussion among radio astronomers and planetary scientists and people like that, and we need to broaden it because we're talking about looking for another civilization. So we want to try and understand what that civilization maybe likes. So let's get the people in who are going to be able to shed new light on that. And again, that's something that hasn't been done historically.

We've really pushed away those other people, other disciplines, and really we need to be embracing them and getting them thinking about it as well. Because as I said, you know, Setty is, we're going to learn about ourselves as much as we will more probably than, than we are going to learn about alien life at least in the short term. So I think it's going to benefit those of the disciplines as well to do SETI. What things are we learning about ourselves through the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

I think at the moment we haven't learned anything for sure because I mean for example we don't know whether there are any other habitable planets or whether earth is the only planet. Now we can look at the only planet that can support life in the universe. So we can look at what things make earth habitable and understand why Earth is habitable. When we discover another Earth-like planet that could support life, that would further inform us about our own planet and where we came from. The idea of imagining what other civilizations are going to be like, the whole discussion of altruism,

the whole discussion of altruism, that we learn about our own levels of altruism and how altruism has affected development of human society. Just imagining what kind of technology advanced life might have and thinking about where our technology might go in future. The whole idea of the great filter, you know, if it's something that we do to ourselves, can we learn from that and preempt things and avoid things, you know, like nuclear war or the climate crisis? So I think it's an ongoing project.

It's just getting us to think more about ourselves and in the context of the universe at large and any other life that may or may not be out there. Yeah, like I say, one of the things that really does fascinate me and I absolutely love to do as the this kind of thinking comes about is trying to take that total first principles back to basics, look at human civilization on a you know interstellar universal scale exactly what is it that we're taking for granted and what are the sort of assumptions and bits and pieces like that. One thing I want to say about that is I worked on the book for 10 years

and I've had two agents it got rejected by about three dozen publishers. And eventually I found a home for it with Bloom's Beery and Jim Martin, the commissioning editor there was very kind to take a risk on it and to accept it. But it is a lesson that, you know, if it first you do it 60, just keep trying. Try three dozen more times. Yeah, there are times where I thought this was never going to happen. My agent got rid of me because they just weren't getting anywhere with it. So it's like get rid of him.

And yeah, there were really times when I didn't think it was going to happen. But if you believe in something and, you know, if you're, that reasonably good at what you do, and, um and I think writing is probably pretty much the only thing I do well, I wish I could speak as eloquently as I could write. I don't know how well this conversation is coming over. But yeah, it's certainly a testament to perseverance, I think. And hopefully, other people have want to write a book and have an idea and can write a little bit.

Hopefully, that would give them hope that if they don't first find a publisher for it, just keep trying because they'll be a publisher out there eventually for you. Man, it's not like you've landed with someone. This is Bliem's Breast Premier League. Some of the guys that I've been speaking to recently, I had Douglas Murray on the other week. I've had, also, I had a new several times over, Sunday times best cell in orthopedic, Franco Pan,

who wrote the Silk Rhodes. So you're swimming in some, as I would say on this podcast, you're swimming in some big, dicked waters. And it's a really nice thing to hear, especially considering that a lot of people look at kind of science and physicists as quite cold and calculating. It's nice to have something that sort of

humanizes the process of writing this. And if it's taken 10 years, then, man, I think I honestly think it's worth it. It's so, let us say, it's crazy dense. It reads very well. So yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't recommend it more. Any of the people that have listened to this, any of the listeners, you know where to go. It will be linked in the show notes below. And obviously, if you follow the link to Amazon on there, you will be supporting this podcast at No Extra Cost to yourself. But for now, Keith, I'm gonna let you go, man.

Thank you so much for today's conversation. It's been awesome. Thank you.