The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: We are not alone in the universe

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

K2-18 B, an earth-like planet with water vapour is spotted 111 light years away. An interstellar object christened Oumuamua flies through our solar system exhibiting characteristics never seen before in an asteroid. Scientists discover intriguing radio wave emissions coming from Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun. These are just some of a growing number of observations that have scientists excited about proving the existence of alien life. Statistical probabilities support this view - the Kepler Space Telescope has identified billions of planets theoretically capable of supporting life. To meaningfully advance the science of astrobiology humanity needs to abandon the longstanding and pervasive view that we are alone in the universe. Skeptics say that given the immense age of the observable universe there should be some evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, but instead all we hear and see is silence. These same scientists argue that the ability of a planet to make the jump from inanimate matter to life - known as abiogenesis - and then to stay alive and become intelligent - requires highly unlikely transitions. Earth and humans are special. Our existence represents an incredible fluke and the statistical probability of it happening elsewhere is all but impossible. In sum, we are alone. Arguing for the motion is Avi Loeb, Astronomer and Professor of Science at Harvard University and a New York times bestselling author, most recently of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. Arguing against the motion is Stephen Webb, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, author of the best seller Where is Everybody, and presenter of the recent top ten TED Talk Where are all the Aliens?  Sources: Sky News Australia, Fox 35 Orlando, KSAT 12, Business Insider, PBS Space Time, World News, CBSDFW, MoleClues TV The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Producer: Nicole Edwards Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the monk debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day

to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, we are not alone in the universe. Scientists may be a step closer to finding life in space. They've found a planet in the so-called Goldilocks zone, which means it has the right temperature to support life and has water vapor in its atmosphere. After investigating the nature of a mysterious and apparently cigar, shaped object called Omuamwa. Deer spotted in 2017 speeding through our solar system,

astronomers remain uncertain over to how to classify it. The court says that scientists believe those radio emissions came from the direction of Proxima Centauri. Is alien life trying to make contact? Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. These are just some of the growing number of observations that have scientists excited about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Statistical probabilities support this view. The Kepler Space Telescope has identified billions of planets theoretically capable of supporting life.

Proponents of astrobiology argue that the time has come for humanity to abandon its longstanding and pervasive view that we are alone in the universe. Why haven't we found E.T., if they're really out there, why haven't we found them yet? Well, to begin with, there hasn't been that much effort, and it's really hard to conduct a major research program because there isn't really adequate funding. extra fraction of 1% to look for intelligent life, it's not been politically feasible all this time. Skeptics say that given the immense age of the observable universe, there should be some evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. But instead, all we hear and see is silence. These same scientists argue that the ability of a planet to make the jump from inanimate matter to life, known as abiogenesis, and then stay alive for millions of years.

years to become intelligent could be an incredibly rare event. There are lots of ways that it seems Earth got lucky. A range of factors made Earth exceptionally unusual and uniquely able to produce intelligent life. Earth and humans are special. Our existence represents an incredible fluke, and the probability of it happening elsewhere is slim to none. In some, we are alone. On this installment, of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, we are not alone in the universe. Arguing for the motion is Avi Loeb. He's an astronomer and professor of science at Harvard University and a New York Times bestselling author, most recently

of extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Arguing against the motion is Stephen Webb, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, author of the bestseller, Where is everybody, and presenter of a recent top 10 TED Talk, Where Are All the Ali? Avi, Stephen, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks for having me. Thanks for the introduction. It's a pleasure to be debating with Avi. I'm really looking forward to this debate today. This is one of these questions that has tantalized and captivated me since I was a child reading science fiction in my bedroom,

wondering about the stars and what exists out there in the universe. So the opportunity to spend some time with both of you, to have your considered scientific opinions on this fascinating question that we have encapsulated in our motion today. Be it resolved. We are not alone in the universe. That is a privilege indeed for me and for our audience. So thank you, Abby and Stephen, for coming on the program. What we're going to do is short opening statements, two minutes each. Avie, you're speaking in favor of the motion. So we're going to have you go first. Please, take us away. Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be here. My base perspective from being an astronomer over the past few decades is a sense of modesty. And we are born into

this world as actors being put on a stage without a script. And the first question to ask is, other other actors. So we can ask them what the play is about. And over the past year, we've learned that about half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth, roughly at the same separation. And so if you arrange for similar circumstances, for liquid water on the surfaces of many of those billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, you might as well get similar outcomes. I think it's arrogant of us to consider ourselves as special and unique. In fact, my daughters when they were young thought that they are the smartest, they are unique and special until we brought them to the kindergarten where they met others and got a different perspective. And the only

way for us to mature is to find others. Without any prejudice, it's unlikely that we are the first to come along because most stars are billions of years older than the sun. And, and we are, you know, And there is no reason why the chemicals on Earth were not abundant on many other planets and why those did not end up making cakes that are even more intelligent than we are, just like in recipe books where we mix ingredients together and get different cakes. I find it hard to believe that we are the most intelligent and definitely not the only ones that existed until now. Thank you, Avi. Concise opening statement. This debate's coming together nicely. Stephen, same opportunity for you, two minutes on the clock to make your opening remarks in this

conversation. Well, first of all, thank you, Rudyard, and thank you, Avi. When we think about how many alien civilizations might be out there, people tend to use a framework set out by Frank Drake, crudely put. We multiply the number of potential sites for life. as Avi has said, that's a large number, by the probability that life will arise and go on to develop technology that we can detect. And for many people, this question is settled because, as Abby said, astronomers now know for certain there is a lot of real estate out there. There could be, I don't know, five billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. But we don't know whether that's a big number in this context. those probabilities I mentioned are completely unknown.

Take abiogenesis, the creation of life from non-life. Some biologists believe abiogenesis might be a vanishingly rare event. Even more uncertain is the path from unicellular life to a space-faring civilization. He's another big number. Perhaps 5 billion different species have lived on Earth, but only one can contemplate the question, are we alone? There's nothing inevitable about the emergence of a species that's curious about the cosmos. Crows, octopuses, dolphins, they're remarkably intelligent creatures.

But if humans go extinct, crows are not going to go on to build a radio telescope. Why would they? I would much prefer emotionally to look out there and find intelligent life, and it's entirely possible we will. And I think the question is so important, we should throw much more resource into looking and to think of new ways of looking. Looking and not finding is not the same as not looking. And given what we know about a biogenesis and of the contingency of evolution, I don't think we should be surprised if we look out and see a silent universe.

Thank you, Stephen. Well, now an opportunity for both of you to react to what you've just heard from each other. So, Avi, I'm going to put another couple of minutes on the clock and turn the program back over to you. I think if we look at human history, that in fact there were many instances where we thought that we are unique and special and privileged.

It started with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who argued that we are at the center of the universe. And that was flattering to our ego, and people believed him for a thousand years, until Copernicus and Galileo realized that the earth moves around the sun. And you see this pattern repeating again and again, where humans prefer to think that they are special and unique and important and privileged, including Fermi's paradox, and Rico Fermi argued,

where is everybody? And of course, that is very presumptuous. It assumes that we are sufficiently interesting for someone to care about us. I think that we are insignificant, that there were so many copies of things like us in the past that nobody really cares about it. We are just like ants on a sidewalk. There are many of them, and when you walk down the street, you don't pay attention to each and every ant. But the one thing to keep in mind is many of the civilizations that existed in the past

may not be around anymore. They may be dead. And so the best way for us to search for them is not through Drake's equation looking for radio signals, because that requires them to be around alive. The best approach is space archaeology, searching for relics that they left behind. And we have not done that as of yet. Thank you, Avi.

Let's go back to you, Stephen, your chance to react to Avi's opening statement or what you've just heard now? Astronomers have made incredible advances. But it's not just about astronomers and physicists. Biologists have a take on this question, too. And the exact same question was being debated more than half a century ago. Back then, astronomers were convinced contact was imminent,

but some of the greatest biologists and evolutionary thinkers of the 20th century, Ernst Mayer, George Gaylord Simpson, Jack Monod, they argued that any species here on Earth is the result of a chance, quirky process of terrestrial evolution. That cognition isn't an end goal or a goal at all, it just is. And if we don't find high intelligence amongst creatures with whom we have shared billions of years of evolution, why should we expect to find it among creatures with whom we share nothing but abiotic chemistry? I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, and I would like to be convinced otherwise.

And if there are civilizations out there, or if they were there, they would have been much more advanced than I was. I quite agree with Avi. and I think they could disturb the universe in a way that would be visible and convincing. But 50, 60 years on from those earlier debates, we're still having the same debate. We haven't made contact. We haven't seen any of these signs of them out there. And I think the arguments of Mayer and Simpson and Menard, they're compelling. Thanks, Stephen.

Let me join the debate now and try to channel some of our kind of listeners' questions as they refer. reflect on your opening statements of what you've both said in response to each other. And, Avi, let me come to you first on that point of if there are so many potentially life-bearing planets out there circling suns approximate to our own, then why don't we see some evidence of a extraterrestrial civilization? I mean, why would we suppose that their level of technology stopped at our level? Why couldn't their level of technology have gone well beyond to create, you know, structures in the universe that we would have observed over these decades now of scanning deep space for any sign, any scintilla of representation of the phenomena

of an intelligent life. Well, there are two simple reasons for what you describe. One is that civilizations may be short-lived, and I discussed it in my latest book, extraterrestrial. And as a result, you have a short window of opportunity to communicate with them. Technological civilizations develop the means for their own distraction, as we know from our own experience, we are changing the climate on Earth. And if they live only for a few centuries, that's a small fraction of the age of the galaxy. And so you have a selection here that you cannot really listen to them conversing with each other. But a more appropriate approach in that

case would be to look for relics that they left behind, something like Voyager 1, Voyager 2, New Horizons that we launched into space. And the main reason that we haven't found clear signals of that, and for example, of industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planets around other stars and so forth is because we are not searching. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mainstream in astronomy right now is allocating a thousand times less federal funds took such a search as compared to the search for dark matter. And frankly, what impact will dark matter have on our daily life? Nothing. And the public is extremely interested in this subject. So how dare the scientific community shove this subject to the sidelines,

ridicule anyone that discusses that opportunity for us to learn about our environment, figure out whether we are the smartest kid on the block? I think that is completely inappropriate. While at the same time, there are large communities of particle physicists working on string theory, extra dimensions, the multiverse, ideas that have no test, no experimental evidence in their favor, and they are still regarded as part of the mainstream. Something in the academic culture right now is not right. And my point is, if we don't invest a billion dollar level of federal funds in the search for technological signatures, we might not have.

find them. They might be subtle. My point is, without searching, you know, it's just like stepping on the grass and saying it doesn't grow. Thank you, Abby. So, Stephen, I want to hear a bit more from you on why the universe just seems so demonstrably empty. And maybe build on some of Avi's ideas here that possibly civilizations that are at our stage or can communicate electromagnically, therefore, you know, sending signals out into the universe, exist only for brief periods of time and that they're exceedingly difficult to detect unless, you know, massive resources are put behind that effort. So first of all, I'd just like to say, I agree with Avi's statement there that we should be

searching and we should be trying different things. I think we have to avoid that idea of the alienation. of the gaps or the equivalent of the God of the Gaps approach. If there's something we can't explain, we say it's aliens, I think we shouldn't do that. But equally, we mustn't take the opposite approach, which is to say there cannot be aliens and everything that we ever observe, we have to take a naturalistic explanation for because we will never make progress. So I absolutely agree with that. And we need to steer that middle course. So before we go on to talking about civilizations, if I can just briefly talk about that idea of abiogenesis.

So life now has two underpinnings, there's DNA which stores genetic information and proteins which allows life to do things. But that's an incredibly complicated setup. And the best idea about how life started is that it came from something simpler, RNA, because RNA can store information and it can act as a catalyst. It can do both jobs. And so you start with RNA and it evolves into something more efficient, DNA and proteins. So now the question is how did RNA begin? RNA is just a chain of molecules called nucleotides, which would have been available in the early Earth's chemistry.

And experiments have shown that given enough time in the right conditions, nucleotides can randomly organise one by one into RNA. But, and it's a huge but, the RNA, produced in that way is always just a tiny strand. The strands are nowhere near long enough to be able to replicate. And in fact, there are not enough planets in the observable universe to allow the random creation of a long strand of RNA. Professor Tomonori Tatani from the Department of Astronomy looked at how life's building block could spontaneously form in the universe, given the volume of matter in the observable universe, the requirement of 40 to 100 nucleotides could not have been possible to fulfill. So what's the answer?

So in the past few months, Tumanoori Tatarini published a possible explanation, and he pointed out that we believe the observable universe is just a small part of the physical universe generated by inflation. There aren't enough planets in the observable universe for this random process to create RNA, but there would be enough planets in the wider physical universe. So Tatarie's idea is that life can come into being entirely randomly, there's no meaning to it. It's entirely random process and perhaps in countless places in the physical universe. So there's nothing special about Earth or about abiogenesis or about us, but within the observable universe, it would be incredibly unlikely for it to be a separate abiogenesis event. In practical terms, we'd be alone.

Now, we can falsify that idea. Maybe abiogenesis is somehow really easy, in which case we could search for separate abiogenesis events here on Earth. The evidence could still be around. Or we might find evidence of a separate abiogenesis event on Mars. We'd have to rule out panspermia. Or maybe we could find evidence on a subsurface ocean of one of the outer moons or a biosignature on a distant exoplanet. There's lots of things we can do to disprove this idea. But before we even get to this idea of civilizations, I think we have to try and rule out the idea that A biogenesis, it's just a chance, meaningless, random events that sometimes happens. Because if it is, then for all practical purposes, we're alone.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. If you're enjoying our one-on-one debates, please consider checking out our new Monk members-only podcast. It's a half-hour program that airs each Friday on our podcast feed and website. It provides you with a half-hour masterclass in current events. We dig into the big issues and ideas, changing our world, hopefully providing you with some original analysis and insights. You can access the podcast and program for free by becoming a monk member, which is also free.

And do all of that on our website, www.munkdebates.com. Again, that URL is monk with a k and debates with an S at the end.com. Hey, thanks for listening. Let's get back to our program. Avi, I want to come back to you on this thing of what we can observe and maybe what we can draw from the conclusions of those observations. And, you know, one of the big events of the last few years was the transiting of our solar system by Omoa, which was, in effect, the first, we believe, interstellar object that we've observed moving through our solar system.

There was a lot of debate around what that object was, what it could represent. You were part of that at the time. It seemed that the scientific community came down. pretty heavily on a consensus that it was simply some form of interstellar debris moving across our solar system. What did you infer from Omoa and maybe what did Omoa Moa say about the debate itself about the existence of alien life in terms of how the scientific community approached it? Well, you have to understand that science should be driven by evidence. And just like basketball players say, keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience. And in your statement, you were referring to the audience, not to the ball.

The ball here is the evidence, which is anomalous. There are anomalies about this object that make it nothing like we have seen before. Al-Muamua, the first known interstellar object to travel through our solar system sped up unexpectedly while passing through our corner of the universe last year, scientists say that the changes in speed were caused by jets of gaseous material and consistent with the behavior of a comet. So we need to explain those anomalies. They were derived from direct observations with telescopes using data.

So we have to explain this data. You cannot just say, oh, it must be rocks, like most people say business as usual. So there is a small fraction of the scientific community that attempted to explain the anomalies in terms of a natural origin. I argue that all of these attempts have major flows, and therefore we should contemplate the possibility of an artificial origin. But if you look at these other explanations, one by one, you can tell that they invoke something that we have never seen before, all of them. So the serious scientists, the ones that follow the scientific process,

invoke something that we have never seen before. Like, for example, a hydrogen, an iceberg, a chunk of frozen hydrogen the size of a football field that we've never seen before. And then when it evaporates, we can't see the cometary tale like we haven't seen around Omoa-Mua. The problem with that explanation is I wrote a scientific paper about it. Such a chunk of frozen hydrogen would get evaporated very quickly by absorbing starlight.

So it's not a viable explanation. And the authors of that paper agree. then there was another suggestion that maybe it's a fragment of a bigger object that was disrupted when it passed close to a star. Most objects would be not passing close to a star and therefore you would not find them as the first object. But also you will get elongated pieces, cigar shape, whereas Oumuamua was most likely at the 90% level pancake shape, flat, very unusual for an object. Then there was this suggestion. Maybe it's a nitrogen iceberg. Again, you wouldn't see the cometary tale,

and it's a chunk of frozen nitrogen, pure nitrogen, because you can't have any carbon-based molecules. The Space Telescope put very tight limits on those around Omuamua. The authors say, aha, there is frozen nitrogen on Pluto. So maybe you have thousands of Pluto's per star and you chip off the surfaces of these Pluto's and you make objects like Omuamua,

and you can't see the nitrogen and that's it. And everyone cheers. Yeah, we found it. It's nitrogen. Okay. Well, in a couple of hours, I'm about to submit a paper showing that the amount of mass you need to make a sufficiently abundant population of objects like Omuamua would be more than the mass budget in stars. You need more than the total mass we have in stars in the Milky Way galaxy making Pluto-like planets. And by the way, Pluto is made mostly of rock and water.

Nitrogen is just half a percent of the mass of Pluto. So you're chipping off a tiny bit. And then where are all the other rocks that we find in our solar system? Where are they? Why would the first object we see be of this rare occurrence of chipping off Pluto's? Anyway, this is just to show you these are the alternatives. It's not enough to just come together and shout very loudly. It is a natural object.

This is not the way science is done. You have to explain the facts. And my point is simple. We should leave the artificial origin on the table as a possible explanation, because in order to push such an object by reflection of sunlight, you really need a very thin object. And we've seen such an object. In September 2020, the same telescope, pan stars in Hawaii that discovered

the Muamua noticed another object, which is pushed away from the sun by reflecting sunlight and doesn't have a cometary tale. Turns out this was a rocket booster from a 1966 mission to the moon, a lunar lander mission. So here is an example for an artificial object that we found without knowing. And at first we didn't know that it's not a rock. But then we figured out it's artificial. The question then is who produced Omoa, Mu, Mua. Stephen, to build on this, you know, what can we observe that could help us figure out the answer to this question, are we alone or not? A lot of noise is being made about the release this spring by the U.S. Pentagon of a really detailed, supposedly far-ranging declassification of the U.S. military's observation of UFOs. The former National Intelligence Director is revealing a new government report.

on UFOs will be full of never before seen or heard Intel. Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public. We're talking about object that, frankly, engage in actions that are difficult to explain, that movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for. What is your view, Stephen, about UFOs and the extent to which the scientific community, an impartial observer should engage with that discussion as a meaningful data point to answer the question, you know, are we alone? So that's a difficult question, Rudyard. So if you ask me what would convince me, well, I guess if I was abducted and probed, there's always a lot of probing going on in these stories, then that would convince me. But I would have no evidence, no evidence-based to convince anyone else.

And that is a problem. I get emails every week from people who are convinced that aliens exist and they had been abducted or they've seen a UFO and therefore aliens exist. It's probably for them, their reality, but it is impossible, I think, for them to convince anyone else. At the other end of the extreme, we have the proverbial fine source landing on the White House lawn, in which case everyone is convinced. We have that middle ground to navigate, though. We have to be alive to the possibility that the observations we make could potentially have an explanation based in alien technology.

And there are lots of possible things we could go and look for. And I think that is right. Very often we're not looking for them. And we mustn't close our minds to that possibility. But equally, I think we have to be, we have to set a very high threshold of evidence before we accept it. Personally, I'm going to have a very high threshold before I'll accept this world change. It would be a world-changing discovery.

Back in 1967, Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish discovered a regularly repeating radio source. They called it LGM-1, short for Little Green Man 1, because they couldn't think of a natural explanation. But people soon explained it in natural terms. It's a rapidly rotating neutron star, a pulsar. I don't know of anyone now who claims that pulsars are radio emissions. alien civilizations. Why would you if you have a natural explanation for them? So I think whenever we make these discoveries, and in the next few years I suspect this will become a major problem for science in general, because we have incredible new observatories and telescopes coming online.

These are discovery machines. They will find things that we can't readily explain. So I think This is going to be a problem for science. How do we distinguish between the natural and the artificial? Because sometimes that might be difficult. Abby, what's your take on, I just think, what we see in popular culture, these videos from fighter planes that seem to show objects moving and behaving in ways that would defy our understanding of what at least our technology is capable of in terms of transiting the physical atmosphere of the earth.

What do you draw from that as a scientist? Should it be part of this discussion, or is it a kind of interesting known unknown that we sidebar until there is something definitive? Well, you see, I'm a scientist driven by evidence. So let me make first a comment about what Stephen said before. He was talking about the multiverse as an argument for why life may be rare and still exist. the multiverse has not been verified experimentally.

We have no way of knowing if there are things beyond the horizon of our present-day universe. And to argue that you can explain life by hypothesizing something beyond what we can see, to me it's sounding like being high on drugs, basically hallucinating and thinking about things that we cannot ever see and arguing that these things would explain things we can see.

Okay? And the point is that science should be guided by evidence. not by prejudice. And it's very easy to go and say, oh, look, there are some nonsensical claims made by people in the public, and as a result, we shouldn't discuss this subject because if I'm abducted, I would know that,

but these are ridiculous statements. These are not scientific statements by any means. And let's not discuss things that cannot be trusted, because we are here trying to discuss science and not ridicule the subject because some people are saying nonsense about it. Like, if you look back in ancient history, people said the human body has a soul. And as a result, you shouldn't engage in anatomy.

And Stephen would say, yes, maybe there is a soul. Let's not discuss it. It's ridiculous. But imagine if scientists were to shy away from the human body. Where would modern medicine be? My point is, even if there is a subject on which nonsense is being said, the duty of science is to clear it up by trying to get more evidence. And in the case, for example, of objects like Omuamua,

what the goal should be is to take a photograph of the next object that would look weird by sending a spacecraft that will come close to it and get a close-up photo. That's the way to find the truth, not by arguing about the multiverse. And by the way, speaking about life, I have a colleague at Harvard, Jack Shostak that got one Nobel Prize. He's trying to produce synthetic life in the laboratory. And he said that about a decade ago when he started in that project,

he thought that it's really difficult to make life on Earth. But now, after working on it, he thinks it's quite straightforward. You can take simple molecules, simple fatty acids, kind of thing you find in soap, shake it up in water. They spontaneously make bilayer membranes. Simple structures like this can grow and divide with just simple physical processes. It's not a matter of an intellectual argument.

He's doing it in his laboratory, and he makes a lot of progress. And so my point about your question on UFOs, unidentified flying objects, is that we should not rely on reports that were based on old equipment by people that provide eyewitness testimonies. What we should do is,

if we want to find out the truth, we should deploy state-of-the-art cameras and the audio sensors in the same locations, record what we see from the sky, and see if there is anything unusual. There is no reason for us to rely on reports that were classified for national security reasons. So, Stephen, before we start to move towards the conclusion of this debate, I want to give you a chance to kind of come back on some of Avie's statements there, and in particular a charge that he's making that you and others in the scientific community are kind of shutting down debate because you're assuming a priori that these claims or phenomena

are just outside of the realm of potential investigation or just seemingly so wild that they don't kind of deserve, you know, rigorous scientific inquiry. Well, I hope I mentioned at least twice in my statements that I think we have to be open to this possibility. I think we have to tread this middle way. But in terms of my personal threshold for the evidence, for something like UFOs, it is going to be high. So, yes, we could do controlled scientific experiments. I'm not sure how you would control them, but I guess we could set something up.

But there's something a little bit more mundane than that. The amount of video evidence that's happening in the world today with porch videos and security cameras and CCR everywhere, we're getting incredibly rare video evidence now for things like shooting stars that we would not have had 50 years ago. We don't see UFOs. So I don't see that there's much evidence there on that particular question. I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise. Understood. Before we got a closing statement, I want to just try a philosophical question out on you both and maybe start with you, Avi.

I mean, what would it mean for us, do you think, as a species, to discover that we are not alone? How do you think that would change, I mean, let's say what we've been talking about today, this whole field of kind of empiricism and, you know, the methods of scientific inquiry? What's at stake here? What would be disrupted if suddenly we had that threshold of proof that you and Stephen would accept that, yes, indeed, we are not alone? The impact on society would be tremendous because it will change our perspective about our place in the universe. It could affect religious and philosophical beliefs. It will raise additional questions about how to behave, you know, what are aspirations for space and so forth. we could in principle import technologies that we discover in the sky. You know, if we land on one of these relics

that we find, there's some piece of equipment and we import that technology to Earth. It may be millions of years in our future. We can learn a lot from it. If we find dead civilizations, relics for dead civilizations, we can figure out why they died and perhaps get our act together. It will be a lesson in history for our future, so to speak.

And given these implications, I regard it as one of the most important, perhaps the most important question that scientists can address. So here you have it, the most important question, being ridiculed by the mainstream of the scientific community, and being put together with all the non-scientific claims made about the same subject. So, Stephen, before we go to closing statement, similar question for you. What's at stake in terms of answering this question if we were able to answer it with some kind of empirical proof? Do you see it as really disruptive to our whole kind of theory of everything?

I think it could, yes, utterly transform the way we view ourselves in our relationship with the universe. I mean, think about, there's that famous quote, isn't there? Either we're alone or we're not. Either way, it's an incredible thought. So the universe could be such that it's just rocks apart from Earth. It could be a universe that is filled with unicellular life, but only Earth has advanced life. It could be a universe where there is a lot of advanced life, but only Earth is home to intelligence.

Or it could be a universe where intelligence is reasonably common. It pops into existence, perhaps, and dies. maybe it's a universe in which there are a few incredibly advanced, incredibly old civilizations. I think it is absolutely critical for us as a species to try and understand what universe we're living in. What is the biological importance of the universe, if any? So if we did find intelligence, potentially beings with whom we might be able to communicate, I think it would be an incredible discovery, absolutely. Amazing stuff.

Well, let's go to closing statement. So, Stephen, you're going to have the opportunity now to kind of sum up briefly the key points you want listeners to kind of keep in mind as they reflect on our motion today, which has been be it resolved. We are not alone in the universe. You've been arguing against the motion. Let's have your closing statement. So are we alone? The answer is we don't know, but it is a profound question. And because we have only one data point ourselves, it's almost impossible to avoid a host of biases when we contemplate it.

And think about the modernity bias, for example. So in the fourth century BC, Metrodorus of Kios said a single ear of wheat in a field would be as strange as a single world in infinite space. So his knowledge of the world constrained him to make that wheatfield analogy. Gauss, one of the greatest of all mathematicians, suggested we could signal aliens by planting forests in the Siberian tundra in a shape that illustrated Pythagoras' theorem. Even Gauss suffered from that modernity bias. In the 19th century, our cities were transformed by canalization, and then astronomers started seeing canals on Mars. When radio and TV became familiar,

SETI began to look for radio signals. A few years ago, we detected gravitational waves. Proposals for gravitational waves, SETI followed. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's inevitable. But there is a bias. People project the thoughts and concerns they are having now onto aliens. We think that's how they'll think. But if alien civilizations exist, their technology could be hundreds of millions of years more advanced than ours.

Imagine what our technology might be like if we survive for another thousand years or 10,000 or 100,000. We might not understand aliens, but we truly notice them, but we don't. We just don't see them. We must continue to look in as in mass. imaginative a way as possible. But if we conclude we are indeed alone, then that is a profound thought too. And it's an important one because it puts a huge responsibility on humanity. Our planet would be the only place where there is a flicker of consciousness of awareness. There'd be no help or guidance or roadmaps coming from the sky.

But there would be the potential for us to make a huge positive difference. to the universe. Thank you, Stephen. Let's go to Avi for the last word in this debate. Yeah, so indeed, as Stephen said, there are lots of possibilities. But there is a simple path forward, and that is to be guided by evidence.

There is this culture right now in academia where when there are lots of possibilities, you just debate them and show how smart you are by making one point or another or ridiculing some other point. But that's not the way to make progress. The way to make progress is to observe the universe. Science is a dialogue with nature.

It's not a monologue. We are not here talking on a podcast and deciding what nature should be. We should attend to the evidence. And that was my guiding principle when I worked on Oumuamua, when I wrote my book and when I think about the future. And so what we should realize is that scientific information is always good because it informs us about our environment. In this case, it tells us whether there are others in our neighborhood.

Now, it's not enough to say, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I have neighbors, or I'm very open to the idea that I have neighbors. What you need to do is search for them. And that is not an intellectual statement in a debate. That is a matter of funding the search at the level of a billion dollars. There is a certain amount of money that gets you there. The way to proceed is to collect data. to collect evidence, learn, let nature educate us without prejudice.

And my point is this subject suffers from a lot of prejudice. And a lot of conservatism. Extraordinary conservatism leads to extraordinary ignorance. Because you are not willing to search. I mean, you are willing to search, but you're not doing any search. And you are ridiculing people that are thinking about doing a search so that there will not be a search and so that you can continue to claim that there are lots of possibilities and I want to be in the middle ground.

The only way to go out of this middle ground is to find the evidence that says one thing or another. Just like as in the case of gravitational waves, a billion dollars resulted in a detection. Okay, so let's do it here. And as to why we don't get visited, you know, it reminds me of when I met my wife, she had a lot of friends that were waiting for Prince Charming on a white horse that will come along and make them a marriage proposal. And it never happened. So why do we think that we are sufficiently important

for someone to care about us, visit us, show themselves to us? We should go out and search. And it's possible that they, for example, very advanced civilizations close themselves in a cocoon because they don't want to degrade their quality of life by interacting with lesser civilizations. And in that case, you know, they still need to throw trash into space. And so we can be just like those.

investigative journalists that go to the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood to find out about their private lives. And one thing to keep in mind is most stars are emitting infrared radiation. Most of them are smaller than the sun. So it's possible that these creatures have infrared eyes. And interstellar travel agencies would never advertise the earth as a desired destination for a vacation because all of our vacation sites offer green grass illuminated by visible light. And that light hurts their eyes and they are used to dark red grass. So why would they ever

come to visit us? We should go out there and entice them. Fascinating debate, gentlemen. Thank you so much. We've talked not just about the existence, the origins potentially of extraterritional life, but I think we've had a really interesting debate about the nature and limits of science and how we should think about physical phenomena, what is scientific evidence, What isn't? Where do we push scientific inquiry and how? So thank you both for your considered opinions, your clear passion for this discussion. Really a terrific debate. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Stephen and Avi. They certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email at podcast at monk debates with an S. Here's listener feedback on a recent debate that was a bit of a departure for this podcast. Be it resolved, Plato, not Aristotle, was ancient Greece's greatest philosopher.

Ernie writes, great talk about Aristotle and Plato. Our world needs to bring back philosophy so that people can learn to think critically once again and have reasonable debates without engaging in, quote, cancel culture, close quotes. I thoroughly enjoyed the debates and the monk dialogues. Keep up the great work. Oh, thanks, Ernie. We're going to continue to explore with this podcast, different formats, different topics. Thanks again for your note.

Andrew, a regular correspondent, writes, I enjoyed your debate of Plato versus Aristotle and would love to see more, such as Be It Resolved, Huxley's Brave New World, Not R. Wells, 1984, got the modern world right. Wow, Andrew, I like that resolution. Let's explore that. And finally, here's some listener feedback on our regular Friday, Monk Members Podcasts. This comes from Rick saying these podcasts are just so incredibly interesting today's being COVID, Brazil, and Navalny. We love talking about the issues you discuss after the

half hour program. It's our Friday Night Entertainment. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you, Rick, for catching the Monk Members Only podcast. If you're already a Monk member, you can find our monk members pod in the benefits section of your membership profile, which you can access online, If you're not a monk member, you can join for free and listen to our monk members' pod simply by becoming a member at www.munkdebates with an s.com. The monk debates podcast is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Thank you, our community, our monk members, and monk listeners for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffin.

The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Richard Griffith, Christina Campbell, and Nicole Edwards are the producers. Api Rahaja is the associate producer. The Monk Debate podcast is mixed by Kieran Lynch. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.

Thank you.