Kind: captions
Language: en
we can actually figure out where are the
aliens out there in space time by being
clever about the few things we can see
one of which is our current date
and
so now that you have this living
cosmology we can tell the story that the
universe starts out empty and then at
some point things like us appear very
primitive and then some of those
stop being quiet and expand and then for
a few billion years they expand and then
they meet each other and then for the
next hundred billion years they commune
with each other
that is the usual models of cosmology
say that in roughly
150 billion years
the expansion of the universe will
happen so much that all you'll have left
is some galaxy clusters and they that
are sort of disconnected from each other
but before then they will interact
there will be this community of all the
grabby alien civilizations and each one
of them will hear about and even meet
thousands of others
and we might hope to join them someday
and become part of that community
the following is a conversation with
robin hansen an economist at george
mason university and one of the most
fascinating wild fearless and fun minds
i've ever gotten a chance to accompany
for a time in exploring questions of
human nature human civilization and
alien life out there in our impossibly
big universe he is the co-author of a
book titled the elephant in the brain
hidden motives in everyday life
the age of m
work love and life when robots rule the
earth and a fascinating recent paper i
recommend on quote grabby aliens
titled if loud aliens explain human
earliness
quiet aliens are also rare
this is the lex friedman podcast support
it please check out our sponsors in the
description and now dear friends here's
robin hansen
you are working on a book about quote
grabby aliens this is a technical term
like the big bang uh yeah so what are
grabby aliens grabby aliens expand
fast into the universe and they change
stuff
that's the key concept so if they were
out there
we would notice that's the key idea
so the question is where are the grabby
aliens so fermi's question is where are
the aliens and we could vary that in two
terms right where are the quiet hard to
see aliens and where are the big loud
grabby aliens
so it's actually hard to say where all
the quiet ones are right
there could be a lot of them out there
because they're not doing much they're
not making a big difference in the world
but the grabby aliens by definition are
the ones you would see
we don't know exactly what they do with
where they went but the idea is they're
in some sort of competitive world where
each part of them is trying to grab more
stuff
and do something with it
and you know almost surely whatever
is the most competitive thing to do with
all the stuff they grab
isn't to leave it
alone the way it
started right so we humans when we go
around the earth and use stuff we change
it we turn a forest into a farmland
turn a harbor into a city
so the idea is
aliens would do something with it and so
we're not exactly sure what it would
look like but it would look different so
somewhere in the sky we would see big
spheres
of different activity where things had
been changed because they had been there
expanding spheres right so as you expand
you aggressively interact and change the
environment so the word grabby versus
loud you're using them sometimes
synonymously sometimes not gravity to me
is a little bit more
aggressive
what does it mean to be loud what does
it mean to be grabby what's the
difference and loud in what way is it
visual is it sound is it some other
physical phenomena like gravitational
waves what are you using this kind of in
a broad philosophical sense so there's a
specific
thing that it means to be
loud in this universe of ours my
co-authors and i put together a paper
with a particular mathematical model
and so we use the term grabby aliens to
describe that more particular model and
the idea is it's a more particular model
of the general concept of loud so loud
would just be the general idea that they
would be really obvious
so grabby is the technical term is it in
the title of the paper it's in the body
the title is actually about loud and
quiet right so the idea is there's you
know you want to distinguish your
particular model of things from the
general category of things everybody
else might talk about so that's how we
distinguish the paper titles if loud
aliens explain human earliness quiet
aliens are also rare
if life on earth god that's such a good
abstract if life on earth had to achieve
and heart and hard steps to reach
humanity's level then the chance of this
event rose as time to the nth power so
we'll talk about power we'll talk about
linear increase
so what is the technical definition of
grabby how do you envision grabbiness
and why are
uh in contrast with humans why aren't
humans grabby so like where's that line
is it well definable what is grabbing
what is non-grabby
we have a mathematical model of the
distribution of advanced civilizations
i.e aliens in space and time
that model has three parameters
and we can set each one of those
parameters from data
and therefore we claim this is actually
what we know about where they are in
space time
so the key idea is they appear at some
point in space time
and then after some short delay they
start expanding
and they expand at some speed
and the speed is one of those parameters
that's one of the three and the other
two parameters are about
how they appear in time that is they
appear at random places
and they appear in time according to a
power law
and that power law has two parameters
and we can fit each of those parameters
to data and so then we can say
now we know
we know the distribution of advanced
civilizations in space and time so
we are right now a new civilization and
we have not yet started to expand but
plausibly we would start to do that
within say 10 million years of the
current moment
that's plenty of time and 10 million
years is a really short duration in the
history of the universe so
we are
at the moment a sort of random sample of
the kind of times at which an advanced
civilization might appear because we may
or may not become grabby but if we do
we'll do it soon and so our current date
is a sample and that gives us one of the
other parameters
the second parameter is the constant in
front of the power law and that's
arrived from our current date
so power law what is the n
in the
in the power law that's the what is the
complicated thing to explain right
advanced life appeared by going through
a sequence of hard steps
so starting with very simple life and
here we are at the end of this process
at pretty advanced life and so we had to
go through some intermediate steps such
as you know sexual selection
photosynthesis multicellular animals
and the idea is that each of those steps
was hard
evolution just took a long time
searching in a big space of
possibilities to find each of those
steps
and the challenge was to achieve all of
those steps by a deadline of when the
planets
would no longer host a simple life
and so earth has been really lucky
compared to all the other billions of
planets out there and that we managed to
achieve all these steps in the short
time of the
five billion years that earth
is can support simple life so not all
steps but a lot of them because we don't
know how many steps there are before you
start the expansion so these are all the
steps from the birth
of life to the initiation of major
expansion right so we're pretty sure
that it would happen really soon so that
it couldn't be
the same sort of a hard step as the last
ones in terms of taking a long time so
when we look at the history of earth we
look at the durations of the major
things that have happened
that
suggests that there's roughly say six
hard steps that happened say between 3
and 12
and that we have just achieved the last
one that would take a long time
which is um
well we don't know
but whatever it is we've just achieved
the last one are we talking about humans
or aliens here so let's talk about some
of these steps yeah so uh earth is
really special in some way we don't
exactly know
the level of specialness we don't really
know which steps were the hardest or not
because we just have a sample of one but
you're saying that there's three to 12
steps that we have to go through to get
to where we are that are hard steps hard
to find by something that
took
uh a long time and is unlikely there's a
lot of
there's a lot of ways to fail there's a
lot more ways to fail than to succeed
the first step would be sort of the very
simplest form of life of any sort
and then um we don't know whether that
first word is the first sort that we see
in the historical record or not
but then some other steps are say the
development of photosynthesis
the development of sexual reproduction
there's the development of eukaryote
cells which are certain kind of
complicated cell that seems to have only
appeared once
and then there's multicellularity that
is multiple cells coming together to
large organisms like us
and
in this statistical model of trying to
fit all these steps into a finite window
the model actually predicts that these
steps could be a varying difficulties
that is they could each take different
amounts of time on average but if you're
lucky enough that they all appear in a
very short time then the durations
between them will be roughly equal
and the time remaining left over in the
rest of the window will also be the same
length so
we at the moment have roughly a billion
years left on earth until
simple life like us would no longer be
possible
life appeared roughly 400 million years
after the very first time when life was
possible at the very beginning
so those two numbers right there give
you the rough estimate of six hard steps
just to build up an intuition here so
we're trying to create a simple
mathematical model
of how
life emerges and expands in the universe
and there's a section in this paper how
many hard steps question mark right
the two most plausibly diagnostic earth
duration seems to be the one remaining
after now before earth becomes
uninhabitable for complex life so you
estimate how long earth lasts
how many hard steps
there's windows
for doing different hard steps and you
can sort of
uh like cueing theory mathematically
estimate of
like
uh the uh solution or the passing of the
hard steps or the taking of the hard
steps sort of like coldly mathematical
look
if life
pre-expansionary life requires a number
of steps what is the probability of
taking those steps on an earth that
lasts a billion years or 2 billion years
or 5 billion years or 10 billion years
and you say
solving for e using the observed
durations of 1.1 and 0.4 then gives e
values of 3.9 and 12.5 range 5.7 to 26
suggesting a middle estimate of at least
six that's where you said six
hard steps right
just to get to where we are right we
started at the bottom now we're here and
that took six steps on average the key
point is
on average these things on any one
random planet would take you know
trillions or trillions of trill you know
of years just a really long time and so
we're really lucky that they all
happened really fast in a short time
before our window closed
and the chance of that happening
in that short window goes as that time
period to the power of the number of
steps and so that was where the power we
talked about before it came from and so
that means in the history of the
universe we should overall roughly
expect advanced life to appear as a
power law in time
so that very early on there was very
little chance of anything appearing and
then later on as things appear other
things are appearing somewhat closer to
them in time because they're all going
as this power law
what is the power law can we for people
who are not sure math inclined can you
describe what a power so
say the function x is linear and x
squared is quadratic so it's the power
of 2. if we make x to the 3 that's
cubic or the power of 3. and so x to the
6th is the power of 6. and so we'd say
life appears in the universe on a planet
like earth in that proportion to the
time that it's been
you know uh ready for life
to appear
and that
over the universe in general it'll
appear at roughly a power law like that
what is the exponent what is n
uh is it the number of hearts yes the
number of hard steps so that's so yeah
it's like if you're gambling
and you're doubling up every time this
is the probability you just keep winning
[Laughter]
uh so
it gets very unlikely very quickly and
so we are the result of this unlikely
chain of successes it's actually a lot
like cancer so the dominant model of
cancer in an organism like each of us is
that we have all these cells and in
order to become cancerous a single cell
has to go through a number of mutations
and these are very unlikely mutations
and so any one cell is very unlikely to
have any have all these mutations happen
by the time your life spans over
but
we have enough cells in our body that
the chance of any one cell producing
cancer by the end of your life is
actually pretty high more like 40
and so the chance of cancer appearing in
the linear lifetime also goes as power
law this power of the number of
mutations that's required for any one
cell in your body to become cancerous
this is the longer you live the likely
right you are to have cancer cells and
its power is also roughly six that is
the chance of you getting cancer is at
the roughly the power of six of the
time you've been since you were born it
is perhaps not lost
on people that you're
that you're comparing the power laws of
the survival or the arrival of the human
species to cancerous cells
the same mathematical model but of
course we might have a different value
assumption about the two outcomes but of
course from the point of view of cancer
somewhere similar uh from the point of
view of cancer it's a win-win well we
both get to
we both get to thrive i suppose
um
it is interesting to take the point of
view of all kinds of life forms on earth
of viruses of bacteria they have a very
different view
and you know it's like the instagram
channel um nature is metal
right the ethic under which nature
operates doesn't often
coincide correlate with human
morals
it seems cold and
um machine like in the selection process
that it performs
i am an analyst i'm a scholar an
intellectual and i feel i should
carefully distinguish predicting what's
likely to happen
and then evaluating or judging what i
think would be better to happen
and it's a little dangerous to mix those
up too closely because then we can
have wishful thinking and so i try
typically to just analyze what seems
likely to happen regardless of whether i
like it or whether we do anything about
it and then once you see a rough picture
of what's likely to happen if we do
nothing
then we can ask well what might we
prefer and ask where could the levers be
to move it at least a little toward what
we might prefer
that's a you know useful but often doing
that just analysis of what's likely to
happen if we do nothing
offends many people
they find that you know dehumanizing or
cold or metal as you say
uh to just say well this is what's
likely to happen and you know it's not
your favorite sorry but
um maybe we can do something but maybe
we can't do that much
this is very interesting
that the the cold analysis
whether it's geopolitics whether it's
medicine
whether it's economics
sometimes misses some
very specific aspect of
um
human
condition
like for example
when you look at a doctor
and the act of a doctor helping a single
patient
if you do the analysis of that doctor's
time
and cost of the medicine or the surgery
or the transportation of the patient
this is the paul farmer question
you know is it worth spending 10 20 30
000 on this one patient
when you look at all the people that are
suffering in the world that money can be
spent so much better
and yet
there's something about human nature
that wants to help the person in front
of you and that is actually the right
thing to do
despite the analysis
and sometimes when you do the analysis
you um there's something about the human
mind that allows you to not take that
leap that
irrational leap
uh to act in this way that the analysis
explains it away well it's like uh for
example uh the u.s government
you know the d.o.t department of
transportation puts a
value of i think like 9 million dollars
on a human life and the moment you put
that number on a human life you can
start thinking well okay i can start
making decisions about
this or that and with a sort of cold
economic perspective and then you might
lose
you might deviate from a deeper truth
of what it means to be human somehow you
have to dance because uh then if you put
too much weight on the anecdotal
evidence on these kinds of human
emotions
then you're going to lose
uh you can also
probably more likely deviate from truth
but there's something about that cold
analysis like i've been listening to a
lot of people coldly analyze
wars
warren yemen warren syria
uh israel palestine
war in ukraine and there's something
lost when you do a cold analysis of why
something happened when you talk about
energy
uh
talking about sort of conflict
competition over resources when you
talk about geopolitics sort of models of
geopolitics and why a certain war
happened you lose something about the
suffering that happens
i don't know it's an interesting thing
because you're both you're exceptionally
good at
uh models
in all domains
literally um but also there's a humanity
to you
uh so it's an interesting dance i don't
know if you can comment on that dance
sure
it's definitely true as you say
that for many people
if you are accurate in your judgment of
say for a medical patient right what's
the chance that this treatment might
help
and what's the cost
and compare those to each other and you
might say
this looks like a lot of cost for a
small medical gain
and at that point
knowing that fact that might take the
wing
you know the air out of your sails
you might
not be willing to do the thing that
maybe you feel is right anyway which is
still to pay for it
um
and then somebody knowing that might
want to keep that news from you not tell
you about the low chance of success or
the high cost in order to save you this
tension this this awkward moment where
you might
fail to do what they and you think is
right
but i think the higher calling the the
higher standard to hold you to which
many people can be held to is to say
i will look at things accurately i will
know the truth and then i will also
do the right thing with it
i will be at peace with my judgment
about what the right thing is in terms
of the truth i don't need to be lied to
in order to figure out what the right
thing to do is and i think if you do
think you need to be lied to in order to
figure out what the right thing to do is
you're at a great disadvantage because
then people will be lying to you will be
lying to yourself and you won't be as
effective yes and achieving whatever
good you are trying to achieve but
getting the data getting the facts is
step one
now that's the final step absolutely so
it's uh i would say
having a good model getting the good
data
is step one and it's a burden
because you can't just use that data
to um
arrive at sort of the easy convenient
thing you have to really deeply think
about what is the right thing
you can't use the so the the dark aspect
of data
uh of models is you can
use it to excuse away actions
that are unethical you can use data to
basically excuse away anything but not
looking at data
lets you expose yourself to pretend and
think that you're doing good when you're
not
exactly
uh but it is a burden it doesn't excuse
you from
still being human and deeply thinking
about what is right
that very kind of gray area that very
subjective area
um
that's part of the human condition
but let us return for a time to aliens
so you started to define sort of the
the model the parameters
of uh grabbiness
right or the uh
as we approach crabbiness so what
happens so again when there's three
parameters yes
there's the speed at which they expand
there's the rate at which they appear in
time and that rate has a constant and a
power so we've talked about the history
of life on earth suggest that power is
around 6 but maybe 3 to 12.
we can say that constant comes from our
current date sort of sets the overall
rate
and the speed which is the last
parameter comes from the fact that we
look in the sky we don't see them so the
model predicts very strongly that if
they were expanding slowly say one
percent of the speed of light
our sky would be full of vast spheres
that were full of activity that is
at a random time when a civilization is
first appearing if it looks out into its
sky it would see many other grabby alien
civilizations in the sky and they would
be much bigger than the full moon they'd
be huge spheres in the sky and they
would be visibly different we don't see
them can we pause for a second okay
there's a bunch of hard steps that earth
had to pass to arrive at this place we
are currently which we're starting to
launch rockets out into space we're kind
of starting to expand a bit right very
slowly okay
but this is like the birth
if you look at the entirety of the
history of earth
we're now at this precipice of like
expansion we could we might not choose
to but if we do we will do it in the
next 10 million years
10 million wow
time flies when you're having fun
uh i was thinking a short time on the on
the cosmological scale so that is it
might be only a thousand but the point
is if it's even if it's up to 10 million
that hardly makes any difference to the
model so i might as well give you 10
million this this
this makes me feel i was i was so
stressed about planning what i'm going
to do today and now you've got plenty of
time plenty of time
uh i just need to be generating some
offspring quickly here okay um
so and there's this moment
[Laughter]
this 10 million
year gap uh or window when we start
expanding and you're saying okay so this
is an interesting moment where there's a
bunch of other alien civilizations that
might at some history of the universe
arrived at this moment were here they
passed all the hard steps there's a
there's a model for how
likely it is that that happens and then
they start expanding and you think of an
expansion it's almost like a a sphere
right that's when you say speed we're
talking about the speed of the radius
growth exactly like the surface how fast
the surface
okay and so you're saying that there is
some speed for that expansion average
speed and then we can play with that
parameter
and
if that speed is super slow then maybe
that explains
why we haven't seen anything if it's
super fast well it gets the slow would
create the puzzle it's low predicts we
would see them but we don't see them
okay so the way to explain that is that
they're fast so the idea is
if they're moving really fast then we
don't see them until they're almost here
and okay this is counterintuitive all
right hold on a second so i think this
works best when i say a bunch of dumb
things okay um
and then uh
you uh elucidate
the full complexity and the beauty of
the dumbness okay
so there's these spheres out there in
the universe
that are made visible because they're
sort of uh using a lot of energy so
they're generating a lot of light
they're changing things they're changing
things and change would be visible
long way off yes they would take apart
stars rearrange them restructure
galaxies they would just be kind of big
huge stuff
okay if they're expanding slowly
we would see a lot of them
because the universe is old as relative
is old enough to where we would see that
we're assuming we're just typical you
know maybe at the 50th percentile of
them so like half of them have appeared
so far the other half will still appear
later
and um the the math of our best estimate
is that they appear roughly once per
million galaxies
and we would meet them in roughly a
billion years
if uh we expanded out to meet them so
we're looking at a grabby aliens model
3d sim right
what's what's this that's the actual
name of the video what uh
by the time we get to 13.8 billion years
the fun begins
okay so this is this is a um right we're
watching a
three-dimensional sphere rotating i
presume that's the universe and then
right crabby aliens are expanding and
filling that universe exactly with all
kinds of uh and then pretty soon it's
all full it's full so that's how
the grabby aliens come
in contact first of all with other
aliens
and then um with us humans the following
is a simulation of the grabby aliens
model of alien civilizations
civilizations are born that expand
outwards at constant speed a spherical
region of space is shown by the time we
get to 13.8 billion years
this sphere will be about 3 000 times as
wide as the distance from the milky way
to andromeda
okay this is fun it's huge okay it's
huge um all right
so
why don't we see
uh we're one little tiny tiny tiny tiny
dot in that giant giant sphere right why
don't we
see any of the grabby aliens
it depends on how fast they expand
so you could see that if they expanded
at the speed of light you wouldn't see
them until they were here
uh so like out there if somebody is
destroying the universe with a
vacuum decay there's this there's this
you know doomsday scenario where
somebody somewhere could change the
vacuum of the universe and that would
expand at the speed of light and
basically destroy everything it hit but
you'd never see that until i got here
because it's expanding at the speed of
light
if you're spinning really slow then you
see it from a long way off so the fact
we don't see anything in the sky tells
us they're expanding fast say over a
third the speed of light and that's
really really fast
but that's what you have to believe if
you look out and you don't see anything
now you might say well how maybe i just
don't want to believe this whole model
why should i believe this whole model at
all and
our best evidence why you should believe
this model is our early date
we are right now
almost 14 million years into the
universe
on a
planet around a star that's roughly 5
billion years old
but the average star out there will last
roughly five trillion years
that is
a thousand times longer
and remember that power law it says that
the chance of advanced life appearing on
a planet goes as the power of sixth of
the time so if a planet lasts a thousand
times longer
then the chance of it appearing on that
planet if everything would stay empty at
least is a thousand to the sixth power
or ten to the eighteen
so
enormous
overwhelming chance that if the universe
would just stay sit and empty and
waiting for advanced life to appear when
it would appear would be
way at the end of all these
planet lifetimes that is the long
planets near the end of the lifetime
trillions of years into the future
so but we're really early compared to
that and our explanation is at the
moment as you saw in the video the
universe is filling up in roughly a
billion years it'll all be full and at
that point it's too late for advanced
life to show up so you had to show up
now before that deadline okay can we
break that apart a little bit okay
or linger on some of the things you said
so with the power law the things we've
done on earth
the model you have says that it's very
unlikely like we're lucky sobs
is that is that mathematically correct
to say
we we're crazy early that is when early
means like in the history of the
universe in the history okay so
given this model
how do we make sense of that for super
can we just be the lucky ones
well 10 to the 18 lucky you know how
lucky do you feel
uh so you know
that's pretty lucky right you know 10 to
18 is a billion billion
so then if you were just being honest
and humble
that that means
what does that mean it means one of the
assumptions that calculated this crazy
early must be wrong that's what it means
so the key assumption we suggest is that
the universe would stay empty
so
most life would appear like a thousand
times longer later than now yeah if
everything would stay empty waiting for
it to appear what was so what is
non-empty so the gravity aliens are
filling the universe right now roughly
at the moment they've filled half of the
universe and they've changed it and when
they fill everything it's too late for
stuff like us to appear but wait hold on
a second
did anyone help us get lucky
if it's so difficult what how do
like so it's like cancer right
there's all these cells each of which
randomly does or doesn't get cancer and
eventually some cell gets cancer and you
know we were one of those
but hold on a second
okay
but we got it early
early compared to the prediction with an
assumption that's wrong that's so that's
how we do a lot of you know theoretical
analysis you have a model that makes a
prediction that's wrong then that helps
you reject that model okay let's try to
understand exactly where the wrong is so
the assumption is that the universe
is empty stays empty stays empty and and
waits until this advanced life appears
in trillions of years
that is if the universe would just stay
empty if there was just
you know nobody else out there yeah then
when you should expect advanced life to
appear if you're the only one in the
universe when should you expect to
appear you should expect to appear
trillions of years in the future
i see right right so this is a very sort
of nuanced mathematical
assumption i don't think we can intuit
it
cleanly with words
uh but
if you assume that you're just wait the
universe stays empty and you're waiting
for
one
life
uh civilization to pop up
then it's gonna it should happen very
late much later than now and
if you look at earth
uh the way things happen on earth it
happened much much much much much
earlier than it was supposed to
according to this model if you take the
initial assumption therefore you can say
well the initial assumption of the
universe staying empty is very unlikely
right
and the other the other alternative
theory is the universe is filling up and
will fill up soon
and so we are typical for the origin
date of things that can appear before
the deadline before that okay it's
filling up so why don't we see anything
if it's filling up because they're
expanding really fast
close to the speed of light exactly so
we will only see it when it's here
almost here okay
uh what are the ways in which we might
see a quickly expanding
this is both exciting and terrifying it
is terrifying it's like watching a truck
like driving at you at 100 miles an hour
and uh right so we would see spheres in
the sky at least one sphere in the sky
growing very rapidly
and
like very rapidly right
yes very rapidly
so we're not so there's there's you know
different def because we were just
talking about 10 million years
this would be
you might see it 10 million years in
advance coming i mean you still might
have a long warning or again
the universe is 14 billion years old the
typical origin times of these things are
spread over several billion years so the
chance of one originating at a you know
very close to you in time is very low so
it still might take millions of years
from the time you see it from the time
it gets here
yeah a million years to be terrified
there's a bad spirit coming at you but
but coming at you very fast so if
they're traveling close to the speed of
light but they're coming from a long way
away so remember
the rate at which they appear is one per
million galaxies
right
so they're they're roughly 100 galaxies
away
i see so the delta between the speed of
light
and their actual travel speed is very
important
right so even if they're going at say
half the speed of light we'll have a
long time
yeah but what if they're traveling
exactly at a speed of light then we see
them like then we wouldn't have much
warning but that's less likely well we
can't exclude it
and they could also be somehow traveling
faster than the speed of light
or i think we can exclude because if
they could go faster than speed of light
then they would just already be
everywhere
so in a universe where you can travel
faster than the speed of light you can
go backwards in space-time so any time
you appeared anywhere in space time you
could just fill up everything yeah and
so anybody in the future whoever
appeared they would have been here by
now can you exclude the possibility that
those kinds of aliens aren't already
here
uh
well you have we should have a different
discussion of that right okay so let's
actually lead that let's leave that
discussion aside just to linger and
understand the grabby alien expansion
which is beautiful and fascinating
okay so there's these giant expanding
spheres spheres of alien civilizations
now
um
when those fears spheres collide
mathematically
it was it's very likely that we're not
the first
collision of grabby
of alien civilizations i suppose there's
one way to say it so there's like the
first time the spheres touch each other
we recognize each other right they meet
um they they recognize each other first
before they meet
um they see each other coming they see
each other coming and then so there's a
bunch of them there's a combinatorial
thing where they start seeing each other
coming and then there's a third neighbor
it's like what the hell and then there's
a fourth one okay so what does that you
think look like um what lessons
from human nature that's the only data
we
have what can you draw the story of the
history of the universe here is what i
would call a living cosmology so
what i'm excited about in part by this
model is that it lets us tell a story of
cosmology where there are actors who
have agendas
so most ancient peoples they had
cosmologies stories they told about
where the universe came from and where
it's going and what's happening out
there and their stories they like to
have agents and actors gods or something
out there doing things and lately our
favorite cosmology is dead kind of
boring
you know we're the only activity we know
about or see and everything else just
looks dead and empty but
this is now telling us no that's not
quite right at the moment the universe
is filling up and in a few billion years
it'll be all full
and from then on the history of the
universe will be the universe full of
aliens
yeah so that's a it's a really good
reminder a really good way to think
about cosmology is
we're surrounded by vast darkness and we
don't know what's going on in that
darkness
until the light
from whatever generate lights arrives
here
so we kind of yeah we look up at the sky
okay they're stars oh they're pretty but
you don't think about
the giant expanding spheres of aliens
right
see them but now you're approaching
looking at the clock if you're clever
the clock tells you so i like the
analogy with the ancient greeks so yes
you might think that an ancient greek
you know staring at the universe
couldn't possibly tell how far away the
sun was or how far away the moon is or
how big the earth is
that all you can see is just big things
in the sky you can't tell but they were
clever enough actually to be able to
figure out the size of the earth and the
distance to the moon and the sun and the
size of the moon
and sun that is they could figure those
things out actually by being clever
enough and so similarly we can actually
figure out where are the aliens out
there in space time by being clever
about the few things we can see one of
which is our current date
and
so now that you have this living
cosmology we can tell the story that the
universe starts out empty and then at
some point things like us appear very
primitive and then some of those
just stop being quiet and expand and
then for a few billion years they expand
and then they meet each other and then
for the next 100 billion years they
commune with each other
that is the usual models of cosmology
say that in roughly 100 150 billion
years
the expansion of the universe will
happen so much that all you'll have left
is some galaxy clusters and they that
are sort of disconnected from each other
but before then for the next 100 million
years 100 billion years excuse me
they will interact there will be this
community of all the grabby alien
civilizations and each one of them will
hear about and even meet thousands of
others
and we might hope to join them someday
and become part of that community that's
an interesting thing to aspire to yes
interesting is an interesting word
is the universe of alien civilizations
defined by war
as much or more
than uh
war defined human history
i would say it's defined by competition
and then the question is how much
competition
implies war
so
up until recently competition defined
life on earth
yes
competition between species and
organisms and among humans competitions
among individuals and communities and
that competition often took the form of
war in the last 10 000 years
many people now
are hoping or even expecting to sort of
suppress and end competition in human
affairs
they regulate business competition they
prevent military competition
and
that's a future i think a lot of people
will like
to continue and strengthen people will
like to have something close to world
government or world governance or at
least a world community and they will
like to suppress war and many forms of
business and personal competition over
the coming centuries
and
they may like that so much that they
prevent interstellar colonization which
would become the end of that era that is
interstellar colonization would just
return
severe competition to human or our
descendant affairs and many
civilizations may prefer that and ours
may prefer that but if they choose to
allow interstellar colonization they
will have chosen to allow competition to
return with great force that is there's
really not much of a way to centrally
govern a rapidly expanding sphere of
civilization and so i think the one of
the most
you know solid things we can predict
about gravians is they have accepted
competition
and they have internal competition and
therefore
they have the potential for competition
when they meet each other at the borders
but whether that's military competition
is more of an open question so military
meaning destro physically destructive
right
so there's a lot to say there so one
idea that you kind of proposed
is
progress might be maximized through
competition
through some kind of healthy competition
some definition of healthy so like
constructive not destructive competition
so like we would likely
grabby alien civilizations would be
likely defined by competition because
they can expand faster because they
competition allows
innovation and sort of the battle of
ideas the way i would take the logic is
to say you know competition just happens
if you can't coordinate to stop it
and you probably can't coordinate to
stop it in an expanding interstellar
wave so competition is a
fundamental force
in the universe it has been so far and
it
would be within an expanding grabby
alien civilization but we today have the
chance many people think and hope of
greatly controlling and limiting
competition within our civilization for
a while
and that's an interesting choice
whether to allow competition to reap
to sort of regain its full force
or whether to suppress and manage it
well one of the open questions
that has been raised
in the past
less than 100 years
is whether our desire
to lessen the destructive nature of
competition
or the destructive kind of competition
will be outpaced by the destructive
power of our weapons
sort of uh
if
nuclear weapons and weapons of that kind
become more destructive than our desire
for peace
then it all it takes is one at
the party
to ruin the party it takes one
to make a delay but not that much of a
delay on the cosmological scales we're
talking about so you could even party on
even a vast nuclear war if it happened
here right now on earth
it would not kill all humans
yes
it certainly wouldn't kill all life
and so human civilization would return
within a hundred thousand years
so all
the history of atrocities
and
um if you look at uh
uh the
black plague right
which is
not human cause atrocities or whatever
there are a lot of military
atrocities in history absolutely in the
20th century those are
um
those challenges
to think about human nature but the
cosmic scale of time and space
they do not stop the human spirit
essentially the humanity goes on
through all the atrocities it goes on
like most likely so even a nuclear war
isn't enough to destroy us
or to stop our potential from expanding
but
we could institute a
regime of global governance that limited
competition including military and
business competition of sorts and that
could prevent our expansion
of course
to play devil's advocate
global
governance is centralized power
power corrupts
and absolute power corrupts absolutely
one of the aspects of competition that's
been very productive
is
not letting
any one person any one country any one
center of power become
absolutely powerful
because that's another lesson is it
seems to corrupt there's something about
ego in the human mind that seems to be
corrupted by power so when you say
global governance
that
terrifies me
more than the possibility of war because
it's uh i think that people will be less
terrified than you are right now and let
me try to
paint the picture from their point of
view this isn't my point of view but i
think it's going to be a widely shared
point of view yes this is two devil's
advocates arguing two devils okay
so
for the last half century and into the
continuing future we actually have had
a strong
elite global community that shares a lot
of values and beliefs and has
created a lot of convergence in global
policy
so if you look at electromagnetic
spectrum or
medical experiments or pandemic policy
or
nuclear power energy or regulating
airplanes or just in a wide range of
area in fact the world
has very similar regulations and rules
everywhere and it's not a coincidence
because they are part of a world
community where people get together at
places like davos et cetera where world
elites
want to be respected by other world
elites and they have a you know
convergence of opinion and that produces
something like global governance but
without a global center this is sort of
what human mobs or communities have done
for a long time that is humans can
coordinate together on shared behavior
without a center by having gossip and
reputation within a community of elites
and that is what we have been doing and
are likely to do a lot more of so for
example
you know one of the things that's
happening say with the war in ukraine is
that this world community of elites has
decided that they disapprove of the
russian invasion and they are
coordinating to
pull resources together from all around
the world in order to oppose it and they
are proud of that
sharing that opinion and their and their
feel that they are morally justified in
their stance there and um
that's the kind of event that actually
brings world elite communities together
where they
they come together and they push a
particular policy and position that they
share and that they achieve successes
and
the same sort of passion animates global
elites with respect to say global
warming
or global poverty and other sorts of
things and they are in fact making
progress on those sorts of things
through
shared
global community of elites
and in some sense they are slowly
walking toward global governance slowly
strengthening various world institutions
of governance but cautiously carefully
watching out for the possibility of a
single power that might corrupt it
i think a lot of people over the coming
centuries will look at that history and
like it
it's uh interesting thought
and thank you for playing that devil's
advocate there
but i think
the elites too easily lose touch
of course of the morals
that
uh the best of human nature and power
corrupts sure but everything is their
view is the one that determines what
happens
their view may
still end up there even if you or i
might criticize it from that point of
view so from a perspective of minimizing
human suffering
elites
can use
topics of the war in ukraine
and climate change and all of those
things
to
sell an idea
to the world
and
with disregard to the amount of
suffering it causes their actual actions
so like you can tell all kinds of
narratives that's the way propaganda
works right hitler
uh really sold the idea that everything
germany is doing is either it's the
victim is defending itself against the
cruelty of the world and it's actually
trying to bring out
about a better world
so
every power center thinks they're doing
good
and so this is uh
this is the positive of competition of
not of having multiple power centers
this kind of gathering of elites
makes me very very very nervous
the dinners
the the meetings in the closed rooms
i don't know
i another
but remember we talked about separating
our cold analysis of what's likely or
possible from what we prefer and so
that's this isn't exactly enough time
for that we might say i would recommend
we don't go this route of a world strong
world governance and
uh because i would say it'll preclude
this possibility of becoming grabby
aliens of filling the next nearest
million galaxies for the next billion
years with vast amounts of
activity and interest and value
of life out there that's the thing we
would lose by deciding that we wouldn't
expand that we would stay here and keep
our comfortable
shared governance
so you wait you think that
global
governance
is
makes it more likely or less likely that
we expand out into the universe less
so okay this is the key this is the key
point
right so screw the elites
so right we want to exp wait do we want
to expand
so again i want to separate my neutral
analysis from my evaluation and say
first of all i have an analysis that
tells us this is a key choice that we
will face and that it's a key choice
other aliens have faced out there and it
could be that only one in 10 or 100
civilizations chooses to expand and the
rest of them stay quiet and that's how
it goes out there and we face that
choice too
and
it'll happen sometime in the next 10
million years maybe the next thousand
but the key thing to notice from our
point of view is that
uh even though you might like our global
governance you might like the fact that
we've come together we know we no longer
have massive wars and we no longer have
destructive competition
um and that we could continue that the
cost of continuing that would be to
prevent interstellar colonization that
is once you allow interstellar
colonization then you've lost control of
those colonies and whatever they change
into they could come back here and
compete with you back here as a result
of having lost control and i think if
people value that
global governance and the global
community and regulation and all the
things it can do enough they would then
want to prevent interstellar
colonization i want to have a
conversation with those people i believe
that both for
uh humanity for the good of humanity for
what i believe is good in humanity and
for expansion exploration
um innovation distributing the centers
of power is very beneficial so this
whole meeting of elites and i've met
i've gotten i've been very fortunate to
meet
uh quite a large number of elites
they make me nervous because
it's easy to lose touch of reality
i'm nervous about that in myself
to make sure that you never lose touch
um as you get sort of older
wiser
you know how you generally get like
disrespectful of kids kids these days
no the kids are okay but
here's a stronger case for their
position so i'm going to play the for
the for the elites yes well for the for
the
for the limiting of expansion and for
the regulation of of um behavior so just
okay can i link on that sure so you're
saying those two are connected
so we the human civilization and alien
civilizations come to a uh a crossroads
they have to decide do we want to expand
or not
and connected to that do we want to give
a lot of power to a central elite right
do we want to
uh
distribute the the power centers which
is naturally connected to the expansion
when you expand you distribute the power
if say over the next thousand years we
fill up the solar system right we go out
from earth and we colonize mars and we
change a lot of things
within a solar system still everything
is within reach that is if there's a
rebellious colony around neptune you can
throw rocks at it and smash it and then
teach them discipline okay
a they said that work for the business
central control over the solar system is
feasible
but once you let it escape the solar
system it's no longer feasible but if
you have a solar system that doesn't
have a central control may be broken
into a thousand different political
units in the solar system
then
any one part of that that allows
interstellar colonization and it happens
that is
interstellar colonization happens when
only one party chooses to do it and is
able to do it and that's what it is
therefore so we can just say in a world
of competition
if interstellar colonization is possible
it will happen and then competition will
continue and that will sort of ensure
the continuation of competition into the
indefinite future
that's and competition
we don't know but competition could take
violent forms okay many productive forms
and the case i was going to make is that
i think one of the things that most
scares people about competition is not
just that it creates holocausts and
death on massive scales is that it's
likely to
change who we are and what we value yes
so this is the other thing with power
as we grow
as human civilization grows becomes
multi-planetary
multi-solar system potentially
how does that change us do you think
i think the more you think about it the
more you realize it can cha