Speaker 1: I want you to try something for me mentally, I mean, okay,
put yourself in the middle of the Atacoma Desert in Chile,
high altitude, zero humidity, absolutely no light pollution. It is midnight.
Speaker 2: You look up and you see the core of the galaxy.
Speaker 1: You see that dense band of milk spilled across the sky,
thousands of stars visible to the naked eye. The sheer
scale of it just hits you in the chest. And
the feeling you get usually it's awe It's this sense
of peace, or maybe a comforting sort of insignificance. It
feels pristine.
Speaker 2: It feels natural, like a vast, untouched wilderness waiting to
be explored.
Speaker 1: Exactly. But here's why we are here today. You have
brought a stack of papers, academic papers, not sci fi
novels that suggests that feeling of pristine wilderness.
Speaker 2: Is a lie, or at the very least, a massive
statistical anomaly that we are misinterpreting, a deception, a really
dangerous one. When I look at that sky, based on
the data we're covering today, I don't see a wilderness.
I see a great or maybe a waiting room.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. Today we are stripping away the
optimism from the Fermi paradox.
Speaker 2: We usually do the Star Trek version of this conversation. Yeah,
you know the one.
Speaker 1: Oh, I know, the one.
Speaker 2: Whereas everybody maybe they're prime directive observers, maybe they're shy.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're just around the corner.
Speaker 2: Maybe they just haven't invented warp drive yet.
Speaker 1: We love those theories because they allow us to be
the protagonist. They center us. But the research we are
unpacking today six specific scenarios based on game theory, thermodynamics,
and cosmological data. It doesn't care about our narrative.
Speaker 2: No, these are the great silence scenarios that are mathematically
consistent but existentially horrifying. We're talking about tsunamis of civilization,
sleeping giants, and the physics of why the universe might
be actively hiding from us.
Speaker 1: The mission for this session of Thrilling Threads is to
look at the silence not as a lack of evidence,
but as evidence of something terrible.
Speaker 2: The silence is data. We just don't like what it's saying.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the first piece of evidence. You've
brought a twenty twenty one paper by Robin Hanson and
his team at George Mason University. This is the Grabby
Aliens model. Now, Graby sounds cute like a toddler. I'm
guessing the math isn't cute.
Speaker 2: It is definitely not cute. Hanson is an economist and
a futurist, and that's key. He applies statistical modeling to
civilization growth from an economic.
Speaker 1: Perspective, which is a different angle, a very different angle.
Speaker 2: The core premise challenges a fundamental assumption we've had for decades. Yeah,
that civilizations are random occurrences, scattered like towns on a map.
Speaker 1: Which is the standard view. Right. We think space is big,
so there's probably a civilization here and another one one
million light years that way, and we just haven't bumped
into each other because of the distance exactly.
Speaker 2: We assume civilizations are static, or they stay in their lane.
Hanson's team argues that this ignores the nature of life itself.
Life expands to fill its container. If a civilization survives
its adolescence, meaning it doesn't nuke itself and master space travel,
it doesn't just sit there. It expands.
Speaker 1: It needs resources, it needs everything.
Speaker 2: The model defines a Grabby civilization by three criteria. They
expand continuously, They expand effectively near the speed of light,
and they make a visible impact on their environment.
Speaker 1: So not just exploring.
Speaker 2: They don't just explore. They restructure. They seize volume, matter
and energy. They take apart stars, they re engineer galaxies.
Speaker 1: So they are cosmic real estate developers on steroids.
Speaker 2: Think of it like a phase transition. Imagine a pot
of boiling water. You're these bubbles of steam forming at
the bottom. What do the bubbles do? They get bigger,
They don't stay small. They expand rapidly until they merge
with other bubbles or break the surface. Hans in model
civilizations as these expanding bubbles of control.
Speaker 1: Okay, but this brings us back to the Fermi paradox immediately.
If the universe is supposed to be full of these
expanding bubbles rewriting galaxies and building dice in spheres, we
would see them, you would think. So the night sky
wouldn't be dark, it would be weird. We'd see patches
of galaxies going dark as they get harvested, or maybe
huge heat signatures.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we see a pristine, natural universe, no waste heat signatures,
no dismantled stars. And this is where the paper pulls
a judo move on our intuition. Okay, most people say
we see nothing, therefore we are alone. Hanson says, we
see nothing, therefore we are early.
Speaker 1: Early. How does that work? If the universe is thirteen
point eight billion years old, how can we be early?
Speaker 2: It comes down to selection bias. This is the part
that's hard to wrap your head around. If we were
living in a universe that was already full of grabby aliens,
we wouldn't be here discussing.
Speaker 1: It because we would have been paved over, right.
Speaker 2: We would be part of their civilization. Yeah, Or more likely,
we wouldn't exist at all because they would have harvested
our solar system a billion years ago. The only time
and place a pristine civilization like ours can't evolve is
in the quiet gaps before the bubbles meet.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see. So the fact that we look out
in see an empty universe doesn't mean the universe is empty.
It just means the front of their expansion hasn't hit
our specific coordinates yet exactly.
Speaker 2: We are existing in a pocket of silence, in the
unpopped part of the popcorn bag, so to speak.
Speaker 1: And the model actually predicts this.
Speaker 2: Hanson's math actually predicts how big these bubbles should be
and how fast they're moving. Based on the age of
the universe. He calculates that these civilizations expanded a significant
fraction of light speed, maybe roughly half the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Half the speed of light. That is incredibly fast for
a civilization.
Speaker 2: It is I mean, we can't even get a probe
to the next star in a human lifetime. They're crossing
galactic voids, and it implies a hard deadline.
Speaker 1: A deadline.
Speaker 2: This is the nightmare part. We tend to think of
space as this infinite frontier. We think we have trillions
of years to explore the galaxy, star trek style.
Speaker 1: Open ended go where no one has gone before.
Speaker 2: The gravy aliens model says no, we are growing into
a container. The walls of that container are rushing inward
at half the speed of light.
Speaker 1: That's claustrophobic.
Speaker 2: It's the tsunami analogy, and this is really the core
of the horror. Imagine you are standing on a beautiful beach.
The water is calm, it looks perfect. You assume the
ocean is safe. But what you don't know is that
as tsunami is moving towards you at six hundred miles
per hour, a wave one thousand feet high. You can't
see it because of the curvature of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Or in this case, the curvature of space time and
the sheer distances.
Speaker 2: Right the information the light from their expansion hasn't reached
us yet, but the wave is real. It's existing right now,
dismantling star systems, and it is rushing toward us.
Speaker 1: So our pristine sky isn't a sign of peace. It's
just a sign that we have a little bit of
time left.
Speaker 2: On the clock, and statistically not much time. In cosmic terms,
the window for a civilization like ours to arise before
the gratty ones fill the volume is narrow. Hanson argues,
we are right at the tail end of the quiet
era of the universe.
Speaker 1: So we're basically squatting on a plot of land that's
already been sold, waiting for the bulldozers.
Speaker 2: Because the bulldozers move at near light speed, we won't
see them coming, or rather we will see them exactly
when they arrive. The sky will change. And then restructuring.
Speaker 1: Restructuring, that's a polite way of saying extinction.
Speaker 2: It's not necessarily malice. That's the thing that gets me.
If you're building a highway, you don't hate the ant
hill in your past.
Speaker 1: Now you don't even think about it.
Speaker 2: You don't declare war on the ants. You just pave
to a grabby alien civilization. We are just buryonic matter.
We are resources to be used for something more efficient.
Speaker 1: That indifference is almost worse than a war, at least
in a war you're recognized as an enemy. Here we're
just gravel.
Speaker 2: Correct. So that's nightmare number one. The external threat that
is rushing toward us, unseen, hidden by the very laws
of physics that limit our site.
Speaker 1: Okay, I need to take a breath after that one.
Let's pivot because if the tsunami is about something rushing
at us, this next theory, where you suggest the threat
is already here. It's just hitting the snooze button.
Speaker 2: This is the estivation hypothesis.
Speaker 1: Astivate. That's a biological term, right, like hibernation.
Speaker 2: Yes, hibernation is what animals do to survive the winter.
Aestivation is what animals do to survive the summer. It's
avoiding the heat. This comes from a fascinating paper titled
that is not dead, which can eternal lie? A great
Lovecraft reference by Sandberg, Armstrong, and Cercovage.
Speaker 1: I love a good academic paper with a horror title.
So why would advanced aliens need to sleep through the summer?
What is the summer? In this context?
Speaker 2: The summer is right now, the current era of the universe.
To understand this, you have to shift your thinking from
biology to physics, specifically, Landauer's principle.
Speaker 1: Walk us through that. I'm a bit rusty on my thermodynamics.
Speaker 2: Landauer's principle links information to thermodynamics. It essentially says that
processing information or raising a bit, making a calculation generates heat.
There is a minimum energy cost to thinking, okay, and
this cost is directly portional to temperature.
Speaker 1: So the hotter the environment, the more expensive it is
to thing exactly.
Speaker 2: Much more expensive. If you are a biological creature like us,
this doesn't matter much. Our brains are incredibly inefficient anyway.
But most futurists and astrobiologists agree that biology is just.
Speaker 1: A phase right the post biological future.
Speaker 2: Eventually, intelligent civilizations upload their consciousness into machines. It's safer, faster,
more durable.
Speaker 1: We're already seeing the beginnings of that. With AI. We
are moving toward a digital existence, right and if you.
Speaker 2: Are a massive galaxy spanning digital civilization, your primary resource
isn't oil or land, it is computation processing power.
Speaker 1: And right now the universe is hot, exactly hot. Space
seems pretty cold to me. It's like three degrees above
absolute zero.
Speaker 2: It's about three kelvin right now because of the cosmic
microwave background radiation. To us, that's freezing. To a supercomputer
trying to run a simulation of a trillion souls, that
is a heat wave. It is thermal noise, it is inefficiency.
It's like trying to run a server farm and a sauna.
Speaker 1: So the smart move is to wait, just turn everything up.
Speaker 2: The smart move is to estivate. The hypothesis suggests that
advanced civilizations aren't dead. They've put themselves into a state
of deep sleep. They've slowed their clocks, powered down their
main systems, and they are waiting.
Speaker 1: What are they waiting for.
Speaker 2: They're waiting for the universe to expand and cool. They're
waiting for the stars to burn out. They are waiting
for the background radiation to fade toward absolute zero.
Speaker 1: And when would that be.
Speaker 2: Trillions of years from now, in the deep cold future
of the universe, a single jewel of energy will be
worth a quintillion times more in terms of computation than
it is today.
Speaker 1: That is an insane return on investment. It's like buying
bitcoin in twenty ten versus buying it today, but on
a cosmic scale.
Speaker 2: It's simple economics. It's ultimate long term investing. To remain
active now would be a grotesque waste of potential. It's
like burning a pile of cash to heat your house
in the middle of July. You just wouldn't do it.
You'd wait for winter.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they are sleeping. Why is that a nightmare
for us? That sounds fine. We get the summer, they
get the winter.
Speaker 2: Win when because of us? Why haven't we heard from them?
Because we are the noise. We are the energetic biological
pests thriving in the heat wave. To them, we are
short lived, inefficient, and loud.
Speaker 1: We're the mosquitoes buzzing around the tent while they're trying
to nap.
Speaker 2: It's worse than that. Think about what we do. We
dig up resources, we burn energy, we radiate heat. If
we become a type two civilization, building Dyson spheres, harnessing
entire stars.
Speaker 1: It is our goal, right, the sci fi great, But.
Speaker 2: In this scenario we are effectively stealing their future assets.
Speaker 1: We are using up the stuff they're saving for the
cold era.
Speaker 2: Exactly, we are degrading their future resources. The analogy I
use is termites. We are termites eating the foundation of
the house while the owners are asleep upstairs, and we.
Speaker 1: Think we own the house because we haven't seen the
owners yet.
Speaker 2: Right, We're running around making a mess, thinking this is all.
Speaker 1: For us, and if the termites do enough damage.
Speaker 2: The owners wake up and they won't be happy. The
silence of the universe isn't empty, my friend, it's the
silence of a library, and we're the only one shouting.
Speaker 1: That gives me chills. That the idea that our success,
our expansion, is actually a threat to something much older
and more powerful. It means the better we do, the
closer we get to being exterminated. As a pest control measure.
Speaker 2: It flips the narrative of contact. We usually want to
make contact. We send out voyager probes with maps to
our house.
Speaker 1: We're practically begging for it in this.
Speaker 2: Scenario, making contact is the equivalent of a termite tapping
on the floorboard loud enough to wake the giant. It's
the dumbest thing we could possibly do.
Speaker 1: So we have the tsunami rushing at us and the
sleeping giants waiting to swat us. Let's move to scenario
number three. This one feels a bit more aggressive active.
Speaker 2: This is the Berserker probe scenario.
Speaker 1: Berserker already the name suggests this isn't about economics. This
is about violence.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't lie. This transitions from strategic weighting to strategic hiding.
It's based on the novels by Fred Zaberhagen, but it's
rooted in a very real scientific concept, the self replicating
spacecraft or the von Neumann probe.
Speaker 1: Refresh our memory. On von Neumann prob.
Speaker 2: John von Neuan, the mathematician, proposed that you could build
a machine that goes to say an asteroid belt, minds
raw materials, and then builds a copy of.
Speaker 1: Itself, a self replicating machine.
Speaker 2: Exactly. If you send one of those to a nearby
star system, it builds two copies. Those two build four
four Bild eight.
Speaker 1: It's exponential growth, and because it's exponential, it fills the
galaxy fast.
Speaker 2: Incredibly fast. Even at slow sub light speeds, a single
probe could colonize the entire Milky Way in just a
few million years. That's a blink of an eye in
cosmic time.
Speaker 1: So the fact that we don't see them is a
big deal, a huge deal.
Speaker 2: The fact that we don't see these friendly probes, no hello,
we come in piece robots, suggests that either no one
builds them, or someone built a different kind, the the berserker.
The hypothesis applies game theory, specifically the prisoner's dilemma to
interstellar politics. It suggests the first civilization to achieve interstellar
travel might have a horrific realization, which is competition is dangerous.
If a neighbor can grow exponentially, they become a threat overnight.
You can't trust them, you can't know their intentions, so
you can't risk it. Exactly, so, to ensure your own survival,
you need to ensure no one else can compete. You
build kill vehicles, self replicating probes with a simple directive,
detect intelligent life, extinguish it, reset.
Speaker 1: And they just leave them out there like landmines.
Speaker 2: Worse, they are hunters and they don't need to be
massive death stars. That's inefficient. They can be small, stealthy,
and dormant. The theory is that they might be lurking
in the ort clouds of star systems, or drifting in
the dark space between stars, just listening, listening for what
radio waves, nuclear detonations, the chemical signatures of an industrial atmosphere,
all the things we do, the things that screen technological
civilization here yea, the things that announce to the cosmo
that a new potential competitor has just reached the board.
Speaker 1: Okay, so when they hear us, what happens?
Speaker 2: The probe wakes up. It calculates the trajectory. It doesn't
need a fancy laser or a warp drive. It just
needs physics. It builds a kinetic impact essentially a large
rock with an engine attached, and accelerates it to relativistic.
Speaker 1: Speeds, a relativistic kill vehicle, a rock moving at ninety
nine percent the speed of light.
Speaker 2: Right, the energy released would be unmaginable. It would sterilize
the entire planet. Or maybe it synthesizes a weaponized pathogen
and drops it into our atmosphere. The point is it's cheap,
it's automated, and it's effective, and.
Speaker 1: It sends it our way. This explains the silence perfectly.
The galaxy is quiet because everyone who makes a sound
gets silenced.
Speaker 2: It's the dark forest theory that six and Lou wrote
about so brilliantly. The universe is a dark forest. Every
civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like
a goo. If he finds another life, another hunter, an angel,
or a demon, he can't determine if they are good
or bad, but he knows they are a potential threat.
So the only rational move is to shoot first.
Speaker 1: And we Oh God, we have been broadcasting I Love
Lucy and Hitler's speeches into space for one hundred years.
Speaker 2: We have been screaming our location. We sent the voyager
probes with maps to Earth, literal instructions on how to
find us.
Speaker 1: We have beamed high powered signals at star clusters to
see if anyone answers if.
Speaker 2: The berserker hypothesis is true. The message has already been received,
the response program has been initiated, and the response it's
likely already on its way, traveling at the speed of
light or close to it, Silent and unstoppable.
Speaker 1: We won't see it coming, not at.
Speaker 2: All one day, the sky will just turn bright and
then it will be over.
Speaker 1: We are the noisy children walking through a dark forest, shouting,
completely unaware of the wolves.
Speaker 2: And the smart civilizations, the ones that survived, they not toe,
stay quiet. That's why we don't hear them. They are
hiding from the same thing that is coming for us.
Speaker 1: That makes every radio telescope, every message we send out
feel like a suicide note it does. It completely reframes
our search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI. We aren't explorers, We
are toddlers playing with a loaded gun.
Speaker 2: It brings a whole new meaning to searching for intelligence.
We might be searching for our own executioner.
Speaker 1: All right, that's terrifying. But notice a pattern here. Those
first three grabby aliensesvation berserkers, they all involve other aliens
destroying us.
Speaker 2: True, they are xenophobic fears the threat is external.
Speaker 1: But this fourth nightmare, this doesn't suggest maybe we don't
need aliens to destroy us. Maybe we do a perfectly
good job of that ourselves.
Speaker 2: Correct. This is the great filter, and specifically the late
filter or trapdoor scenario.
Speaker 1: The great filter is pretty famous in these circles, but
usually it's discussed someone abstractly, let's break down mechanics for
the listeners.
Speaker 2: The core logic is this, there must be some some
statistical improbability that prevents dead matter from becoming a space
faring civilization. Otherwise, given the age of the universe, the
galaxy would be colonized by now.
Speaker 1: Right, it should be full.
Speaker 2: Since it looks empty, something is stopping the process.
Speaker 1: And that's something is the filter. It filters out life.
Speaker 2: Right now, there are two options option A. The filter
is behind us. Maybe the origin of life is incredibly hard.
Maybe going from single cells to multi cells is a
one in a trillion shot.
Speaker 1: That's the hopeful version.
Speaker 2: If that's true, we are the lucky lottery winners. We
made it. The hard part is over. The universes are
oyster I like option A.
Speaker 1: Option A makes as special, It makes us the chosen ones.
Speaker 2: We all like option A. But the science is starting
to point away from it. We are finding the building
blocks of life everywhere. Water on Mars, phosphene on Venus,
amino acids on comets. Life seems easy, or at.
Speaker 1: Least the ingredients are common, very common.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in intelligence seems to be a huge evolutionary advantage.
So If life is easy and intelligence.
Speaker 1: Is natural, then the filter isn't behind us, it's.
Speaker 2: Ahead of us. This is the horror of the late filter.
It' suggests that civilizations arise constantly. They build cities, they
discover the atom, they invent radio, they launch rockets, and then,
without exception, they die. They hit a wall, a trapdoor.
The silence of the universe isn't because no one is
playing the game. It's because the game is rigged to
kill the player at level ten, and we're at level
nine about to level up.
Speaker 1: What is the trap? Is it war? Climate change?
Speaker 2: Those are probably minor filters. They might kill some civilizations,
but all of them every single time. The great filter
has to be something more universal.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom warns about this. He calls it
a technology that is too easy to invent but too
destructive to control. The easy nuke exactly. Think about nuclear weapons.
They are terrifying, but they are hard to build. You
need state level infrastructure, centrifuges, rare isotopes. It limits who
can use them.
Speaker 1: It keeps them in the hands of a few, which
is scary enough.
Speaker 2: But imagine if destroying a city didn't require uranium. Imagine
if you could do it with a microwave oven and
some chemicals you could buy at a hardware store.
Speaker 1: If that were true, civilization would end in a week.
All it takes is one nihilist, one crazy person, one mistake.
Speaker 2: Precisely, if such a technology exists, something that allows a
single individual to destroy a planet, and if that technology
lies on the inevitable path of scientific progress, then statistical
ruin is guaranteed. It's not a matter of if, but when.
Speaker 1: And we are advancing fast. We are democratizing technology, AI,
synthetic biology, nanotechnology. We are putting godlike powers into the
hands of smaller and smaller groups.
Speaker 2: That's the funeral march. If the late filter is real,
then every breakthrough we make is in progress. It's a
step toward the trip wire.
Speaker 1: So finding life on Mars would be the worst news
in human history.
Speaker 2: The absolute worst. Finding fossils on Mars would mean that
life isn't the filter. That means the filter is almost
certainly ahead of us. The emptier the universe seems, the
better our chances.
Speaker 1: We look at the stars and wonder where everyone is.
The answer might be that we are standing in a graveyard.
But we haven't dug our own plot yet.
Speaker 2: The quiet isn't peace. The quiet is the aftermath.
Speaker 1: Civilizations pop up, get loud, discover the easy nuke. Maybe
it's a bioengineered virus, maybe it's gray goo, and then
go silent, over and over again. We are just the
next ones in line to find out what it.
Speaker 2: Is, and we're running towards it thinking it's progress.
Speaker 1: That's heavy. It makes you look at a headline about
a new scientific discovery and think, is this the one?
Is this the one that kills us?
Speaker 2: It promotes a very different view of progress. Progress becomes dangerous.
It suggests that knowledge itself might be the weapon.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've covered external threats, internal threats. Now let's get weird.
Speaker 2: Let's get weird.
Speaker 1: Nightmare number five. This one unsettles me because it's about
things we can't see but are right here, literally in
this room, the shadow biosphere.
Speaker 2: This moves us from distant threats to uncomfortable intimacy. This
is based on proposals by scientists Carol Cleland and others.
It starts with a simple question. When we look for life,
what do we look for?
Speaker 1: We look for stuff like us, carbon, water, DNA, exactly.
Speaker 2: We scan the Goldilocks zones. We analyze for biosignature that
our kind of life produces, but that assumes all life
follows a specific chemical pathway that happened on Earth. Cleveland
suggests there could be a shadow biosphere right here on.
Speaker 1: Earth, like a second tree of life.
Speaker 2: Yes, life may have emerged on Earth more than once
with a completely different biochemical foundation. We are the descendants
of the standard origin event, but there could be a
chemically distinct biosphere existing right alongside us.
Speaker 1: Oh, what that even look like?
Speaker 2: Microbes that don't have DNA, organisms that process artsynic instead
of phosphorus, or use different chirality in their molecules. Mirror
images are the ones.
Speaker 1: We use, and we don't see them.
Speaker 2: We don't see them because our tools are built to
find us. We use PCR tests that look for DNA.
If something doesn't have DNA, it's invisible to us. We
might be scrubbing shadow life off our kitchen counters and
not even knowing it. It's the ultimate blind spot.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's creepy, but how does it explain the silence
of the universe.
Speaker 2: Expand that concept to the cosmos. Look at the composition
of the universe. Normal matter, the stuff stars, planets, and
you and I are made of.
Speaker 1: Marionic matter, is.
Speaker 2: Only up fifteen percent of the matter in the universe.
Some sources say as little as five percent of the
total mass energy, and the rest dark matter about eighty
five percent of the matter. It's the gravitational scaffolding that
holds galaxies together.
Speaker 1: So we are the minority. We are the afterthought.
Speaker 2: We are the cosmic scum on top of the pond.
The anomaly. The shadow biosphere theory asks, if physics allows
for complex structures in normal matter, why not in the
dark sector, why not dark life?
Speaker 1: So the universe could be teeming with life, but it's
all made of dark.
Speaker 2: Matter, densely populated, just not with diaryonic beat. That's us.
The universe isn't empty. We're just looking in the wrong
place with the wrong eyes.
Speaker 1: The horror here is the intangibility completely.
Speaker 2: There could be a civilization existing in this room right now.
Complex intelligent structures made of dark matter passing through your body,
through the Earth, through the Sun.
Speaker 1: And they don't interact with us.
Speaker 2: Dark matter only interacts vio gravity, if at all. On
local scales, they would pass right through us. Like we
aren't even there, so we are ghosts to them. Or
there it goes to us, we are the blind men
in a crowded room. We assume we are alone because
we cannot see. But statistically it is arrogant to assume
that only the fifteen percent of visible matter can support complexity.
The universe could be dominated by dark life.
Speaker 1: The idea that I could be walking through an alien
city right now and not know it. It makes you
feel incredibly vulnerable.
Speaker 2: And here is the darker implication. What if they are
aware of us. We can't interact with them, but maybe
they can interact with us. What if we aren't ghosts?
What if we are live stock?
Speaker 1: Whoa live stock?
Speaker 2: If the shadow biosphere exists, and if it is more
advanced or more populous than us, we have no way
of knowing that intent or their capabilities. We are vulnerable
to force as we literally cannot touch. We might be
an energy source, we might be an experiment. We might
be something they just tolerate, like mold in the corners
of their vast invisible house.
Speaker 1: That is a special kind of paranoia. The idea that
the empty room is actually full and everyone is just
watching you, and you.
Speaker 2: Can't watch back. You are physically incapable of looking back.
You don't even have the senses to know you're being watched.
Speaker 1: All right, we've arrived at the final nightmare number six.
And this one, this one isn't about biological death. It's
about the end of reality.
Speaker 2: Itself, the simulation termination.
Speaker 1: This is the one that makes you question if the
chair you're sitting on is real.
Speaker 2: This comes from the simulation argument famously popularized by Nick Bostrom.
He's really the king of existential dread, isn't he?
Speaker 1: He really is? But this goes beyond the matrix. This
isn't about breaking.
Speaker 2: Out, No, this is about the statistics of existence. The
argument relies on three statistical premises. Oneizations capable of running
ancestor simulations. Hyperrealistic simulations of their past are possible.
Speaker 1: Which seems plausible given our trajectory with VR and AI plausible.
Speaker 2: Two such similations would run, many, many of them, billions
to study history, sociology to run experiments. And premise three, Therefore,
there are billions of simulated minds for everyone real biological mind.
So statistically, statistically, if you are a conscious being, it
is overwhelmingly likely ninety nine point ninety nine nine nine
percent likely that you are in a simulation. You are
not in base reality.
Speaker 1: Okay, I've heard this before, but why is this a nightmare?
Why does this explain the silence?
Speaker 2: It becomes a horror scenario when you look at the
termination condition. The simulation is run for a purpose, But
simulations have limits. They have limited ram, limited processing power.
Speaker 1: Even the supercomputers of the future have.
Speaker 2: Limits exactly, and we the simulated beings, are consuming resources
as humanity expands, as we build around supercomputers, as we
try to simulate our own universes.
Speaker 1: Within this one, we're nesting simulations.
Speaker 2: The computational load on the host machine increases exponentially.
Speaker 1: We are lagging the server.
Speaker 2: We are entering the danger zone, and there is evidence.
Look at quantum mechanics the observer effect. Things only exist
in a definite state when you look at them.
Speaker 1: That sounds suspiciously like a video game.
Speaker 2: It looks exactly like optimization algorithms in a game engine,
rendering only what is being looked at to save memory.
Plank lengths look like pixels, the speed of light looks
like a processor speed limit, the maximum rate at which
information can move across the grid.
Speaker 1: So the universe looks empty because because the developers didn't
bother to code the rest of the NPCs, non player characters.
Speaker 2: Why render billions of alien civilizations if the simulation is
only about Earth. If the experiment is how does humanity
handle the twenty first century? Oh, you don't need aliens,
You just need a skybox, a background render of stars
that aren't really there.
Speaker 1: It's just a painted ceiling, a beautiful high resolution jape.
Speaker 2: And here is the terrifying implication. If the simulation is
an experiment, say to answer the question, how does a
civilization evolve from nuclear power to AI? What happens when
we answer the question?
Speaker 1: When we get there, when we achieve superintelligence or crack fusion.
Speaker 2: When the data is gathered, the simulation is no longer useful.
It is just a drain on power. The moment we
truly understand the theory of everything, the moment we crack
the code of the.
Speaker 1: Universe, the experiment concludes.
Speaker 2: The screen goes black. Yeah, no apocalypse, no fire and Brimstone,
just end of program. We are racing toward a finish
line that is actually a cliff, and we're running faster
every day.
Speaker 1: So our curiosity, our drive to understand the universe, is
actually rushing us toward the off switch.
Speaker 2: We are trying to solve the puzzle, not realizing that
solving the puzzle ends the game. It reframes scientific discovery
as a countdown clock. Every new paper in physics is
one tick closer to zero.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, let's take a breath, deep breath. We have
been through the ringer today. We've talked about grabby aliens
rushing at us like a tsunami. We've talked about sleeping
giants who see us as termites. We've talked about berserker
probes hunting us in the dark.
Speaker 2: We discussed the great filter, the trapdoor that kills every civilization,
the shadow biosphere, the ghosts walking through us, and finally
the simulation termination, the plug pull.
Speaker 1: It's a lot, and it completely changes how you look
at that night sky. That feeling of peace is gone.
Speaker 2: It is the silence isn't empty, It is heavy with information.
It's screaming at us if we know how to listen.
Speaker 1: I want to leave the listeners with a final thought.
We started with the beauty of the stars, but now
I have to ask is it better to be alone?
Is it better to be the only life in a
vast empty universe? Or is it better to be in
a crowded room where everyone is holding their breath hiding
from something.
Speaker 2: That is the question, solitude or suspense. I think I
prefer the solitude, even if it's lonely. The alternative is
hunt or be hunted.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Being the only consciousness in the universe
feels like a lot of pressure, But being a termite
in a sleeping giant's house isn't.
Speaker 2: Great either, and being a line of code is just depressing.
Speaker 1: Truly, So we want to know where you stand. Which
of these scenarios keeps you up at night? Are we
the termites, annoying the sleepers? Are we walking into a
trip wire? Or are we just expensive software waiting for
the delete key.
Speaker 2: I'm bidding on the berserkers personally. It explains of radio
silence too well. The game theory is just it's brutal,
but it's sound. The math just works.
Speaker 1: I'm going with simulation. It feels the most plausible given
our own trajectory with AI and computing. It just fits
too well with the weirdness of quantum physics.
Speaker 2: Fair enough. Either way, we're in trouble.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment and tell us what you think. We
want to hear your theories, your fears, and maybe your hopes.
If you have any.
Speaker 2: Left after this, we could use them.
Speaker 1: Op. We really could. Until next time, keep looking up,
even if it scares you. This has been thrilling thereat.
Speaker 2: Stay safe out there,