Speaker 1: Welcome to the God's Eye View Podcast. I am your host, Trevor.
Speaker 1: Kind of a gimmicky episode today. I'm not gonna lie
Speaker 1: to you. It's not the deep stuff we normally do.
Speaker 1: It's just a kind of casual We'll be talking about
Speaker 1: the Fermi paradox. There's other bigger things I should be
Speaker 1: getting into right now. You know, there's this new anti
Speaker 1: matter discovery. There's all these new physics things that are interesting.
Speaker 1: But I've just been too busy. I'm not I don't
Speaker 1: know enough about them. So I'm outsourcing my work to
Speaker 1: some short explainer clips on YouTube and then we'll kind
Speaker 1: of discuss them. I think we'll still be really interesting,
Speaker 1: maybe more interesting, you know, maybe this is better. We'll see.
Speaker 1: So just been going and hard, you know, at work,
Speaker 1: which is good. I go like, I oscillate. I'll be
Speaker 1: trying to coast for a little bit at work, and
Speaker 1: then I'll get manic. I'll be working like fourteen hours
Speaker 1: a day. I'll be like two am. I'll be staring
Speaker 1: at my laptop screen and I'm like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I have to go to bed, and then I stop. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I wish I could share the idea you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to share like active proposals, it's technically supposed to be confidential,
Speaker 1: but it is sort of related to these ideas I
Speaker 1: think I've shared in the past about you know that
Speaker 1: some blood pressure medications might have these other secondary effects
Speaker 1: that might be good or bad, that are completely unrelated
Speaker 1: to their effects on lowering blood pressure. And so just
Speaker 1: kind of exploring that, and I came up away to
Speaker 1: with a way to address a really key limitation that
Speaker 1: is a problem. And you know something every reviewer brings up,
Speaker 1: something every grand and paper reviewer brings up so very
Speaker 1: excited about that. It's genius. I wish I could say more.
Speaker 1: Just just trust me that your boy came up with
Speaker 1: a really great idea today. So of course it ruins
Speaker 1: my weekend because now it's all I'm going to be
Speaker 1: thinking about. So anyway, today with the good old Fermi paradox.
Speaker 1: You guys know what the Fermi paradox is? Oh you don't, Well,
Speaker 1: here's a quick overview.
Speaker 2: Are we the only living things in the entire universe?
Speaker 2: The observable universe is about ninety billion light years in diameter.
Speaker 2: There are at least one hundred billion galaxies, each with
Speaker 2: one hundred to one thousand billion stars. Recently, we've learned
Speaker 2: that planets are very common too, and there are probably
Speaker 2: trillions and trillions of habitable planets in the universe, which
Speaker 2: means there should be lots of opportunity for life to
Speaker 2: develop and exist. Right, But where is it? Shouldn't the
Speaker 2: universe be teeming with spaceships. Let's take a step back.
Speaker 2: Even if there are alien civilizations in other galaxies, there's
Speaker 2: no way we'll ever know about them. Basically, everything outside
Speaker 2: of our direct galactic neighborhood, the so called local group,
Speaker 2: is pretty much out of our reach forever because of
Speaker 2: the expansion of the universe. Even if we had really
Speaker 2: fast spaceships, it would literally take billions of years to
Speaker 2: reach these places, traveling through the emptiest areas in the universe.
Speaker 2: So let's focus on the Milky Way. The Milky Way
Speaker 2: is our home galaxy. It consists of up to four
Speaker 2: hundred billion stars.
Speaker 1: That just a quick interruption. It really is impossible to
Speaker 1: fathom the scale of this thing we're in. This is
Speaker 1: one of the things people like about simulation theories. It
Speaker 1: sort of can account for that, you know, because we're
Speaker 1: in our everyday life, we're not used. We're not used
Speaker 1: to this type of scale, so it's hard for us
Speaker 1: to fathom. But we are used to the ability to
Speaker 1: scale extremely dramatically. Not this dramatically, but extremely dramatically in
Speaker 1: virtual environments. You know, you can make an actually huge
Speaker 1: world virtually, And there's that one video game where you
Speaker 1: can literally like go from planets plan I forget what
Speaker 1: it was called, but I mean, really, theoretically, there really
Speaker 1: is no limit. Well that's not true. There is a
Speaker 1: limit in terms of what I guess it probably it
Speaker 1: might depend there might not be a limit actually, because
Speaker 1: you know you can you can write the I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about computer science, but you could write the
Speaker 1: code in a way that well, and this is probably
Speaker 1: how I would assume all video games work. It's why
Speaker 1: we use them as an analogy. Is that you're kind
Speaker 1: of rendering the perceptual sphere of your character. So no
Speaker 1: matter how big the world is, you only ever have
Speaker 1: to account for the perceptual sphere of the character. And
Speaker 1: so assuming that you know there's vast expanses of empty space,
Speaker 1: that's very information sparse. But yet, yeah, I guess there
Speaker 1: would be some limit to how many descriptions of planets
Speaker 1: you could store in a hard drive or something. But
Speaker 1: I mean scale is very easy to explain in an
Speaker 1: information system in a real you know, in a world
Speaker 1: where this is real stuff. You know, if these rocks
Speaker 1: floating in space are actually rocks made up of some
Speaker 1: smallest divisible unit, which in and of itself to me
Speaker 1: just sounds kind of unlikely. But let's just say that's
Speaker 1: the case. It's sort of. It is hard. This isn't
Speaker 1: a great argument or anything, but it is hard to
Speaker 1: imagine this much of that stuff. Where did it come from?
Speaker 1: You know, because a godless universe, we kind of have
Speaker 1: to assume it came from nowhere, or it came from
Speaker 1: some random sequence of events. And it's like, okay, but
Speaker 1: what was the first event? Right? And why was it
Speaker 1: the first? And oh it's eternal. It's like, okay, that
Speaker 1: doesn't really solve the problem, like where did all this
Speaker 1: stuff come from? Why is it here? It doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be We can all imagine nothingness, so yeah, it's it.
Speaker 1: I find the mystery fascinating. What I'm getting increasingly frustrated
Speaker 1: with is the argumentation around this topic, because it's like,
Speaker 1: can't we just all agree that this mystery is staggering,
Speaker 1: Like it is just you cannot It's shocking how staggering
Speaker 1: the mystery is in this group of people who insist
Speaker 1: that it's not mysterious. Where does that come from? Like
Speaker 1: how I mean, no offense, I know, I just talked
Speaker 1: about I don't like arguing, but it's like gross, What
Speaker 1: a gross instinct? What a gross instinct to just like
Speaker 1: look out at the universe and be like, oh right,
Speaker 1: but you know it's mostly hydrogen and helium and basically
Speaker 1: what happened? You know what I mean. It's just like okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is interesting, But you know, where did it
Speaker 1: all come from? Why is any of it here?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Is time infinite? Is it linear? Like these deep questions
Speaker 1: to me are just like boggle the mind. It's amazing
Speaker 1: in the insistence of like, oh yeah, well, we'll figure
Speaker 1: it out someday. It's like, I don't know, I think
Speaker 1: we're really good at figuring out the description and the
Speaker 1: rule set of the world we live in, but we're
Speaker 1: hopeless figuring out where it came from. Like those are
Speaker 1: two entirely different questions. So anyway back to the Fermi Parader.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of stars, counting one per second, it
Speaker 2: would take you one hundred lifetimes to count them all.
Speaker 2: There are about twenty billion sun like stars in the
Speaker 2: Milky Way, and estimates suggest that a fifth of them
Speaker 2: have an Earth sized planet in its habitable zone, the
Speaker 2: area with conditions that enable life to exist. If only
Speaker 2: zero point one percent of those planets harbored life, there
Speaker 2: would be one million planets with life in the Milky Way.
Speaker 2: But wait, there's more. The Milky Way is about thirteen
Speaker 2: billion years old. In the beginning, it would not have
Speaker 2: been a good place for life because things exploded a lot.
Speaker 2: But after one to two billion years, the first habitable
Speaker 2: planets were born. Earth is only four billion years old,
Speaker 2: so there have probably been trillions of chances for life
Speaker 2: to develop on other planets in the past. If only
Speaker 2: a single one of them had developed into a space
Speaker 2: traveling super civilization, we would have noticed by now what
Speaker 2: would such a civilization look like? There are three categories,
Speaker 2: A type one civilizing.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think you get the idea, So I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're it's weird because we got a lot of
Speaker 1: different Like the ven diagram of potential explanations is really
Speaker 1: bizarrely overlapping, you know, because people who would normally really
Speaker 1: strongly disagree with each other, like people who believe in
Speaker 1: aliens and more reduction of scientists, like, they find a
Speaker 1: lot of common ground in certain ways. But I mean,
Speaker 1: basically it seems like there's a couple possibilities. One is
Speaker 1: that it is just so much scientists like to do this.
Speaker 1: They like to do this. It's almost like poetic, you know,
Speaker 1: because they're always struggling to find spirituality and what they
Speaker 1: do in their worldview because nihilism sucks, and so they
Speaker 1: will have sort of like a fern Gully Avatar kind
Speaker 1: of answer, is that a good analogy are a good anyway?
Speaker 1: They have this answer where it's like, well, life is
Speaker 1: just so much more special than we ever thought, and
Speaker 1: the chances of life arising and it's really just way
Speaker 1: the probability is just so much more unlikely than we
Speaker 1: ever could have even imagined. You know. Yeah, even if
Speaker 1: there are this staggering number of habitable planets in our galaxy,
Speaker 1: and even if many of them are much older than
Speaker 1: our own, life is just so special that we should
Speaker 1: just really feel grateful to be here. And I agree
Speaker 1: that is true. It's not really a scientific answer, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean it is, but it's couched in like all
Speaker 1: sorts of so I don't know. It's like spiritualism or
Speaker 1: not spiritualism. I don't know, but you get the idea
Speaker 1: it is true. I mean, if life is truly that unique,
Speaker 1: I mean, that is fascinating. Now I don't really like
Speaker 1: my arguments. My beliefs are sort of unrelated to the
Speaker 1: existence of life in the galaxy. I think if a
Speaker 1: totally reasonable that a creator would create a system that
Speaker 1: could lead to the emergence of life, and it could
Speaker 1: be that life emerges all over the place, it could
Speaker 1: be that life emerges only in one place, like this
Speaker 1: is not really none neither outcome would really affect my worldview. However,
Speaker 1: now that I say that if we really were and
Speaker 1: we don't know that we are, of course, but if
Speaker 1: we really were the only planet with life out of
Speaker 1: the trillions of habitable planets, like, how can you not
Speaker 1: view that as evidence of Like I can't be care
Speaker 1: about how I phrase it, Like the evidence of would say,
Speaker 1: divine intervention in our existence, you know, like all the
Speaker 1: rule set is established in a way that you know,
Speaker 1: once life gets going, it does this certain thing. It's
Speaker 1: selective pressure exists. Genetic mutations can happen and could be
Speaker 1: selected for if they're beneficial, Like give give evolution all everything,
Speaker 1: you know, give the full thing. But still, I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't know where life comes from. We don't understand
Speaker 1: a biogenesis. We don't understand just like we don't understand
Speaker 1: the first domino and the formation of the universe. We
Speaker 1: don't understand the first domino and the creation of life.
Speaker 1: Could it be that there was some sort of intervention,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's there's all sorts of miracles in
Speaker 1: the development of humanity. I mean, the merging of They
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been mitochondria at the time, they would have
Speaker 1: been a purple hylem bacterium. But you know, our anc
Speaker 1: into animal cell ancestors. If this is how it went down,
Speaker 1: we don't know. You know, at some point incorporated bacteria
Speaker 1: inside of the cell and they formed a symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 1: This is we're not pretty confident this is what mitochondria
Speaker 1: are is or ancient ancient structures or they're the descendants
Speaker 1: of ancient structures, And there is sort of this symbiosis
Speaker 1: between our cells and the mitochondria, which are almost like
Speaker 1: I mean, you could call them almost like parasites, except
Speaker 1: they're much more beneficial than they are harmful, you know,
Speaker 1: so it's a symbiosis. So that is completely unique. You know,
Speaker 1: we've never really seen anything like that, and so that
Speaker 1: almost seems like, you know, could there have been interventions
Speaker 1: at various time points, you know, just the creation of
Speaker 1: information bearing molecules like DNA that i've been introduced. Now,
Speaker 1: when you say stuff like that, I think the instinct
Speaker 1: for people is to think like some other alien race
Speaker 1: introduced you know, DNA, and who knows, I mean, who knows.
Speaker 1: But at the very least you got to say, hey,
Speaker 1: rationalist reduction is like, you got to stop being so confident.
Speaker 1: It's really becoming a problem. And I feel like they
Speaker 1: kind of retreated for a while, but I feel like
Speaker 1: now they're back, you know, I've seen a lot more
Speaker 1: confidence with the rational reductionist types. Anyway, So a paper
Speaker 1: came out recently. It's kind of a weird paper, but
Speaker 1: hesitate to even call it a scientific paper. It's more
Speaker 1: like an opinion. But Sabine Hastenfelder, our friend with the
Speaker 1: thick accent, reviewed it. So let's listen.
Speaker 3: The Fummi paradox just got so much worse. One of
Speaker 3: the most plausible explanations for why we've not yet heard
Speaker 3: of other intelligent species has been that technological civilizations eventually
Speaker 3: develop artificially intelligent systems, and it's not intelligent to populate
Speaker 3: the galaxy, they lose interest basically, But in a new paper,
Speaker 3: physicists now our use quite convincingly. I think that this
Speaker 3: is wrong. This isn't just interesting because of the Fermi products,
Speaker 3: but because it generally tells us how our ratitude to
Speaker 3: space trouble has been changing. The Fermi proaducts is the
Speaker 3: question of why we haven't yet found aliens. So maky
Speaker 3: Way has hundreds of billions of stars. We now know
Speaker 3: that planets are common, and that many planets are quite
Speaker 3: plausibly in the habitable zones of their stars. Indeed, many
Speaker 3: of those planets should have formed billions of years before Earth.
Speaker 3: So why haven't we heard of any other intelligent species?
Speaker 3: Other civilizations should have had plenty of time to spread
Speaker 3: through the galaxy, build visible technology, or at least leave traces,
Speaker 3: but we haven't heard or seen anything from anyone. There
Speaker 3: have been lots of different explanations, for example, that the
Speaker 3: emergence of life is just incredibly unlikely, all that habitable
Speaker 3: planets are much rarer than we think. But one of
Speaker 3: the explanations that's attracted the most attention is that advanced
Speaker 3: civilizations simply lose interest in space travel because it's, on
Speaker 3: a basic level dumb. Space travel is expensive and inefficient
Speaker 3: and just exactly what is the purpose anyway? Humans currently
Speaker 3: attempt to travel in space for irrational reasons. So the
Speaker 3: argument goes because of national pride, because they believe that
Speaker 3: more humans are better than fewer humans, or because they
Speaker 3: don't fully realize just how incredibly large the distances are
Speaker 3: between solar systems and how long it take us to
Speaker 3: travel there.
Speaker 1: Or because we like GPS navigation. This kind of this
Speaker 1: is like such a dumb argument. Now Sabine is just
Speaker 1: laying out a counter argument. This is not her position,
Speaker 1: but it's got to be, you know. Speculating about the
Speaker 1: Fermi paradox in this way to me is like so
Speaker 1: dumb because it's so culturally colored, you know, like it
Speaker 1: has so much to do with your cultural lens. There
Speaker 1: is an unfathomable number of reasons why a civilization might
Speaker 1: want to be in space right that we can't even comprehend.
Speaker 1: I mean, technologies emerge out of nowhere and we never
Speaker 1: even thought about it before, and now suddenly they're like
Speaker 1: the most important thing. Like, for example, she mentioned or
Speaker 1: maybe she's about to mention. I don't know, this is
Speaker 1: the second time I'm watching this, but she either just
Speaker 1: mentioned or was about to mention that once you figure
Speaker 1: out AI, there's no reason to go to space. AI
Speaker 1: is so useful. And it's like, lady or whoever saying this,
Speaker 1: we didn't even know about AI a couple like a
Speaker 1: few years ago. So like, could it be that maybe
Speaker 1: you're just saying this because it's a culturally relevant topic
Speaker 1: to you right now? Like could there not be some
Speaker 1: other future culturally relevant developments in space, you know, exploration,
Speaker 1: There are planets in our Solar system that we can
Speaker 1: go to, for example.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So I just think this is so dumb, and it
Speaker 1: reminds me I want to talk to you guys about something.
Speaker 1: At the end. It's like it's like financial advice. No, sorry,
Speaker 1: it is not. It is unequivocably not financial advice, but
Speaker 1: it is related to finances, So we'll talk about that letter.
Speaker 3: Once the civilization develops artificial intelligence, they grow out of
Speaker 3: the silly ideas, so the argument goes, and instead they
Speaker 3: make their life cozy on their home planet, space traveling
Speaker 3: in virtual reality. Populating the galaxy requires too many resources
Speaker 3: with little resultant. This ultimately not sustainable. A related argument
Speaker 3: has it that civilizations just take it slowly for some
Speaker 3: billion billion years because computation becomes thermodynamically easier than quite
Speaker 3: the argument, seeing that I can't plan a had enough
Speaker 3: to reliably water the plants in any case, I've always
Speaker 3: found this an interesting argument because it basically pitches Elon
Speaker 3: Musque against himself. It leads you to expect that at
Speaker 3: some point groc will begin to argue against SpaceX. Okay,
Speaker 3: but now here comes the new paper. The author argues
Speaker 3: that this earlier argument is fundamentally flawed. He says that
Speaker 3: once the civilization has artificial intelligence, robots and space factories,
Speaker 3: space exploration doesn't require big and fast machines. It can
Speaker 3: be done with plenty of small, cheap spacecraft, and with
Speaker 3: machines that need neither food, nor air nor motivational posters.
Speaker 3: And that just makes the fermi products so much worse
Speaker 3: beca because now you have to ask not just well,
Speaker 3: why haven't we received any electromagnetic signal from the aliens?
Speaker 3: But why have we not found any of their space probes?
Speaker 3: Why are they not here? The author gives multiple reasons
Speaker 3: for why space exploration is rational, most importantly the preservation
Speaker 3: of the species and possibly other species, knowledge, preservation, and
Speaker 3: scientific observation. If the cost of small probes is small
Speaker 3: compared with the value of these factors, then it makes sense.
Speaker 1: The author, I think we'll enterrate there. This is obviously true. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not a scientific conclusion. This is just someone
Speaker 1: sharing their opinion, you know. But the opinion is incredibly logical, right,
Speaker 1: Like the idea that like, oh, people will just lose
Speaker 1: interest in space, It's like, well, more likely as technology improves,
Speaker 1: you'd become more interested in space because the cost to
Speaker 1: access it would decrease, both the financial cost and the
Speaker 1: costs to life if you don't have to send to humans.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of this idea of van is a
Speaker 1: von nou Van what me? Uh? Is it von Noyman probes?
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm saying that, right, It's just
Speaker 1: this idea that you know, with sufficient technology. You could
Speaker 1: build a probe that you launch and it's AI or whatever,
Speaker 1: and uh, it mines the needed materials from asteroids and
Speaker 1: duplicates itself with three D printers or whatever. Right, like
Speaker 1: just infinite timescale technology constraints are pretty pretty small, right,
Speaker 1: and so it'd be like this like self replicating explorer
Speaker 1: and there'll just be buillian, I mean, exponential growth in
Speaker 1: these probes and they'd fill the galaxy, you know, looking
Speaker 1: for life, and we'd run into one of them. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, this of course makes a ton sense. Now
Speaker 1: she goes on to make it the point that we
Speaker 1: don't have any We would never know if that were
Speaker 1: the case, because I think people kind of have this
Speaker 1: misconception that we're like really looking out into the space
Speaker 1: and there's radars set up that track everything.
Speaker 2: This is not true at all.
Speaker 1: There are there's ACCID, there's object tracking, but you would
Speaker 1: there really would be no way to distinguish between you know,
Speaker 1: an asteroid and like a passive prob. Now, if something's
Speaker 1: zipping around out there, maybe and if it's big yeah
Speaker 1: and close, then yes perhaps. But anyway, so it doesn't
Speaker 1: sound like it's related to the normal topics are show covers.
Speaker 1: But it kind of is because the Fermi paradox is
Speaker 1: a kind of a problem. You know, if life can
Speaker 1: emerge through these mechanisms that we propose, that rational reductionists propose,
Speaker 1: and there are so many habitable planets and so much
Speaker 1: time has transpired, surely there should be life on these planets.
Speaker 1: And maybe there is. I mean, this is a big
Speaker 1: focus of an ass right now, trying to bring rocks
Speaker 1: back from Mars. I really like, and this was what
Speaker 1: I wanted to bring up at the end here. I
Speaker 1: really like this company called rocket Lab and they're self
Speaker 1: funding a mission to Venus to scoop up some atmosphere
Speaker 1: because there was some paper that came out a while
Speaker 1: ago that claims through spectral analysis that they're finding particular
Speaker 1: compounds in the atmosphere of Venus. How do you say
Speaker 1: that Venusian atmosphere, I don't know the atmosphere of Venus
Speaker 1: that is pretty strong evidence of like microbial life. So
Speaker 1: they're trying to go do that. And so that is
Speaker 1: actually the financial thing I wanted to bring up. I know,
Speaker 1: honest to goodness, more about commercial space flight than probably
Speaker 1: any other thing I talked about on this show, and
Speaker 1: I've never brought it up because it's like a very
Speaker 1: niche interest. But you know, over time, I feel like
Speaker 1: I'm learning to know you all. You guys have been
Speaker 1: sending me emails and stuff. It's so cool. So I
Speaker 1: do feel like I have to share this other passionate
Speaker 1: interest of mine. So I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's my age or what. But you know, you had,
Speaker 1: like when I was a kid, you had the space
Speaker 1: shuttles all very exciting. It was a part of like
Speaker 1: scientific triumphalism, you know, is, hey, we're doing the human
Speaker 1: genome project, We've got the space shuttles, We've got like
Speaker 1: procuring everything, we're colonizing the solar system. Like, clearly the
Speaker 1: worldview that gave rise to this is a worldview that
Speaker 1: is worth taking seriously. And so when it sort of
Speaker 1: began to oppose the religious worldview, you know, you feel like, well,
Speaker 1: you've got to go with the scientific worldview. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at it. You know, who doesn't want antibiotics, you know,
Speaker 1: And so of course that's a total incorrect way of
Speaker 1: Now we know, I think as a society that this
Speaker 1: is a strange way to view the issue. But at
Speaker 1: the time it seemed compelling, but then we just stopped
Speaker 1: being good at that. We just stopped doing it for
Speaker 1: you know, whatever reason. So I guess, you know, some
Speaker 1: credit to Elon not you know, not to get political.
Speaker 1: Uh he started a you know, he sold PayPal, started
Speaker 1: a company that that's pretty impressive. You know, they've done
Speaker 1: some pretty cool stuff, really cool stuff. Anyway, they had
Speaker 1: there's an there's another competitor that they have that is
Speaker 1: so cool. So I encourage you, if you're into this stuff,
Speaker 1: to look into it. People assume, you know, SpaceX is
Speaker 1: only competitors Blue Origin, and the only reason Blue Origin
Speaker 1: gets any attention is because it's Jeff Bezos's company. They
Speaker 1: basically what they do is they just steal money from
Speaker 1: the taxpayer and do nothing with it. In my opinion,
Speaker 1: they get these huge government contracts, they fail at everything.
Speaker 1: You know, the rocket just blew up the other day.
Speaker 1: In decades have gone by, it's just like just builking
Speaker 1: the tax payer. You know, I think they legitimately want
Speaker 1: to do the things they're trying to do. It's just ineffective.
Speaker 1: But you know, Bezos, he's an influential, connected person, so
Speaker 1: he's able to just keep getting the money, and that
Speaker 1: all applies to Elon Musk as well. But you know,
Speaker 1: their company has been like really effective, you know. So,
Speaker 1: but there is another company, well there's hundreds of other companies,
Speaker 1: but there's one other serious company that is just ran
Speaker 1: by a regular dude, some New Zealander Kiwi, who just
Speaker 1: was a kid into rockets, you know. And this company
Speaker 1: is so cool. I'm kind of pitching it right now
Speaker 1: honestly because he's just so impressive. So check him out.
Speaker 1: Just go on YouTube search Rocket Lab Peter Beck interviews,
Speaker 1: and it is that what they're doing is so cool.
Speaker 1: They're kind of getting into defense stuff, which you know,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, do you really want to invest in
Speaker 1: a defense company? But they're very much focused on missile interception,
Speaker 1: so I guess that's nice. I don't know, I'm probably
Speaker 1: just justifying it to myself. But he is funding a
Speaker 1: mission to Venus too. You know. They put stuff in
Speaker 1: orbit around the Moon. They've they're sending stuff to Mars,
Speaker 1: so it's a very legitimate company. They they're coming up
Speaker 1: on their one hundredth rocket launch here momentarily. But the
Speaker 1: financial aspect of this the only reason I have any
Speaker 1: money at all. To the extent that I do is
Speaker 1: because of this company. I bought with a very small
Speaker 1: amount of money, like a thousand bucks less than that
Speaker 1: I invested in this company when it was three dollars
Speaker 1: a share, and so it's now like almost ninety. It
Speaker 1: went all the way up to one hundred and fifty,
Speaker 1: but it's it's down. Basically, what happens is everyone just
Speaker 1: kind of mirror SpaceX in the short term, but then
Speaker 1: over the long term, you know, the better companies sort
Speaker 1: of differentiate, differentiate. So RockA labse pretty consistently growing. They
Speaker 1: just bought like a Starlink competitor, like a satellite manufacturer.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty cool. So I don't know, if you're
Speaker 1: into finance, check it out. I'm not recommending you invest
Speaker 1: in it because it's you know, you it's had an amazing,
Speaker 1: like generational run. Like I wish I had put every
Speaker 1: penny I had. Just think if I had put ten
Speaker 1: grand let's do some quick math about it at three
Speaker 1: So say I put ten grand in at its peak,
Speaker 1: it would have been worth well ten X would be thirty.
Speaker 1: So that's one hundred thousand times five half a million,
Speaker 1: Is that right? If I put ten grand in at
Speaker 1: three would it be half a million? I feel like
Speaker 1: that's not right. This is the worst show I've ever done.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but I have to know. I have to.
Speaker 1: I need to. This is what I want. I want
Speaker 1: to steer at my ceiling all night. I just want
Speaker 1: to look at the ceiling and go, you idiot? Why
Speaker 1: were you? Why were you broke? Why couldn't you be
Speaker 1: have had ten grand, if disposable cash to invest ten
Speaker 1: thousd times fifty? Right? Yeah, yeah, oh that's stupid. Of
Speaker 1: course it's five anyway, So yeah, I would have had
Speaker 1: half a million dollars, but alas I was poor. So anyway,
Speaker 1: I see it going back to one fifty someday, but
Speaker 1: probably probably a couple of years. Anyway, they're getting ready
Speaker 1: to launch a much bigger rocket, so checking out look
Speaker 1: up that it's supposed to be this year. So anyway,
Speaker 1: so I guess that's it for our episode. The I
Speaker 1: think the important the part of this that relates to
Speaker 1: what we like to talk about is the Fermi paradox.
Speaker 1: Scientists now kind of like to dismiss it because I
Speaker 1: think it does have religious implications, or at least you
Speaker 1: could interpret it as such.
Speaker 2: But it's not bad.
Speaker 1: I mean, there there, it's it is sort of true,
Speaker 1: although you know, you can now people will argue, well, well,
Speaker 1: actually maybe there's not as many habitable planets as we think,
Speaker 1: but we have pretty good evidence there is. So it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe that number is wrong. You know, maybe the air
Speaker 1: bars are wide, but there's a lot, like a crazy amount.
Speaker 1: And if you have a crazy amount, no matter how
Speaker 1: improbable the emergence of life, or you know, the necessary
Speaker 1: steps to cause the emergence of life, then there should
Speaker 1: be life somewhere, and if it's much older than us,
Speaker 1: it should be you know, selective pressure. If selective pressure
Speaker 1: should be somewhat similar at least in some habitable planets
Speaker 1: to how it would work here. Right, And so really
Speaker 1: I think the position you have to retreat to is well,
Speaker 1: maybe we just can't find it, and that is a
Speaker 1: good answer, you know. But this paper is saying like, well,
Speaker 1: that doesn't really make sense either, because if there are
Speaker 1: advance civilizations, surely there are some more advance than us.
Speaker 1: It just seems totally natural that one of those civilizations
Speaker 1: would be spacefaring and we should be able to find it.
Speaker 1: But again, the argument still stands. You know, maybe we
Speaker 1: just it's they're too far away or whatever. So I
Speaker 1: personally wonder, I kind of wonder if there just really
Speaker 1: is not a speck of life anywhere in the planet.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's or anywhere in the planet, anywhere
Speaker 1: in the universe. I it seems impossible to me. It
Speaker 1: seems impossible. But I do wonder. Imagine if we knew
Speaker 1: that for sure, that nowhere in this essentially infinite universe
Speaker 1: with trillions of habitable worlds, was anything that looks like life,
Speaker 1: certainly advanced life, right, that would be pretty cool. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a way, it's kind of sad, right, But to me,
Speaker 1: that's like, Okay, obviously something special happened here. But then
Speaker 1: people go, you know, well, why would why would God
Speaker 1: make this huge universe just to put life in one spot?
Speaker 1: You're thinking about it wrong, in my opinion, if you're
Speaker 1: thinking about this like this creator that had to like
Speaker 1: for his teeth and try really hard to build this thing,
Speaker 1: and it took energy and power and time, and if
Speaker 1: you're viewing it with those very human eyes, like the
Speaker 1: way we might view building a house, right, and imagine
Speaker 1: we build a built a three hundred square foot house
Speaker 1: just for me and my wife to live, and someone
Speaker 1: would be like, what why did you build this? You know,
Speaker 1: this house you could you could turn into a seven
Speaker 1: forty seven factory. Why did he build a house this pic?
Speaker 1: I think that is a very human perspective of how
Speaker 1: to look at creation, which makes sense we're humans, but
Speaker 1: that I don't think that's the right perspective. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, if you view it more like a virtual environment,
Speaker 1: it would be totally reasonable to design this really like
Speaker 1: law constrained, fascinating system and then just put life in
Speaker 1: one spot because you want to pay attention to it
Speaker 1: and it's interesting and unique, right, and you're timeless, so
Speaker 1: you do you do one thing at a time. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know who knows one of the one of
Speaker 1: the many many mysteries that I will never get an
Speaker 1: answer to. You know, the quote we say on here
Speaker 1: a Lot is I don't have it exactly right, but
Speaker 1: it's it's like, you know, I forget how the quote goes.
Speaker 1: But it's like we're asking all these questions. We're asking,
Speaker 1: we're asking, we're asking, and one day we're going to
Speaker 1: die and we're either going to get the answer where
Speaker 1: we're going to stop asking. Isn't that just the absurdity,
Speaker 1: the absurdity of it. But listen, all the absurdity, all
Speaker 1: the absurdity will be fine if it turns out there
Speaker 1: is more than this. If there isn't, I'd rather believe
Speaker 1: there is, because I'm not sure I could face that
Speaker 1: just cold nihilism. And I love the idea, like, oh no,
Speaker 1: it's good. It means just you just got to enjoy it,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of this like hedonistic, like just
Speaker 1: maximize pleasure and love and connection. And yeah, that's true,
Speaker 1: you should do that. However, in a meaningless universe is
Speaker 1: totally irrelevant. You know, you're not you don't get to
Speaker 1: take any of it with you. It's it's very fleeting.
Speaker 1: I still agree it's the right approach, but intellectually it's
Speaker 1: not satisfying at all. And it's funny. I read Wisdom
Speaker 1: too on here go back and find it. I actually
Speaker 1: recorded the audiobook of Wisdom, the Book of Wisdom from
Speaker 1: the Judo Canon. It's not the pot Well, the Protestants
Speaker 1: view it as part of the Apocrypha. The Catholics view
Speaker 1: it as the Second Canon. You know, it was a
Speaker 1: part of the Greek septuagen so they view it as scripture.
Speaker 1: It's all complicated anyway. Most likely the first Christians viewed
Speaker 1: it as scripture, so the Catholics viewed a scripture. And
Speaker 1: you read Wisdom too, the second chapter of the Book
Speaker 1: of Wisdom, and the author is having this argument. He's
Speaker 1: having this exact conversation, and he's pitching those people as
Speaker 1: the bad guy, the like, the morally corrupt, the people
Speaker 1: saying like, hey, we're here for a brief time, you know,
Speaker 1: we just need to enjoy it. You know, why live
Speaker 1: this disciplined, disciplined life, you know, just enjoy things while
Speaker 1: you can sing your song, while you have air in
Speaker 1: your lungs. Basically like and there's an element of that
Speaker 1: that I think is true. But it is funny because
Speaker 1: this was written, like a you know, at least fifty
Speaker 1: years before the crucifixion, and they basically describe the crucifixion perfectly.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I'm surprised atheists don't pick that up and say, like, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: the Gospel writers were just trying to fulfill that prophecy
Speaker 1: or something. I've never heard that argument. But as someone,
Speaker 1: if you believe it's true, which I do. It's like
Speaker 1: pretty powerful prophetic message, so check that out. Here's the
Speaker 1: plan I'm going to start. I don't know. It's a
Speaker 1: lot of work, so I don't know. This might be
Speaker 1: another failed business attempt, but I'm going to start posting
Speaker 1: audiobooks somewhere for our publishing company to be determined, probably
Speaker 1: Substack if they I don't know if they have a
Speaker 1: good audio inner for listening to books, so I'm trying
Speaker 1: to figure that out. But so folks who subscribe to
Speaker 1: the Substack, it's like five dollars a month would get
Speaker 1: access to all the audiobooks forever, you know, But I
Speaker 1: don't know, five books a month it seems kind of steep.
Speaker 1: It's not like I'm going to be cranking them out
Speaker 1: all the time. So I don't know. We're still thinking,
Speaker 1: but stay tuned for more announcements on that point. And
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to the God's iView podcast. Email me
Speaker 1: at God's iView book at gmail dot com. Stay safe
Speaker 1: out there, everybody. It's a crazy world. God bless