Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willis,
your host. I'm real excited about our guests tonight. Uh,
doctor Robert Well, Yes, doctor Robin Hanson. Real amazing person.
If I was a very intelligent alien and I landed here,
I think I would want to talk to him. I mean,
this guy is amazing. I listened to Kurt Jamungle's podcast
and was kind of blown away. I actually listened to
it twice, which is something I rarely do, so I'm
really excited to bring him on. I hope you take
the time and look in the show notes and read
Robin's biography. It's just amazing. So without further ado, welcome, Hello,
glad you here. As I said, I think your theory
is just amazing. And I first of all, I just
want to say, and I usually do this, we have
a blog this week and check that out over at
podcastufo dot com. And I want to thank everyone that
supports the show and of course all our listeners. Thank
you everyone and chat tonight for being here live. But
one of the things I wanted to tell you right
off the bat, which I think you'll find interesting because
I know it kind of dovetails with a lot of
what you'll be talking about, and that is back in
the nineteen nineties before I was really looking into this topic. Now,
I've told this story on this show a number of times,
but I think you'll really appreciate it. So I had
an insurance broker come to my house for a life
insurance policy and we were wrapping things up and talking
and he said, you know, he mentioned for some reason
that he was in Vietnam and I said, oh, wow,
you know, that must have been really something. He said, well,
I had a very unusual job. I said, well, what
was that and he said, well, I was in a
special part of the Air Force that was exploring why
these UFOs were showing up during napalming and other things.
So I said, oh my god, this is really crazy. So,
you know, we talked quite a bit about it, and
he said they're interested in our nukes, and you know,
blah blah blah. This is back in the nineties. Now.
I wasn't even paying any attention to this top the
topic of UFOs at that time. So he's getting ready
to leave and I said, hey, by the way, what
does a government think that they they want with us?
And he looked at me and he just said, we're
a Petri dish. That's what he said. So I thought
you'd appreciate that whatever, you know. And I've never been
able to reach this person, you know, since I started
doing the show. But I mean, what a that's quite
a comment.
Speaker 2: The space is full of dramatic, amazing stories, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: That's true. That's true. So if you would please talk
a little bit about yourself and your interest in you know,
you did this thing called the Great Filter. I think
that's really fascinating, and you know, that's what I'd like
to talk about a lot tonight. Is that your thoughts
on that. But you have quite a background, and have
you always been into science and since a young age.
Speaker 2: I think since college. I was sucked in by the
fancys or the ideal of being a thinker who figures
important things out. I maybe some early college lectures sort
of sold me on that vision, and I guess I
was also sold on the vision that you should be
looking for surprises, big things, and it's worth pursuing big
things even if the chances are small. I'm an academic,
I'm a professor, but as you may know, most professors,
most academics just want to have a little corner of
the world where they are the specialists in something and
then you know, do a sequence of very solid, very acceptable,
you know things where they are skilled at it and
they can show off their skill, and then they are
a scholar and researcher who you know is fits in
our big world of all these old things. But you know,
I wanted to, like always wanted to reconceive things, to
see the differently, maybe because there have been these people
across history who have found ways to look at things
different and that made a big difference. And I'm always
rusted after being one of those people who made a
big difference. So once I had the freedom too, I've
always been trying to go for these long shots, the
big ways to reconceive things, big ways to understand things different,
and hopefully I will come across or have come across
a few of those along the way. So I'm a
professor of economics. But I started out in engineering a
long time, that did physics, and did philosophy of science
and physics, and did computer science for nine years, and
AI actually in basi and statistics and did political science.
And since I became tenured in economics. I've written a
book that's kind of a futurist book, and another book
that's kind of a psychology book, and so and at
the moment, I've been working on culture, and two years
ago I worked on the Sacred. So I've just done
a lot of different things.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: One of the things I did, which I guess is
what your interested did, which as basically a grad student,
and then at postdoc I just noticed this question of
for me's question where is everybody in the universe, And
being the arrogant sort of person that I am, I
thought I could just go in and try to work
on it, which I did, and then I came up
with this perspective called the Great Filter, which is really
just a way to rename the question where is everybody?
But in an interesting way. So I did that in
ninety eight, I guess quite a while ago eight ninety
nine worked on the Great filter of it, and then
I have gone elsewhere since then. But then about four
years ago, four or five years ago, I returned to
the topic and did it again more mathematically, because I
had noticed a certain mathematical equation that had been neglected,
I thought by people who had been thinking in this area,
and so I made a basically mathematical version of the
great filter. But you know, I guess you'd like a
quick quick summary.
Speaker 1: I guess right, yeah I would. But before that, did
you rewrite it? Because there was because we know a
little more than we did then, you know, because we
have like the James Webb telescope, and we have more well,
we've done a lot more observation.
Speaker 2: It's about being clever with what you know. So the
things I realized that we could use were things we
had known for a long time, so they weren't new
things to know. But so a famous example is back
in ancient Greece, somebody cleverly figured out how to use
the data they had to figure out how far away
the sun was our way the moon was, which is
pretty incredible, and most people didn't realize that the data
they had could tell them that, and they were roughly
right with the numbers they got. So again, it was
about taking some data we have and realizing you can
squeeze more out of it than people have.
Speaker 1: Ah, I see, uh huh. All right, yeah, so let's
have an overview of your thoughts.
Speaker 2: On the So we're going to do two steps first,
we're going to talk about the great filter, this idea
from a long time agoing. This is one of the
areas of my life where I've been lucky with influence
in the sense of this phrase, the great filter, has
become popular and now maybe every week there's a news
article somewhere that uses this phrase the great filter, to
talk about aliens. So that's kind of cute.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: But so the idea is, you look up in the
sky and you see no aliens. But if we look
into our future, if we think about what we could
become soon as a civilization, we think we have a
chance at least of being much bigger than we are.
Science fiction is full of scenarios like that. And by bigger,
I mean not just more technologically advanced, I mean filling
a larger space, like going to many star systems nearby
and then being more visible, doing more things and giving
off using more energy, and changing how things appear. And say,
within a million years, which is tiny and cosmological times,
we could fill the galaxy completely and remake the galaxy completely,
and that would be visible from a long way off.
You would see it, certainly from one galaxy over, but
maybe even from a million galaxies over. So when we
look up at the universe and we say, well, where
are these people like us who are a million years
more advanced than us? We don't see them. And that's
puzzling because we think this is a huge universe. We're
not that special. It doesn't seem and so if we
could do that, if we could almost be there, I
can something else almost be there. But you look up
in the university, you just don't see it. So that's
the puzzle, and my contribution was to rephrase this puzzle
in the following terms. Every part of the universe starts
out simple, dead, and then it evolves over time, and
each place has a chance of evolving to the next
step toward what we are and what we might become.
So there's a chance of starting life that's very simple.
It's a chance that simple life gets more complicated. There's
a whole set of stages that life can go through
to get more advanced. It can be multicellular, it can
have what's called you carry ittes, different kind of internal structure.
It can have sex as a way to share genes
and develop. There's a whole bunch of ways that life
can get better, and eventually that gets to us, and
then eventually it would get further than us. So there's
a path starting from simple dead matter to becoming us
and further, and the whole universe starts out going down
that path. Every spot in the universe starting out on
that path. But if the path is really hard each
step of the path, maybe most things don't make it
that step. They just fail to get onto the next step.
And so there's a filtering process. Lots of things start
out and then lots of things get cut away, and
you get fewer and fewer things making it down the path.
And if you look at us, we go how much
filtering has happened between the beginning and now that's the
size of the great filter from the very beginning to
where we are. And then we're not all the way yet,
there's the size and the filter of the beginning all
the way to what we hope to become. And the
key observation is this filter must be really hard, because
we see this whole universe is stuff, and nothing we
see has gotten to this point where we think we
could get soon. So that process must be really hard.
It must. Most things that start out down that paths
get knocked off somehow, they don't start life, they don't
get sex, they don't get multicellular, they don't get intelligence,
whatever it is. They fail, and we succeeded almost where
at least at this point, which is pretty far down
the path. So the great filter is just the idea
that we can reframe the question of where is everybody
as the question, well, where along this path is the filter.
It doesn't have to be just one spot. It could
be many spots, but the net effect of each of
the filters along the way adds up to a big filter.
And we can see that that big filter has to
be huge in order to explain the fact that nobody
else is out there that we see. And you could
ask how much is left in the filter? And how
much is left in the filter basically says how hard
it is to achieve this hope for future we have.
So you can see roughly ten to the twenty four
planets in our observable versus the moment, and you might think,
you know, nothing has achieved that, so none of those
ten to the twenty four have gotten where we think.
So maybe you think of the whole filter as a
factor of ten to the twenty four. That's pretty big.
What if there's only ten to the two left, so
we've gone through ten to the ten to the twenty
two so far, and then there's ten to the two left,
adding up to ten to the twenty four, that would
be we're way past most of it. But even that
scenario says, Okay, there's only a one on one hundred
chance from here of becoming this big growing things we
hope to be. That is ninety nine percent chance we're
going to fail. And many of these failure scenarios are
not very pleasant. So this suggests kind of a troublesome
vision of the future. Some of the future could be
left in front of us, and that could be enough
to take us out. So that's the basic story of
the Great Filter. One last thing to say about it
is if we find something else in the universe that's
gone along this path, well, the farther it went down
this path, the more that's saying that the step before
that was not so hard, But that suggests that the
steps after that are harder, including the step after where
we are now. So, for example, we saw simple life
on Mars or somewhere out in the universe, and it
was had an independent origin from us. That would suggest
our future is worse. So it's bad news for our future.
It would be fascinating news, but it's bad news about
our future to find anything out there that's at least
gone down part of the path up to where we
are now.
Speaker 1: And you said there's two steps. Did you say there's
another step to this? Or that? Is that? Everything is that?
Speaker 2: So I've just summarized the idea of the grape fielder,
and I think it contains two parts, the part that
we've gotten past now for us at least, and the
part that's ahead of us until we could be big
and visible. And we should like that part remaining to
be small. I see, But we can't be very sure
of that. So we should worry about how much is that?
Because the whole thing is huge, and anything that suggests
that behind us something was easier than we thought means
ahead of us stuff is harder than we thought.
Speaker 1: And what what makes you think that? Do you think
it's like a natural thing? I mean, you can you
can say for us, you know, we're we're curious. It's
hard to say what another species developing on another planet
with all different variables. I know, I meant you mentioned
that we have plenty of things to go by with
the animals on this planet and other you know, species
on this planet, and of how they developed and all that.
But but what makes someone curious is that part of evolution,
you know, I mean, because you know, I mean, what
would make us want to call anize. I mean, you
think it's a natural thing.
Speaker 2: So you're focused on something pretty recent in our history.
But remember that the entire path, all the way back
from the beginning, all the way to this future point,
all of that's the filter, and it's all plausibly part
of it. So it's not clear that any part of
the future has really been in the recent past. It
might be, but it's actually less possible. So it turns
out that on Earth intelligence evolved several times independently, and
that makes it less plausible that it was a really
hard thing to do. So the hard, really hard things
to do should plausibly only ever have happened once in
our history. We got lucky enough to even happen once,
But intelligence was something happened several times. Now, there's different
kinds of intelligence. You might say, oh, what our kind
is special? Maybe the kind that has curiosity However, curiosity
is pretty common among mammals. Although you might think, well,
maybe mammals were hard, right, so again, but I can
tell you some details. This really suggests that nothing in
the last half billion years has been very hard, unfortunately,
So we'd like to look at our personal history. Like
you know, some people think, oh, like the Industrial Revolution
happened three hundred years ago, and that might have been
really hard, and maybe that was the big thing. But
anything that happens really fast is less likely to be
the cause of this filter because our universe is now
fourteen billion years old, so that gives you lots of
time for things to be hard and nevertheless eventually be found.
So anything that happens really fast just as not very
plausible to have been at least a sort of thing
where the universe was just trying it over and over again,
searching in the space of possibilities and eventually found something.
Speaker 1: Hmm interesting. I had a professor I'm not I'm sorry,
not a professor of visiting NASA scientists, and he was
an astrobiologist, Doctor Jeffrey Bennett was on the show a
number of years ago, and he said that basically water
cooler talk at NASA. This is just a phrase. He
said that they all thought that if a civilization can
make it through the bottleneck of technology without blowing themselves up,
then they'll be exploring the stars, they'll be traveling the stars.
And do you kind of think that's.
Speaker 2: Again, I think we're primed to think about our recent
history as really important, and the cosmological perspective says, that's
just really unlikely. Fourteen million years of whole of the
universe history, and you're going to look at the last
three hundred years and say, ah, that was the really
important thing. Yeah, you're right right, Anything that happened in
only three hundred years just isn't plausibly that hard. But
we can go into that detail if you want, happy
to go whichever direction you want. But again, as I mentioned,
we did a more mathematical version of the great filter model.
So what I've just told you is far just has
this one number. Okay, maybe a constraint on the total
filter is at least ten to the twenty four, but
it doesn't really have other numbers, and it's sort of
a qualitative analysis. But returning to the topic, we were
able to give numbers a lot more.
Speaker 1: Numbers Okay, So let's say let's say you talk about
numbers and development, you know, because we are young, like
you know, the Earth is young compared to a lot
of planets in solar systems out there. So let's say
something's advanced of us a million years, you know, somewhere
in our galaxy. So how does that does that all
part of your thinking.
Speaker 2: Well, if we're going to get to, say, thinking about
what could possibly make any sense of UFOs being aliens
as opposed to delusions or hoaxes or something else, then
we're going to have to think about the possibility that
there is other advanced life near us and more advance
than us. And in that case, we're going to have
to think about scenarios like that. But I think we
need to do some prep work before we can get
to that sort of scenario. I think first you just
want to have your best scenario of just what the
universe looks like in terms of where advanced life is
in it, and then you want to ask how could
we change that scenario in a minimal way to make
sense of maybe UFOs being elides. But I don't think
we're there yet in our conversation here to be able
to go to that scenario yet, So the simplest scenario
of the universe is that advanced life appears at some
point on a planet like ours, and then it has
to go through a number of steps, difficult steps on
that planet advancing life, where each step is life searching
in a vast space of possibilities to find a a
great rare combination that will let it go to the
next step. And then all of a certain number of
steps all have to happen, like getting where we are
and then farther before the window for life on that
planet ends. So our window for life on our planet
will end in about a billion years. And if we
hadn't appeared down doing what we're going to do, then
plausibly life would have just been melted or burned up
basically by the heat of the increasingly hot sun in
a billion years. So life has to go through enough
of these steps to achieve the ability to leave that
planet and then spread out into the universe. So basically,
some random planet has to start this process of going
down this path of the rake filter, going through what
will call hard steps, and it has to reach the
end of that path before the window for that planet ends,
and then the life on that planet then starts to
out in the universe, and it just spreads at some speed,
presumably whatever is the fastest feasible speed to spread out,
because there'd be competition inside that would push for people
to run to the frontier as fast as they could
to get there before others. And then this keeps spreading
until these civilizations meet each other, and at that point
they fill the universe with civilizations, and now the universe
is no longer dead, it's full of advanced life. That's
the simple scenario. And this scenario has three three parameters.
So remember life appears at random points in space, so
we don't need a parameter for that. It appears on
planets at random times, and then it spreads it a speed,
and the time at which appears has a two parameters
to it because it's a power law, and that power
law comes from this hard steps model. What we i
know is that if a planet is lucky enough to
go through lots of hard steps before it's deadline, even
though on most planets that doesn't happen, then in fact,
the chance of it happening as a function of time
goes as a power law, which is the power of
the number of steps, so say six might be a
plausible number of steps. And now this is actually the
standard model we have for cancer in your body in
innimal bodies. So each cell in your body could become cancerous.
In order to do so, about six mutations have to happen,
all in that same cell. These mutations happen at a
constant rate over time, but the chance that six of
them happen in the same cell, the chance of that
goes is the sixth power of time. That's why you
get cancer much more often later in life. And when
people die, roughly a forty percent of them have cancer
somewhere in their body. So it's the same mathematical model
here for cancer in your body as for any particular
planet to achieve advanced life. That is, you have I
don't know, billions of cells in your body, and again
one of them, at the end of your life has cancer,
but the rest don't I e. It's pretty rare. And
so then it's pretty rare that anyone planet manages to
achieve our level of advanced life or farther by the
time the window is out. But since you've got so
many of them, then it becomes more likely that you know,
every once in a while one of them does. All right,
So what that says if we say that on a planet,
the chance of advanced life appearing as a function of
time goes to, say, the sixth power of time, then
we have two free parameters here we need to describe that.
We need this power, which is say six, and we
need the constant in front of the power, which says
sort of the overall rate of the power law. Now,
so now we have a model with three parameters again
the speed of expansion when they expand, and then the
two parameters in the power of of time, constant in
front of the power law and the power. And we
can get these three parameters all from data. So that's
the clever looking at data and realizing it says is
more than you think.
Speaker 1: Part wow.
Speaker 2: So we can walk through each of those pieces of
data and how which number it tells us. But the
bottom line is the power is about six, the speed
of expansion is say half the speed of light or more,
which is crazy fast, and the constant is such that
we right now are sort of in the middle of
the distribution when these things appear in the universe. And
that implies that advanced life like that can expand in
the univer is be visible appears about once per million galaxies,
so it's really rare. Then there's really unlikely there's another
one in our galaxy if it's once per million galaxies.
And if we were to head out and succeed to
expand the universe and grow and grow as fast as
we can, say over half the speed of light, it
would be roughly a billion years until we met the
nearest neighbor.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So's those are key parameters. So I promised you numbers.
So those are numbers. Now they're rough, you know, within
a factor of say four or something, but they're better
than what I told you. For the great filter, again,
we have a simple three parameter model. We fit each
of the parameters to data. Then we basically have a
simple model of the distribution of aliens in spacetime. And
this model explains why we're so crazy early. So you
might think fourteen million years is not early, but the
average star will last five trillion years. Wow, And life
is much more likely to show up on a long
lived star than a short lived star because of this
power of six. So we're five billion years into our star,
but five trillion is a factor of one thousand longer,
and life has a chance of a factor of one
thousand to the power six more likely to show up
toward the end of one of these long lived stars
than one of our short lived stars like ours. So
we are crazy early in this distribution. And the reason
is this analysis saying we're early assumes that the universe
would just sit and wait empty for us. Whenever we
were ready, it would be ready for us and we
could just go in. But the model I just told
you says, no, it's going to fill up soon, and
then it'll be full. In a billion or two years,
all these different alien civilizations out in the universe will
have spread out and met each other, and then everything
will be full. And then these long lived stars just
cannot do anything with life because they will have been
taken over by some advanced civilization and remade it for
their purposes, and then they can't wait trillion years for
life to a bole. So this is the simple model
where aliens in space time. It's called grabby Aliens. You
look at the website grabby aliens dot com. You could
see more detail. So in our conversation here we could
go into this model more or we could go in
the direction of what might to say about UFOs. So
I'll let you pick where you are at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I want since the show more or less
about UFOs, I think we could head in that direction.
All right, just a couple of you know, I mean,
kind of off topic questions, but still, you know, I
always want an opportunity to ask someone like you, you
know what I mean? Do you think we'll ever figure
out what would cause the first spark of life? Of
life on any planet? You know? I mean that's you know,
people talk about panspermia and all that, the possibility of that,
but I just that part is interesting.
Speaker 2: Think about how much we've learned in even just the
last century. Yeah, and then think about a million years,
which is ten thousand times longer, And that's a tiny
fraction of fourteen billion years. So if we spand out
and we spend a billion years and then finally meet
other aliens in that billion years, we're going to learn
a lot. We're basically going to learn everything we can
learn about the physical universe around us. And I'm pretty
sure that'll tell us what which scenarios were most likely
for life to start.
Speaker 1: Interesting, I have a friend named Mark D'Antonio. He's an astronomer,
and he was at a conference and I saw when
I saw I met him the first time, he had
to roll of toilet paper and the roller toilet paper
was taped on both sides, and then he said, this
is the Earth, the beginning of Earth. And then he
started rolling the toilet paper out. It comes like halfway
around the room and he says, and here's you know,
first life. And then he comes around a little further
and then on the very end of this long right
roller toilet paper was human existence like half an inch.
Speaker 2: Es human existence is like a million years. But if
you think about just the last one hundred years, how
much we've learned. I mean, we're clearly on a rapid
tear for learning more so whatever, you know, maybe the
raid will flow down a lot for some obstacles we
can't see now, but clearly we're going to learn vastly
more than we know now. So that seems like the
sort of thing will learn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, again off topic a little, do
you think AI is going to really assist in like
advancing us a lot more in knowledge in things like
what you work.
Speaker 2: With on the long time scales, it just seems obvious
that competition within civilizations will push for the more efficient
implementations of intelligence and activity and manufacture and everything, and
that artificially constructed things will just beat out biosquishy things
like us, like we were the initial things to get
it started. But clearly, like in the rest of our economy,
you know, we make planes instead of birds, cars instead
of horses. You know, just making things deliberately artificially has
just beat out trying to jerry rig some bio squishy
thing to do what want.
Speaker 3: I never thought of it like that, but you're right,
we don't make I mean, it may take another ten
thousand years or something, but clearly, on a million years timescale,
all of our descendants are basically going to be artificial.
Speaker 2: If there's any biosquishy things, they're going to be left
in zoos somewhere to be you know, some museum copies
to remember help people remember what stuff used to be like.
But you know, basically the future is artificial, including intelligence.
Speaker 1: So wow, wow, that's fascinating. So yeah, I love this.
I love the futurists. You know that, uh, that part
of uh, that's fascinating to me. But okay, so you
said something about the grab an alien.
Speaker 2: Is that the grabbyliens dot com. If you want to
hear more about this mathematical model and what were the
key pieces of data that we used, and you know,
the uncertainty in it and how we got these numbers.
But basically, you know, once per million galaxies sounds pretty rare,
but there's a lot more than a million galaxies in
the universe, so it means there's really a lot of
alien civilizations out there. So it's pretty sure that if
we kill ourselves, the universe is still going to get
filled with filled with advanced life. We advanced life in
the universe isn't up to us. But what happens in
our area of the universe, the nearest million galaxies for
the next two billion years, that is up to us.
And that's that's a lot of mistake, so we should
still try to do our best about.
Speaker 1: It, right yep. So I just want to let the
listener know that in the show notes, I have both
the great filter and I it's all in your bio
that I found and also the would you call.
Speaker 2: It grab grabby Aliens dot.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, grab the aliens? I got it.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, okay, So now you want to go
through the UFO thing, right I do. All right, let's
do it. But let's be methodical. Let's let's go a
step by step, right, okay, okay. So first of all,
I'm going to classify two different kinds of things to
think about here in Baysian analysis. So this is a
standard way we think about how to figure out the
probability of things in our world. There's two steps in
an analysis of any conclusion, like are you know UFOs
aliens are some UFOs aliens? Say? One is what we
call a prior, how plausible are various scenarios just on
basic grounds of you know, what makes sense in terms
of what we know. And another is what we call
the posterior, which is based on a likelihood just looking
at particular pieces of evidence. And for each piece of evidence,
you want to say, how likely is that piece of
evidence to have arisen depending on different assumptions we could
make about its origin. So for any say, particular UFO siting,
I'd say there's roughly four main categories of explanation. One
is just delusion and error, and that's the easiest one.
People want to go forward to dismiss it because you know,
you just want to get rid of it because it
sounds kind of crazy, right. Delusion and error one category
of explanations. Second category hoaxes, lies and hoaxes. This is
an accident. Somebody is purposely setting things up and lying
in order to trick you into believing something. And that
has happened in the past. That's a real thing, okay.
Third is there are organizations somewhere around here on Earth
or originating from Earth, say recently, that just have a
lot more powerful capabilities than they've led on And UFOs
are basically seeing those vastly more powerful capabilities of some
organization on Earth near Earth came from Earth, and that's
what they are. And the fourth explanation is the same
as that, except not from Earth, not from here recently,
at least not from here now. So those are our
for main explanations. And then there's two steps of the analysis.
One is, okay, just looking at these categories, ignoring any
particular piece of evidence, how likely do these things seem?
That is, how often have these things happen in the past?
You know, how much do you have to twist what
you know to make it makes sense? That's called the
prior and the other is the likely. You look at
a particular thing, like the Kniamts sightings of the tic tac,
and you say, okay, looking at the details of that explanation,
how plausibly is it that these people were just drunk
or you know, delusional on drugs or what you know,
or just you know, blinked and saw something weird to
put the speck in their eye? Who knows? Right? That's
one second is could they just be lying? Somebody put
them up to it and and you know they've got
a program and a plan and there's a lie here.
That's the second one. From the details of the thing,
you say, if that were true, would that make sense
what we see? And you're looking at the details of
what you see to say, you know, how consistent could
the lie be? Basically, you know, how likely is it
that nobody would tell on them? Right? Could you see
it in their eyes? Right? You're going to try to
go through the details of the scenario and try to
match that to the hypothesis and say how likely is
this these details to appear if this were the truth?
And you can do that for each of the four hypotheses,
and that would be the likelihood. So when we these
are the two things to do when you're analyzing any hypothesis,
including UFOs, is first think of the prior, what's just
on basic principles, which things are how plausible? And the
other looking at any particular piece of evidence, how likely
could that have come from the different scenarios. So I
want to say that I've looked at some of the reports,
like the Nimess thing, and I got to say, it
isn't easy to dismiss and hoaxes. I'm sorry, Delusions and
errors are just hard for me to buy for at
least the dozen most prominent cases. Okay, I can't dismiss
hoaxes and lies so well because people can lie pretty
well when they want to, But delusions, I'm going to
say no. But I'm not an expert on these particular cases,
and there are other people who are, and so I'm
just going to stand up and claim to be an expert.
But I am going to claim to be an expert
on the prior. Why because I did this world class
work on We're are aliens in space time, So at
least for the aliens part of the prior, I think
I'm a world class expert. So it's my job to
address this question, whether I want to or not. I mean,
as you know, there is a bit of academic disapproval
for the topic, and people have been shamed or excluded
on the basis of the association. And I'm willing, but
I got to figure. Look, it's my job here. If
I stand up and say I'm an expert on where
are aliens in space time, then I got to be
someone who speaks to this UFO thing. So that's how
I want to locate my expertise here. It's only on
the prior, and only on the prior of one of
these four categories. I have some opinions about the others,
if you want to talk about them, but it's mainly
on this one that I am the most expert. So
my job here would be to say, given what we
know about the universe and plausibly where aliens are in
the universe according to our analysis, how believable is it
that some of the UFOs we see actually are aliens.
In order to answer that question, I basically need to
take what I know and construct a scenario in which
that's true. And when putting the scenario together, I need
to make as few crazy assumptions as possible. That is,
every scenario I'm every assumption I add to the scenario
has to be penalized according to how unlikely it is.
And then at the end I'm going to have a
total penalty of the scenario, which is the prior basically
for the scenario. And the key question is how low
is that prior. But let's first put a reference point
for basically how low a prior needs to be in
order to sort of do things like we do in
the rest of the world. So we have murder trials,
and I would say the prior for any particular murder
trials roughly one in a million. That is, on average,
one in a thousand people get killed and are murdered
as opposed to just die, and that person who died
has roughly a thousand people around them who might plausibly
have done it. So an accusation that this person was
killed by that person the prior there is roughly one
in a million.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't mean we say this is crazy and
just turn murder accusations away. We say, look, a trial
is capable of evaluating something with one in a million prior.
The physical evidence you can actually introduce in a trial,
is quite commonly able to overcome a one in a
million prior and make you believe afterward that, yeah, this
guy did it. That's just a fact of the legal system.
We do murder trials all the time. We convict people
of murder all the time. So clearly, ordinary physical evidence
is quite commonly able to overcome I'm a one in
a million prior. Now, if it was instead one in
a million, which is ten to the six, it was
one and ten to the thirty or something, then you
might just say, look, I don't care what evidence you have.
There's just no way your evidence is going to overcome
how crazy unlikely this is. You don't forget it. And
that's what many you of go skeptical skeptics basically say.
They say, this theory you've got is just crazy. It's
so crazy that if if someone says they think they
saw it, I'm going to believe they went delusional and
crazy rather than believe what they say they saw. So again,
that's the standards, like one in a million, fine, one
in ten of the thirty not fine, okay. So, and
that's what we're going to find out when I put
together a start, and the question is going to be, well,
what's the prior going to be? And my answer is
it's going to be between one and a thousand and
one and ten thousand, so more than one in a million.
So it's plenty big enough that if some people say
they saw something, you should actually look at what they say.
So right, it's you know, like in a murder trial,
you don't just say, well, yeah, this is crazy, so
I'm not gonna listen to your evidence. You got you
got to listen, right, And similarly here, I'd say this
is big enough that you got to listen. It's not
so big that without the evidence, I would just say
it's likely to be true. Look, one of a thousand
means nine hundred ninety nine times out of one thousand,
it isn't true, right, But that's the prior. That's before
you heard any evidence. But if people are saying they
saw stuff, which they apparently are, then you got to
look at that evidence to draw your final conclusion if
you think the prior is high enough. And again, my
job is to figure out what the prior is. So
if you want to, we can walk through what is
this scenario I tried to construct and how did I
get this prior number? But that's where I sit in
the space of the topic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't mind. Let's walk through it a little bit.
Speaker 2: All right. So the main thing to notice is the
things that are going to be hard to explain. That
we need to find something in the scenario to make
to explain what's hard to explain. Okay, So first of all, remember,
my simple model of aliens has them appear once per
million galaxies, and we meet in a million years. So
UFOs is aliens has aliens being a lot closer to
us in space time than this simple model suggests. Right,
So that's the first thing. How about what the hell
are they doing right next to us, so close that
they're visiting? That's at odds with the simple analysis, right,
So that the first thing we need is to explain
why the hell are they close in space and time? Okay. Secondly,
if they were close in space and time and more
advanced than us, they would have to be in order
to be here now, because it would be crazy unlikely
for them to have shown up exactly the same time.
So they have to be more advanced to be here
with us now. You know, at least a million years
plausibly ten million years more advanced than us. That would
be plenty of time to fill the galaxy and remake everything,
but they haven't. Why not We need an explanation for that.
So first, what are they doing here now, really close
to us, when the nearest one on average should be
you know, a million galaxies away? Secondly, why didn't they
fill the galaxy? You know, use it? And then the
last one is the standard description of UFOs is puzzling
in the following way. If they were ten million years
more advanced than us and they wanted to be here,
they could have done one of the following two things
would have been really easy. First, they could have just
been really obvious. They could show up on the White
House lawn. They could blow up some buildings. They could
just make it completely obvious that they're here. There's just
no reason that that would be impossible. On the other hand,
they could also be completely invisible. They could be in
black spheres orbiting that we couldn't possibly see, and they
could see, you know, from there, any detail they want to.
There's no reason they couldn't know everything they wanted to
know about us in as much detail as they want
without us noticing anything about them that would be completely
feasible for something ten million years more advanced than us.
So the puzzle is they didn't pick either of these
two options. Right, The reports are they're hanging out at
the edge of visibility. They're being noticeable, but they're not
being obvious, and they're not doing much. Okay, they're not
building anything, they're not you know, reaping and sewing anything.
They're not blowing anything up. They're just wiggling around at
the edge of visibility. Like, we need to explain that.
So these are the three main things we need to
explain in a theory of what the hell if some
UFOs really are aliens? Like, how does that make any sense?
So that's the task here. How could it make any
sense that some UFOs are aliens? That's what I'm struggling
to do, and honestly, like it is a struggle, right,
You got to admit, if there's any topic I've ever
come across that try that basically seems to undermined a
lot of assumptions we have about stuff. It's the idea
that UFOs or aliens. And that's exactly why the intuition
of a lot of people is that's just crazy, and
it's not a crazy intuition. It's not a crazy intuition
to think some hypothesis that requires that you reject enormous
amounts of all the things you've ever believed that stuff
might not just be so crazy and likely that you
should just dismiss it, which is, you know what most
authorities do. So then it's a surprise from that point
of view if I can construct a snaro with a prior,
say one to ten thousand, that actually makes sense of it.
But that's my job here, okay, and that's what I
claim to have been able to do, is to come
up with a not so crazy scenario that makes sense
of this. But these are the things we need to
make sense of. Why are they so close? Why didn't
they do anything with all the space around us? And
then why are they hanging out at the edge of
visibility not doing anything as far as we can.
Speaker 1: Tell, right, you know, and they're not you know. I'll
let you continue on, but just to add a little
bit to it, because people ask me, you know, questions sometimes,
and one of the questions they ask is why do
they have lights? You know exactly I mean, But it's
like point yeah, what's the point. And you know, some
people say, well, it might be part of their propulsion
or whatever, you know, but still we.
Speaker 2: Need a more basic question, what the hell are they doing?
What's their point? What's their purpose?
Speaker 1: Exactly? Yeah, that is one of the three major questions
when it comes to UFOs. What do they want?
Speaker 2: You know? But yeah, look, most people they're kind of
not very theoretical and trying to be agnostic, and so
they just say who knows. But I'm a theorist. That's
what I do in all the different areas of my
intellectual endeavor. I figure out what our best understanding things
are and put it together to make sense and explain things.
So that's what I'm going to do here, is to say,
I'm going to be much more ambitious. I'm going to
say that I want a story for how this makes sense,
and that's what I want to put together. But again
it's going to come with a penalty. That is, I'm
gonna have to make some assumptions that might plausibly be
faulse and so you know, but I have to count
how implausible they are in my analysis. All right, So
are you ready to make some assumptions?
Speaker 1: Sure? All let's go just to let you know. In
five minutes, KGRA is going off the air, So I'm
just going to say goodbye to everyone there now, well
the pause here, and I'll be back well later on
this evening with Ron Janix with my co host Dan Elioto.
In next week we're gonna be on with Danny Shehan.
So anyway, we'll we.
Speaker 2: Just did the perfect cliffhanger here, right, We just promise
to explain all this for people. If only you'll come
back and listen to the rest of this episode, we
will answer this burning question in your mind. But ha ha,
you'll have to come back to the rest of the
show to find out. I didn't plan that, but we
did that pretty well.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was good. Yeah, yeah, all right, okay the
radio producers laughing. You just sent me out. Yeah, there
we go.
Speaker 2: Cliffhanger. You know you want to find out, you have
to come to the next episode, all right. So the
first assumption I'm going to make is panspermia, which you
mentioned before. That's what can cause a correlation between them
and us. We need a correlation in space and time,
and the way to do that is a common origin.
There was an Eden a long time ago, and that
planet partially developed life. Life evolved in that planet part
of the way to where we are now, and then
some rocks smashed into that planet, knocked a rock off
that planet, and inside that rock with some of that life,
and it drifted for maybe a long time until it
reached our stellar nursery, which is where our star and
planets were born, where ten thousand other stars and planets
were born at the same time. So that's how stars
are formed. They're stormed in a little nursery where lots
are formed all at once. And in that nursery, rocks
are flying back and forth really fast all the time,
lots of them. And so if life came from the
outside and seeded that nursery, it would likely seed not
just one planet in the nursery, but lots and lots.
So that means lots of planets around, lots of stars
from that nursery would have life, not just us. And
then what happens is this nursery drifts apart, and you know,
within a few million years, they're spread out in a
ring around the galaxy, and we can see them actually
in telescopes because they all have the same spectrum. They
all have the same mixture of chemical elements, and we
can see from their spectrum that they would be with
the siblings of us, and so we can see them,
they can see us. All of the descendants from the
same stellar nursery are spread out in a ring around
the galaxy, all advancing along this path of the great filter,
trying well, randomly progressing to become more advanced. The assumption
is one of those other ones got to be advanced
before us.
Speaker 1: One mm hmm. So this woman just posted something in
chat that's sort of related to kind of what we're
talking about. I'm posting it here right now. Thank you
Chris for that. How to account for the recent detection
of dimethyl sulfide. You're familiar with this, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, I saw that in the news.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, basically, there's either life there or there isn't.
It's one of the best evidences we've seen for maybe
life being there. But many people are of course saying, look,
chemistry is complicated. Maybe there's some other way we haven't
figured out that you could get that chemical there, but
it is intriguing. It's especially intriguing. Look, we've had evidence
for life elsewhere in our solar system. Like that chemicals
that you know mainly come from life that we found
around other moons in our solar system. But if that
that more likely has the same common origin as us,
that is, that's like the same process that has life
on Earth from a com an origin, because actually Earth
cooled later than the outer Solar system, so actually the
outer Solar system was a few hundred million years cooler first.
So life, if it was in our solar system more
plausibly started there and then spread to us than vice versa.
But that doesn't really change. You know, we're pretty sure
there's no aliens in our solar system, right We've looked
at enough of the moons and stuff that you know,
if if they were there, they're hiding. Okay, So but
we're thinking about something that's not hiding. It just grows
up and that's where it is. So so anyway, that
evidence would suggest that it would be a separate origin,
more separate at least than us. I don't think that
star is one of our stellar nursery siblings. So if
there's life there, that suggests simple life is just a
lot more common than we thought, which means the early
steps of the Great Filter are easier than we thought,
which means the future is harder than we thought, which
is bad news. But no, just be wary. Okay. So
again we're trying to explain how it could make any
sense that UFOs are aliens, and the first step is
panspermias siblings other planets born in the same stellar nursery
went along the same path as us, maybe thousands of them,
but one of them got to advance life before we did,
plausibly millions tens of millions of years, even more older
than us. So that's the first assumption. First thing, we
assume that gets them to be near us in space
and time. Okay, But now the second thing is, but
they didn't go colonize the galaxy, but they didn't change it,
at least if they did, they just did a few
surveys or something. They didn't go remake everything like they
could have. So we're gonna need to just assume that
that's they did that on purpose. It might be a
religious meaning, it might be a governance reason. We can
talk about plausible reasons why they might not want to.
But they decided they did not want to colonize the universe,
and they made a rule that nobody in their civilization
was allowed to do that, and they successfully enforced that
rule for tens of millions of years. So first of all,
you got to admit, like, this isn't just writing some
passing some bill. This is actually pretty damn hard. So
that's you'll have to discount for the fact that you know,
it's pretty plausible that somebody might want to do this.
I could see our descendants wanting to do this, but
actually achieving it. Well, that's more impressive. They actually successfully
made a rule that was against anybody from within their
civilization expanding out and colonizing because it just anyone leaving
from their home couldn't have done it. All it takes
is one probe that leaves the home world to colonize
the galaxy, and it could do that in a million years.
So they successfully prevented anyone from leaving to do that. Impressive.
Now again that's the second as first pens Permia siblings. Secondly,
they got a rule against expansion colonization. Maybe it's religious,
maybe it's ecological, maybe it's governance and cultural. There's several
plausible reasons, but they made that choice. Now, once we
see that we've made that assumption, we no longer need
to explain why they're here. A direct implication is they
could see that any of their siblings would break their rule.
So if they're going to enforce the rule, they have
to not just do that at home. They have to
go out to any of their siblings and enforce the
rule on them. So that's why they would be here
to enforce their rule. And we can also notice that
an easy way to enforce the rule would have been
to just destroy ourself, clearly, so we can also conclude
they didn't want to do that for some reason. They
have some degree of affiliation or empathy toward us, and
they didn't want to just kill us all off. But
they're here to enforce the rule. So we've gone a
long way towards snorw know what their purposes here. So
now from a purpose you can see you can go
a lot further in predicting behavior if you know, like
what the point is. We can already also infer Look,
this expedition they sent here to enforce their rule itself
risks their breaking the rule. This expedition, if it went rogue,
well that would be the end of it too, right,
So this expedition cannot be given a lot of freedom.
It cannot be you know, said to just go there,
figure it out, decide what to do. We trust you. No,
they're not going to trust it, okay, So what that
means is they had to figure out a strategy at
their home world, a simple, robust strategy to send these
people with and only give them the tools necessary to
implement the strategy, and maybe you know, have political officers
or other things to make sure they don't do anything else,
because again, this expedition risks the whole thing. So now
we have to ask, what simple strategy could they have
approved from the home world that would plausibly get us
to follow their rule without destroying us. And that's that's
what we need to explain. The strange strategy of hanging out,
hanging out at the intermediate level of visibility, right, not
really obvious, not completely invisible. How does hanging out at
an intermediate level of visibility achieve their goal of having
us not break the rule? Is voluntarily? That's the puzzle.
That's the last thing. Once we explain that we're done, and.
Speaker 1: Would you say break the rule? You mean colonize, right,
go out.
Speaker 2: And mess with the universe in a big visible way.
Which they clearly didn't want to do.
Speaker 1: Hmm.
Speaker 2: Now, we don't know exactly how much messing with the
universe would bother them, but it's pretty clear they didn't
allow very much because we haven't been able to see anything.
But you know, maybe they all allow for a little bit.
But clearly they're worried that we would do more than
a little bit, which we do seem inclined to do, right,
you know, without them limiting us, we might well do
more than a little bit. Yeah, so they need to
be here to stop them. Okay, So now the last
assumption here is that they were social animals like we
are social animals, and social animals robustly have status hiarchies,
and on Earth at least, social animals can domesticate other
social animals by slipping into the top of their status. Harcky.
That's how humans domesticate horses, dogs and each other by
being the top dog. So we domesticate dog by basically
being the top dog and being more powerful and impressive
than the other dogs, and making our wishes known and
not being too hostile. That's how we domesticate dogs or
horses or the other animals we dovestigate. Now, most social
animals can't be domesticated actually, so you know, they had
to fear that in fact, we couldn't be domesticated. But
there's a chance that we could do be domesticated. And
if so, the way to do it was to slip
into the top of our status archy, the way we
domesticate other animals. So what this assumes that domestication is
a kind of universal thing among social animals everywhere in
the universe. It's not just a peculiar feature on Earth.
So it happened there. They understood it. They said, this
pretty good chance this advanced species is a social animal
that could be domesticated. Maybe they were domesticated themselves too,
so they understood, okay, domestication is the thing that happens
especially to intelligent, highly social species. And you know it
is true. Domestication works better for very social species because
they are more influenced by each other and higher status
members that they're all right, So now this strategy says, okay,
the way to domesticate those humans, you need to show
up and be visible. You need to be impressive, more
impressive than the rest of them. You need to be
not too hostile, so you know, you should be peaceful.
You need to be there so they couldn't just do
something visible from a thousand light years away, right, that
doesn't work. You need to be there local, you need
to be impressive, you need to not be too hostile,
and then you need to make your wishes known. And
the point is we're smart enough through the analysis. I've
just told you to figure out what they want, so
they don't need to say anything more. Now you might say,
this explains why they aren't completely visible, but how does
it explain why they didn't go completely obvious. Well, when
humans have tried to domesticate other humans, it turns out
that's often failed when the humans were too different. Humans
aren't that different from each other, but even small cultural
differences among humans have often made some humans just hate
the idea of being domesticated by those other humans and
the whole thing doesn't work and they resist them astation,
and you know, that makes it a lot harder if
they resist. So for humans domesticate other humans, we've needed
to typically be culturally similar enough or opaque enough that
people don't get really mad about the other culture. So
in the past, for example, you know, invading armies would
often just knock out the elites of an existing civilization
and take over and be the new elites, but then
not be very visible, not show very much about themselves
in order to make the local people not hate them
and accept their new rule. That's often happened in human history.
So the point is, but these are actually aliens, so
there's plausibly something about them we would hate if we
actually knew. Maybe they eat babies, who knows. It doesn't
bother them, and they don't get why we're bothered. But look,
because they're aliens, they're most likely actually quite a bit
more different from us than most other humans happen. So
the whole idea of them showing up and revealing a
lot about themselves risks. We don't hate some random detail
that we learn about them. So their strategy is, now,
let's let's not reveal very much. Just show up, be impressive,
be peaceful enough, be local, make your message clear. That'll
be enough. So that's the hypothesis. That's what they're doing,
and that's what I roughly assign on one on one
thousand and one and ten thousand prior to and you
can see I had to make some assumptions. But they're
not crazy unlikely assumptions, but you know, they still aren't
obvious things that would happen, but they're plausible things to happen,
but it's still not things you would necessarily predict. If
that's what you were, just making a prediction without any data.
So what.
Speaker 1: You say that they're the kind of giving a message,
or you would say that we were should be taking
this message and it's a message like we're here, but
you're not going to know anymore, or or you know,
I mean, what what do you think them as?
Speaker 2: The messages look so many you probably know better than me.
Many people who believe in UFOs are aliens. They believe
the UFO aliens are peaceful and generous, hearted and wise,
and they actually want to follow their advice over the
advice of their local authorities. Many people in the UFO
space trust the aliens more than they trust Earth authorities.
Speaker 1: I have to say you're right about that, just from
you know, comments they usually get. People will say, well,
they'll save us from like a nuclear war, right, you know,
they think they're going to come in and save us.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you this is just the natural reaction of domestication.
The dog and the horse says, you know, that animal
doesn't look so much like a dog. But damn it,
if they aren't really impressive, they're in my social world.
They they they dominate me, and they see as things
seem to go well when I go along with what
they say. So you know, let's just do it.
Speaker 1: Mmmm.
Speaker 2: That's how animals get domesticated. That's how humans. They get
domesticated by other humans. So this is just a very
natural reaction really to seeing that the aliens are here.
They're not too hostible, and they're vastly more capable than
the other authorities these around them. Like if you've got
to believe that these UFOs are just vastly more capable
than your local authorities, if they're here at all, they
are just really capable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, there's there's I'm sure you've probably heard
this that there's a lot of people that have talked
about usos which are underwater, you know, coming out of
the water, and you know, even more impressive, they're so vast,
the ocean is so vast, you know, and unexplored that
there is possible, you know, there is many possible places
they could be hiding if that is the case. But
if they're hanging out like just beyond visibility.
Speaker 2: Well, they're just within the visibility. If there were just
beyond the ability, we wouldn't see them, right, They're hanging
out just within the range of visibility to just barely
be visible.
Speaker 1: And let's just say scenarios here. You think it would
be like representing like you say, one of the sister
cultures or whatever, like there'll be representatives, you know, And
you know, I after doing the show for this long,
I still don't know really, you know. When I'm asking
people ask me, well, what are they, I say, I
don't know. I really don't know, and I don't know
if they're alien or not or you know. And there's
a doctor Avi Lobe. You probably heard of him, yes,
and he he claims, you know, there's a possibility that
they're like a higher like an artificial intelligence like drone
almost or something like that.
Speaker 2: I would say, almost surely they're artificial. But I just
said almost surely any advanced civilization of unofficial that's nothing
special about them. We're going to be artificial in a
few thousand years.
Speaker 1: Probably. There was a couple of comments in the chat
that was pretty funny. When you were talking about that
you know, we don't want to be just lost squishy
things in a museum, really, but right, but it's pretty funny.
But anyway, Yeah, this is just totally fascinating. And so
if they were like hanging out, you know, people speculate.
You hear people say things, well, there's bases on the
other side of the moon, there's this and that, and
you know. But one of the questions I'd like to
ask someone like you is, well, you kind of explained it,
so maybe it's maybe you know, uh, move point, but
why would we be so if life is so common
out there, why would be we be so special that
we'd be visited? But you're kind of explaining that in
these theories that we're just being watched so we don't expand.
Speaker 2: We're capable of messing up this galaxy and universe they're in.
They want it to stay natural and empty, and we
would mess that up naturally.
Speaker 1: So I think we're doing a pretty good job at
this planet, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, we're a whole long way to fill this planet,
but we are aggressively expanding for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, wow, that's really something.
Speaker 2: And you know that there's a bit of a taboo
within the UFO world of doing what I'm doing. So
I mean, so there are people who want the UFO
world to be respected, and they think discussion of scenarios
brings disrespect. We sound like we're saying crazy things. So
many of them say, look, we should just say there's
the data here. And the thing we're all going to
say is, look, the data is real. You need to
think about it, but not actually think about it. They
don't want us to be actually generating scenarios and comparing
to them the data because that sounds crazy. They want
us to just focus on saying the data is real.
You know, the data needs to be taken seriously, and
that's how they think the whole field can be taken
more seriously is by tabooing discussion of possible theories to
explain the data and merely insisting on the solidity of
the data.
Speaker 1: Wow. Well, I'm enjoying this a lot. I think it's
really fascinating. And you know, there is I've talked about
this many times. There is kind of a division anyway
in the UFO community. But it's usually like, you know,
there's one person they think is good, one person they
think is bad, and you know, it's just like our
whole society, you know, the division and all that.
Speaker 2: I mean, as far as I know, I don't know
what these sides are, so I haven't taken a side.
Maybe maybe I've been turning to the side. You I
don't know enough about this world to know what the
sides are which side I be taken on? But I
do know there is this one division I saw between
some people who say, look, we need to just shut
up about the theorizing and just focus on the data
and so in order to be respected by the usual authorities.
Speaker 1: Well, I think you know what I mean, Like anything
you want to know. That's part of the question is
you know, what what are they doing here?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: I mean that's one of the three questions. What do
they want? What are they doing here? And you know
what are they the three?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: So my theory here is not very encouraging answers. I mean,
they might be accurate answers, but they are not inspiring.
So look like, according to my story here, the aliens
could easily intervene and solve many of our problems, but
they do not want to. Yeah, and they are not
inclined to, and they're not going to so my story says, Look,
they're never going to show up and say here's the
cure to cancer and here's how to time travel or whatever.
They're just never going to do that because you know,
they want until they are clearly domesticated, that's their priority,
and until that's clear that they succeeded at that, they're
just not going to risk that by doing other stuff
for us.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this case. I don't know if you
how much you've looked into anything, but there's this case
called the Ariel school incident that happened in the nineteen nineties.
Were all these school children APPETI yes, yes, right, but
they some of them had visions during this encounter, and
the visions were like the Earth is being destroyed. But
the one thing I'm just going to follow up with
saying is they never talk. There was never anything about fixing.
It's just this is happening, nothing about fixing.
Speaker 2: You know, so many of those children, if I recall
and other people, basically had this feeling that the aliens
were the good guys coming here to protect nature against
the bad humans, and that the children should side with
the aliens over their local human authorities. That was a
sense that the children had.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, a lot of them went home
and told their parents and their you know, of course,
their parents were thinking it was the devil or something
like that, you know, some of them. But yeah, but
I did speak to someone that their parents were very supportive,
and you.
Speaker 2: Know, nevertheless, the message was trust the aliens over your
local human authorities.
Speaker 1: Many people have claimed that they have seen like visions
of the destruction of the earth, you know, when they're
having these encounters, which is pretty scary, you know, and
it's kind of like, Okay, you know, wake up everyone,
you know, that's that's kind of the message. But they're possibly.
Speaker 2: Getting well again. As I say, my my theorist, so
I've learned a lot over the years about all of
our best theories of everything, and I've got to say,
the idea that some UFOs are aliens is just, on
the face of it's terribly scary. Like that just upsets
so much of our usual assumptions about the history and
the nature of things and the explanation for events. I
don't need somebody's vision to be scary. Somebody had a
strange brain. That's not going to scare me much more.
Than the basic fact. Look, this is a scary fact.
If some UFOs aliens, we are in a very different
scenario and much more at risk than we might have thought.
This is a very risky scenario.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, it's going all the way back
to I think, you know, the nineteen nineteen forty seven
basically when there was a memo that the government put out,
the twenty memo. I'm not sure that's what I just
pulled up, but that they think the likely scenario is
that it is extraterrestrial, or at least some of them are.
And you know, a lot of them can be explained,
you know, but there is, like you mentioned, there's some
really unique ones that you know, you're not going to
have fighter pilots, you know, making all these stories up.
When it comes to like the tic TAC that.
Speaker 2: We might want, you want to walk through the hook
scenario because that is an alternative explanation too. I mean,
I don't think you can fairly draw a conclusion about
one scenari unless you've compared it to the others. Really,
you should like walk down each of the paths of
each of the scenarios in order to do a full comparison.
Speaker 1: But if you're talking about the tic tac possibly in.
Speaker 2: Particular, just the whole category of explanation, right, all right, yeah,
categories of explanation.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, we'll go there in just a second. Here's
another question though, by this same gentleman. Can you make
any distinction between domesticated as in tame versus domesticated and
service livestock animals? Do you understand the question?
Speaker 2: Yes, So the question is do they have some plan
to use us in some domesticated animal way? And it
seems obvious that no, like whatever we could become for them,
they could have just made for themselves out of the
raw material of the universe. That we're not especially useful
for doing anything. I think, any particular physical task or
mental tasks they needed doing, they could have just made
a machine to do that far better than we could.
So it's not like we're going to be some especially
useful input into their economy. Remember, they chose not to
expand into the galaxy. They've limited their economy to their
home world. They're not here to, you know, grab some
raw materials and take them home. They're not here to
like peruse our patent database and find some discoveries. They
haven't found. No, we're not useful. But apparently they didn't
want to destroy us, which would have been the simplest
way to solve our problem that we present of threatening
the rules. So they must have some degree of affiliation
with us, some desire not to kill us and destroy us,
But they don't have enough empathy that they want to
cure cancer, give us world peace or anything like that. Yeah,
they're going to let us suffer and without helping in
any way, as their priority is to domesticate us over
the long run, which basically means yes, team following their direction,
doing what they say.
Speaker 1: Well in a way, you know, I mean, it's like
we would not interfere in nature, like a preserve or something,
you know, I mean, it's kind of right.
Speaker 2: So some of us have that attitude toward nature around us.
And in fact, I think many people in the world
don't like this image of our descendants going out and
remaking the galaxy, and that bothers them. And that's the
kind of attitudes that might have caused aliens to not
do that. There are other reasons as well, we could
go into if you'd like, about why you might not
want to allow your civilization to expand in the universe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, why would that be?
Speaker 2: Well, in the last century, the world has created a
world culture. So a century ago there were all these
different national cultures that fought each other and we're vying
for control. But since then we've created more of a
world culture, especially among elites, and we used that world
culture to be much more peaceful and cooperative with each
other around the world. And we like that, and we
liked the idea that we could control our evolution, our change,
and if weird or bad stuff was happened, we could
just pass laws to stop that. We like this idea
at the moment that humanity as a whole is taking
control of Earth and humanity together to manage its evolution
and manage our planet together and our history together. People
like this idea, and that's a big change from say,
a century ago, and certainly from a thous years ago,
or basically had a world full of competing things, and
nobody really saw the whole Earth as a system was
trying to deal with it altogether. Nobody tried to manage
the future of our species together. But today people think
in those terms that we can think about what we
as a species, as a planet, what problems, we face
what we want to do about them and together decide.
So for example, capitalism i'man economists, has lots of competitive
process that produces outcomes that people don't like, and then
they like to regulate and make those things not happen.
So unfettered, unleashed competitive capitalism scares people, and they liked
the idea of having governments and even world governments that
can limit that. So, for example, on unfettered competition and
nuclear weapons, for example, bothers people, and I like the
idea of having central powers to prevent that. Or you know,
unlimited genetic engineering of diseases or whatever bothers people. So
there's a lot of ways in which competitive capitalism could
lead to outcomes that people would rather prevent by having
shared regulation of the world. And we do, in fact
have regulation around the world. We don't have a world
government we have because we have a world culture. We
just have a lot of correlation and regulation everywhere such
that we actually deal with say banking and nuclear energy,
and medical experiments and airline accidents and all sorts of
things pretty much the same all the way around the world.
And we like that fact now the day any colonist
leaves the Solar system to go off to another star.
That era ends that colonists who goes off to another
star can evolve out of control, and they can have
descendants that evolve further out of control, and we can't
regulate what they become and what they will do. And
then they could spread to one thousand star systems and
then come back and buy for control for here, and
we couldn't stop them. As soon as you'll let any
colonists leave into the universe, the error of humanity together
discussing what it wants to do and controlling it ends,
and we enter an error of unlimited competition, where any
part of our descendants who go in any potential direction
can choose to become weird and strange in ways we
don't like, and if that makes them powerful, they can
come back and impose their changes on the rest of us.
That could scare you, that could make you think, no,
we don't want that to happen. We want to prevent
anybody from leaving because we want to maintain a civilization
where we decide things together. So that's the pitch for
not expanding. M I see, and you can see the
emotional appeal it.
Speaker 1: Has Hmmm, all right, so you mentioned just a few
minutes ago that the hoax's aspect of this, No, I
would say hope myself. I think, well, what are we
going to be talking about hoaxes here? Because there's I
don't know if you'd consider hoaxes like CGI or AI
created videos and things like that on YouTube, because there's
a town of them on YouTube, sure, and there's on
Facebook and all that, but that's mostly what you see
in hoaxes today when it used to be nuts and
bolts hoaxes.
Speaker 2: So UFO reports have go back way far. So if
we're going to explain very old reports as hoaxes, we
have to be invoking the technology available at the time
to create hoaxes, right. So we can't use current technology
to explain nineteen forty seven hoaxes, right, will have to
be saying what could they have done at the time
to produce the impressions dated at the time. Okay, So,
first of all, governments, including the US government, have in
fact made hoaxes that were big and lasted a long time.
So for example, during World War Two, we made up
whole separate invasions I think through Turkey that didn't exist,
where we tried to fool the Nazis that that was
going to happen, so that they would divert resources to
other places. Even for D Day, we had whole inflatable
tanks and inflatable planes in certain places in England that
they might see and think the invasion was going to
come from there. So during wartime we've done some pretty
big fake stuff. And for example, the US made up
something for the excuse of the Vietnam War that was
just a lie, and we didn't admit that. For a
great many decades we pretended the lie was true. So
there have been big hoaxes that have lasted for many decades.
So the capability is there sometimes and the inclination is
there sometimes for some big hoaxes, especially related to war
and buy large governments.
Speaker 1: MM.
Speaker 2: Next, notice that a lot of our best data is
from governments. Their most a lot of the most persuasive
you fur reports are from government officials, you know, pilots, sailors,
et cetera. Not just to view US, but from other governments.
And you know, if it's a government causing the hoax,
why they can of course get their employees to lie
to us.
Speaker 1: So but why would they? I mean, I can see
in a more time. Okay, go ahead, sorry, Okay.
Speaker 2: So, like I said before, what we need is a
scenario that makes sense of it, right, just like with
the aliens, we need a star. Why would anybody do
the hopes? So, as you probably know, the biggest war
issue in the last seventy years was the possibility of
nuclear war and the possibility of a first strike whereby
one would just out of the blue, without warnings, send
missiles off to the other side, try to destroy their
missiles so that they couldn't retaliate back. And the ability
to do that depended on technology that changed over time.
So the worry was, well, at the moment, we don't
think they could do a retaliation or you know, at
the moment of hers strike wouldn't work. They'd see him
coming and they'd launch theirs. But what if there's a sudden,
you know, jump in technology that that might allow a
first strike. That's what people have been worried about a
lot for a long time, right, So that's why they
are trying to research into technologies and track the other
guy's technologies because they want to make sure this mutual
assured dissection thing can stay as an equilibrium and that
they won't find a clever way to sneak around it
and start a war and knock us out. Right, So
now here's here's an idea. So as you know, like,
we've spent many, many billions of dollars in the Cold
War all the time. So if you could somehow switch
you know, the Cold War equilibrium by spending I don't know,
a billion or even ten billion dollars, it would be
money well spent. There is a huge budget for this,
even in nineteen forty seven, there'd be a huge budget
for this. Right. They would be willing to spend a
lot of money if they could somehow switch the Cold
War equilibrium even a bit to favor the other side
not doing a first strike against them, right, or even
them being able to do a first strike against the
other people. But you know, I guess the nicer thing
to imagine is they want to prevent the other side
from a first strip. Okay, So the simple idea is,
if you can get them to believe there's a chance
there's a third party around who would take issue with
their first strike, you might make them hesitate with the
first strike. You have to convince them that it's not
just the two of us. There might be a third
party who is powerful and able to impose its will
and would take offense at your first strike. If there's
a chance of that, that'll just make you pause a
little bit more about this first strike, even when you
figure out the clever way to do it. So then
both sides would have an incentive to make the other
side believe maybe there's a chance that there really is
the third.
Speaker 1: Party, the third party being a UFO. Yes, how would
they know, the UFO would even want to get involved,
you know what I mean, You don't know.
Speaker 2: But the point is just just add uncertainty. I see,
it's a first strike is a big risk, right, you
think you have a way to knock their stuff out
and then they weren't me retality. But if you're wrong,
you're in big shit, in trouble, right, Okay, So you're
only going to do it if you're pretty sure you
could get away with it, right, And so you have
to look at all the different ways it could go wrong,
And you're only going to approve it if you're you
think you're pretty solid or you're really desperate. Otherwise you're
just not going to do this, and that's of course
what we saw in the last seventy years. Nobody ever
did it right, because nobody ever felt they were sure
enough they could get away with it. Yeah, even when
we were the first people to have the weapon on
the other side, didn't We weren't sure enough of that
right to just do a first strike right at the beginning, Right,
we had the bomb before they did. Why didn't we
just do a first strike. Well, I didn't have that
many We aren't very sure, so we didn't do.
Speaker 1: It, Thank goodness, thank goodness. Yes, yeah, wow, that's that's
quite a theory, you know.
Speaker 2: So it makes me not the hoax thing isn't crazy,
but it is a bigger hoax that lasts longer than
most of the ones we've seen. So but it's not
crazy far away from the others. But it is a
bit of a stretch.
Speaker 1: Right yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But here's an interesting corollary. If in fact, UFOs
as Aliens is just a big psychop, a big hoax
faked by the government for this purpose, they probably would
have faked the moon landings too, come on, right, if
they were willing and able to this, and that would
achieve a similar purpose to fake the moon landings. Then yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Certainly would have saved a lot of money.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if they save money, but they
might have just made it more sure to happen. Like
they made real rockets, right, real rockets launched off from
the ground. But the question is did they do everything
they claimed they did? But the surprising thing wasn't to
have rockets lost off the ground, even really big ones.
The surprising thing was to actually successfully do all the
things that you said you did. That's the impressive part.
So maybe they didn't actually do all the things they
said they did. Yeah, they just did some of them
like a rocket left, maybe at left, or it's orbit
came back. You know, maybe some stuff was even dropped down,
some mirrors were dropped down, whatever. But you know, they
just didn't do everything they claim because maybe they couldn't.
Speaker 1: But yeah, well that's funny. Now. I talked to Alan Bean,
who was the fourth fourth man on the moon, and
he said I asked him, I said, how do you
feel about people that say that you never went to
the moon. He said, well, they're not really hurting anybody,
and you know that it's not my job to convince
him and and and I know it was you know,
I know I did, but you know, but he was
a very he was a gentleman about it. He he
was a great guy. And basically, you know, I asked,
what would it be like standing and looking up at earth?
You know, I said, if it was me the whole time?
Am I going to get back? That's all I could
think about. And he said all he had to do
is just focus on the task in front of.
Speaker 2: Him, and that's how being able to do this sort
of thing.
Speaker 1: So that's that's right. So as far as the hoax part,
I understand that that's something I would have never thought
of in a million years about the government and doing that.
But you know, there's enough like, for instance, you know,
I had a sighting that would be I would consider unexplainable,
and so many people I know have that are outside
of the military, So you know, I mean, there there's
a there's always that as well. And but anyway, I
really appreciate your time and your thoughts, and I just
I just love hearing you talk about all this. It's
really really been fantastic. And can someone I'm going to
have your do you have Let's see, I have links
I think I have all your links that you.
Speaker 2: Did say if you want me to pitch my books,
I've got.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, the books of course, Yes.
Speaker 2: A elephant Age of M and the Elephant in the Brain.
Speaker 1: Tell me what about a little brief of what each
book is?
Speaker 2: Okay? So the Age of M, which is my first
book singly authored, is the subtitle is Work, Love and
Life around Robots Rule the Earth. So it's an analysis
of what would actually happen if a certain kind of
robot rule the earth. So many people like to make
the claim that you couldn't really know what would happen,
it's just too strange predict and I'm trying to convince
you that no, we can use our basic understanding of
the world to figure out how it would actually play out.
And so I try to prove that with a lot
of details showing you exactly how, at least a certain
kind of robot that scenario would play out. Wow, and
it's a scenario that still could happen. We don't know
exactly which kind of AI will eventually be the first
one to be human level, but there's a certain kind
of AI if that one is the first one to
be here and level then this book's scenario I suppose
they would play out. My other book is The Elephant
in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. The basic
claim here is that you and most people are just
wrong about your motives more than you think, and in
big areas of your life like education, medicine, politics, charity,
there's a standard story you give about why you do
things in those areas, and that story is wrong. Yeah
that is, there's another reason that's a bigger one, And
this helps us rethink a lot of policy area. Well,
if we're wrong about why we go to the doctor
or why we go to school, then our policy analysis
of those things are just going to be wrong, and
we'll just misunderstand how those things work. So we in
fact do a lot of things for different reasons than
we think that's right.
Speaker 1: And sometimes you have to do a little introspective of why.
Speaker 2: Introspection doesn't work very well. What you should do is
look at everybody else and what they're doing, and come
up with your best explanation for everybody else, and then
just assume you're like them. I don't assume that you're
so much better different than everybody else. Just try to
figure out why everybody else does stuff, and that'll be
a good guide for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I almost took on something really big one time,
like buying an auction gallery, you know, basically in California,
and I really had to think that all the way through.
What was what was my real motive? You know, And
I came up with passing on it, you know. I
mean that. It's just it's you know, big decisions like that,
you know, that change your whole life. And I'm glad
I did for you. Yeah, I'm glad I did. But anyway,
it's been such a pleasure of talking to you. Thank
you so much, and a lot of really great comments
in the chat tonight about thinking, you know, complimenting you
as such a great thinker, and I agree totally.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, if you want to come on again,
I've got other revolutionary ideas to run past.
Speaker 1: You so excellent. All right, Well you take care.
Speaker 2: That's what I got about yours, But other things I
can talk.
Speaker 1: About, right right, Okay, take care, Thank you very much,
Take care, all right, everyone, So we'll be back next
week with Danny Shehan and thanks so much, and hang
in for go over to our another our other stream
at nine pm tonight with Ron Jenix and Dean Alioto
and I interviewing him. Thanks so much, and remember to
keep your eyes to the sky.